Holmen AB

Good afternoon and welcome to the interim report presentation for the Holman Group. It's especially nice to see you actually on a Friday afternoon, Anders, it's 2.30 and I know you have had some other companies presenting before us. Anyway, my name is Henrik and this is Anders. We are the usual suspects going to do this today and we start as we normally do to go through the presentation and then we're happy to take any questions you might have. To start with, we have a very strong result also in the third quarter, a bit above 1.1 billion SEK, despite that we have had the maintenance shut. But of course, we have had a lot of help from really high wood products prices. Before we start to go through the different business areas, just take one step back and look at how we have come through the whole pandemic period. I'm happy to see that we have kept our net debt almost unchanged during the whole period, despite that we have given normal dividend or paid for normal dividend. We have bought Mattinsons and we had also paid for half a wind farm, roughly 700 million SEK. Roughly half at least, which is a very strong base for going forward in the future and develop the company further. A few words about the wood market. What we have seen lately, as you know, all sawmills have been running full, so there has been quite a lot of competition for the saw logs in the forest, actually a bit more up in the north than in the southern parts of Sweden. And we can also see that prices are on the rise, not so dramatically, but still that the price trend is up. If you look at pulpwood, on the other hand, the market is more or less in balance for a couple of reasons. First of all, there have been some closures and supply of wood has been quite high as well, partly driven by the spruce bark beetles down in the southern parts of Sweden. So, Anders, slightly higher prices. How does this compare to our financial results?

Well, the financial performance of the forest is quite dull, as it should be. Not much has happened. We see slightly higher result in the Q3 over Q2, thanks to the higher timber prices.

Thank you. Then moving on to paperboard. Our two mills, one in Sweden, one in England, where we produce a bit more than half a million tons of paperboard. The market is actually quite good. The market balance is healthy. I would almost say it's under stress. Also for some reasons. First of all, demand in Europe is up some 4% so far this year compared to last year, which is strong. Partly depending on that, somewhere our virgin-based board is also meeting recycled fiber-based board. That's white line chip versus folding box board. And there has been some substitution going towards more folding box board and less RCP-based products. Partly because the availability of RCP isn't that good. And there is in the market also a bit of cost pressure and together with good demand and the balance we also see as we speak right now a pressure on prices for paperboard up. We are currently negotiating, so we are not commenting on how this will go. And as you remember, we have always said that it takes time to change prices when it comes to consumer board, especially up in the niche where we are based. We have had... Maintenance shots, both in the second quarter and in the third quarter, even though we have roughly the same volumes or we have delivered roughly the same volumes, which means that we have reduced our stock levels a bit. But Anders, it's quite a messy quarter, to be honest. Indeed. It is. So if you try to summarize everything that has happened, including maintenance shots, energy costs, etc.,