Holmen AB (HOLM_A) Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the interim report presentation for the Holmen Group. My name is Henrik Sjölund, and this is not Anders Jernhall. This is Stefan Lorén. He's been with the company for actually quite many years before, and then you were away working for LKAB and back now as CFO. And Anders Jernhall, who you know really well, most of you at least, he has a more free role as vice president of the company. So we will do the presentation together in roughly the same way as Anders and I used to do it. And then after the presentation, we are happy to take any questions you might have. So Stefan, let's start. First quarter. A good result from us. Again, not the least thanks to a really good performance from board and paper, which I will come back to a bit later. The environment is not easy. The market conditions are, I would say, both uncertain and not extremely good. We'll come back to that as well. If we look at our industry, I mentioned board and paper, but if we also include our wood products division and look at how we have performed in terms of return on capital employed in the first quarter, we reached 20%. And as you know, the last 10 years, looking at the graph, we've been on that level roughly, actually 19% as an average. We are now a little bit after the first quarter. We have, as always, I would say, a very strong financial position and we paid a lot of dividend, 1.9 billion SEK. And after having paid the dividend, our financial position is strong and we have a net debt of roughly 10% of equity. All right, let's start with the forest division and maybe more the wood market as such. I think if we go back one year and when we discussed, we discussed actually quite a lot. What is the situation in the wood market? What do we believe about price...