Company: ATO
Filing Date: 2025-11-14
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000731802-25-000056
Chunk: 26

Company: ATMOS ENERGY CORP
Filing Date: 2025-11-14
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 26
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 which could increase our costs to repair damaged facilities and restore service to our customers or impact the cost of gas. If we were unable to deliver natural gas to our customers, our financial results would be impacted by lost revenues, and we generally would have to seek approval from regulators to recover restoration costs. To the extent we would be unable to recover those costs, or if higher rates resulting from our recovery of such costs would result in reduced demand for our services, our future business, financial condition, or financial results could be adversely impacted.

Financial, Economic, and Market Risks

Our growth in the future may be limited by the nature of our business, which requires extensive capital spending.

Our operations are capital-intensive. We must make significant capital expenditures on a long-term basis to modernize our distribution and transmission system and to comply with the safety rules and regulations issued by the regulatory authorities responsible for the service areas we operate. In addition, we must continually build new capacity to serve the growing needs of the communities we serve. The magnitude of these expenditures may be affected by a number of factors, including new policy and regulations, and the general state of the economy.

  The liquidity required to fund our working capital, capital expenditures, and other cash needs is provided from a combination of internally generated cash flows and external debt and equity financing.  The cost and availability of borrowing funds from third party lenders or issuing equity is dependent on the liquidity of the credit markets, interest rates and other market conditions. This in turn may limit the amount of funds we can invest in our infrastructure.

The Company is dependent on continued access to the credit and capital markets to execute our business strategy.

Our long-term debt is currently rated as “investment grade” by Standard & Poor’s Corporation and Moody’s Investors Service, Inc. Similar to most companies, we rely upon access to both short-term and long-term credit and capital markets to 

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satisfy our liquidity requirements. If adverse credit conditions were to cause a significant limitation on our access to the private credit and public capital markets, we could see a reduction in our liquidity. A significant reduction in our liquidity could in turn trigger a negative change in our ratings outlook or even a reduction in our credit ratings by one or more of the credit rating agencies. Such a downgrade could further limit our access to private credit and/or public capital markets and increase our costs of borrowing.

While we believe we can meet our capital requirements from our operations and the sources of financing available to us, we can provide no assurance that we will continue to be able