Boliden AB (publ)

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to Boliden's Q1 2025 results presentation. My name is Olof Grenmark and I'm head of investor relations. Today we will have a results presentation led by our president and CEO, Mikael Staffas, followed by our CFO, Håkan Gabrielsson. We will also have a Q&A session. Mikael, welcome.

Thank you, Olof. Good seeing all of you. We are, unless it's already clear to everybody, we are in Itik today. We have a lovely day here with about minus five degrees and clear skies. And we're slowly approaching spring over here. The snow shield is maybe a little bit less than it was during winter, but we still have plenty of snow around. We will have later today the AGM here as well. And then later this afternoon, We will also inaugurate the dam project, and I'll talk a little bit more about that one in a little while. So anyway, all of you, welcome this morning. First of all, the highlights of the quarter. We had an operating profit of 2.6 billion kronor. In this, there has been a negative impact from the Finnish strikes of about 100 million, very much in line with what we said when we talked about a quarter back. free cash flow of a negative 1.8 or 1.9 billion SEC. Håkan will take you through some of those details, but in essence, we have built back some of the working capital that we very effectively or almost too effectively worked down in Q4. We have lower recoveries and lower mill volume in high-tech. That is, though, however, very much in line or even slightly better than what we had in the press release that we released in early March. The ramp up of Tara has gone quite well and is going according to plan. The ODA has started the commissioning and as those of you who attended in either way or form the Capital Markets Day, we have no updates as such since then. The project is moving along according to plan. We did make a directed share issue that was issued a few weeks back. We decided to make that directed issue when it was clear that we were going to get a closing of the Lundin deal sooner than we thought. And eventually we got all the things clear and we did close the deal last week on Wednesday. So given that we've had Easter holidays, I think this is today our second day of of real kind of action into the asset as such. Financial performance, I said, 2.6 billion in the quarter. Free cash flow, negative 1.9 billion. CapEx of 2.9 billion. Håkan will come back and talk more about all these numbers. The key projects, and this, of course, very important for the future, and we have generally, we are doing quite on plan compared to what we said before. The other expansion, there is no news we're proceeding according to the plans that we had that we presented on the Capital Markets Day. The Kysnerberg expansion is going fine as well. We have had our first trial and the first loads up the underground trolley line. We are now working on getting this one fully commissioned and we will inaugurate it in about a couple of weeks from now officially. Rönnscherf cell house is also moving ahead according to project and we will have the ramp up there during the second half of 26. The Boliden area tailings and recycling project is also well under well also for completion the second half of 2026. The Tara restart ramp up has worked very well. We are very well set for this year's target of 1.8 million tons and we're moving on to then in a couple of years reach 2.2 million tons in Tara. On the ESG side, it looks here like the greenhouse gas emissions are slightly up, which they are year on year, but they are moving according to plan. So there's nothing really much to talk about that. We had a relatively good quarter in terms of injuries. We have come down a step. It doesn't mean that this is in any way an easy ride. And we've had some nasty near misses in the quarter that has... Once again, put even more focus from our side on the issue of safety. Sick leave going a little bit the wrong way. I think this is in line with what we see quite a lot in Sweden and Finland over this winter, where the influences and the colds have had a relatively larger spread than usual. Market side and market development. This, of course, something that we can talk a lot about. It's, of course, first we need to talk about what happened in the quarter and then maybe separately about what happened after the quarter. But in the quarter, we've had a good development generally, especially of the base metals or the metal prices. We did have already during the quarter a slight downturn in the dollar, which affected us negatively. But all in all, it was a relatively good market terms throughout the quarter. And you can also see on this long run that this was on a higher level than really been seen before. Then after the quarter, you see this in this slide here with the second white line, which is after the release of the quarter, then both metal prices and especially the dollar has continued to weaken. And of course, the overall situation has weakened since the end of the quarter. However, having said that, we're still on a relatively good level So far, who knows how the things will develop from here. We'll come back a little bit and talk about this when we talk about the outlook. If we then start looking at what's happening in the industry, we can say that in copper, this line you see here is the price line at the end of the quarter. But even as if we look today, we'll still have a healthy copper market with prices well above marginal costs. You see marginal cost for most mines going down. This is mainly an effect of lower TCs. Then on the zinc side, you also see prices going down, lower TCs helping here, and still, even though the margin is less, a relatively healthy margin as well. And then we look at nickel, and this is nothing new, that we have a situation where the prices are well down in the cost curves, and it's very difficult to make money producing nickel. If we then go back and look at ourselves and look at our mine production, I think, well, it's, of course, a disappointment compared to last year, but it's still slightly higher than what we had guided for. The diorite intrusion is, of course, the issue that we are struggling with and that we're fighting with. And then we have the oxidizer, where the oxidizer will go away faster. And Likavare is now up in full production, which is an apostate site in Itik. In Garpenberg, we had a strong production, but we did have lower grades. We did alert to this during the capital market day that we would have lower zinc rates. Silver grades were quite according to the annual guiding. In the Ikevitsa, we also had a stable production, the mill volume just under the permit level that we have there. Bulin area, of course, is an area that's right now feeling very well from high gold prices. But we also had a strong performance in terms of the mining activities there. And we had a higher mill volume than in both our comparison periods. And Tara, we've had the ramp up going very well in the quarter. On the smelter side, we started off the year in a pretty tough situation. We ran into a problem with the feed, especially on the copper side. That improved during the quarter. And when you add the thing up, we finished relatively well. But there was a challenging concentrate situation, both for Rönnsjö and for Harjavalta. It's also important here to point out, and I'll just say it here as an extra note, some people have this morning made a big thing about the fact that we have lower sales. That is in such just a very big success because in the smelters where we have a lot of gold that's going through, when we operated Rönnshop with the tank house, this was a very good raw material strategy because we got free gold. When you don't have a tank house, that is not such a smart raw material theory because you end up paying for gold that you cannot recover and the economics are much worse. We have managed to turn around our raw material supply in a substantial way. Gold production is down a lot. That is good. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. Even with the high gold prices, that is a good thing. And, of course, the challenge will be, and we are working on that, that as we, towards the end of next year, start getting full production again through a tank house to then kind of get back to our kind of ideal raw material mix in that situation. And I should say Harrivatn and Kokkola both were impacted by strikes. Kokkola did have an unplanned maintenance in the roaster, but apart from that, good production as well. And in Odda, We are now ramping up production from relatively low level and it's come a little bit up. There's quite a lot more still to be done. With that, I'll give it over to you, Håkan, to talk a little bit about the financial summary.

Thank you, Mikael, and good morning. So financially, I think you've seen the numbers. We report an EBIT excluding or an operating profit excluding process inventories of 2.6 billion. That is substantially up compared to the same quarter last year. And it's down compared to Q4, which was a strong quarter, but also very much boosted by insurance.