Seifi Ghasemi: Right now in that $5 billion and $5.5 billion that is not a significant amount of money for the project on Texas, because we are in the process of getting the permit and doing the preliminary engineering. But we did spend a few $100 million, but it is not significant part of that $5.5 billion. The $5 billion to $5.5 billion is mainly going to be spent on our continuing operations in NEOM in Saudi Arabia for our green hydrogen facility, a substantial amount of it will go to our blue hydrogen facility and other substantial amounts will be our blue hydrogen facility in Canada and then obviously our expenditure on the sustainable airline fuel facility in Los Angeles. And then obviously we have our maintenance CapEx and about $1 billion a year that we spend on our day-to-day investments like any other industrial gas business that they don’t usually talk about it and we don’t put out press releases about how many small projects won, because we do win small projects like everybody else, but that is about $1 billion too and our maintenance CapEx is around 500, 600 and so $1.5 billion is those and then the rest of it is for the big project.
Steve Byrne: Thank you.
Seifi Ghasemi: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you, we’ll go next to John McNulty from BMO Capital Markets.
John McNulty: Yes. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions, [Indiscernible]. So we had a question on the dividend hike that you guys announced earlier. It strikes us as kind of smaller than I guess what we’ve seen in the past from Air Products. And I guess the question is, why is that? And is there any concern from, say, the rating agencies around the comfort with your capital spending or is there some change why that hike would be as kind of modest as it’s been? I guess how should we think about that?
Seifi Ghasemi: Well for the past six or seven years I have always been telling people that I personally believe that dividend should be a percentage of the stock price and we had given people a guidance that we target that we pay about 2.5% of our stock price as dividends and we were doing that. But now with the stock price where it is, and you are talking about now more than $7. It is significantly higher than that. So I don’t see why we should significantly increase the dividend than the stock prices where it is, because the shareholders are getting more than 2.5% from the stock and then 10% growth and it becomes at least almost again 12.5% return if they buy the stock. If there is no issue with respect to our cash or our cash flow and so on, but we also have investors who believe we shouldn’t pay any dividend, but obviously that will never happen and they are never going to reduce the dividend.
But the rate of increase is very directly related to the stock price, my friend.
John McNulty: Got it. Okay. So it’s more about the yield, not necessarily the earnings growth or anything like that?
Seifi Ghasemi: Thank you.
John McNulty: Okay, and then just as a follow-up question, it would just be on the, I know you mentioned earlier in kind of first-half versus second-half, there’s a bunch of projects that should be running a little harder, running up more or coming on. I guess can you remind us what projects, you know, aren’t necessarily fully running in your first-half of the year, but will be in the second-half of the year just so we can kind of model that out or map that out a little bit better?
Seifi Ghasemi: Well that’s one then I’m going to get into disclosing the operational details of our customers and I’m not — I don’t have the privilege of doing that because of the confidentiality agreements we have. So if you give me a break, I cannot answer that question in detail. Sorry about that.
John McNulty: No, no problem. No problem at all. We’ll definitely give you a break on that. Thanks for the time.
Seifi Ghasemi: Thank you. Appreciate that.
Operator: Thank you. We’ll go next to Vincent Andrews from Morgan Stanley.
Vincent Andrews: Thank you and good morning, everyone. If I could just ask on the helium, what was sort of the surprise in the quarter on the electronic side of the equation, like so what’s really changing with those customers? Is it something in particular, or is it just the economy there is decelerating? And are we at the point with it in the electronics piece that you’re comfortable that, you know, that aspect has flattened out at a level that you’re comfortable with. Maybe we could start there.
Seifi Ghasemi: First of all, good morning, Vincent. Thanks for the good question. You know, usually what happens with the electronic industry and you know this better than I do, is that they run very strongly during the third quarter of the calendar year to make all of the chips and so on which are used for all the toys and everything that people are going to buy for Christmas. And then when that period is over, usually the fourth quarter of the year for the chipmakers is slower. That is the general thing. And then in addition to that, you do have economic conditions and all of that. I am not an expert in terms of the dynamics of the electronic industry, but I would like to tell you that, that is what we are seeing, that a lot of these people are slowing down.
And then the other thing that might be in play is that the helium price is being high, it significantly affects the operational people at the chip manufacturing facilities to try to conserve as much helium as they can or other users. So there might be a little bit of a demand destruction too.
Vincent Andrews: Okay. And then as a follow-up, in the fiscal second quarter, you know, we obviously just had another winter storm or winter freeze in the Gulf Coast area. Are you anticipating that, you know, you’re going to have some downtime associated with that or customers are going to have downtime from some plants being turned off in preparation for that weather event?
Seifi Ghasemi: That’s a very difficult question to answer, to be honest. That might be the case, but I don’t want to predict that, Vincent. I don’t know.
Vincent Andrews: I just meant what had already happened, the storm that happened in January. Is that already baked in?
Seifi Ghasemi: Yes. Dr. Serhan, do you have anything to add to that?
Samir Serhan: Minor issues really that happened. We still see very strong hydrogen demand even during that phase.
Vincent Andrews: Okay. Thank you very much.
Seifi Ghasemi: Okay, Vincent. Thank you.
Vincent Andrews: Yes, thank you very much.
Seifi Ghasemi: Excellent.
Operator: Thank you. We’ll go next to David Begleiter from Deutsche Bank.
David Begleiter: Thank you. Good morning.
Seifi Ghasemi: Hey, David.
David Begleiter: Good morning. Just staying on helium, can you quantify the impact of the year-over-year helium profit decline in Q1? And your expectations for the full-year in terms of helium profit decline?
Seifi Ghasemi: David, you are asking a question that we have never answered, that is we have never really disclosed the details of the performance of our helium business for competitive reasons. And I’m sure you understand that. So I do not want to quantify that exactly. But if you look at the, you know, when you compare to last year — when we compare to last year, we are still ahead. But we are trying to explain is the difference between what we delivered versus guidance versus last year we are still ahead. But we expected, we did not expect the weakness in helium the way it has materialized. Would it continue in the second quarter and the third quarter — I mean in the second, third and fourth quarter of our fiscal year remains to be seen and that is one of the reasons we lowered our guidance, because we are allowing for the fact that it might continue. But we don’t know for sure.
David Begleiter: Understood. Thank you. And just on the Alberta project, now that we’re within 12 months, hopefully a startup, do you have timing of that project ramping up earlier next year? And how should we think about the earnings contribution throughout the calendar year ‘25 for Alberta?
