Praxair Earnings Call Nuggets: Rebound Activity in China and Risk Assessment

Praxair, Inc. (NYSE:PX) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Rebound Activity in China

Robert Walker – Jefferies: This is Rob Walker in for Laurence. Jim, can you go into a bit more detail on the rebound you are seeing in activity in China?

James S. Sawyer – EVP and CFO: I think that you can see that in several areas. I admit the most important one in my mind is really the pace of decision making and the pace of moving forward on projects. We saw generally during the segment third quarter of 2012, kind of lot of pause in decision-making as people were waiting for the (party) members to get chosen and so forth. That in turn slowed down capital spending and now we have seen that improve. So we are seeing much quicker decision-making in terms of new project proposals and we are also seeing additional strengthening demand in merchant gases and onsite gases particularly in December and first couple of weeks of January.

Robert Walker – Jefferies: Then can you update us on where merchant utilization rates are by region and kind of how those – whether they are up or not sequentially?

James S. Sawyer – EVP and CFO: We don’t really go through them all by region, but I would tell you that utilization rates generally speaking are sequentially off in Europe. They were lower in the U.S. They were lower – in Asia actually they are up slightly, but generally they are not as strong as we would like them to be.