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Q2 2008 Enagas Earnings Conference Call - Final.

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Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

UNIDENTIFIED COMPANY REPRESENTATIVE: Good morning ladies and gentlemen; welcome to the conference for the presentation of the results of Enagas corresponding to the first semester of 2008. The results have been published this morning before the opening of the stock exchange and they are available at our webpage energas.es.

Mr. Antonio Llarden, the President of Energas will chair this meeting. We have forecast the duration of this conference around 30 minutes. As is normal, we will first of all summaries the main figures and relevant facts for the first semester of this year and after that we will have for a round of Q&A and will try to give you the best responses.

And without further ado, I give the floor to Mr. Antonio Llarden.

ANTONIO LLARDEN, CHAIRMAN & CEO, ENAGAS: Good morning ladies and gentlemen and thank you very much for your attention. It is a pleasure for me to be talking to you today for this presentation. I will try to sum up the main elements for the first semester 2008. And after that I will talk about the main strategic advances of the company and the perspectives and challenges for the coming future.

In this sense, I would like to highlight the importance of the approval by the Spanish Government on May 30 this year of the [energy] infrastructure plan in 2008 to 2016 that extends the visibility for the investment period of Enagas, and also reinforces the basis for the ongoing strategic plan of Enagas 2007 to 2012.

For the main figures, we are going to see them now. 2008 has been a satisfactory year from an economic point of view. But I would like to highlight the most important point of this year; it's related to the fulfillment of strategic goals for the long run, as I will detail further on.

The main figures for the first part of the year 2008 have been the following. Net profit was EUR129.9 million, 11% growth with regard to the same period last year and in line with the objectives that were set at the beginning of the year. Also we have investment of the amount of EUR365.8 million. That is slightly above our forecast and we are maintaining the growth of the investment revamp that we have experienced in the last year.

And related to assets put into operation, that's to say those that are generating revenues, we had a figure of EUR394.5 million, a figure that allows us to be optimistic with fulfillment of our annual objectives to implement [activities] for an amount of around EUR600 million. Related to the financial situation of Enagas, net debt is EUR2.0167 billion with (inaudible) debt between assets to 44.6%. On the other hand, the average cost of the debt in the first part of the year was 4.67%.

On the other hand, the gas demand in the Spanish gas system had a growth of 17.2%, a growth that is especially significant if we take into account the nice weather conditions we had this year and the deceleration of the economic activity.

Regarding other important facts or figures, EBIT was EUR219.1 million, 7.8% more than last year for the same period and EBITDA was EUR317 million, 6.3% more than in 2007. And we're keeping our forecast for growth for this year around 7.5%.

With regard to investment, in the first semester 2008, they amounted to EUR365.8 million. That is 79% of this investment was devoted to transportation projects, 20% to regasification and the remaining 1% for underground storage. It is important to highlight that -- that's something that I would like really to point out that during the last 12 years we have reached investments around EUR700 million.

Related to assets put in [operation], which the figure of EUR394.5 million. That entails an improvement rate of 65% with regard to the goal set for asset volume in [operation] that will be around EUR600 million. On the other hand, the volume for projects in construction are around EUR800 million this year, which guarantees an important figure that implementations in the coming quarters. That means that in this year we have almost EUR400 million in place and we still have EUR800 million in work in progress.

The main project during this year was the transversal gas pipeline, the project Barcelona-Arbos, and also the semi-ring on the southwest Madrid and also the large one of the capacity of regasification in the Cartagena plant.

On top of that, we are still working to get the authorization for our project portfolio,...

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