Billerud Ab (Sweden)

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Billerwood Q4 Report 2024 webcast and conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Lena Chatawa, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to this presentation of Billerud's fourth quarter and full year results for 2024. The presentation will be held by Billerud's President and CEO, Iva Vatnes, and our CFO, Andrei Kvist. Afterwards, there will be a Q&A session. So by that, we would like to get started. So over to you, Ivan.

Thank you, Lena. And good morning, everyone. And thanks for listening in. We are excited to present another solid quarter for Billerud and some concluding remarks for 2024. So let's get into it. And next slide, please. Now trying to summarize 2024 in a simple manner is not easy. It has been a year with several twists and turns. And also for 2024, much of the year was in essence about navigating through uncertain and difficult market conditions. Having said that, 2024 landed clearly better versus 2023. It's also been a year with different realities between the two regions. A region, North America, has had another very solid year and delivered consistently strong results. Tail-winding of a strong performing U.S. economy. It's in particular impressive to see a North American result when we keep in mind the operating rates are still below 70%. Our Europe region has experienced more challenging conditions with relatively slow consumer demand for many of our categories and all-time high costs on portfolio. In terms of the financials, I am satisfied with improved results we see on several fronts. We end the year with 5% net sales growth and significantly improved profitability. We have a strong balance sheet and will proceed to the AGM with a dividend proposal of 350 SEC per share. That is in line with our dividend policy and is up 75% versus a year ago. Next slide, please. And for our quarter four, it was another period of robust financial performance, enabling us to end 2024 on a good note. We recorded plus 20% net sales growth, plus 18% organic and currency neutral. And encouragingly, the top line growth is broad-based, stemming from both regions and across most categories. The profitability improvement is significant. 13% adjusted EBITDA for the quarter, which is 5 percentage points up versus last year. North America continues to impress us and delivered again a wonderful quarter. Its best profitability performance in almost two years with an EBITDA margin of 19%. It's also good to see a region, Europe, which suffers from more soft market conditions, delivered a clear profitability uplift versus a year ago. Strong cash flow conversion in the corner, meaning we end up with a net debt leverage of one time EBITDA, which is the lowest ratio we've had in quite a bit of time. So next slide, please, and over to some comments about market condition and sentiment. Q4 turned out to be a bit better than we had expected. In fact, we managed to Q4 with strong volume delivery, particularly for region Europe. Most of our channels and categories are operating on the close to normalized conditions, with the only notable exception being consumer and luxury. And for us, that means carton board and coated liner. They are suffering from weaker conditions with plenty of supply out there and in general, weak consumer demand. Now, going into 2025, There are reasons to believe we passed the bottom of the curve and we are seeing some signs of improved marketing conditions. As we had anticipated for Q1, we will have a positive net pricing impact from a substantial and needed price increase for liquid packaging board, which is partly offset by price reduction on paper board and second craft paper. But positively, We have very recently announced price increases on both Container Board and SAC, which will help us from Q2 non-boards. These come in addition to the price increase we also recently announced on quota-free sheet rolls in North America. We've also seen recently that pull pricing is starting to come upwards again. We are more optimistic towards 2025 than we were three months ago, although I do want to stress the point that uncertainty is still high. So with that, I want to hand it over to André.