BillerudKorsnäs AB (publ) (BILL) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

And food and beverages. And that means for us mostly liquidating packaging board that has performed surprisingly well during the first six months of '26 and has reached normal conditions. And also within the industrial channel, where our exposure mostly found within the SAC, the sentiment has strengthened a bit during the quarter. So with that, I will hand it over to Andre. Thank you, Ivar, and good morning, everyone. So starting with our net sales, which were down 2% versus a year ago, and this was driven by the pricing development in Europe. Sales volume for the group were in line with the last year with North American up 7%, while the European volumes were down close to 3%. Currency continues to have an impact on both our top line and profitability as we have stronger Swedish krona compared to Q2 last year. Next slide, please. The profit decline versus last year was driven first and foremost by price pressure in Europe and loss of emission rights. Now most of the impact was offset by our decisive actions to reduce costs, our volume growth in North America and pulpwood cost relief in The Nordics. Our EBITDA margin of 7% was a clear improvement sequentially, given we also had heavier maintenance schedule now in Q2. Excluding the impact from maintenance shutdown, adjusted EBITDA increased with four percentage points versus quarter one. Next slide, please. Moving over to regions. And first of all, I'm very pleased to see that our actions to improve profitability in Region Europe are yielding results as we see improved profitability both sequentially and versus a year ago. We did see sequentially lower volumes across most categories, but clearly, that impact was more than offset by our pricing and mix actions together with cost reductions. Pricing was up with close to ...