With a combined revenue of $21 trillion and $2.1 trillion in profits, the 2026 Fortune 500 is the definitive list of America's largest companies.

Fortune 500

Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

The 300 companies on this year’s list brought in over $12.6 trillion in revenue for the latest 12 months, with the median revenue figure at $22 billion.

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The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

The 200 companies on this list are transforming industries from the inside out.

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This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

F500-2021-340-Air Products & Chemicals

The industrial gas company supplies chemicals and gases to markets around the globe, and even supplies NASA with critical gases needed for Space Shuttle use.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-354-Air-Products-and-Chemicals

The Pennsylvania-based manufacturer produces specialty gases and chemicals for manufacturing customers, as well as gas-related equipment for the energy industry.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

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Air Products &amp; Chemicals is a top global industrial gases company, supplying essential gases like hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and nitrogen to customers across industries. Those include energy, chemicals, metals, electronics, and food. Founded in 1940, the company has expanded its operations to over 50 countries, delivering gases through pipelines, on-site production, and bulk delivery systems. In 2024, Air Products completed the $1.81 billion sale of its liquefied natural gas process technology and equipment business to Honeywell International, aligning with its focus on core industrial gases and clean energy initiatives. The company is investing heavily in low-carbon hydrogen projects, including a 15-year agreement with TotalEnergies to supply 70,000 tons of green hydrogen annually starting in 2030. Air Products is also recognized as a dividend aristocrat, with over 35 consecutive years of dividend increases.

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Air Products & Chemicals (APD): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Air Products & Chemicals

air products & chemicals

Good morning, welcome to Air Products' third 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 Megan Britt. You may begin.

Hello, welcome to the third quarter fiscal 2026 earnings conference call for Air Products. Our prepared remarks today will be led by Eduardo Menezes, Chief Executive Officer, and Melissa Schaeffer, Chief Financial Officer. We have prepared presentation slides to supplement our remarks during the call, which are posted on the investor relations section of the Air Products website. During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements, which are our expectations about the future. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Our actual results could materially differ from these statements due to these risks and uncertainties, including, not limited to, those discussed on this call and in the forward-looking statements and risk factors sections of our reports filed or furnished with the SEC. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statements.

Please note in today's presentation, we will refer to various financial measures, including earnings per share, capital expenditures, operating income, operating margin, the effective tax rate, ROC, and net debt to EBITDA on a total company basis. Unless we specifically state otherwise, statements regarding these measures refer to our adjusted non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures to our most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found on our investor website in the Relevant Earnings Release section. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Eduardo.

Thank you, Megan. Hello, thank you for joining our call today. Now, please turn to slide three. Earlier today, we reported results for the third quarter of fiscal 2026. In the quarter, we managed volatile marketing dynamics to deliver a 9% increase in operating income compared to the same period last year. Our operating margin of 25.6% was also up compared to the same period last year, largely from volume and price improvement, partially offset by higher costs. Earnings per share were $3.47, up 12% compared to the same period last year. This was above our guidance range, largely due to improved volume and higher contributions from our equity affiliates. Volume improvement was led by higher on-site results, new asset on streams, and helium.

The hidden headwind in the quarter was 2%, which was better than expected, largely on electronics momentum in Asia. Return on capital of 11.7% was up relatively to prior year and improved sequentially. Moving to slide four, we remain focused on three key priorities for 2026. On earnings growth, EPS are up 14% year to date. With another quarter of strong performance, we are raising our full year earnings guidance, which now implies an improvement of 11%-12% for the full fiscal year. We continue to expect EPS growth to be achieved primarily through volume growth from new asset contributions, pricing actions, and continued productivity. Next, we continue to make progress on optimizing our large project portfolio. On June 30th, we announced our decision to exit the Louisiana project, the Casa Grande, Arizona project, and other smaller scale clean energy distribution projects.

As a result, we recorded a pre-tax charge of $2.9 billion this quarter. We are working on opportunities to redeploy the industrial gas assets and sell the ammonia production assets associated with the Louisiana project. On the green ammonia project in Saudi Arabia or NGHC, we have now finalized a marketing and distribution agreement with Yara. I will speak to this more in a moment. Finally, on our third priority, maintaining capital discipline, the cancellation of the Louisiana project will allow us to reduce our capital expenditures. While we expect to reduce capital expenditures overall, we will remain focused on investing in our backlog of traditional industrial gas projects, especially in the electronics end market. In addition to investing in our traditional industrial gas projects, we remain committed to continuing our strong track record of returning cash to our shareholders.

Year to date, we have returned $1.2 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends. Please turn to slide five. I am pleased to share that Air Products and Yara have signed a marketing and distribution agreement for renewable ammonia from the NEOM Green Hydrogen project in Saudi Arabia. Under the agreement, Yara will transport and commercialize the renewable ammonia that will be acquired by Air Products from NGHC that is not used by Air Products to produce green hydrogen in Europe. This model creates the first fully integrated value chain for renewable ammonia by enabling product from the world's first large-scale green ammonia plant to be sold and delivered through Yara's existing global supply chain. As a final note, we do not expect this project to have a material financial impact in fiscal year 2027.

Please turn to slide six for a summary of our current project backlog and an update of our capital expenditure forecast. Before I go into details, I want to provide some context on how to think about our backlog. To be included in the backlog, a project must have reached final investment decision, or FID, following a robust review process to ensure we have adequate returns relatively to the risks of the project. Our backlog will include investments in projects with long-term contracts, with a strong customer, and in few cases, production facility to grow our liquid bulk and packaged gases business. With this criteria, we currently have a traditional industrial gas backlog of approximately $3 billion in projects. A significant portion of the capital projected for the backlog will support electronic customers. This includes over $1.5 billion in projects wins for Air Products in the last six months.

Translating our backlog into a view of capital expenditures, on the right-hand side of this slide, we are targeting to invest approximately $1.5 billion per year going forward in traditional industrial gas projects. These are air separation and hydrogen projects of varying sizes, and there are new projects being added and completed projects being removed from the list. The CapEx figures for fiscal year 2027 are preliminary and represent the committed spend for traditional industrial gas projects based on our current backlog. As we continue to build our backlog, our focus will be on opportunities that meet our risk-adjusted return thresholds. As we previously disclosed, we are also moving forward with several underperforming projects, given our commercial obligations and project status. Although these projects are not expected to contribute materially to our future operating income, we continue to work to improve their results through commercial negotiations, operational improvement, and productivity.

I want to thank the Air Products team for delivering the results this quarter. I will turn the call over to Melissa to discuss those results in greater depth and review our 2026 outlook. Melissa?

Thank you, Eduardo. Please move to slide seven for a high-level summary of our third quarter financial results. Sales were up 5%, while operating income grew 9% on volume, currency, and price, overcoming higher costs from fixed cost inflation. Volume growth was led by our onsite business, driven by contributions from new assets coming on stream in Asia and Americas, as well as higher production from U.S. refinery assets. Pricing was up, primarily in Europe and the Americas. With this underlying business performance, operating margin of 25.6% improved over 100 basis points compared to the prior year. Earnings per share of $3.47 increased 12% from the prior year due to the base business growth as well as strong equity affiliate contributions. Return on capital of 11.7% was up 60 basis points on strong base business performance and large project optimization. Please turn to slide eight.

Our third quarter earnings per share of $3.47 increased $0.38 or 12% from the prior year. We saw a 2% headwind from helium this quarter, which was better than our guidance of 3%, driven by improved volume and pricing in Asia, supporting our electronic customers, partially offset by lower base volume in the Americas. Currency was favorable 2% and in line with our third quarter guidance. The base business improvement was driven by onsite volume, including new assets and pricing. We also saw strong contributions from equity affiliates in Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Despite higher costs in the quarter, driven by fixed cost inflation, we remain on track with our headcount reduction plan for the year, having recognized approximately $75 million in the saving year to date. Moving now to slide nine. I will provide an overview of our results by segment.

You can find additional details of the quarterly segment results in the appendix. In the Americas, operating income improved 6%, primarily driven by onsite volume, including contributions from our HyCO existing facilities and a new asset in our Gulf Coast hydrogen pipeline. The volume improvement, along with pricing, was partially offset by higher costs, including fixed cost inflation, distribution, and dislocation costs. Asia operating income grew 18%, primarily due to benefits from the gasification assets held for sale, new assets on stream, and helium. In Europe, operating income increased 2%, primarily driven by pricing actions which more than offset higher power costs. This benefit, along with a currency tailwind of 2%, more than offset higher costs, including fixed cost inflation. In our Middle East and India segment, operating income was relatively flat, while equity affiliates income increased from our joint ventures in Saudi Arabia.

Lastly, the corporate and other segment benefited from productivity as we continued to reduce our corporate SG&A. This improvement was partially offset by lower sale of equipment activity. Please turn to slide 10. Year-to-date, we are free cash flow positive as strong operating cash flow exceeded the capital that we spent on maintenance and executing the backlog. We have also returned $1.2 billion in cash to our shareholders in the form of dividends in fiscal 2026. As it relates to our leverage, our net debt to EBITDA ratio is 2.1x, which considers our proportionate ownership of the NGHC joint venture assets under construction. We remain committed to bringing the company back to an AA-2 rating over the long term. Moving now to slide 11. We expect our fourth quarter earnings per share will be in the range of $3.55-$3.65, up 5%-8% from the prior year.

We expect to achieve this growth through continued benefits from new asset contributions, pricing actions, and progress on our productivity initiatives. However, we remain cautious given our macroeconomic uncertainties. We expect helium to continue to be a headwind due to lower price, despite some volume and price improvement in Asia. With this, our fiscal full-year guidance is now in the range of $13.39-$13.49, which correlates to an 11%-12% growth from prior year. For capital expenditures, we now expect to spend approximately $3.5 billion this fiscal year. We have reduced the capital outlook to reflect payment timing adjustments, lower expected maintenance, and canceled projects. We'll now open the call up for questions. Operator?

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, you can press star one to ask a question, we'll pause for just a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal for questions. We'll now take your first question, coming from the line of Duffy Fischer with Goldman Sachs.

Good morning. Just a couple questions around your asset at Jazan, given the attack that happened there. One, I think when you brought that online, it was supposed to contribute about $1.35 of EPS per year. Is that still a good number? Two, in your Q4 guide, how much is kind of taken out, I guess, for what's happening there, or does it take a while for that to flow through? Just the third one, do you have any third-party insurance for that, if that conflict escalates and it becomes somewhat impaired?

Good morning, Duffy. As you know, we've seen the news and, of course, we have information from the site, but I hope you understand for contractual reasons with Aramco, we cannot give you a lot of comments on the project. I can tell you only that the numbers that you have in terms of contribution are in the ballpark. Probably a little lower than that, but the numbers are in the ballpark. We do not expect any financial impact for Air Products coming from these events. As you know, Saudi Aramco is not commenting on the fact yet, so we need to wait until they do that to provide more information. Again, the most important thing for us, there are no injuries to our employees or to the JV employees. We do not expect a financial impact.

If I could just incrementally add one thing, Duffy. If you remember, the contributions for Jazan are a financing receivable, so they do decrease over the life of the agreement. Again, as Eduardo said, you are in the ballpark of contributions for 2026.

Next question will come from the line of John McNulty with BMO Capital Markets.

Yeah, thanks for taking my question, and congratulations on some solid results. I wanted to just understand, I guess, one of your comments on NEOM and then just get your kind of high-level view there. I think you said with the Yara contract, there's no impact on 2027. Does that mean you don't foresee any drag on your fiscal earnings from NEOM or benefit for that matter? Again, I guess, stepping back, can you speak to your level of confidence at this point as to whether or not Yara and yourself, you're going to be able to find a buyer for that volume in calendar 2027 that at least clears your offtake agreement? If you can give us any color on that'd be great.

Thank you, John. Yeah, I can confirm that our expectations to have no gain or loss in 2027. I cannot go much beyond that, again, because of the T&C of the agreements we have with the joint venture and the confidentiality obligations that we have. We do not expect any impact in 2027, and what we expect going forward is before the beginning of each year, we can give you some more clear picture of what the expectations are. As you know, this is an agreement for a product that we're going into market globally now with Yara. It will evolve with time depending on the market conditions. For 2027, we are confirming no impact for our products.

Your next question will come from the line of Jeff Zekauskas with JPMorgan.

Thanks very much. You talked about how the penalty from helium this year is lower than you originally expected. Maybe it's a little bit more than $100 million pre-tax rather than $150 milion. If you had to distribute the, I don't know, the $105 million or $110 million penalty through your business segments, how would you allocate it geographically?

Jeff, we look at this in a global basis. I would say that what we are doing in the helium business is really remarkable. I know when we talk about externally that the impact is 2% or 3%, it's difficult for everyone to understand what is behind that. Just to give you a picture, 40% of all the volume we sold during this quarter came from our cavern in Texas. Gives you an idea of, and in June was even more than that, the percentage. Gives an idea of how much we are exercising our system to keep our customers supplied and to make sure that we keep our position as a reliable supplier that can sign long-term agreements in this business. Our impact is mostly in price and didn't come from this quarter.

It comes from a year of negotiations that, or more than a year of negotiations that we have from a moment where the market was very short. I would say that today, that impact is migrating more to Europe and North America because of the type of customers that we have, mostly in the healthcare space and the MRI sector. We're very optimistic about the future in the helium side, and we have been really gaining a lot of new commitments for volumes in the long term, especially in the electronics area and especially in Asia.

Okay, thank you for that. In the Mid East, equity income was up over $100 million. I think in the second fiscal quarter, it was closer to $80 million. Are the joint ventures operating at a new level of profitability, or this was just an unusual jump that had to do with transitory items?

Thank you. In the Middle East, we are seeing improvements in our equity affiliate income. The improvement in equity affiliate income, though, globally, was split amongst multiple joint ventures. One thing I do want to note, we did have an especially strong quarter this quarter in our Middle East joint venture, but that was largely contractually structural. It's driven on a preferred dividend to our joint venture partners, and that's just the timing. We will see the normal run rate reconfigured in Q4 this year.

Your next question will come from the line of Chris Parkinson with Wolfe Research.

Great. Thank you so much. You've had a nice little bump up in your backlog from various electronics projects, one officially with Samsung and then two others, so I think we can all presume who the partners are. Can you just offer a little bit of color on, first of all, how long those projects were being assessed, in terms of you becoming CEO? Were those kind of longstanding, being assessed for multiple years? Were they relatively new? And then whether or not that you'd further expect even some of those smaller projects to continuously trickle in over the next, let's say, 12 or 18 months or so. Thank you.

Thank you, Chris. Good morning. Yeah, I would say that on this backlog, we have one very large project that started in 2022, I believe, that is a project in Taiwan that was multiple phases that we're building more than five large air separation plants. We have now three done, and we still have two to go. Other than that, all these projects, they're basically coming in the last 12 months. I would like to create credit for that on my presence here. The reality is the market is going through a super cycle, and we have been working very hard to get our fair share of that. We announced two very large projects, as you know, one in Korea, one in Taiwan. We have other projects that we are going to announce this quarter that we are talking to the counterparts about issuing the final announcement.

When we look at our list of opportunities, I would say that the list is long today, and it is skewed to the electronic side. Probably close to two-thirds of our opportunities or more than that are in the electronic space. That's where the market is today. I would say that the traditional market in chemicals and steel, there is a lot of capacity in the world. Not to say that there are no opportunities, but they are mostly coming from replacement of old assets and one project here or there. The electronics is really where the growth is, and I think we're very fortunate that we kept that capability in the company, that we have been executing projects in Asia for a long time, and that fits well with where the market is now.

Got it. Just as a quick follow-up, NGHC has indicated they're over 90% complete on the primary facility, and then about 95% plus complete on the solar farm in wind garden, plus or minus. I think that update was actually from a few months ago. As that relates to slide 18, just getting away from the actual agreement with Yara, but as the ramp of those facilities begins, can you reconcile the exact timing and how we should think about how that affects slide 18 in terms of the net debt adjustment? Also in your 10-K, the debt was listed, I believe, and forgive me if I missed something, but around $4.7 billion. In this slide, you have roughly $5.25 billion. I was wondering what that extra half a billion represents or if I'm just missing something. Thank you so much.

Chris, thanks for the question. As mentioned before, the consolidation of NEOM is in fact because of the EPC arrangement during construction, right? The deconsolidation will happen once that plant is up and on stream. After commissioning, we will deconsolidate. That is on slide 18, what you're seeing here is the deconsolidation and back down to a net debt of around $11 billion, $11.5 billion. The difference between the $5.2 billion in debt here, there is no difference. That is our carrying value of the NGHC net debt. The proportional may be just our proportion of that 33%. There is no difference between what we've reported and what we have here. This is just the deconsolidation of the joint venture after the construction is completed and we've commissioned.

Just as one point, when Melissa talks about commissioning, meaning being at full production capacity, and this is a first of a kind plant with a lot of new technology. We're expecting a long commissioning process, and that's one of the reasons why we cannot precise exactly when this change in debt consolidation can happen. Also, our full obligation to buy the product.

Your next question will come from the line of Vincent Andrews with Morgan Stanley.

Thank you, and good morning. First, I just want to clarify on NEOM, the comments on no material financial impact for fiscal 2027. Is that for both the income statement and the cash flow statement? Also, I think, Eduardo, I heard you just say that, as it relates to the consolidation, that you said something about when there'll be a trigger in terms of when you're obligated to buy the product. Is it potentially the case that you don't have to buy product in fiscal 2027? If you could clarify that, I'd appreciate it. My follow-up would be on the CapEx reduction for the target year. I think you brought it down by about $500 million. If you could just talk about what's driving that and what you think the alternative use of that capital might wind up being.

Thank you, Vincent. On NEOM, we cannot discuss the details of our agreements, but as I said, the process for commission will take some time for the facility to get to full production. We're going to need to keep you informed during this period. We are absolutely confirming no impact on the income statement. On the cash flow statement, I don't know exactly how to qualify that, but Melissa.

Since we aren't commissioning, the large portion of the spend and any distributions that we put into the joint venture are largely complete. If you remember, this is 73% project financed. Our contributions to the joint venture, again, are largely behind us. Again, no financial impact both to the P&L and no large impact to the cash flow statements. From the CapEx perspective, we did reduce our CapEx forecast for this year by about $500 million. That's largely just timing associated to the execution and the payments of all of our backlog under execution. Nothing material there. We continue to be able to invest in our underlying industrial gas projects. The distribution to those will be against what we've already talked about, really the electronics wins that we're executing right now.

Projects that we continue to bring on our backlog in outside electronics space as well.

Next question will come from the line of James Hooper with Bernstein.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Can I start on the Louisiana project and Darrow. Can you go through a little bit more detail on what happens to the kit and the LAN, how you're thinking about it, and any discussions that you've had there, please?

Yeah, no worries. The Darrow, what we're going to be doing is

This is a project we started probably six, seven years ago. The project was in a certain stage that we have a lot of the equipment already purchased in hand, in warehouses, and mostly in the U.S., but some in Europe and in China. It is a very different situation from what we had last year when we canceled the World Energy project. These are high, let's say, world-class assets. The air separation plants, the hydrogen purification, the ammonia loop. We see a lot of value for these assets in the market, as you can see in the transactions that were announced recently when people buying ammonia plants and so forth.

We are in a process of taking all the data and making sure that we maximize the value we can recover from these projects by basically using part of this equipment in our own operations, like the air separation and some other equipment related to industrial gases. On the case of the ammonia loop, which is a very important asset, making sure that we can commercialize that as a full unit, and in some cases, if possible, to generate projects for Air Products. I think it became public that one of the products that we executed was a similar ammonia plant that we did in Texas. In terms of capacity, it was 3,600 tons per day. Those two assets that we have from Darrow, they are 4,000 tons per day using the same technology.

They are desirable assets, and the market is showing that they have significant value. We can attach, if possible, possibility of supplying hydrogen and nitrogen to these assets. This is the objective. We are going to work on that in the next few months. We have a team here in Air Products, in engineering, business development working dedicated to this task. Our objective is to recover as much money as we can. Generate new business for the company. Sorry, go ahead.

Thank you. Just as a follow-up on that, Eduardo. If you do see a bit of a windfall with leverage starting to get below two times, how are you thinking about capital allocation and projects or potentially starting a buyback?

Yes. If we get any money, will be a non-GAAP income on top of what we initially forecast. It will only go through our pool, and it will be allocated as we do with the rest of the cash uses and sources that we have. Melissa can give more color on that.

Yes, absolutely. As we've talked about cash flow neutrality, focused on that this year and moving forward. We do have share buybacks in our capital allocation waterfall. We have a line of sight of being able to start that program towards the end of 2027, beginning of 2028. That obviously depends on the projects that we have coming down the pipeline. We will want to invest in high return projects first and foremost, continue to increase our dividend, and share buybacks will become part of that program as we move forward.

Next question will come from the line of David Begleiter with Deutsche Bank.

Thank you. Good morning. Eduardo, back on NEOM. If the project was at full production capacity in 2027, hypothetically, what would the financial impact be on Air Products?

David, I think we said that many times. This project, Air Products has an obligation to buy the ammonia at a fixed price, and we are exposed to the market conditions on the other side. Again, we will work to be able to provide a forecast at the beginning of each year of what the impact will be. It would be premature for us to go much further than that. What I can tell you is that for 2027, the expected impact is zero, and we're going to have another one for 2028. You're basically asking the same question in a different way. I understand the curiosity and the objective of getting this information. Unfortunately, the situation is, as I report, not different from the situation that you have from another player in the ammonia market.

With the exception that our fixed cost is fixed, and it's not a function of fluctuations in natural gas price.

Understood. Just wanted to try. One last thing. On the Americas, on the cost side, do you need additional price increases to offset these higher costs you're incurring in the Americas?

Yes. No, thanks for the question, David. We are seeing some increase in cost in the Americas, largely associated to some project costs and some dislocations driven by maintenance. Of course, we are seeing fixed cost and inflation as everybody is. We don't have a significant packaged gas business in Americas, as you know. Our ability to increase pricing is limited to our liquid bulk product. We do look to continue to overcome with price in the Americas and in all of our regions. Of course, we're looking to drive productivity as well to offset those cost increases.

Your next question will come from the line of Laurence Alexander with Jefferies.

Hi. Just two quick ones. One, could you give a quick update on what you're seeing on the merchant volumes by region? Secondly, on NEOM, if the original strategy works out and the green premium evolves and the green ammonia market establishes itself as a kind of separate market with a much higher value, is Air Products obligated or constrained to keep NEOM in the portfolio? If there was a higher or better strategic owner, are you allowed to explore that five or 10 years down the road?

Well, starting with the first question on the merchant side, I would say that we see the market in the Americas progressing relatively well, still growing. Europe as a whole is a difficult market today. I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that the industrial market in Europe is not growing. In Asia, it's a little bit of a different scenario. China is still a little better than it was, I would say, a few months ago. It's still a difficult market with a lot of overcapacity that we need to overcome. The other markets suffering other than electronic side, in Taiwan, South Korea, they are suffering a little bit with high energy costs. We don't have a big exposure outside of electronics. The little exposure we have in the merchant business there, it's flattish from that perspective.

That would be on the merchant question. On the NEOM question is, there are two different things, right? One is the Air Products participation in the joint venture that is subject to any joint venture agreement to rules on if any of the partners decide to leave the partnership, that there are specific rules on how the process works. It works for us, for our partners in every joint venture. That's one side, and I would say that everything is possible, but that's a joint venture that we did, we think tend to be on the long-term. The other position is the position as an offtaker of the product. We already talked about that. It's a 30-year contract. Again, this is a commercial operation that, of course, we could at some point, having a back-to-back or even work on the agreement.

Although I would expect the project company, the joint venture to expect Air Products to stay as the offtaker and that we would need to go more in a back-to-back agreement to move a large volume. Frankly, this is not different from what we are doing today with this agreement with Yara, where they will, with their marketing capability and their distribution capability, their ships, they will go to the market, and the intent is to sign long-term agreements. They're not gonna be as long as the 30-year deal that we have, we don't want them to be as long as that because the expectation is that, as we said several times, our price to buy the product from the JV is basically fixed, and we're expecting in the long term the market to evolve, the prices for ammonia to evolve with the energy prices.

We are looking initially to have agreements that will be long-term agreements, very far from the 30-year period that we have with our obligations.

Your next question will come from the line of Kevin McCarthy with Vertical Research Partners.

Yes. Thank you, and good morning. I wanted to follow up on the helium discussion, maybe with a two-part question. Can you elaborate on the source of incremental goodness in the earnings function in helium? It's my understanding you have quite a large percentage under contract. Did that come from new or modified contracts or perhaps the spot market, albeit a smaller exposure there or perhaps both? On the supply side, there have been sort of unpleasant goings on in the country of Qatar recently, as you are well aware. Can you provide an update on any impact to Air Products therefrom and also efforts to procure helium from other places in the world? Thank you.

Yes, Kevin, it's a long question that would need a long answer here. I would say that on the new agreements that we sign, a lot of that is new electronic projects that are being built especially in Asia, some in the U.S. I think with our system and this information that I provided with the cavern that we have, and the diversification of sources, I think we made clear to the customers that Air Products is a very reliable solution. We have been fortunate to sign a lot of new agreements for projects, that some of these projects will start in a year, in two years, in three years. They are longer term agreements than you normally would see in the merchant side.

Some of them are connected to these large air separation plants, projects that we are signing, and they have the same term of our large on-site contracts. I would say on the source side, we have for many years, a strategy to diversify our sources between the U.S., Qatar, Algeria, and we continue to do that. It's very hard to predict when the situation in Qatar will improve. I think there was some loads that were able to be filled by QatarEnergy. Frankly, today, you would need to cross to the Red Sea side to ship, and the volumes coming out of the Middle East from this source, they have been very limited. We are not counting on that on our forecast for now.

As I said, we are taking a lot of product out of our cavern, and we are in a position that we can continue to do that for many, many quarters. I would say that has been our strategy, and I'm very happy that we have a cavern today. It's something that our position as an industrial gas company in the heating chain, with the end of the BLM became more and more like a middleman position, but a middleman with a lot of strength based on the supply chain, on the number of containers we have and so forth. We're still subject to be squeezed when the market is long by our customers and to be squeezed when the market is short by our suppliers.

Having the cavern and having this ability to draw product for many, many quarters, help us on both sides to negotiate and to have a more stable business.

Thank you for that. If I may, a second question on the Yara deal. I appreciate you may not be able to get into specifics, but conceptually, should investors think of that deal as fully hedging Air Products' offtake risk or partially hedging it? Or are there scenarios where you would be obligated to offtake but not able to move the product through Yara?

I would say that you should see that as a way to eliminate the volume risk. We still retain the price risk. We talked about that before. I think some people underestimate the volume risk. Air Products, we could not do that. We have an obligation to lift all the tons that are produced by the joint venture. ammonia is a product that it's not like an air separation plant that you can send the product. You cannot take the risk of shutting down the plant because you have a tank full event. This deal with a counterpart like Yara that owns their own distribution network, that owns multiple ships, eliminate that risk. The price risk is still there. Most of the price risk will sit with us.

We have a commission scheme with Yara that they will share the upside with us, they will be incentivized to commercialize this product, this green product, as much as possible. I would say that was the objective from the beginning, I am very happy with the agreement that we have. I think this relationship became very important for us. Hopefully it will grow as you guys seen on the GCA announcement as well.

Your next question will come from the line of John Roberts with Mizuho.

Thank you. Last quarter, you gave us an end market breakdown for Air Products. Maybe could you talk about the volume growth in three buckets, semiconductors, refining and basic petrochemicals, or I think what you call energy, and then all other. Were we double-digit percent in electronics and mid-single digit percent in refinery and petrochems, and maybe down low single digit percent in all other?

Hey, John. How are you? Thanks for the question. We actually don't usually externally break it down as far as growth by area. I will tell you, though, we continue to see some really strong returns and ramping up in the electronic space, both from a backlog as well as the supply. We had new assets coming on stream this year, and you are seeing the contributions of those assets in the electronic space. In the refinery space, I would say it's a little bit more of a mixed bag. In Europe, we're not seeing great volume improvements, but we are seeing great volume improvements in our HyCO business in the Americas. The rest, again, you can see in our volumes. We've seen some improvements in the Americas and in Asia, but not great improvements in Europe.

Again, we see good improvements in electronics in our new assets and ramping up as well as our backlog refineries in the Americas. The rest is again, a mixed bag, as you see in our underlying results.

Your next question will come from the line of Josh Spector with UBS.

Yeah. Hi, good morning. I just had two quick follow-ups. One, if you're able to disclose on the Yara offtake from NEOM, is the commission structure fixed or is it variable? Then second, just on the Americas pricing, down sequentially, again, I understand the point around packaged gases. Just curious if you characterize that as helium-related or if there's something else underlying impacting that. Thank you.

Yeah, I would say on the first question, I think I just explained that, but, the scheme that we have, of course, they incentivize to place more product as green, which implies that it's a higher price product. It is a variable structure, not a fixed structure. On the Americas, Melissa.

Yep, absolutely. Thank you. You do see a top side 1% decrease. I could tell you actually from an underlying, we saw some price improvement in the Americas, actually. Price was actually an improvement in the non-merchant pricing. This was more than offset, though, by our headwinds in helium pricing. That really largely was a slow quarter in the space sector. We do want to see that hopefully rebound in the next quarter as we see launches increase.

All righty. Your next question will come from the line of Patrick Cunningham with Citi.

Hi, this is Alex on for Patrick. Just a quick question on Darrow. I think in the past you said that you were able to monetize something about $1 billion, I think. I'm just wondering if that still holds true and what the timeline could be expected. Then as a follow-up, I'm wondering if you could provide some update on the Edmonton project.

Yeah. On Darrow, I think any number that we gave to you in the past was, we qualified them as estimate. We're working on that. I wish we had a very clear timeline for that. We'll take the time that we need to take to maximize the value. As I explained, the value will come from someone that wants to use these units as a whole, not selling piece by piece. It will take some time to get there. We will update you, as the job develops. Regarding Edmonton, we have no updates from what we had before. We continue to work on the project, and we do not have news in terms of start-up dates or costs, beyond what we shared with you before.

Your next question will come from the line of Arun Viswanathan with RBC Capital Markets.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. Congrats on the strong results. I guess I just had a question there. I think you started the year expecting a 9% EPS growth, you're now guiding to 11%-12%. Is it right to assume that most of that was mainly volume upside? I guess as you look into fiscal 2027, could you provide maybe some initial thoughts on what portion of earnings growth would maybe trail off because of, maybe you're further along in the restructuring actions, but maybe what you pick up because of backlog and maybe some volume upside from helium or any other sources? Thanks.

No, thanks for the question. Let's go through this outlook. We did in fact increase to an 11% and 12% year-over-year improvement. Very proud of the team for all their efforts to focus in on both the volume growth as well as productivity and pricing. As we look forward, the largest driver of our improvement is in fact market volumes. We do expect market volumes to continue to improve, largely as we've talked about in the Americas and specific around HyCO. We are seeing some green shoots in Asia, specific in the electronic space. We do expect those to continue. However, we do have some concerns over the macroeconomic environment, largely in Asia and Europe, that we are building into a no significant market growth because of that uncertainty moving forward. We did have some contributions on new assets.

As we've talked about, both in Americas and Asia, we had a 3% year on year benefit from those new assets. We continue to focus on price and productivity. We will have some comp headwind because of our productivity actions, having a year-over-year comp impact. We do continue to want the teams to focus on and continue to find productivity as we move forward.

Okay, thanks for that. Given that you now do have less spending committed to Darrow as you move forward, what is the opportunity? I think you did address this earlier, but is there an opportunity to potentially pull forward the buyback capabilities or even potentially pursue some M&A? Thanks.

Yeah, no. As you know, this is very much of an opportunistic industrial gas market, right? As projects come forward, we will continue to be very disciplined on our capital deployment. We're looking for risk-adjusted returns on all projects that we enter into. We do have the share buyback in our waterfall. As we continue to improve our cash positions, take advantage of any opportunistic M&A and new projects, we would look to have any additional investable capital into a share buyback program. As I mentioned, that will likely come into a line of sight towards the end of 2027, early 2028.

Air Products & Chemicals (APD) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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