Saia, Inc. (NASDAQ:SAIA) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript April 26, 2024 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Douglas Col - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Frederick Holzgrefe - President and Chief Executive Officer

Conference Call Participants

Scott Group - Wolfe Research
Amit Mehrotra - Deutsche Bank
Bruce Chan - Stifel
Tom Wadewitz - UBS
Eric Morgan - Barclays
Jordan Alliger - Goldman Sachs
Jonathan Chappell - Evercore ISI
Daniel Imbro - Stephens
Brian Ossenbeck - JPMorgan
Ravi Shanker - Morgan Stanley
Tyler Brown - Raymond James
Bascome Majors - Susquehanna
Jason Seidl - TD Cowen
Ken Hoexter - Bank of America
Stephanie Moore - Jefferies

Operator

Good morning and welcome to Saia's First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the call over to Doug Col, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Douglas Col

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Saia's First Quarter 2024 conference call. With me for today's call is Saia's President and Chief Executive Officer, Fritz Holzgrefe. Before we begin, you should know that during this call, we may make some forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements and all other statements that might be made on this call that are not historical facts are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially. We refer you to our press release and our SEC filings for more information on the exact risk factors that could cause actual results to differ.

I'll now turn the call over to Fritz for some opening comments.

Frederick Holzgrefe

Good morning, and thank you for joining us to discuss Saia's first quarter results. While underlying macro trends remain lackluster in our view, our year-over-year results in the first quarter reflected tremendous share gains made since last summer. In the quarter, we averaged approximately 33,000 shipments per day compared to approximately 28,500 per day last year or an increase of nearly 16%.

We've opened seven new locations in the past 12 months and our employee count has grown significantly, allowing us to staff the new locations and enabling us to handle the growth in volumes while still providing our customers with excellent service. I'm particularly pleased to see all of our key service performance indicators continue to trend positively as we continue our expansion.