Gränges AB (publ) (GRNG) Q1 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to this first quarter presentation for Grengis. My name is Jörgen Rosengren. I'm Grengis' CEO, and I will be taking you through this presentation today together with our CFO, Oskar Hellström, who's here with me. The first quarter of 2024 showed a return to volume growth, and that happened because we saw a stabilization of the market demand in most sectors after a long period of destocking downstream from us. And now we believe that inventory levels are more normal in most of the sectors that we serve. But it also happened because we had focused in some time on market share gains and gained some good results from that in the first quarter of this year. And as a result, we did indeed then show some volume growth, albeit at the modest level of 2% to 122,000 tons in the first quarter, relative to 120,000 tons last year. We also managed to... achieve good productivity improvements, and they, together with the growth that were recorded, largely offset the customer price pressure. That is a normal feature of the environment today, with lower energy prices and so on. And as a result, we recorded an operating profit of 356 million SEC, which we regarded as a good result and more or less in line with last year when compensated for energy compensation that we received in the first quarter of last year. We also are very proud of our sustainability performance, where we recorded some very, very good results in the first quarter. Turning to the market then, and to our sales in 2020, for various business statements. We saw negative volume growth in Greenwich Americas. And the most important factor there is somewhat later on, sell into the customers in the HVAC segments as a result of their manufacturing starting up a little later than...