Scandic Hotels Group AB (publ) (SHOT) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Welcome to the Scandic Hotels Group Q2 2026 report presentation. For the first part of the conference call, you will be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answers session, you are able to ask questions by dialing pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers, CEO Jens Mathiessen and CFO Per Christensen. Please go ahead. Thank you very much and good morning everyone and thank you all for joining us for this Q2 presentation. My name is Jens Mathisen. I'm the CEO of Scandic and together with me I have our CFO Per Christiansen as always. Let's dive into the highlights so please turn to page 2. We delivered a good quarter with solid growth. We improved our earnings and also higher profitability. The business is performing well across most of our markets, with Finland remaining the exception. Market conditions were favorable, supported by a busy event calendar, strong leisure travel and stable demand for business travel and meetings. Demand was particularly strong in the capital cities of Sweden, Denmark and Ireland. Finland remained challenging throughout the quarter, while the Norwegian hotel market was affected by a hotel strike lasting more than six weeks. The recovery in Finland is taking longer than we had expected, but we remain focused on turning the performance around. We now expect a gradual improvement with a stable second half of the year with a financial performance on same levels as last year. During the quarter, we expanded the hotel portfolio, continued to grow ScandiGo, we secured a long-term financing framework, and we progressed the Dallata acquisition according to plan, with completion expected in the fourth quarter. Looking ahead, the booking situation remains strong. Compared with earlier this yea...