Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget SCA (publ) (SCA_A) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to this presentation of SEA's 2025 half-year results. 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, good morning and warm welcome to the presentation of our results for the second quarter 2025. During the second quarter we continued to deliver good profitability in a challenging environment and our high degree of self-sufficiency in strategic areas mitigated higher costs, not the least related to wood-raw materials. We reached a bit over 2 billion SEK on EBITDA level and by that an EBITDA margin of 38% for the second quarter. In the quarter, SEA had higher prices and a really strong production, good delivery volumes in both wood and container board. The volume increase has not the least been related to Bålsta sawmill and Obola container board mill, where we have performed strategic investments. Due to higher availability in production in our container board mills, we also generally noted a lower specific cost level in the second quarter. And all strategic investments will step by step contribute to increased productivity and cash flow generation during upcoming years. Global uncertainty remains driven by discussions around new and changing tariffs. This clearly affects the global demand and business climate in a negative way. Especially the pulp market has been hit so far. Turning over to some financial KPIs for the second quarter. As already mentioned, our EBITDA level reached a bit over 2 billion SEK, which corresponds to 38% EBITDA margin. Our industrial return on capital employed came out at 8%, counted for the last 12 months, and the leverage was at 1.8 times, and our net debt to equity...