Sanoma Corp Unsp/Adr (SWYBY) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Sanoma's first half 2025 results presentation. My name is Kaisa Uurasmaa. I'm heading investor relations and sustainability at Sanoma. During the first half of the year, our results, operational EBIT increased, and that was mainly driven by learning. And today, we have President and CEO Rob Kolkman and CFO Alex Green presenting the results. After the presentation, we will host a Q&A session. We will first take questions from here at Sanoma House. We will then hand over to the telephone line, and then you can also use the chat function in the webcast platform. After the event, the recording, including the Q&A, will be available on our website. With this, I would like to invite Rob on stage, please. Thank you very much, Kaisa. And good morning, everybody. It's my pleasure to present the half-year results to you. And as Kaisa was mentioning, they are good first half results with our operational EBIT improving, driven by learning. So as per usual, I would like to go through a couple of the key points, then zoom in on learning and media before handing over to Alex to dive a bit more into the financials. So if you look at the net sales, they were overall stable, with growth in learning, offsetting the lower advertising sales that we still see here in Media Finland. The operational EBIT, excluding PPA, improved, again driven by that net sales growth that we saw in learning, but also continuing the improvement of the cost base, and it was slightly declining in the second quarter in Media Finland, and therefore also for the half year. We continue to see our free cash flow improving. That's driven by the higher operational earnings and also lower financial items. And Alex will zoom in on that a little bit more in a minute. Like mentioned ...