Canadian National Railway Company

Good afternoon. My name is Julianne, and I will be your operator today. Welcome to CN's second quarter 2022 financial and operating results conference call. All participants are now in listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session, during which we ask that you kindly limit yourself to one question. I'd now like to turn the call over to Paul Butcher, Vice President, Investor Relations. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Butcher.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for CN's second quarter 2022 financial and operating results conference call. Before we begin, I'd like to draw your attention to the forward-looking statements and additional legal information available at the beginning of the presentation. As a reminder, today's conference call contains certain projections, and other forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. and Canadian securities law. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements and are more fully described in our cautionary statements regarding forward-looking statements in our presentation. After the prepared remarks, we will conduct a Q&A session. I do want to remind you to please limit yourself to one question. The IR team will be available after the call for any follow-up questions. Joining us on the call today are Tracy Robinson, our President and CEO, Rob Riley, our Chief Operating Officer, Doug McDonald, our Chief Marketing Officer, and Ghislaine Oul, our Chief Financial Officer. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to CN's President and Chief Executive Officer, Tracy Robinson.

Thank you, Paul, and good afternoon, everybody. Very pleased to be here with you all today. Whether you're joining by phone or the webcast, welcome. And I'm very proud of the quarter that this team has delivered in Q2. Now, last quarter, we laid out a number of principles that would guide the way that we run our business and the way that we grow. And I'm happy to say that we've advanced on all of these principles. And while we continue to have work ahead of us, as I said last quarter, this is going to take some time. I'm very pleased with the way the team is coming together and the results that they're producing. Now, we've leaned into our scheduled operations, improving train performance and service to our customers, and we're seeing the beginnings of improvement in velocity. We've begun to work on our book of business to ensure that we're selling into our operating model in a manner that we can deliver to our customers. And we continue to improve our yield performance. We're growing our bottom line, we're growing our top line. More work to do, but we've got a great start. Now let me highlight a few key points of our Q2 financial performance. We achieved record revenues of $4.3 billion, up 21%. Now that's on 2% volume growth, higher fuel surcharge revenues, and a strong yield management. The operating ratio for the quarter was 59%. a 260 basis points improvement over Q2 last year. The network is fluid, and the operating team has done a great job of improving performance across the network. The commercial teams had a strong quarter on yield, and bringing these together with the work of the rest of the team has enabled us to deliver a record EPS. We achieved $1.93 in the quarter, up 30% over last year. Solid performance by the team. Now, as I reflect on my first few months as CEO of this great organization, I've got to say that every day I feel more excited about the future of CN. I've spent a lot of time during these last few months meeting with our employees across the system, with our customers, conversations with government, and with our investors, including many of you. And since our Q1 call in April, I've spoken about some of my key priorities, and these remain the same. I am really encouraged with the start that we have. We're far from done, as I said, but I'm seeing a team that is leaning in, doing it together, focused on bringing CN back to being a leader in the industry. I'm going to let my colleagues today highlight some of the progress we're making, but before I turn it over to them, I'll provide a few high-level thoughts. Firstly, we spoke about leaning into a scheduled operation. This has launched very well and it's leading to improved performance for our customers and across the network. We continue to build momentum here. Rob's going to provide you with some more details on this and also on our preparedness to accommodate what we believe will be a very strong volume growth expected in the second half of this year. Secondly, it's about being thoughtful and intentional about our book of business. Our customer service levels are better. and we're going to stay focused on this. We know that we earn our way to grow by running a tight, efficient operation and freeing up capacity for growth. This is important as we ready ourselves for the volume coming, particularly in the Western Network over the remainder of this year. We've seen over the years a lot of growth in the Western Corridor. This is an important region for us. And as we move forward, we're going to keep focusing on it. But we're also going to lean in to more fully utilizing the other parts of the network, densifying the eastern region and southern region. This will strengthen our business, our resilience. It's going to drive stronger returns. Now, Doug's going to provide you with an update on the business environment and double-click a little bit on Halifax, which we believe is a gateway that will provide significant opportunities for CM in the future. Third, I talked about working in a much more integrated basis. We need to sell into the schedule and the operating model that we have in a way that leverages our strengths. Our efforts to do this in a coordinated way are generating results. Ghislaine, Rob, Doug, and I meet on a regular basis, and we look at pretty much every contract, every pricing decision. We work the resource levels, whether it's crews, equipment, and we work our capital spend, where we're investing. We know that success is about having all these levers set in the right place, Now, our decision's not always easy, but we do it as a team, and I think it's driving the right outcome. And finally, it's about ensuring that we grow the top line at the same time that we're growing the bottom line. Our results this quarter reflect this effort, and I'm pleased with our progress and our momentum here. Suzanne will provide more details of the financial performance in the quarter. So our plan's working, and this team, see our full team, is focused on delivering solid results as we move into the second half of this year. Now let me pass it over to you, Rob.