Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Gränges's second quarter results presentation. My name is Jörgen Rosengren, and I have the great honor and also pleasure to be President and CEO at Gränges.

Today, I'm joined in this conference by Oskar Hellström, our CFO and Deputy CEO, and Anna Hedenby, our Investor Relations Director. I will start today's call by giving a short summary of the second quarter, after which Oskar will present our results in more detail, and then I will round off with some comments on the outlook.

As always, we will do our best to get through the presentation rather quickly, leaving ample opportunity to ask questions after the presentation is finished. Now, to summarize the second quarter, I'd like to first point out the continued strong volume growth.

We grew our sales volume by 5%, despite hesitant demand in many of our markets. The main driver behind this growth was continued market share gains, as we've seen for several quarters now, and of course, also strong operational performance, enabling us to deliver this volume, but also to respond quickly when we see commercial opportunities.

In fact, the second quarter of 2026 was our 10th consecutive quarter of year-on-year sales volume growth, and in itself was the best sales volume we've ever had in a single quarter. Strong volume then, and this volume, together with pricing and recycling, and also productivity improvements, more than offset the cost increases we had to take during the quarter, and also currency headwinds.

Taken together, all this led to a record adjusted operating profit. It, in fact, increased 33% over last year to 580 million SEK, making this the stronger quarter result in the history of Gränges.

We also delivered record sustainability results. We had our lowest ever carbon emissions intensity, and we had our highest ever recycling performance.

These achievements, of course, strengthen our competitiveness, our customer relations, our long-term growth, but of course, they also help the planet. Now, as I've already mentioned, market share gains continue to be the main driver behind our growth, also in the second quarter, as the underlying demand in most of our markets and segments remained hesitant.

Looking at the different end markets, our sales to automotive grew by 7%, packaging by 11%, and climate control by 4%. In all cases, this is stronger growth than that of the end-consumer and markets that underlie these numbers.

As you can see, the growth this quarter was mainly driven by Europe and by Americas. In Americas, market share gains drove strong growth in both packaging and climate control, resulting in a total volume increase of 8%, despite relatively soft underlying demand.

In Europe, we grew even faster, by 13%, delivering our best year-to-date sales volume ever. Growth was particularly strong in automotive in Europe, thanks to large market share gains there.

Overall, our sales volume increased by 5% compared with the second quarter last year, thanks to market share gains resulting, as I've already said, in our best volume in a single quarter ever. Now, before I hand over to Oskar, I'd like to briefly revisit some of the things we presented at our Capital Markets Day in June.

First, I'd like to point out that our long-term direction remains unchanged from what it has been for the last 5 years. Personally, I think this latest quarter is another really good example of us executing according to that plan, which we call Navigate.

Now, as many of our Navigate strategy has three phases, and last year, we finalized the long investment phase, which significantly expanded our production capacity worldwide and strengthened our capabilities also, but it was a phase that required significant capex. Now, we've shifted our focus to utilizing and optimizing the assets we've built, increasing capacity utilization, continuing to gain market share, improving productivity, both capital productivity, cost productivity, asset productivity, and also, of course, maintaining a disciplined capital allocation.

Now, all of this is built on the same strong foundation we have talked about for several years now: safety, people, sustainability, as well as disciplined risk management and capital allocation. Taken together, all these initiatives support our ambition to build an industry leader in aluminum recycling and flat rolling while delivering strong cash generation and attractive shareholder returns over time, and then to reach carbon neutrality by 2040.

Here are the key messages that were delivered on the Capital Markets Day. As you can see, we made many bold statements.

Our investment phase is finalized, we expect lower capex from now on. We have a much higher sustainability ambition.

We promise to try to get our utilization above 90% by 2027, which in itself is a very strong statement, implying something like 100,000 tonnes of extra volume. We've launched a 4-year Optimize program to focus on price mix, but also asset, cost, and capital productivity.

This is not something in only one of our regions, no, all of our regions raised ambition according to these strategic initiatives. Looking at the results side then, we do expect much stronger cash conversion ahead.

In fact, our ambition is to have a 70% cash conversion from EBITDA to operating cash flow. We will be disciplined in how we allocate that cash, and in particular, we are looking into share buyback as an alternative, which we will activate as soon as our leverage is sustainably below or at 1.5 times net debt over EBITDA.

We reconfirmed our financial targets and also that we believe that they're within reach, maybe not least importantly, our 15% return on capital employed targets. We also recommitted to building an industry leader in flat rolling and recycling of aluminum.

These messages are available, of course, in the Capital Markets Day material, which in turn is available on our investor relations page, please take a look at that. With that, which was quite a mouthful, I am turning over to Oskar, who will take us through the results in a little bit more depth and detail.

Yes, thank you, Jörgen. I will try to do so.

The second quarter of 2026 was, in fact, by quite a good margin, the best individual quarter we've had so far. We continued to experience solid sales growth, as you heard from Jörgen, despite the continued softness across many of our markets.

As you can see on the left-hand side here, the sales volume grew by 5% year-on-year to 167,000 tonnes, or 333,000 tonnes then on a rolling 12-month basis. On the earnings side, we saw an even stronger positive development, and the adjusted operating profit increased by 33%, or 144 million SEK, to 580 million SEK.

For the margin, the adjusted operating profit per tonne improved by more than 700 SEK from 2.7 thousand SEK in Q2 last year to 3.5 thousand SEK in Q2 2026. If we look at the drivers behind this, we continue to see increasing inflationary pressure for several cost items, not the least in Americas.

This, together with price pressure in Asia and negative, but sequentially improving, currency effects that totals 32 million SEK year-on-year, these are then the key negatives in the quarter. The external pressures that we see are, however, more than well offset by very positive developments in several other areas.

We note a continued improvement on the market scrap spreads, and this is an important contributor when we compare with last year. Here, we, however, need to remember that we had the reverse effect from the scrap spreads in Q2 last year, and that we are now back at or slightly above the levels we saw back in 2024.

In total, the improved market scrap spreads added some 60 million SEK to operating profit from a year-on-year perspective. Provided that the current spreads remain, we expect to see positive year-on-year effects from this also the next two quarters.

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

On this slide, I think it's worth to highlight that we've had items affecting comparability in the quarter. That's negative 15 million SEK, and these are related to a fire that occurred in our production facility in Shandong.

This means that the reported operating profit for the quarter is 565 million SEK, compared with the adjusted operating profit of the 580 million SEK. The profit for the period increased by more than 38% to 405 million SEK for the quarter, and this is, of course, primarily driven by the higher operating profit.

The financial net is fairly stable compared to last year, as lower market interest rates compensated for the increased net debt level. Earnings per share attributable to Gränges's parent company shareholders increased to 3.73 SEK for the second quarter, and the return on capital employed reached 11.8% in the quarter.

This represents an improvement by 0.6 percentage points compared to the year before. Before we look more in detail on the cash flow and leverage, I would like to spend a little bit time on the development on the market price for aluminum.

Now, as most of you probably know well, Gränges makes the money on the value that we add on top of the aluminum raw material, and that the aluminum price, therefore, is to be considered as a pass-through to our customers. 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 of tariffs on primary aluminum from Canada, the Midwest transaction price for aluminum has doubled since the beginning of 2025.

Driven by this, but also by increases in other regions, the average aluminum price for Gränges has increased with more than $1,600 per tonne in the same period. We continued to see a further increase of the aluminum price in Q2.

Now, short term, the aluminum price is sensitive to many things, for instance, the development of the conflict in the Middle East, it's very difficult to forecast how this will develop. As you can see on this chart, the market price started to decline towards the end of the quarter, and this is, of course, positive for Gränges and for our cash generation.

In the second quarter, the increasing aluminum price had a negative impact, still, on our working capital and cash flow with some 600 million SEK. Provided that the aluminum price remains on the current level, we expect this to impact the operating cash flow positively with about 300 million SEK in the third quarter.

With this in mind, let's now look at the cash flow for the second quarter in more detail. Starting then with the operating cash flow, this amounted to negative 155 million SEK in Q2.

As you can see on this chart here, the strong EBITDA of 792 million couldn't fully compensate for the build-up of net working capital that totaled 838 million SEK. As I mentioned earlier, about 600 million SEK of this is related to the increased aluminum price, and the remainder then is a volume-driven seasonal increase from the first to the second quarter.

Here, we should note that we continue to improve the working capital efficiency in the quarter, and this has had an offsetting effect on the seasonal build-up. Capital expenditure, that amounted to 109 million SEK in the quarter.

During Q2, we also distributed 179 million SEK to our shareholders, and the second dividend payment with the same amount will be paid in November. Including taxes and interest paid, as well as changes in currency rates, this led to that the financial net debt increased by 564 million SEK to 5.1 billion SEK during the second quarter.

Thanks to the strong earnings development and the improved EBITDA, the net debt to EBITDA ratio increased only slightly to 1.9 times, still within our target range of between 1 and 2 times. Now, let's continue with the operating segments, and starting then with Gränges Americas that made a record quarter and reached new all-time highs for both sales volume and operating profit.

As you heard from Jörgen earlier, we had a strong sales volume development in Americas. Sales volume increased by 8% year-on-year and reached 65,000 tonnes in the quarter.

The growth is primarily market share-driven, but we also saw the demand gradually picking up in the climate control market, which is positive. In terms of earnings, we continued to experience increased inflationary pressure for many cost items, and we also continued to have negative year-on-year currency translation effects from the strengthening of the Swedish krona against the US dollar.

We see a sequential improvement here, and in the second quarter, the net change in foreign exchange rates was only 7 million SEK compared with the same period last year. Turning then to the positives, we had a very good operational performance in all our US facilities in the quarter, and this enabled both the volume growth, as well as productivity improvements.

We also note a continued improvement of the market scrap spreads, which, together with improved pricing, are important earnings drivers then, if we compare with last year. In total, the adjusted operating profit increased by 55% to 449 million SEK.

In terms of the margin, this represents an operating profit per tonne increase from 4.8 thousand SEK to 6.9 thousand SEK. This, I think, is good evidence of the strong execution we're seeing from our Americas team.

Leaving Gränges Americas, continuing with Gränges Asia, and here, the slowdown of the market that we saw in Q1 continued in the second quarter. We continued to gain market share, winning primarily automotive customers, and this compensated for some of the lower demand.

We also had some negative effects on the sales volume from the fire in the Shandong facility, where we were not able to ship about 3,000 tonnes to primarily industrial customers, but this, we should mention, is fairly low margin products. Due to the negative volume effect from the fire, the sales volume decreased by close to 5% to slightly below 53,000 tonnes.

Excluding this, the sales volume would have been fairly stable compared with last year. When it comes to earnings, the effect from the lower sales volume and the market price pressure were only partly offset by product mix improvement and by productivity increases.

As a consequence, the operating profit decreased to 81 million SEK, and the operating profit per tonne came in at 1.5 thousand SEK. Changes in currency rates were positive 2 million SEK compared to second quarter last year.

The financial effects from the fire in Shandong were relatively limited in the second quarter. The contribution loss from the 3,000 tonnes of industrial products that we couldn't deliver was about 3 million SEK.

Earlier, I mentioned the 15 million SEK of write-down and extraordinary costs there booked as items affecting comparability. For those of you who would like to have more details on this, and also how we currently view the impact of this fire going forward, there is a good section on this on page 12 in our half-year report, please have a look at that, and you will get more detailed information.

Then moving on to Gränges Europe, where we continued to experience hesitant underlying end-user demand across most market segments. We did, however, successfully compensate for this with share gains, especially within the automotive and industrial markets.

In total, the sales volume in Europe increased by 6,300 tonnes, or 13%, to 53,000 tonnes in Q2. Given how challenging the European market has been, I think this is a very good outcome.

Despite negative effects from foreign exchange rates of 27 million SEK compared to last year, the operating profit increased by 17% to 87 million SEK, and the operating profit per tonne reached 1.6 thousand SEK. The key drivers behind the improved earnings are the sales growth, improved pricing, and increased productivity, together with the tailwind from the improved market scrap spreads.

Finally, from my end, then some words on our sustainability performance, that also reached new record levels in the second quarter. We continued to reduce our carbon emissions intensity, which is down 13%, and increase our volume of sourced recycled aluminum, which is up 14% compared to second quarter last year.

The share of sourced recycled aluminum is now at an all-time high of 49%, which is close to 4 percentage points higher than in Q2 a year ago. The carbon emissions is at an all-time low of 5.6 thousand tonnes CO2 per tonne aluminum, and that also happens to be 50% down from our SBTi baseline from 2021.

More importantly, when it comes to the carbon emissions, we have raised our 2030 ambitions further and lowered our total intensity target with 25% from 4 to 3 tonnes of CO2 per tonne aluminum. This, I think, reflects the confidence in our strategic direction and our sustainability ambitions, and it puts us in the forefront of our industry.

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

Thank you, Oskar. We're getting closer now to the end of our prepared remarks, and we'll soon turn over to Q&A.

Let me give you a flavor then of what we're expecting for the third quarter. First, we need to acknowledge that the market remains really difficult to predict, and maybe not super strong in all respects, but having said that, we do continue to see opportunities to grow through market share gains.

In Americas and Europe, we expect sales volume growth in the mid-to-high single digits compared with the third quarter of last year, driven mainly then by continued market share gains. To get the full benefit of that growth, our ambition remains the same as before, which is to offset cost increases through pricing and recycling and productivity also.

In Asia, we're facing a different situation. There, we expect continued price pressure, but we also have a high ambition in the productivity area.

When it comes to volume, we expect the fire in Shandong to result in a year-on-year sales volume decrease of approximately 10,000 tonnes, and this decrease is then, thankfully, primarily related to lower-margin industrial products, because in China and the situation we're in, our priority and focus remains on protecting strategic business and customer deliveries by securing supply through alternative solutions. Finally, unlike what I've said in the recent quarters, foreign exchange rates are currently expected to be broadly neutral compared with the third quarter of last year.

As Oskar already mentioned, we are optimistic about our ability to have a better cash flow going forward and a better cash conversion, thanks to the development of the aluminum price. To summarize today's presentation then, we delivered our 10th consecutive quarter of year-on-year volume growth, and this was driven by continued, systematic market share gains, despite hesitant end-user demand.

Also in the quarter, we delivered record sales volume and record earnings. Our good commercial and operational performance, apart from delivering the volume that we reported, also enabled us to offset cost increases, continued price pressure in Asia, and negative currency effects through pricing and recycling and productivity.

Americas delivered another record earnings quarter, and Europe delivered its best ever year-to-date volume and significantly improved its profitability. We also delivered our strongest sustainability performance, so far at least, with the lowest carbon emissions intensity and the highest recycling level in our history.

We entered the third quarter with good momentum and optimism also, and feel that we have many opportunities still to grow through market share gains. All in all, this was the strongest quarter in the history of Gränges, and we remain focused going forward then on continuing to deliver profitable growth.

That concludes our prepared remarks for today, operator, we are now ready to take questions from the audience.

Good morning. I have one question, and it's on how to think about the earnings bridge going forward.

If I look at Q2, and if I take away the FX effect and the positive metal price effect you had, the contribution margin this quarter is far exceeding, call it, the normal levels we've been talking about for a long time. If we're going into Q3, if you have lower end of your volume guide, you will have largely unchanged volumes year-over-year.

On an organic level, should we expect a similar level of contribution margins also for Q3? I guess, in other words, should we expect a significant improvement in organic EBIT, even if you have largely unchanged volumes on a group level?

Thank you.

Good morning, Gustaf. Oskar here.

That was a very good question. I think maybe it's difficult to answer, or maybe not.

I will try. There is a lot or there are some things now, of course, if you look sequentially from Q2 going into Q3, there are a couple of things we could mention.

We do expect to see some growth in Europe and Americas and potentially some decline in Asia. If you look at the regional differences in margin, this means, of course, that even with a similar or slightly increasing even volume on group level, we should have a positive geographical mix effect here.

That is one thing. The other thing, I think, worth to mention is, of course, that we do get some benefits from the price-cost net.

We managed to increase prices more year-over-year than the costs are increasing. Now, prices are to a large extent contracted for the rest of the year, costs levels to some extent, of course, also, but that means that we expect to see a similar effects year-over-year in Q3 as we had in Q2.

Last but not least, and the third thing I think we could mention and highlight here is that we do get positive effects from the normalization of the scrap spreads. Our recycling profitability, in that sense, is improving.

We expect that to be fairly similar in Q3 as in Q2, and therefore, also that means a continued year-over-year improvement or a normalization to 2024 levels or however you want to phrase that. I don't know if that answered your question, but these are, I think, the three key things to keep in mind when you're looking at the Q3 performance.

Sure. Maybe if I can follow up.

If I take all the FX effect you mentioned and what I believe is the positive metal price effect in the bridge, in order to get to the 580 you did in EBIT this quarter, yeah, the contribution margin is something like 13,000, 14,000 rather than the 7 to 8 we have been, yeah, again talking about for a long time. Is there big element of very strong productivity in Americas, for example, just so we don't get too crazy on the earnings here in the coming quarters?

No, but

that's a good point. It was a very good quarter in Gränges Americas in many aspects.

I think we had three three production plants. All three production plants had, operationally, very good performance in the quarter.

Basically, everything went well, which is, of course, what you expect, or what you hope for, but that's not necessarily how it is all the time. That was the case in Q2, it was a very strong quarter.

That, of course, contributes to the good margin development. Secondly, also, we see now in the US a very positive effect from the price-cost net there, that we manage to increase prices more than the costs are increasing.

Perfect. Thank you.

Thank you, Gustaf.

Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my questions.

Just a few from me. Americas EBIT per tonne was very sort of impressive.

It reached record high for the second quarter in a row. Could you maybe just help us reason through the mix impact as HVAC volume sort of return?

Is it fair to say that the HVAC volumes that were sort of temporarily replaced by sales into other segments, generally were replaced by business with shorter contract durations, and therefore, maybe faster repricing? Correct me if I'm wrong, but a significant portion of the HVAC deliveries over the next few quarters will still be done on sort of old terms.

How should we think about the just sort of timing of any potential profitability improvements from there, and maybe can you tell us roughly what portion during the second half of HVAC deliveries will still be done on old terms? Yeah.

Morning, Kaleb. It's Oskar here.

That I think is a good question. This is sometimes a little bit counterintuitive, right?

You're absolutely right in the sense that the HVAC market is a relatively high-margin market for us in the US, but also a market then where we have longer-term contracts. In contrast to some other market segments, industrial, for instance, where contracts are typically shorter.

That also means then that market price effects flow through typically quicker in industrial than in HVAC. The fact that we've seen weak HVAC demand now for some quarters has actually had a positive effect in the sense that we can get access to the positive market price effects for the industrial segment when we had capacity available for that, to say.

You're absolutely right now that shifting back now into more HVAC volumes, we need to remember that HVAC volumes are typically higher margin relative to average, but to your point then, some of this is still going to be under older contracts, if you wish, that not necessarily fully maybe reflects the current price level of the market. You will have those two two effects there going in opposite directions.

How should we think about that timing-wise? Because I guess during the year or beginning of next year, you sort of renegotiate some of the HVAC contracts.

How should we think about any potential positive mix improvements?

We try to make it so that we have these contracts renegotiated evenly basically. Or we don't want everything to expire at the same time, about a third or up to 50% of the contracts are typically renegotiated every year.

Typically the time to do this is towards year-end, and 1st of January is the most common starting point for new contracts. You will have a breaking point there going into 2027.

That also, of course, means then that the price levels that we will have on these contracts will largely reflect the market situation when these contracts are renegotiated. The Q4 market is going to be important, I think, for determining the price levels of the contracts that are up for renegotiation for 2027.

That's very clear. Thank you.

Last year you also mentioned a sort of negative impact of 60 million from premiums last year and scrap spreads, which sort of fully reversed this quarter. Can you maybe just help us quantify how big that negative impact was for Q3 and Q4 last year?

You said 60 million for Q2, but just to sort of give us an idea of the financial impact during the second half.

Sure. So 60 million was actually the improvement to Q2 last year.

If you see the Q2 '25 versus '24 effect, that was negative some 50 million or so. If I remember correctly, we had the corresponding effects in Q3 and Q4, '25 versus '24, was some 40 and 30 million or so, respectively.

That also means then that we have reversed that and a little bit more than reversed it, right? I think I indicated that also in my prepared remarks.

If scrap spreads remain on the current level, we expect the year-on-year effect in Q3 versus Q3 2025 then to be approximately 70 million SEK. Hopefully we will get some tailwind there.

That's very clear. Thank you.

Just lastly, a lot of sort of the big HVAC players in the US seem to sort of suggest when they report the last quarter that they expect inventories to fully normalize during Q2 and be back to completely normal levels in Q3. I know shipping data isn't perfect, but it seems to sort of suggest the same thing.

Have you seen the same sort of thing, and has there been any sort of visible changes, even if small, at the beginning of Q3?

Yeah. I think, based on what we see, we agree with that picture.

I think many of our customers were a little bit reluctant going into the year and going into the second quarter as well. If you look at the shipment data that we can see from the HVAC industry, that indicates 5%, 6% growth or so in the second quarter so far, and that they are actually working down their inventories also of our type of material.

That means that we expect to see HVAC deliveries for us also to pick up even more in Q3 year-over-year than what we saw in Q2. Then we need to, of course, remember that Q3 last year was not a particularly strong HVAC quarter, rather the opposite, right?

There is some positive momentum here in the industry, and our view also is that inventories are coming down.

That's very clear. That's all from me.

Thank you for taking my questions.

Thank you, Kaleb.

Yes, hello. I had a couple of questions in the similar line of the contribution margin questions before.

Just trying to get an understanding of the earnings impact in Asia with the fire. In part, you have the 40 million higher costs, that's pretty straightforward, but then you have the 10,000 lost tonnes, and as you mentioned, these are lower margin tonnes.

Can you give us an indication of what perhaps a reasonable contribution margin on these lost tonnes could be?

Sure. On average, this type of business, the industrial business there in Asia, it has an average contribution of around 3 Swedish krona per kilo.

That also means then that the 3,000 tonnes that we couldn't deliver in Q2 has a contribution value of around 9 million 9 million SEK, which is I think I mentioned that earlier as well. That assumption, the 3 SEK per kilo, that that's a fair assumption also forward-looking here for this business.

Understood. Then previously you also said that the fire will impact the second half of 2026, which presumably means that the volume impact will be similar in Q4.

Is that reasonable? Then gone by '27?

Yeah.

Our target is to complete the repairs and the commissioning and so forth of the damaged assets in Shandong before year-end, so that we should be fully up to normal operations in beginning 2027. Now there might be some upsides to this.

Maybe we are done quicker. It depends on many things, right?

I think it's a fair assumption to say that probably Q3 and most of Q4 will be impacted in this way. Yep,

understand. Then on the flip side of that, we have the contribution margin in the US, which, now you're doing around 7,000 EBIT per tonne, and you've previously given like a group average rule of thumb of 7 to 8 thousand contribution profit per tonne, which, if you're doing 7,000 EBIT and then you have your fixed cost base, that number has to be significantly higher in the US.

What roughly is that number in the US?

We will only provide you with this fantastic round number for the group, Adrian, but I think you're on to the fact that, of course, the contribution is different now, and, it's basically fair to say this, right, for Q3: the volume growth that we will see in Europe and, particularly, in the US will have a higher value than the volume that we are potentially not being able to produce and ship in Asia. You can expect a quite significant geographical mix effect from that respect.

Then maybe we can highlight also in this context that, yes, there are certain products now, primarily for industrial customers, that we short term will not be in a position to profitably deliver to customers, but we have good alternative supply solutions and outsourcing of hot rolling in place so that we can deliver our more strategic parts of our product portfolio. Of course, our ambition is to continue to find growth there where we can.

Now we have a short term challenging market, but maybe we can still compensate a little bit with other volumes also in Asia, potentially there. At least that's what we're aiming for.

Understand. A final one on the US, a more broader question to understand what really is driving the very strong performance.

I was thinking about the whole tariff regime and you being able to raise prices given your local footprint. Would you say that that's the big reason why profits have lifted as much as they have in the past year or so in the US, or is the main part of the profit lift not tariff-related, but rather your internal actions?

I think, Adrian, this is Jörgen speaking. If you zoom out a bit, you will see that we have improved our volume and our profit for many years now in the US, especially the profit, in a very systematic way.

That is due to the good operational and good commercial performance of our business there and of our team there. This is also true of this quarter and this first half-year, where the development has continued to be extremely good.

It's also so, of course, that strategically we are happy that we have production in the US, which matches up very well with the demand that we have in North America, as we do also in Europe and Asia. Tariff walls are, of course, intended to be beneficial to the people who have local production, as we do.

Naturally it's a help, but the improvement is due to good operational and commercial performance.

Understood. That's helpful.

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

Thank you, Adrian.

Good morning, Jörgen and Oskar. This is Oskar Lindström from Danske Bank.

Two two questions from me. The first one is on data centers.

Now in your Capital Markets Day presentation, you said that it was I believe about 4% of Americas' volumes last year, and that it would roughly double this year, and that it had also sort of helped to compensate for the weakness in the residential HVAC market in Q1. What kind of development are you seeing in the data center segment, or how are you seeing that it's impacting your business now?

Do you sort of get orders early and then sort of know that you will have a certain amount of volumes next quarter, next year? Yes, how is that business impacting you?

Would that segment impacting you?

Good morning, Oskar. I think you're summarizing well yourself when it comes to the previous volume impact that it had in 2025 and also in the beginning of this year.

When it comes to going forward, we're not sure exactly how this will develop, but we're optimistic about it, because these are products that fit very well into our production footprint and our technical skills, and these are customers that we've developed and can now continue to grow with, right? Here we're hoping, of course, that the underlying trend of big data center build-out will benefit us also hopefully for many years to come in the Americas, and maybe also in other regions over time.

Far you have summarized it well yourself, and going forward, we're optimistic about this. Data centers is one of 20-odd segments that we focus on, right, and we're, in fact, optimistic about many of those segments also.

Right. Good.

Then my second question is on Europe, where the growth of the electronic vehicle segment is providing you with some tailwind in terms of the volumes. I'm wondering, are these tailwinds related to sort of a few contracts which you have signed, which you're now starting to deliver on, or is it more of a broader market development, so that it's being driven by sort of a wide set of customers that we should expect to continue well into next year as well?

Yes, the growth in Europe in general, and also as you say in the EV segment, is related to us making a very large effort three or sometimes even four years back to develop the products and the customer relations that are necessary to benefit from the EV growth, right? Under that initiative, we've taken many contracts for many articles, and also have been relatively successful to pick the right articles and the right platforms so that when those platforms are now being produced, we are benefiting from that.

Those contracts generally are multiyear contracts, and the platforms, of course, are multiyear platforms also, we expect to enjoy that benefit for some time to come.

All right. Excellent.

Thank you. Those were my questions.

Thank you, Oskar.

Hi. Thank you.

Two two questions, I guess. First, coming back to the US there, and you have a very strong performance currently, and I guess your capacity utilization seems to be a bit stretched.

Could that sort of open up for, well, bottlenecks, capex maybe to increase that going forward, or is it still room to improve? That's the first one.

Hello, Mats. Jörgen speaking here.

It's like this, I think, that we have now, as expanded our capacity quite a bit in the Americas, in Europe, and in Asia over the last couple of years. Then we have to remember that that is what we call the nameplate capacity, the theoretical capacity, whereas in reality, when you want to produce at that capacity, there are many things that you need to resolve, and some of them can be these bottlenecks that you refer to.

This is exactly the import or the idea behind our 4-year Optimize program is to optimize this in detail now with mix, with productivity improvements, with debottlenecking, and so on, so that we can achieve the sales that should be possible in our nameplate capacity. This goes also for the Americas, where we have a good sales improvement, but are not yet at all at our nameplate capacity, we should theoretically be able to grow in the US also without a lot of capacity expansion capex.

The work to do so, though, is the details are many and detailed, of course, being details, and we are going to take many small steps in that direction over the next couple of quarters and years, at least until 2027, when we've said that we are going to have a 90% utilization for Gränges as a whole, which also, of course, implies a high utilization in the Americas, otherwise we cannot reach that target. The 90% figure is not intended to come with any large capex tab.

Great. Just about Asia there and China, and I guess you have this insurance coverage in place, and should we expect your sort of, well, losses to be fully covered by that?

Could you also sort of give some indication of the timeline there when compensation could be expected to be paid? Yeah.

Hi, Mats. It's Oskar here.

Since, as for all our production facilities, they are fully insured for property damage and business interruption. In the case now in China, it's a relatively small property damage case, and we expect that to be a fairly straightforward discussion with the insurer, and that discussion is, of course, already ongoing.

When it comes to the business interruption, that's a slightly different matter, right? Before you actually know exactly how much compensation you will get, and so forth, you also have to know exactly how large the damage is.

That we will only know once the facility is back up and running. Property damage part probably solved fairly soon, I would expect.

Business interruption probably is something for to expect for 2027.

Okay. Great.

Thanks a lot. Thank you.

Thank you, Mats.

Thank you, operator, and thank you everybody who has listened in on this first half of 2026 earnings call, and thank you for all the good questions. I hope that you have a good day going forward.

Take care. Goodbye.