(Reuters) – U.S. power and gas utility Sempra posted a 17% drop in its first-quarter profit on Tuesday, impacted by lower earnings at two of its units.
Sempra, which caters to nearly 40 million customers in areas including California, Texas and Mexico, said revenue from its natural gas utilities more than halved to $2.11 billion from the year earlier.
Profit at the company’s California unit dropped 5.8%, while its electric sales fell to 935 million kilowatt hours (kWh) from 1.6 billion kWh a year ago.
Sempra Infrastructure, the company’s unit that develops, invests and operates clean energy infrastructure, reported a 58% fall in its quarterly earnings.
But the Texas unit posted a more than twofold jump in its profit during the quarter.
The company said Sempra Texas “continues to see broad economic expansion across its service territory with notable growth in residential, commercial and industrial development, including development of digital infrastructure such as data centers and microchip and semiconductor manufacturing facilities”.
Utilities are expecting to benefit from a boom in electricity demand driven by data centers used for powering technologies such as generative AI, which has led to revisions in capital expenditure plans and demand forecasts for many utilities at the start of the year.
Sempra’s net income fell to $801 million, or $1.26 per share, for the quarter ended March 31, from $969 million, or $1.53 per share, a year earlier.
Its total revenue came in at $3.64 billion, down from $6.56 billion last year.
The San Diego, California-based company expects its full-year 2024 profit per share to be between $4.52 and $4.82. It posted a profit of $4.79 per share in 2023.
(Reporting by Roshia Sabu in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
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