Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Air Products' fourth 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.

Thank you, Christina. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Air Products' fourth 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 Saifi Ghasemi, our Chairman, President, and CEO, Dr. Samir Surhan, our Chief Operating Officer, Melissa Schaefer, our Senior 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 when we refer to earnings per share, EBITDA, EBITDA margin, the effective tax rate, and 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, adjusted effective tax rate, and adjusted 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 Safie.

Thank you, Simon, and good day to everyone. Thank you for taking time from your very busy schedule to be on our call today. Before we discuss the results, I would like to say that despite the well-known global challenges in 2020 and 2021, the talented, committed, and motivated people of Air Products demonstrated resilience and resolve and delivered excellent results, and in addition, continued to execute our growth strategy. I want to thank every one of our employees for standing together, working hard, and delivering for our customers and shareholders. Now please turn to slide number three. There you can see some of our key highlights for this year. We delivered strong EPS this year, achieving 11% compounded annual growth since fiscal year 2014. And we increased the dividend for the 39th consecutive year. We were again recognized by prestigious raters and organizations for outstanding sustainability performance, including one we just announced this week, the Echo Waters for the fifth year in a row. Our growth strategy and sustainability strategy are one and the same. And to that end, we proudly completed the asset acquisition and project financing transaction for the $12 billion Jazan joint venture with Aramco, Aqua Power, and Air Products Kudra, as we announced last week. In conjunction with the government of Canada and the province of Alberta, we announced the new net zero hydrogen energy complex in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. This world-scale energy complex will begin with a transformative 1 billion net zero hydrogen production and decontraction facility expected out in the stream in 2024. And just a few weeks ago, they announced the $4.5 billion world-class clean energy complex in Louisiana. Air Products will build, own, and operate this megaproject, which will produce over 750 million standard cubic feet per day of blue hydrogen for local and global markets by 2026. We will also capture and permanently sequester 5 million metric tons per year of carbon dioxide, making it the largest carbon capture for sequestration facility in the world. By combining our core strengths and competencies, we successfully develop, execute, and operate these larger scale gasification, carbon capture, and hydrogen projects to address the significant energy and environmental needs of the world. This is fully aligned with our higher purpose as a company. Now please turn to slide number four. As always, safety is the most important focus for all of us at Air Products, and our goal will always be to achieve zero accidents and incidents. Despite the challenging COVID-19 condition this year, our team continues to focus on working safely, following our strict protocols to help protect our own employees, our customers, and our communities. We are pleased with the focus by the team that improved our safety performance in fiscal year 21 versus last year. The slides number five, six, and seven, which we have shared with you many times before, include our goal, our management philosophy, and our five-point strategic plan. These are the principles that we follow every day, and they will continue to guide us in the future. Now please turn to slide number eight. As we speak, world leaders are gathered in Glasgow to work on closing the gap between climate aspirations and climate action. We are actively engaged in this rapidly evolving global dialogue and committed to ensuring that Air Products is best positioned to deliver on behalf of all of our stakeholders through this critical period of energy transition. We believe a successful energy transition requires successful development and execution of larger scale mega projects. Without that, the job cannot be done. The scope and complexity of these projects require talented people with a variety of skills and backgrounds from different parts of the world to work together as one team. This is the higher purpose of our company. We can overcome divorce significant energy and environmental sustainability challenges with our focused and united people working together to provide real solutions for our customers. Now please turn to slide number nine. As I have said before, we believe that hydrogen is the one of the energy sources of the future along with electricity. We are scaling hydrogen production and developing infrastructure to ensure this successful adoption as a sustainable fuel. Hydrogen will be the sustainable fuel of the future. Our customers count on us to deliver this hydrogen produced in a highly efficient manner. Meanwhile, we are making significant investments in new facilities to produce low carbon and carbon free hydrogen made from hydrocarbons. By executing on new clean hydrogen projects in Alberta and Louisiana, we will be a leader in blue hydrogen as well as green hydrogen as we continue to execute our innovative NEOM green hydrogen project in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Now, with that background, I'm happy to turn the call over to Dr. Samir Serhan, our Chief Operating Officer, to talk about our major projects. Dr. Serhan?