Shelley Simpson
President at J.B. Hunt Transport Services
Thank you, John, and good afternoon.
As John made pretty clear, the market continues to be challenging. We remain focused on what we can control and how we position our business to deliver exceptional value for our customers and shareholders over the long term. The challenge we face today, as an organization, is managing the business to best prepare us for future growth, while balancing the need to manage and control costs in the near term. To be clear, the strategic opportunities we have across our business segments gives us great confidence in our future success.
Last quarter, we introduced our priorities for 2024. Our focus as a management team and an organization is to execute on these priorities, which, as a reminder, are: one, to deliver exceptional value to our customers through operational excellence; two, scale our long-term investments in our Company foundations, which are people, technology and capacity; and three, drive long term compounding returns for our shareholders. The markets are always hard to predict. Even more so over the last several years, given the wild swings we have seen on both the supply and demand side of the equation. One thing we know for sure, markets ultimately return to some balance after over-correcting on one side or the other.
We continue to view the market as out of balance and customers have been and are taking advantage. We've been surprised by the competitiveness in the bid season thus far. We can't predict when the current rate environment will change. And as a result, we remain committed to our efforts to control our cost. Importantly, though, we are doing this without sacrificing the long-term opportunities for our Company to grow and generate greater returns for our shareholders.
In fact, I would argue, we've only enhanced it during the first quarter with some of the investments we've made, most notably, Our purchase of the Walmart intermodal container fleet. We are also adapting in how we approach our customers and contracts in terms of our commitments. We will always be long-term focused and strategic. That said, we will have to be thoughtful in how we work with our customers. Our management team and business leaders are intensely focused on our cost efforts, while maintaining discipline on our long-term growth in return on capital thresholds.
In closing, I remain confident in our strategy and approach to manage through this part of the cycle. We continue to make thoughtful and disciplined investments that will only enhance the future performance of our Company. While the magnitude of this part of the cycle has certainly been more severe, both in terms of depth and duration, we strongly believe in our ability to outperform the market on service quality, value and growth. We have and we'll continue to prove our ability to deliver outperformance for our people, our customers and our shareholders. Our confidence is in our people, our experience, our complementary businesses, our scale, and our financial strength, which uniquely positions us for our future.
As we've said in the past, we remain committed to disciplined investments in our people, technology and capacity, but we will continue to challenge ourselves on our costs. I am confident that we will be better positioned as a result coming out of this part of the cycle, as we continue to pursue our vision to create the most efficient transportation network in North America.
With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CFO, John Kuhlow. John?
