Norfolk Southern Corporation

Greetings and welcome to Norfolk Southern Corporation's first quarter 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to introduce Luke Nichols, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Thank you, Mr. Nichols. You may now begin.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Please note that during today's call, we will make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements relate to future events or future performance of Norfolk Southern Corporation, which are subject to risks and uncertainties and may differ materially from actual results. please refer to our annual and quarterly reports filed with the SEC for a full discussion of those risks and uncertainties we view as most important. Our presentation slides are available at NorfolkSouthern.com in the Investor section, along with a reconciliation of any non-GAAP measures used today to the comparable GAAP measures, including adjusted or non-GAAP operating ratio. Please note that all references to our prospective operating ratio during today's call are being provided on an adjusted basis as referenced in our earnings release. Turning to slide three, it's now my pleasure to introduce Norfolk Southern's President and Chief Executive Officer, Alan Shaw.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Norfolk Southern's first quarter 2024 earnings call. Here with me today are Mark George, our Chief Financial Officer, Ed Elkins, our Chief Marketing Officer, and our new Chief Operating Officer, John Orr. I am excited to have John on the Norfolk Southern team. John is a 40-year railroad industry veteran and a proven PSR expert who has worked with Hunter Harrison, Claude Mongeau, and Keith Creel to implement PSR railroads across three countries. I promised you that we would focus on productivity in 2024 and we're taking action to do just that. Bringing in someone of John's caliber was another step to accelerate our operational improvement. John is going to share the progress in our operating metrics that he and his team are already driving and his plans for furthering productivity in our merchandise network to deliver immediate margin enhancement. Our strategy is about balancing service productivity and growth with safety at its core. The strategy is anchored on a PSR-driven operating plan and designed to deliver top-tier earnings and revenue growth with industry-competitive margins. When we say industry-competitive margins, it has to be within 100 to 200 basis points of the industry average. Let's recall where we've been and discuss our path forward. Last year, in response to East Palestine, we prioritized investments in safety and service to protect our franchise and our shareholders, and we delivered on both fronts. We are operating one of the safest networks in North America and are producing service levels better than anything we've seen since 2019. Despite that progress, more work remains to be done to get us back to industry competitive margins. We were not delivering the productivity and we were not running fast enough or efficiently enough. I needed to make changes to accelerate our progress and to introduce greater operational discipline into our culture. To that end, we started making organizational and process changes last fall, culminating with the recent hiring of John Orr. Now, we have safely built the foundation to drive substantial gains in productivity And we've committed to a 400 to 400 basis point OR improvement in the second half of this year. We will close that margin gap with peers. We will deliver a sub-60 operating ratio in the next three to four years. And we will do it in a safe, sustainable manner that recognizes our current operating environment and brings key constituents, including our shareholders, customers, employees, and regulators, along with us on our mission. We will urgently deliver productivity through disciplined operational excellence that continues to safely serve our customers, positions us to grow by meeting markets as they evolve, and allows us to generate outsized returns for our shareholders. I'll now turn it over to Mark to review our first quarter financial results.