American Water Works Company, Inc. (NYSE:AWK) Q1 2024 Results Conference Call May 2, 2024 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Aaron Musgrave - Vice President of Investor Relations
Susan Hardwick - President and CEO
Cheryl Norton - EVP and Chief Operating Officer
John Griffith - EVP and CFO

Conference Call Participants

Richard Sunderland - JPMorgan
Angie Storozynski - Seaport
Gregg Orrill - UBS
Aditya Gandhi - Wolfe Research

Operator

Good morning. And welcome to American Water's First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and is also being webcast with an accompanying slide presentation through the company's Investor Relations Web site. The audio webcast archive will be available for one year on American Water's Investor Relations website.

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

Aaron Musgrave

Thank you, Betsy. 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 first quarter earnings release and in our March 31st 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. After our prepared remarks, 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. Good morning, everyone. As we announced yesterday, we started 2024 with solid financial results. As shown on Slide 5, earnings were $0.95 per share for the quarter compared to $0.91 last year. The increased results were as we expected and put us on track to achieve our full year earnings guidance, which we are pleased to affirm. First quarter 2024 results included $0.02 per share of additional interest income from the February 2024 amendment of the seller note related to the sale of HOS, which reflected the higher interest rate and the successful earn-out of the $75 million contingent consideration as we detailed in our February call. Here, you can also see a recap of some of our other key accomplishments so far in 2024, and John and Cheryl will add to these in their remarks. As we announced in late February, we completed a successful long term debt issuance of $1.4 billion. This delivered on the highest priority in our 2024 financing plan. We also invested well over $600 million of capital in infrastructure this quarter. In addition, we completed a large acquisition and filed general rate cases in several states in accordance with the traditional process of earning a return on the capital investments we have made. We did all of this while keeping customer bills affordable and staying true to our high value for quality service and sustainable operations, which we highlighted in our disclosures we published in early April as noted on this slide. The other significant news so far in 2024 for us and the water industry as a whole came on April 10th when the EPA announced the final national primary drinking water regulations for six PFAS chemicals. Cheryl will elaborate further on the PFAS water quality standards, but I want to reiterate that we fully support the EPA's efforts to protect drinking water quality. I want to again assure our customers, regulators, investors and other stakeholders that American Water has the expertise to tackle this issue head on. And in fact, we have demonstrated that in many locations for some time now.