Sappi Ltd S/Adr (SPPJY) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

And thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SAPI First Quarter2026 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be the question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star, 1, 1 on your cell phone keypad. You're going to hear an automatic message advising your hand is raised. To read your question, please press star, 1, and 1 again. Read the advice that this conference has been recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to our speaker today, Steve Binnie. Theo, please go ahead. Thank you very much and good day to everybody. Thank you for joining us. I will move through our investor presentation and, as always, call out the page numbers as I go. And just starting on page two, I draw attention to the disclosure on forward-looking statements for you. Moving to slide three. Looking at the overall numbers for our Q1, it's fair to say that these were challenging market conditions with a number of headwinds which had an adverse impact on our earnings and just highlighting a few of these which have the most material impact. Firstly, resolving pulp prices down $160 compared to a year ago, a very material impact, and We've seen this shift in exchange rates linked to a stronger dollar, sorry, a stronger Rand or maybe even more relevant is a weaker dollar, which once again has a major impact on our earnings. On top of that, we've seen as we've gone live with our Somerset Mill PM2 project, We've come to market at a time when paper boat markets are weak in North America, which has meant that our ramp-up has been a bit slower than anticipated. We did have some production issues in North America. These were once-off events, mainly linked to ou...