BLRDY - Billerud AB (publ) (BLRDY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-04-24 18:45:25 ET
Billerud AB (publ) (BLRDY)
Q1 2024 Results Conference Call
April 24, 2024 03:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Lena Schattauer - Head, Investor Relations
Ivar Vatne - Chief Executive Officer
Andrei Kres - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Linus Larsson - SEB
Cole Hathorn - Jefferies
Martin Melbye - ABG
Oskar Lindstrom - Danske Bank
Presentation
Lena Schattauer
Good morning, and welcome to this webcasted conference call following the publication of Billerud's interim report for the first quarter 2024. Our President and CEO, Ivar Vatne; and our CFO, Andrei Kres, will hold the presentation. And after the presentation, we will open up for Q&A. By that, I would like to hand over to Ivar. Please go ahead.
Ivar Vatne
Thank you, Lena, and good morning, everyone. We're excited to provide you with some of the highlights from the first quarter of '24, and it's certainly been an interesting start of the year where the market has started to turn more positive. So let's get into it and next slide, please. So for our Q1, we are down versus year ago on most financial measures. And having said that, at that time, we were at a very different ending phase of a different market sentiment. Hence, our performance now in light of the previous quarter is, in many ways, the more interesting dimension.
And then entering into 2024, we did expect to see a somewhat improved market, and that is certainly what we have experienced and even a bit better versus our ingoing expectations. Sequentially, profitability is up more than 50%, where we are again encouraged by the result in North America. One of the biggest drivers of the improved result has been the extra demand, and we grew volume close to 50,000 tonnes versus Q4. We've also had some help from positive pricing and favorable mix, which is certainly welcome. Of other events during the quarter, we divested idled mill assets of Wisconsin Rapids. And I'll come back to that a bit later in the presentation with some more perspective.
So next slide, please. And I mentioned a bit around this topic already, but we have seen broad-based improvement of the market conditions during the quarter. And having said that, we are coming from weak levels, and we still have quite a bit left before we would reach fully normalized levels. However, now we can safely say that the inventory destocking we struggle with during '23 is now behind us, and that should continue to fuel our order books into the coming months....
Billerud AB (publ) (BLRDY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript