Holmen AB (HOLM_A) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everybody, and most welcome to the Interim Report presentation for the Holmen Group. Today it's me, Henrik Sjölund, and Stefan Loreen. Correct name again. Now the second quarter. Good. We will go through the presentation, and then we're happy to take any questions you might have after the presentations. So let's start. Well, as you know, A quarter, again, characterized by uncertainty and cautious consumers, leading to a quite tough supply-demand balance for, I'd say, all forest-based industries. In our case, we also had Arctic weather up in the north, which helped us to deliver a decent result, which we will come back to in the different business areas. During the first quarter, we also paid dividends to our shareholders. 1.5 billion Swedish crowns and our financial situation after the dividend just to remind you is of course very strong and shall remain so regardless of the future a few words about the forest and normally we don't talk so much about the forest we talk about the wood market same again what we see in the first quarter is that the industry is not running full declining or say, production curtailments, especially in the pulpboard industry. We have seen pulpboard prices coming down slowly, and that continued in the first quarter. We talked a lot about saw logs as well, and we said we don't see anything happening. Also, saw log prices are coming down. We will come back to that when we go through wood products, but also there we see that saw mills are not running full in the first quarter. In our case, this is actually the same slide as we showed a quarter ago, and the reason for that is that we hardly buy anything in the market. We are fully occupied helping forest owners to take care of the wood that came down in the storm in the middle par...