Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.

Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. is an American industrial gases company that produces atmospheric gases (oxygen, nitrogen, argon), process gases (hydrogen, helium, carbon monoxide, syngas), and related equipment for customers in refining, chemicals, metals, electronics, manufacturing, medical, and food industries, generating $12.04 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Founded in 1940 and headquartered in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the company operates in approximately 50 countries, employs roughly 21,300 people, and has paid a rising dividend for 43 consecutive years. It is one of the four companies that dominate the global industrial gas industry, alongside Linde, Air Liquide, and Messer.

This is a story about a genuinely durable industrial franchise at a moment of unusual flux. The core business — supplying essential gases to large industrial customers under 15-to-20-year contracts with cost pass-through provisions — possesses structural characteristics that should command a premium in almost any market. But the company has layered onto that foundation two of the world's largest clean-hydrogen projects, NEOM in Saudi Arabia and the proposed Louisiana blue-hydrogen complex, that together represent an enormous capital commitment with uncertain returns. A CEO transition in February 2025, a bruising activist campaign, $3.6 billion in project exit charges taken in the second quarter of fiscal 2025, and a Middle East conflict disrupting helium supply chains have collided to produce a range of plausible outcomes for the stock as wide as it has been in a decade.

The file turns on a single question: whether the clean-hydrogen mega-projects create or destroy value relative to simply reinvesting in the traditional industrial gas business and returning excess capital to shareholders. The stock at roughly $276 — about 21 times the midpoint of guided FY2026 adjusted earnings — is not obviously demanding, but neither is it pricing in much probability that the answer turns out to be "destroy."