The present analytical study investigates the influence of axial heat conduction within the flow on the heat transfer in the thermal entrance region of a concentric annular duct with laminar and turbulent internal flow. The solution is based on a decomposition of the elliptic energy equation into a pair of first order partial differential equations. By using a new defined vector norm it is possible to obtain a selfadjoint eigenvalue problem for the extended Graetz problem even though the original convective diffusion operator is non-selfadjoint. The obtained exact analytical solutions for the Graetz problem with axial heat conduction are as simple to compute as the related solutions of the parabolic problem.