Shelley Simpson
President and Chief Executive Officer at J.B. Hunt Transport Services
Thank you, Brad, and good afternoon to everyone on the call. I'd like to start by saying I'm humbled and honored to have recently assumed the role as CEO and to lead our great company on the next phase of our growth journey. While recognizing this is a big moment, as only the fifth organizational leader in our company's 62-year history, let me be clear, our vision, our mission and our focus has not changed.
We have large addressable markets. We provide excellent service for customers. We have talented people across our organization. We are prime, and we are ready to execute on our opportunities for growth. My message to the team on day one was quite simple, ready, set, go. As you've heard us say consistently, we remain committed to our investments and managing the business with a long-term mindset. These investments span across our company foundations, which include our people, our technology and our capacity. Through investments in these key areas, we have a significant number of opportunities to provide value to and on behalf of our customers across our suite of complementary service offerings.
Our focus remains on deploying capital in areas of the transportation industry where we see a long-term opportunity to generate compounding returns. We operate in an industry that is cyclical, but we have focused on businesses and areas that we feel confident we can compete effectively, take share and win. We do this by remaining financially disciplined, keeping our focus on the long term while managing costs in the near term and relying on our vast experience. We will be prepared to meet the growing needs of our customers while driving long-term growth for the company and our shareholders.
Earlier this year, we introduced our priorities for 2024, and we as a management team and as an organization continue to execute on these priorities which as a reminder are: one, to deliver exceptional value to our customers through operational excellence; two, scale [Phonetic] a long-term investment in our company foundations, which are people, technology and capacity; and three, drive long-term value and returns for our shareholders.
While the first half of this year has been challenging in terms of our financial performance, we remain focused on delivering exceptional value to our customers. In 2024, we've continued our record performance in safety and our service levels to customers has been exceptional. We have received multiple awards this year for our high service level from our customers. Our joint intermodal service offering with BNSF, Quantum, is running well above our initial expectation from an on-time service performance.
In Dedicated, we continue to improve our value to customers as we've been able to balance the need to be disciplined with underwriting new business while providing customers some flexibility with meeting their needs. Final Mile continues to make progress on its profit improvement plan and we continue to work on areas around cost, integration and growth in ICS and see some progress in the business.
Finally, we remain encouraged about the value proposition for customers in our drop trailing business in JBT and the future potential of that business. While admittedly, the market has been challenging, we have invested throughout this downturn to set us up for future growth and success across the business. We continue to focus on controlling expenses in the near term without jeopardizing our long-term potential, managing our head count through attrition while at the same time, continuing to deploy and enhance our technology to increase the productivity of our people.
We took advantage of a strategic opportunity to acquire the intermodal assets for Walmart earlier this year, which added capacity to our network, but also increase the long-term growth potential of our company, which we believe will drive long-term returns for both the company and our shareholders. The team will provide more details with their prepared comments, but in summary, we will stay in the course, focus on the long term with the same 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?