Williams Companies, Inc. (The)

hey everyone and welcome to the williams third quarter 2021 earnings conference call today's conference is being recorded at this time for opening remarks and introduction i would like to turn the call over to mr danilo giovanni vice president of investor relations please go ahead thanks samir good morning everyone thank you for joining us and for your interest in the williams companies

Yesterday afternoon, we released our earnings press release and the presentation that our President and CEO, Alan Armstrong, and our Chief Financial Officer, John Chandler, will speak to this morning. Also joining us on the call are Michael Dunn, our Chief Operating Officer, Lane Wilson, our General Counsel, and Chad Zemrin, our Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategic Development. In our presentation materials, you'll find a disclaimer related to forward-looking statements. This disclaimer is important and integral to our remarks, and you should review it. Also included in the presentation materials are non-GAAP measures that we reconciled to generally accepted accounting principles. And these reconciliation schedules appear at the back of today's presentation materials. So with that, I'll turn it over to Alan Armstrong.

Great, and thanks, Danilo, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. We do have a lot of good news to share with you today, but let me just start by saying that our long-term strategy of connecting the fastest-growing natural gas markets with the best supply areas continues to deliver exceptional financial results, as demonstrated by these higher-than-expected third-quarter financials. As John will walk through in just a moment, we achieved all-time record results in the third quarter with our adjusted EBITDA of 12% compared to the same period last year, driven by growth across all three of our major business segments. Given our robust performance to date and continued strong fundamentals, we are raising our 2021 EBITDA guidance midpoint for the second time this year to a level that is now 8% above our realized 2020 results, which I'll remind you came in above expectations last year in a very challenging backdrop. Not only did we deliver performance, more on our financial performance this quarter than we expected but we continue to make strides in executing on key projects and transactions that give us a clear line of sight to sustain growth for many years to come we'll talk a little bit about that today but so for right now let me turn it over to john to provide you some insight into the drivers of this all-time record quarter for williams john Thanks, Alan.