Essity AB (publ)

Good morning and welcome to Esri's presentation of the Q2 results. My name is Sandra Åberg, I'm Head of Investor Relations here at Essity. We will begin with a summary of the key business highlights from our CEO Ulrika Karlsrud, followed by the financials and a closer look at the key metrics presented by our CFO Fredrik Rystad. After that, we will have a Q&A session where you will have the possibility to engage directly with us. If you would like to ask a question, you just press star one on your telephone. With that, let me hand over to our CEO. Ulrika, welcome.

Thank you, Sandra. And welcome also from my side to this presentation. We can summarize the quarter with that we delivered a positive organic sales growth and a result of 4.7 billion SEK. And the fact that we have this stable development in a quite challenging market environment is a testament to our resilience and to the strength of our broad portfolio of essential hygiene and health products. The organic sales growth that we delivered was close to 2%, 1.9% to be precise, and primarily driven by a strong pricing performance. We also grew very nicely in our strategic categories and segments, such as feminine care, incontinence care, retail, wound care, lymphology, Torque PeakServe and Torque Skincare. And it's promising and encouraging that the focus and investments that we put behind driving higher yielding segments is paying off. On the other hand, we also in some of our segments and categories experienced a lower demand in the quarter as customers and consumers are constraining their spending following the weak economic climate and the global uncertainty that we see. And that resulted in limited volume growth. Looking at our profit margins, or at our margins first, because we can talk about our gross margin first, that was on a very high level, actually on a record high level. The limited volume growth and the increasing SG&A costs, though, impacted our profit margins. So the 13.7% adjusted EBITDA margin, that is a decline compared to the same quarter last year, but a sequential improvement compared to previous quarter. A highlight of the quarter is the strong output that we had from our innovation pipeline, as you will see now when we move into the different business areas, starting with health and medical. Now, Q2 2025 marks the 17th consecutive quarter of growth for medical solutions. So also this quarter, we were growing medical solutions, not the least in wound care. We also had good growth in our incontinence care business in many markets. There were some markets, though, where we had more challenging market conditions. One example is in the UK, where lower-cost competition gained ground. Another example is in Colombia, where the government has been restricting funding to healthcare. Here it's important to remember though that we have a quite unique advantage that we are present with incontinence care across the different channels. So if a patient does not get a TNR product through healthcare then he or she can actually then purchase the product instead in the retail channel and we pick up some TNR volumes there instead. The underlying market growth or the underlying demand continues to be high in all of our categories across health and medical. And we continue to execute on our strategy, which is to market holistic solutions that are providing good quality care at the lowest possible total cost for our customers, while also making sure that we have offers for those customers who choose to buy the cheapest product per piece. Then we also continuously, of course, upgrade our assortment and make sure that we have products that are relevant for everyone. So in this quarter, we extended our bariatric range in the US with sizes 3XL and 4XL, which demonstrates that we indeed provide products for everybody and everybody. Moving to consumer goods, one of the highlights of the quarter was our good growth in feminine care. We are strengthening positions in many markets, to mention a few, Mexico, UK, Australia. Also here it's important to have products for different income levels and give us the pricing flexibility and so on. So here we introduced a tiering approach in the quarter. And the product body form ultimate is coming on shelf in the UK as we speak. And it's designed for heavy flows and allows us to trade up consumers to higher value products. Another highlight in the quarter in consumer goods was the strong growth we had in incontinence retail, not the least in Tiananmen. This is a very attractive segment for us. One out of four men over 40 experience some kind of urine leakage, and only five to seven percent are using purpose-made products. That's quite a potential. And we are putting ourselves in an even better position to capture that potential by doing a facelift of our Tena Men range that we did in this quarter. So we upgraded the packaging and we also put some even stronger claims on the packaging to make it even more appealing and relevant for this target audience. The low light in the quarter was the continued weak development in baby care. So here we are impacted by the low birth rates that we see, but also by continuous very high competitive pressure and an increasing price sensitivity among the consumers. We are responding by accelerating and gearing up our promotional pressure and also, of course, to upgrade our products. So we are launching in this quarter an upgraded product with softer leg calves. So we are making sure that we are as sensitive as possible to the delicate skin of those little ones. Also, I think interesting news is that we gained another contract with Amazon in the quarter that is kicking in in Q4. In consumer tissue, we experienced good growth in the low-tier, mid-tier segments, and that is again showing that consumers are getting more price sensitive with the inflation and also with the increased cost of living. So important for us in consumer tissue is to make sure that we adapt our assortment to be as relevant as possible and as competitive as possible in all the different tiers along the good, better, best spectrum. If you remember last quarter, we had two launches in the value segment. And this quarter, we are upgrading our premium segment, specifically our Just One product. And we are then extending the Coreless technology to this product. And I must say, this is a personal favorite for me. As a consumer, not to have to deal with any waste when you change bathroom roll, then that is just wonderful, totally hassle-free. Before leaving consumer goods, I do want to share one more achievement, since it's quite new news, and that is that we were recognized by the Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity, commonly known as the Oscars of the creative industry. We won seven lions for our groundbreaking work on brand building in our feminine care category. And now you might wonder why is that important? Well, it is important because we know that progressive and emotional brand campaigns are impactful and impactful. Brand building is an indicator of future growth. Moving to professional hygiene. Here we experienced a lower demand, especially in the hotel and restaurant sector in North America. So consumers are just restricting their discretionary spending, and we can see that. We follow some indicators here. For example, we can see that the restaurant foot traffic has declined by 3.5% in beginning 2025 compared to last year. We can also see that the hotel occupancy rate is slightly lower than previous years. And those type of indicators is telling us something, and that we also see in our sales. This is mostly in North America, but we can see some tendencies to that also in Southern Europe. That market dynamics, in combination with that we have lost some contracts due to price pressure, led to that we had declining volumes in professional hygiene. However, we were growing strongly in our strategic segments, which is very important. And that we could also see in a favorable mix in the quarter. We also delivered positive organic sales growth here because of that mix, but also because of very good pricing discipline. And going forward, we will continue to be disciplined with pricing. However, we will have to adjust selectively in order to fuel volume growth. We're also working in top-to-top joint business planning with our main distributors to continue to intensify our sales activities. And also here, of course, innovation is an important element to fuel growth. In this quarter, we had some different innovations. The one I want to mention is Torchmatic. That is one sensor dispenser, I should say, for hand towels. Here, we extended the battery lifetime to six years. Previously, it was one year, roughly. And that is setting a new standard in the industry and important for our end customers that then don't have to spend as much time on maintenance. And in fact, the battery lifetime is a barrier for customers to use automatic dispensers. And that is, of course, a barrier that we then remove. Then if we continue with the innovation, also on Torque, we have the Coreless functionality. And you might remember the product that we launched in 24, Torque OptiServe Coreless. And this has been very well received. Now, some customer wins stand out more than others. And we are so proud to now have Torque present at the Yankee Stadium. And speaking about prestigious wins, again this quarter we were recognized for our sustainability performance. For the sixth consecutive year we got awarded by the non-profit organization CDP for our leadership in sustainability, specifically for how we engage and work with our suppliers in our climate action. We were also confirmed as a constituent of the FTSE for good index series. So some strong recognition for our sustainability performance. And with those positive news, I think it's time to hand over to Fredrik so that we can listen to the figures behind this performance. Over to you.

Thank you so much, Ulrika, and I'll be happy to share a little bit of financial information relating to the second quarter. So I'll actually start with our sales and how that's developed in the quarter. And you've touched upon it. We actually did grow organically with just close to 2%. So if you look at this in constant currency, our net sales increased with about 700 million. Now, of course, obviously, S&T, we have most of our net sales and most of our profit, obviously, outside of... of the country of Sweden. And since the Swedish krona has strengthened quite considerably, there is lots of translation impact. So if you look at that in nominal terms, you can see that we had a contraction of our reported net sales of just over 6.5%. Now, if I stay on the organic sales development for a second, and I'll start there with volume. We did have a positive volume growth of 20 basis points, and I'll go through business area by business area, because there were certain differences, actually quite large differences, and starting with health and medical, Ulrika, you mentioned it. We had the 17th consecutive quarter of good growth in medical and especially there on wound care. So really very encouraging development and continuing to be that. That was not the case when it comes to incontinence. Some of you may remember. that in Q1 we also had a low volume development and this was a large largely attributable to pre-buying in Q4 of last year so we were actually counting on that volumes would come back here in Q2 and to a degree that actually also happened but just as you mentioned Ulrika we saw some increased price sensitivity, some increased competition in some of our markets. And clearly this led to a negative volume development for Inco in the quarter. And if we look forward, we'll see, that's at least our estimate, we'll see volumes pick up. But of course, it is for the time being a little bit challenging from a market perspective. So moving on to consumer goods, really strong. And we have seen that now for quite some time, both for incontinence retail and for feminine, a super good growth in terms of volume and also for net sales in total. So all in all, very good. And this is not just isolated to one geography, it's all of our markets. So continuously a very good development. We also did see some volume growth in consumer tissue, mainly in the good and and the low segments, as you alluded to. And of course, as we had also in Q1, our main struggle is related to baby. And we saw another quarter here of quite weak volumes and also weak pricing. So generally speaking, baby is a problem. We have... put in place a number of initiatives and we will take a lot of action here as we go forward. But clearly it was a disappointment with volumes in baby in the quarter. So if I move on then to price and mix, you can see it's really strong. And if you look at the number there, 1.7%, this is all related to price. And we had increases of prices basically in consumer goods, And also professional hygiene, really good development there. And flat also in health and medical. And this is not just isolated temporarily to the full year. We also saw a sequential increase of our prices with roughly 0.3%. So price management continues to work actually really, really well. Now, we will see a little bit of selective price action, as you talked about, Ulrika, in coming quarters. But generally, our price management remains quite strong. So, I'll move on then and talk a little bit about our EBIT margin. a margin and sequentially we did increase our margin from 13.5 to 13.7 but as you can see on this slide if we look at the full year and compare the last year in Q2 we dropped our margin with approximately 1% and you can see that consumer goods increased the margin which was really helpful and we saw a contraction when it comes to professional hygiene and health and medical. What is very, very strong, and this is important to point out, we saw another increase in our gross profit margin with, as you can see here, 20 basis points. And this is despite a very significant increase of COGS. So if you actually look at our COGS number in margin terms, it had a negative impact of roughly about 2%. I'll come back to that in a second. But actually, if you look at that 2%, margin impact, negative margin impact, we compensate it fully, basically all in price. So we have said this many times, we are able to compensate movements or raw material, negative raw material movements, as an example, through our pricing. So our pricing power remains very strong. And so a very good thing with cross-profit margin. Now COGS Those of you that listened to our closing after Q1, you will remember that we guided for sequentially flat cost in terms of COGS. And this was also the case. But if you look at it year on year, you see still a very significant increase. And this is mainly coming from basically raw material. You can say distribution and... And those are the main things, but included in that negative is also tariffs. And we talked a little bit about tariffs, although not quantifying it. And having now seen this for the entire second quarter, we have an impact margin-wise of roughly 0.3%. It's not evenly spread, so it's much more for particularly pre-PH, 0.6%. and health and medical was 0.5, and much less in consumer goods. But overall for the group, 0.3%. So these were the negatives in COGS, raw material distribution and tariffs, and the positive energy and, of course, also savings that we had in the quarter. So if I move on then to A&P, we actually marginally increased our spending in A&P, not a lot, but clearly actually lower than what we saw in organic sales growth. So the margin contribution there, as you can see, was positive. And this was not the case for SG&A. If you look at SG&A in constant currency, and SG&A, what I mean by that is SG&A excluding AMP, you can see an increase of a bit over 7%, so quite considerable. And roughly about two-thirds of that relates to personal cost, and the rest is relating to IT. Now, none of that is unplanned. All of these are things that we have planned, expansion or implementation of our new IT platform, or other sales... supporting activities so it's not unplanned it's just that when we have a low growth and a low volume growth in particular cost absorption becomes much less and therefore the margin impact is not favorable and here of course we will make sure as we go forward that the cost growth is contracted in in future quarters So this is probably a reasonable opportunity to provide you with a little bit of guidance for the coming quarter, so Q3. And as usual, we do this sequentially. So when I mention numbers now, please bear in mind this is Q3 versus Q2. So if I start then with COGS, we expect that to be somewhat lower sequentially, somewhat lower. We expect part of that coming from raw material, a positive raw material impact, and savings picking up a bit. So somewhat lower sequential COGS. And speaking of that savings, we are actually guiding, and you will remember this, 500 to a billion for the full year. We still guide for that range, but... So far this year, savings have been a bit lower and this is due to perhaps a bit lower volumes than expected. So if anything, it's more likely that we'll see cost savings to be COG savings to be in the lower part of that range. But we remain with the estimate of 500 to 1 billion. So if we look at then A&P. We will increase there both in absolute terms and in relation to sales as we go forward. It's not going to be material, but you'll see some increase. And when it comes to SG&A, sequentially, we expect it to be flat. So obviously not increase from the level that you see. So I'll leave EBITDA margin there and I'll move on to cash flow. And here we saw an operating cash flow of 1.5 billion approximately. And this is a bit lower actually than what you would expect from a second quarter. Those of you that know us well, you always know that we are typically relatively weak on cash flow in Q1 and Q2 as we build working capital. So this is not unusual. We do this every every year, but we saw a little bit of increase in accounts receivables and also to a degree in inventory that was a little bit higher than what was usual. When it comes to the working capital buildup, We believe this is temporary. We will adjust our inventory levels. They normally do go up in the second quarter, but they've gone up a little bit too much. So we'll make sure we adjust that in coming quarters. When it comes to accounts receivables, this is more related to phasing. So we will see that picking up also there in coming quarters. When I look at net cash flow, Q2 was much lower than last year. This is technical. This has to do with the fact that in 2025 we paid our dividend in the second quarter, whilst in 2024 we paid our dividend in the first quarter. And we also had much higher share buybacks in the second quarter than we did last year. last year. So with this said, and on the back of this cash flow, we have a slight increase. If you look at the net debt numbers here on this slide, you can see that our net debt is increasing, but we still obviously remain very strong when it comes to financial strength. And with those words, Ulrika, I'll leave back to you.

Yes, let's summarize the quarter again. We delivered positive organic sales growth and a stable profit in spite of weaker volume development than we expected in a challenging market environment. And we're especially pleased with the strong growth of our strategic segments and with the high pace of innovation that we have delivered in the quarter. When it comes to profitability, it was stable, but impacted by the lower volume growth and an increase in SG&A costs. And that brings me to the priorities for the rest of the year. We will continue to execute on our strategy and have specific focus on measures to reduce our cost level and to accelerate volume growth, profitable volume growth, of course. That was all from me.

Thank you, Ulrika, and thank you, Fredrik. Now we will move into Q&A, and Ulrika and Fredrik will join me here. If you have a question, please press star one. If you want to retract the question, press star two. With that, are we ready to get started? We have a list of questions already. Yes. So let me welcome Niklas Ekman, DNB Carnegie. Hi, Niklas.

Hello. Thank you. Can I start with a question on volume growth? As you mentioned, very low volume growth here in Q1 and Q2. Can you tell us a bit more about efforts that you're doing here to restore volumes and particularly here the problems in health and medical? I had trouble understanding how much of this did you see as... maybe temporary problems and how much of this is more structural or at least cyclical. If you can start in that end, please.

I think there are two aspects, of course, irrespective of which category we talk about. One is the market development as such, and that is quite difficult for us to judge what will happen in the market environment, for example, in professional hygiene in the hotel and restaurant sector. But we are, of course, focused on the things that we can influence. And then we're working across our categories with increased sales activities, strengthening our marketing campaign plans, and also what I was alluding to in my presentation, that we focus a lot on making sure that we are competitive also in the low-mid tier segments of our assortment, so that we have a competitive offer all along the spectrum of good, better, best. Speaking about incontinence healthcare specifically, there are a lot of moving parts. We have markets where we are growing very nicely, as I said, and we have also gained some contracts that will kick in later in the year. And then we have some markets where we do have specific challenges. And if we look at that all together, most of the decline that we have seen is temporary. So as Fredrik was saying, we expect to pick up in volumes in incontinence care.

Very clear. Thank you. And you mentioned here in the results statement, you talk about a need to lower costs and increase efficiency. And can you give any examples of this? And is this part of a larger program or is it just included in the guidance of 500 million to 1 billion in savings?

There are two different aspects. One is, of course, the COSSEI program that we have on COGS, the continuous work we have to reduce our COGS levels. And there we had a lower performance in the beginning of the year, but we have very strong plans moving forward. So there we expect to come in between 0.5 to 1 billion SEK as we have expected. as we have talked about previously. Then what I was talking about in my CEO comment was rather the increasing SG&A costs. And the fact that we have a limited volume growth in combination with the weak economic climate, then it's quite clear that our SG&A costs are increasing too fast. As Fredrik was talking about, we do not have the volume growth to absorb those. So we need to take measures to reduce our cost level. We have not launched any cost program, but we believe that we can reduce costs by increasing the focus on this across the organization. I cannot rule out that we will take other measures as we move forward.

Very clear. Thank you. Just a final question. You've been CEO now for a month and a half. Can you tell us some initial learnings here in your new role and what would you expect would be your main priorities in the year ahead and maybe how that differs compared to your predecessor?

As you said, I've been six weeks into the job, so I'm still working on building my perspective on the business. I'm engaging with both external stakeholders as well as spending time out in the organization to shape my view and my perspective. important for me to take the time to really enrich and challenge my initial thinking on what needs to be changed and prioritized and developed to realize and unlock the full potential of SET. So I'm still in that process. Having said that, an advantage of course for me being being in the executive management team for some years, is that I've been able to be up and running operationally from day one. And also one specific thing that I put a lot of focus on is that we should strengthen our customer and consumer focus further in the organization. That will also support speed and agility. When we are consistently delivering and exceeding customer and consumer expectations, then a lot of other things fall in place.

Thank you, Ulrika. Thank you, Niklas, for your questions. We will move on. Next question comes from Patrick Fowlen, Barclays. Hi, Patrick.

Hi, good morning, Eureka, Fredrik and Sandra. And congrats again, Eureka, on the appointment. So I guess starting first with maybe health and medical, you made comments on tougher markets like the UK. And I guess if lower cost offerings are maybe gaining share, will that put pressure on pricing for you guys structurally or how are you guys addressing that? And then just staying within health and medical from a profitability perspective, are there any other cost pressures we should be aware of that you're seeing there? Thank you.

As I was saying before, this is very market-by-market specific, and we continuously work with moving customers up the value ladder, because we know that our offers are providing the lowest total cost for our customers. So when you think of, for example, the cost that you have for staff, the cost that you have for laundry and so on, It's important to have well-functioning products, and that is important for us to continue to market. And we do that across our markets. So that is our first strategy. Then, of course, selectively, in order to gain volumes, we might adjust pricing. But that is very selectively, and it's from market to market.

OK. Clear enough. And then on just the competitive dynamics, what is the promotional environment like in Europe, and how are you guys seeing that split between tissue and baby care? Because I guess the question is just on continued volume performance, which obviously, you know, X the baby care segment consumer is quite strong. So how should we think about that in the second half? Does the environment look quite supportive for continued volume growth? Thank you.

Well, there is a high promotional pressure, as it normally is in those categories, and that continues to be the case. It's also so that the lower mid-tier segments, including private label, is gaining some ground under those economic environment that we're in. Anything you want to build on that, Fredrik?

Yeah, I think your question is quite wide, Patrick. It is basically on all retail. It's a bit different. So if you look at promotional activity within consumer tissue, it's actually quite normal. And if you look at the sequential pricing for us, As a group, it was actually positive. So again, price promotion, it comes in very much into price. So that doesn't indicate a very aggressive promotional activity in the European community. However, it's very different when it comes to baby. There we have seen, and you mentioned it earlier, Rika, that part of the, you can say the cause or root cause for our, quite low volume or a volume decline is very aggressive price promotion from our competition. So for the time being, baby is promotionally heavy. Whether that will continue as we go forward, really difficult to say, Patrick. And when it comes to feminine and incontinence, I think the situation is quite normal.

Thank you, Patrick.

Okay, thank you, guys.

Thank you, Patrick, for your question. We will move on to Céline Panotti, JP Morgan. Hi, Céline. What's your question today?

Good morning. Thank you for taking my question and congrats, Ulrika, on your nomination. My first question, can we talk about professional hygiene So we've seen weakness in volume now for two quarters in a row. And you mentioned the ORECA channel being complicated. Am I right to assume that that volume pressure should linger into the coming quarters? And could you talk about specifically your comment about selective pricing because the pricing has remained quite good in that category. So are we expecting really at the edge that pricing decelerates or should we think about that in a more meaningful way? That's my first question.

Yeah, I think when we talk about the hotel and restaurant sector, of course, it's very difficult for us to anticipate how that will develop in the coming quarters. This is an effect of the global market environment and the uncertainty that we see in the world. So that is not something that we can speculate in. What we make sure to do is, of course, to plan for different scenarios. So when the market is turning, we will be prepared for making leverage that in the best possible way. And when we are in the current market situation, we're also making sure that we then have the right offers and that we are putting additional efforts in sales activities together with our main distributors. So we are dealing with that ambiguity in our daily operations. When it comes to pricing, what I was conveying there was that we will continue to be very disciplined when it comes to pricing. However, there will be some selective adjustments. And this is, again, very selective.

Does it mean that the tariff cost cannot be put through to customers given the current environment?

I can maybe comment, Celine, just on so far, if I put it that way. Actually, it's interesting because the tariff impact, and I mentioned it earlier, you may remember that it was actually about 60 basis points, so 0.6%, quite significant for P8. But it's actually not U.S., tariffs, which is a bit perhaps surprising. It mainly relates to Canadian tariffs. So what we actually do there is we manufacture in our manufacturing sites in the U.S. and then we sell volumes to the Canadian market. And since Canada, as should I use the word perhaps retaliation, having instigated tariffs, that's actually where we we have most of the impact when it comes to pH. Now obviously the people we actually compete with in Canada are in Canada and don't have that impact. So it is so far at least been difficult to compensate that pH tariff impact.

Right. My second question, if we go back to consumer tissue, so you're mentioning that there is probably more demand at the low to the bottom end of the range. So I was wondering whether, you know, how you can talk about your profitability level in these products versus the average of the consumer tissue. And if you could as well share your high-level thoughts on the consolidation in the market with Susano coming into the market with the GV deal with Kimberly-Clark.

If I start with the JV then, and then Fredrik can comment on the profit margins. With the JV that we have seen announced now, we don't see any immediate impact on Essity. Of course, we are used to fierce competition and we will continue to execute on our winning strategy where we build our brands and we deliver relevant innovation and we make sure that we have a best in class supply chain. So that does not change for us.

Yeah, I can take the first question. So, as you know, Cillian, we are in all segments, basically. So, if you look at the private label part, we do have a business there. And we, of course, have the more higher-end branded and everything in there between. So, generally, when you look at profitability, if you look five years back, the private label business was actually not very profitable. We have developed that as we separated that business. You may recall profitability has actually come up quite a lot. We have become much more efficient and profitability is clearly good there. We do have a better overall return and profitability for the high end branded and of course, slightly lower for the lower parts. But it's not super big. So in a way, it's also profitable for us to actually grow in the mid to low end. We would prefer to grow in the very branded end of the market, but we also gain from growth in mid to low end.

Selin, thank you for your question. We will move down the list. Next question comes from Linus Larsson from SEB.

Thank you, and good morning to everyone. I'd like to come back to health and medical and profitability. And I wonder if we could spend maybe a minute or two on this negative margin development that we've seen year on year. Every day margin was down 3.2 percentage points. So if you could shed a bit more light on that and potentially some thoughts on the future there as well. What is driving this and how may this change going forward, please?

If we start with the incontinence care part of the business, you may remember going back when we had these massive cost increases and input costs some while back. It took us a while, because of the customer and market dynamics that we have, being in a regulated market in incontinence care healthcare, to compensate with price. Over time, then, we compensated with price. And then, of course, as the market on the input costs were stabilizing, then we had a bit higher price than that in a period of time. And that is exactly what we're comparing now with year over year. Now that has stabilized, so we are on healthy margins in incontinence care, but on stabilized margins. Then when it comes to medical, it's a lot about volume growth. So here we need quite some volume growth in order to have the scale effect, and that is what we focus on, further accelerating volume growth.

Okay, great. And then maybe linking that last part onto what I think you said about AMP already, and then maybe for the group as a whole, I guess, what exactly are you guiding for on AMP in terms of, you know, as a share of sales or in total numbers?

Yeah, Linus, it's always difficult to say exactly, but as I said, we are guiding for higher AMP in absolute terms and also higher than we've seen in terms of percentage of sales. It's not going to be material. It's going to be 10, 20 basis points. I can't really say exactly, but it's going to be up. And if you look at the perhaps longer perspective, our absolute firm belief is that investing in A&P is actually very profitable. It drives, obviously, net sales growth, but it also does drive profit growth. So we do expect A&P over time to grow, but in the near term, slightly up.

Thank you, Linus, for your question. We have to move down because we have lots of people that want to ask questions. So next caller is Charles Eden from UBS. Hi, Charles.

Hi, Sandra. Hi, everyone. Two questions for me, please. My first one is on professional hygiene. You've obviously gone through restructuring in this division over the last 12, 18 months with the intention of improving profitability returns. In hindsight, do you still think that that's playing out as you planned or expected? Or perhaps is the operating deleverage from the loss of these volumes being more pronounced than you'd expected? And then maybe linked to this, could you also discuss the dynamics in the North American market? Do you believe it's a market volume issue or more ethically specific? And what I guess I'm asking is, restructuring aside, do you believe you're losing volume share to KC Professional, Georgia Pacific, P&T Professional, whoever, in that market or not? And then my second question, Frederick, is one I often ask. But just on the 679 COGS headwinds, can you just help us split between raw materials, energy costs, and distribution? Obviously, I see the positive contribution from cost savings of 112. And obviously you appreciate the sequential commentary on COGS, but can you just confirm that this should also turn to a year-on-year tailwind in the EBITDA bridge from Q3? Thank you.

That was many questions. You might need to help us, Sandra, to sort them out. But if I start with the professional hygiene one, I think I alluded to that before, that of course, there is a big part of this that is about the market development. When Americans are not that much out in restaurants and hotels and so on, then of course that has a direct impact on us. As I also said, we have had some customer losses. We've also had some customer wins. And we don't measure neither in incontinence care healthcare nor in professional hygiene, we measure market share on a very short time perspective. We measure that more over time. So it's difficult to say what is what, but I would dare to say that the majority of this is about the markets. development. From a strategic perspective, I would say that the work that we did to restructure the professional hygiene business and focus more on our strategic segments has played out very well. We see that in the growth of our strategic segments. So that has been done well from that perspective. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Fredrik, and then I think that the next question was for you.

Yeah, I can. No, I think you said it, Ulrike. But maybe, Charles, just to say that I don't think it's an operating leverage issue. It's not that. So I think the restructuring has played out pretty much exactly as we did plan. You mentioned, did we lose against KC Professional or GP or those? I think the answer is no, because, and again, I just don't have that market data, so I'm guessing a bit. But the reason I'm saying that is that the losses have appeared in... in the core or base assortment in the lower end. And as a consequence, that's not really where we play a lot and that's not where KC and the others play. So from that perspective, this is more the low end actually being price aggressive, I think it's fair to say. Then I think your question on... COGS, I've already forgotten it, but I think one of the questions you actually asked was, are we going to have a tailwind also when it comes to year-on-year? And I can confirm that is the case. So somewhat lower also year-on-year. I think your middle question there was about raw material, right?

Sorry, do you want me to clarify? It was just on the split of that 6, 7, 9 headwind, obviously 1, 12 positive cost savings. But I guess offsetting that by, what is it, 800 headwinds between warm-up energy and distribution can just help us split between those three and that 800 million.

Yeah, give you all of that is perhaps not necessary. But if you'd look at the 679, then the absolute biggest part by far is raw material. That's 413 to be very exact. And then I mentioned a number of others. So 112 was savings, but we had 178 for distribution as an example. So there are many, many different items there. But as I said, 679, the absolute majority is in raw material of 413 to be exact. Thanks for asking all my questions.

Thank you, Charles, for your questions. Now, David Hayes from Jefferies. What's your question, top of mind, today?

Top of mind, just a quick one, I think, quite detailed. Just on the SEC costs versus the SEC... sales you mentioned earlier about sort of the deleverage effects and effects just wonder you can give us those numbers how much of costs are in sec uh i assume sales is relatively small and then on the um just in terms of that input cost discussion and the the sequential uh references is that all underlying cost or does that include the currency effects in terms of sec versus dollar and i guess relates to that can you give us a sense of how much raw materials are dollar derived just to get a sense of what kind of offset you get in terms of the SEC dollar move in recent times. Thank you.

Yeah, if I start, I actually didn't understand the first question, but the second question, if that was in absolute terms, so when I said somewhat lower, that is actually related to the absolute amount, including currency impact. I mean, the main item is actually what we buy is pulp. We buy that in US dollars, so we have a positive impact in that. If you look at this quarter, then Q2 versus last year, we had a very positive pulp impact, but on the other hand, we had a negative FX impact when we bought other material, but the net impact was positive. If you look at the next quarter, we expect it to be year on year slightly positive, less, but still positive.

Thank you. And the first question was just in terms of the difference between if SEC sales are 5%, let's say, are the cost bases at 20% of your cost basis SEC?

Yeah, but you're talking about transaction now. So the transactional impact, I guess, right? Exactly. Yeah. And the absolute majority of those transactional impact is exactly what I just mentioned. It's within the purchases of our raw material. We have a little bit of like IP and innovation and all of that. So we have a little bit of actual cost in Sweden, as an example. We also have it in Germany and in the United States. So I think you can, for the sake of simplicity, what you can do is look at the impact only in COGS. I think the rest is smaller from a transactional sense. Okay, great. Thank you so much.

Thank you, David. So now we have a question from Tom Sykes, Deutsche Bank. Hello, Tom.

Yeah, morning. Thank you. Just wanted to explore the SG&A comments a little bit, please. So can you at all say which divisions saw the highest increase in SG&A, and when you talk about generating SG&A efficiencies, are you talking about, I mean, reducing the sales headcount that you've put in, or are you talking about finding some efficiencies elsewhere? Because my understanding was that the IT and digital will still have to go up or still plan to go up in 26. You've obviously put a lot of salespeople in, but are you already taking out salespeople that you put in? Sorry. If you could maybe explore that. Can you answer that question first, Tom?

I will start with the questions here on cost savings and cost reduction. First, the background is that we are doing a lot of different initiatives across the company. to improve our efficiency, to generate sales, as you were alluding to, and also to serve our customers and consumers in the best possible way. And from that, we are increasing our SG&A costs, not the least in IT, and also we have the salary inflation component, which is quite big. And this is not specific to any business unit or any part of the value chain. It's something that we see across the organization, that we are having a lot of initiatives to improve, for example, in digital systems and so on. So not specific. When it comes to taking measures to reduce our cost levels, we do have to be a bit specific. Of course, it is about reducing costs across the business and also in many parts of the value chain. But to your point, our first priority is to accelerate volume growth. So we do not want to do anything that has a direct impact on sales. So, of course, also in a sales force, you can become more efficient, but it's not about reducing any salespeople.

And maybe just to add there, you asked about whether we had any significant differences, and we don't, actually. If you look across our three business areas, you'd find it to be roughly evenly spread, the increase. So it's actually planned increases for all.

Okay, thank you. And then just on the professional business, in how much of the growth historically was driven by the restaurant sector in North America, because that's fundamentally changed in terms of the number of people going into restaurants and eating versus eating at home. And from what it seems like in your results, if people eat at home, they clearly use less of your product than if they were eating in a restaurant or at least lower value items. So that's fundamentally changed. Do you think you're Do you think your cost base is now right-side for that fundamental change?

Yeah, I can start. It's a good question, Tom, because if you look at Horica as a total segment for the group, it's roughly about 40%. But if you look at it in the United States, it's actually slightly bigger, so about 50%. Exactly the distribution between hotels, restaurants and catering, we don't think we've actually shared that. But obviously restaurants is a big part of the business there. And whether it's a structural or permanent change you're alluding to, it's perhaps, in our view, a bit premature to come to that conclusion. But clearly, of course, we need to make sure that we're competitive from a cost perspective. But, yeah, it's difficult to comment more than that. Okay. All right.

Thanks, Fred. Thank you, Tom. Then we have a question from Misha from BNP Bariba. Hi, Misha.

Hi, morning all. Thanks for taking my question. I have one on the top line. Now, you made different comments with regards to your ambitions on the volume side in different businesses, as well as on pricing. But just From the overall group perspective, and I know you don't guide on the top line, but if we think directionally, do you expect volume growth to sequentially pick up in Q3 versus Q2 and in Q4 versus Q3 at the group level? And also, do you think that you will be able to achieve positive price makes in Q3 and Q4 year on year? Thank you.

Sequentially in terms of volume, is that what you're asking, I guess? Because it's really difficult to actually give you those. And to be frank, I mean, first of all, we don't comment on volume. I can only refer to our long-term, obviously, net sales growth or organic sales growth, the targets of more than 3%. So this is normally what we do. And, of course, commenting volume numbers for individual companies quarters is incredibly difficult so i i'll refrain to to do that but just out of uh out of uh just more for clarity q1 and q4 are normally weak in terms of volume or weak i shouldn't say weak but lower than q2 and q3 so q2 and particularly q3 is normally a bit stronger So if you look at volume growth sequentially between Q1 and Q2, just using that as an example, we're actually up by 2.6%. And so you clearly see that, what I was just alluding to. And Q3 is normally slightly stronger, but it's very difficult to comment on. So we don't do that, as you know, give those kind of detailed comments.

banks and on pricing?

Maybe Okay, you have a follow up on pricing? Because you've commented on the one volumes?

Yeah, you talk about the pricing looking forward to the next few quarters. Yeah, I mean, again, we don't comment on that, obviously. We always try for good price management. We have provided here some comments related to selective price action in terms of professional hygiene and some other comments. But generally, as an outlook for pricing, we don't provide, of course, as you know.

Understood. Thank you.

Thank you, Michel. Now, in the interest of time, I see that we have Oskar Lindström, Danske Bank, also wanting to ask a question. Hi, Oskar.

Hi, Sandra.

Can you keep to one question? Because we have only three more minutes. So if you have one question, we can take that, and then we have to wrap up, unfortunately.

Certainly, on costs, we've talked quite a lot about today. You mentioned that COGS will be somewhat lower in Q3 than in Q2, but at the same time, you also say that AMP costs will be higher, both absolute and relative. Now, where should we expect sort of total costs to come out in the balance of these two?

Yeah, I... I'm going to refrain from commenting that, Oskar. I don't actually have the exact detail numbers, because it's both... You're right, SG&A is expected to be flat, AMP a bit up, and COGS. So the overall... Yeah, it's a good question. I won't comment. I hope that they'll balance out roughly, but hopefully COGS will be down a little bit more than AMP is up. But I don't actually have the exact detail.

I understand, of course. Thank you very much. I'll stick to that question.

Thank you for keeping to one question, Oskar. Well, now it's time to wrap up. Before we close, any closing remarks from you, Ulrika?

Yeah, thank you, Sandra, and thank you for joining us. As we close this quarter, I look forward to working with the organization to accelerate profitable growth and to reiterate the priorities that we have now moving forward. We will continue to execute on our strategy with specific focus on taking measures to reduce our cost level and to accelerate volume growth. And then over time, I aim to come back to you to share more about our strategic bets for the future. Thank you.

Thank you, Ulrika, and thank you, Fredrik. Thank you for watching this webcast. If you have any further questions or would like to meet, please don't hesitate to reach out. Then I wish you a good rest of the day.