Standard&Poor's Ratings Services bases its ratings on Enterprise Products Partners L.P. (EPD) and its operating subsidiary Enterprise Products Operating LLC on the companies' "strong" business risk profiles and "significant" financial risk profiles under our criteria. Key credit strengths include EPD's operating scale, business line diversity, and high proportion of fee-based revenues. Partially offsetting these strengths are EPD's aggressive growth strategy, commodity price exposure, significant financial leverage, and status as a master limited partnership (MLP). As an MLP, EPD distributes most of its free cash flow (after maintenance capital spending) to unitholders each quarter and generally relies on the capital markets to fund growth capital spending. We expect Enterprise Products Co. (EPCO), which owns limited partnership interests in EPD,
