Essity AB (publ) (ESSITY_A) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to ESRI's presentation of the Q4 and full year 2025 results. Here to take us through the highlights, we have our CEO, Ulrika Kolsrud, and our CFO, Fredrik Rystad. After the presentation, we will open up for your questions. If you'd like to ask a question, you just have to dial in and press star one. With that, let's get started. I'll leave over to our CEO. Ulrika, the floor is yours. Thank you, Sandra. And also from my side, welcome to this webcast. The final quarter of 2025 confirms that we are standing strong in a continued challenging market environment. We continue to grow in our strategic segments such as incontinence care, wound care and premium products in professional hygiene. And we strengthen market shares across our different branded categories. We're also strengthening our profit margins. Actually, we are strengthening our profit margins in all three business areas in the quarter, and we deliver a stronger result than last year's same quarter. When it comes to volumes, sequentially, we have a stronger volume, so stronger volume in Q4 versus Q3. Looking at quarter over last year's quarter, however, there is a flat volume growth. And that together with the fact that we are then lowering prices in order to compensate for lower input costs is resulting in that we are reporting a negative organic sales growth. And that underpins the importance of the initiatives that we took last quarter to accelerate profitable growth. We are now operating in the new organizational setup with decentralized decision making, with end-to-end accountability and with even sharper focus on our most attractive categories and segments. And we are starting to implement our cost-saving program. In the quarter, we also strengthen our position for profitable grow...