Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Air Products and Chemicals' first quarter earnings release 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.

Thank you, Leanne. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Air Products' first quarter 2020 earnings results teleconference. This is Simon Moore, Vice President of Investor Relations. I'm pleased to be joined today by Sefi Ghasemi, 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 available on our website at airproducts.com. This discussion contains forward-looking statements. Please refer to the forward-looking statement disclosure that can be found in our earnings release and on slide number two. In addition, throughout today's discussion, we will refer to various financial measures. Unless we specifically state otherwise, we are referring to adjusted non-GAAP measures, including adjusted earnings per share, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted EBITDA margin on both the company-wide and segment basis, and RSE. Reconciliations can be found on our website in the relevant earnings release section. Now, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Sefi.

Thank you, Simon, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking time from your very busy schedule to be on our call today. I would like to thank everybody at Air Products to again delivering a very strong quarter. we are very pleased with our earning per share of $2.14 for the first quarter, up 15% over last year's strong results, and the 23rd, I'd like to repeat that, the 23rd consecutive quarter of year-over-year earning growth. Please now turn to slide number three, safety, is always the most important focus for all of us at Air Products, and our goal continues to be zero accidents and incidents. I was pleased to see improvement this quarter as our people redoubled their efforts so that we can move toward our ultimate goal of an accident-free work environment. Slide number four shows our goal And slide number five shows our management philosophy. I have discussed this with you many times before, so I don't want to take the time to repeat it, but those slides are very important guiding principles that we follow. Now please turn to slide number six, our five-point plan that we have discussed with you in detail before. I do not want to focus on our past performance because, frankly, I like the dreams of the future more than the history of the past. Our dream of the future is to make sure air products will continue to be the safest, most diverse, and most profitable industrial gas company in the world, providing excellent service to our customers. Our dream of the future is for Air Products to become the largest American chemical company as measured by market capitalization. We will achieve this by focusing on growth driven by our core competencies. Our dream of the future is for Air Products to be the leader in providing solutions to the world's environmental sustainability challenges through gasification of coal, pet coke, and refinery residues, developing solutions to capture CO2 from gasifiers and hydrogen plants, and further developing technologies and making air products the leader in providing hydrogen for transportation around the world. Our dream of the future is to be a company that has a higher purpose beyond just creating value for our shareholders through improved financial performance. We want to be a company where people from all walks of life and nationalities come together, work together, and feel that they belong and that their contribution matters and are appreciated. A company that is focused on innovation to solve the substantial environmental issues facing all humanity. A company that is passionate and contributes to the well-being of all the communities in which we operate around the world. A global company that brings people from all over the world together to collaborate, improve understanding, and prevent conflicts that arise from misunderstanding. We are committed to work very hard to realize our dreams of the future by executing on our five-point plan strategy. Now, please turn to slide number seven. You can see our exciting gasification strategy. We continue to be very focused on successfully executing this strategy and the announced projects, and we are making excellent progress, and we continue to be very optimistic about this sector. Slide number eight summarizes the Gulf Coast Ammonia Project we announced earlier in January. As I said, this is the largest U.S. investment in the history of air products, and winning this project is a direct result of the value of our Gulf Coast hydrogen pipeline, the competitiveness of our hydrogen plants, and our expertise to develop, build, and operate the largest projects in the history of industrial gas industry. As a result, this project will exceed our commitments in terms of financial returns. Please now turn to slide number nine. We have talked extensively about the significant opportunities for capital investment to generate significant shareholder value. At the same time, the cash generation strength of our existing business allows us to be confident in raising our dividend for the 38th consecutive year. The more than 15% increase we announced yesterday to $1.34 per share per quarter is the largest per share dividend increase in our history and will result in almost $1.2 billion directly returned to our shareholders in form of dividend next year. Now please turn to my favorite part slide number 10, you can see that our EBITDA margin continues to be more than 40%, which is up over 1,500 basis points from early 2014. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Scott Krakow, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, to give you the details of our very good financial performance. Scott?