Rottneros AB (publ)

Hello and welcome to today's broadcast with Rottneros, who will be presenting their financial report for the second quarter of 2026. With us, we have the CEO, Per Bjurbom, and CFO, Monika Passanen. If you wish to ask questions, you can do so via the form found to the right of the broadcast. And if you're calling in and would like to ask a question, press star 9 to raise your hand and star 6 to activate your audio once you've been given the word. And with that said, I hand it over to you guys. Go ahead and present.

Thank you, Elliot, and I would like to wish you all welcome to this Q2 report for Rotterdoos. Myself, Per Bjurbom, CEO, I will start to make a presentation of the highlights and the market, and then I will turn the word over to Monica, and I will present the financials, and then I will wrap up at the end, and then we are open for Q&As. So we move on to the highlights for Q2, and... As you may be all aware of, we are coming out of a streak of quarters where we have been on the negative side on EBTA number, and we are very pleased to see that they are showing up an EBTA of 31 million SEAC. Also a theme during the quarters is the wood pricing. The wood pricing has come down as we have anticipated earlier quarters, and we are happy to see that materializing in our numbers. We also can see that in our niches where we are prioritizing our production, we can also see a stable demand. And we continue within the company to scrutinize cost, and we are also happy to see that that is giving results. So we are happy on the cost development of the company this quarter. This next slide. And for you, maybe new to Rottneros, just some short words about the company. So, producer of softwood pulp for demanding customer when it comes to purity and strength. We are located here in central Sweden. We also have a joint venture in Poland with Arctic Paper producing packaging. And if you look on our rolling 12 months figures, we have a net turnover of about 2.3 billion SEK. And we're running 266 employees, production volume 328,000 tons. And all of our volumes, 79% goes into these prioritized niches. Please, next. Let's take a look at what has happened in the market. If we start with pricing, we can see that basically it's been moving sideways. It is affected by the currency. We have enjoyed a little bit weaker Swedish crown during the last quarter. And maybe there is... These are not going down, so they're moving sideways and I think we should be happy about that. If you look on the producer stock of the bleach softwood pulp around the world, you can see that they are on 46 days. and that is a number that is on the high side so that also shows that there's a plenty of pulp out there that that is available for our customers this next slide and then if you don't look what is happening in our main market europe of production of different paper grades we can see that Here we have a decline. In 2025, the decline was 2.5%. And for the first four months here in 26, the decline is continuing. Container board has a slightly positive effect, and that is the biggest product area. So that has a huge impact on the averaging of this. But otherwise you can see that the paper production in Europe is declining. And here we can also see that there is paper and board coming in from other places in the world, especially from Asia. Next slide. And then if you take a look on deliveries of chemical pulp on a global basis, you can see that China, if you start with a circle here on the left side, you can see that 41% of the consumption is the deliveries are made to China. So what is happening in China has a huge impact on this market. And then if you look on the right here, we can see that China is still growing consumption. Europe is lagging. And North America is lagging and Latin America is on the poor. So next slide. And then if you look on where we are doing our business and we have 69% of our business in Europe and 24 in Asia and 7% in North America. So we consider of course Europe is our home market. And when you're dealing with this kind of product, it's always important to deliver them as so close to home as possible because it's easier to have a good service to customers and make good deliveries and good planning together with the customers. And if you then remember that the consumption here has gone down, the production has gone down with 1.7%. We have increased our share in volume here by 2.8% in the first half. So we have a strong position here in the European market. With that, I leave it over to Monica.

Thank you, Per. As Per already concluded, we have a quarter where we're posting a positive EBITDA. What we see here is the bridge from second quarter last year when it was minus 15 to plus 31 this quarter. But if you remember the price slides that we saw earlier, there was a big decline in prices throughout 2025, but they were still on a fairly high level during second quarter compared to where we are now. Much is due to pricing. The NBSK price in dollars is 9% down quarter to this year compared to last year, but also the dollar has weakened in this period by 3%. But the big impact and plus comes from variable cost where really the cost of wood is the major cost item or major improvement. They were at the peak during spring 2015, 2025, sorry, and have continued coming down since then. We also see some positive effects from lower costs for chemicals and fuels. In the beginning of 2025 we saw that the market was going in the wrong direction and our profitability was low. We initiated a savings program that was targeted at fixed costs and especially at personnel and we are now 266, as we heard earlier, down from 288 a year ago, but we also targeted all other fixed costs. The other two big items are maintenance and also bought services, and we have been able to decrease also in the cost in these areas. The item other here is the majority or half of it comes from that we sold emission rights last year. This year so far, we haven't sold any emission rights. So that is of course a negative in the comparison. We also see lower sales prices on our byproducts and that goes partly together with the general fuel costs. Then if we look at the first six months, it's very much a similar picture. Really, the big difference is that it's a bigger impact on price and currency for the half year as they were very favorable still in Q1 2025. Those of you who have been following us might remember that in the first quarter we talked about the production issues that we had, especially in Valvik mill during the very cold winter. So we have a negative impact in volume, especially from the beginning of the year this year. But for the variable cost and fixed cost, you see a similar picture as for the second quarter. This picture is just to highlight the importance of the cost of wood for our whole profitability. For the first half year, it was 45% of our cost structure. This is a look at the balance sheet. With an improved EBITDA, we should of course have a better operational cash flow. However, we have had an increased working capital during the quarter. It has a lot to do with how the production is being planned. Now in July, Rotneros Mill was standing still as planned for summer vacation for four weeks and we needed to build stocks ahead of this standstill to be able to service our customers. And then at the end of September, we will go into Valvik Mills annual maintenance shutdown and to be able to to keep up our service levels. We're also usually building some stock at this time of the year. However, we will continue to have very strict focus on our working capital and on our cash flow, considering the several quarters of lower profitability. We also focus on our investment levels and foresee that they will be much lower this year compared to last year. Approximately 60 million this year versus 166 the year before and also the year prior to that. So that continues to be our focus on the cash flow and decreasing costs. With that, I hand back to Per to make a summary.