Wabash National Corporation

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Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us on this call. With me today are Brent Yeagy, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Mike, 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 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. Thanks, Ryan. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today.

Beginning with the first quarter of 2024, our revenue and income fell slightly short of our expectations due to slower customer pickups of equipment. I'd like to emphasize that particularly for a year of weaker demand, Q1 tends to be seasonally weaker. Additionally, the size of our products necessitates that we rely on customers to pick up their equipment before we are able to recognize revenue. That said, our production outstripped shipments during the first quarter, so the delta versus our anticipated quarterly revenue and the associated income will flow to subsequent quarters during 2024, particularly Q2. As we'll discuss later, our financial outlook for the year remains unchanged. From a strategy perspective, we continue to enhance our network at 78 dealer locations. Through our marketplace joint venture, we launched the initial version of our Wabash marketplace in the first quarter. Collaborating with leading technology and logistics providers, the platform seeks to deliver customer-centric solutions to an integrated partner ecosystem that sets new industry standards for parts, services, and trailer capacity. The ultimate objective of the Wabash Marketplace is to develop a comprehensive end-to-end digital platform that transforms the experience for dealers, customers, and suppliers. Utilizing advanced technology and connectivity, we aim to streamline the supply chain experience, making it more efficient, connected, and user-friendly. Dealers and customers will benefit from improved access to a wide range of parts and services, with a particular focus on our trailers as a service or task capabilities and the expansion of our Wabash Parts distribution network. The marketplace has significant potential for growth as the team focuses on opening up opportunities for additional value added offerings. Also, our Wabash Parts distribution JV is reaching an initial stage of maturity that will facilitate meaningful growth in 2024. Of course, the synergy between our comprehensive first to final mile equipment portfolio, Wabash Parts, and the Wabash marketplace and our parts and services segment more broadly affirms our position in this market as we seek to add more value for our customers by supporting equipment through the course of its life cycle. Confidently investing in strategic growth initiatives during a down year in the trailer industry marks a new chapter for Wabash, one that we have not previously had the opportunity to explore. As we gain more clarity on 2024, it's important to emphasize the resilience of our portfolio that has grown over the last decade. we see relative stability in customer demand for our truck bodies and tank trailers, which helps mitigate the anticipated decline in dry van demand this year. In addition to benefiting from strategic customer relationships with best-in-breed participants in trucking, logistics, and retail, our expanded and diversified equipment portfolio not only enhances our stability through market cycles, but also provides a stronger foundation for layering on strategic growth. This backdrop positions us well to capitalize on market shifts, and continue our innovation and leadership in the transportation, logistics, and distribution industries. As we continue to advance our strategic objectives, a vital component is fostering higher levels of employee engagement, which we believe leads to enhanced execution and improved financial performance. At Wabash, we are dedicated to building a culture that embodies our core values and emphasizes respect for individuals. In line with this commitment, we have established a Culture Council, a multi-year initiative aimed at addressing critical aspects of our organizational environment. These include our work environment, working relationships, well-being and community, growth and autonomy, flexibility and consistency, and systems and processes. To bring these areas to life, we have formed cross-functional teams tasked with implementing changes that positively affect all employees and creating an environment where everyone can succeed. These teams represent various functions in geographical locations, ensuring a wide range of perspectives and ideas are being represented across the teams. This investment in our people and elevation of our internal standards not only aligns with our leadership responsibilities and values, but also advance the interests of Wabash, our customers, partners, shareholders, and our communities through the acceleration of our strategic vision and increasing sustainability of value creation. Moving on to market conditions. While our customers continue to experience a challenging freight environment, we have seen important leading indicators, like the ISM index rising above 50, indicating expansion returning to the manufacturing sector, while surveys of inventory levels at shippers suggest evading headwinds from destocking that have been working against the freight market over the last couple years. While these positive indicators have yet to immediately translate into improved freight conditions, we are optimistic that improvements may be on the horizon when you pair the strengthening macro backdrop with the amount of capacity that has left the transportation industry since the market downturn began in early 2022. Thinking beyond the current trade cycle, we remain bullish on our core markets benefiting from secular trends like power only, persistent driver shortages, and the resurgence of nearshoring activity within North America. Shifting focus to our backlog, at the close of the first quarter, we had a total of 1.8 billion in orders. with $1.5 billion of that figure expected to be shipped in the next 12 months. Both figures were lowered by roughly $100 million sequentially, but it's important to note that with over $500 million in revenue for the quarter, the relative stability of our backlog implies that we continue to see meaningful volumes of new orders. Moving to our financial outlook, with the benefit of further visibility provided by our sizable backlog, we are reiterating our full year 2024 guidance of $2.3 billion of revenue and a midpoint of $2.25 of EPS. In closing, we are capitalizing on the opportunities presented by the market environment in 2024. With a diverse portfolio of first-to-final-mile equipment and a growing parts and service business, Wabash is positioned with unprecedented strength paired with minimal leverage at this stage of the freight cycle. I believe our ability to maintain focused execution on our unique organic growth projects underscores the strength of our strategic positioning for the future. We are actively working to deepen relationships with our dealers, suppliers, and customers, as well as engaging with interesting new players within the transportation, logistics, and distribution landscape. Simultaneously, we are committed to fostering a culture of continuous improvement within our own employee experience, ensuring that we remain well equipped to act on our strategy. We are confident that this approach will not only enhance our financial performance at all points in the cycle, but also enable Wabash to sustainably grow our level of value creation for all stakeholders. With that, I'll hand it over to Mike for his comments.