When assessing Industrial Gas Companies’ reliability, quantitative indicators such as financial health, production efficiency and supply chain health need to be incorporated. For example, the gearing ratio in 2022 for Linde Group is as low as 45%, under the industry level of 60%, indicating minimal financial risk; Net profit margin was 18.3% in the corresponding quarter, a much higher value than Air Liquide’s 14.2%, indicating its cost management and efficiency strengths. Statistics for the production side are that the oxygen capacity of the air separation unit (ASU) of the industry leader with low-temperature rectification technology can be up to 80,000 cubic meters/hour, and the unit energy consumption can be as low as 0.32 kWh/ cubic meter, while the energy consumption of small and medium-sized industries can be 30% higher, which will directly influence the customer gas cost. In supply chain, Air France achieved 98.5% on-time delivery of liquid nitrogen in the Chinese market in 2021 leveraging its distributed tank network (50-200 tons per tank capacity) and real-time monitoring system to maintain the transportation loss rate at 0.5%, while local companies typically have a loss rate above 2%.
Safety record and technological innovation is another key aspect. For Praxair, its 2020 safety accident rate is a mere 0.12 incidents per million hours worked, below the 0.5 threshold of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), thanks in large part to the 1.5 percent of annual revenue (about $320 million) invested in equipment automation upgrades. In the field of hydrogen, Linde Group’s Type IV hydrogen storage tank operates at 70 MPa, weighs 40% less compared to the standard model, has a life cycle of more than 15 years, and provides the fuel cell vehicle durability of more than 800 kilometers. Besides, whenever an industrial gas company acquires ISO 14064 accreditation, its capture percentage of carbon can be as high as 90%, such as Air Products’ Blue hydrogen plan in 2023 in Saudi Arabia that preserves 5 million tons of carbon dioxide yearly, which by default reduces the customers’ cost of carbon taxes by approximately $180 million annually.
Being market responsive is no less than getting customer participation. As the McKinsey report predicted, the year-on-year rate of industrial gas demand in the world in 2023 will be 5.7%, where electronic special gases (such as neon, hexafluorethane) will grow by 12%, and R&D expenditure of leading companies will be over 4% (such as the Air Liquide Group’s yearly R&D budget 800 million euros). Ensure gas purity to levels above 99.9999% in high-precision uses such as semiconductor manufacturing. TSMC, for example, has supply contracts with industrial gas companies that include “outage compensation clauses” that require suppliers to pay 200 per cent of the order value if gas supplies are interrupted for over four hours, and such contracts have lowered customer attrition rates to below 3 per cent. At the same time, digital products became a new standard, i.e., Linde’s “Remote Gas Management platform” constantly monitoring customer tank levels in real-time (accuracy ±1%) and predicting replenishment cycles (deviation <2 hours) and reducing customers’ inventory expense by 25%.
Historical cases also support the assessment framework. A leak of nitrogen in Harris County in the United States resulted in over $200 million in production losses for local businesses in 2018, and the firm was penalized $54 million for failing to utilize smart sensors in pressure vessels (industry standards dictate that data must be collected every 10 minutes). On the contrary, during the 2021 Texas cold wave, the firm ensured zero interruption of the medical oxygen supply chain through a redundant piping system (having the ability to load 150% of daily demand) and distributed power sources (80% of sites have gas turbine backup power). These events show that the reliability of an industrial gas company must be measured in terms of a combination of history-based long-term data measurement (e.g., 5-year mean time between failures MTBF) and disaster response times (e.g., disaster recovery system start-up speed <30 minutes).
In short, from monetary values to technical innovation, from the resilience of supply chain to record of compliance, industrial gas companies need to cross-check the similarity of their dependency on multi-dimensioned data, and supplement this with moving measurements of trends in industry performance (like 22% annual growth in hydrogen energy market) and factual requirement of real customers (like semiconductor manufacturers requiring contaminants in the gases <1 ppb).