American Water Works Company, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the American Swatters Second Quarter 2023 Year-End 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 Swatters Investor Relations website. I would now like to introduce your host for today's call, Aaron Musgrave, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Musgrave, you may begin.

Thank you, Sasha. 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 second quarter earnings release and in our June 30th Form 10-Q, each filed yesterday with the SEC. And finally, all statements during this presentation related to earnings and earnings per share refer to diluted earnings and diluted earnings per share. Susan Hardwick, our President and CEO, will share highlights of second quarter and year-to-date results and thoughts on our affirmed 2023 EPS guidance and longer-term targets. John Griffith, our Executive Vice President and CFO, will discuss our successful financing activities in the first half of the year cover our financial results in more detail, and we'll close with an update on our acquisition activity. Cheryl Norton, our Executive Vice President and COO, will then discuss our capital investment plan, regulatory updates, and we'll conclude with a review of our recently published sustainability report and other new disclosures. We'll then close by answering your questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to American Water's President and CEO, Susan Hardwick.

Susan Hardwick Thanks, Aaron, and good morning, everyone. Let's turn to slide five, and I'll start by covering some highlights of the first half of the year. As we announced yesterday, we delivered strong financial results in the second quarter and the first half of 2023. Earnings were $1.44 per share for the quarter compared to $1.20 for the same period last year. In the first six months of 2023, earnings were $2.37 per share compared to $2.07 per share in the same period of 2022. The results were in line with our expectations, as we knew the first half of the year would be strong compared to last year due to revenue increases from several general rate case proceedings completed in 22 and early 23 and from infrastructure mechanism filings. We continue to execute on our regulatory strategy, which continues to be the key driver of our results. Revenues in the second quarter were also higher, due to increased usage from warm and unusually dry weather in several of our states. Tempering results were higher operating costs, which John will elaborate on further. Moving on to some of our other key accomplishments so far in 2023, we invested nearly $1.2 billion in capital projects year-to-date, reflecting great work by our teams responsible for planning and completing these investments. Also, as you will recall, the total capital investment plan for 2023 includes approximately $400 million for acquisitions, including two sizable transactions we expect to close in the fourth quarter. Our outlook for future acquisitions remains very strong, as we have over $550 million of acquisitions under agreement, including those two sizable deals. As we announced in March, we completed a very successful equity issuance of $1.7 billion of American Water Common Stock, This delivered on the highest priority in our 2023 financing plan. And as we announced last month, we completed a convertible debt issuance of just over a billion dollars that achieved the other key element of our 2023 financing plan. Finally, earlier this week, we were pleased to publish our company's latest sustainability report. Cheryl will share a few highlights of the report, but at its core, it tells the story of how we are fulfilling our mission of providing safe, clean, reliable, and affordable water and wastewater service in a very sustainable way to American water customers. And this has been our mission for over 135 years. Turning to slide six, we are affirming our 2023 EPS guidance range of $4.72 per share to $4.82 per share on a weather normalized basis. And once again, we are affirming our long-term targets. I continue to believe that our strong regulatory, financing, and operational execution is the differentiator from our peers. Our track record of executing on these fronts gives us confidence and should give investors confidence in our ability to achieve our short-term and our long-term financial targets. As we've done in the past, we expect to consistently grow earnings and dividends at a top tier pace over the next five years and beyond. And with that, I'll turn it over to John to cover some second quarter highlights and financial results in more detail. John?