Essity AB (publ) (ESSITY_A) Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello and welcome to Esri's presentation of the results for the first quarter 2025. My name is Sandra Åberg, Head of Investor Relations. Today, our CEO Magnus Kroth and our CFO Fredrik Rystedt will guide us through the essentials of the Q1 report. We will also share some assessments on the tariff situation and why we expect the current tariffs to have a limited impact on Esri's business. After that, we have set aside time to answer any questions that you might have. After the webcast today, we will be road showing in Stockholm and next week we will be in London. So if you would like to meet, please reach out to me. With that, a solid start to the 2025. Magnus, could you please elaborate? Thank you very much, Sandra, and good morning, everyone. And thanks for listening in and watching our Q1 report today. So, as a summary, a solid performance with higher sales and a strong cash flow. All business areas continued to the strong growth and we saw higher volumes, mix and price in two out of the three business areas in health and medical and professional hygiene, and we saw a positive price in professional hygiene, but lower volumes, overall stable volumes. We saw strong growth in our high margin categories, which is, of course, where we prioritize, and this was partly offset then by higher COGS and higher SG&A. The way to work with this is, of course, that we are always incredibly cost-conscious COGS is mainly attributed to raw materials and distribution, SG&A to inflation and investments in growing our business. And the way to grow this to achieve our long-term margin and growth targets is to continue to focus on solid volume growth. So that will be a theme today and also a theme for the coming quarters. And as I mentioned, strong cash flow and a solid balance sheet. Yes...