Steve Byrne: Can you provide a little more granularity on how you got the 21% sales growth in electronics year-over-year given that end market that’s clearly slowed?
Sanjiv Lamba: Steve, when a fab has been constructed — and we’re talking about solid contracts with long — Tier 1 players across the world. When a fab is constructed, they have to manage that operational elements to a point, right? So that capacity utilization works in our favor. And we are actually growing that market both in terms of ramp-ups that are happening on new fab that came up two or three years ago, and we continue to ramp our gases into increasing production that is happening over there. And in addition to that, we also continue to improve some of the molecules that we bring into these fabs given the new technologies that are there. We call them electronic special gases. That — we are continuing to see growth over there as well. And of course, I’ll always add that there is a good strong pricing element to that.
Steve Byrne: And if I could, on the OCI blue ammonia project, the 2025 start-up does seem quite ambitious. Is construction already underway? And maybe particularly for your partner, does your contract with them take effect in 2025 if their plant is not on stream? And at the other end, your — is your partner for sequestration well on their way to getting a classic injection well? Can you comment on those perhaps key bottlenecks?
Sanjiv Lamba: Sure. So, these projects typically take many months to develop, in some cases, years. And so, we have been working on this project for a while, Steve. So, that’s the reason why we are reasonably confident about getting this up and running in 2025 and in commercial production. So, I feel pretty good about where things stand with that. Having a local engineering organization with ability to do EPC on very complex projects obviously helps and is a competitive advantage from a Linde perspective. Our customers have obviously been working on their project for a period of time as well and are well advanced in terms of their own construction activity. So again, for you, good watching that. And I am not concerned about delays on their end.
Having said that, contractually, we always protect ourselves, and we have date certain contracts to ensure that we are — if we have done the investments and done the construction that we needed to do that we are able to then ensure that our facility fees or facility charges are then paid to us on a date certain basis. Coming on to the downhole activity. We are talking to at least three, if not more, very competent world-class companies that are experts in carbon sequestration. And those discussions are progressing well. And obviously, you would expect us to do some diligence around their ability to get permits sake, where they stand in that process. Some have already applied. Others are fairly advanced in terms of their preparation. Again, we feel good about how they are kind of in terms of readiness to manage the sequestration when it comes to the pipeline.
Operator: Our next question comes from Vincent Andrews with Morgan Stanley.
Vincent Andrews: Just sticking with that global end-market trend slide, two aspects of it. One, is this going to be the last quarter of difficult healthcare comparisons? And should that yellow box start to turn green? And then secondly, the other piece within industrial actually had the worst sequential sales growth. So, what in particular within that other bucket was driving that minus 6% sequentially?
Sanjiv Lamba: Right. So, we are about lapping the COVID volumes. Vince, you’re right that we will see that largely lap now. I think the point that you can also note is a sequential movement on that suggests that we are actually headed in the right direction. You’ll see that green — the greening up of it, if you like, in the quarters ahead. So, that looks pretty much in — along the expectations we have for that. As far as the rest is concerned, clearly, we — there are sequential elements over here that have a range of different things. Matt has referenced most of this. I’m going to just highlight a couple of them, so I make sure that I cover that. One, we told you that U.S. on-site business saw customer outages due to the winter storm in the U.S. That obviously affected between metals and chemicals and energy.
We have — and again, you’ve heard this before, but I’ll just repeat it. Our January trends look very good. Most on-site customers are back to seasonal run rates, in line with expectations or even slightly above. We mentioned that in our Q1 guidance already, as you might have seen. So, feeling pretty good about where that trend is in terms of the developments out of the Americas that you saw. As far as EMEA, I’ll just briefly cover and let you know that from our perspective, there has been lower economic activity across EMEA for the course of this year, has been especially true on the on-site business given the volatility on the energy costs, customers in metals, chemicals and energy, obviously, impacted by that. So, volumes were down versus previous year as far as our on-site business portfolio was concerned.
But again, having strong contracts and high-quality customers helps, and you can see that in the EMEA margin, which hit that 25% mark, which was a target that I’d set for them as they moved down that journey to try and bridge the gap to the Americas margin. As far as Europe is concerned, sentiment is, of course, improving. And given the stability in energy pricing, we’re starting to see some volume creeping up slowly as far as that on-site business that I mentioned to you earlier on. But of course, they still remain below previous year levels, and we’re just waiting and watching how that all shapes up.
Vincent Andrews: And just to that other end market, which is the bottom one on that slide, under industrial, is there anything specific in that other piece?
Sanjiv Lamba: Matt, do you want to take this?
Matt White: Yes. Sure, Vince. So a couple of things on other. Generally, what it represents, clearly, items that wouldn’t fit in the categories above it represents a competitor or it would represent distributors that we don’t have an actual end market identified. It is the smallest percent, so large moves could shift it. In this particular case, it’s the seasonal component of LPG. That’s the big driver since that is a sort of a retail component of our Southern Hemisphere business. And that just shows on the year-over-year, right? You can see the year-over-year is still up slightly. This is mainly driven by the seasonality component of some of that residential LPG component.
Operator: Our next question comes from Tony Jones with Redburn.
