Essity AB (publ) (ESSITY_A) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to Esri's presentation of the Q2 results. My name is Sandra Åberg, I'm Head of Investor Relations here at Essity. We will begin with a summary of the key business highlights from our CEO Ulrika Karlsrud, followed by the financials and a closer look at the key metrics presented by our CFO Fredrik Rystad. After that, we will have a Q&A session where you will have the possibility to engage directly with us. If you would like to ask a question, you just press star one on your telephone. With that, let me hand over to our CEO. Ulrika, welcome. Thank you, Sandra. And welcome also from my side to this presentation. We can summarize the quarter with that we delivered a positive organic sales growth and a result of 4.7 billion SEK. And the fact that we have this stable development in a quite challenging market environment is a testament to our resilience and to the strength of our broad portfolio of essential hygiene and health products. The organic sales growth that we delivered was close to 2%, 1.9% to be precise, and primarily driven by a strong pricing performance. We also grew very nicely in our strategic categories and segments, such as feminine care, incontinence care, retail, wound care, lymphology, Torque PeakServe and Torque Skincare. And it's promising and encouraging that the focus and investments that we put behind driving higher yielding segments is paying off. On the other hand, we also in some of our segments and categories experienced a lower demand in the quarter as customers and consumers are constraining their spending following the weak economic climate and the global uncertainty that we see. And that resulted in limited volume growth. Looking at our profit margins, or at our margins first, because we can talk about our gross marg...