NorthWestern Shareholders Given Rosy Picture
The Associated Press
04/23/09 - 02:32 PM EDT
SUSAN GALLAGHER
BUTTE, Mont. (AP) Electricity and natural gas supplier NorthWestern Corp. has fared relatively well amid the nation's economic turmoil, CEO Bob Rowe said at the company's annual meeting.
NorthWestern, which does business as NorthWestern Energy and sells utility service in Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska, is financially strong and the places in which it operates are "resilient and relatively healthy," said Rowe, CEO since August.
"We are quite pleased with where we find ourselves today," he told shareholders Wednesday at the annual meeting on the campus of Montana Tech in Butte. The meeting was held in this old mining city after convening in New York last year as NorthWestern moved from Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange.
On Thursday, South Dakota-based NorthWestern reported first-quarter net income of $22.8 million, or 63 cents per share, compared with $23.5 million, or 59 cents per share, in the first quarter of 2008. The increase in earnings per share resulted largely from a share buyback that ended in the third quarter of 2008, the company said.
Shares of NorthWestern stock fell 7 cents and were trading at $20.61 Thursday morning.
In 2008 NorthWestern had net income of $67.6 million, up 27 percent from 2007. The company emerged from bankruptcy in 2004.
Rowe said the company wants to develop several major capital projects, among them the proposed Mill Creek Generating Station, a 200-megawatt, gas-fired plant that would be built about three miles from Anaconda in southwestern Montana. A Montana Public Service Commission decision on that project might be issued in May, he said.
Other projects include the proposed Mountain States Transmission Intertie, a 500-kilovolt power line extending several hundred miles across private and public lands in southwestern Montana and southeastern Idaho.
In November, Montana utility regulators gave final approval for NorthWestern Energy ratepayers to buy Montana's Colstrip 4 power plant in a $407 million deal. The Public Service Commission said the prospect of stability in consumers' power rates influenced the approval.
Colstrip 4 will be the first large-scale power plant owned by Montana's main utility since energy deregulation occurred in the late 1990s and Montana Power Co. broke up.
Rowe said NorthWestern has been buying power "in a market that is becoming more and more challenging" and the company wants to rebuild a system with in-house generation of power in Montana. Seventy percent of NorthWestern's business is in Montana, according to company spokeswoman Claudia Rapkoch.
After the meeting of shareholders, NorthWestern hosted what it called a "community meeting," with some Butte city leaders among the people attending.
Rowe told them that NorthWestern had hoped for an annual meeting free of turbulence or surprises, what he called a "boring meeting." That is what the company got and "we're very thankful," he said.
NorthWestern had some negative headlines in recent weeks after an explosion March 5 destroyed several buildings in downtown Bozeman and killed a woman. The explosion was traced to a leak in NorthWestern's gas supply line.
