Linde plc

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Q1 2019 Lindy Earnings Conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we'll conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will follow at that time. If anyone shall require operator assistance, please press star and the zero key on your touchtone telephone. As a reminder, this call will be recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Juan Velez. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for attending our first quarter earnings call and webcast. This is Juan Pelaez, head of investor relations, and I am joined this morning by Steve Angel, chief executive officer, and Matt White, chief financial officer. Today's presentation materials are available on our website at lindy.com in the investor section. Please read the forward-looking statement disclosure on page two of the slides and note that it applies to all statements made during this teleconference. The reconsiderations of the adjusted pro forma numbers are in the appendix of this presentation. Steve and Matt will now review Linda's first quarter results and provide a full year outlook. We will then be available to answer questions. Let me now turn the call over to Steve.

Thanks, Juan. Just a few comments before I turn it over to Matt. Our whole separate order was lifted on March 1st, so the first quarter contains only one month of combined operations. Good start to the year, 12% EPS growth, some positive leverage from sales to operating profit as a result of pricing and cost synergies. We paid $477 million in dividends and purchased $700 million of stock net of issuances. in addition to the $600 million purchase in December of last year. The backlog remains healthy at $3.5 billion. This excludes a project that many of you have heard about, which is a project with Exxon Mobil in Singapore that's value to us will be about $1.4 billion of capital investment. Jurong Island in Singapore is ExxonMobil's largest integrated manufacturing complex, and it's anchored by a 600,000-barrel-per-day refinery. They are investing $5 billion in their largest downstream project, which goes by the acronym of CRISP. We are building four gasifiers to tie into two existing gasifiers that Lindy operates today. We will be taking PITCH, from ExxonMobil and returning hydrogen, oxo gas, and nitrogen to ExxonMobil, as well as hydrogen and carbon monoxide to multiple customers via our pipeline system. You can see our project is very much integrated into ExxonMobil's new project. This project will be executed by Lindy Engineering. We see a solid return anchored by a base facility fee structure, and we expect contract signing to be in the next 30 to 60 days. Regarding key milestones, we completed the squeeze-out of our minority lending AG shareholders on April 8th. We announced the divestiture of our South Korea assets on April 30th. which represents about 75% of the expected value from our required divestitures in Asia. All our employees are excited about the merger. We see a strong pull for application technologies as we begin to appreciate each other's capabilities, a strong pull for plant capabilities, and best practices in every aspect of our business. We are currently working through a very detailed cost and restructuring initiatives. We held our first zero-based budget review for all corporate functions a few weeks ago. And I have to say that I'm pleased with the progress we're making. Key priorities going forward. A successful integration, obviously. price management to make sure that we're covering cost inflation all around the world, delivering on our cost, capex, and growth synergies, and building a high-performance culture in every sense of the word. Regarding guidance, I'll let Matt elaborate further, but we may be a bit conservative at this point. Just keep in mind we're only one month into this merger. and I'll turn it over to Matt.