L'Air Liquide Sa Unsp/Adr

Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Air Liquide Q3 2026 Revenue Conference call. All participants are currently in listen mode. Only until we conduct a question and answer session and instructions will be given at that time. I will now hand over to the Air Liquide team. Please begin your meeting and I will be standing by.

Thank you Heidi. Good morning, everyone. This is Aude Rodriguez, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you very much for attending the call today. Francois Jackow and Jérôme Pelletan will present the third quarter revenue. For the Q&A session, they will be joined by Émilie Morem-Renoir and Adam Peters, both group VPs overseeing, respectively, EMEA and North America. Adam is on the phone with us from the U.S. In the agenda, our next announcement is on February 19th next year for our full year 2026 results. Let me now hand you over to Francois.

Thank you, Aude, and good morning, everyone. It is my pleasure to present Air Liquide's operational highlights for the third quarter of 2026. This morning, you will see that these good results show our ability to deliver growth This quarter marked the confirmation of the inflection in our top-line sales momentum, especially in electronics and industrial merchants. fully in line with the trajectory of our Beyond Strategic Plan presented two weeks ago. Today, with many actions announced at the Capital Markets Day already launched, we are clearly in full motion and well aligned with our Beyond Strategic Plan. Let's look at the figures on slide three. Our third quarter results underscore the positive contribution of the actions taken recently and confirm we are fully aligned with the trajectory of beyond. First, top line acceleration. This is the most noticeable result of the quarter. Q3 confirms the inflection initiated in Q2. We now stand at sales growth above 4%, excluding forex and energy, and reaching 5% for gas and services. This is driven mostly by electronics and industrial merchants. Of course, in the current environment, we should stay cautious for the future. But the fact that the volumes are now positive is very encouraging. On top of this, at plus 5.3%, industrial merchant pricing demonstrates again our ability to effectively manage the cost curve. Also, efficiency momentum remains outstanding. Over 440 million euros year to date. This significant achievement confirms that our transformation program continues to yield structural results and is well aligned with our margin ambitions and beyond. Operating cash flow remains robust at plus 6% excluding currency impact. This provides us with ample financial flexibility to fund our strategic capital allocation priorities. Our investment backlog reached another all-time high at €6.2 billion, up from €6 billion at the end of June. These are, as you know, high-quality projects under construction that will directly fuel our profitable growth as they ramp up. This high backlog and the recent signings show that we continue to secure our long-term growth momentum in line with our Beyond Ambition. In summary, a few days after the CMD announcement, you see that already in Q3, we positioned ourselves well in line with our Beyond Profitable growth trajectory, accelerating top line growth, driving pricing, and delivering efficiencies. I would like to come back to the acceleration of the top line and start on slide four, with our electronics business. It's delivering an excellent momentum, up plus 12% this quarter. Carrier gases, which account for around half of our total electronics revenue, as we mentioned during the CMD, marked an acceleration with double-digit comparable sales growth, supported this quarter by five startups and several units ramp up. This is just the beginning of the contribution of the increased investment in the past years, providing, as you know, thanks to the solid business model, high visibility, recurring and contractually secured growth. And I would say the story keeps going. Securing growth for tomorrow, we have doubled our investment decisions in the first nine months of 2026 compared to the full last year. This includes several major strategic wins. Please remember our recently announced 170 million euros investment in Japan. Japan, where we have invested more than 800 million euros in the past five years. Japan is clearly backed in the Semicon race. Being the only international gas player present in Japan is a clear competitive advantage, and I would say it shows. Also compelling is our market differentiating advanced materials portfolio. As we discussed during the CMD, this segment naturally tracks technology demand cycles, as shown on the graph. It is currently experiencing a strong growth surge, reaching plus 27% in the third quarter. This may not be always the case, but it is clearly driven by the accelerated demand for advanced chips and Emily in AI applications. Overall, you can see that our momentum and outlook across electronics is already very consistent with our beyond trajectory of greater than 10% annual growth rate in sales. Moving to slide five. Growth in industrial merchants served as another major engine this quarter. delivering over 5% comparable sales growth. Sustained high pricing was amplified by the positive inflection in volume growth, excluding helium. In fact, the industrial merchant volumes have now been positive since Q2 and accelerated further in Q3. This sales growth is the highest in three years. Taking an optimist view, This performance may point to the early stages of a broader recovery, supported by underlying volume growth across all our geographies in Q3. This being said, regarding Helium, while market conditions are somewhat improved, supply constraints remain a headwind today. Also encouraging is the volume pickup in U.S. art goods. Art goods delivered solid growth each quarter fueled by construction, government, defense, and also aerospace sectors. While all this is very positive and it's an early signal, visibility, of course, in industrial merchants remains shorter than in our long-term contracted businesses. especially in the current environment. So I would say we should remain cautiously optimistic. Overall, our strong sales growth in industrial merchant this quarter positioned us very well to execute and deliver our beyond strategic plan trajectory of plus four to plus six percent revenue growth. As a reminder on side six now, Beyond is our compass for the next five years, anchoring our execution and operational discipline. I want to take, of course, this opportunity to once again emphasize the three core pillars underpinning our ambition. Profitable growth with a plus 10% EPS CAGR, lasting value creation with ROCE exceeding 11% by 2030, and a positive impact with a 33% reduction in scope 1 and scope 2 CO2 emissions by 2035. Q3 performance clearly demonstrates that we are on the right trajectory to deliver on these commitments. Turning now to slide 7. Following our capital markets day, we have moved swiftly into execution. We launched our post-CMD engagement with strong momentum. Externally, we met individually with more than 100 investors on two continents, as well as held analyst meetings in both Europe and in the US. Internally, we onboarded the organization through our Global Engagement Day, connecting with our 65,000 employees worldwide. And also, A specific 3-day session with our top 200 leaders aligning on execution priorities. Needless to say, execution is fully underway with the initial launch of our Keep Beyond initiatives. Lastly, as a clear sign of our momentum and our confidence in our strategic roadmap, we have already initiated our 4 billion shares repurchase program at full speed. Following this week board authorization, we will deploy the first 1 billion trench to be executed by the year end 2026. We are fully engaged and executing with speed and confidence. Thank you for your attention. I will now hand over to Jérôme to provide a deeper dive into our third quarter financial performance. Jérôme, please.