Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget SCA (publ) (SCA_A) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to this presentation of SEA's 2026 first quarter report. With me here today, I have President and CEO Ulf Larsson and CFO Andreas Everts to go through the results and take your questions. Over to you, Ulf. Thank you for that, Anders. And also from my side, very good morning. So despite the increasing costs and the continued challenging market for forest industrial products, we delivered 1.1 billion SEK on EBITDA level and by that an EBITDA margin of 23% for the first quarter. Segment renewable energy had a record high result during the first quarter and that was driven by electricity prices, strong deliveries and also very good market for liquid biofuels. Our new wind farm located in Jämtland started operations during the quarter and contributed to a high profitability within the segment. And our high degree of self-sufficiency in strategic areas continue to be an important factor to mitigate high costs, partly offsetting high wood, raw material and energy costs. Turning over to some financial KPIs for the first quarter, as already said, our EBITDA reached 1.1 billion SEK, and that corresponds to a 23% EBITDA margin. Our industrial return on capital employed came out on 2%, counted for the last 12 months, and the leverage was 2, while our net debt to equity reached 11.9%. So and I will now make some comments for each segment starting with the forest. Stable harvesting levels from our own forest have contributed to balanced supply of wood, raw materials to our industries during the period. We have seen a long-term trend of increasing saw log prices and they continued up also in the first quarter. However, availability of saw logs has increased towards the end of the quarter due to the big storm and that will also gradually reduce prices coming...