Centuri shares now traded on exchange
Centuri Holdings, with corporate roots dating back before statehood, became Arizona’s newest public company following its separation from parent company Southwest Gas in an April 17 stock sale.
Centuri provides infrastructure maintenance and construction for utility companies, mainly in natural gas and electricity, but with more recent forays into solar, wind and other renewable energy sources. Southwest Gas, which acquired a predecessor company and made Centuri a subsidiary in 1996, remains its dominant shareholder.
Centuri shares are now traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LTRI.
The company, headquartered in north Phoenix, employs around 12,500 people across 43 states and two Canadian provinces, including about 850 in Arizona.
It generated $2.9 billion in revenue last year from utility customers such as Southwest Gas, Sempra Energy, American Electric Power, Southern Company and SoCal Gas. Centuri posted a net loss to shareholders of $186 million in 2023, though new President and CEO Bill Fehrman said that mostly reflected a write-down of a business unit that won’t recur.
Instead, Centuri’s business is stable and anchored by relationships averaging 23 years with large, high-quality utility companies.
“We’ve never had a down year at the EBITDA level,” Fehrman said, citing a cash-flow measure known as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
Even the corporate name reflects a lengthy tenure. “We have been doing this for a century, and we’re ready to go for the next century,” Fehrman said in an interview.
Centuri partners with utilities to maintain, upgrade and expand their energy networks, which collectively provide power to around 100 million individual and business customers.
That mainly involves modernizing infrastructure through the maintenance, retrofitting, and installation of energy distribution networks while also preparing systems for the transition to clean energy sources and advanced data connections.
For various reasons, many utilities have become more reliant on outsourcing.
“Our core operations are focused on modernizing utility infrastructure, which reduces risks of hazardous gas leaks, reduces methane emissions from natural-gas pipelines and hardens electric infrastructure from weather events,” Centuri said in a statement.
The company also expects increased demand from clean-energy sources, supported by the federal Inflation Reduction Act and other legislation. Centuri cited projects such as connecting existing electric grids to solar and wind energy, building out electric-vehicle charging stations, constructing battery-storage facilities and transporting gas from dairy farms.
“The utility industry is characterized by consistent growth of highly predictable, nondiscretionary, regulatory-driven investment, supporting resilience through economic cycles and periods of economic disruption,” Centuri added.
Separating from Las Vegas-based Southwest Gas could better enable both companies to improve their strategic and operational flexibility, increase the focus of both management teams on their respective operations, adopt unique dividend and other investment policies, and provide other benefits. Centuri’s corporate roots in Arizona date back to the founding of a building materials firm called RiggsLinthicum Co. in 1909, three years before statehood.