Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Air Products and Chemicals' second quarter earnings release conference call. 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, sir.

Thank you, Alan. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Air Products' second quarter 2019 earnings results teleconference. This is Simon Moore, Vice President of Investor Relations. I'm pleased to be joined today by Stacey Gassemi, our Chairman, President, and CEO, Scott Krakow, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Sean 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 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 Sethi.

Thank you, Simon, and good morning to everyone. We appreciate your interest in Air Products and thank you for joining us on our call today. At Air Products, We have a talented, committed, and motivated team who stays focused on serving our customers and creating value for our shareholders every day of the year. This team delivered yet another quarter of very strong safety and financial results. I want to thank all of our 16,000 employees for their hard work, dedication, and contributions. Our quarterly adjusted earnings per share of $1.92 is up 12% and represents the 20th consecutive quarter. I'd like to stress that the 20th consecutive quarter that we have reported year-on-year quarterly EPS growth. This strong result overcame a negative 8 cents currency impact. Our EPS is up 17% on a constant currency basis. We continue to be the safest and most profitable industrial gas company in the world with a record quarterly EBITDA margin above 37%. We remain in a very strong financial and technological position with a business that generates significant cash flow. I remain extremely confident of our ability to deploy this capital into high-return industrial gas projects that will generate significant value for our shareholders while also continuing to return cash to our dividend. Now, please turn to slide number three. All our employees around the world are focused on safety, and as a result, we have improved our lost time injury rate by 83% and our recordable injury rate by 45% since 2014. Slide number four states our long-standing goal. Five years ago, we set the goal to be the safest and most profitable industrial gas company in the world, providing excellent service to our customers. I am very happy and proud to say that we have achieved this goal and are committed to maintaining our position in the years to come. We expanded the goal to include being the most diverse, and that is part of our continuing journey to create a work environment where everyone can achieve their true potential. Slide number five is my management philosophy that I have followed throughout my business career. And we have talked about this many times before, so I don't want to dwell on it. Slide number six shows our five-point plan for air products as we move forward. We are committed to have best-in-class performance to maintain our current leadership position, grow the company by expanding our offering related to our core competencies, continue to change the culture of the company, and most important, to achieve our higher purpose. That higher purpose is to create a company where people feel they belong and their contributions are recognized and valued. A company that is committed to sustainability and supportive of the communities in which we operate. a company that our people want to work for, where they are proud to be part of an innovative process to solve the energy and environmental challenges facing the human race. That is our higher purpose, and we are committed to it. Please turn to slide number seven, which shows the key milestones in our gasification strategy. Let me take the opportunity to provide an update on a few of these exciting projects. As I said last quarter, the Luan project continues to run very well and is contributing to our results as we expected. The Jazan ASU, the main air separation units, were built on budget and on time and they are in the process of being commissioned as we speak. The definitive contract for the Jazan gasifier and power plants, which are very complex contracts, and many of them are being negotiated with Saudi Aramco. And we expect the conclusion of those discussions by the end of calendar 2019. We are continuing our discussion with YK Group for the very large coal to syngas project. This project is still underway, and There are some issues related to the allocation of coal, which is very important for us, but the project has the support of the central government, and we are optimistic that we will have more definitive announcements about the project as we move forward. And for the Juitai project, that project is under construction, with expected on a stream in 2022. In addition to these announced projects, As we have said before, we continue to work on a significant number of very large new gasification opportunities around the world. Now, please go to slide number eight, where you can see the results of our key profitability metrics. We remain committed to our goal of continuing to be the most profitable industrial gas company in the world as measured by each of these metrics. Now, please go to slide number nine, which is always my favorite slide, and particularly this quarter. You can see our record quarterly EBITDA margin of 37.7%, which is up over 1,200 basis points from five years ago. This is a great achievement by the people of Air Products, and all of us are very proud of it. 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?