It’s not by accident that Tulsa-based Williams Companies, Inc. handles 30 percent of the natural gas business in the United States. Company President and CEO Alan Armstrong suggested at the Bernstein 35th annual Strategic Decisions Conference call, the company would like to see more growth.
“The one thing you will notice about Williams as an infrastructure provider is that we have focused more heavily than anybody in the space on natural gas, that’s not by mistake,” said Armstrong.
The Tulsa company formerly had an exploration and production company that had the ability to get gas out of the ground at a low cost.
“And with that, we’ve determined we thought that demand for natural gas would continue to grow at faster and faster rate. And so, we really wanted to be in the volume business, not in the price business because really the U.S. ability to produce natural gas at a lower cost was more than more people thought.”
As a result, Williams handles nearly 30 percent of the nation’s natural gas through transmission or gathering systems and Armstrong said the business is about $59 billion enterprise value.
“As a result of the structure of our business, we been right on top of the street consensus now for each of the last 13 quarters, and in fact in 2017 we exceeded the midpoint of our guidance that we laid out and as well in 18. We also exceeded all of the guidance metrics that we laid out.”
The company’s Transco pipeline systems are the company’s drivers for growth, according to Armstrong. The systems serve the Eastern Seaboard and the Southeast.
” We just happened to be in a terrific position with Transco and today’s the nation’s largest pipeline as well as the fastest growing pipeline of any of the scale pipelines,” he told prospective investors at the conference call. “And so, we’re really excited about the opportunities that continue, a lot of people keep saying, we’ll see when is that going to end and I can tell you we really don’t have that kind of vision. Right now through the next four, five years, we got a lot of projects on backlog and we really don’t see that changing anytime soon.”
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