“This mostly occurred in December, but the vast majority of customers are back to their seasonal run rates. Therefore, this is not expected to be an issue going forward.”

In context

“ass-through of energy costs and has no effect on operating profit dollars. However, this will impact operating margins as we gross up or down sales and variable costs. Volume is down 1% from last year and 4% sequentially. This -- prior year, economic weakness in EMEA and severe weather conditions in the U.S. more than offset growth in APAC and project start-ups. Most of the slower volume came from pipeline customers. So, there's a larger impact to sales than profit given the contractual fixed payments. Versus the third quarter, volume decline is coming from weather impact to U.S. pipeline customers, EMEA's softer economy and normal seasonal impacts from Southern Hemisphere LPG. We saw a larger-than-normal amount of U.S. pipeline customer outages toward the end of the quarter from weather. This mostly occurred in December, but the vast majority of customers are back to their seasonal run rates. Therefore, this is not expected to be an issue going forward. Pricing actions remain robust with an 8% increase from 2021 and 2% from the third quarter. These increases are broad-based and aligned with the weighted inflation rate. Operating profit of $2 billion resulted in a record 25.3% operating margin. Excluding pass-through, operating margins expanded both sequentially and year-over-year in all gas segments as pricing effects net of cost inflation continue to improve underlying business quality. The engineering segment had an abnormally high operating margin this quarter due to favorable project timing. Recall that engineering follows a percent of completion accounting method. Customer cash deposits are held on the balance sheet as liabilities until we have the contractual right to bill the customer, at which point the liability is recognized on”