American Water Works Company, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to American Water's fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and is also being webcast with an accompanying side presentation through the company's investor relations website. The audio webcast archive will be available for one year on American website's 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.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's call. At the end of our prepared remarks, we will open up 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 fourth quarter earnings release and Form 10-K, each filed yesterday with the SEC. This call will include a discussion of non-GAAP financial information. A reconciliation of our historical adjusted earnings per share to GAAP earnings per share can be found in the appendix of the slides for this call. And finally, all statements during this presentation related to earnings and earnings per share are meant to refer to diluted adjusted earnings and earnings per share. With that, I'll turn the call over to American Water's President and CEO, John Griffith.

Thank you, Aaron, and good morning, everyone. Let's turn to slide five, and I'll start by covering some highlights of 2025. You can see here an abbreviated list of some of our key financial and other accomplishments for the year, and David and Cheryl will add to these in their remarks. As we announced yesterday, we achieved 2025 financial results near the upper end of our expectations. Adjusted earnings were $5.64 per share for the year compared to $5.18 per share in 2024. Our results reflect the clear execution of our plan in 2025, which delivered EPS growth of 8.9%. Our regulatory and state teams were very active this past year, completing and initiating several significant general rate cases in 2025, while enhancing our ongoing communications with key stakeholders. These cases are driven by infrastructure investments needed to serve our customers. They punctuate the focus we have on providing safe, clean, reliable, and affordable service to approximately 14 million people across our footprint. And as you can see, we invested over $3 billion in 2025 to help achieve that mission. I'm proud to say that we again achieved our goal of keeping residential water bills well under 1% of median household income on average across our footprint. Given the national and state level dialogue on affordability, including utility bills, our focus on high quality, affordable service remains very important. This is also why we strive to continue adding new customers to the American water system as a core piece of our business model. We know through 140 years of experience that scale and regionalization will translate into more affordable and efficient operations for customers we're privileged to serve. With over 104,000 customer connections under agreement heading into 2026, we're pleased to be executing on that aspect of our long-term plan. Finally, our company's ability to stay focused on serving our customers safely and reliably this past year was tremendous. As you'll see in this year's 10K and proxy statement, we had an outstanding year in 2025 in terms of performance based on several key safety and water quality metrics. And of course, as I'll talk about more in a few minutes, we ended the year with the announcement that we entered into a definitive merger agreement with essential utilities. We look forward to sharing with many of our states, including through the regulatory approval process, the benefits this merger will bring to customers and other stakeholders over the near and long term. I believe the overall takeaway today for investors is that our strong execution in 2025 coupled with our low risk top tier capital growth plan demonstrates American Water's ability to deliver on its long-term plan. I'm confident we will execute on our plans for 2026 and beyond building on the momentum we have from 2025. Turning to slide six, we are affirming our 2026 earnings guidance of $6.02 to $6.12 per share. This represents our expectation of 8% EPS growth in 2026 compared to our adjusted 2025 EPS, consistent with what we laid out last fall and aligned with our expectation to achieve consistent EPS and dividend growth well within the 7% to 9% range through 2030 and beyond. We have demonstrated during these last few years and with our guidance for 2026 that our business plan is strong and compelling. On slide seven, we are again affirming our long-term targets and drivers of growth in the business. Our commitment to solving problems for our customers remains steadfast, including addressing aging infrastructure and water quality challenges, and doing so with a keen eye towards customer affordability. We believe this foundation, coupled with the capital investment needs that lie ahead, uniquely positions American Water to achieve consistently strong earnings and dividend growth for many years to come. In closing, on slide eight, I'm pleased to share that we've already achieved a few milestones on the path to closing our merger with Essential Utilities since the October announcement. I want to thank our respective companies' legal, regulatory, and financial teams for their excellent work over the last few months to timely file for all of the necessary state regulatory and shareholder approvals. As I mentioned earlier, we are eager to demonstrate to commissions and other important stakeholders in the months ahead the positive elements this merger will bring to the mission of serving our customers. On the shareholder front, we were pleased to announce last week that shareholders of American Water and Essential overwhelmingly voted in favor of the respective merger-related proposals during the special meetings on February 10th. On behalf of the American Waters Board, I want to thank our shareholders for their time, attention, and support of the proposed merger, which we expect to close by the end of the first quarter of 2027. We are very excited about the opportunity to bring together our two great companies to form a leading water and wastewater utility company in the country for the benefit of our combined customers and shareholders. With that, I'll hand it over to David to cover our financial results, rate case updates, and balance sheet strength in further detail. David?