Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to Air Products' third 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 Megan Brent. You may begin.

Hello and welcome to the third quarter fiscal 2026 earnings conference call for Air Products. Our prepared remarks today will be led by Eduardo Menezes, Chief Executive Officer, and Melissa Schaffer, Chief Financial Officer. We have prepared presentation slides to supplement our remarks during the call, which are posted on the investor relations section of the Air Products website. During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements, which are our expectations about the future. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Our actual results could materially differ from these statements due to these risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those discussed on this call and in the forward-looking statements and risk factors sections of our reports filed or furnished with the SEC. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statements. Please note, in today's presentation, We will refer to various financial measures, including earnings per share, capital expenditures, operating income, operating margin, the effective tax rate, ROC, and net debt to EBITDA on a total company basis. Unless we specifically state otherwise, statements regarding these measures refer to our adjusted non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures to our most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found on our investor website in the relevant earnings release section. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Eduardo.

Thank you, Megan. Hello, and thank you for joining our call today. Now, please turn to slide three. Earlier today, we reported results for the third quarter of fiscal 2026. In the quarter, we managed volatile marketing dynamics to deliver a 9% increase in operating income compared to the same period last year. Our operating margin of 25.6% was also up compared to the same period last year, largely from volume and price improvement, partially offset by higher costs. Earnings per share were $3.47, up 12% compared to the same period last year. This was above our guidance range, largely due to improved volume and higher contributions from our equity affiliates. Volume improvement was led by higher on-site results, new assets on streams, and heating. The heating headwind in the quarter was 2%, which was better than expected, largely on electronics momentum in Asia. Return on capital of 11.7% was up relatively to prior year and improved sequentially. Moving to slide four, we remain focused on three key priorities for 2026. On earnings growth, EPS are up 14% year-to-date. With another quarter of strong performance, we are raising our full-year earnings guidance, which now implies an improvement of 11% to 12% for the full fiscal year. We continue to expect EPS growth to be achieved primarily through volume growth, from new asset contributions, pricing actions, and continued productivity. Next, we continue to make progress on optimizing our large project portfolio. On June 30th, we announced our decision to exit the Louisiana project, the Casa Grande, Arizona project, and other smaller-scale clean energy distribution projects. As a result, we recorded a pre-tax charge of $2.9 billion this quarter. We are working on opportunities to redeploy the industrial gas assets and sell the ammonia production assets associated with the Louisiana Project. On the Green Ammonia Project in Saudi Arabia, or NGHC, we have now finalized a marketing and distribution agreement with IARA. I will speak to this more in a moment. Finally, on our third priority, maintaining capital discipline, the cancellation of the Louisiana Project will allow us to reduce our capital expenditures. While we expect to reduce capital expenditures overall, we will remain focused on investing in our backlog of traditional industrial gas projects, especially in the electronics end market. In addition to investing in our traditional industrial gas projects, we remain committed to continuing our strong track record of returning cash to our shareholders. Year-to-date, we have returned $1.2 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends. Please turn to slide five. I'm pleased to share that Air Products and IARA have signed a marketing and distribution agreement for renewable ammonia from the NEON green hydrogen project in Saudi Arabia. Under the agreement, IARA will transport and commercialize the renewable ammonia that will be acquired by Air Products from NGHC that is not used by Air Products to produce green hydrogen in Europe. This model creates the first fully integrated value chain for renewable ammonia by enabling products from the world's first large-scale green ammonia plant to be sold and delivered through Yara's existing global supply chain. As a final note, we do not expect this project to have a material financial impact in fiscal year 2027. Please turn to slide 6. for a summary of our current project backlog and an update of our capital expenditure forecast. Before I go into details, I want to provide some context on how to think about our backlog. To be included in the backlog, a project must have reached a final investment decision on FID following a robust review process to ensure we have adequate returns relatively to the risks of the project. Our backlog will include investments in projects with long-term contracts with a strong customer and, in few cases, production facility to grow our liquid bulk and packaged gases business. With this criteria, we currently have a traditional industrial gas backlog of approximately $3 billion in projects. A significant portion of the capital projected for the backlog will support electronic customers. This includes over $1.5 billion in projects wins for air products in the last six months. Translating our backlog into a view of capital expenditures, on the right-hand side of this slide, we are targeting to invest approximately $1.5 billion per year going forward in traditional industrial gas projects. These are air separation and hydrogen projects of varying sizes, and there are new projects being added and completed projects being removed from the list. The CAPEX figures for fiscal year 27 are preliminary and represent the committed spend for traditional industrial gas projects based on our current backlog. As we continue to build our backlog, our focus will be on opportunities that meet our risk-adjusted return thresholds. As we previously disclosed, We are also moving forward with several underperforming projects, given our commercial obligations and product status. Although these projects are not expected to contribute materially to our future operating income, we continue to work to improve their results through commercial negotiations, operational improvement, and productivity. After we bring these products on stream, we expect total capex expenditure of roughly $2 to $2.5 billion per year, which can sustain both our future growth and ongoing maintenance. Again, I want to thank their products team for delivering the results this quarter. Now, I will turn the call over to Melissa to discuss those results in greater depth and review our 2026 outlook. Melissa?