L'Air Liquide Ord (AIQUF) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the AIQUFELD First Half twenty twenty six Results Conference Call. All participants are currently in listen mode only until we conduct a question and answer session and instructions will be given at that time. I will now hand over to the AIQUFELD team. Please begin your meeting and I will be standing by. Good morning, everyone. This is Corde Rodrigues, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you very much for attending the call today. Francois Jacob and Jerome Belton will present the first half twenty twenty six performance. For the Q and A session, we will be joined by Emily Moren Grenoire and Adam Peters, both VP overseeing respectively EMEA and North America. Adam is on the phone with us from The US. For our next events, we look forward to welcoming you to our Digital Capital Markets Day on October 5. Let me now hand you over to Francois. Thank you, Oud, and good morning, everyone. It is my pleasure to share Liquide's operational highlights for the first half of twenty twenty six. Against this demonstrates its resilience, delivering sustained growth and strong financial performance. Partially, while driving robust execution today, we continue to secure our long term growth trajectory through a record volume of new project signings. Let's start with slide three. Our first half results clearly reaffirm the structural trends of our business model. Comparable sales growth increased to 3.5% in the second quarter, lending above expectations and representing a pickup compared to the 1.9% in the first quarter. This positive momentum was primarily driven by strong underlying performance across both booming electronics and improving industrial merchants. Overall, sales growth in the second quarter reached 5.2% excluding FX and en...