Canadian National Railway Company

Good afternoon. My name is Sarah, and I will be your operator today. All participants are now in a listen-only mode. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Stacey Elderson, CN's Assistant Vice President of Investor Relations. Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Elderson.

Thank you. Bonjour à tous et merci de vous joindre à notre appel conférent sur les résultats du troisième trimestre 2024 du CN. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for CN's third quarter 2024 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 US and Canadian securities laws. These statements are subjects to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements. They are more fully described in the forward-looking statement section of the presentation. After the prepared remarks, we will conduct a Q&A session with our analysts. As usual, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question. Joining us on the call today are Tracy Robinson, our President and CEO, Derek Taylor, our Chief Field Operations Officer. Pat Whitehead, our Chief Network Operations Officer. Remy Lalonde, our Chief Commercial Officer. And Jisla 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.

Thanks, everyone, for joining our call today. Most of you would have already seen our press release on September 10th. where we updated our 2024 guidance and longer-term outlook. We'll get to more details about the quarter in a moment, but I'd like to start by saying a few words about how we see things now that the noise of the past two quarters is mostly behind us. First, let me say a few words on operations. We implemented our scheduled operating plan 30 months ago now. It's proving over and over again to be the right plan for our network, and the velocity it creates the levels of customer service it supports, and in its resilience and ability to recover. The latest proof point is the way our operating performance rebounded after both the fires in northern Alberta in July and after our labor-related shutdown. And we bounced back quickly. When you're putting up numbers, like October month-to-date car velocity at 223 miles per day, train speed of 20 miles per hour, all while handling record Western Canadian grain volumes and maintaining really strong local service levels for our customers. When the team is delivering at those levels, you know that this is a pretty well-oiled machine. This is a credit now to Pat, to Derek, and to the entire operating team. Now, second, the macro is lighter than what we expected coming into 2024 and maybe even a bit softer than what we thought on our last call back in July. We're seeing this play out in our merchandise business, especially in construction-related commodities, as well as in automotive. Having said that, we've built up a strong pipeline of opportunities with our customers that are unique to this network. We see this driving more than half of the volume growth in coming years, so we're confident that these will allow us to grow in spite of some of the macro challenges. And finally, because of the softer economy, We haven't seen the levels of volumes that we expected on parts of our network this year. Because of that, we're continuing to adjust our resource levels to more closely align resources to the demand we see coming our way, particularly in our eastern and southern regions. We stopped hiring on certain parts of the network earlier this year, and we continue to be purposeful in our decisions around labor. We're finding that balance between minimizing costs and having the right resources in place to handle the growth, which means some surge capacity in key locations. Now we have and will continue to take actions to drive margin improvement into the fourth quarter and beyond. And Pat will speak to this in more detail in a few minutes. And we're in the process of firming up our outlook for 2025, and we'll be able to give you more details on that in January. But as we do this work, our story remains the same. We're committed to delivering on our growth agenda underpinned by our scheduled operating model. Our recipe of volume growth, pricing ahead of rail inflation, and incremental margin improvement will enable us to deliver our three-year outlook of high single-digit EPS cater. Okay, now turning to the quarter. I'm pleased that the Teamsters arbitration process is now well underway. This gives us labor stability on the railway. And with the work stoppage behind us, our operation is fully recovered, and Derek will give us more insight into how we managed through and lifted out of that disruption. On the demand side, the noise created by the labor situation clearly had an impact on our business in the quarter, most meaningfully in intermodal. Following the network restart, we saw a snapback in domestic intermodal demand and expect a more gradual return of the international business based on our experience with the Canadian West Coast pork strike last year. Vancouver and Rupert remain compelling gateways And Remy and the team are working hard to get those volumes back as quickly as possible. Now, just a couple things to mention on the cost side. One, we were resourced to handle more volume. And two, bringing the network to an orderly shutdown, as well as the Alberta wildfires, came with some additional expenses, which combined came through in our margin performance this quarter. Putting it all together, we delivered $1.72 of EPS for the third quarter, 2% higher than last year, with an OR of 63.1%. Suzanne will give us more details in just a few minutes. Now, we're looking past Q3 and into the fourth quarter to really demonstrate what this railroad can do. And I'll hand it over to the team to provide more details. Over to you, Derek.