Brookfield Infrastructure Partners LP

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Brookfield Infrastructure Partners LP third quarter 2020 results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants' lines are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star and then one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star and then zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Rene Lubiansky, Managing Director, Investment. You may begin.

Thank you and good morning. Thank you for joining us for Brookfield Infrastructure Partners' Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call for 2020. On the call today is Sam Pollack, Chief Executive Officer, Bahir Manios, Chief Financial Officer, and David Krant, SVP of Finance. Following their remarks, we look forward to taking your questions and comments. At this time, I'd like to remind you that in responding to questions and in talking about our growth initiatives and our financial and operating performance, we may make forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, and future results may differ materially. For further information on known risk factors, I would encourage you to review our annual report on Form 20F, which is available on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Baheer.

Thank you, Renee, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to be on this morning to report on our strong results for the quarter. We reported funds from operations, or FFO, of $365 million, or 79 cents on a per-unit basis. This is an increase of 8% compared to the prior year, as all of our operating groups reported solid operating results, in addition to contributions received from new investments completed over the last 12 months and gains on some realizations we had on our financial asset program. On a constant currency basis, our FFO per unit would have been 16% higher than the prior year. The impact of a lower Brazilian real reduced our U.S. dollar results by $30 million during the period. I'm pleased to share that similar to the second quarter, government restrictions had very little impact on most of our businesses, allowing them to perform in line with our expectations. The economic recovery over recent months has had a positive impact on our GDP-sensitive operations. Two notable examples being our total traffic volumes, which are now currently operating at pre-shutdown levels. and connection activity at our regulated distribution business in the UK, which is now currently averaging almost 90% of planning. David will walk through the detailed results for the various operating segments, but before handing off the call to him, I wanted to make a few remarks on our balance sheet and liquidity position. As we've highlighted in our materials many times in the past, a fundamental element of our business strategies to maintain a strong financial position throughout each economic cycle. Our resilience to the economic slowdown this year was aided not only by the sustainability of our underlying cash flows, but also due to the disciplined approach we've utilized over the years in financing our investments. As a result, we've maintained a robust credit metric and a solid investment-grade rating. With the prevailing backdrop of low interest rates and supportive credit capital markets, we've taken the opportunity during the period to further enhance our balance sheet. We successfully extended maturities at attractive rates across our portfolio, which reduces exposure to any near to medium-term capital market volatility. In this regard, we completed two financings at the corporate level, which increased our average corporate term to maturity from six to eight years. First, we issued $500 million Canadian of 12-year notes in the Canadian market to opportunistically refinance a $450 million series of notes that are maturing in 2022. In addition to being our longest issuance to date, the new series also has the lowest coupon to date at 2.855%. Second, we issued $200 million of perpetual green preferred units at a fixed rate of 5.125%. This inaugural issuance is our first corporate financing in the U.S. market and demonstrates greater access to capital markets and our commitment to sustainable investment practices. Following an active quarter of capital deployment, which Sam will touch on in his remarks, our liquidity position remains healthy as we have approximately $3.6 billion of liquidity on a total basis with $2.4 billion of that residing at the corporate level. Over the next six months, we will look to enhance our current liquidity position with proceeds from several ongoing asset sales that are being progressed. During the quarter, we launched several new processes which could generate almost $1.5 billion of additional liquidity by mid-2021. So with that, thanks for your time this morning, and I'll turn the call over to David to discuss our operating results in a little bit more detail.