Gränges AB (publ)

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this presentation of Grengis' first half-year result for 2023. My name is Jørgen Rosengren, and I'm joined here by our CFO, Oskar Hellström. And we will try to take you through this morning the big picture, but also the details of our half-year results. So, starting with the big picture then, we had in the quarter now, a stable volume, slightly down from 122,000 tons last year to 120. And we think that this is kind of an achievement in itself in a very uncertain and volatile environment. Our good earnings in the quarter and also reduced working capital led to a good cash flow, which helps our balance sheet situation and creates flexibility, of course, for the future. Very good. I should mention that this happens periodically. despite the fact that we continue to invest rather heavily in our future and hope then, therefore, to have a very good future also looking forward.

Speaking of earnings, the price and productivity and new business actions that we undertook in the quarter and have been undertaking for a long time, than cost, mix, and demand challenges in the quarter. And also, for the longer term, we continued in the quarter as we have done now for some time. to progress relative to our navigated plan for sustainable growth. And in sum, then, the adjusted operating profit for the quarter was up 30% relative to last year. Last year was a record quarter. And therefore, this year is also a record quarter, and we reached a level now of $450 million in the quarter, compared to $350 million approximately last year, and an all-time high result.

Let's begin then to go over the market. We saw a market which in most segments was rather weak in the quarter. That goes for HVAC, so heating, ventilation and air conditioning customers, for packaging customers and for many other niches where Grengis is active. But we did see very stable and, in fact, good growth in automotive customers. This, of course, is related partly to the difficulties that the automotive industry experienced last year because of component shortages then. But it's also due to the fact that last year we had trouble in China and were suffering there from a COVID lockdown, which, of course, now we're recovering from. In total, for the group, then, we had very strong growth in automotive, and we had weak growth in other segments.