Good morning. My name is Phyllis and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Chesapeake Utilities 2015 Third Quarter Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Beth Cooper, you may begin your conference.

Thank you, Phyllis, and good morning everyone. We appreciate you joining us today to review our third quarter and year-to-date results. Joining me on the call today with prepared remarks is Mike McMasters, President and CEO. We also have several additional members of our management team here with us today to answer questions following our prepared remarks. The presentation to accompany our discussion today can be accessed on our Web-site under the Investors section and Events & Webcasts subsection or via our IR app. Moving to Slide 2, before we begin, let me remind you that matters discussed in this conference call may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements and projections could differ materially from our actual results. The Safe Harbor for Forward-Looking Statements section of the Company's 2014 annual report on Form 10-K provides further information on the factors that could cause such statements to differ from our actual results. As summarized on Slide 3, yesterday we reported net income of $5.1 million or $0.33 per share for the third quarter. This represents an increase of $1.9 million or $0.11 per share over the same quarter of 2014. While third-quarter results are typically lower due to the seasonality of our businesses, we are pleased to report quarter over quarter increases in net income and earnings per share. Continued strong growth in both our Regulated and Unregulated Energy business segments generated the higher results. Our growth in earnings is the result of the concerted efforts of our employees to reach sustained earnings growth on our investments with total assets exceeding $1 billion for the first time. In particular, our growth investment in plant increased $147 million since the start of 2015 as a result of the sustained execution of our strategic growth plans. I will now…

Thank you, Beth. Good morning, everyone. Our financial results for the third quarter and year to date reflect the profitable growth opportunities that our employees have successfully cultivated in our energy businesses. Our team remains committed to identifying and developing opportunities to provide future earnings and dividend growth for our investors. Before getting to any details, I thought it would be helpful to briefly touch on our strategic planning process that gave birth to our growth strategy. First, we update our strategic plan every year. Second, we look for new ways to help support our employees and their community engagement efforts. Engaging our employees is a key component of our strategy. Every year we ask our business unit leaders and our strategic business development team to take a new look at market conditions and the new opportunities that are evolving in the market. Finally, we ask our teams to figure out ways to grow at rates faster than they could if they simply continue doing what they are doing today. This keeps our thinking fresh. Turning to Slide 14, the key projects and initiatives that we are undertaking are intended to generate long-term sustainable growth. Our execution of these projects and initiatives has been a direct result of our disciplined strategic approach to growth. The Aspire Energy acquisition is a good example of the results of our strategic planning process. As a result of the acquisition, we now operate 16 gathering systems and over 2,000 miles of pipeline in the areas in and around the Utica Shale play in eastern and central Ohio. Over 80% of Aspire Energy's margins are derived from the sale of natural gas to two local distribution companies that serve approximately 30,000 end-use customers. We believe that there are significant growth opportunities on and around our…

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Joyce Spencer with Hilliard Lyons.

First off, congratulations on an awesome quarter here. I think we are all positively surprised.

Thank you and we are glad for positive surprise.

Just one quick one from me here, and thanks for the additional color on the slides, they were really helpful. Want to talk a little bit about Aspire there. If I heard correctly, you mentioned about 80% of gross margin is going to be in that first calendar quarter which we missed out this year. My question is, I guess correct me if I followed you wrong on that step, but should we be thinking about profitability from an EPS standpoint to be 80% plus there in Q1 as well, or is there still pretty good potential to have that spread out a little more evenly?

I think the 80% number I think that you heard was related to the margin contribution from the sale to LDCs, the sales of gas to LDCs. Aspire does have the typical I'm going to say pattern of a temperature sensitive utility business, driven by the sales results that you see as you would expect. So there is some seasonality. And I don't know off the top of my head what the percent of margins come from in the first quarter, but it is quite high. You recall that off the top of your head?

Spencer, using is I gauge the disclosures that we have out there, what you'll see for the first nine months of Aspire, you will see basically $7.7 million factored in for this year and then when you look at it for 2016, the first calendar year, what we put out there is $13 million. That's going to include some growth but it does give you kind of a baseline from a margin perspective to say, we're really talking something much less than 50% when you look at that.

Okay. Yes, that makes sense and I had actually thought of that initially to back into that.

And that's actually, you commented in the beginning, that's additional disclosures that we put out there this quarter.

Yes, perfect. And I guess more broadly, I know over the past, at least on the last call, you all noted that so far so good on the integration front on Aspire. Is that still the case and just any more general color on that purchase?

Yes, that's still the case. When we purchased it, we looked pretty hard at the company obviously and it was sales to the LDCs that we thought made it very similar to what we are currently doing with intrastate pipeline on Delmarva and also the intrastate pipelines that we are constructing down in Florida. And so we felt pretty good with the business model. We've been able to bring on a couple – several employees in Ohio that have I think added a lot to the organization and we are very pleased with our hires there. So I couldn't be happier I guess. The last – the FPU acquisition was a very big acquisition and very much more difficult because of the size, with all the employees that we had there. The last two that we have done, Sandpiper and Aspire, with a relatively small size, 45 employees or so, have been I'd say very smooth. FPU was very smooth as well. [Indiscernible] It had great earnings just out of the gate, but it just was more, it was harder work but it was a great acquisition.

Yes, absolutely. I mean that turned out to be a real homerun. Thanks for the color there. Glad to hear things are progressing well. Thanks.

[Operator Instructions] At this time, there are no further questions. I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Mike McMasters, President and CEO.

Thank you for joining our call today and for your interest in Chesapeake Utilities. We are proud of what our team has accomplished for shareholders in the past and we remain committed to working hard to deliver shareholder value. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And that does conclude today's conference. You may now disconnect.