Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call November 7, 2024 9:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Danilo Juvane - VP, IR
Alan Armstrong - President & CEO
John Porter - CFO
Micheal Dunn - COO
Chad Zamarin - EVP of Corporate Strategic Development

Conference Call Participants

Jeremy Tonet - JPMorgan Securities
Praneeth Satish - Wells Fargo
Indraneel Mitra - Bank of America
Manav Gupta - UBS
Theresa Chen - Barclays
John Mackay - Goldman Sachs
Keith Stanley - Wolfe Research
Robert Catellier - CIBC
Zack Van Everen - TPH & Company
Jack Wilson - Truist

Operator

Good day, and welcome to Williams Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this call may be recorded.

I would now like to turn the call over to Danilo Juvane. Please go ahead.

Danilo Juvane

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us and for your interest in the Williams Companies. This morning, we released our earnings, press release and the presentation that our President and CEO, Alan Armstrong will kick-off in a moment. Also joining us on the call are John Porter, our Chief Financial Officer; Micheal Dunn, our Chief Operating Officer; and Chad Zamarin, our Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategic Development.

In our presentation materials, you'll find the disclaimer related to forward-looking statements. This disclaimer is important and integral to our remarks and you should review it. Also included in our presentation materials are non-GAAP measures that we reconcile to generally accepted accounting principles. And these reconciliation schedules appear at the back of today's presentation materials.

So with that, I'll turn it over to Alan Armstrong.

Alan Armstrong

Great. Well, thank you Danilo and thank you all for joining us today. A lot of positive updates to walk through with you this morning as we delivered another record quarter of adjusted EBITDA, driven primarily by our natural gas transportation expansions and Gulf Coast Storage acquisition. In fact, our better-than-planned execution on growth projects and higher-than-expected performance on acquisitions along with core business strength gives us the confidence to once again raise our guidance midpoint for 2024, which John will detail in his remarks.

The returns of our projects and acquisitions have been strong enough to overcome what has been a very challenging natural gas price environment and fairly impactful hurricane season so very pleased to see the way our entire portfolio responded in this environment. In fact, a recent Wells Fargo note on mid-stream return supports our view that Williams has delivered one of the best cash returns on invested capital in the sector, generating a 22.9% return for the 2018 through '23 period, nearly double the sector median of 11.9%.