Holmen AB

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Interim Report presentation for the Holmen Group. It's me, Henrik, and it's Stefan, and we will take you through the presentation. And once we finalized, we are happy to take any questions you might have. So, Stefan, let's start. Yep. second quarter we were able to deliver a bit over 800 million which i think is a decent result given the situation especially when it comes to consumer products which we will come into a bit later we also If you look at only our industry, which is board and paper and our wood products, the industry where we always measure return on capital employed, we were able to deliver 15% in the second quarter. And if you look at the last 12 months, we have an average of 17% over the last 10 years, even a little bit more. Our financial position is strong. We have also distributed 2.8 billion to our shareholders during the first half of the year through dividend and buybacks. Let's change subject totally and go into the forest or more the wood market in Sweden. We have talked about increasing log cost both saw logs and pulp wood for many quarters. But I think now it's time to say that things are changing. But in the second quarter, especially saw log prices continue to go up. And remember when we buy or what we buy today and last week, we will consume that in roughly half a year or even a little bit more. as i said solo prices continue to go up especially in south of sweden and also the difference now between south of sweden and northern parts of sweden when it comes to so logs we have never had such a big price difference pulpwood leveling off in the second quarter and as we speak right now there is some price pressure on pulpwood that's quite clear but we haven't seen it yet and the same there. What we buy today, we will make use of it in our industry in roughly half a year. Stefan?

The result for the forest division was 519 million Swedish krona during the second quarter. That is an increase by some 30 million compared to the first quarter this year due to higher harvesting on our own forest. Despite this higher harvesting in Q2, we have still harvested less during the first six months of this year compared to last year and also compared to our long-term harvesting plan. That is although due to timing issues, so that means that we will increase our harvest in the second half of this year compared to the first.

Thank you. Let's continue with renewable energy and very strange situation in the second quarter. If we look at the energy market in europe as such we say that we have a seasonal effect and what do we mean by that well when there is a lot of sun in the system especially in germany the price comes down that we see this year and we also see that it has an effect on south of sweden in our case we use sc3 as the reference That has had quite a big effect, but it hasn't had any effect at all on the northern prices. They are simply historically low. We have to go back to 2020, one quarter, we had prices as low as... In the second quarter, no, the price was 10 euros per megawatt. And obviously, a lot of electricity was simply locked in in northern parts of Sweden during the second quarter. a lot of water in the system as we said more than what we usually have but there are also other effects with cables flow based etc anyway when we make use of our hydro power we do get the premium but stefan when the premium is on 10 euros it doesn't help very much