Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Please stand by. We're about to begin. Good day, everyone, and welcome to Air Products and Chemicals First Quarter Earnings Release Conference. Today's call is being recorded at the request of Air Products. Please note that this presentation and the comments made on behalf of Air Products are subject to copyright by Air Products, and all rights are reserved. Beginning today's call is Mr. Simon Moore, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, April. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Air Products' first quarter 2019 earnings results teleconference. This is Simon Moore, Vice President of Investor Relations. I'm pleased to be joined today by Saifi Ghasemi, our Chairman, President, and CEO, Scott Krakow, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Shawn Major, our Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary. After our comments, we'll be pleased to take your questions. Our earnings release and the slides for this call are available on our website at airproducts.com. Please refer to the forward-looking statement disclosure that can be found in our earnings release and on slide number two. Now, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Sebi.

Thank you, Simon, and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us on our call, and we do appreciate your interest in Air Products. The talented, motivated, and committed team at Air Products delivered another quarter of strong safety and financial results. Our quarterly adjusted earning per share of $1.86 represents the 19th consecutive quarter that we have reported year-on-year quarterly EPS growth. Excluding the impact of a plant sale last year, our EPS was up 9%. We continue to be the safest and most profitable industrial gas company in the world with an EBITDA margin above 35%. We are in a very strong financial position, and our business generates significant cash flows. This allows us to continue to invest capital into value-creating projects to profitably grow the company while also continuing to return cash to our shareholders. Yesterday, we announced our 37th consecutive year of dividend increase. We are proud of our new quarterly dividend of $1.16, and I'd like to stress quarterly dividend of $1.16 per share, which in turn means that we will return about a billion dollars in cash to our shareholders over the next year. At Air Products, we have a great, talented, and committed team who stay focused on serving our customers and creating value for our shareholders every day. Now, please turn to slide number three. All of our 16,000 employees around the world are focused on safety, and as a result, they have improved our last time injury rate by 83% and our recordable injury rate by 33% since 2014. On slide number four, you can see our goal, which is to be the best, safest, most diverse, and most profitable industrial gas company in the world, providing excellent service to our customers. On slide number five, you can see our overall management philosophy that we have shared with you many times before. We have come a long way over the last four years However, we continue to be focused on shareholder value, capital allocation, and an empowered and decentralized organization. Now please turn to slide number six to see our five-point strategic plan. We remain focused on sustaining our lead in safety and financial performance. We continue to see tremendous opportunities to deploy capital in value-creating projects, primarily in our on-site business. Scott will take you through the numbers, but let me provide you a quick overview of our progress. Since the start of fiscal year 2018, we have spent and committed over $8 billion on exciting new growth projects. Both Scott and I remain committed to managing our debt balance to maintain our current targeted AA2 rating. At this rating, we believe we still have about $14 billion remaining to invest. So, we have already spent or committed over half of the $16 billion available over the five-year period of fiscal year 18 to fiscal year 22. We recently announced new projects in California, Minnesota, India, Algeria, and China. We have made great progress so far, and I remain very confident, and I like to stress the word very confident, of our ability to deploy this capital into high-return industrial gas projects that will generate significant value for our shareholders. The fourth point of our plan is to continue to improve our 4S culture, meaning safety, simplicity, speed, and self-confidence, to create a committed and motivated environment where our team brings their positive attitudes and open minds to work every day. And finally, we do have a higher purpose to create an inclusive and enjoyable environment for all of our people so that everybody feels proud to innovate, solve challenges, and contribute to our communities. We remain focused on executing this five-point plan. Our goal is to be the best industrial gas company in the world, not the biggest. Now please turn to slide number seven. Then you can see our dividend history. As I said, we are proud of our 37-year record of increasing the dividend. And we are excited about giving over $1 billion to our shareholders in 2019 via dividend in cash, this direct cash return to our shareholders complements the tremendous investment opportunities that will drive air products growth for many years to come. On slide number eight, you can see our gasification strategy that continues to be a key focus of our investment opportunities. Gasification is just another way to make syngas that can be turned into a wide variety of products, including chemicals, diesel fuel, high-end olefins, polymers, hydrogen, and or power. A key benefit of gasification is that it enables an environmentally friendly way to use lower-value feedstocks. We have successfully supported this market over the last few years with very large air separation units providing oxygen to customers operating their gasifiers in China and Saudi Arabia. We have announced four large projects where air products will own and operate the gasifiers and syngas cleanup and provide syngas and all related products to our customers. The key is that these projects are consistent with our on-site business model where we don't have any raw material or product volume or price risk. The Luan project that we had announced before is fully on the stream thanks to the continued effort of our great team in China and continues to successfully supply syngas to Luan for their chemical production. You see the positive impact of Luan in our Asia and company results this quarter, and we remain confident Luan will deliver over 25 cents of earnings per share in fiscal year 19. And we continue to make good progress on the other gasification projects we have announced. Now please turn to slide number nine. We remain committed to our goal of being the most profitable industrial gas company in the world, as measured by each of these three metrics and they are. Now please go to slide number 10, which is always my favorite slide, showing the over 1,000 basis point improvement in our EBITDA margin. Finally, please turn to slide number 11, The successful execution of our strategy will allow us to deliver 13% compounded annual earning per share growth over the last five years, based on the midpoint of our fiscal year 19 guidance. We will continue to execute our strategy and we believe we will deliver and increase our earning per share by at least 10% per year on average over the coming years. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Scott Krakow, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, to discuss the results in detail. Scott?