Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the Air Products 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. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Jess. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Air Products Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Results Teleconference. This is Simon Moore, Vice President of Investor Relations, Corporate Relations, and Sustainability. I am pleased to be joined today by Shafi Ghasemi, our Chairman, President, and CEO, Dr. Samir Surhan, our Chief Operating Officer, Melissa Schaefer, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Shawn 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, 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 Sethi.

Thank you, Simon, and good day to everyone. Thank you for taking time from your very busy schedule to be on our call today. I want to begin by saying a few words regarding Air Products' response to the current situation in Eastern Europe. We are deeply concerned by the human tragedy in Ukraine and the impact that this conflict has on the world. We condemn this aggression and encourage all efforts for peace. Our hearts go out to those affected and we are continuing to support our employees in this region. As a company, we are providing humanitarian support, including assistance to the International Committee of the Red Cross from the Air Force Foundation. Our employees have also responded with care and generosity, reaching out to their affected colleagues and making contributions to various organizations supporting relief efforts. Our presence in Ukraine is minimum with about $5 million in sales last fiscal year. And we have suspended the development of a small air separation unit in the country. Our business in Russia is also very small with less than $25 million in sales last fiscal year. We are in the process of exiting Russia and will stop doing business in that country. Now, before we get into the details, I want to thank each and every one of our 20,000 employees around the world for their hard work, commitment, and dedication to operational excellence and to serving our customers. Last quarter, Despite the very difficult conditions caused by war, significant inflation in energy costs, supply chain disruptions, and lingering effects of the COVID-19 virus, our people delivered strong results with an earning per share of $2.38, which is 14% higher than the previous year. As always, our people's commitment and dedication is our competitive advantage as we move forward. Now please look at slide number three, focusing on safety, which is our highest priority. Our second quarter safety performance was similar to last quarter, but still behind last year. Although we are proud of the fact that we have made significant progress in this area over the past few years, this result is not acceptable. Our goal remains zero accidents and zero incidents, and we are committed to achieving that goal across the organization. The slides number four through number seven include our goal, our management philosophy, and our five-point plan for moving forward. And we have also included our higher purpose slide to explain what we are trying to do every day when we come to work. We have shared these slides with investors many times before, but we always have them as part of our package to emphasize the point that these are the principles that we will follow every day and they will continue to guide us as we move forward.