Canadian National Railway Company (CNI) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

As a reminder, forward-looking statements are not guarantees, and factors such as economic conditions, competition, fuel prices, and regulatory changes could impact actual outcomes. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to CN's President and Chief Executive Officer, Tracy Robinson. Thanks, Stacey, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm pleased this morning to share our Q4 and full-year results. 2025 was a year in which this team delivered strong performance against a backdrop of significant volatility and a challenging macro. The actions we took over the past year were proactive and exactly what the environment demanded. We've been disciplined. We've completed an important investment cycle. We've maintained a relentless focus on productivity improvement and increasingly on commercial intensity. And these actions drove our 2025 results. They helped us navigate a tough year and have set us up well for when volumes start to grow across the industry again. Now, on our last call, we made three commitments to ensure we deliver the type of returns we know CN is capable of. The first was on performance. As Q4 demonstrates, we continue to intensify our commercial execution while maintaining strong, disciplined network performance. Our focus is simple. Concentrate on areas we can control and deliver through execution, regardless of the macro backdrop. Our results today reflect this focus, with improvement across all key operating measures. Second, on financial discipline, we reset our capital programs to reflect today's environment with concrete actions to reduce costs and improve productivity. These actions are strengthening free cash flow, and we remain committed to returning excess capital to shareholders while maintaining a strong balance sheet. And third, on gu...