Arctic Paper S.A. (ARP) Q3 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello and welcome to this webcast with Arctic Paper. If you have any questions, please use the form relocated to the right and we'll take that up during the Q&A. And with that said, please go ahead with your presentation. Okay, good afternoon. My name is Marky Arczynski. I'm the CEO of Arctic Paper Group and together with Katarzyna Wojtkowiak, the CFO of Arctic Group, we would like to present and to comment the Q3 results of our group. Good afternoon again. I will start with a very short summary of our results. Net sales was 819 million zlotys, which is approximately 5% less than the same period of last year. The slight decrease in the revenues was mainly caused by the general macroeconomic situation in Europe, especially in Germany, which is our biggest market. On the EBITDA side, there was a significant drop in comparison to last year, especially in the paper segment. This was mainly due to extremely high prices of pulp, especially hardwood, which is the main raw material for the paper production. And that was historically high until more or less mid of third quarter. And we will see the decrease only now in the fourth quarter. Net debt to EBITDA ratio was still negative for the entire group, and the change in comparison to last year was mainly due to new loans, which were taken for the new investments. And I would like to make some comments regarding each of our four segments, pulp, paper, packaging and the power. Regarding paper, we have a stable low demand across Europe. Please point out that Europe is only our main market. More than 98% of our output is dedicated for domestic consumption in Europe. We have quite flat prices compared to the last quarter and even compared to the previous year. And this is one of the reasons that despite of the increase of the all...