Entergy held its third-quarter earnings call with financial analysts Wednesday as yet another hurricane, the fifth to hit Louisiana this season, bore down on the state.
“We’ve activated our storm response plan, and we are fully prepared and ready to respond,” Entergy CEO Leo Denault told analysts. “We’ve had a record-breaking storm season with back-to-back hurricanes hitting our service area. Yet no matter what 2020 threw at us, we remain steadfast in delivering on our commitments to our customers, our communities, our employees and our owners.”
Hurricane Zeta made landfall later that evening, ripping through Entergy’s New Orleans hometown with 110 mph winds. The most powerful hurricane to hit the U.S. this late in the year since 1899, Zeta knocked out power to more than 480,000 customers. By Friday morning, 327,000 were still without service, with some facing prospects of a full week without power.
Zeta followed Laura in August and Delta in October, both of which caused significant damage west of New Orleans. Aided by mutual assistance partners, Entergy deployed 12,000 workers after Delta to restore most of the nearly 500,000 outages in five days.
“We showed why we are best-in-class in storm response as we successfully managed to back-to-back major hurricanes all amid a global pandemic. That’s what we prepare for, and that’s what we do,” Denault said. “We can control what we can control. We can’t control the public health crisis, so we’re going to control what we can control.”
Entergy reported third-quarter earnings of $521 million ($2.59/share), as compared to 2019’s third quarter of $365 million ($1.82/share). That exceeded analysts’ expectations of $2.42/share, according to Zacks Information Research.
Denault said the results “amid these extraordinary times” demonstrated Entergy’s progress in building a “simpler, stronger and more resilient company.”
Entergy’s share price lost traction during the week, as did the rest of the broader market. Shares closed Friday at $101.22, down 5.8% following the earnings announcement.
