Billerud Ab (Sweden)

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Billerwood Third Quarter Report 2024 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today. Lina Schitter, please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to this webcast and conference call. We have today published Billruth's results for the third quarter of 2024. Our president and CEO, Ivar Vatne, and our CFO, André Kress, will present the results and answer questions. So without further delay, I would like to hand over to the speakers. And first up is Ivar. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Lena. And good morning, everyone. And thanks for joining in this beautiful Thursday morning. To be excited to present another solid quarter for Billerud. It's been a quarter with few surprises. And in general, we are pleased with the result we see on several fronts. So let's get into it then. Next slide, please. And in essence, we've seen strong net sales growth and a profit recovery trend throughout 2024 is continuing. We record plus 6% net sales growth, plus 9% organic and currency neutral. And our top line growth is coming from both regions, and across most of our categories. We see also for this quarter significantly improved profitability, both versus a year ago and versus previous quarter. And what is satisfactory to see is that the recovery is coming from both regions. Europe records its best profitability in over three years. And I will continue my praise for our region, North America. Another excellent quarter with strong results across the board. And coming in with 18% EBITDA, making it a long trend of superb results. Key for a strong progress to improve bottom line has been our relentless focus on fighting cost inflation through proactive pricing and mix management. And we have succeeded again this quarter on exactly that priority. And last but not least, we continue to deliver on our profitability enhancement program and add another 220 million SEC this quarter, making us well positioned towards a full year target for 2024. So next slide, please. And let's get into some of the categories and channels with market conditions. And overall, and very much as we had expected, we experienced slightly better sentiment during the quarter, so during Q3. But we have not been operating at strong levels in any of our categories. Having said that, there is no doubt that we do see a worsening situation going into Q4. And the underlying consumption is below where we expect the long-term trend to be. And this is clearly a trend shift versus what we saw during first half of 24. But keep in mind, situation is different per channel and per region. This is a very important point to keep in mind. So add a little bit more detail. So for food and drink, our biggest channel by far, we experienced normal conditions during the quarter. And going forward, we do expect stable conditions for liquid packaging board, while somewhat softening conditions for container board. For our printing and publishing channel, it's been a solid quarter. Presidential campaign and closure of more capacity in US has improved our position as the natural choice and the clear market leader for domestically sourced graphic paper. We have started Q4 well for graphic paper. In consumer and luxury, That was a disappointment during Q3, and we ended worse than what we had expected. And we experienced a clear negative shift of the sentiment during the quarter. And in general, you can say that cart and board is in a tough spot with overcapacity and in general quite weak underlying demand. And we see this in several of our big European markets, with low GDP growth and consumers holding back on spending. We're not too optimistic about carton board in the short term and expected to go further down before we hopefully see a recovery later in 2025. And lastly, for our industrial channel, Q3 was pretty okay. We've seen decent demand and upward pricing for both brown and white sac. But also here, we see a worsening situation and then negative trend shift happening towards the end of Q3. So we expect tougher conditions towards the end of the year, in particular on the volume side. So with that, I hand it over to André.