Greetings, and welcome to Atmos Energy's Third Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] And as a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jennifer Hills. Thank you, please go ahead.

Thank you, Brenda. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. This call is being webcast live on the Internet. Our earnings release and conference call slides presentation are available on our website at atmosenergy.com. As we review these financial results and discuss future expectations, please keep in mind that some of our discussion might contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act and the Securities Exchange Act. Our forward-looking statements and projections could differ materially from actual results. The factors that could cause such material differences are outlined on Slide 30 and are more fully described in our SEC filings. Our first speaker is Chris Forsythe, Senior Vice President and CFO of Atmos Energy. Chris.

Thank you, Jennifer, and good morning, everyone. Yesterday, we reported fiscal 2018 third quarter earnings and continuing operations of $71 million or $0.64 per diluted share, compared with $71 million or $0.67 per diluted share in the prior quarter year's third quarter. Year-to-date, earnings from continuing operations were $564 million or $5.09 per diluted share, compared with $347 million or $3.27 per diluted share in the prior year period. Yeah-to-date results include a $166 million or $1.49 per diluted share non-recurring income tax benefit from Tax Reform. Our third quarter results were in line with our expectations with major drivers underlying our performance during the first half of fiscal year continuing into the third quarter. Operating income in our distribution segment decreased $50 million to about $62 million in the third quarter, largely driven by $12 million decrease in contribution margin due to the implementation of Tax Reform. Contribution margin was positively impacted by regulatory actions which provided an incremental $11 million in contribution margin in the quarter. And we continue to experience solid customer growth. Over the last 12 months, our distribution segment had a net 34,000 customers, which represents a 1.1% net customer growth. We also continue to add transportation customers to this system in our Kentucky/Mid-States Division. Combined, this growth added nearly $5 million in contribution margin for the quarter. Operating expenses rose approximately 11% quarter-over-quarter. We experienced a planned increase in pipeline integrity activities, higher volume locate costs, higher employee related cost and increased depreciation property tax expense resulting from our capital spending. We also incurred about $1.5 million in travelling expenses associated with the planned Northwest Dallas outage during the second quarter, bringing the total expenses associated with the events approximately $24 million. This particular product has been completed and we do not anticipate material…

Chris, thank you very much for the great update on the quarter and thank all of you for joining us this morning. As you can see from our third quarter results, we remained very focused and on track to meet our fiscal 2018 target driven primarily by our proactive pipe replacement and system modernization investment. Our commitment to safety is fair now. From 2011 to 2017, we invested approximately $6 billion on replacing 80 infrastructure and modernizing our system. And between fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2022 we planned to spend an additional $8 billion with rate of capital investment growing approximately 11% per year on average. With over 80% of this spending will be focused on safety and reliability investments as it has been in the past. Our group dedicated employees are the reason for our continued success as we prefer our safety and service commitments to our customers and our communities where we life and work. We constantly strive to become a safest provider of natural gas services through our investments, not only in our infrastructure but also in our employees and the technology and business processes used to maintain and operate our system and in public safety awareness. For example, training hours in 2018 increased approximately 10% year-over-over with the majority of the training at our world-class training center going towards technical skills development and safety. And since third part damage is the number one cause of least in our system, we continue to raise public awareness through pipeline safety efforts. These efforts are paying off, reported injuries for employees are down 17% year-over-year and our fiscal 2018 damage rate is below the industry average and has been reduced approximately 20% of its last six years, request an increase by 50% over that same period. We continue to…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Dennis Coleman with Bank of America.

Dennis, good morning.

Good morning to all. Couple of quick ones for me. You still on or we still the guidance of 385 to 405 and sort of now we are down to one quarter ago, I wonder if you might just talk about what gets you to the higher end of that range or lower end of that range?

Yeah, I think - Dennis, this is Chris. Good morning. You know as we look into the fourth quarter, we've got some plan that pipeline is ready to work, we take APTs outline, so that's a big project that started in early July. And so that's a variable. That right now with where we see things as of today we project to be somewhere middle of that guidance range at this point.

Okay, okay. And then a couple more detailed questions on in the distribution segment, OpEx and tax expense were little higher than our estimate. I wonder if there is anything particular, now you did talk a little bit about that on Slide 5 but any additional comments you might make there.

Yeah, on OpEx, I think it is seeing some timing, particularly employee cost, we had some key executive retired a year ago, so the settlement charges set up in the third quarter, not that material but that was you know one item that did flow through. With tax expense, you are talking profit taxes or you are talking…?

Yeah, not income taxes.

Yeah, profit taxes you know we are adjusting our estimates profit tax, we are mostly on a calendar basis. So as we are working through the valuation process with profit tax seem in various municipalities, we just make adjustments for the year and what we think our full calendar year expenses.

Got it, got it. Okay. That's helpful. Thanks very much.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Okay, this concludes today's question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to management.