Canadian National Railway Company

All participants, thank you for standing by. The conference is ready to begin. Good afternoon. My name is Patrick and I will be your operator today. Welcome to CN's fourth quarter and full year 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. You may press star 1 if you have a question. I would now like to turn the call over to Paul Butcher, Vice President, Investor Relations. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Butcher.

Well, thank you, Patrick. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for CN's fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial 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 presentations. 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 uncertainty that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements and are more fully described in our cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements in our presentations. After the prepared remarks, we will conduct a Q&A session. I do want to remind you to please limit yourselves 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, Doug McDonald, our Chief Marketing Officer, Ghislaine Houlle, our Chief Financial Officer, and last but not least, the youngest recruit on the team, Ed Harris, our Chief Operating Officer. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to CN's president and chief executive officer, Tracy Robinson.

Thanks, Paul, and welcome to our earnings call. I'm very pleased to be with you all today, whether you're with us by phone or webcast, we appreciate you joining us. Now, I'm approaching getting close to the end of my first year with CN, and as I do that, I can't be prouder of this team and what we've accomplished together over the last year. It's important to me and to all of us that we've delivered on what we promised. We drove top line growth and we drove to the bottom line. We started with a pretty tough first quarter, but we finished the year on guidance with an EPS up 25% and an operating ratio that starts with a 5, first since 2017. We also delivered a return on invested capital of 15.9% and free cash flow of nearly $4.3 billion. I want to take this opportunity to thank each of our CN employees. I am grateful for your focus and your hard work in delivering to some very big commitments this year. We came together as a team and across the entire organization we have risen to the challenge. But we're not done. We've got more work to do on many fronts and we'll be focusing on this through 2023. Without a doubt, we are in an uncertain economic time. And like many others, we are assuming this year a mild recession. Now, our bulk segment will help us in the first half of the year, but we have less visibility in the second half. This company, like others, we've dealt with recessions in the past and we'll deal with this one. We have a great network and a diverse book of business provides stability for us in times like this. So we're going to remain nimble and close to our customers and we'll perform well this year regardless of volumes, and we will position ourselves for the upswing when it comes. And while current expectations that North American industrial production will be negative in 2023, we will grow EPS in the low single-digit range. Now, the team with me today will walk through our performance 2022 and our outlook for 2023. I am pleased to have Ed Harris joining us on the call today for the first time. Ed was appointed Chief Operating Officer in December and he brings a little bit of experience, 40 years of experience to our team. Most of that was with CN running a scheduled operation. He's pretty passionate about being back and doing just that. Ed will give us an update on our operating performance and he'll make some comments on our path forward and continuing to improve our operation. and importantly, on his mandate to get the next generation of operating talent ready. Now, following a strong top-line performance in 2022, Doug and his team are working closely with our customers to monitor volume trends and making sure our portfolio continues to fit our network. We're going to maintain our approach of selling into our capacity. Doug today will give you an update on our key markets and how we'll look to outperform that North American industrial production this year in terms of volumes. And Ghislaine, as always, will cover the details of our financial performance in the quarter and the year, as well as assumptions driving our 2023 financial outlook. Ed, over to you.