BillerudKorsnäs AB (publ)

Welcome to the Billawood Q2 Report 2025 webcast and conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers presentation there will 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 Shatawa, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Good morning and very welcome to this presentation in connection to the Q2 Report that we have published this morning. With me is our President and CEO Ivar Vatne along with our CFO Andrej Kles. They will hold the presentation and afterwards take questions from the telephone conference. So with that we will get started. Please go ahead Ivar.

Thank you Lena and good morning everyone. And thanks for listening in this Sunday Friday at least here in Stockholm. It's a tale of two stories for a quarterly report. And I think it summarized quite well in the heading here on the slide. Another excellent quarter for region North America while we are navigating through more challenging conditions for region Europe. But let's get into the details. So next slide please. And if we start from the top we record flattened sales growth when adjusting for currency. Growth in North America and decline in Europe. A region North America continues to impress and record yet another excellent quarter. And 22% EBITDA margin is a level we are clearly happy with. In fact 22% is the highest profitability level we've had in North America since end of 2022. The situation for region Europe has been more challenging and market conditions have gradually turned more and more unfavorable during the quarter. And in essence we are navigating in a market where we face weak demand and supply over capacity. Now despite this and with our continuous strong focus on working capital discipline we have been able to produce an excellent cash generation coming in with cash growth from our pro activities of 75% versus year ago. The progress on our evolution journey in the US continues and we've taken new important steps during the quarter. And I want to share some more details on that part so let's get into the next slide please. Now evolving our product portfolio in North America towards packaging material is one of the top priorities for the company. And I'm both proud and excited to see the progress we're doing. We reach another important milestone during the quarter with 1000 tons sold of our each line tribute and low grammage carton board voyager. And overall we see strong interest amongst both the new and existing customers to carry out trials for the new products. And overall the feedback on the product quality and performance has been highly encouraging. It confirms again that the local US production within our industry is a good place to be where we can offer quality, speed, reliability and predictability. Also in terms of the capital project to enable even further exhalation in our evolution journey we are progressing as per plan. And I'm looking forward to providing you with more updates on this exciting journey as we move along in 2025. Next slide please and over to some market comments. And it is challenging to give a proper market read these days. And uncertainty in particular in the wake of geopolitical decisions seems to be the new normal and can change industry parameters literally overnight. But there is no doubt that some of the in-going optimism for demand recovery in region Europe for 2025 is a memory far away. The training conditions for most of our categories in Europe weaken during the quarter and there are three main reasons for that. So number one consumer demand is still muted and is yet to recover. The growth rates we are expecting long term for this industry and most of the categories we have exposure to. Number two we are seeing the impact of more production capacity coming online in the region first and foremost within board and three the tariff impact is real and we see now evidence of how the trade flows have started to change. Not only with volume historically being exported to into US but now due to import tariffs have some competitiveness and is partly relocated back into Europe. We also see some Asian volume struggling to find its way into US and puts more pressure into markets in the Middle East. And overall we do not expect the situation to improve going into Q3. Now the notable exceptions we operate on the more normalized conditions are liquid packaging border here in Europe and our graphic and speciality paper in North America. For both these cases we are expecting to continue their solid performance. We've continuously seen over the past quarters. So with that I'd like to hand it over to André.