John D'Orazio
Management
Good morning and welcome to RGC Resources Third Quarter Earnings Call. I'm John D'Orazio, President and CEO of RGC Resources. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to attend. Please mute your line and hold your questions until the completion of the presentation. Also the link to today's presentation is available on our Web site at rgcresources.com on the Investor and Financial Information page. Before we begin, just a reminder on forward-looking statements as shown on slide two. Moving to slide three, we plan to review key operational and financial highlights, our outlook for 2018, and take any questions. Our third quarter earnings per share are $0.14, as shown on slide four. Fiscal year-to-date earnings per share are $0.88, which is a $0.04 improvement over 2017. We will cover more third quarter and year-to-date financials results later in the presentation. As slide five highlights, we invested $7 million in regulated utility in the third quarter, $2 million increase over the same period last year. Approximately $1.9 million was spent on infrastructure replacement; $4.9 million on customer growth, and $0.2 million on other capital needs. The quarter-to-quarter increase was primarily due to elevated spending on system reinforcement projects supporting customer growth. Slide six shows year-to-date capital spending. We are approximately $1 million ahead of 2017, primarily due to infrastructure replacement and system reinforcements. We continue to experience steady customer growth as shown on slide seven. We added 129 customers in the third quarter, and have added 489 customers year-to-date. On slide eight, our residential volumes increased 35% and our commercial volumes increased 13% in the third quarter compared to the same period last year. On slide nine, our year-to-date commercial volumes increased 20% compared to the same period last year. Of significance, our top ten customer's usage increased 9%. We are on slide 10. Mountain Valley Pipeline is under construction with a targeted in-service date of the first quarter 2019. Fiscal year-to-date, we have invested $5.2 million in the project. As you may recall, the MVP Southgate expansion was also announced in April with projected in-service date at the end of 2020. Now I would like to introduce Paul Nester, our Chief Financial Officer. He will review the third quarter and year-to-date financial results.