Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Air Products and Chemicals' first 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.

Thank you, Leigh Ann. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Air Products' first quarter 2021 earnings results teleconference. This is Simon Moore, Vice President of Investor Relations, Corporate Relations, and Sustainability. I am 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 will 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, when we refer to earnings per share, EBITDA, EBITDA margin, In ROCE, both on a company-wide and segment basis, we are referring to our adjusted non-GAAP financial measures, adjusted earnings per share, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, and return on capital employed. Reconciliations of these measures to our most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found on our website in the relevant earnings release section. Now, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Safey.

Thank you, Simon. And good day to everyone. We thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to be on our call today. We are living at a time when all humanity faces significant challenges. The most important and immediate one is the battle against the deadly virus that has already taken many lives and continues to ravage communities around the globe. We can only fight this deadly and global virus if we work together and stay united. In my more than 45 years in business, I have learned that all problems, no matter how challenging, can be solved if we stay focused and united, working toward a common goal. So it is in this spirit of working together as a team that I want to acknowledge the united and extraordinary efforts of all the talented, committed, and resilient people of air products around the world. They work hard every day to provide critical products and services to our customers. Our people working in solidarity and in a determined way have made it possible for us to keep our 750 facilities around the world operating during this unprecedented crisis. They are the ones who are making it possible for us to deliver the good results we see this quarter. And they are the ones who are pushing forward with developing and executing major world-class projects to ensure our growth in the future. They are the ones who, through their actions every day, give meaning to our higher purpose as a company, which is to help humanity move forward in a sustainable way and bring people together to help solve energy and environmental challenges. Our people are the soul of our company, and I am very proud to stand with them. Now, please turn to slide number three. As always, Safety is the most important focus for all of us at Air Products. It's a moral responsibility to keep our people safe, and our goal will always be zero accidents and incidents. Despite the challenging COVID-19 conditions, our team continues to focus on working safely, following our strict protocols to help protect themselves, our customers, and our communities. On slides four, five, and six, you can again see our goal, our management philosophy, and our five-point plan for moving forward. These are the principles that we follow every day. They drove our performance improvement in the past and will continue to guide us in the future. While we have accomplished a great deal in the past six years, transforming air products and delivering superior performance, I always prefer to focus on the future because I prepare the dreams of the future to the history of the past. I have shared our dreams of the future with you before, which you can see highlighted on slide number seven. I would like to repeat them again. Our dream of the future is to be the safest, most diverse, and most profitable industrial gas company in the world. Our dream of the future is to be the largest American chemical company as measured by market capitalization. Our dream of the future is to be the leader in providing solutions to the world's significant energy and environmental challenges. And we believe air products has a higher purpose beyond delivering superior financial results, bringing people together to work together and deliver sustainable solutions that benefit our customers and our world. This is what drives us every day. Now please turn to slide number eight. I'm proud to say that during the past 12 months, we have made significant progress in making these dreams a reality. We have significantly improved our safety record. Our margins remain highest in the industry. We announced our new sustainability goals, including carbon intensity reduction and diversity goals. These are consistent with our growth opportunities and our higher purpose. We helped drive our market cap increase by improving our earnings per share by over 10% on average over the last six years, with positive EPS growth in 2020, despite the negative impact of COVID-19 pandemic. We have continued to create and win projects that help customers and countries meet their growing needs for cleaner energy and environmental solutions. Let me share a few of the examples of these large, important projects that demonstrate progress on our strategy. We've won four world-scale energy heat exchanger projects over the last year, including the Qatar gas megaproject and the project in Mexico that we announced earlier this week. These projects are already contributing to our bottom line as we continue to complete them for our customers. We are executing the Gulf Coast Ammonia Project in the U.S. Gulf Coast and have acquired the hydrogen assets of our PBF customer in California and Delaware. These projects will further enhance our hydrogen leadership position in the United States. We announced the $2 billion coal to methanol project categorized as a national strategic project by the Indonesian government to support energy development and transition and reduce the country's reliance on fuel inputs. We also announced the innovative NEON project in Saudi Arabia to provide the board with a roadmap to transition to carbon-free, that is green hydrogen, the energy source of the future. Now please turn to slide number nine. We remain committed to delivering superior financial performance. And as I said, our people also know they are supporting the higher purpose in the work they do every day. Our industrial gas enterprise is critical to the success of dozen industries. And the scope and complexity of our mega projects require talented people with a variety of skills and backgrounds from different parts of the world to work together as one team. We are proud to bring people from diverse backgrounds and experiences together to collaborate and develop these innovative solutions for some of the most significant energy and environmental challenges in the world. That is our higher purpose, and it inspires our team and drives us every day. Now please turn to slide number 10, which highlights our key gasification projects. We are committed to our gasification strategy and are pursuing exciting projects around the world. We continue to see countries and large companies driving to convert low-value feedstock into high-value products. They have identified gasification as the best way to use abundant, low-value resources like coal, petcoke, and refinery bottoms in a sustainable manner. And we are in the best position to work with them and help them deliver better, more sustainable solutions that benefit their economies and their people. We do expect to announce additional gasification projects in the future. Now, specifically, I would like to give you an update on the two largest gasification projects which I discussed during our last earning call. First, our $12 billion acquisition of the Jazan gasifier and power plant from Saudi Aramco. Since our last call with investors on November 11, 2020, we have continued our discussions with Saudi Aramco to finalize all of the contracts, arrange the financing, and move toward the financial close. I am encouraged by the progress we have made in the last three months, and I would especially like to thank the Saudi Aramco very senior management for the positive steps they have taken to move this transaction forward. We obviously still have work to do to bring this significant project to a final conclusion, but I am more optimistic than I was three months ago. The second project we discussed on the last earning call was Luan. We have reached an agreement with Luan to temporarily reduce our fixed monthly fee during the time that the plant is shut down. And Luan has agreed to extend the length of the contract, which improves our return. Luan did pay us the reduced monthly fee for the months of October November, and December. We continue to believe that the plan will be restarted during this fiscal year. Now, please turn to slide number 11, which reflects our recently announced 12% dividend increase, raising our quarterly dividend to $1.5 per share for an annual rate of $6 a share. This dividend increase is a reminder that while we continue to develop our exciting growth opportunities, we have significant cash flow that supports this substantial dividend increase, the 39th consecutive year of increase for our products. And finally, slide number 12 shows our dividend margin. As always, my favorite slide. that it shows that the margin is up over 1,400 basis points since 2014. I am very proud of our team who continue to deliver EBITDA margins of nearly 40% for the quarter, despite the challenges facing us. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Scott Krappel, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer to provide a financial overview. Spot?