A Wall Street Transcript 2013 Top Fifteen CEO Interview: How Does Steven J. Kean from Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, L.P. (KMP) Create a 7% Current Dividend Yield ?

Wall Street Transcript

67 WALL STREET, New York - December 13, 2013 - The Wall Street Transcript has just published its Top 15 CEO Interviews of 2013 Report. This special feature contains expert industry commentary through in-depth interviews with successful public company CEOs. The full issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via The Wall Street Transcript Online.

Topics covered: Top 15 CEO Interviews of 2013

Companies include: Kinder Morgan Energy Partners (KMP)

In the following excerpt from the Top 15 CEO Interviews of 2013 Report, the President and Chief Operating Officer of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners discusses the outlook for his company for investors:

TWST: If you could, please start by giving us a brief history of Kinder Morgan and the four publicly traded companies under its umbrella.

Mr. Kean: Rich Kinder and Bill Morgan formed the company back in 1997. To give you some kind of perspective on what's happened since then, at the time it had an enterprise value of about $350 million; today Kinder Morgan has a combined enterprise value of over $100 billion. We had about 176 employees in the beginning, and now we have almost 11,000 employees.

We've experienced steady growth over that time due to a combination of things. We have been growing our underlying business and the earnings from our existing assets, we have been investing in expansions in our existing businesses, and we have completed a number of acquisitions. If you look at just KMP, for example, we've invested about $30 billion since inception, split roughly equally between acquisitions and expansion projects, so we've had a lot of growth over the years, and as we look ahead there's still a good deal of growth to come.

We have a fairly probable project backlog that adds up to about $12.6 billion - that's spread across the whole complex, and there are many more that we hope will move into the probable category. We've enjoyed good historical growth, and we are in a very good time for future growth in our business as well.

There are four ways for investors to participate in the value we generate from our assets. We have two MLPs: KMP, which is the original Kinder Morgan MLP, and EPB, which we acquired the general partner of when we did the El Paso transaction last year. The general partner of both of those MLPs is owned by KMI, and KMI receives incentive distributions from the MLPs as a result of its position as general partner and also owns a large number of units in each of the MLPs. So the combination of incentive distributions and regular distributions from the MLP units KMI owns are what generates most of the cash flow to KMI.

KMI does have some assets, but many of those assets have either been dropped down or are in the process of being dropped down. We just announced...

For more of this interview and many others visit the Wall Street Transcript - a unique service for investors and industry researchers - providing fresh commentary and insight through verbatim interviews with CEOs, portfolio managers and research analysts. This special issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via The Wall Street Transcript Online.