Hello and welcome to today's webcast presentation with Rottneros. With us presenting today, we have the CEO, Per Bjurbom, and CFO, Monica Pasanen, who'll be presenting the Q1 report for 2026 and answer questions during the Q&A after the presentation.

If you have any questions, please feel free to use the form located to the right, and we'll take it up after the presentation. Please go ahead with your presentation.

Thank you. Per Bjurbom is my name.

I'm CEO of Rottneros since mid-March, this is then my first quarterly presentation for the company. I would like to start with presenting some highlights for the quarter.

EBITDA -36, and this is in parity with quarter 1 2025. The results is affected by lower prices and weaker dollar.

What is good now going in the quarter is that wood prices are coming down, and that will have a positive effect on our operations. Of course, the environment we are living in today is filled with uncertainty, and how it affected us here under the quarter, I think it's the same as everybody else.

It's just a challenge to understand what is happening in the world. To mitigate the situation we're in, we will continue to work on cost.

We have, I think, been successful on fixed cost compared to previous years and have had a, if I say, a very strong fixed cost program in place. We continue to work on cost and efficiency.

Then I'm going to do a short recap of Rottneros. We are then driven by some trends.

Here we have four major trends that affects our business. Electrification of society is really important.

We have a strong position for this electrotechnical pulps. Sustainability as a general trend going from plastic to paper affects our business a lot, and here we need to serve this market with special paper pulp and packaging.

E-commerce, of course, is a driver for consumption of fibers. Tissue then is a health trends, and personal hygiene is driving the consumption of pulp.

If you then look into what end-use areas we're active in, we have a strong foothold in electrotechnical papers. We have a strong foothold in filter and cartonboard.

We also serve speciality papers producers, and also we are in tissue and printing and writing, and some fiber cement. I want to point out here is that this niches that we are trying to grow within is really important for our future for developing the business.

As you see on the percentages here that we are successful of improving the foothold in these segments. Then just a short recap of where we're located.

We have a pulp mill in Vallvik, a pulp mill in Rottneros. We also have Rottneros Packaging in Kostrzyn, and we also have our fiber supply companies within Nykvist Skog and Rottneros Baltic.

Some comments on the markets. If you go back a year, comparing to comparable quarter, we can conclude that the markets are restrained.

If you start to look on quarter-on-quarter, then we would like to say that the market is moving sideways. We are then affected by exchange rates.

Prices in SEK is affected by a weaker dollar. The global markets of stocks levels of NBSK is 44 days, and I think it's been around this level now for some time.

In this price charting here, you see that we in SEK then on, if you are positive, you see it's a little bit dip upwards here in the last points. Also the CTMP price kind of even out here on a level that, yeah, hopefully is the bottom.

Next slide then. If you then look on Rottneros' main markets in Europe and see how different segments that we deliver into have developed, then you can see that compared to '25 to '26, it is not a very positive situation.

We're kind of back to 0.2% on the different grades. If you look on these others on the very right where we try to be active in our niche approach, there we have seen a more stability than other grades.

If you then look on from a regional perspective, the demand compared to '25 has decreased by 2.6%, and if you look on from a regional perspective, then Europe has the main impact on this decrease. If you look on North America, it's around zero, and in China and Latin America, you had some growth.

When you look on this picture then, you have to keep in mind that the Chinese share of the pulp market is approximately 40%, what's happening in China is affecting the outcome a lot. Then I leave the word over to Monica, and she will talk about the financials.

Yes, thank you, Per. As mentioned, we see some lower costs, but the currency has affected us when we compare to the first quarter of 2025.

This is the waterfall and where the differences come from. We're going from -27 to -36.

The biggest negative impact is from price and currency, where currency is a big part of the -51. In the quarter, we started off by having a tough production due to the cold winter weather, and we did lose production tonnes.

Total for the group, we are 5% below in volume versus a year ago, and this impacts us negatively. On the positive side, we have the variable costs, and it is the wood costs that has really decreased starting from mid-2025.

We saw some improvements in our results from these decreasing costs already last year, but this quarter, we see that it starts making a big difference. A year ago, we initiated a bigger program to reduce our fixed cost.

We saw that this program was finalized during end of last year, and now we can see that we are 26 million better in fixed costs than a year ago. In others, we did have a positive effect in the first quarter of 2025 when we sold emission rights of 10 million, which we didn't do this year, we didn't sell any emission rights.

If we exclude those, we are on a very similar level. All in all, we ended up with -36 for the first quarter in EBITDA.

On this picture, we want to just highlight the importance of the cost of wood. This is our total cost structure in the first quarter, and the cost of wood amounts to 44% of our cost base.

It's imperative that we keep seeing lower wood costs for our business. Taking a look at the balance sheet, starting off by the loan agreement, as we mentioned for the year-end report, where we didn't fulfill all the covenants at the end of December, mainly related to profitability targets.

We've had very good discussions with our lenders during the first quarter, and in March, we could enter into an amended loan agreement with the bank. It runs until April 2027 next year.

The new amended agreement has new profitability targets, and it also means that we have access to 75 million crowns in a rolling credit facility. We are really keeping our eyes on working capital.

We did that already in December, but when we in last quarter decreased by more than 200 million our working capital, when we compare quarter-on-quarter or quarter 1 '25 to quarter 1 '26, we have 280 million lower working capital. We continue having that focus.

We also focus on our investments. During the quarter, we invested 7 million, which is a very low number.

In '25, we invested 37 million in the quarter and 166 million for the full year. This year, we expect the investments to remain at approximately 60 million, very low compared to previous years.

We also continue to have measures to improve efficiencies, cost efficiency, and other measures in our operations. With that, I hand back to Per to summarize.

Yeah. To summarize this, then the markets are moving sideways.

Wood prices are coming down, and as you saw in previous slides, this will have impact on our cost structure. Then also we are living in this year political uncertainty, and we need to be ready to handle that if some strange things occurs.

Far, good. We will also then continue to work on operational efficiency and cost in all aspects.

Thank you, and I leave over to the moderator.

Thank you very much, Per and Monica, for that presentation. We'll start with the Q&A here.

How much bigger will the impact from lower wood prices be in Q2 compared to this Q1 quarter?

We are a bit careful with giving forecasts, but we see that the prices has continued down, we will continue to see improvements, but we don't want to give exact numbers. We can also see that for our Vallvik mill, we have good availability of wood, and we also get a positive impact from the storm that was in December, Johannes, that means that there's additional wood available in that area.

Thank you for that answer. How did a weaker US dollar against SEK affect Rottneros' sales prices and margins during the quarter?

If we look at the US dollar, it was 10.7 as an average for the first quarter in 2025 and 9.1 in the first quarter this year, and this has a big effect. If you see our annual report, we say that 50 öre to the dollar will affect our profitability with 68 million on an annual basis.

You understand that this difference going down or with a weaker dollar had a big impact now in our first quarter. In the -51 that I showed earlier, a big part was currency.

Now we have seen that the currency has improved. We're more on an average of 9.2, 9.3, and that is, of course, improving the situation.

What were the main reasons behind the decrease in EBITDA compared with the first quarter of 2025?

The main impacts came from currency, market prices, but also production. We had a very good production year last year and Vallvik mill made a new production record, and it started already in the first quarter with good production.

This year, as those of you who are in Sweden realized, we had a very cold winter in January, February, which did affect us negatively with several smaller problems in Vallvik mill where we lost tonnage, and that also impacts our profitability.

Thank you for that answer. How is Rottneros adapting its production levels to the current weak market conditions for the CTMP?

Yes. The strategy for CTMP is that we are very diligent on what orders we are taking in and to secure margins.

We also are exposed to a very volatile electricity market, strict rules for how the mill is run according to electricity price is applied. Those two measures are the key measures to handle the situation.

We also are very diligent on what kind of orders we accept.

Thank you for that answer. I believe you already touched upon this, but maybe you can add some more color.

What impact did the colder winter weather have on the production at Vallvik mill? Yeah.

I do not ex-

It occurred before you started, Per, even. Yes, but

yeah. Can it be 2, 3,000 tonnes of pulp that was not produced during this time?

A bit more even.

Even a bit more, yeah. The issue is when it's cold, it's more difficult to run this pulp mills.

Do you have a correct figure for that?

It depends on what you compare to, but it's approximately 5,000 tonnes that was lost in Vallvik compared to budget or previous year. It's several smaller things, but when it's cold and icy, you don't get the same efficiencies in the operations.

Thank you for that. We'll take one final question here.

What measures is management taking to improve cash flow, production availability, and overall operational efficiency?

We are in a process now to identify items that affects this different line items in the P&L. This can be of say very different kind of things.

The key thing here is to identify these things, evaluate them and see what kind of impact this will give on the P&L, you can line up very many different things, but focus on the ones that gives the biggest impact with the least resource. This could be different thing.

It can be how you run the pulp mill, it can be cost things, you can look into are we organized in the right way. We will run a structured, say, program approach to deal with this, and hopefully, this will give effects in the P&L going forward.

Difficult to give any amount, to say, but it will improve the company.

Okay. Thank you very much, Per and Monica, for that, and that concludes this Q&A, and I'll hand over the word back to you for some concluding remarks.

Yes, thank you for listening in here, and this was my first quarterly report, and hopefully, it will go better the next time. Thank you.