L'Air Liquide Ord

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Air Liquide third quarter 2024 revenue conference call. All participants are currently in listen-only mode until we conduct a question and answer session, and instructions will be given at that time. I'll now hand over to the Air Liquide team. Please begin your meeting, and I will be standing by.

Good morning, everyone. This is Aude Rodriguez, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you very much for attending the call today. François Jacob and Jérôme Pelleton will present the third quarter revenue. For the Q&A session, they will be joined by Émilie Moren-Renoir, Group Viti, overseeing air liquid operations in Europe, Africa, Middle East, and India, and by Adam Titus, Group Viti, CEO of Air Liquide North America. Adam is on the phone with us from the U.S. In the agenda, our next announcement is on February 21st next year for our full year 2024 results. Let me now hand you over to François.

Thank you, Aude, and good morning everyone. It is my pleasure to be with you today to share the highlights of the third quarter of 2024. In a few words, once again, we demonstrated remarkable resilience delivering a strong performance fully on track in a challenging environment, while actively driving business development to build for the future. Let's start with the financial highlights of our performance on slide three. The numbers speak for themselves. First, the 3.3% comparable sales growth. This underscores the resilience of our business model in soft markets, notably We have seen sequential improvement in comparable sales growth, both with and without the effects of significant devaluation in Argentina. Jerome will come back to the detailed momentum between regions and business lines. Some are confirming their sequential improvement clearly, others are slowing down. The second figure highlights our 100 base point of OIR margin improvement, excluding energy pass-through. By the end of September, it remains ahead of target. This reflects our strong commitment to performance we deliver on our promises. The 100 base point expansion also marks an acceleration from previous periods, demonstrating our strong focus on execution in terms of efficiency, pricing, and portfolio management in spite of macroeconomic headwinds. To sustain this improvement of our profitability, you know that we have launched significant transformation initiatives of our organization and operations. Those initiatives will be more and more visible as they bring structural improvements in 2025, 2026 and beyond. The third figure is our 4.2 billion backlog, which exceeds again 4 billion. This is a solid indicator of future growth when the projects currently under construction will start up. In summary, Q3 reflects our unwavering commitment in three areas, residence, performance, and business development. Let's move now to slide four. At 1.4 billion, investment decisions are at a record level this quarter. These investments include various mid-size projects, and I'm excited to highlight some of the major long-term agreements signed this quarter. Let's start with the most recent one in the U.S., where we will supply oxygen to LG Chem for their electric vehicle battery plant in Tennessee. It is a $150 million investment in an air separation unit, a liquefier, storage equipment, and small pipeline, which will enable us to more than double our local liquid capacities for the industrial merchant market. We will also source renewable electricity to offer low carbon products to customers. This project highlights the group ability to leverage our traditional business model in supporting customers with the emerging energy transition markets. The second project is in China, where we announced the takeover of an air separation unit and the signing of a long-term contract with Wanhua Chemical Group. This is a 60 million euro investment that also includes a new liquid carbon production unit to serve the local industrial merchant markets on top of oxygen and nitrogen. This is also our first contract with Wanhua, the largest polyurethane supplier worldwide. And we look forward to establishing a mutual beneficial long-term relationship with this customer. Let's finish with Europe, with a renewed partnership to supply Orubis, a leading copper producer, with large volumes of oxygen and nitrogen. We will invest 100 million in an air separation unit in Bulgaria to replace older units, consuming 7% less electricity, and we will work with the customer to source part of the energy from renewable electricity. The investment also includes the modernization of four existing air separation units in Germany. These plans will also support the development of industrial merchant markets in both regions. Those three projects and on this quarter across key major economic regions illustrate the strength and adaptability of EDIKID's business model to the current environment. I will now turn over to Jérôme to present the details of the Q3 performance Jerome, please.