Knight-Swift Transportation Holdings Inc.

Good morning. My name is Andrew and I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Knight-Swift Transportation fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. If at any time during your call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. Speakers from today's call will be Adam Miller, Chief Executive Officer Andrew Hess, Chief Financial Officer, and Brad Stewart, Treasurer and Senior VP of Investor Relations. Mr. Stewart, the meeting is now yours.

Thank you, Andrew. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. Today, we plan to discuss topics related to the results of the quarter, current market conditions, and our earnings guidance. We have slides to accompany this call, which are posted on our investor website. Our call is scheduled to last one hour. Following our commentary, we will answer questions related to these topics. In order to get to as many participants as possible, we limit the questions to one per participant. If you have a second question, please feel free to get back in the queue. We will answer as many questions as time allows. If we're not able to get to your question due to the time restrictions, you may call 602-606-6349. To begin, I will first refer you to the disclosures on slide two of the presentation and note the following. This conference call and presentation may contain forward-looking statements made by the company that involve risks, assumptions, and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Investors are directed to the information contained in Item 1A, Risk Factors, or Part 1 of the company's annual report on Form 10-K, filed with the United States SEC, for a discussion of the risks that may affect the company's future operating results. Actual results may differ. Before we get into the quarterly results, I will hand the call over to Adam for some opening remarks.

Thanks Brad, and good afternoon everyone. So as we close the book on 2024, we have more conviction that we are finally moving on from the prolonged down cycle that has weighed on the freight transportation sector for nearly three years. 2024 was another very difficult year, but it also brought a stabilization in pricing, a return of seasonal patterns, a cooling of cost inflation, and a marketplace that gave more and more indications of approaching balance in the second half of the year. While the extended drop in freight rates alongside stiff inflation over much of the past three years has taken margins to unusual lows, we have not been waiting for the next upcycle to prepare our business to produce significantly higher margins. We have deployed capital strategically via acquisitions to create more runway for growth and margin improvement, in both truckload and LTL. We have diligently trimmed costs in our businesses to mitigate margin pressure in the trough. We have sustained efforts to develop technologies that will help our business be more efficient and responsive to both opportunities and challenges created by a new cycle. We have taken advantage of unique opportunities to accelerate the organic expansion of our LTL network on our path to developing a valuable nationwide service offering. and we have worked to enhance our collaboration across service lines to capture more opportunities and drive more synergies. As customer needs become increasingly acute and dynamic in an improving market, we believe these efforts, our leading truckload scale, and our diverse service offerings will position us to be an outside beneficiary in an improving market, particularly because our industry-leading One-way truckload exposure can be arguably the most commoditized service during loose markets, but becomes some of the most valuable capacity we offer in a tighter market. Please turn to slide three. So with this perspective, for 2025, we have identified the following key levers that will help drive our near-term success. For truckload, we will intentionally leverage our scale suite of services, trailer network and flexible over-the-road capacity in order to enhance our value proposition. For our customers, this means maximizing our capacity and agility towards creatively solving larger and more complex problems. For us, this means more market opportunities are captured and kept in-house and that distinctive solutions are less commoditized. For LTL, While the past 18 months have been a period of significant investment to expand our network, the focus in 2025 will pivot to growing shipment count to drive margin expansion through revenue growth, freight mix upgrades, operational efficiency gains, and better cost absorption while maintaining price discipline. Our team has positioned the business well, and we couldn't be more excited about the opportunities ahead of us in 2025. We will continue to be opportunistic regarding organic and inorganic opportunities to grow our network and business where the strategic fit is right, but we expect to be more selective in 2025 while we drive returns on the existing investment. For logistics, we spent much of the down cycle harmonizing our technology platform. As the market recovers, we will leverage this platform to sharpen how we value opportunities and buy capacity to enhance how we engage with carriers and to improve the efficiency of how we execute transactions. This business continues to be a great complement to our asset business as it augments our capabilities in a stronger market and it augments our freight opportunities in a weaker market. It also affords us the ability to better utilize our trailer assets to enhance returns through our power only service. For intermodal, We have been grinding on improving our volumes, cost structure, network balance, and customer diversification and have made meaningful progress in a weak pricing environment. For 2025, our focus will be on gaining market share through the bid season to improve network balance and enhance asset efficiency on a path to profitability. And for our customers, we will continue our path towards developing a unique ability to service freight needs. with several large national truckload brands with unique networks and trailer capacity, we have the capabilities to solve acute challenges and support projects by leveraging capacity across our network. We are also refining our capabilities to leverage our national offering in both full truckload and LTL to support our customers and our conviction on the synergy opportunities is just as great as it has ever been. And now I'll turn it over to Brad to kick off the overview of the quarter.