RGC Resources, Inc. (NASDAQ:RGCO) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call February 10, 2023 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Paul Nester - President, CEO & Director

Jason Field - VP, CFO & Treasurer

Tommy Oliver - SVP, Regulatory and External Affairs

Conference Call Participants

Paul Nester

Good morning, and welcome to RGC Resources 2023 First Quarter Earnings Call. I am Paul Nester, President and CEO of RGC Resources.

Let's review a few administrative items. [Operator Instructions]. At the conclusion of the presentation and our remarks, we will take questions. The link to today's presentation is available on the Investor and Financial Information page of our website at www.rgcresources.com.

Joining me this morning are Jason Field, Chief Financial Officer; Tommy Oliver, Senior Vice President of Regulatory and External Affairs; and Kelsey Davenport, Director of Finance.

Moving on to Slide 1. This presentation does contain forecasts and projections, and Slide 1 has our forward-looking statements. The agenda for today's call is on Slide 2. As usual, we will review operational and financial highlights from the first quarter, talk about our fiscal 2023 outlook, and again, we'll be happy to take questions at the end of the call.

Moving on to Slide 3. We continue to have good customer growth. You'll notice that the bar chart there shows a slight decrease in customer count from 2021. You may remember, as we've discussed extensively going back to 2020 about the moratorium that was imposed on utility disconnects and the effect that, that had on our customer counts in March of 2022, we were able to resume our collection processes for nonpay turnoffs. And consequently, as we've gotten into the colder weather this winter, we have been able to re-add some of those customers. Our total customer count is just under 63,000. We're really happy with that number. We fully expect to go over 63,000 here in the coming months. We had a good first quarter, adding new services and main extension, another 1.1 miles of main. We really believe that the housing development in the Greater Reno Valley is still strong. We expect again this year to add approximately 500 to 600 new customers.

Jason, walk us through our delivered volumes, and financial statements and capital spending for the first quarter.

Jason Field

Would be happy to, Paul. Thank you. We are on Slide 4. Our first quarter delivered volumes were up approximately 620,000 decatherms compared to the first quarter of 2022. That's a 23% increase due largely to the colder-than-normal weather compared to a year ago. Heating degrees overall were 31% greater than last year. Additionally, we continued to benefit from an increase in transportation and interruptible volumes due to our single multi-fuel customer that has continued its higher natural gas utilization during the quarter.