Atmos Energy Corporation

telephone keypad. And if you would like to withdraw that question, again press star 1. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dan Mazir, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer. Dan, you may begin.

Great. Thank you, Krista. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our fiscal 2024 third quarter earnings call. With me today are Kevin Akers, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Chris Forsythe, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Our earnings release and conference call slide presentation, which we will reference in our prepared remarks, are available at atmasenergy.com under the Investor Relations tab. As we review these financial results and discuss future expectations, please keep in mind that some of our discussion might contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act and the Securities Exchange Act. Our forward-looking statements and projections could differ materially from actual results. The factors that could cause such material differences are outlined on slide 32 and are more fully described in our SEC filings. With that, I will turn the call over to Chris Forsythe, our Senior Vice President and CFO.

Chris? Thank you, Dan, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us and your interest in residential customer growth and rising industrial load in our distribution segment increased operating income by an additional $18 million. Revenues in our pipeline storage segment increased $19 million period over period. $11 million of this amount, never right or right mechanism, was realized during our third fiscal quarter. Several of the pipelines coming out of the Permian Experience planned and unplanned maintenance. This reduction take away capacity of the system. We expect spreads to remain elevated through the end of our fiscal year. Excluding the $14 million one-time bad debt adjustment, bad debt adjustment will be reported in Mississippi in the first quarter. Consolidated O&M increased at net $16 million for about 3%. This increase is primarily due to higher import related costs, insurance premiums, IT software maintenance costs are offset by a $15 million decrease in O&M and our pipeline and storage segments primarily due to the timing of inline inspection work. As expected, O&M in the third fiscal quarter trended higher than the prior quarter and we anticipate O&M spending in the fourth fiscal quarter to trend higher as well as continues to focus our spending of compliance, maintenance, and system monitoring. We expect fiscal 24 O&M to be in the range of $800 million to $820 million. Consolidated capital spending increased to $2.1 billion with 80% plus dedicated to improving the safety and reliability of our system. Spending our distribution segment has increased due to higher safety and liability spending and higher spending to support customer growth. Spending in our pipeline and storage segment is lower than the prior year due to timing. We remain on track to spend approximately $3.1 billion this fiscal year. Since the end of our second fiscal quarter, we implemented about $213 billion in annualized regulatory outcomes, including all of this year's Texas grip filings and our annual filings for the city of Dallas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Year to date, we have completed $380 million in annualized regulatory outcomes. Currently, we have an additional $182 million in annualized outcomes in progress. Additionally, we made our first filing under APT's new system safety and integrity mechanism seeking a $19 million increase in revenues. This new mechanism was approved in APT's last general rate case as a closing mechanism for costs incurred to address new federal and state safety related regulations, meaning we will recognize the revenue and related O&M costs after review and approval by the Texas Federal Commission, resulting in no impact to operating income. Our financial position continues to remain strong. We finish our third fiscal quarter with an equity capitalization of 61% and approximately $4.3 billion liquidity. This amount includes $551 million in net proceeds available under existing forward sale agreements that will fully satisfy our anticipated fiscal 24 equity needs and most our anticipated fiscal 25 needs. In June, we completed a $325 million senior unscrewed debt offering, tapping our existing 10-year .9% senior notes. As a result, our overall weighted average cost of debt as of June 30 stands at 4.1%. Our debt profile remains very manageable with a weighted average maturity of approximately 17 years. As we head into the fourth quarter of the fiscal year, we now believe our fiscal 24 earnings per share guidance will be at the higher end of our reaffirmed earnings per share guidance range of $6.70 to $6.80. Our anticipated financing plan for fiscal 24 is all regulatory outcomes that can impact fiscal 24 have been implemented. As I mentioned ago, we anticipate spreads for APTs through system business will remain elevated, which will modestly contribute to our Q4 results. And we have a reasonably clear line of sight in the system compliance, maintenance, and monitoring we will be performing in the fourth quarter. As a reminder, our guidance range includes two items totaling $0.17 that we will exclude when we initiate our fiscal 25 guidance in November. The first item is the Texas property tax benefit that we've been discussing all fiscal year, which would favorably impact fiscal 24 results by $0.10. Additionally, the one-time Mississippi bad debt adjustment represented $0.07. We continue to anticipate 6% to 8% earnings per share growth when we suggest the EPS amount through fiscal 28. Thank you for your time today, and I will turn the call over to Kevin for

his good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We continue to benefit from solid economic growth in our service territory. For the 12 months into June 30th, we added 57,000 new customers with nearly 45,000 of those new customers located in Texas. The Texas Workforce Commission reported in July that the seasonally adjusted number of employees reached 14.2 million. Texas again added jobs at a faster rate than the nation over the last 12 months ending June, adding over 267,000 jobs representing a .9% annual growth rate. Industrial demand for natural gas in our service territories also remains strong. During the third quarter, we added 10 new industrial customers with an anticipated annual load of approximately 2 BCF once they are fully operational. Fiscal year to date, we have added 32 new industrial customers with an anticipated annual load of approximately 6 BCF once they are fully operational. On a volumetric basis, the 6 BCF of anticipated industrial load is equal to adding approximately 110,000 residential customers. And during the first nine months of the fiscal year, our customer support agents and advocacy teams continued their outreach efforts to energy assistance agencies and customers, helping over 47,000 customers receive nearly $19 million in funding assistance. Our consistent performance reflects the vital role we play in every community, safely delivering reliable and efficient natural gas to homes, businesses, and industries to fuel our energy needs now and in the future. We appreciate your time this morning and we will now open the call to questions.

If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. And if you would like to withdraw that question, again press star one. Your first question comes from the line of, say, she with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning, team. Thanks for taking my questions. I just want to first quickly touch on financing. Could you just further discuss the equity needs for 2025 and definitely given 2025 largely done with four instruments and the recent renewal on ATM? Just how does that better facilitate the equity needs in 2025? Thanks.

Yeah. Well, this is Chris saying good morning and thanks for joining us. We typically issue between $600 and $800 million a year in equity through the ATM program that we have. And as I mentioned a few minutes ago, we have $551 million priced at the end of June of which that amount will basically mostly satisfy our fiscal 2025 needs. So I think that hopefully that will give you enough color to update your models.

That's great. That's great. Thanks for the colors. Very helpful. Maybe just quickly turning to O&M execution for 2025. You raised the midpoint guidance by $20 million last quarter. And I guess things are on track for this year. Could you talk about going forward, what are some of the key items you're focusing on O&M execution and how are you benchmarking with the .5% annual increased items?

Thanks. Yeah, this is Kevin. Good morning. Glad to have you join us today. Again, we're working through the remainder of fiscal 24 right now and anticipate it will be the same items as we move into 25. And we'll have additional detail and color as we get to our November call on 25. But again, the drivers around O&M continue to be hydrostatic testing, line locating, integrity regulations, marketable placement on difficult or hard to locate lines, those sort of things. And then looking for opportunities as we move forward to enhance those or pull things forward when we have the ability to do that. So again, the same items that we're focused on this year, we anticipate seeing again in 25.

Yeah. And I'll add to that too is that, you know, as I said at the end of my prepared remarks, we're still anticipating 6 to 8% EPS growth off of the adjusted EPS amount for fiscal 24. So that's the overall theme to take away from. We'll have some put some takes on the O&M as Kevin mentioned, but we're still guiding to that 6 to 8% growth target.

Great. That's very helpful. Thanks for the color. So I'll leave it there.

Great. Your next question comes from the line of Richard Sondersen with the JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for the time today. Morning. Good morning. Looking at 24 results, you've called out the 17 cents of one-offs. I'm curious how we should think about the rest of the business into 25. Does everything else continue into 25 other than CPT spread benefit, meaning take the 680 top end, less 17 cents and maybe back out another roughly 10 cents for the spread pickup?

Yeah, I think you're on target there, Rich, is backing up the 17 cents off of whatever you want to assume for the outcome for fiscal 24. You know, APT, you know, we will have some spray activity next year, but we just can't predict it. So I wouldn't necessarily discount too far off of what you have, the two one-time items when you're starting your 7% or 8% or 9% whatever you want to do on the growth target for fiscal 25, because we will have some activity. It's just this year, particularly in the third quarter, we saw some elevated spreads. And as you commented, you know, it expected reverse back to the mean, which means we'll still have some activity there.

Okay, great. That's really helpful. And I guess one quick follow up on that spread opportunity. I know you referenced in the script kind of a continuation into 4Q. Is that already contemplated in the higher end guidance language or is that potential upside depending on how that materializes?

No, that's all contemplated in the guidance that we've updated here this morning.

Great. Very clear and very helpful. Thanks for the time. Thank you.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your phone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Levine with Citi. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Good morning. Hi, everybody. To follow up on the APT spread dynamics, what are you assuming for the Matterhorn in service date with the current 24 guidance? And are you assuming that the spread means ride for the remaining portion of your fiscal year?

Yes, Chris said, you know, again, we don't anticipate any further maintenance this year on the upstream segments of APT there that would impact the spreads right now. They've mitigated from the highs we've seen over the last quarter somewhat. And look, going forward, you know, definitely Matterhorn will be coming on. I think if you read some of the documentation from the upstream folks, sometime in September, October, early fall, that will be coming on. We'll just have to watch and see what that does for the dynamics out there. Then as we normally get into the shoulder much in winter period, demand will drive it further from the spread impact. Again, I always like to remind here why APT exists and that's to serve the customers behind it, the LDCs behind it. And then when we have opportunity, we'll move that gas across our system. So right now, again, we don't anticipate any further maintenance upstream that would impact the spreads any further than what we're currently seeing today at this point.

Okay. And then a follow up on that. Given the strong performance this fiscal year on APT, does that have any implications for resetting the bar which you get the sharing mechanism in future time rates?

No, that's set in the rate case itself on a go forward. So the next time that will potentially look at would be in the next five years, five years in the next required filing.

Yeah. So as a reminder, that bar was set at 106.9 million. And so that's the benchmark we have to achieve to begin sharing over about that amount. And of course, it works the other way too if we fall short. But 106.9 is the target we're looking at.

Okay. And then last question for me, to the infrastructure built in your service territory, do you see any opportunities on the LDC side to maybe build some infrastructure to support the movement of gas associated with some of the gas generation that may be coming?

Yeah. As we've talked about on previous calls, there's always that opportunity out there. But let's remember the power generators that we have on APT system, we're one of several suppliers to them so they can move or flex between suppliers at their will out there so we wouldn't be a sole supplier. And we'll just continue to keep an eye on that over the next few years and see how that develops. But again, we would be one of several suppliers or inputs into those facilities.

Thank you for the time. Thank you.

And that concludes our question and answer session. And I will now turn the conference back over to Dan for closing remarks.

Thanks. We appreciate your interest in Atmos Energy and thank you again for joining us today. A reminder, a recording of this call is available for replay on our website. Have a great day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation and you may now disconnect.