Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

or 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. Today's discussion contains forward-looking statements, including those about earnings and capital expenditure guidance, business outlook, and investment opportunities. Please refer to the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements that is provided in our earnings release and on slide number two. Additionally, throughout today's discussion, we will refer to various financial measures, including earnings per share, operating income, operating margin, EBITDA, EBITDA margin, the effective tax rate, and ROCE, both on a total company and segment basis. Unless we specifically state otherwise, Statements regarding these measures are referring to our adjusted non-GAAP financial measures. 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 Sefi.

Thank you, Seth, and good day to everyone. Thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to be on our call today. The committed and dedicated people at Air Products delivered another set of outstanding results this quarter, driven by strong organic sales growth, demonstrating the strength and stability of our business. At Air Products, We have an excellent and resilient industrial gas business that is the foundation of who we are and what we do. We supply customers in dozens of industries, customers who depend on our people's expertise to make their products and processes more efficient and sustainable. We have been doing this for the last 83 years. And we will continue to do all we can to be the safest and most profitable industrial gas company in the board, providing outstanding service to our customers. But at the same time, we are using all of our experience, financial strength, and core competencies as the board's leading supplier of hydrogen to implement are low and zero carbon hydrogen megaprojects around the world. When it comes to generating a cleaner future now, we want to lead the way, decarbonizing heavy-duty transportation and heavy industry around the world with clean hydrogen at very large scale. This combination is our growth strategy. and it is the path forward for our continual success and profitable growth in the quarters and years to come. I want to thank the hardworking and talented team at Air Products who make all of this possible. Now, please turn to slide number three, our safety performance, which is always our highest priority. We have worked hard to realize significant progress since 2014, but we always drive and strive to do even better. Our goal is to achieve zero incidents and zero accidents. Now, please turn to slide number four, which summarizes our management philosophy. We have shown you this slide every time that we have an earning call. But I cannot emphasize enough our commitment to the basic principles delineated in these slides. These principles will guide our actions in the future. Now please turn to slide number five, our third quarter adjusted earning of $2.98 per share improved 40 cents or 16% versus last year and exceeded the top end of our guidance for the quarter. Both price and volume were again positive. We continued to demonstrate significant pricing strength while our volume improved for the ninth consecutive quarter, driven by strong on-site performance, including improved hydrogen demand in Americas and over 30 new assets that we have brought on the stream. Additionally, we anticipate the recently announced $1 billion Acquisition of the natural gas to syngas facility in Uzbekistan and new LNG sale of equipment projects will add significantly to our future earnings. As you can see on this slide, we have delivered an average of 11% cumulative average growth rate of earnings per share in the last nine years. Now, please turn to slide number six. We are committed to rewarding our investors by providing a healthy dividend and return cash to them. We are proud of our record of more than 40 consecutive years of dividend increases. We expect to return more than $1.5 billion of dividends to our shareholders in 2023. And also, this slide demonstrates that we have increased our dividend by an average of 10% in the last nine years. Now please turn to slide number seven, which shows our EBITDA margin. This continues to be my favorite chart. This graph is self-explanatory. and clearly demonstrates the significant improvement of our margins as compared to nine years ago when I had the honor and privilege of becoming the chairman, president, and CEO of Air Products. Now, please turn to slide number eight. I would like to again highlight the two fundamental pillars of our growth strategy. our resilient core industrial gas business, and the low and zero carbon hydrogen projects, the mega projects, each underpinned by sustainability. By running our existing business efficiently every quarter, we were able to deliver double-digit earning per share growth in eight of the last quarters. And we continue to advance our blue and green hydrogen projects to help decarbonize the transportation and the heavy industrial sector of our economy. We expect these world-scale clean hydrogen projects to significantly add to our already strong profit stream in the future. Now, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Melissa Schaefer, our Chief Financial Officer. Manisha?

Thank you, Safey. As Safey has said, the consistency and resilience of our business was on full display this quarter. Price and volume gained 4% and 3% respectively, and all profit metrics were up again double digits over last year in a difficult environment. Thanks to the people of Air Products for your continued commitment to serving our customers around the world. We are proud that our Neom Green Hydrogen Joint Venture, the world's largest green hydrogen production facility, achieved financial close in May. The joint venture successfully secured over $6 billion of non-recourse financing from over 20 global project finance leaders. The project was two times oversubscribed, a clear demonstration of confidence in this project. Now please turn to slide nine for a review of our third quarter results. In comparison to last year, volume increased 3%, driven primarily by our onsite business. Merchant price was 10% higher compared to last year, the seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit increases. This equates to a 4% price gain for the total company, with positive pricing across all regions. Declining natural gas costs in Europe and the Americas, reduced energy cost pass-through to our on-site customers. This 11% decline in sales had no impact on profit, but had a positive impact on margins. The overall impact of currency was modest. However, Asian currencies were particularly weaker and contributed to slightly unfavorable currency impact against the U.S. dollar. EBITDA improved 12%. as strong price and equity affiliate income, including the contribution from the second phase of the GEZAN project that closed in January, more than offset higher costs. EBITDA margin jumped almost 600 basis points, with lower energy costs passed through, accounting for two-thirds of the margin improvement. ROCE progressed steadily to reach 12%, which is 130 basis points higher than last year. We expect ROCE to further improve as we bring new projects on stream and continue to put the cash on our balance sheet to work. Adjusting for cash, our ROCE would have been 13.6% this quarter. Sequentially, favorable volume and price net available cost drove improvement to the EBITDA and EBITDA margin. Lower energy cost pass-through also benefit EBITDA margin. by about 200 basis points. Now please turn to slide 10 for a discussion of our earnings per share. Our third quarter GAAP earnings of $2.67 per share included two non-GAAP items that together negatively impacted EPS by 30 cents per share. First, we recorded a 23 cent charge for business and asset action. Second, the non-service components of our defined benefit plan resulted in a $0.07 cost this year versus a $0.03 gain last year. Excluding these non-GAAP items, our third quarter adjusted earnings was $2.98 per share, up $0.40 or 16% compared to last year, driven by strong pricing and higher equity affiliate income. Price and volume and cost added $0.34 to our third quarter adjusted earnings. Price, net of variable cost, contributed $0.52 this quarter, and volume improvements contributed an additional $0.09. Costs were unfavorable $0.27, driven by inflation, as well as our ongoing efforts to support our growth strategy, including bringing new assets on stream. Equity Affiliates' income was 18 cents higher due to the contribution of the second phase of JASAN project and good results from our other unconsolidated joint ventures in the Americas and Europe. The remaining items, including non-controlling interest, interest expense, and non-operating income and expense, together had a modest negative 6 cent impact. We expect our fiscal year 2023 effective tax rate to be approximately 19 to 20 percent. Now, please turn to slide 11. Our ability to steadily grow this railroad cash flow, especially in challenging conditions, is a hallmark of the strength and stability of our businesses and underpins our dividend and capital deployment program. Over the last 12 months, we have generated about $3.2 billion of distributable cash flow or over $14 per share. We prioritize over 45% of or about $1.5 billion as dividends to our shareholders while still having roughly $1.8 billion to invest for growth. Now, please turn to slide 12. We have made significant progress in developing or deploying our capital since 2018, committing most of our estimated investment capacity available in 2018 to the 2027 timeframe. Because our strategy related to the energy transition extends well beyond 2027, we have revised this slide to show a rolling 10-year time horizon. We have not changed any other assumptions or calculations. We remain committed to maintaining our current targeted AA2 rating. With our strong cash flow and additional debt leverage, we estimate that we can put more than $30 billion to work over the next 10 years. Today, we have an $18 billion backlog with $11 billion of projects focused on the energy transition. We believe that investing in these high-return projects is the best way to create long-term shareholder value. Now, to begin the review of our business segment results, I'll turn the call over to Dr. Serhan.