California Water Service Group (NYSE:CWT) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call April 27, 2023 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Tom Scanlon - Corporate Controller

Marty Kropelnicki - President and CEO

Tom Smegal - VP, CFO and Treasurer

Conference Call Participants

Jonathan Reeder - Wells Fargo

Gregg Orrill - UBS

Davis Sunderland - Baird

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the California Water Service Group Q1 2023 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I'd now like to welcome Mr. Tom Scanlon, Corporate Controller, to begin the conference.

Tom Scanlon

Good morning, and welcome, everyone, to the 2023 first quarter results call for California Water Service Group. With me today is Martin Kropelnicki, our President and CEO; and Thomas Smegal, our Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Replay dial information for this call can be found in our quarterly results release, which was issued earlier today. The replay will be available until June 26, 2023. As a reminder, before we begin, the company has a slide deck to accompany the earnings call this quarter.

The slide deck was furnished with an 8-K yesterday afternoon and is also available at the company's website at www.calwatergroup.com. Before looking at this quarter's results, we'd like to take a few moments to cover forward-looking statements. During the course of the call, the company may make certain forward-looking statements. Because these statements deal with future events, they are subject to various risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially from the company's current expectations.

Because of this, the company strongly advises all current shareholders as well as interested parties to carefully read and understand the company's disclosures on risks and uncertainties found in our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, press releases and other reports filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

I'm going to pass it over to Tom to begin.

Tom Smegal

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on our first quarter results call.

I'm going to start on slide number five of the slide deck, which is just a table of our financial results for the first quarter. And what you'll see there is a large drop in revenue, which I'll get to in just a second.

We had a decrease in operating revenue of $41.9 million or 24.2%. That lines up with a decrease in operating expenses of $15.3 million. And that's a reduction of 9.3%. The effect of those among the other things that were on during the quarter was that we had a net loss for the first quarter of 2023 of $22.2 million or $0.40 per share, and that compares to net income of $1.1 million or $0.02 per share in the similar quarter last year.