APD - Air Products and Chemicals Inc. (APD) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2024-04-30 14:36:03 ET

Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. (APD)

Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call

April 30, 2024 08:30 ET

Company Participants

Sidd Manjeshwar - Vice President of Investor Relations

Seifi Ghasemi - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer

Melissa Schaeffer - Chief Financial Officer

Samir Serhan - Chief Operating Officer

Conference Call Participants

John McNulty - BMO Capital Markets

Jeff Zekauskas - JPMorgan

Steve Byrne - Bank of America

David Begleiter - Deutsche Bank

Duffy Fischer - Goldman Sachs

Michael Leithead - Barclays

Marc Bianchi - TD Cowen

Vincent Andrews - Morgan Stanley

Kevin McCarthy - Vertical Research Partners

Patrick Cunningham - Citi

Chris Parkinson - Wolfe Research

Josh Spector - UBS

Laurence Alexander - Jefferies

Mike Sison - Wells Fargo

John Roberts - Mizuho

Presentation

Operator

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. Sidd Manjeshwar, please go ahead.

Sidd Manjeshwar

Thank you, Katie. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Air Products' second quarter 2024 earnings results teleconference. This is Sidd Manjeshwar, Vice President of Investor Relations. I am pleased to be joined today by Seifi Ghasemi, our Chairman, President and CEO; Dr. Samir Serhan, our Chief Operating Officer; Melissa Schaeffer, 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 2. 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 Seifi.

Seifi Ghasemi

Thank you, Sidd 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 3 includes our employee lost time injury rate and recordable injury rates 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 4 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 5. Our second quarter adjusted earnings per share of $2.85 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 broad scale low-carbon hydrogen projects are driving sustainability, enabling customers to decarbonize and generating a cleaner future for our world....

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