Industrial gases major Linde posted a first-quarter net income of $1.9bn, up 11% year-on-year, despite facing “increasingly challenging global conditions.”
Quarterly operating profit totalled $2.4bn on the back of strong sales of $8.8bn.
CEO Sanjiv Lamba said the results underscore the resilience of its operating model, discipline of capital allocation and “perseverance of management actions.”
Americas sales of $4bn were up 10% on 2025, leading to an operating profit of $1.3bn, while APAC sales of $1.7bn were up 11% versus the prior year.
Compared with first quarter 2025, underlying sales increased 6%, driven by 6% volumes primarily in the electronics, and chemicals and energy end markets and projects startups.
Europe, Middle East & Africa sales of $2.2bn were up 7% year-on-year, yielding an operating profit of $784m.
Linde Engineering was one of the company’s few underperforming segments. Sales were $517m, down 8% year-on-year. Order intake for the quarter was $640m and third-party sale of equipment backlog was $2.8bn.
©Linde
The downtrend follows a confirmed by Linde EVP and CFO Matthew White earlier this year, where he discussed job cuts on the ground.
“The majority of [job cuts] right now is in the engineering segment,” he said. “That is not expected to come back, it’s more a function of how we run our company … you have to get ahead of inflation and structure your organisations around the regions you operate in.”
Order intake for the quarter was $640m and third-party sale of equipment backlog was $2.8bn.
