Gränges AB (publ)

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this second quarter earnings call with Grengis. It's a pleasure to have you here. We're going to be referring to our presentation that you can see on the screen. And if you're only listening, the presentation is also available on our investor relations web page. Starting in the beginning, we had a strong result in the second quarter. We achieved that result in what we consider a very challenging environment. Safety is always first forward in Gränges, and unfortunately we have to report two serious setbacks in this quarter. We had a very serious fire in our Gränges cone implant, and tragically we also lost a colleague in a fatal workplace accident in the U.S. in Salisbury. This is, of course, not acceptable. We need clearly to step up our efforts in this area. We are taking such actions accordingly. Looking at our sales results, the volume was down quite a bit from 131,000 tons last year to 123,000 tons this year, so about 7%. And there were several reasons for this. Demand actually was good across, but it was weak in automotive. And of course, there's a general dampening effect on all markets caused by the war in Ukraine. But we also had reduced output in our plants in Shanghai and our plants in Salisbury for the reasons mentioned, especially in Shanghai, of course, related to the

COVID lockdown that we had there despite this very or rather negative volume development we had a very very strong profit development and that's because of an increased margin mainly due to pricing which more than compensated or at least fully compensated for our cost increases that were quite large in the quarter.

And this together with the volume development then led to an all-time high operating result. We also had, in fact, an all-time high I'll get back to that in a moment. In the quarter, we finalized making a long-term plan, which we call Navigate. And we put it in place, communicated it internally, externally, and also communicated external targets for the long term connected to that plan. I'll get back to that also. These good results, they don't happen by accident. They happened as a result of very strong work across grangists. And there are many good examples of that. But maybe one of the strongest examples is the work and the efforts that were made in China and Shanghai to keep our customers supplied, to keep deliveries going, despite the very severe, very draconic, actually, lockdown situation. that were in place in Shanghai. So an extraordinary team effort, which kept the plant operating due to the personal efforts of more than 200 employees who volunteered to work in the factory during the lockdown, but also to live there in that time. Fortunately, we've been able to return to normal operations since last month. in Shanghai and the net result of all this is, in my opinion, an extraordinarily low negative impact of this very, very severe situation with a reduction of only 4,000 tons of the volume in the second quarter, approximately 20% of the normal volume in Shanghai. So extremely well done. Turning to sustainability, one of the longer-term ambitions that we have communicated in the quarter is our ambition to become climate neutral in 2040, or latest, 2040. That is some time away, but it's a very, very... tough targets and a very strong commitment on our side and requires a lot of improvement over the next couple of years to get to that goal. Part of that effort and part contributing factor to that target is our increased recycling. and the increased circularity that we can achieve, for instance, by having closed-loop agreements with our customers. And we measure that in several different ways, but one way to measure it is the volume of recycling that we have. And there we have set the target to have increased it tenfold by 2030 relative to the reference year, which is 2017. Further on the sustainability area, we have launched a new brand for our most sustainable products called Grains Endure. And that brand is reserved for products that are especially good in helping our customers decarbonize, helping our customers meet their demands of climate-conscious end-users. and that offer our customers the highest quality with the lowest sustainability impact. And more in detail, it requires our products to have a carbon footprint of a maximum of four tons, carbon dioxide equivalents per ton of product. Cradle to gate, and Grengas is among the few companies who can have a, measurement of that of the carbon footprint of our products all the way from the box it from the aluminum from the alumina all the way to the finished product what we call cradle to get them all our products will also then have a third-party verified carbon footprint and be responsibly sourced and produced again with a third-party verification Now we're going to turn to the numbers and starting then with sustainability performance. Because in sustainability, we don't only have long-term ambitions, we also have short-term performance. And that was very evident in the quarter where the carbon emissions intensity was reduced quite dramatically by 14%, in fact, year on year. and was now at 8%, an all-time low, relative to the 11, not 8%, but 8 tons per ton, of course. In the best ever result and quite a bit down from the 11.4 in our baseline year of 2017. And also the recycling rate, the amount of sourced aluminum scrap that we use is up quite a bit in the last quarter to 35%, again, an all-time high record, and quite a bit up from the reference year also in that case. Volume then, we had general demand, as I said, but we did have three effects that went in the other direction. And one of them, of course, is something that goes across, and that's the general weakness we've seen and have seen now for quite some time in the automotive industry. And that impacts both Grangus Americas and also Grangus Eurasia. But we also had two regional specific things affecting volumes. In Grangus Americas, we had a close down of the salt spray plant as a result of that accident, which impacted volumes there. And in Grains Eurasia, as mentioned, we had the COVID lockdown. And these two things then in the quarter specifically go, of course, across all segments. And that's why you see a lot of red arrows on this page. In total, a 7% volume reduction in the quarter. On the other hand, as mentioned already, the margin went the other way. We measure margin in a couple of different ways, but an effective measure is, or an efficient measure is, operating profit per ton, which you can see on this page. And it recovered further from the lows that we had in the second half of last year as a result of cost increases, which we then had not fully compensated for by price increases, but now have fully compensated for by price increases. And as you can see in the quarter, this measure, the operating profit per ton was up from 2.4 last year to 3.1, a very solid improvement. Now, these two factors together, the volume and the margin, of course, boil down to our profit. And Oskar, our CFO, will now speak about our profit in the quarter and also some other measures. So I turn it over to you, Oskar.