Canadian Pacific Kansas City Limited

Good morning. My name is Stephanie, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to Canadian Pacific's second quarter 2022 conference call. The slides accompanying today's call are available at investor.cpr.ca. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. I would like to now introduce Megan Albiston, Vice President, Capital Markets, to begin the conference.

Thank you, Stephanie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Before we begin, I want to remind you that this presentation contains forward-looking information and actual results may differ materially. The risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could influence actual results are described on slide two in the press release and in the MD&A that are filed with Canadian and U.S. regulators. This presentation also contains non-GAAP measures, which are outlined on slide three. With me here today is Keith Creel, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Nadeem Villani, Chief Financial Officer, and John Brooks, Chief Marketing Officer. The formal remarks will be followed by Q&A, and in the interest of time, we appreciate if you could limit your questions to one. With that, it's now my pleasure to introduce our President and CEO, Mr. Keith Creel.

Thanks, Megan. Good morning, and thank you for everyone joining us today. Let me start off, as I always do, thanking our entire CP family. I can tell you, after a very challenging first quarter, I'm extremely proud of the resilience and the tenacity this team's demonstrated delivering these results over this second quarter of the year. During the quarter, we produced second quarter revenues of $2.2 billion. an operating ratio of 59.7, core EPS of 95 cents. As we expected with a more normal operating environment, the team delivered strong sequential improvement in a number of the metrics that drove the financial performance. We had sequential improvement, Q1 to Q2, of 16% on locomotive productivity, car miles per day improved 15%, dwell improved 13%. Also, I'm very excited about the self-help business initiatives that continue continue to be accomplished by the marketing team, with some exciting developments on the customer front, new business announcements, and even a port expansion, which John will get into more detail in his comments. On the CPKC front, positive momentum continues toward our transformational merger. Last week, as many of you are aware, the STB announced dates for the public hearings. It's going to be late September as we continue toward an early 2023 decision date. Customer feedback continues to be overwhelming. We continue to run test shipments on an interline basis in intermodal grain metals and continue to have very progressive and exciting exploratory discussions about new opportunities in export potash. Another key development we're super excited about, announcement by the KCS, they successfully negotiated tenure extension to the exclusivity rights. My hats off to Pat, Oscar, and the KCS team for this tremendous outcome. And again, the momentum continues as we do our planning to hit the ground running to exceed expectations for all stakeholders. So we're in a good spot. We continue to gain ground and look forward to realizing the vision of that transformational merger as we march toward the first part of 2023. Now looking at the back half of the year from a demand standpoint, we continue to build momentum on the CP network, the upcoming grain harvest, It's looking better every day. The demand environment continues to be strong. We're resourced to deliver cruise locomotives, cars. We still expect to deliver double-digit RTM growth in the back half and ultimately grow RTMs and earnings for the year. With that said, let me hand it over to John to provide some color on the markets before he turns it over to Nadine to elaborate on the numbers.