Holmen AB

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the year-end report presentation for the Holmen Group. My name is Henrik, this is Anders, and we will go through the presentation, and after that, we're happy to take any questions you might have. So let's start. First of all, if we look back at 2022, it has been a quite strange year, characterized by energy crisis, lack of raw material, horrible war in Ukraine, etc. And for us as a company to have the base in our own forest land, good control of the raw material, but also our renewable energy situation has made it possible to deliver a record high result, historically high. And based on that. We have also had a discussion internally and the board of directors have proposed to give an ordinary dividend of 8 SEK and an extra dividend of another 8 SEK. Our good result in combination with our good financial position, not the least that we have a very low net debt at the end of the year, 2 billion SEK. We feel that we can both do the ordinary and the extra dividend, but also have the muscles that we need to invest in our operations in our different business areas. So it's a rather good feeling about the situation we have. If we then switch to the wood market and the forest, Anders will come back to the value of forest land. We have a situation... I think we should actually be quite proud of what we have done the last, say, 50 years. We've been able to... All years increased the standing volume of wood in the forest at the same time as we have been able to increase slowly but safely at least the harvest. But we have also been able actually to improve the biodiversity index, which was introduced a few years ago at the COP15 meeting. It's a way to measure the status in the forest and how much it has been affected by human activity. In the case of Sweden, we've also been able actually to improve over the last, say, 20 years quite a lot. You know, there's a lot of discussions about the forest. When we look internally or when we look at Swedish politicians, our report to EU, etc., we get like one picture. When other people look at us from outside, normally we come out much better. Something we have to come back to in the future. But I think actually we could be quite proud of what we have done. And the wood market, well, I mentioned the war initially, and the situation we have now, if you look at not only Sweden, but surrounding countries and the Baltic Sea, we have a situation where we don't see any Russian pulpwood coming into Finland, which affects the market. And there is simply lack of raw material, especially pulpwood in Sweden right now. We have no wood coming from the east.

We have actually lately seen a tendency that some of the pulpwood actually is going towards the east from Sweden, which, well, we have.

We had that up in the north, but we haven't seen it further south before. That's the pulpwood sector, and at the same time, as the pulp mills are running, I would say fairly full, because you also need to have access to the raw material, which is not given in today's situation. And when it comes to the sawmills and the demand for saw logs, it's more a balanced situation, even though sawmills in Sweden are operating at quite high operating rates and there is a quite high demand also for saw logs still. Anders, higher prices should mean slightly higher revenues for our forest operations.