Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to 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. Sid Mendeshwar. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Katie. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Air Products' Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Results Teleconference. This is Sid Manjeshwar, Vice President of Investor Relations. I am pleased to be joined today by Sefi Ghasemi, our Chairman, President, and CEO, Dr. Sameer Sarhan, our Chief Operating Officer, Melissa Schaefer, our 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. 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 with that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Safie.

Thank you, Sid, and good day to everyone. Thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to be on our call today. As you know, I always start with safety, which is our top priority at Air Products. Slide number three includes our employee last time injury rate and recordable injury rate in the first half of fiscal year 2024. Both of these rates were at their lowest levels since 2014 and the best in the industry. This is great progress, but our ultimate goal will always be zero accidents and zero incidents. Slide number four outlines our management philosophy. We believe strongly in these principles and they will continue to guide us as we move air products forward like we have done in the past 10 years. Now, please turn to slide number five. Our second quarter adjusted airing per share of 285 exceeded the upper end of our previous guidance range and improved 4% compared to last year on strong results in Americas and Europe. We continue to effectively manage our current business while simultaneously executing our growth projects. We are focused on reducing costs and improving pricing in this inflationary environment. Our industrial gases business and border-scale low-carbon hydrogen projects are driving sustainability, enabling customers to decarbonize, and generating a cleaner future for our work. Now please turn to slide number six for a review of our third quarter and full year guidance. For the third quarter of fiscal year 2024, our adjusted earnings per share guidance is $3 to $3.05. our earnings are generally higher in the second half of our fiscal year. We are maintaining our full year guidance of 1220 to 1250 per share as we continue to monitor economic uncertainties, including China's economy and activities in the electronic industry throughout Asia. We continue to expect our capex to be in the range of five to five and a half billion in fiscal year 2024. Now please turn to slide number seven. Our adjusted earning per share has improved an average of more than 10% annually since 2014, a trend we are committed to continue. Now please turn to slide number eight. We take a balanced approach to determine our dividend, considering various factors, including yield, payout, and peer benchmarks, while investing for growth and maintaining our A2 credit rating. In January, we again increased our dividend to $1.77 per share per quarter, extending our record of 42 consecutive years of dividend increase. We expect to return approximately $1.6 billion to our shareholders through dividends in 2024. Slide number nine shows our EBITDA margin trend. always my favorite slide. Our margins have again climbed about 40%, leading the industry and reflecting our commitment to creating shareholder value. At this point, I would like to remind our shareholders that almost 10 years ago, on my first call as Chairman and CEO of Air Products, I promised you that we would make Air Products the safest and most profitable industrial gas company in the world. And we have delivered on that. On the same call 10 years ago, I also promised we would increase our earnings per share on the average by 10% every year. And as you see on the slide seven, we have delivered on that too for the last 10 years. So today, I want to set the goal for the next 10 years. Air products will continue to be the safest, most diverse, and most profitable industrial gas company in the world. And as we have done before, deliver earnings per share growth of at least 10% per year on the average for the next 10 years. We have done it before, and we will do it again. I have total confidence, and I want to stress this. I have total confidence in the ability of the talented, dedicated, motivated, and committed people of Air Products to execute our bold and forward-looking strategy and deliver significant value to our shareholders. I want to thank every one of them for their hard work, commitment, and dedication. I'm very proud to be part of this team. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Melissa, our Chief Financial Officer, to make remarks about the second quarter. Melissa?