Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. (NYSE:APD) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Seifi Ghasemi: Well, it depends on what you would have negotiated with our partners. I don’t expect it to have been significantly different. But because — I mean, you talked about additional capital cost, but as I said, a lot of the operating costs is being capitalized. So that necessarily doesn’t affect the return on the project. But again, I just don’t — I have two other partners, and I respect them. I don’t want to disclose their financials there. But as I said, from a product point of view, you need to look at the total supply chain.

Seifi Ghasemi: , okay.

Unidentified Analyst: Yes, thank you very much.

Operator: Thank you, sir. We will take our next question from John McNulty with BMO Capital Markets.

John McNulty: Yes, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions, Seifi so. Seifi, you seem excited about the price of the offtake for NEOM basically remaining flat. So I guess, why is that? Are you seeing interest from buyers right now that are higher than what you thought they would be at the time that you originally signed into this contract? I guess, how should we be thinking about that?

Melissa Schaeffer: Well, I think that’s one way of putting it. The thing that we see is significant interest in the product. And obviously, as a businessman, we would like to offtake anything that we buy at the most favorable price that they can get. But I’m particularly interested in the reason I keep mentioning that because I just want to make sure that people don’t think that, well, these guys said $5 billion, now it’s $8.5 billion. Therefore, this — the price of ammonia must have gone up. It did not. And it just — look one other thing, John, you know this better than I do see our project financing this thing with some of the biggest banks in the world, giving us money. They have looked at this project, they have looked at of the, and they are bidding to finance it. So I guess, they all think this is a good project and a good prospect, and they were going to get their money back. You know what I mean?

Dr. Samir Serhan: Yes. No, for sure. I guess, maybe looking at it from a slightly different angle. So when you think about like when I think about project financing, the benefit of it is that tend to juice the returns a little bit more, but it does take out some of the EPS on the — tied to the equity that’s being put to work because there’s less equity involved. I guess when you think about the total capital of the project overall, the distribution side as well as the actual production side and the economics around that. I guess, how has that changed relative to what you thought originally with the project financing now in place?

Seifi Ghasemi: John, it has obviously improved because I’m putting less cash on the production side. So we are bit off. And as long as the price of ammonia is the same. So we have made an improvement. We have another $1 billion that we were going to invest to do other things.

Melissa Schaeffer: Got it. Fair enough. Thanks very much, Seifi.

Seifi Ghasemi: Thank you.

Operator: We will go next to John Roberts with Credit Suisse and thank you. ExxonMobil recently announced a blue hydrogen project in the Gulf Coast that includes ammonia as well. And it looks like it has merchant ambitions there? Since refiners are a large customer for Air Products, help us understand, would you have bid for that project as well? Or how do we think about how your customers might play in the hydrogen and potentially ammonia market?

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