American Water Works Company, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to American Water's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and is also being webcast with an accompanying slide presentation through the company's Investor Relations website. The audio webcast archive will be available for one year on American Investor Relations website. Now I'd like to introduce the host for today's call, Mr. Aaron Musgrave, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Mr. Musgrave, you may now begin.

Thank you, Nick. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's call. At the end of our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Let me first go over some safe harbor language. Today, we will be making forward-looking statements that represent our expectations regarding our future performance or other future events. These statements are predictions based on our current expectations, estimates, and assumptions. However, since these statements deal with future events, They are subject to numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from the results indicated or implied by such statements. Additional information regarding these risks, uncertainties, and factors, as well as a more detailed analysis of our financials and other important information, is provided in the earnings release and in our March 31, 2022, Form 10-Q, each filed yesterday with the SEC. All statements during this presentation related to earnings and earnings per share refer to diluted earnings and earnings per share. Susan Hardwick, our President, CEO, and CFO, will discuss first quarter financial results, 2022 earnings and long-term guidance, and our commitment to ESG principles. Cheryl Norton, our Executive Vice President and COO, will then review our regulated growth strategy, including capital investments and regulatory proceedings in the first quarter. Susan will then comment on some exciting news we shared yesterday regarding our executive management team before closing by answering your questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to American Water's president, CEO, and CFO, Susan Hardwick.

Thanks, Aaron, and good morning, everyone. As Aaron said, I'll comment further in just a few minutes about recent announced additions to our executive team. But I want to start by saying what a privilege it has been to serve as the company's CFO these past three years. But I also must say I'm thrilled that this will be my last call as the CFO. Let's turn to slides five and six, and I'll start by covering our first quarter financial results and then share some business highlights to start the year. In the first quarter of 2022, earnings were 87 cents per share compared to 73 cents per share in the same period of 2021. Results for the regulated business drove all of the increase of 14 cents per share, while market-based business and other results were essentially flat as compared to the same period in 2021. Regulated results for the quarter reflect revenue increases from several general rate proceedings completed in 2021 and early 2022, as well as from infrastructure mechanism filings. These higher revenues were partially offset by higher depreciation and increased production costs due to some inflationary pressures on chemicals and energy prices. Market-based businesses and other results were similar in the first quarter of 2022 and 2021 with a loss of $2 million or one cent per share in both of those periods. But in those results, the seven cents per share of earnings from HOS in 2021 was mostly offset in 2022 by the interest income and earnings from the revenue sharing agreements in place as a result of the sale of HOS late last year. While we're currently reflecting the interest income and revenue share contributions in other, they really do represent results driven by the regulated business, and will even more so once the proceeds of the note receivable from the sale are received and redeployed into regulated capital investment. We will continue to report these pieces separately so that it is easy to track. Finally, our military services group had similar results in both quarters, and our MSG team continues to expect an announcement on the Naval Station Mayport, Florida bid this summer. In addition to the strong quarter of earnings growth, our regulated business invested $437 million in capital projects and acquisitions in the quarter. This is a great start to the year and puts us on pace to meet our $2.5 billion capital investment goal in 2022. I may sound like a broken record here, but as we've said last year when we announced our stepped-up capital spending plan, The increasing levels of investment will continue to ramp up during this year and over the next few years, and it will take time to see recovery of those investments in rates. We're now in the regulatory cycle that we've talked about before, with general rate cases being filed every two to three years in our larger states. We've already announced rate case filings in New Jersey and Illinois earlier this year, which are proceeding as expected. We'll be filing a general rate case in Pennsylvania tomorrow and our next case in California next week, which follows the statutory cycle there. In aggregate, we expect to file five to six general cases in 2022, seeking to earn a return on over $4 billion of investment. Clearly, regulatory execution is critical to the success of our plans. Let me make one more comment on our investment progress before I move on. As you will recall, the $2.5 billion total capital investment planned for 2022 includes the $235 million anticipated acquisition of the City of York's wastewater system that we're very excited about. We're also excited, though, about the 30 other acquisitions across several states we have under agreement as of March 31st. They demonstrate that the acquisition pipeline is quite strong. Turning to slide seven, after a strong start to the year, we are affirming our 2022 guidance range of $4.39 per share to $4.49 per share. As we shared in February, our expected regulated earnings growth range in 2022 of 24 to 30 cents reflects new authorized rate levels in several jurisdictions. As expected, we saw much of that revenue increase related to new rates in the first quarter of 2022, including in Pennsylvania, which recorded a full quarter of the base rate increase from last year, as well as the step increase effective January 1 of this year. We also experienced about $0.03 per share of timing favorability for operating costs in the first quarter of 2022 that we expect to reverse in later quarters. As I've mentioned previously, we will not see any material earnings in 2022 from the redeployment of the sale proceeds from HOS and New York. But the expected earnings from interest on the seller note and revenue from the utility share agreements will nearly offset the loss of the prior annual earnings contribution from HOS. Finally, on slide seven, I'll just reiterate that we are confident in the long-term financial targets we set forth in November, including 7% to 9% EPS growth through 2026. Moving on to slide 8, as we announced yesterday, our Board of Directors increased the company's quarterly cash dividend payment from 60.25 cents per share to 65.5 cents per share, a nearly 9% increase. Including this year's expected increase, we have grown our dividend at a compound annual growth rate of 9.6% over the last several years, significantly outpacing most of our utility peers. We plan to grow the dividend at the high end of the 7% to 10% range, as we know that is important to many of our shareholders. Before I turn the call over to Cheryl, I want to cover a few important points related to our industry leadership in ESG. Coming in May, we plan to issue our second annual Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Report. This report will highlight the efforts we have undertaken and the strides we have made advancing our commitment to building an inclusive workplace. Within the report, you will find our first disclosure of consolidated EEO-1 data for American Water. Based on feedback from shareholders and ESG best practices, we made a commitment in our recently filed proxy statement to begin disclosing this data annually in 2022 and thereafter. This action will deliver on that commitment. We are also pleased to be publishing in May the second annual installment of our ESG data summary, which will be found on the sustainability page of our investor relations website. The data summary will share numerous metrics for calendar year 2021, including scope one and scope two emissions and progress toward our greenhouse gas emissions reduction target. As many of you know, American water has achieved significant greenhouse gas emission reductions over the last decade. Due to the nature of our business and our emission reductions over the years, we are in a great position relative to a large majority of our utility peers. For example, we're able to talk about our emissions footprint in hundreds of thousands of metric tons, whereas most other utilities talk in terms of millions of metric tons. Last year, we came closer to achieving our current goal. We began the process of evaluating new greenhouse gas emission targets. This evaluation is well underway by a large cross-functional team and is running in parallel with our annual planning process. They are focused on diligent study and analysis, including the potential addition of a Scope 3 emissions and potential alignment with the Paris Agreement. The team expects to present its findings and recommendations to management and the Board later this year. I wanted to share this update with you today to demonstrate our commitment to transparency as one of the top ESG leaders in the industry. And with that, let me turn the call over to Cheryl to cover in more detail our operating results and strategies for 22. Cheryl?