Wabash National Corporation

number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star one. Thank you. Ryan Reid, Senior Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. You may begin your conference.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us on this call. With me today are Brent Yeagy, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Mike Pettit, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, please note that this call is being recorded. I'd also like to point out that our earnings release, the slide presentation supplementing today's call, and any non-GAAP reconciliations are available at ir.onewabash.com. Please refer to our slide two in our earnings deck for the company's safe harbor disclosure addressing forward-looking statements. I'll hand it off now to Brent.

Thank you, Ryan. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. I'm pleased to announce another quarter of strong financial results which continues to demonstrate successful execution against our strategic vision. With the industry's broadest portfolio of first-to-final-mile product solutions and a growing parts and services offering that complement our transportation equipment group, we remain dedicated to elevating our value proposition even further for our partners. In addition to securing two pivotal agreements with strategic customers, we have also focused on adding value across our partner ecosystem by executing relational agreements with key suppliers like Hedro, Ryerson, and most recently, Rockland Flooring. Rockland is a longstanding supplier of wood flooring for trailers, and their supply commitment will bolster Wabash's strategic positioning as we look to enhance demand planning within our dynamic industry. Just as we continue in our pursuit of enhanced value creation within our transportation solutions business by redefining relationships with our evolving set of direct customers and key suppliers, We have similar strategic focus on amplifying our parts and services offering by working collaboratively with our best-in-class dealer network to provide differentiated offerings to make customers more efficient by leveraging our parts distribution capabilities as well as embracing the power of digital transformation. I'm excited to announce a significant expansion of our Wabash Parks Network and trailers as a service capabilities to a new joint venture with Fernway Group The collaboration is strategically aimed to enhancing our e-commerce and partner ecosystem. Fernwave boasts a distinguished track record in scaling industrial tech, and we anticipate that this JV will significantly accelerate our development and growth of an end-to-end digital platform that provides an industry-leading experience to our dealers, traditional and non-traditional suppliers of both parts and services, and a broad set of customers spanning the transportation, logistics, and distribution landscape. Wabash is positioned as a central figure with an increasingly complex ecosystem of industry participants where innovation endeavors to address challenges within transportation. And we look forward to using our unique positioning to work closely with Fernway to scale transformative projects that will help to enhance efficiency of logistics networks. I'd also like to take a moment to thank our board of directors whose active engagement and diligent oversight throughout the process of forming the strategic joint venture has been instrumental. As always, their collective experience, guidance, and support has been pivotal in steering us along this path of reinvigorated organic growth. If this joint venture appears to be a departure from a well-worn path for Wabash, I would respectfully encourage you to take a closer look at our most recent journey. Over the past few years, our company has undergone a profound transformation. We've restructured, resegmented, rebranded, refinanced our debt, and recapitalized our manufacturing operations. These sweeping changes have yielded substantial financial accomplishments that have come ahead of schedule. At our 2022 investor meeting, we unveiled a new set of long-term financial targets, which included an EPS goal of $3.50 per share by 2025, which at the time was viewed as an ambitious target. For those keeping score at home, we have achieved $3.74 of EPS through the first three quarters of 2023, are in the process of setting a new bar for what peak earnings can look like for this company. And just as importantly, as demand conditions within bands soften in 2024, we fully expect to put in our best trough performance as the power of our portfolio shines through with truck bodies, tank trailers, and parts and services all expected to continue posting strong financial performance. While I've called this out in the past, I'd like to reiterate that the record earnings figure we will achieve in 2023 is being done so on unit volume that resides uniquely below full factory utilization. Additionally, by the time we make our way back to the next market peak, we would expect our parts and service business to be the margin accrued piece of the portfolio. Turning our attention to market conditions and backlog, shipment activity continued to outpace new orders in the third quarter. which is not surprising given the softening of demand conditions as freight rates bump along the cyclic bottom. Considering the challenging transportation market conditions that our customers have been contending with, it's also not surprising to see order activity shifting toward the later stages of the typical seasonality timeframe. Ending Q3, our total backlog stood at $1.9 billion, while our 12-month backlog was $1.4 billion, and we do expect to achieve an uptick in order flow through Q4 with order season now underway. As industry participants have noted, every additional month that the freight market continues to languish, the stronger and more durable we expect the inevitable recovery to be. Over the long term, we maintain our belief that our core markets are benefiting from secular trends such as power only, persistent driver shortages, and resurgence of reshoring activity within North America. Moving on to our financial outlook, With the first three quarters of EPS in 2023 outstripping any full year in the company's history, we again are pleased to raise the midpoint of our full year 2023 EPS guidance to $4.65 from $4.45. In closing, we are well prepared to execute in 2024. Wabash is as strong as it's ever been at this point in the freight cycle with minimal leverage and the ability to continue our focused execution on our unique organic growth projects outlined on our strategic roadmap. We expect to navigate a reduction in dry van industry demand next year, but we will do so with recently proven capabilities and the performance of other major facets of the business remaining strong in the coming year that will allow us to accelerate as demand rebounds within the van segment during 2025. We see 2024 as a point in time where we will expand and deepen relationships with our dealers, suppliers, and customers as well as interesting new players within the transportation, logistics, and distribution landscape. Yes, certain markets may pull back in 2024, but nothing is happening that will derail us from our purpose and our strategic mission. We are executing to the plan that improves our financial performance at all points in the cycle and facilitates opportunities for Wabash to continue to grow our level of value creation for all stakeholders. With that, I'll hand it over to Mike for his comments. Thanks, Brent.