NorthWestern Corporation (NASDAQ:NWE) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

NorthWestern Corporation (NASDAQ:NWE) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript April 26, 2024

NorthWestern Corporation isn't one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Travis Meyer: Good afternoon and thank you for joining NorthWestern Energy Group's Financial Results Webcast for the quarter ended March 31st, 2024. My name is Travis Meyer. I'm the Director of Corporate Development and Investor Relations Officer for NorthWestern. Joining us today to walk you through the results and provide an overall update are Brian Bird, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Crystal Lail, Chief Financial Officer. All participant lines are currently muted. After the presentation, we have allotted time for a Q&A. I'll provide instructions for asking questions at that time. However, if you intend to ask a question and are joining us by a computer, please set your Zoom identity to your first and last name so we can call on you by name and let you know when your line is open.

NorthWestern's results have been released and the release is available on our website at northwesternenergy.com. We also released our 10-Q pre-market this morning. Please note that the company's press release, this presentation, comments by presenters and responses to your question may contain forward-looking statements. As such, I will direct you to the disclosures contained in our SEC filings and the Safe Harbor provisions included in the second slide of the presentation. Also please note this presentation includes non-GAAP financial measures. Please see the non-GAAP disclosures, definitions and reconciliations also included in the presentation. The webcast is being recorded. The archived replay of today's webcast will be available for one year beginning at 6 P.M. Eastern today and can be found in the financial results section of our website.

With that, I'll hand the presentation over to Brian Bird for his opening remarks

Brian Bird: Thanks, Travis. Well we were in South Dakota this week. Actually, we were in Brookings earlier in the week. We had the fortunate event of having a valve turning on the first renewable natural gas coming on to our system. And matter of fact, with five more of those projects, two-thirds of our residential customers in South Dakota will be receiving renewable natural gas. So that's in 2025, so we have a handful more of those projects coming on. We're very excited about that. It's certainly helpful for our Net Zero by 2050 goal. We were in Brookings in the latter half of the week also for a Board Meeting which we finished up this morning and had the Annual Meeting. And at that Annual Meeting, it was our Board Chair's last meeting.

Dana Dykhouse turned out after 15 years on our Board. He's been a fantastic Board member and he is an icon in the State of South Dakota. We've been very, very fortunate to have him on our Board and we will miss him dearly. With that, I'm going to talk about the recent highlights. For the quarter, we reported GAAP diluted EPS of $1.06, non-GAAP diluted EPS of $1.09. We're affirming our 2024 diluted EPS guidance of $3.42 to $3.62 for 2024. We're affirming our long-term rate base and earnings per share growth rate targets of 4% to 6%. We've completed our debt financing needs for 2024 and we've declared a dividend of $0.65 per share payable June 28th, 2024 to shareholders of record as of June 14th, 2024. The Montana, we also have Montana Electric and Gas rate re-filings anticipated for the third quarter of 2024, and that will, for Montana Electric, will include the Prudence Review of Yellowstone County Generating Station.

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