Company: AWK
Filing Date: 2025-12-29
Form Type: S-4/A
Source: 0001193125-25-332292
Chunk: 66

Company: American Water Works Company, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-12-29
Form: S-4/A
Chunk 66
---
’s businesses can be integrated in an efficient, effective, and timely manner, or at all. The combined company could have difficulty integrating the combined assets, personnel, and operations of American Water and Essential. American Water and Essential anticipate that the integration of the two companies will ultimately be complex and expect to devote significant time and resources to this integration process. Risks and uncertainties that could impact the combined company negatively include:

| • |     | unforeseen or significant difficulties in integrating the two companies and their assets, operations, cultures, 
 and employees;                                                                                                  |

| • |     | the potential disruption of the ongoing businesses and distraction of American Water’s and 
 Essential’s management;                                                                    |

| • |     | changes in American Water’s and Essential’s business focus and/or management; |

| • |     | risks related to owning, operating, maintaining, and successfully managing Essential’s natural gas                   
 distribution business, including any increased risks and liabilities associated with the operation of that business; |

| • |     | difficulties in establishing and/or maintaining uniform standards, systems, controls, procedures, and policies,  
 including accounting and financial reporting, across the combined company, or merging or linking disparate ones; |

| • |     | the potential impairment of relationships with employees and partners as a result of any integration of new 
 management personnel;                                                                                       |

| • |     | the potential inability to manage an increased number of locations and employees; and |

| • |     | the effect of any government regulations that relate to American Water’s and Essential’s businesses,                
 including with respect to jurisdictions in which the other company’s regulated businesses currently do not operate. |

It is possible that the integration process could take longer than anticipated and could result in the loss of valuable employees, the disruption of each company’s ongoing businesses, processes and systems, or inconsistencies in standards, controls, procedures, practices, policies, and compensation arrangements, any of which could adversely affect the combined company’s ability to achieve the anticipated benefits of the merger as and when expected. The integration could also be more expensive than anticipated. It is also possible that the 41

combined company will not successfully compete for some or all of the reasons discussed in the risks described in American Water’s and Essential’s respective Annual Reports on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2024, each as updated by subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form
8-K. Failure to achieve these anticipated benefits could result in increased costs or decreases in the amount of expected