The Southern Company

Good afternoon. My name is Kathy, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Southern Company first quarter 2023 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. At that time, if you have a question, please press the 1 followed by the 4 on your telephone. If at any time during the conference you need to reach an operator, please press star zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Thursday, April 27th, 2023. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Scott Gamble, Vice President, Investor Relations, and Treasurer. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Kathy. Good afternoon and welcome to Southern Company's first quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me today are Chris Womack, President of Southern Company, and Dan Tucker, Chief Financial Officer. Let me remind you, we'll be making forward-looking statements today, in addition to providing historical information. Various important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements, including those discussed in our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, and subsequent filings. In addition, we will present non-GAAP financial information on this call. Reconciliations to the applicable gap measure are included in the financial information we released this morning, as well as the slides for this conference call, which are both available on our investor relations website at investor.southerncompany.com. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Chris Womack.

Thank you, Scott, and good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. I am delighted to be joining you today in my first earnings call as president of Southern Company. I've enjoyed getting the opportunity to interact with many of you over the last couple of months and look forward to meeting with many more of you in the months ahead. I am incredibly excited about the future of Southern Company, the energy industry, and the valuable work that we're doing to serve our customers and communities. I am excited about the opportunities ahead of us and proud to be a part of a team that is making such a significant impact in building the future of energy. As you've watched us reposition our deep, talented bench across the system, our mission remains unchanged, provide our customers and communities with clean, safe, reliable, and affordable energy while continuing to keep our customers at the center of everything we do. Also unchanged is our goal to deliver superior risk-adjusted total shareholder return. And I believe our financial plan supports that objective. The strength of our value proposition is a function of our customer and community-focused business model, the robust economic growth in our service territories, and the constructive regulatory frameworks in our states. It is also a function of our discipline as we remain committed to our objectives of strong investment-grade credit ratings with a regular, predictable, and sustainable dividend policy. Along with our focus on long-term execution and value accretion, we are executing on our plans and believe we're well positioned to achieve our financial objectives for 2023. Dan, I'll now turn the call over to you for our financial update.