Canadian National Railway Company (NYSE:CNI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Steven Hansen: Just hoping you could perhaps provide some commentary around the intermodal outlook and specifically, the delta you’re seeing between international and domestic. I think on the last call, you had started to acknowledge some weakness in the international side, and that continues to be the case. But domestic weakness is a newer phenomenon that’s been downgraded it seems. Just maybe some commentary around the relative prospects for the 2 would be helpful for the year.

Doug MacDonald: Thanks, Steve. It’s Doug. So it’s a good question. So on the international side, we continue to see some inventory overstocking. We continue to see blank sailings coming in from Asia. There’s some forecast for that to continue all the way through the first quarter. So we do see weakness there, but we don’t have a lot of visibility moving forward. On the domestic side, we’re actually seeing some very normal volumes right now. We’re not seeing a lot of weakness, but we’re not seeing a lot of strength. So what we’re doing is being — we’re doing fairly conservative around volumes. We think we’re set up to move at all. And the customers are, I think, right now that even though with dropping truck prices, we’re still being very steady from the rail standpoint.

Operator: The next question is from Ariel Rosa from Credit Suisse.

Ariel Rosa: So I wanted to ask, in terms of the volume outlook and maybe some of the conservatism around that, does any of that reflect anticipated impact from the CP KCS merger going through? And then separately, with regard to this Investor Day coming up, in May. I just wanted to understand, Tracy, kind of what are your objectives there? And what are the main things that you’re trying to communicate to investors that you feel maybe aren’t being understood? Or I guess why holding Investor Day now?

Tracy Robinson: Thanks for the question. Firstly, the KCS, I mean, we’ve talked about this a number of times. We’re very comfortable with our position relative to any announcement or any merger that may take place there. We’re pretty focused on our own game. And when we’re on our game, and we’re pretty tough to beat. So what we’ll do at Investor Day is lay out for you a couple of things that we think are important to have a dialogue with you about. And one of them is where we see the scheduled operation taking us in the future. And the resilience of that is the basis for all of what we’re going to talk to you in the first — in the future is really the core of how we run this railroad. And when I say scheduled operation, I mean not just the operations side of it, but it’s how we sell into the capacity as well.

The second thing we’ll talk to you, we’ll lay out for you is how we see the growth shaping up as we look forward. We’re pretty excited about some of the growth prospects. This year is an anomaly. We’ve got a little bit of a turndown. This has happened before. It will happen again. But we’ll come out of this very nicely. I think we’re very well positioned. But what we’ll be talking to you about in May and Chicago is how we see the growth over the medium term to the longer term. And there’s a lot there that we’re excited to talk to you about.

Operator: The next question is from Justin Long from Stephens.

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