I'm Patrick Cunningham. I cover chemicals here at Citi. For our first fireside chat today, we have Air Products. Air Products is a global industrial gases company with an 85-year history and advanced supply positions operating in approximately 50 countries. The company supplies essential industrial gases, related equipment, and applications expertise to customers in industries like refining, chemicals, metals, electronics, manufacturing, medical, and food. As the leading global supplier of hydrogen, Air Products also develops, engineers, builds, owns, and operates some of the world's largest clean hydrogen projects, supporting the transition to low and zero-carbon energy in the industrial and heavy-duty transportation sectors. Joining me today from Air Products will be Eduardo Menezes, Chief Executive Officer, and Melissa Schaeffer, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Eduardo joined Air Products in February 2025, bringing 30-plus years of industry experience. Since then, he has continued to refocus on the core industrial gas business strengths while optimizing Air Products' project portfolio. Melissa Schaeffer has been with Air Products since 2016 and leads the company's global finance organization. Both have articulated the strategic roadmap Air Products is following, targeting further margin expansion and earnings growth and aiming for industry-leading adjusted operating margins. I think a natural place to start would be your two largest outstanding projects, Louisiana and Neon. Maybe first on Louisiana. It seems like you have several options on the table and only a few weeks left in the year. Any update on the direction that project is heading, how some of your commercial conversations are progressing there? Good morning, Patrick. Thank you for having us here. Yes, as I said, since the day I came to Air Products, this is a very large project that probably did not start the way I would start that project. We started that without having a customer. The fundamentals of the project are sound, right? If you look at the infrastructure you have in the Gulf Coast, the price of natural gas, the ability that we have to move hydrogen long distances in our pipeline, and you look at the 45Q incentives in the U.S., the project makes sense as designed, right? Our project is a little different from other projects in the same space. It is very large. We're going to make 750 million cubic feet a day of hydrogen, but 80% of that hydrogen was supposed to be converted into ammonia, and only 20% would stay as hydrogen and be moved into our pipeline. The fundamentals of the project make sense. We have been working very hard to identify and to work in agreements with ammonia producers that would take over the ammonia loop and operate the ammonia facility, produce the ammonia, handle the storage, handle the shipment of ammonia. We would concentrate ourselves in the air separation and the hydrogen-producing equipment. Not very different from a similar project that you have in the Gulf Coast with OCI and our Woodside. Same kind of structure. The difference is our project is two and a half times the size, so it takes a little time to find the right players to get this done. I self-imposed myself a deadline at the end of the year. I fully expect by the next two weeks to have a communication explaining where we are in the project. We made significant developments on that, but I cannot say more than that at this point. Yeah, and maybe I just have to wait a couple of weeks here for the news. What sort of, you talked about OCI, Woodside, that being sort of a similar project. Obviously, that has more sort of conventional returns for the industrial gas producers operating there. How do you think about the return hurdle you need to make a go, no-go decision, justify executing that project with whatever the remaining capital outlay may be? Yeah, it's the kind of return you expect in industrial gases. Our industry, we always try to have certainty on return in exchange of a more reduced number than a producer will expect by itself. We expect the project to have the similar returns of our hydrogen project. This will be exactly a hydrogen and nitrogen project for Air Products, not more and not less. That's all we're going to do is to produce hydrogen and nitrogen and then supply to our customers. Understood. Maybe just on Neon, it seems like construction is progressing well, on track for 2027. I think you mentioned on the last earnings call you would likely sell some ammonia from that asset as your offtake for green hydrogen is later in the decade. Conceptually, I guess my question is, does this make your downstream marketing of Neon offtake an underperforming project, similar to how you maybe classified some other parts of the portfolio? I have some follow-ups there as well. No, I wouldn't say that. I would say that the project was conceived that way, that all that ammonia would be produced in Saudi Arabia, exported to Europe, and then converted back to hydrogen. Of course, you can generate clean or green hydrogen in Europe without having that. You can have electrolysis. You can have a process in Europe using power there to produce green hydrogen in Europe. The play here is really an arbitrage on power costs and capital costs between Saudi Arabia and Europe. I think from that perspective, the project, the fundamentals of the project are still okay. In other words, we will be able to, or we are able to produce green hydrogen in Europe using this ammonia at a price that is competitive against someone producing green hydrogen in Europe from electrolysis, from wind or solar power in Europe. That says only that we can run faster than the other guy, right? We still need to run faster than the bear or the lion, whatever you want. How much market will be developed in Europe, that's a question of regulation in Europe and how that will become a reality. We try to follow that as close as we can. The EU has some regulations that ask all the member states to use at least 1% of their fuel as renewable fuel. Most places, or all the places so far, accept what they call the refinery route. In other words, if you use green hydrogen in your refining process to produce your regular oil products, that counts against your RFNDO targets of 1%. This regulation has to be what they call transposed to every country in the EU. They are in different stages. I think only Denmark approved that so far. In other countries, they are in different stages in the parliament. Most countries, the large countries, they are even proposing higher percentage than 1%. I think Spain is 4%, Germany is two and a half. There are several proposals in parliaments on these different countries. We're going to need to wait and see. Hopefully, by the summer of 2026, they will make that definition, and that will be applicable in Europe, I would say, in 2030. That's the perspective from the green hydrogen point of view. Our plan is expected to start in 2027. Between 2027 and 2030, I'm 100% sure we're not going to have a significant market in Europe, right, for green hydrogen. We are trying to develop other ways to commercialize ammonia because at the end of the day, Air Products has the accountability to lift every ton of ammonia produced by that plant. I have to find a market for that, and we're working on that as well. We expect to have something to inform how we're going to do that by the first half of next year, if not earlier than that. I mean, how is that market developing? I guess how can investors get comfortable with what the returns may look like from 2027 to 2030 as you sell green ammonia? Do you expect to get a premium? Is this more of just a cash return on that downstream marketing? Yeah, ammonia is a commodity, right? You can't control the price exactly on the marketplace. I can tell you that today, the price is very good, but there's no guarantee that it's going to be the same six months from now or two years from now. I would say that our project, the big advantage we have because we are back integrated into power, right? We generate our own solar and wind power. Basically, we have no variable costs. The price we have in the beginning of this agreement will basically be the same price five years from now, 20 years from now. The only cost increase we'll have is for local labor, and that's very small compared to the overall cost. I think in the long term, it's a very good bet on that project. In the short term, we're going to need to see what happens there. That is part of the work we're trying to do in the beginning, is try to see how we can insulate ourselves from these variations in the market. There is a lot of work to be done to get there. Understood. Somewhat related, I think you have a commitment to be free cash flow neutral to positive in 2026. You talked about this $4 billion CapEx number that you have out there for 2026. Is that number a best-case scenario if you ultimately decide to pursue some additional investment in Neon and Louisiana in 2026? What's the sensitivity around that number for the project? I'll let Melissa talk more about that, but you need to remember that our fiscal year ends in September, right? For 2026, this number includes all the investments we have in these projects. I think we already made that point that for Louisiana, we received a minor air source permit for the project. We applied for a major air source permit because our potential customers asked for that, and that will take until probably mid-2026. The capital cost, the CapEx that we have forecasted for Louisiana, it's things that we already committed a year or two years ago. There is really no field activity at this point for that project. Long story short here, the CapEx includes all the scenarios that we have. But Melissa, you can... Sure. No, you're spot on. Yes, we have talked about cash flow neutrality through 2028. In fact, we have a line of sight of cash flow neutrality to slightly positive in 2026. Obviously, ties some other non-strategic assets like our old headquarters land that we'll be selling in downtown. Certain one-offs are going to get us to cash flow neutrality in 2026 through 2028. As Eduardo mentioned, absolutely. The forecast that we provided does include Darrow moving forward. We have taken that into consideration, but there will need to be certain financing actions that we take to be able to get there. One thing I do want to remind everybody, and we've talked about this, but I think often people do not utilize this within their models, is Neon will be deconsolidated in 2027. Right now, the Neon debt sits on our financials. In 2027, when we deconsolidate that, that will come off. We will be very quickly back into the metrics that we need to be, and our balance sheet will be largely delivered at that point in time. That is something that I just want to remind everybody as they are forecasting the free cash flow as well as the leverage metrics, that that is something to take into consideration. Got it. I mean, just putting all of that together from the first few questions, it does not sound like there is a scenario where CapEx meaningfully steps up again because you decide maybe the return is justified economics in terms of reinvesting in... Not for 2026. For 2027, depending on how Darrow will move forward, we need to see what the numbers will be. Again, we're working on that. This is a massive project, right? A little bit of change can change a lot in the overall numbers, but we'll give guidance at the right time regarding 2027. Understood. I just wanted to go back to Neon just briefly. I think one of the links in the chain for getting green hydrogen landed in Europe would be building ammonia cracking capacity. I think one of your competitors recently started a pilot scale ammonia cracker. Can you just remind us the journey that Air Products has been on there, what you would need to see to make that investment, and what it might look like? Yeah, we have been developing our own solutions as well in this area. The agreement that we disclosed, I think a year and a half ago with Total to give an idea, that agreement is for something like 200 tons a day of hydrogen. That plant that you saw the announcement, I think they talk about 30 tons, but it's not 30 tons of hydrogen. It's 30 tons of ammonia that will be cracked. So that will be probably five, six tons of hydrogen. The scale is very different. We have been working on our own solutions in pilot scale and so forth, but the real challenge here is to come with a solution for larger amounts and trying to be efficient and try to reduce the cost of converting the ammonia back to hydrogen. We have our own programs on that, and it's always a challenge to find room in your budget for these large pilot projects, and we're working on finding a solution for that. We may go in a different direction on building our first facility that it's not halfway, but it's more like a commercial scale facility than a pilot project. Understood. Maybe just pivoting to some of your other projects, can you speak to some of the improvements you're hoping to deliver for Rotterdam and Edmonton, whether it's from a capital cost or commercial execution standpoint? Just in the context of making go forward investments, can you remind us how much volume commitment that you have there already? I think I talked a little bit about these projects, right? The first thing I tried to do was to, what is the joke? The first thing you need to do when you are in the hole is to stop digging, right? You need to stop digging. We try to put the project under control and make sure we understand the schedule and the cost of these projects. I think we did that. We are satisfied now that we're executing the project, and we're going to be able to deliver the project in the numbers that we informed our shareholders and our board and so forth. That is the first thing we did. Now we need to try to see how we can improve that. I would say that on the capital side, it will be difficult to make a change because we already made a big effort to put the project back in control. I don't see a significant improvement that we can make in the CapEx cost. I would say the volumes are the challenge here. The Edmonton project, we have around 40-50% of the volume contracted. Right now, we are working to, we have a pipeline. We're connected to several refineries there with gray hydrogen. We're working to try to find more customers for this plant. The situation in Canada, if you don't follow, it's very fluid right now. If you think about Europe, Canada is even more complex today in terms of regulations and that kind of stuff. From the U.S., and they just announced a new MoU between the federal government and the provincial government of Alberta for CO2 minimum prices, which is a good thing for us, but they still need to go into the details and talk about free allowances. It is a very complicated regulatory environment there. It is way more complicated than the U.S., much more similar to Europe, and I would say even more complicated than Europe right now. We are trying to understand exactly how the market will end in Canada, what the incentives will be. I would say that if you want to do biofuels in Canada today, it is probably the best place in the world today because of the incentives they have and the objectives that the government has to commercialize canola oil. We need to see who else is going to invest there and try to make that jump over there. I think there is no question that we have the right infrastructure in place with the pipeline and we have the right connections there, but the regulations will be important there. In Rotterdam, we have, in fact, we have three projects in Rotterdam. The largest one is a completely new SMR with CO2 capture. We call that ICO 5. This one has 40-50% of the volume contracted with one biofuel customer that is always building an expansion that is moving ahead. Same situation, we need to find additional customers for the additional volume. We are working on that. That is one project. The second project is a CO2 capture of an existing reformer that we have there that we call ICO 4. That one is basically fully contracted between product from our reformer and product from a refinery that is close by that is sending their CO2 to us. This one is fully contracted. We have a third project in Rotterdam that was supposed to be the first ammonia import terminal with ammonia crackers and liquefiers. We are definitely moving forward with the liquefier, but at this point, we paused the rest of the investments to see how that market will develop because at the end, until the regulation in Europe is there from 2030, there is not a lot of incentive for people to pay premium prices for that product. The liquefier is connected to our existing infrastructure so we can produce the product gray or blue or green, whatever the hydrogen we have, and that will go forward. There are three different projects. The liquefier is a merchant project, so we need to develop that market. We have an existing liquefier there that we are replacing. Three different situations. One, we have 50% volume contracted. The other one is fully contracted, and the other one is a merchant project that we are going to need to develop when the project is, when the plant is ready. Maybe just wrapping up just with core industrial gas business and how you view that broadly. I mean, I think there's been this perception that Air Products has taken its eye off the ball on core growth areas, whether it's electronics or decaps or maybe even lost out on some more capital-efficient energy transition projects. Do you feel like you can win your fair share of projects and attractive growth areas during this transition time? Yeah, I believe so. I do not completely disagree about the assumption that we took the eye out of the ball. It is natural, right? If you are executing a project like Neon, it is an $8 billion, $9 billion project, and then you have a $30 million aspiration plant. It is not very hard to think about where you are going to send your agent, right? That is part of the issue we had at Air Products. I have been working on fixing that. We basically now have kind of a, we split our engineering organization. One will be focused only on the aspiration side, the other one, hydrogen side. We are trying to make sure that we are competitive on the traditional projects. I do not think when I say took the eye out of the ball, it is not every day. It is not that we completely lost our capability. We are still very strong on that side. We are executing a lot of projects in Korea and Taiwan on electronics. We expect to see more projects coming out of that, but we definitely feel the need to be more focused on these projects to be more competitive. That is why we made the changes we made in the engineering side. Understood. Look, we've gone this far in our chat without talking about quarter-to-date trends. How do you see core industrial and markets and regions shaping up to end the calendar year and maybe exiting into 2026 at this point? Yeah, it's not a great environment, but industrial gas is a very resilient business. As you said in the beginning, we go from CO2 for carbonation of soft drinks all the way to chip manufacturing for semiconductors. Every place in between. It's a very resilient industry. We expect to see an environment that will not going to help us a lot in 2026, but we include that in our forecast, in our numbers that we gave guidance for EPS. We're going to need to work on that. I think just quickly, the U.S., low growth, a little bit of, it's a difficult market now for new customers making investments. I would say that the tariffs, the labor situation, it's not very helpful at this point in the U.S. We talk about all these data centers, and it's true. There's a lot being done on that, but basically we're bringing new competitors for the engineering and construction market, right? When Google or Meta will talk about building a data center, if the building costs X or 1.5X, really doesn't make a big change for them compared to the amount of money on GPUs and chips they have inside the building, right? They have been inflating the market a little bit in that side. We have to be very careful. Our customers as well, right? They're thinking about twice, three times before they authorize a new investment in the U.S. That's the challenge that we have right now here. The basic market, it's working well. Normal customers in steel and chemicals, we don't see a decline there. Asia, again, booming in Korea and Taiwan because of electronics. China, hyper-competitive market, not a lot of growth, but we still see the market. Whoever has an asset is operating the asset at full capacity. It is a little difficult, not now, but say for the last four or five years in China with deflation and the PPI declining and that kind of stuff. Europe is probably the most affected area. We see a lot of the product from China that cannot move to the U.S. right now, moving to China or moving to Europe. That is affecting local manufacturers in Europe. Europe is the place where product is more diversified. We have a packaged gas business different from the U.S. or Asia. I do not know if we are being fortunate on that side. We were not affected in large facilities that we are seeing closures of customers affecting us. Of course, you read about that every day. There is a rationalization steel, a rationalization chemicals, and it's something that we keep our eye on. It's not something you can control, but it's more about what customers you had to begin with. Got it. That's helpful. Maybe your $13 guidance for fiscal year anticipates some continued sort of tough environment from the helium market, and that's been a fairly tough market for you. I guess first, can you unpack how much of that has been and will continue to be price versus volume? If you could just remind us how much of your volume is contracted for the year versus what may be susceptible to additional changes in the market dynamics. Yeah, our guidance already includes what we expect that will happen this year, right? And helium is a product that you can go all the way from very, we can commercialize the form of a full wiser container, very large quantities all the way to cylinder for people doing filling balloons for products. Air Products, most of our volumes is on the large side. As we know, we do not have a very large packaged gas footprint other than Europe. In these agreements, they tend to be for large customers. They tend to be three to five years. We know very well what will happen during the fiscal year of 2026 at this point. That is included in our base. It is still a product that is very profitable for us. It is above our average profitability. It's just it was a product that we're making a lot of money in 2023, 2024. I would say our product is a little more exposed because if you look at the percentage of our sales, it's larger than our competitors because we, I would say until five years ago, we were the number one helium supplier globally and maybe three, four years ago. We use that to our advantage when the market was short. Now that the market is long, I think we took the right approach of developing this cavern that we can store helium. Now we see our competitors doing the same. Hopefully the market will become a little more rational in the near future, but we still have these issues that we have new sources coming from Russia and other places and that they're making their way to the market. Understood. We have a few minutes left, but I just wanted to open it up for any questions from the audience. Otherwise, I'm happy to crack on. All right. Just right. Just on the cost side, you've committed to pretty healthy right-sizing. 60% of the action is already completed. How should we think about the timing to realize cash costs to deliver on the remaining 40%? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. You are spot on. 6% of the actions have been completed to date. We saw about a $100 million cumulative cost savings in FY2025 from the actions that we had previously. We are looking for about that run rate into FY2026. As we continue to complete the majority of the remaining actions in 2026 and a little bit in 2027, we are looking for about a $100 million cost savings. Now, of course, wage inflation does eat away on that, right? We do need to continue to look for additional productivity, not just in headcount, but across the organization with efficiencies and other productivity actions. That is in our forecast, about $100 million of additional cost savings. Understood. Just related to those cost actions, I guess if there are further changes to the project landscape, like potential write-downs, is there potential to be more aggressive on the cost actions or maybe said differently, how much of the cost structure that remains after these actions is devoted to some of these outstanding mega projects? Yeah, the projects we may have that situation, but at the end of the day, the cost for the people working on the projects is normally capitalized and does not affect the ongoing costs. You mentioned some of the portfolio optimization, some of the assets held for sale there, right? Is there more to go there beyond just gasification assets? What may or may not happen with energy transition? How do you think about the rest of the portfolio? Yeah, there is other stuff we're working on. We need to get that done to be able to communicate that. As you know, Air Products has some very important positions in joint ventures. We're satisfied with our joint ventures. We believe that there is no desire, not we believe, there is no desire from our side to exit any of these joint ventures. There are opportunities for consolidation, for optimization, and we're working on that. That's part of the gap closure for the financial side that Melissa mentioned for 2026. We understand exactly what we said when we talked about being cash neutral for 2026. She used two examples of the projects in China and the land sale that we have of the old headquarters. We had two or three other actions we're working on. That gave us the confidence to generate the cash we need to be cash neutral. Understood. Maybe I'll just close with this one. I think there's obviously a lot baked in in terms of cost takeout and right-sizing, but I think it doesn't include additional opportunities for efficiency and productivity. Maybe what might you hope to bring to the table from an efficiency productivity standpoint, areas where you can potentially leverage AI or other new technology? Yeah, we are trying to, like everybody else, we're trying to understand exactly how to use AI in the company. We took an approach to approach this issue from both sides, from the top and from the bottom, right? From the top, we have some institutional projects, if you want, with data scientists and sometimes external consultants and so forth working on things that are very large and important for us. Power management, for example, is an area that is very important for industrial gases. We can fluctuate our demand using liquid storage and other methods. That's very helpful for potential suppliers of power. We're trying to optimize that to minimize our overall power cost. That's a corporate program that we are using AI. At the same time, we decide to give access to AI tools, the genetic models, and so forth to the vast majority of our vendors. We basically let them have the tool and let's see what they can develop. I would say Air Products is well prepared for that. I worked a lot in the industry. I've seen a lot in terms of industrial gas companies. We are probably in a position that we may be the only one that uses the same ERP and have the same instances in every location in Air Products, right? We have that in place. That is very helpful because with that base, you can put the right guardrails, you can build the connectors, and then you can go to your organization and say, "Okay, now you have the AI tool and you have this base here. Feel free to develop new applications and new agents and so forth. We are doing a lot of fun things and having internal competitions, Agent of the Month, and who developed the most interesting things. There is a lot going on on that side. We have a robust productivity program in Air Products that has been in place for many years. We have now identified every project that we have in productivity that used AI or can use AI, and we are trying to revisit them and see what else we can squeeze out in terms of productivity. At the end of the day, it is a balance here. If you go to people and say, "Use this tool," they are always going to be concerned about themselves. Am I going to be affected by that? You need to do this leap of faith of giving them the tool and say, "Use it and let's see what we can get." Do not talk about headcount and stuff like that at this point. We just need to see what we can get out of it. That's great. I wish we had another half an hour, but we'll have to leave it there. Please join me in thanking Eduardo and Melissa. Thank you.