Linde plc

ladies and gentlemen good day and thank you for standing by welcome to the lindy second quarter 2026 earnings call and webcast at this time all participants are in a listen-only mode please be advised that today's conference is being recorded after the speaker's presentation there will be a question and answer session and i would now like to hand the conference over to mr juan pelias head of investor relations please go ahead sir abby thank you

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for attending our 2026 second quarter earnings column webcast. I'm Juan Pelaez, head of investor relations, and I'm joined this morning by Sanjeev Lamba, 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 disclosures on page two on the slides and note that it applies to all statements made during this talk conference. The reconciliations of the adjusted numbers are in the appendix of this presentation. Sanjeev will provide some opening remarks, and then Matt will give an update on Lindy's second quarter financial performance and outlook, after which we will wrap up with Q&A. Let me turn the call over to Sanjeev.

Thanks, Juan, and good morning, everyone. During the second quarter, we achieved record sales on EPS levels, with both growing at near double-digit percent, while increasing the backlog by $1 billion to a record $8.1 billion. after securing a new electronics win in the U.S. In addition, the backlog project pipeline remains healthy with several new project opportunities under development. For the remainder of the year, we're expecting to start up more than 20 projects that add up to approximately $1.3 billion in investments. Even after accounting for these startups and based on the opportunities I see today, I expect our sale of gas backlog to finish the year with an eight handle. underscoring the continued strength of our long-term growth outlook. While these results demonstrate the strength of our core business and the future growth prospects, we are not satisfied with our margin performance for this quarter. Operating margins excluding cost pass-through declined approximately 30 basis points year-over-year, primarily driven by the America segment. Some of this is due to higher equipment and hard goods sales in our package business which actually I view as a good sign of U.S. manufacturing recovery. But the majority is driven by the U.S. home care business. Even though we have been actively pruning this portfolio, it simply has not been enough to overcome the continued headwinds led by higher cost inflation and policy changes. We have a series of actions underway, and I fully expect sequential improvement into the third quarter. At the same time, we continue to evaluate the strategic fit of this U.S. home care business within Linde, both in part and as a whole, while remaining focused on improving its performance and ensuring it earns its place in the portfolio. Matt will speak more to the numbers, but I remain confident in our long-term margin expansion story. Now, I'd like to touch on some growth trends which can be found on slide three. Consumer-related markets grew versus prior year and sequentially. Healthcare and food and beverage grew along with demographic trends and consumption, with stronger sequential growth related to beverage seasonality. As expected, electronics is the fastest-growing end market, with a combination of project startups and higher demand tied to hardware associated with AI. As I mentioned earlier, we added $1 billion of new electronics wins to the backlog to support the expansion of advanced node fabs in Western US. Consistent with other backlog projects, we've already begun constructing the plants under reimbursable LOIs while the supply contracts were finalized. I'm pleased to see this addition to our existing network of plants in Arizona and look forward to winning a few more large opportunities that we're currently pursuing. not included in the backlog are a couple of electronics wins by a taiwan jv which will invest approximately 800 million dollars to build own and operate asus and hydrogen production units to supply to new semiconductor fab and advanced packaging facilities there overall i expect electronics to remain our largest backlog contributor and one of the fastest growing markets for the foreseeable future Moving to industrial-related markets, manufacturing remains the fastest-growing market. We experienced volume growth across APAC and the Americas, although the U.S. is still the primary driver with both aerospace and construction activity related to data centers. In fact, aerospace accounted for more than a third of the manufacturing growth during the quarter. Both metals and mining and chemicals energy markets grew low single digits. medicine mining activity was solid in the u.s and brazil and most of the chemicals growth relates to project backlog contributions in apac aside from these regions both end markets remain flattish across other geographies in summary we've left the more difficult comps and are starting to see green shoots of growth across certain geographies and end markets for the more the project backlog reached a new record from the large-scale electronics wins and we anticipate some further base capex investments to support our commercial space customers. Regardless of the current challenges, you can be assured that the entire Lindy team is focused on being the best performing industrial gas business globally. I'll now turn the call over to Matt to walk through our financial results. Thanks, Sanjay.