2/10/2022

speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for holding and welcome to Suzano's conference call to discuss the results for the fourth quarter of 2021. We would like to inform that all participants will be in a listen-only mode during the presentation that will be addressed by the CEO, Mr. Walter Schalke, and other executive officers. After the company's remarks are completed, there will be a question and answer section when further instructions will be given. Should any participant need assistance during this call, please press star zero to reach the operator. Before proceeding, please be aware that any further looking statements are based on the beliefs and assumptions of Suzano's management and all information currently available to the company. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions because they relate to future events and therefore depend on circumstances that may or may not occur in the future. You should understand the general economic conditions, industry conditions, and other operating factors could also affect the future results of Suzano and could cause results to differ materially from those expressed in such forward-looking statements. Now, I would like to turn the floor over to the company's CEO. Please, Mr. Walter Schalke, you may proceed.

speaker
Walter Schalke
Chief Executive Officer

Good morning, everyone. It's a great pleasure to have you here with us to discuss the fourth quarter results and annual results of Suzano. I'm very pleased to have with us today the major part of our C-level. And please, if you want to have any kind of questions, please be prepared to do it to all of us. I would like to share with you that I'm very Proud of the results of 2021 of Susana. I would like to thank you publicly, all of our 16,000 employees and our leadership that delivered the all-time high results of our history. And not only that, we are preparing the company for the future as well. We had extremely good volumes on Pope last year, The paper has the outstanding results as Fabio is going to share with us. We are able to deliver almost 23.5 billion reais of EBITDA last year, and that was extremely positive and could allow us to reduce our net debt from $12.3 billion to $10.4 billion last year, almost $1.9 billion We did have impact on inflation and then our cash cost was impacted from our budget and from the previous year. But we are preparing the company for the future. We have an extremely good position on liquidity at this point of time. And our leverage right now is 2.4 times net debt over EBITDA. More important than the results that we had last year is that we are preparing the company for the next coming years. As you may know, we have five different strategic avenues and we are pursuing all of them. We are on a structural basis continue to reduce our costs for the next coming years. We've retrofitted some of our plants with the new project Cerrado, and in addition to that, we have extremely important development on the forest side, on the reduction on the average radius from the forest to the plant. We will continue to keep our relevance on the pulp market with our new project Cerrado. Aires is going to share with us We continue to have vertical integration as part of our strategy. The fluff market has been performing extremely well. We have been working on the consumer goods that have been doing well, and the paper did all-time results last year, as Fabio is going to share. Our perception and we have been working that is novability is critical for us. And then we have the new addressable markets for the future. We are delivering new opportunities. One example is Spinova that last year had their IPO with extremely good acceptance of the market. and we continue to play a very important leading sustainability role for the future and carbon markets will become even more important for the future. Now I'm going to pass to Cristina that is going to share our views about ESG in the last year and for the coming years.

speaker
Cristina
Executive Officer, ESG and Sustainability

Thank you, Walter. Good morning, everybody. 2021 was a year of continuity and ambition elevation. On the environmental front, we are again pioneers in unique and breakthrough nature conservation goals. We established a biodiversity corridors goals and to our knowledge, we are the only company with a target of such nature. On the climate change front, which is so essential to our business strategy, we are raising our own bar. We adhered to the science-based target initiative and the business ambition for 1.5 degrees. And very importantly, Thank you very much. and or gender diversity in the final hiring stages aligned with our long-term commitments. I am very proud to share that diversity and inclusion is a target for 100% of the people in leadership positions, impacting their variable compensation. Again, this shows Susano can be a trendsetter. In our shared value approach and increasing scope of our community impact, We made very significant progress in the achievement of our long-term poverty reduction goal. In addition, Susana's programs and projects had the domino effect of doubling income generation. Sustainable companies have good governance, and progress on this front is a necessary lever and catalyzer for progress on the environmental and social pillars. In that sense, we gave formality to practices that were already occurring, as you can see on the slide. Formal responsibility for ESG and risk management, mandatory periodic performance, evaluation for board members and minimum attendance. Finally, I would like to highlight the celebration worth the achievements of SUSANO from last year. That signals how we have increased embeddedness of sustainability in our business strategy and operation, as well as our evolution in transparency. We raised $3.1 billion in sustainability-linked bonds and sustainability-linked loans. This has been tied to greenhouse gas emissions, intensity reduction, the reduction of our industrial water use, and diversity and inclusion targets, specifically increasing women in leadership positions. There's now places, as of December of 2021, our debt linked to ESG at almost 40% of the company's total debt. Susano also had in June our first ESG call, a quantum leap to enhance engagement with our stakeholders. And finally, on the ESG indexes and ratings, I want to highlight and celebrate that Susano reached an A- in all three carbon disclosure project questionnaires, water, climate, and forest. We were coming from a B-score. So that's on the sustainability front, and now we're going to speak of our paper business. So over to you, Fabio Almeida.

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