Sergey
Vasnetsov:
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Good
morning. And once again, welcome to our second Industrial
Select Conference in Miami. My name is Sergey
Vasnetsov. I'm a US chemical analyst and a particular pleasure
of covering industrial gases companies, which are technically not chemical
companies, but have been wonderful stocks in the past decades, and so I
believe will be wonderful stocks going forward as
well.
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Our
next company is Air Products. And today we have this half hour
of both the CEO and CFO of the Company being at this
conference. I appreciate them making efforts to come down
here. Obviously, the interest to Air Products story has been
very strong for other times, and today it's even stronger given some
interesting developments in the
industry.
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So,
I would like to welcome John McGlade, the CEO of the Company, and Paul
Huck, Executive Vice President and CFO of the Company. With us
also is Nelson Squires, Director of Investor Relations. And I
think there will be a number of opportunities for you in the breakout
session and also Q&A later on to raise your
questions.
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In
my view, industrial gas is a really unique place in many
different ways. It's a global (inaudible) concentrated industry
and it's achieving very high returns on capital employed and yet able to
grow rapidly. And strategically, just one or the other, you
don't get both, but industrial gases do provide you such
opportunity.
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So,
I would welcome John to talk to us about the path forward for Air
Products.
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John
McGlade:
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Good
morning, everyone. And my thanks for Sergey and to the
Barclay's team for pulling off what looks to be a good
conference. And certainly, for any of you coming from the
Northeast, a welcome break from the weather that we've had over the last
several weeks up there. Even if we didn't get a chance to get
outside too much, it's still nice to think it's
nice.
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I
wanted to spend a couple of moments here this morning with you on two
points. One, obviously last week we announced an acquisition,
or a tender offer, if you will, for Airgas. And I wanted to
frame what that transaction means for Air Products. But also
want to reinforce and spend the majority of my time talking about the
underlying Air Products and why we think it's a great shareholder value
proposition.
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I
have to call your attention to three slides on information,
forward-looking statements. There's more than normal as a
result of the transaction. There's handouts for all the
material in the back of the room. And so, when you have a
moment, if you'd take a moment to look at this, we'd very much appreciate
that.
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Let
me start with the highlights of our offer to acquire Airgas. As
many of you know, it's an all cash offer at $60 a share. The
offer represents a 38% premium over the trading price. When we
made the offer, the closing on the 4th of February, of
$43.53. We expect it to be accretive to Air Products on a cash
basis in year one. There are substantial cost synergies
yielding $250 million a year by the end of year two. And we
have secured the committed financing for this transaction for an all-cash
offer.
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Just
for your information, the transaction costs we expect to incur in doing
this -- and there's been an accounting change over the last year or so,
where these used to be typically capitalized, will be expensed and they
will have impacts as noted on this slide, as estimated on this slide in Q1
and Q2. And as in any type of acquisition, we've looked closely
at the regulatory considerations and we really believe that we have those
understood, that the divestitures we'd have to make are identified and
they are covered in the financials and considered in the financials that
we'll show you.
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Let
me take you to sort of the reason behind this and what makes it a really,
really exciting opportunity, from my point of view and from that of the
Board of Air Products and the Management Team's point of view. If you
think about the modes of supply in the industrial gas industry, packaged
gases, liquid/bulk and tonnage, this would create one of the world's
largest integrated industrial gas companies in the world. And
certainly by far the largest in North
America.
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We'd
have broad, broad geographic and mode of supply diversity. And
it really brings together two very, very good companies that have
significantly complementary skills and strengths that we believe will
allow us to better serve our customers, but also to drive growth and cost
synergies by taking the strengths of both of the
companies.
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And
from our perspective right now, the timing really is
right. There are a number of things as it relates to how we
think the economy is slowly starting to recover is a good time to buy
in. But it's also a very efficient way for Air Products to
enter back into the US packaged gas business. And when we look
at some of the things that Airgas is embarking on now in terms of bringing
supply chain efficiencies and synergies to their overall operating company
-- and I'll talk to those a little bit more -- we believe we can bring a
fairly substantial amount of value in that context as
well.
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For
those of you who aren't familiar with Airgas, the company was started in
the early '80s and they've done a very nice job of rolling up and
acquiring the premier packaged gas position in the United States
marketplace. In '09, their fiscal year '09, they were $4.3
billion in revenue. And over the last five years, 19% top line
growth and 7% same-store sales growth. The difference,
obviously, is the roll-on acquisitions that they've been able to provide
and do well.
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They
serve a very, very broad base of the economy in the United
States. And then, one of the attractive things for us, as
you'll see on a later slide is that, being in the packaged gas business
would give Air Products-based business in North America access to markets
that we don't have complete access to today. I'll talk to those
a little bit later.
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And
then, one of the key elements is their high-touch model, with over 1500
sales representatives across the United States and North America, which is
a very attractive opportunity again, more from a growth point of view, for
Air Products to bring its skills and capabilities through those sales
resources and channels and, in turn, vice versa with some of the Airgas
products.
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This
is a good look at what the pro forma company would look
like. You'd have a company that comes close to $13 billion in
revenue. What you really have here is the mode of supply
characteristics for the industry, so on-site equipment, specialty
materials, packaged gases, liquid/bulk, etc. And you can see
how adding Airgas is largely a packaged gas business into the Air Products
mix gives you what you see on the right-hand side of this
slide. A much larger business balanced across the modes of
supply. These modes of supply and percentages are very
consistent with the overall industry and market modes of
supply. And again, it creates the largest industrial gas
company in North America and one of the largest on a worldwide
basis.
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Let
me talk a minute about synergies. On my first slide I mentioned
that we see by the end of year two $250 million a year of annual
synergies. And where do they come from? They come
from a number of areas. On the cost side of things, the ability
-- and if you think about Airgas and my comments on the earlier slide, a
lot of their growth has come from acquiring smaller operations and
bolting them on, and less from taking an opportunity to look at
their supply chain and consolidating filling locations, consolidating
specialty gas plants, moving more from a hub-and-spoke delivery approach,
combining and leveraging their purchasing capabilities of their products
to buying equipment in this space all over the globe. And
utilizing shared services, something we've done as a company for a number
of years. Operate shared service centers in three locations
around the globe and really run the vast majority of our
transactions. This is the non-customer facing transactions, the
back office transactions off of a shared service system enabled by a
single instance of SAP.
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Great
operational efficiencies we were able to achieve. Certainly, a
good company like Airgas is looking at this. They've been
public in saying they've been looking at this. And without
trying to sound arrogant, we've been on this journey. We've
done it. We understand how to do it. And we think,
both at a supply chain level and then, of course, at a shared service
level for the corporate-related functions, we think we have a really good
handle on how to do that and how to accelerate that and bring those
efficiencies and synergies forward, which is why we feel confident in the
level of synergies we're talking to by the second year. And
then, of course, you have some of the normal things you have in any
acquisition, duplicate public company costs and corporate overhead and
infrastructure costs that further contribute to the
synergies.
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Something
we haven't talked as much about is, in my mind -- and I'm going to come
back in a little while to the base Air Products -- it does represent an
opportunity through here for us to accelerate growth for Air Products in a
number of fronts. Taking the combined businesses in the United
States, one of the things that we've done -- Air Products operates a very
substantial packaged gas business in Europe. We also operate
fairly substantial integrated packaged gas businesses, not only in Europe,
but in some of our key joint ventures around the globe, Mexico, Italy,
India, places like that.
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And
one of the things that we've done to really grow our business
differentially to the market, both from a growth point of view and a
profitability point of view, is to continue to innovate and offer new
offerings. Those Integra cylinders and 300 BAR cylinders are
just two examples. I'm going to come back to them a little bit
in the discussion around the base business. But basically, what
these are, are bringing safety, convenience, easy to handle packaging to
our customer base. And we've been able to use that to grow share and use
that to grow the profitability of our businesses relative to some of our
other competitors.
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I
mentioned earlier that, given some of the market sectors or the industry
sectors that Airgas is involved in, this gives us a really good
opportunity for Air Products in the United States to access some of the
industry sectors that you have here -- fabrication, construction,
pharmaceuticals, etc. And these are industries that tend to buy
packaged gases and liquid/bulk. And in many cases, these
industries buy proportionally more packaged gases than they do
liquid/bulk. So, largely not really available to Air Products
in the US market simply because we don't really have that complementary
packaged gas offering. But these are good
industries. And typically, if you look at most of these, they
aren't cyclical in the nature of some industrial cycle. In
fact, in many cases, really follow more of a population type of cycle in
the food, the medical, pharmaceuticals,
etc.
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And
then finally, one of the stated strategies of Airgas is to globalize their
business. And if you think about the thought process around
being diversified in all three modes of supply and the benefits of
integration and density that you get if you looked at that earlier map of
all of the locations that Airgas has in the United States, if you put on
our liquid plants on that and then you did where we have this capability
globally, it's that density. It's that integration that allows
you to continue to drive the profitability of the business. We
already have established positions. We believe we can take a
lot of their model, their expertise and their knowledge in helping roll up
an industrial gas business in the packaged gas sector and help drive a
further additional growth for their products and the combined
entity.
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As
we've been out talking about this transaction, there's really been two
primary questions that we've been asked, among others, but two of them
that I wanted to really take head-on in the discussion there this
morning. Get to -- why invest in the North America market is
one. And what does this investment mean around your ability to
drive growth in your existing business? Does that mean your
opportunities are less limited?
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And
I'll come back to this theme a couple of times. But on that
second point, the point of our underlying business, we see the
opportunities -- and hopefully, in the second half of my discussion here,
you'll agree. We see the underlying opportunities in our base
business to be as strong as we conveyed and as strong in many ways as the
global recovery occurs as we've ever seen. And so, I'm very,
very bullish long term in that
recovery.
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And
one of the key criteria that we looked at hard as a management team and as
a board, etc., is we don't want to jeopardize our ability to execute
against our base strategy. And I know -- in a few short words,
we don't believe we will or have done anything, should we be successful in
this transaction, that will impact that. In fact, as you'll see
on the next slide, we actually think it enables it as you get further out
into time.
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But
more fundamentally, on this slide, this is an eye chart. I
don't expect you to read all the numbers. The bottom line of
what the point I was trying to make here is we could get caught up in
percentages at times, percentage growth, but the North American market
still represents 28% of the world's growth over the next five
years. Very attractive market. When you then combine the
ability in this space to continue to do roll-up acquisitions in the
packaged gas space, and some of the cross-selling opportunities and the
industry sector opportunities that become available, in my mind a very
compelling reason to really make this -- take this
action.
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Let
me talk a little bit about the key measures that we're going to put in
place here as we go forward. And these measures aren't to in
any way, shape or form take away from the commitments that we have out to
you all and that I'll summarize at the end, a double-digit EPS growth, of
continued margin and return improvement. But in any transaction
of this nature, you do write up the assets to current market value and so
you have some accounting issues. One of the things we're going
to pay a lot of attention to is, from our shareholders' perspective -- and
as you can see on the left, this is accretive from day one on both a GAAP
EPS, which has the intangibles and goodwill considered, and a cash EPS
basis.
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I
think perhaps one of the more important things here, though, is if you
look to the EBITDA margin chart, continuing to drive the improvement in
that margin generates a significant amount of cash. You see in
the first year we would expect the margin to be around 23% and, a year
later, or a couple of years later, we have that margin out by over 300
basis points. Something we've proven we can do and have done on
our returns on capital and are doing presently on our margin goals within
the underlying Air Products business to generate five years out over 50%
more cash flow for the combined entity than exists
today.
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And
gives us even greater flexibilities based on the market at that
opportunity to reinvest in the business, or to take other actions in terms
of providing cash back to shareholders, which would be judgments we'd
obviously make at a point in time when we'd look at the
opportunities. But they'd be judgments we'd make against how we
utilize cash and how we've been consistent as an enterprise in utilizing
our cash flow generation and communicating to your, our
shareholders. Invest in our business, pay our dividend, look
for tax efficient funding of our pension fund and share
buyback.
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So,
let me talk a bit about the path forward. Have gotten a lot of
questions on that. Let me just give you a couple of headlines
here. We did file a lawsuit in Delaware count. That
tends to be customary in this type of situation where we're seeking to
protect shareholders' rights in terms of their ability to access this
offer. We did commence a tender offer. It's a
fully-financed tender offer on February 11th. I commented
earlier about the regulatory process and our understanding of what we
believe we need to do. And we're prepared to follow this all
the way through, putting up for election a slate of directors as that
process plays out over this next number of
months.
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But
the thing I want to be really clear about with you is we're going to be
disciplined in this. We believe we've put a fair and compelling
offer on the table. We are not going to bid against ourselves
in this transaction. And also, as I'm going to say in a minute,
I'm not going to do, and we're not going to do, anything that impacts our
ability to really access what we see to be is the growth opportunity in
the underlying business. And as I noted a moment ago, that was
a really key point of discussion for many months between our management
team and our board. To get ourselves comfortable, we had both
the financial capability, as well as the people and human capability to
effectively execute what we believe is a very solid
strategy.
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So
with that, I'm going to switch gears. Just a bit of history. If
you take a look at this slide, and you look at the left-hand part of this
slide, what I'm really showing you is the improvements that we've made as
an organization over the last five years. And as you can see,
we moved our margin up a couple hundred basis points. We've
improved our return on capital by just short of 400 basis points
throughout that period of time.
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In
that time period, we invested some $5 million in plant and equipment,
in high quality projects. And I'll talk about some
of those projects, like our hydrogen businesses, in a
moment.
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The
other thing you can see on the right-hand side of this slide is,
obviously, we were not -- we were impacted by the global recession just
like every company was impacted in a global recession. We took
a number of significant actions in the first half of fiscal year
'09. And I think the point I’m portraying in this quarter by
quarter is to really demonstrate the impact of those actions and the
sequential improvement that we're making as an organization, and have been
making as an organization, coming out of the recession, really focusing on
driving our margins to 17% by 2011, as we've committed to
do.
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Continuing
to keep our return on capital 3 to 5 points above our cost of
capital. And really driving our cost structure to a lower cost
structure to allow us to be more competitive at higher returns in the
marketplace. And you'll see in a bit some examples of some new
projects that we've brought in, notwithstanding the projects that we
brought in in this prior time period, the $5 billion plus of investment
and the return capability. But I want you to know that I'm very
comfortable and confident around what the prospects are for the underlying
business, with or without the Airgas
transaction.
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As
I think many of you know, industrial gases tend to play a really unique,
and Sergey mentioned a place in helping drive solutions for our
customers. Typically, they're used to improve productivity, to
reduce energy efficiency, to improve product quality or to provide an
environmental benefit, either in our customers' end product or, more
likely and more usually, somewhere in their manufacturing
process. And that's been a driver of industrial gases that, as
industrial gases grow at multiples of the GDP or multiples in industrial
production or manufacturing over the many, many
years.
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I
think what's happened more recently, and I'm not unique in standing up in
front of you and talking about the market opportunities that this industry
sees around the areas of energy, around the areas of the environment and
around new and emerging markets, whether it be from a technology point of
view or from a geographic point of view. But I think the point
I'm trying to make here is, when those are layered on the traditional
drivers, we see good growth, very good growth, high single digits, low
double digits growth over the next number of years in terms of top line,
that translates into even more leverage in the bottom line because of some
of the factors that are shown on that slide. And I'll build
those out a little on subsequent
slides.
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Let
me talk first about our merchant business. This is our largest
business. So, where we have a packaged gas business in Europe,
that comes through the merchant segment. In '09, $3.6
billion. It's a global business. I'll
talk about our equity affiliates in a minute. About 70% of the
revenue is outside the United States today. And it is in the
small tonnage, in the liquid/bulk area and the packaged gas modes of
supply. And this is a business that achieved an 18%, 18.3%
operating margin in FY '09 and is well on its way to hit the FY '11 target
of 20%, which blends into the 17%
target.
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The
growth in this industry, and one of the things that we've been able to use
to go back to the drivers of the needs for industrial gases, is to bring
applications expertise to really provide safe, reliable, low-cost
solutions to our customers. I have a simple example
here. This is in the glass space, so think about float glass,
the glass that's used in autos, windows and large buildings,
etc. And what we've been able to do here is create a combined
set of offerings.
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First,
on the right a low-cost, very efficient oxygen production facility that
meets the needs of that facility, the float glass line. Combine
it with patented technology that we developed on the left, which is a
cleanfire burner. And all we're doing is, back to that energy
efficiency and environmental benefits, we're putting in some oxygen,
backing out some natural gas, reducing the natural gas consumption and
improving the environmental output in terms of less NOx and less CO2
coming out of the facility. And really creating the ability for
our customer to make a higher quality product, to many times meet those
environmental and efficiency benefits and, in some cases, actually get
more throughput or output from their facility from the same footprint than
they could without using this technology. We've won 75% of
these orders over the last number of years by really bringing both a
products supply solution, as well as a technology solution that is in the
vein of some of the trends that we're seeing out in the
industry.
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One
other example -- and I mentioned on some of the benefits we see of
bringing some of the differentiated offerings that we've identified in the
packaged gas business that has allowed us to grow very nicely in
Europe. We believe we can bring those to the United States as
well and bring them into the Airgas channel to really be successful with
the transaction.
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And
this is an example of the Integra cylinder. We don't have to
spend a lot of time on it, but if you had -- what I didn't put on here, or
perhaps I do have on here in the right-hand slide, is you have an
all-in-one packaging system on the top that protects the valve where you
-- and the regulator where you extract the gas from. And that's
created a real opportunity from a handling point of view, from a safety
point of view, for our customers from an ease of moving those cylinders
around. And it's been really nice in growing our European
business.
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It's
one example of many. So, I don't want anyone leaving here
thinking that it's only the Integra cylinder that's the differentiated
offering. But it's one simple example. It's been an example
that we've twice been recognized with a Queen's Award for
Excellence. And that excellence award first was for the
original innovation and then, more recently, for the continuing
utilization of that in other gases and other industry sectors to drive
that innovation further into the
business.
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I'll
move us on to tonnage gases. It's an area we talk a lot about
as a company with you. It's been a significant driver of our
growth as a company. In fact, our founder created the on-site
model way back in the late '50s and we brought it into the hydrogen arena
in the early '90s. The tonnage segment, you can see $3.1
billion in sales. Primary markets are refining, chemicals and
steel. The highest growth market of late has certainly been
refining or chemicals and steel in developing parts of the
world.
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Let
me talk a minute about our hydrogen business. It's over $2
billion in revenue. It's grown over the last 10 years at more
than 10% per annum. And we really see that level of
growth. We see the opportunity for another $8 billion -- or 8
billion standard cubic feet of hydrogen capacity to be installed over the
next 10-year period. And the markets that are gonna be driving
that are represented by the pie chart. You can see sort of the
percentages of where the markets come from on the right. But
let me spend a couple of minutes on what some of those drivers of growth
are.
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Simple
growth in fuels. And I recognize in saying that there's a lot
of discussion and some action on refinery shutdowns in the United States
and elsewhere in the world. What you'll find, if you look below
that, is that the refineries that use hydrogen tend to be the top quartile
refineries because they can handle the most difficult and challenging
crudes, those that are heavier, those that are more sour, meaning that
they have more sulfur. And so, those refineries, if anything in
the environment we're in -- and when we have economic recovery we expect
we'll see some transport fuel growth but, more importantly in that, as the
industry rationalizes itself, those refineries that take hydrogen -- and
you'll see in some subsequent slides -- we're tied into most of those if
not many of them, will, if anything, take higher intensities of hydrogen
utilization.
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What
initially drove the hydrogen story was legislation starting in California
with their clean fuels carb legislation, then throughout the United
States, then Europe. But this was largely all driven to
personal vehicles, personal transportation vehicles. Today,
there's another wave of hydrogen that's come on this year and it's some of
the four or five new hydrogen projects that we'll bring on that were
geared for off-road diesel. There's more legislation on the
books a little bit further out that will require the railroads, which burn
a lot of diesel, to go to the higher standard. And then,
ultimately, marine. And so, part of the growth we see, and as
you can see, that 15 or so percent of growth comes from the further
knock-on effects of dealing with other transport vehicle fuels and forcing
them, if you will, to the same
standard.
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Another
area, and we've been active in this, is continue
outsourcing. There still are refineries, chemical plants around
the globe, but we're talking really about the refinery sector, that own
and operate their own hydrogen plants. Not as many as there
used to be because this market has largely, in new CapEx, gone to the
industrial gas industries, with us being a leader in taking that
on.
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But
there are facilities out there. We announced a few months back
MarkWest, where we're acquiring an asset that they had that we can quickly
blend into our infrastructure and get some growth. There are
also older inefficient units that were built in the late '60s, early '70s,
when natural gas was $2 a million BTUs. And when there wasn't
the level of environmental legislation that there is today. And
so, they emit a lot of SOx and NOx from their facilities. And
that's an example of the Baytown, the ExxonMobil Baytown contract that we
announced where we converted and shut -- they had an increase in demand
but they also had an old unit which we were able to shut down and provide
a really attractive solution to them and to our
shareholders.
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This
is a quick eye chart. I'm not going to go through each of these
franchises. But those of you who know the refining industry
would recognize a lot of these locations as some of the key global
refining centers around the world. Air Products is well
represented in each of those with pipelines and multiple hydrogen
production facilities. In total we have over 40 hydrogen
production facilities. That's more than two times anything of
our nearest competitors. And we believe we're well positioned
in those markets to grow. And if you go back to my comment
earlier, as the crude slate gets heavier, as the industry consolidates,
the refining industry, these are where the highly complex refineries
are. These are the refineries that already use hydrogen and
would anticipate them using more hydrogen as we go forward. And
part of the underpinning of our view is that this market will continue to
grow nicely into the future.
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Let
me move us on to one other aspect of the tonnage business. I
haven't talked as much about this in the past. That's
oxygen. And there's some interesting things happening in
oxygen. Obviously, it was one of the key -- and it was -- where
the on-site model first came about, oxygen to the steel
industry. Eliminating cylinders, eliminating liquid supply and
building small plants right at a customer's
site.
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Certainly,
steel and chemical in the more -- in the Western world or more mature
world, you don't have a lot of new demand. You do have some
modernization opportunities. But there's still a significant
amount of demand in China and in India for infrastructure
growth. So, new steel mills and mill
modernization. Shutting down old mills that aren't using
state-of-the-art technology, replacing them with new mills that consume
quantities of oxygen.
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Also,
as countries like China go to feedstock independence and they look to
utilize their coal resources, 30-some gasification projects already in
China. You'll see a couple on our list that we've been
successful in. And we expect more to come in that market. The
beauty on gasification is the requirements tend to be two to three times
the amount of oxygen that a typical steel mill will take. And
so, the net effect here really is, over the next 8 to 10 years, a fairly
substantive increase in total installed oxygen capacity is our
view. And that gets close to rivaling the installed capacity in
oxygen that exists today.
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So,
summarizing all of that, I just wanted to -- before I left the tonnage
segment, leave you quickly with a list of the projects that we've been
communicating with you on, that will contribute to our 2010 earnings are
on the top of that chart. You can go through that
chart. The whole left-hand side on the top, those are hydrogen
opportunities. And the right-hand side are largely oxygen
opportunities. You can take the hydrogen largely in the
refining sector. And you can see the oxygen is spread
throughout the world, both emerging as well as, in the case of the US
steel opportunity and the Isle of Grain LNG opportunity in the US and the
UK.
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And
then, just since the beginning of this fiscal year, which was October 1
for us, you can see the projects that we've announced in this
space. And again, on the left, those four projects are
hydrogen-related contracts and, on the right, largely oxygen and
geographically dispersed. The Weihe one is a gasifier
opportunity, as is the PetroChina
one.
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Let
me wrap up on our segments with a quick discussion on our electronics and
performance materials businesses. As you can see, in '09, $1.6
billion in revenue. Frankly, this was the industry that was
hardest hit across our broad portfolio of businesses by the
recession. The supply of gases and materials into the
semiconductor memory, flat panel, photovoltaic markets, as well as the
supply of additives into various markets like institutional and industrial
cleaning, auto, housing, etc. And so, when you think about what
the market correlation is, you can understand my
comment.
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|
It's
also a part of our business that is rebounding very nicely, particularly
on a global basis, in Asia in particular, both in the electronics and the
performance materials area as an opportunity to provide nice leverage, if
you will, from an earnings point of view. And that's in our
guidance for '10. And like the other businesses, we have margin
goals that we're committing to deliver
on.
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I
don't want to spend a lot of time on that segment, but I want to spend one
moment on what we see to be another level of growth going into the future,
another level of potential growth going into the future in the electronics
side of that segment. And that's really in the thin film
photovoltaics market. And that's an area where we believe,
given our large experience base in selling specialty materials and gases,
the fact that we're basic, meaning we manufacture most of those specialty
materials and gases ourselves, that we have the capabilities and the
knowledge to deal with them in high purity environments. We're
basic in chlorine technology and very strong surface science
capabilities.
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|
The
attractiveness of this business for us is, each one gigawatt photovoltaic
fab will require about $100 million of gases and specialty
materials. And you can pick your own choice on
projections. Our projects show that, over the next five-plus
years, that there'll be 30 to 40 of these facilities
built.
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|
We've
gotten 20 pieces of business, not all one gigawatt facilities, in FY
09. So, even in a year where there was a fairly significant
recession, that new business goes anywhere from one or two products to the
full slate of products to facilities that are geared to start out -- most
of them don’t hit the ground running at one gigawatt. They
start out at a third of that or a quarter of that or a half of that, and
then grow into it. But, a really exciting area and space in
electronics for us.
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|
I
mentioned earlier our equity affiliates. Here we're unique
relative to most of the industrial gas industry. It's been a
great growth model for us going forward -- I mean, in the past, excuse
me. It represents over $2 billion on 100% basis of
sales. Typically, we're 50/50, but you don't see this in the
operating lines of our P&L. You see it in equity affiliate
income.
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|
But,
in most of these markets, we're the market leader. They're
high-growth markets with good returns. And we've always been in
a position, as we have in Korea and Taiwan, Spain, etc., as our partners
-- typically, when they go through a generational change, want to get out
of the business, we're there to buy it. It's locked-in
growth. It's low risk. We've done this many times
and we'll continue to look at that going
forward.
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|
So,
let me wrap up with two slides. I mentioned earlier we're not
walking away from our goals for the underlying Air Products
business. We do think that the Airgas transaction is a very
unique opportunity for us.
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But
this is a slide that we used in our Q1 results for Q1 fiscal year
'10. Just a couple of points. Basically, the bottom
line of what we're saying here is that the global economy, the recovery,
is frankly playing out as we expected it to play out and that's what
you're seeing. We saw Europe down a little more, Asia up a
little more. But in total, we're seeing growth pretty much the
way we'd expected. We were surprised a little. We
think silicon growth with be a little stronger and we conveyed that in the
Q1 update.
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And
we expect to spend close to the same amount of CapEx -- you saw some of
the projects on the prior slide -- this fiscal year as we did last fiscal
year. And fiscal '09 was $1.5 billion in CapEx. And
that drives you to an EPS growth of 17 to 22% year-on-year and gets us
right back against one of our goals of double-digit EPS
growth.
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Let
me close with a couple of points. We believe the industrial gas
industry, as Sergey mentioned early on, really does provide
stable and solid cash flows because of the diversity of this business
model and the geographies we operate in. We think the Airgas
opportunity just adds to the underlying capability of what we have as an
organization, as Air Products.
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|
Hopefully,
what you can see, and saw on some of the slides, is our underlying
business has very solid growth prospects. We see new
opportunities in the energy, environment, emerging markets
areas. And quite honestly, are very excited about the growth
opportunities that Airgas would bring to the combined
entity.
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The
results. We're going to continue to drive for double-digit EPS
growth. We will continue to focus on our return on
capital. We're going to continue our margin
improvement. And we believe that the accretive nature of the
transaction, along with the increase in cash flow when you don't look at
the accounting issues, really drive for a solid shareholder value
proposition going forward.
|
|
Thank
you. I can take a few questions, I
believe.
|
Unidentified
Participant:
|
Thanks
a lot. I believe this packaged gas business is a business that
you used to own and sold. And so, I guess I'm wondering what
was the sell rationale and then buying it back and doing a -- I don't
think you've done a hostile deal anymore. It seems like it's
exceedingly urgent. There does seem to be some inconsistency in
owning it, selling it and, not only buying it back, but buying it back in
such a hostile nature with such urgency. I was just trying to
get a little bit more clarity.
|
John
McGlade:
|
Sure. That's
a great question. And I mean, the key to a successful industrial gas
business, and in particular a successful packaged gas business, is to have
concentration and density. And if you think about that map of
the United States that I showed you, Airgas has done a very nice job at
building that concentration and density. We know that because
we did -- while we exited the US packaged gas business, we never exited
the packaged gas business in some of those equity affiliates I showed you,
or in Europe where we had the density and we had the concentration and the
ability to make is successful.
|
|
When
we exited the business in the United States a decade ago, we were a $200
million business. That wasn't density, that wasn't the scale,
and that wasn't the capability -- you couldn't afford the capability to
bring the efficiencies that I was talking about on a couple of the slides
on the transaction to the table.
|
|
Today,
that's a $4 billion entity that has done a very nice job at rolling up --
not only buying our assets, but other assets, rolling up to an attractive
company that you can apply the systems, the tools that we've proven to be
able to work in Europe and
elsewhere.
|
|
Yes.
|
Unidentified
Participant:
|
Could
you describe beyond the EPS accretion what kind of financial metrics,
return hurdles and others you have in mind when you look at the
acquisition opportunity?
|
John
McGlade:
|
When
we look at any acquisition opportunity. I mean, a couple of
things. One, first and foremost and the point I was trying to
make, which I think maybe gets a little bit to the other question, was we
believe we have a solid underlying growth story, which was the second half
of my discussion. And so, one of the first metrics, not return
related, per se, that we put on this was we don’t want to jeopardize our
ability to be able to finance that growth or our ability to be able to
resource that growth with people.
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|
Second,
from a return point of view, margin improvement, which is a surrogate that
is in mind easily conveyable to the broad 20,000 Air Products employees,
and with an Airgas size transaction cash margin improvement, if you will,
and EBITDA, are real ways to drive the top line and the -- to drive
productivity, to drive cost, to drive volumes, to drive pricing, to really
enhance the margin and generate the cash. Ultimately, that cash
allows us to, frankly, improve our return criteria on return on
capital. And we worked hard over the last four or five years to
get that to the 12% or more on a return on capital. Our goal
has always been -- and that's greater than our goal -- has been to be 300
to 500 basis points above our cost of capital. We're going to
take a bit of a dip in that, if you will, if we have to -- if we're
successful and we write up the assets, which you have to do,
obviously. But we're not going to walk away from moving right
back to that type of target and
metric.
|
Unidentified
Participant:
|
Great. My
question was exactly that one, but I'll move on. You brought up
the macro and it's played out exactly like you thought. And
hate to ask a macro question, but in a world that's swimming in debt, are
you leaving yourself more margin for error than you have in the past given
the environment when you're doing
CapEx? Thanks.
|
John
McGlade:
|
We
looked hard -- well, I mean, we looked hard at -- and that was my other
point earlier. We looked hard at our capital structure and
could we manage an all cash type of offer, which we believe we
can. So, when we built our models, we modeled into that the
type of CapEx I showed you for fiscal year '10. And that CapEx
growing, as we've communicated in other discussions, each year out given
some of the growth prospects we were talking about here. And
then we stress tested it. And we believe that we've got the
right balance and the right ability to weather a storm while being able to
continue to drive the growth that we see
coming.
|
Unidentified
Participant:
|
How
do I handicap the opportunity to retrofit coal plants in the US and the EU
now that climate change is kind of on the back burner or
whatever? That was -- you'd talked about in the past that being
kind of the Holy Grail.
|
John
McGlade:
|
Yeah. I
ultimately believe that clean coal has a place in solving the energy
dynamic in many geographies or countries that have the privilege of having
a readily abundant supply of coal.
|
|
I
think in past discussions I was clear that you need to have some level of
certainty around what's going to happen on the CO2. Is it going
to be a tax? Is it going to be regulated at all? Is
there going to be some cap and trade? Because people aren't
going to make the investments, the significant investments in those
facilities in the absence of that.
|
|
We've
got to be candid. A bit of a breather here because of the
economic turndown that the demand on our power infrastructure mitigated or
abated itself a lot. But, it -- as the economy starts to
recover over time, you still are back into some level of dynamic around
demand outstripping supply. And then, I believe in the US there
probably is an opportunity at some point in the future. There
are certainly projects that are more demonstration in nature that are
going on. In China, it's already a reality, at least using the
coal for feed stock independents. And so, I think that it isn't will it
occur as much as when will it occur and what sort of external enablers
that we need to make that happen on the
timeline.
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|
--Breakout
room and we can certainly -- Paul, Nelson and I will be there for further
questions.
|
Sergey
Vasnetsov:
|
Thank
you.
|
John
McGlade:
|
Thank
you, Sergey.
|
Consideration
|
All-cash
offer for all Airgas shares at $60.00 per share
|
Premium
|
Premium
of 38% to Airgas’ closing price on 2/04/10
of $43.53 |
Accretion
|
Expected
to be substantially accretive to Air Products cash
EPS in year one |
Synergies
|
Substantial
cost synergies yielding $250 million run-rate by the
end of year two |
Financing
|
•Air
Products has secured committed financing, is committed
to remaining investment grade and to returning to an A rating •Transaction
costs expected to be approximately $200MM,
expensed as incurred. •Q2
~$0.08 per share impact
•Q3
~$0.10 per share impact
|
Regulatory
Approval |
Air
Products has thoroughly considered potential regulatory
issues and is prepared to make appropriate divestitures |
Revenue
(FY2009)
|
$4.3B
|
Total
CAGR (over last 5 years)
|
19%
|
Same
Store Sales Growth
|
7%
|
|
FY04
|
thru
|
FY08
|
H109
|
H209
|
Q110
|
Sales
(
CAGR/ % chg vs PY )
|
|
14%
|
|
(16%)
|
(25%)
|
(1%)
|
Operating
Margin *
|
12.8%
|
1.8%
|
14.6%
|
13.2%
|
15.5%
|
15.9%
|
EPS
Cont Ops.*
|
|
21%
|
|
(24%)
|
(16%)
|
20%
|
ROCE
(4
quarter trailing)*
|
9.6%
|
3.4%
|
13.0%
|
|
|
|
ROCE
(instantaneous)
*
|
|
|
|
10.0%
|
11.2%
|
11.7%
|