Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. (NYSE:APD) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. (NYSE:APD) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript February 5, 2024
Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $2.73 EPS, expectations were $2.99. Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good morning, and welcome to the Air Products' First 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 sir.
Sidd Manjeshwar: Hi, thank you, Jenifer. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Air Products' first quarter 2024 earnings results teleconference. This is Sidd Manjeshwar, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Treasurer. I'm 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 two. 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 very busy schedule to be on our call today. As always, I would like to begin with the slide number three, our safety performance, which is our number one priority at Air Products. I'm very pleased to share that our employee recordable injury rate in first quarter was 78% than in 2014, and our employee lost time injury rate was at a record row, the best in the industry. Our ultimate goal will always be zero accidents and zero incidents. Now, please turn to slide number four, which summarizes our management philosophy. These principles remain fundamental to how we manage and grow our company. Now please turn to slide number five. I would like to take a few minutes to discuss the results for this quarter.
Our first quarter adjusted earnings per share of $2.82 was 7% higher than last year. Our business performed well and we are moving forward. There were several positive contributions to this result that included strong conversion margins, robust on-site activities in Americas and Europe, and higher quality affiliate income globally. Despite the year-to-year improvement that I just mentioned, our results diverged from the guidance range that we have given you due to several items that they're not factored in our first quarter 2024 outlook. We have given you a forecast and we are delivering less than the forecast, but again I’d like to express that we are 7% higher than last year. These factors that affected our guidance are: number one, larger than anticipated volume headwinds from weak economic growth in China.
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