Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Gränges' first quarter results presentation for 2026. My name is Jörgen Rosengren, and I'm President and CEO at Gränges, and today I'm joined here in this conference by Oskar Hellström, our CFO and Deputy CEO, and Anna Hedin-Bay, our Investor Relations Director.

I'm going to give you a short summary of the first quarter, after which Oskar will present our results more fully, and then I will round off with some comments on the outlook. Today we'll try to go through the presentation rather quickly, which means that there is going to be ample room for questions and answers after the presentation is done.

Now, to summarize the first quarter, we'd like to first point out the good volume growth that we've enjoyed. We grew our sales volume by 5%, and all that organic, of course, since it's now a while since we made our latest acquisition, despite actually quite weak demand, unstable demand, but also quite weak demand in many of our markets.

We grew quite a bit faster than the market. An encouraging sign was that this growth actually speeded up during the quarter, and March was a very strong month, which gives us, of course, momentum going forward.

The driver behind the growth that we did realize is that we took market share in all of our regions in this quarter, as we have been doing for some time now. In fact, the first quarter of 2026 was the ninth consecutive quarter, if we counted that correctly, of year-on-year sales growth in Gränges, and that's a very good trend, and one we'd like to, of course, keep up going forward.

A little less positive, of course, is the pressure that the higher aluminum price, which again rose during the quarter, exerts on our working capital and our cash flow, and we believe that this trend will persist at least into the second quarter. On the other hand, we had quite strong operational performance in all regions in the quarter, especially towards the end of the quarter, and this was a key factor behind the strong volume growth and also the good results.

That's of course because, as you realize, all of you, of course, good operational performance enables us to flexibly capture market share opportunities that emerge during the quarter in a speedy way, but it's also of course so that good operational performance also drives productivity. Now then, as a result of this good commercial performance and operational performance, we were able to offset cost increases as well as large negative currency effects, around 85 million SEK or so, with share gains, price, and productivity in the quarter.

In doing so, we realized an EBIT increase of 12% to 459 million SEK, which is the best ever EBIT in the first quarter for Gränges. If you'd count in constant currencies, of course, you'd see that the underlying performance improvement is much higher still, probably around or above maybe 30%.

It's also great to see that our sustainability performance speeded up in the quarter, resulting in both an even lower carbon footprint for our business and also increased recycling, something that's a strategic priority for Gränges. Now, as I mentioned, we took significant market share in the first quarter in all of our regions, in fact.

Here you can see how that plays out across the regions and across our end-customer markets. Let me just touch on some highlights here.

In HVAC, we saw a very weak market, a trend that started, I guess, in July or so last year, and persisted during the autumn and also during the first quarter of 2026. Nevertheless, we were able to keep sales volume roughly flat thanks to significant market share gains.

We very strongly outperformed the market in this segment, which secured then a volume growth of 3% for Gränges Americas. In Asia too, we took market share gains, and we did outperform the market, the share gains almost offset weak market demand.

The weak market demand, of course, was due to low vehicle production in Asia in general and in China specifically. The growth ended up just slightly below zero, then slightly negative.

In this chart, I think Europe deserves a special mention. We had a very strong share gain in automotive and other niches, which created a very healthy growth around 15%, which, of course, far outstrips any growth that the market provided us with, and also we believe all competitors.

Now, for several years in a row, we've experienced a large volatility around us: geopolitical volatility, macroeconomic volatility, also practicalities that have been quite volatile, for instance, in the supply chain. For our business, of course, that means that the landscape we're playing in, the conditions we have to accept, change rather rapidly, both commercially, operationally, and also financially.

This, in turn, means that we have to react fast and flexibly together with our partners to offset those effects. We've done this, we feel, in a good way, and this latest quarter was certainly no exception.

Now, the outbreak of the war in the Middle East added, I guess you could say, to an already complicated situation in many ways, besides being, of course, from a human angle, a really terrible thing. We did see higher market prices for energy, for freight, and other factors that were important in our P&L.

Thankfully, the impact on our profit at least in the first quarter was rather limited, and that's thanks to timing effects, because some of these things take time before they work themselves into the P&L. It's also thanks to our hedging and other risk management policies, and other various actions that we've taken.

This, of course, is something that we've had quite a lot of practice with over the past years, and it's I think no exaggeration to say that we've significantly strengthened our ability to withstand such external shocks, by way of strengthening our risk management, our processes internally, and also our commercial contracts both upstream in the value chain and downstream. We also saw significant aluminum supply chain disruption, which further fueled already existing trend towards higher aluminum prices.

These, as will impact our cash flow and working capital. Like I said, we've gotten quite used to handling turbulence like this over the past years.

In the first quarter and as has been the case in the past and will be the case also going forward, our focus is on things we can control, or at least influence. Top of that list, I guess, is market share gains, and then to optimize price and mix, and also to improve our productivity, all things that we did in a good way, I think, in the first quarter.

Now, if the cash flow took a bit of a hit in the first quarter from the higher aluminum price, but was also influenced by our seasonal working capital build-up, which takes place every year, it was, however, helped by lower capex than we've had before. That's because we're now fully out of the years-long and rather intensive investment phase which lasted from 2018 to 2025.

You can see this on this chart in the dark blue bars, that we had quite a lot of expansion capex in those years on average and in total. As you can see on this picture also, and maybe reiterating a message from the last several quarterly reports, we now project very limited capacity expansion capex in the next two years.

That we hope will make a meaningful difference to our balance sheet, strengthening it, and also, of course, provide for better cash flow going forward. That said, the cash flow in the first quarter was weak, and we want to be clear about that.

With that, I'd like to thank you for your attention and turn over to Oskar, who is going to take us through a little bit more fully how the first quarter played out.

Thank you, Jörgen. I will certainly try to do that.

As we just heard here, the first quarter of 2026 was, in fact, the best quarter we've had so far. We continued to experience a solid sales growth despite the continued softness across most of our markets.

As you can see on the left here, the sales volume grew by 5% year-on-year to 160,000 tonnes. Also on the earning side, we saw a positive development with the adjusted operating profit increasing by 12%, or 50 million SEK, to 459 million SEK.

Looking at the margin, or the adjusted operating profit per tonne, this improved by 200 SEK from 2.7 thousand SEK in Q1 2025 to 2.9 thousand SEK in Q1 this year. I think this is a very good development taking into account the strengthening of the SEK against primarily the US dollar, which led to a negative year-over-year currency effect of 85 million SEK in the quarter.

In constant currency, the operating profit increased 33% and would then have reached 544 million SEK with a 3.4 thousand SEK per tonne margin in the first quarter. This, I think, is a good indication of the momentum that we have in the underlying business right now.

If we look at some of the earnings drivers, we note increasingly inflationary pressure for several cost items, not the least in Americas. On the positive side, we also see a continued sequential improvement of the market scrap spreads.

Also from a year-on-year perspective, we saw a slightly positive impact on profits from the improved scrap spreads in the first quarter. Here we should also say that provided that these scrap spreads remain on the current level, we expect to see increasingly positive year-on-year effects from this over the next two quarters.

Looking at the things we can control ourselves, we continue to see positive effects from volume growth, improved pricing, and continued productivity improvements. Let's continue with some more details of the group financials then before we go on to the operating segments.

Here I think it's worth to highlight that the profit for the period increased by close to 24% to 322 million SEK for the quarter. This is, of course, driven by the improved operating profit, but we also see positive effects from a lower financial net primarily from lower market interest rates.

Thanks to this, earnings per share attributable to Gränges parent company shareholders increased to 2.93 SEK for the first quarter. The return on capital employed reached 11.1% in the quarter.

This represents a sequential improvement of 0.3 percentage points compared to the fourth quarter, but a decrease of 0.6 percentage points compared to a year before. The year-on-year decrease is primarily attributable to two things: first, the additional capital we've added in Asia through the acquisition and ramp-up of the facility in Shandong, and second, then, of course, to the higher market price for aluminum.

The development of the aluminum price, I think, is something we should comment a little bit more on before we look into the cash flow and leverage development for the quarter. Now, as most of you probably know well by now, Gränges makes money on the value that we add on top of the raw material, and the aluminum price is to be considered as a pass-through to our customers, right?

This means that the impact from the aluminum price on the operating profit in absolute terms is limited. The aluminum price does, however, impact the value of our working capital.

When the market price for aluminum increases, this has a negative impact on the change in working capital and, consequently, on our operating cash flow. Understandably, the reverse is true when the market price declines.

On the back of the US introduction on tariffs on primary aluminum from Canada, the Midwest transaction price for aluminum has close to doubled since the beginning of 2025. Driven by this, the average aluminum price for Gränges on the global level, then, has increased by about 1,500 US dollar per tonne in the same period.

We continued to see a further increase of the aluminum price in Q1 in all three regions where we operate, and this is then largely fueled and driven by the war in the Middle East. In the first quarter, the increasing aluminum price had a negative impact on our working capital and cash flow with some 550 million SEK.

Provided that the aluminum price remains on the current level, we expect that the increase to date will impact the operating cash flow negatively with about 500 million SEK in the second quarter. With this in mind, let's now look at the cash flow for the first quarter.

Starting with the operating cash flow, this amounted to -333 million SEK in Q1. As you can see on this chart, the strong EBITDA could not fully compensate for the build-up of net working capital that totaled 877 million SEK.

As I mentioned earlier, 550 of this is related to the increased aluminum price, and the remainder is a volume-driven seasonal increase from the fourth to the first quarter. Capital expenditure amounted to 123 million SEK in Q1.

Including taxes and interest paid as well as changes in currency rates, this led to that the financial net debt increased by 517 million SEK to close to 4.6 billion SEK during the first quarter. The net debt to EBITDA ratio increased to 1.8 times, still within our target range of between 1 to 2 times.

Now let's continue with the operating segments and starting with Gränges Americas, that made a record quarter and reached a new all-time high for both sales volume and operating profit. As you heard from Jörgen earlier, the sales volume in Americas increased by 3% year-over-year in Q1 despite a continued weak HVAC demand, despite impact from a rescheduled maintenance stop, and some adverse weather that we experienced there in the beginning of the quarter.

If the start of the quarter was a bit slow, that was compensated by a very strong finish. Driven primarily by share gains, the sales volume in Americas came in just about 62,000 tonnes for the quarter.

In terms of earnings, we see increasing negative year-on-year currency translation effects from the strengthening of the Swedish krona against the US dollar. In the first quarter, the net change in foreign exchange rates was -57 million SEK compared with the same period last year.

Further, we continued to experience increased inflationary pressure on wages and other input costs. Still, we managed to compensate for all of this with volume growth, increased average fabrication price, and improved productivity.

As a consequence, the adjusted operating profit increased by 17% to 378 million SEK. In terms of the margin, this represents an operating profit per tonne increase from 5.3 thousand SEK to 6.1 thousand SEK.

Needless to say, I think our Americas team has done an outstanding job here. Leaving Gränges Americas, moving on to Gränges Asia, where the market slowdown that we saw toward the end of last year remained in quarter one.

We continued to gain market share with primarily automotive customers, and this compensated for some of the lower demand. In total, the sales volume decreased by 2% to slightly below 48,000 tonnes.

When it comes to earnings, the effects from lower demand and market price pressure were only partly offset by the share gains and by productivity increases. As a consequence, the operating profit decreased to 51 million SEK, and the operating profit per tonne came in at 1.1 thousand SEK.

Changes in currency rates had a close to neutral impact compared to the first quarter last year. Moving on to Gränges Europe, and here we continued to experience weak demand across all markets.

We did, however, successfully compensate for this with market share gains, especially within automotive and other niches. In total, the sales volume in Europe increased by 7,500 tonnes, or 16%, to 54,000 tonnes in Q1.

Against the backdrop of today's European market, I think this is truly an impressive achievement. Despite negative effects from foreign exchange rates of 27 million SEK compared to last year, the operating profit increased by 55% to 73 million SEK.

This is driven by the volume growth together with improved pricing and cost productivity. The operating profit per tonne reached 1.3 thousand SEK, up 300 SEK per tonne compared with last year.

Finally, then, some words on our sustainability performance, which remained strong in the quarter. We continued to reduce our carbon emissions intensity, which is down 15%, and to increase our share of sourced recycled aluminum, which is up 9% compared to first quarter last year.

During the quarter, we also issued a new 600 million SEK green bond, for which we experienced quite large investor interest despite the market turmoil. This, I think, reflects the confidence in our strategic direction and sustainability ambitions, which I think is great to see.

Last, but certainly not least, we have achieved the highest MSCI ESG rating of AAA, recognizing our leading ESG performance and resilience within our industry. This we are, of course, also very happy with.

With that, I hand over back to Jörgen, who will provide you with an outlook for the second quarter.

Thank you, Oskar. Now we're getting near to the end of our prepared remarks here, but let me first give you a flavor of what we're expecting for the second quarter of 2026.

Then I think first we need to say and acknowledge also that we do see a lot of uncertainty around us, and larger uncertainty maybe than ever, although we have been saying that now for quite some time, every quarter almost. As a result of that, of course, market demand is weak, I want to say, generally, and also quite difficult to predict.

Having said that, though, our ambition is to continue to take market share in all of our regions. That's also the reason we feel confident in being able to forecast a mid to high single-digit volume growth in the second quarter, and all of that, again, is based on taking market share.

Now, to get the full benefit of that growth, we aim to continue to offset any negative external effects, such as the negative currency we expect to experience in the second quarter and cost increases of various kinds. We intend to offset those negative effects with pricing and with productivity.

A little bit on the negative side, however, we do expect that the increased all-in aluminum price will continue to weigh on operating cash flow and working capital also in the second quarter, despite the fact that we expect lower capacity expansion capex going in the second quarter and also going forward. Then to try to summarize today's presentation before I hand it back to the operator, we realized market share gains across all our regions, all our markets, which drove a 5% volume growth despite weak demand.

We also had very strong operational performance, and that helped us both get the volume out the door, and also helped our financial results greatly by providing good flexibility to take opportunities that show up and also good productivity. I have to say that all of the regional teams really, in Americas, in Europe, and in Asia, have done a fantastic job creating these results.

A result of that work, we did indeed have strong financial performance in the quarter on almost all lines, except for our cash flow then, which was weak. We delivered some excellent sustainability results that Oskar just spoke about.

We continued to focus, as we've done in the past and will do in the future also, on things we can influence, or even control: the market share, the price mix, and also our own productivity. In all these areas, we have high ambitions also going forward.

The outlook for the second quarter is for more growth, good growth, in fact, and we aim to try to get the full financial benefit of that growth. All in all, I guess we could say we had a record first quarter and feel that we have strong momentum going into the second quarter of 2026, and therefore also strong confidence.

Now, before we move on to the Q&A session, I'd like to invite all of you to participate in our Capital Markets Day, which takes place on June 2 in Stockholm. We hope to see many of you there, and there are more details, including a registration form, available on our website for you to go there, I suggest immediately after this call, and sign up.

That really concludes our prepared remarks for today. Operator, now we're ready to take questions if there are any, and we will try to answer them as best as we can, please.

If you wish to ask a question, please dial *5 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial *6 on your telephone keypad.

Hi guys, and thank you for taking my questions. Just a few for me.

First on automotive, growth in Europe was, as you said, very strong. It was up 21% year-over-year, and sort of on par with last quarter despite not having any sort of effects from the backlog reductions.

Is it fair to extrapolate this sort of growth rate in Europe for automotive for the remaining period of the year, for the next few quarters?

Kaleb, good morning, and thanks for showing up here. A good question.

Look, the growth that we have in Europe now is the result of a several years effort of building up a strong market share in various new platforms, specifically driven to a large extent by electric vehicle platforms, which we're, of course, very happy about seeing growth now. Whether it's fair to extrapolate or not, it's fair to assume that we will have a mid to high single-digit growth in the second quarter, because we're predicting that, and that, of course, is based on our belief that we will continue to take market share.

In that respect, I think it is fair to extrapolate our ambition to continue to take market share, but as we don't give specific forecasts for the individual regions.

That's clear. Thank you.

Another question on Europe. European aluminum premiums are up quite a lot since the sort of turbulence in the Middle East started.

Just given that you have a relatively high share of recycled materials, can you maybe say something about how we should reason around the sort of recycling economics and metal spreads in Europe?

Yeah. Morning, Kaleb.

It's Oskar here. I think that's also a very good comment, and I briefly touched upon this a while ago here now in the prepared remarks, but you're absolutely right now that we do see the European metal premiums increasing.

I think generally that is a positive for us. We saw the reverse of this in 2025, and we all know that pressured our earnings quite significantly.

When we now look ahead, premiums are up now on much more attractive levels. That means better recycling margins for Gränges.

When we also see the movement in the premiums, that also gives some positive timing effects as well on the actual premiums itself, right? Looking ahead now in the second quarter, assuming now that current situation remains, we basically, as I said earlier, expect to see quite a substantial year-over-year effect on earnings from less pressure, you could say, on metal spreads and metal premiums.

If you recall last year, we had some negative 60 million SEK of earnings impact from this, and I think it's fair to assume that approximately this will be reversed in looking from 2025 to 2026 second quarter.

That's clear. Thank you.

Just briefly to clarify on HVAC in the US, it performed quite strongly given the market situation. Is all of that due to market share gains, or did you see any sort of changes in inventory levels or overall demand?

Can you maybe also say something about how inventory levels have developed if there's anything you can observe or have observed during the beginning of Q2?

The short answer is yes, it's all due to market share demand. It's probably more than all of it is due to market share demand, to speak.

Regarding inventory levels in the supply chain downstream, we don't know, I think is the short answer. Slightly longer answer is we don't know, but people say that they are more normalized now than they were in the past.

Thank you. Just lastly on Asia, the sort of volume decline seems to be entirely driven by weak automotive demand, right?

I guess the sort of mix improvements you've discussed in earlier quarters, at least as I interpret it, has mainly referred to sort of increasing the share of automotive products. How should we sort of view the possibilities for that sort of mix improvement in the next few quarters given that automotive demand seems to be on the weaker side in Asia?

I guess can it simply sort of be done through market share gains moving forward, or is it reasonable for us to be a bit more conservative on that side?

It's a really difficult question, because it's always very reasonable to be conservative about the Asian market if you look at the market. We feel we have a strong team in Asia, and they have outperformed the market for very long periods of time.

We are slightly more optimistic, I guess, than what the market would make you think. On your question about the mix, there are some good mix opportunities in automotive, and also some worse mix opportunities in automotive, and that's also true for the other segments.

It's not so simple to say that automotive is good mix and the other segments are bad mix. It is true that in this particular quarter, we did not have the market growth that we needed, even after offsetting it with market share gains, that we needed to sustain a profit improvement.

That's how it is. We are a little bit soft on our expectations, I think, for Asia specifically in Q2, and then we expect a recovery.

As you probably know, the market was down, the light vehicle production was down quite a bit in Asia as a whole, despite some countries performing well, and it was down even worse in China, of course, right? Some of our new business is related to China, and of course, then we didn't get quite the same growth that we used to have in the last eight quarters or so.

That's all for me. Thank you.

Yes, hello, Jörgen and Oskar. I'd like to start off with a question on the very strong profitability in the US with EBIT per tonne in dollars is up more than 30% year-on-year despite volumes not really being up that much.

Would you say that there was anything exceptional behind the quarter, or is this a sustainable level of profitability going forward?

Yeah. Good morning, Adrian.

This is a very good question as well. I think what you see here is, of course, an impact of many things, right?

I think, as Jörgen said earlier, we had a good operational quarter in the US with the exception of a little bit in the beginning of January there, started slow, but ended very strong, as you see. Good operational performance helps margins typically.

That being said, I think what you see here primarily is the effect of that the contracts that was renegotiated going into 2026 now, they were renegotiated under even better market conditions than the contracts that expired. As a consequence, of course, we managed to further improve the pricing in those contracts.

Of course, then that means that margin increase is price-driven. It also means, then, that the contracts that are in place will be in place now for the remainder of this year.

Understood. That's very helpful.

Then also, I guess sticking to the US, what's your view on end-market demand in HVAC now that we sort of head into the peak HVAC season? Can you comment anything about current order books compared to how they looked at this point last year?

We don't really have that kind of visibility that would make that comment meaningful. We we had good volume in the first quarter, and like we say also in the report, we enter the second quarter with good momentum.

As what happens to the market in the second quarter, of course, depends a lot on the market, right? There you have some uncertainties on demand, and you also have the the wild card of of the weather, and so on, right?

I don't think anybody knows that. We try to not focus so much on on forecasting that demand, to be honest with you.

Instead, what we try to focus on is is to take market share so that we can know that we have the ability to grow no matter what happens to the to HVAC market, right? It can be up a few percent, it can be down a few percent.

If we have the market share gains that if we can keep the market share gains that we had in the first quarter, we feel that we are well equipped to face whatever comes our way there. The the honest answer, at least, is we don't know what the HVAC market will do this year.

The only positive sign going into the year maybe that we feel reasonably sure of is that we believe that the the supply chain inventories have normalized after being quite high after summer last year and during all of the fall.

Understood. Then a final one for me.

Oskar, you have previously talked about this rule of thumb of conversion profit around 7 to 8 thousand SEK for every incremental tonne of volume. In last year, you didn't quite manage to realize that because of other external headwinds, but it sounds like those are perhaps subsiding now.

Is it fair to say that for 2026 we should expect each added tonne to add perhaps 7 to 8 thousand SEK to EBIT as the usual rule of thumb should be?

I think that's still a good proxy. Then, of course, we need to be aware of that, as you say here, that there are other things that can impact these things as well, but and not the least, also, of course, where in the group the incremental tonne shows up, right?

Because we all know that we have typically higher margins now in Americas than in Asia, for instance. On group level, I think 7 to 8 SEK per kilo is still a good proxy.

Okay. In that case, that's all for me, thank you.

Thank you. Morning.

I have a few follow-ups on the earlier automotive question. I guess mainly for Europe, but also in Asia.

The outgrowth trend is very clear now, for at least five quarters in a row. I won't try to get a split between gains and call it a structural tailwind, but with what you know today, with the market shares that you have already taken, now for how long do you think that supports an outgrowth versus the underlying market?

That's the first part of it.

That's a good question, but it's also a difficult one. I think we look at it in this way, that in automotive specifically, and you refer specifically to Europe, let's narrow it down to that then.

In automotive in Europe specifically, the platforms that we have, we have. Generally, it's so that more than one supplier gets each platform, but there is also an understanding around what are the volumes that are associated with that platform and the shares, and so on, right?

In automotive, the platforms we have, we have. The market share we have, we have, right?

We built it up over some time, and then it depends indeed on the underlying production of those platforms relative to other platforms and, of course, on the automotive production in general. That's a bit of a difficult thing to forecast really, and we don't do that to such an extent.

We do believe that we will keep these platforms that we've taken now, and in that sense, I guess you could say that this could persist.

All right. Put it this way, if I look at Q1 isolated, and that might be too short of a period, I guess there could be timing effects as well, but if you just compare the number you posted for Europe versus both production rates, but also our sort of forecast of take-up rates depending on the mix, is this a quarter where you're selling volumes to new platforms versus last year, or is this sort of spillover effects from gains you took earlier?

It's both.

Yeah. Just to highlight that, Gustaf, we have some new

Okay. To be very clear.

Sorry. There are some new platforms coming out now that are starting to being ramped up this year that we have not had before, right?

That's also one of the reasons why you see this quite substantial growth.

Yeah. I guess it would be fair to assume that the volume impact from won shares comes gradually, right?

If you've taken contracts where you start delivering early 2026, that could be a tailwind throughout the year, right?

It could be, absolutely.

Good. Thank you.

Thank you, Gustaf.

Thank you. Three sets of questions from me.

The first one is you mentioned strong operational performance during the quarter, but especially towards the end of the quarter. What was that improvement?

What drove it? Yes, a little bit more color on that if you will.

Should I take my other two questions immediately?

One by one. Good morning, Oskar.

We had a really good March. I guess we're a little bit proud of that, and that's why we're emphasizing it.

It was also so that during the beginning of the quarter, we had some various negative effects in our production. For instance, we had some adverse weather events in the US, and so on, which took some catching up.

When we look at the quarter, we see this acceleration, right? It's always nicer, of course, to exit the quarter with a high momentum than with a low momentum.

It is really important, though, in our business to be very close between sales and operations, because when you are and an opportunity presents itself, as it did several times during the last year, then we can be fast on our feet, and we can take advantage of it, right? If we're struggling to keep up and do not have good operational performance, then maybe we have to pass.

The good operational performance also has been a strong driver of our market share gains as well.

Shoot. Good.

My second question is on the scrap spreads, which you've talked about already. My question here is, was there any positive impact already in Q1 from increasing scrap spreads?

If so, is something you can quantify?

There was a little bit of positive impact, especially if you look sequentially comparing with the fourth quarter. If you look on a year-on-year perspective, now on group level, I would say it's in the order of magnitude 10 million SEK or so positive versus last year in first quarter.

Wonderful, thank you. My third and final question is if you see any impact from the new tariff regime on aluminum and derivative products on your business or on demand from your customers?

If so, how should we expect this to materialize for you? Thank you.

There have been two very tangible impacts on our business since April last year then. One is, of course, all the practical things that this has led to in sales, in our supply chain in various ways, and finding new supply routes, and new suppliers, and discussing with customers, and invoicing the customers for these tariffs, and then now maybe hopefully getting some money back from the US government, and then having to refund the customers for that, right?

It's quite a strain on the whole organization, I think, more financially and KPI-wise. I think the biggest effect has been that's for sure these tariffs and the increasing regionalization that they represent have been two strong factors, not the only factors, but two strong factors behind the acceleration of what we call the all-in aluminum price, right?

The LME, the global aluminum benchmark price, you could say, plus the various premium we pay in the various markets, right? That has increased quite dramatically during the year, and you see that quite clearly, unfortunately, you could say, in our working capital and our cash flow.

When it comes to effects on customers in terms of substitution and such things, I imagine that's what you're asking about, that's not been a big thing so far at least. It can be a factor going forward, I assume, but there are also other substitution effects going the other way, right?

For instance, copper has also become more expensive, and more expensive more rapidly and more massively than aluminum, for instance. That then drives a bit of substitution in the other direction.

The answer to the question is no, we haven't seen any strong effects from our customers of that kind, and whether we will is a bit of an open question. I hope that was what you were asking for, otherwise, please elaborate.

Yes, that was part of what I was asking. I was also wondering if the most recent changes to these I think they're 232 tariffs, where they will go from, as I understand it, basing the tariff on the metal value of the imported derivative products to the total value of the imported products.

Is that having an impact on your customers who the alternative to producing HVAC units in the US and buying raw materials from you would be to import an HVAC unit or other products?

That's a good question, Oskar. I think what the US administration has done here is that they have also clarified a little bit here, because there has in the past been different interpretations of whether or not the tariffs were valid only for the metal part of the product or on the whole product value.

Now, from Gränges' perspective, we have always interpreted this as that the tariff should be applied to the full value of the product, the metal and potential value-add. That's exactly now what they have clarified.

For us, there is no change. Now, there might be peers to us out there that have interpreted this differently, and then charged or paid a different tariff in the end, and maybe they have to pay different additional tariffs now.

From Gränges' perspective, this is no change to us.

Great. Those were all my questions.

Thank you.

Thank you, Oskar.

Hi, and good morning. Just a few questions here from me.

You mentioned there are good mix opportunities in Asia. I was just wondering if you could elaborate a bit on which end markets these are.

At 1.1 EBIT per tonne in Q1 here, what margin levels are you targeting for Asia on a sustained basis? Do you have any timeline for that?

Yes. As good morning also.

As we acquired a big chunk of capacity in the form of two operating units up in the northeast there in Shandong Province a little more than a year ago. The strategy we used going into that was to fill them up to level where we were breaking even, I guess you could say, and we did that rather rapidly, or we think very quickly, in fact.

We're quite proud of that, but it's, of course, so that when you take so much market share so quickly, then you can't be choosers, to speak. That means that we've taken in some really good variable margin product, and we've also taken in some product that has a low variable margin into our mix then.

When I say mix opportunities, it's really to try to, over time now, grow the higher-margin variable products and maybe at the expense of shedding some of the lower-margin product volume. It's not so much about the market mix, to speak, but really about how we optimize our mix after having quickly grown it over a period of 12, 15 months or so.

In doing so, we had a target last year of offsetting the added fixed costs that we had in a way that would be EPS accretive, and we're sort of round there now. Now, of course, we have a target to grow the profit, right?

Exact targets profit per tonne per region is not a forecast that we give out. By way of example of markets that we think we can grow in, we have some of the similar markets that we also saw after in Europe that has to do with EV platforms and various components to do with thermal management in them, and in the cars, but also in the battery platform there, right?

It has to do with some new segments for us in plate and in other areas, and it has to do a little bit also with the battery industry in general, and maybe also some niches that are new to us, right? It's a checkered picture, I guess you could say, but it's also a very large market, and we have the experience of going after small niches in a large market and making that pay.

That's also the plan for Gränges Asia.

Super. That's super clear.

Just another question. I don't know if you already answered it, but just let me know in that case.

You talked a bit on the Americas margin here, which is due to the repriced contracts for the rest of 2026. My question here is just at the next or at contract renewals, if the Midwest premium normalizes, will you be able to uphold these margins that we've seen here in Q1?

Yeah. Good question, Linus.

I would say that these things has not so much to do with the actual base metal price and the Midwest price. The fact that the market as such is slightly more favorable, it has more to do now what has changed really is the additional 232 tariffs that was introduced last year, right?

That is what is impacting the market when it comes to our own fabrication pricing, and so forth, right? The Midwest premium has more to do with the cost of metal, which is a pass-through for us, right?

Midwest premium changing is more of a working capital and cash flow thing for Gränges rather than something that impacts our operating profit.

It doesn't work like Europe. Now I remember.

Just one last question here. You've earlier talked about 20 million upside here from scrap spreads in H1, and now you talked that you've seen 10 million in the quarter here.

Can we, given that the European premium is above pre-tariff levels, can you expect the level to go beyond the 20 million that you've guided for earlier?

I think I said 60 to 70 million year-over-year in Q2, somewhere around there. Whether or not it will be higher, it very much depends on what happens going forward, of course.

That being said, if things remain on current levels, we see quite good effects both in the second quarter as well as looking into the third quarter. Of course, then that's based on the fact that we saw quite some pressure on scrap spreads and premiums in both second and third quarter last year.

Adding to that, I guess you could say last year's downside is this year's upside,

and

that's good, of course. We also have to mention, I think, in the context that there is dark concerns, of course, about the aluminum supply to Europe, which are related to the war in Iran, and the fact that a lot of the world's aluminum production comes from that region and now has difficulty reaching the rest of the world.

Exactly how that will impact prices, premia, and also scrap prices in Europe, I think is really hard to predict. When there was a similar shortage, I guess, in the US market last year, the premia went up, and the scrap also went up, right?

The spreads went down. Now that also led to more generation of scrap and keeping more scrap in America.

It's possible that we'll see such an effect in Europe, or some other effect, we don't know. Based on today's values, we are quite bullish, I guess, on the year-on-year effects, exactly as you explained, Oskar.

Yeah. Year-on-year positive, right, but we need to remember that they are positive this year because they were largely negative last year, right?

It's a reverse effect, if you wish.

Understood. Just one more.

We saw a controlled shutdown of Qatalum during this turbulence here. Have you guys picked up any other production here, controlled or uncontrolled shutdowns, or

In general, nobody is getting much aluminum out of the Middle East right now, and that's problematic, of course. How long that will last depends on, after the controlled shutdown, but also after the attacks that those sites have been under, how long does it take for them to start up, and how long does it then take for the traffic to resume its normal routes and capacity, and so on?

All of those things are way, way, way above my pay grade. I really have no clue.

I really don't. The experience is, though, that or at least my experience, limited experience, I guess, after the five years in the aluminum industry, is that the price mechanism is quite strong.

The global price mechanism is quite strong as a means to offset or equalize any shortages or bottlenecks in supply. That's maybe especially so in aluminum because the scrap market also is a large buffer.

There's a lot of scrap in the market, right? When the aluminum price goes up, then the scrap becomes more attractive to convert, and then you can start up more scrap remelting furnaces, and so on, right?

It's a complex picture. We have seen some of our competitors, I think, having a little bit of difficulty with supply of aluminum because they were maybe then contracted with very specific alloys or very specific SKUs from the Middle East.

We have been fortunate in not having that problem right now. Far, good, I guess.

We'll see.

Great. Thanks for taking my questions.

Thanks, Linus.

Hi. Thank you.

A couple of questions from me as well. Coming back to this metal price premiums you mentioned, you have a positive reverse impact there of 60 to 70 million in Europe in Q2 to be expected.

Didn't you see anything in Q1, or what amount already benefited Europe in the first quarter?

Yeah. Good question, Mats.

The 60 to 70 million, we should say, is a global number. It's not Europe specific.

It was an outlook for the group. In the first quarter, we do see some positive impact.

As I said, sequentially, of course, we see a continued impact. Year-over-year, it's around 10 million 10 million SEK or so positive impact in Q1.

Great. Then coming back to China, maybe.

It's a volume decline, and I guess you saw soft automotive, and so on. Did you see any sort of inventory reductions also on top of somewhat soft production?

Do you mean in the

inventory in the market, or what?

Supply chain. Historically, there's been some sort of supply chain inventory impact in volumes also, but yeah, could you say anything?

I don't really think we know, Mats. The picture is quite complex.

Firstly, in China, of course, the first quarter is always a bit of a gamble, because you have the Lunar Festival in the middle, and then it takes time to start up and so on, it's a little hard to tell. Secondly, we saw quite a different picture with some markets in Asia producing at high growth rates, right, and others at negative growth rates.

Third, you have this rather big global disruption of the supply chains, and so on. Inventories, of course, include what's on the water.

The answer is I don't know the answer to your question.

Oh, thank you anyway. Then, you mentioned that March was quite strong, and you saw a substantial improvement.

That must mean that you have started out pretty well in April also, and I guess that includes in your guidance. But

As we said, Yeah. go ahead and ask your question.

Sorry for the interruption.

Yeah. My question is really, due to the Middle East tensions, etc., do customers have sort of pre-bought or tried to stock up with some extra aluminum components to secure deliveries, and so on?

That's certainly been the case in some markets when it comes to aluminum, the metal, right? When it comes to our products that we make, that may not be such a big factor because they are bulky, they're hard to store, and the supply chains that we feed them into are not engineered to build up a large inventory of products, right?

When there is stocking of aluminum or securing, I think is a better way to put it, of aluminum volume because of fears of supply chain disruption or fears of higher prices, that doesn't necessarily mean that the aluminum is actually moving anywhere. It's just sitting there waiting to be used.

When it comes to our products, I don't think that pre-buy has been a really strong effect in the first quarter. That's a little bit with the caveat that we never really know exactly pre-build, pre-buy, where is that, right?

No, I think you see for customers especially within automotive and the higher-value segments, this type of behavior is, I think, it's not really there to any major extent. You do see these effects from time to time, Mats, when you come to the products that we sell through distributors, and so forth.

They act a little bit more opportunistic when it comes to metal pricing and when to buy and when not to buy, right? We need to remember then that the majority of our products are fairly high-value products, shouldn't say our distribution customers are not sophisticated.

They are very sophisticated, they're very good at what they do, but they act a little bit more opportunistic maybe than our average customer does.

Generally, also, I think the higher aluminum price quite in general, of course, makes it much more expensive to hold inventory. It's one thing to pre-buy when the aluminum price is 40, 50% lower than it was today, but now it's a very expensive commodity to be holding on to, right?

Very good. A couple of small ones to finish with.

First, you talk about the production shutdown that was due to maintenance that was moved from Q4 to Q1, what was the impact? Maybe you already mentioned that, but

We we mentioned that especially in when we did the quarter one, oh sorry, quarter four presentation, because it had an impact then. In essence, what what happened was that we moved 2,000 tonnes in in the US from the the first quarter back to the fourth quarter and and moved basically some 20 million SEK of EBIT over over year-end there basically.

If if everything else would have been the same, and and we wouldn't have done the maintenance stop in Q1 this year, then we would have produced 2,000 tonnes more in the US and and hopefully then had a 20 million SEK higher higher earnings or EBIT in in Q1. That was also an explanation why why Q4 maybe came in a little bit better than than we originally thought.

Yeah. Then final one about energy price.

Some of your capacity are operated on gas, Poland, I guess. What's your sort of ability to pass on those higher energy prices compared to previous peak of energy?

Yeah. Previous peaks of energy have been very high at some points, right?

I think in Europe, we struggled a little bit after the outbreak of the Ukraine War, that's when we really had a peak in energy prices. That made us make some changes to the way we operate at that time.

That also means that now we feel that we have quite good tools in place for managing energy price fluctuations. Just to very briefly explain what we do, I think we hedge energy, we hedge natural gas short-term to quite large degree, right?

We also have in our contracts, our long-term contracts, we have surcharge clauses which allows us to, with some delay then, pass on changes in energy price to our customers. The delay in the surcharge clauses are covered by the hedging, so that means that we don't currently foresee any major impacts from energy price changes.

Great. Thanks a lot.

Thank you, Mats.

Thank you, operator, and thanks everybody who attended this first quarter presentation for 2026 for Gränges, and thanks especially those who provided us with these interesting and thoughtful questions. With that, we close the conference and wish all of you a nice day.

When the weekend comes around tomorrow evening, a good weekend also. Take care.

Goodbye.