Earnings Call Excerpt
Piedmont Natural Gas Company, Inc. (PNY)
F4Q08 Earnings Call
January 5, 2009 2:30 pm ET
Executives
John Sutphin - Manager of Finance and Investor Relations
Thomas E. Skains - Chairman, President, Chief Executive Officer
David J. Dzuricky - Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President
Michael H. Yount - Senior Vice President - Utility Operations
Franklin H. Yoho - Senior Vice President - Commercial Operations
Analysts
Dan Fidell - Brean Murray, Caret & Co.
Greg McGowan – Sidoti & Co.
Dave Parker – Robert W. Baird
Presentation
Operator
Welcome to the Piedmont Natural Gas year-end 2008 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the conference over to John Sutphin. Please go ahead Sir.
John Sutphin
Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining our 2008 year-end earnings conference call. This call is open to the general public and is being web cast live over the Internet. If you would like to access the web cast of this call, please visit our website at www.piedmontng.com and choose the Investors link. On the right-hand side of that page you will find a link to the web cast.
On the call today presenting prepared remarks we have Tom Skains, President, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Dave Dzuricky, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Other members of our executive management team are also in attendance. At the conclusion of the prepared remarks we will open the discussion to questions.
Finally, this call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities laws. Actual results may materially differ from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. More information about the risks and uncertainties related to these forward-looking statements may be found in Piedmont’s latest Form 10K which is available on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov.
With that I will turn the call over to Tom.
Thomas Skains
Thanks John. Good afternoon everybody and thank you for joining us for our 2008 year-end conference call. We know many of you are just getting back from your holiday break and we appreciate your time with us today. As you already know we filed our 10K and issued our year-end earnings release last Monday. I’m going to walk through some of our highlights for 2008, talk about the year ahead in 2009 and then I’ll pass the call over to Dave for a more detailed discussion of our financial results.
2008 was another excellent year for Piedmont with record net income of $110 million compared to $104.3 million in 2007. That translates to EPS growth of more than 6% as we grew diluted earnings per share from $1.40 in 2007 to a record level of $1.49 in 2008. In addition to EPS growth we increased the quarterly dividend in 2008 for the 30th straight year and provided shareholders with a 34% total return for the fiscal year in a difficult and uncertain economic climate.
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