American States Water Company (NYSE:AWR) Q2 2022 Earnings Conference Call August 2, 2022 2:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Bob Sprowls - President and Chief Executive Officer

Eva Tang - Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Angie Storozynski - Seaport

Jonathan Reeder - Wells Fargo

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the American States Water Company Conference Call discussing the company's Second Quarter 2020 Results. The call is being recorded. If you would like to listen to the replay of this call, it will begin this afternoon at 5 p.m. Eastern Time and run through Tuesday, August 9, 2022, on the company's Web site www.aswater.com. The slides that the company will be referring to are also available on the Web site. After today’s presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions [Operator Instructions].

Presenting today from American States Water Company is Bob Sprowls, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Eva Tang, Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer.

As a reminder, certain matters discussed during this conference call may be forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the safe harbor and liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Please review a description of the company's risks and uncertainties in our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, this conference call will include a discussion of certain measures that are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP in the United States and constitute non-GAAP financial measures under SEC rules. These non-GAAP financial measures are derived from consolidated financial information but are not presented in our financial statements that are prepared in accordance with GAAP. For more details, please refer to the press release. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Bob Sprowls, President and Chief Executive Officer of American States Water Company. Sir, you may begin.

Bob Sprowls

Thank you, Chad. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'll begin with some brief comments on the quarter. Eva will then discuss some financial details. And then I'll wrap it up with some further thoughts on the quarter, updates on regulatory activity, California's drought, ASUS, dividends and then we'll take your questions. Before I provide some highlights on the second quarter results, I'm pleased to report that last week, our Board approved another sizable dividend increase. The annualized dividend rate after this increase is $1.59 per share, which represents nearly a 9% increase from the current annualized dividend rate of $1.46 per share. This action marks the 345th consecutive dividend payment by the company. American States has paid dividends every year since 1931, increasing the dividends received by shareholders each calendar year now for 68 consecutive years.