American Water Works (AWK) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending June 30, 2023

July 27, 2023 9:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the American Water's Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and is also being webcast within the accompanying slide presentation through the company's Investor Relations website. The audio webcast archive will be available for 1 year on American Water's Investor Relations website.

I will now like to introduce your host for today's call, Aaron Musgrave, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Musgrave, you may begin.

Aaron Musgrave

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 30 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 will 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 5, 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.