Canadian National Railway Company

Good afternoon. My name is Abby, and I will be your operator today. Welcome to Canadian National Railway's third quarter 2022 financial and operating results conference call. All participants are now in listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session during which we ask that you kindly limit yourself to one question. I would now like to turn the call over to Paul Butcher, Vice President of Investor Relations. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Butcher.

Thank you very much, Abby. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for CN's third quarter 2022 financial results conference call. Before we begin, I'd like to draw your attention to the forward-looking statements and additional legal information available at the beginning of the presentation. As a reminder, Today's conference call contains certain projections and other forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. and Canadian securities law. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements and are more fully described in our cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements in our presentation. After the prepared remarks, we will conduct a Q&A session, and I do remind you to please limit yourself to one question. The IR team will be available after the call for any follow-up questions. Joining us on the call today are Tracy Robinson, our President and CEO, Rob Riley, our Chief Operating Officer, Doug McDonald, our Chief Marketing Officer, and Jisne Ul, our Chief Financial Officer. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to CN's President and Chief Executive Officer, Tracy Robinson.

Welcome to our CN call. I'm very pleased to be here with you all today. Whether you're with us by phone or webcast, we appreciate you joining. I will start today with some comments from the year. Now, when I joined this team earlier this year, we were coming out of a very difficult fall and winter. We declared at that time that we were going to lean into a scheduled operation and focus on moving our assets more quickly. We said that we were going to be intentional about building our book of business to ensure that we sold into the strengths of our network and our operating plan. We intended through this to improve the service we provide to our customers and the consistency of our operations and our interactions with our supply chain partners. We started this on April 1st, and we've progressively leaned into this program over the last six months. I can't tell you how pleased I am with the effort and the focus of this team and of the results that they are producing. You can see it across our operating and service metrics, and you can see it in our financial results. Our intent was to demonstrate that this discipline would drive the growth in our top line to the bottom line, and we're doing just that. This team has done a great job of driving this program forward. We're not finished yet, but we have a great start and some positive momentum. Now, as a result of this work, we're adjusting our expectations of our results from the year. We now expect to deliver an increase of about 25% in EPS this year. And this is up from what we expected to be 15% to 20% growth earlier this year as we came out of winter. And we expect to produce free cash flow of approximately $4.2 billion. up from our previous guidance of $3.7 to $4 billion. And this comes as a result of every member of this team leaning into a single plan. I'm proud of how we're all working together, and I'm even more excited about what we can create. Now, the third quarter. Our performance this quarter has put us in the position to deliver the results I just spoke of. Rob, Doug, and Jazan will go through the details on the quarter and what we see for the balance of the year in just a moment. But before they do, let me highlight just a few key points about our Q3 performance. Volumes turned positive this quarter, up 5% on an RTM basis, and when combined with solid pricing, fuel surcharge revenues, and a lower Canadian dollar, we delivered record revenues. While we're seeing some early signs of softness in certain markets, we will continue to be very busy through the fourth quarter, particularly on the western part of our network. Doug will provide you with the details on volumes and on our top line performance. We continue to make good progress in Q3 on the discipline of running to our plans. We're running at nearly 90% on time from an origin perspective, probably close to optimal. Our car velocity was 212 miles per day in the quarter, which is the best third quarter car velocity since 2016. Rob will provide you with a few more insights on the operating side and on some very important improvements in safety. And finally, as we grew volumes in Q3, we were able to deliver to the bottom line as well. EPS of $2.13, up 40% on an adjusted basis, representing a quarterly record, and an operating ratio of 57.2%. JISLAN will provide you with the key elements that are driving that performance. So a very good quarter, delivered by a very strong team. And on the team, I mentioned when I joined earlier this year that I was launching with this team that I would assess as we leaned into our plan. I'm very pleased today to announce that Doug McDonald, who stepped into our chief marketing officer role on an interim basis, has now been officially made our chief marketing officer. Congratulations, Doug. And we'll continue to assess the team as we move further into our plan. And on that note, let me pass it on to the team, starting with Rob.