David P. Yeager - Hub Group, Inc.
Management
Great. Thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for participating in Hub Group's third quarter earnings call. I'm joined today by Don Maltby, our President and Chief Operating Officer; and Terri Pizzuto, our Chief Financial Officer. We successfully executed on our strategy to increase market share this quarter and saw strong growth with targeted customers across all of our business lines. We fully understood the deploying of growth strategy in this soft freight environment would result in lower gross margins. But the alternative of losing share was unacceptable. Our focus remains on providing excellent service to our clients as we continue to invest in our people to provide differentiated service in an energized culture. We are also prepared to implement our acquisition strategy to further diversify our service offerings. Today I'm going to talk about the Intermodal business. Don will then discuss the other business lines, followed by Terri, who will cover the financial results. Generally speaking, demand is muted, and Intermodal peak season got off to a slower start than we anticipated. Although volume in the domestic Intermodal market declined 2%, Hub's consolidated Intermodal volume was up 4% in the third quarter, Local East volume increased 1%, Local West was up 3%, and Transcon increased 8%. We broke two records this quarter. First, Intermodal volume. The last week of September was our highest weekly volume ever. Second, the third quarter Intermodal volume was the highest in Hub history. We were able to grow more than the market because of our customer-centric strategy, growing with the right customers and the right markets, and providing superior operational execution. In fact, on-time performance increased 360 basis points year-over-year. We project that we'll see volume growth of between 2% and 3% for the full year, which would imply growing mid-single digits in the fourth quarter. We believe the peak will extend through the end of the year due to changes in our customer mix and retailers' evolving shipping patterns. The most recent bid season brought positive results, as our targeted approach to the market allowed us to increase business levels with our strategic accounts, while at the same time, grow targeted markets. Obviously, price is very challenging in this market. However, we were disciplined in our approach to support and protect strategic customers and markets. Margin erosion from price decreases and rail cost increases was partially offset by cost-saving initiatives, resulting in Intermodal margin declining 3%. For the third quarter, rail on-time performance improved 15% on a year-over-year basis and was flat sequentially. Fleet turns improved 0.3 of a day to 14.8 days, and the fleet installations of the GPS units are on track to be completed before year end. Finally, our current fleet size is 31,600 units, which enables us to meet our customer commitments. And with that, I'll turn it over to Don.