Spire Inc. (NYSE:SR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Unidentified Analyst: Hi. Just wanted to ask about the growth-related CapEx in the quarter, it looks like a slight run rate step up from fiscal year 2023. Is that growth fully attributable to new residential connections, is there a geographic focus to this growth? And are you seeing any trends with respect to new connections and the customer composition specifically?

Steven Lindsey: Yeah. Great. Great question, Tanner. I don’t know if I would attribute that to specific growth trends. Some of it was movement from quarter to quarter of some items. We’ve been — we’ve seen some movement around the path or the CapEx profile of the storage project also in the utilities. From quarter to quarter, we have different prioritization around what’s getting in a specific quarter. So I don’t know if there — I wouldn’t draw a trend line from that, I think it’s really just something that’s moving across quarters.

Adam Woodard: And I’ll follow, this is Steve. That one thing that we are very focused on is the consistency year-over-year of our capital deployment, in terms of infrastructure, new business. And so I don’t think the uptick has anything to do relative to that. I think it’s a pretty consistent year-over-year message relative to our new construction. But we do have other types of programs, meters, and things like that, and investment in some other types of things that are not necessarily infrastructure specific. But again, I think if you think about the way we deploy, it’s very consistent, it’s very even across all of our footprints. So whether it’s Missouri East, whether it’s Missouri West, whether it’s the Southeast, that’s the way we really focus over the long-term. And we reaffirm, we used to have a five-year plan, now we have a 10-year plan. And I think we’re very confident in our ability to deliver on that.

Steven Lindsey: Yeah. Good point.

Unidentified Analyst: Great. Thank you. And then at the parent stripping out one-time items for the hedging and the interest expense in the quarter, you noted base corporate costs were higher year-over-year. How should we think about the cadence of those ongoing base corporate costs going forward through the rest of fiscal 2024?

Steven Rasche: I think they’re going to be pretty flat, Tanner, this is the other Steve. And it’s very consistent with the assumptions we had underlying the guidance of corporate cost. And as you might recall, when we launched guidance last year for that other category, which would include corporate costs, that was down pretty significantly from the run rate we had the year before. Again, part of that was due to one-time costs that didn’t recur late in fiscal year 2023.

Unidentified Analyst: All right. Great. Thank you, and congratulations to Scott Dudley, by the way. Thank you for all of your help and appreciate it.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Christopher Jeffrey with Mizuho. Please go ahead.

Christopher Jeffrey: Hi, everyone. Maybe to approach the puts and takes for the guidance for the year from a couple of different angles. Just wondering as far as like the regulatory aspects, the RSC in Alabama, the ISRS in Missouri. Have those been kind of in line so far is what you’re expecting in the budget? And then maybe on the also the other income items where you’re kind of expecting those one times the interest hedging recovery on some of those higher debt levels. Like, how is that kind of trending against the expectations for the year?

Adam Woodard: Christopher, hi. This is Adam. Yeah, I think that — I think those items have met our expectations, as far as the coming back to a normalized RSC in Alabama. I think the cadence of our ISRS filings has been planned in and has come in as expected. So, yeah, I think your observation there is a good one and question is a good one. I think those items have really met our expectations thus far in the year and things are running according to plan.

Steven Rasche: And Chris, I would add that, yeah, we fully contemplated the one time item, which was the hedge settlement, which happened in early October. So it was well before we even launched guidance. If there is one thing that we saw in Q1, and we’re seeing it reversing Q2, that would be the drawdown in deferred gas costs because that’s tied to customer demand. So even though the weather norm worked, the additional amount we would get from the PGA and the deferred gas costs, specifically in Missouri, was a little below what we had expected. But I can assure you that what we’re seeing in January, that comes back around, which is why we never want to get overly exercised about what happens in one small piece of the overall winter. We want to get through the entire winter season, and then we’ll reevaluate. We’re still on track to get those largely paid off by the end of the heating season.

Christopher Jeffrey: Great. Thanks. And then as far as that January weather, I think people have asked on the utility side, but on the marketing side — and then it also sounds like there’s some midstream kind of leverage to those types of weather events, dislocations. Just wondering how you’re thinking about both of those pieces, the marketing and the midstream for 2Q and the rest of the year?