Holmen AB

Morning, everybody. It's not afternoon this time. And welcome to the Interim Report presentation for the Holman Group. In this room, it's me, Henrik, and it's Anders. And we will go through the presentation as we usually do. And we're happy to take any questions you might have after the presentation. But to start off, I'm extremely happy, to be honest, that we have a business model to start with that also works very well in times with high inflation, lack of fiber and energy in the world, and also terrible war around us. This has meant that we have a very nice result. And it's two things standing out. It's high volumes from our wood products division. It's also very good prices from our paper division. We'll come back to that when we go through the different business areas. A good result in the first quarter also means that we have a very strong cash flow, and it has also reinforced our, from the beginning, already strong financial position and a very strong balance sheet. Then let's go through the different business areas, starting with our forest division, and as we usually do, try to put some flavor to the wood market where we currently are. I think wood is one of the few raw materials that have not changed really in a world where everything has become much more expensive and especially everything related to energy. If you look at the situation right now, you can see, or during the first quarter, you can see that, well, there is good competition for saw logs and prices have ticked up. But if you look at pulpwood, not much has happened. But where we are right now, things are a bit different. First of all, we see that, of course, the sawmills are running full. They are making a lot of money. But also the activity in the pulp industry has increased at the same time as we also see that Supply is restricted. There is no pulpwood or wood chips coming from Russia, which has an effect on the market. At the same time, also, as we have seen that the pulp that we had, the pulp, the strike that we had in Finland, the European strike has come to an end. So in the headline, you can see competition intensifying in that it's not only for saw logs, that's also for pulpwood going forward. But that's about what happens now, Anders, during the first quarter. Not so much happened.

No, it was a very stable and ordinary quarter for the forest business. We did not have any sale of forest land that we had last year relating to the UK primarily. We have not so far seen very much of price increases that have gone through for the forest division. So it's a very ordinary quarter.

It is, and it should be normally. Yeah. Then a few words about our paper board division and not the least how we see the market. I think already last time we said that the market is quite strong. Customers are maybe not crying for board, but they are eager on getting as much as they can. And when we talk about Europe, we still see strong demand and we also see deliveries from European suppliers going up to European customers by a couple of percent. But also in this market now, after 10 years, we finally see prices really going up. And prices are going up thanks to healthy demand, healthy market balance, but also from cost increases, especially for continental suppliers. And there's also a push from beneath. If you would look at the white line chip producers, the ones that base their production on recycled fibers, but they also have to buy gas to run their factories. You see that the cost pressure is even higher and that has materialized in price increases. But also in fallen box board and solid beach board, prices are moving up. In our case, our order books looks fine and also we are increasing prices. But we used to say, Anders, that half of our production roughly is fixed in a bit longer contracts and with the rest we follow the market. We also had a period with the turbine out of production for more than half a year, which has been quite a challenge for us. But can you maybe technically explain how to see this?