Holmen AB

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the interim report presentation for the Holmen Group. My name is Henrik Sjölund and together with me, Mr. Anders Jernhall. I think most of you actually know us and we do as we normally do. We go through the presentation for the different business areas. And once we finalize that, we are happy to take your questions. So let's start by summarizing the second quarter and the first half year. Despite an extensive maintenance shut in paperboard at our Workington mill, we are happy to deliver almost 900 million in the second quarter. To a very large extent, thanks to a very strong wood products market. But I'm also quite happy to see that our paper division was able to come back to full capacity utilization and also turn the figures from red into black. A good result has also materialized in good cash flow. And just to note that we have during the first half of the year, we have paid the dividend of 1.7 billion SIC. And at the same time, we have a very strong financial situation, which is necessary and a good base to further develop our business. And then let's move on to forest and a few words about the forest market and the wood market. We have a situation which you are familiar with where all sawmills are running full, thanks to the very strong wood products market. When it comes to competition for the saw logs in the forest, we can see that prices are on the rise and have gone up during the quarter. On the other hand, to be honest, the increase in saw log prices have been quite modest given the very strong wood products market. If we then look at the pulp wood market, the situation is different. The market is more in balance. And there are a few explanations. First of all, We come from a period where we had spruce bark beetle infestation and quite a lot of supply of pulpwood coming out of the forest during last year and also during this year partly. But we also have a number of closures. We have the Ortviken paper mill that closed down quite a lot of capacity in the first quarter. And we also know about the announcement that the Kvarnsveden paper mill in Sweden is about to close. For ourselves, you know, it has been quite a warm summer. There has been some fires. In our case, nothing strange and no big ones. We are looking now at the spruce bark beetle infestation we have to some extent also this year, but it's too early to say what it will develop into and we will come back to that a bit later. Anders, what about the financial result for the forest?

Yes, it's a pretty stable result compared to last year, roughly the same level. Looking at Q2, it was a bit soft due to higher costs, mainly relating to taking care of some storm falling from some local storms. And in the Q1, we were benefiting from a sale of the forest property.

Thank you. then moving on to paperboard it's actually a quite nice place to be in in the niche market in solid beach sport in folding box sport where we are what we see right now is that there is healthy demand it's good demand not only in europe but also in asia where we sell some our volumes We also see that there are some price announcements but remember that prices in this segment takes time both when they are on the way up and when they go down and also look at the history just to remember. In our case, not only our order book has been good and we look forward to healthy demand, but when it comes to our own performance in sales, well, we have a good sales mix and we are also happy with the products mix that we have. What we also have had in Paperboard, however, is, as I said in beginning, an extensive maintenance shut at our Workington paper mill. We plan to close down the board mill for roughly a week. We started up a little bit late, but since then the board production is running as normal. And then we also plan to shut down the bio boiler and the turbine for a bit over a month. And then when that part was starting up also a little bit late, we had an accident, which means that unfortunately, The turbine and the biobowler will be out of operation until early next year. This is unfortunate, of course, but I think I'll leave it to you Anders to summarize the financial aspects of the maintenance shut and also the division.