Linde plc

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the fourth quarter 2020 Wendy Earnings Call. At this time, all participants' lines are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star and then one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star and then zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Juan Perez, Head of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Crystal, thank you, and good morning, everyone, and appreciate attending our 2020 Fourth Quarter Earnings Calling webcast. I'm Juan Pelaez, Head of Investor Relations, and I'm joined this morning by Steve Angel, Chief Executive Officer, Matt White, Chief Financial Officer, and Sanjeev Lamba, Chief Operating 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 reconciliations of the adjusted numbers are in the appendix of this presentation. Steve, Sanjeev, and Matt will now give an update on Lindy's fourth quarter performance and will then be available to answer questions. Steve?

Thank you, Juan. The entire team responded exceptionally well in a year dominated by COVID-19. Our frontline workers in particular deserve special recognition for what they accomplished and what they continue to do for our customers, our patients, and our communities. Despite the challenges of COVID, our key safety metrics continue to trend positively. We always say safety first here at Lindy, and our people certainly walked the talk in 2020. We ramped up our healthcare capabilities around the world. We developed new protocols to treat COVID patients in their homes, freeing up needed capacity in overburdened hospitals. Since March, we have treated 90,000 COVID home care patients, and unfortunately, that number continues to grow. And we did that while caring for our existing base of some 1.6 million home care patients. We kept our plants running reliably and maintained service to our customers. We started up new plants in challenging circumstances with minimal delays. With the help of virtual tools, we transitioned from central to distributed operations almost flawlessly. In light of the inequalities in our society exposed by COVID-19, We contributed an additional $1.5 million to our communities beyond our normal level of giving. We demonstrated the resiliency of our business model. We quickly adjusted cost structures in line with local market conditions. We utilized our strong commercial terms and conditions to shield us from volume disruptions. We capitalized on more resilient growth opportunities in healthcare, electronics, and food freezing. We delivered strong financial performance for the full year. Matt will provide more detail on the financials, but let me share a few highlights. XFX, we delivered 13% earnings per share growth on minus 2% sales. Our EBIT percent rose 260 basis points to 21.3%. Close operating cash flow grew 21% to $7.4 billion. And the single most important metric to me, return on capital, grew 180 basis points to 13.4%. We won significant projects serving new semiconductor fabs, the largest of which is yet to be announced and is not yet included in the 3.6 billion cellar gas backlog number you see in the presentation. We won 36 small on-site projects in growing markets such as pulp and paper, lithium-ion batteries, and precious metals. We advanced our sustainability initiative. We are the only chemical company in the world who has been recognized in the World Dow Jones Sustainability Index for 18 consecutive years. And MSCI recently upgraded our ESG rating to an A rating. This time last year, we announced a new greenhouse gas emission intensity reduction goal of 35% by 2028. At this point, we're nearly halfway to achieving this goal. And we continue to develop applications that enable our customers to address their environmental challenges. We're currently working on several carbon capture utilization and sequestration projects that we expect to come to fruition in the coming months. We've made progress on our Clean Hydrogen Initiative. We ramped up our JV with ITM to build PEM, Proton Exchange Membrane, electrolysis plants. We formed a dozen partnerships with fuel cell electric vehicle manufacturers, energy companies, and renewable power producers. We closed several important projects in China, South Korea, and Germany. We made significant progress on our diversity goals for women globally and minorities in the U.S. We conducted our second employee engagement survey, and the results were very positive and improved year over year. We maintain a strong compliance program. Establishing a strong culture of compliance is a fundamental responsibility of every leader in our company. We didn't ring a bell or anything, but the merger integration is over thanks to the outstanding work of many people from both legacy companies. In short, we accomplished a great deal in 2020 and performed at an exceptional level, especially when considering the environment. Now, I've just made a lot of we statements, and now I have one more. We are well positioned for another outstanding year in 2021. Now I'll turn it over to Sanjeev to provide more details on the business trends and outlook.