Mondi plc

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss the third quarter trading update. I'm Andrew King, your group CEO, and with me today is Mike Powell, our group CFO. I'm sure you've all seen the announcement this morning, so I'll just pick up a few points before happy to go into questions. Our performance in the third quarter was, as we expected, lower than the previous quarter with an underlying EBITDA of 223 million euros. As we mentioned in August, we moved some of our planned maintenance shuts from the second quarter into the third quarter. Combined with the normal shut schedule for Q3, this resulted in a higher impact of planned maintenance shuts in the third quarter when compared to the previous quarter. In addition, we advised of a likely forestry fair value loss in the second half of the year when compared to the gain that we booked in the first half. Together for the third quarter, these resulted in a difference of 90 million euros when comparing the third quarter result with that of the second. Seasonally softer demand and modestly higher input costs mainly related to paper for recycling price increases and higher external energy purchases also impacted the quarter. Packaging paper price increases implemented earlier this year benefited our upstream businesses in the quarter, while uncoated fine paper and pulp prices declined in the quarter following a recovery in pricing earlier in the year. Going into the final quarter of the year, trading conditions remain muted against the backdrop of an uncertain macroeconomic environment, but there are fewer planned maintenance shuts, and we do expect a normal seasonal pickup in demand. We are very excited by the progress we are making on our capital investment projects. Our two biggest expansionary projects, the paper machine investments at Steti and Duino, remain on track for startup next year. While it can be difficult to stay the course on these investments in a down cycle, I firmly believe in our approach of investing consistently on a through cycle basis to deliver strong value creation. Together with the recently announced acquisition of Schumacher's Western European assets, which we expect to complete in H1 next year, we are very well placed to capitalize on the structural growth in sustainable packaging. With that, Mike and I are happy to take your questions.

Thank you. This is the conference operator. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star 11 on their touchtone telephone please pick up the receiver when asking questions. We will now take our first question. Please stand by. And the first question comes from the line of Lars Kuehlberg from Stifel. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Thank you for taking my questions and good morning. Just to be clear, can you Please call out the fair value changes and the maintenance activity in the quarter as there are pretty big items and specify them. Also, if you kind of look at your underlying performance, excluding those items, it does look quite a sizable deterioration and with a backdrop of somewhat improving demand, near or at least, and with a significant part of your revenue base seeing progressive pricing. If you can walk us through the buckets there, if there was any particular negative volume movements in the quarter that you want to call out. And you talked about modest cost increases. We know about OCC, but it does seem as if there's more than modest cost increases. But if you can put some color there, that'd be helpful. Thank you. And finally, what do you expect for forest value Q4 in the total annual maintenance cost, please. Thank you.