BDNNY - Boliden AB (publ) (BDNNY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-04-23 22:59:03 ET
Boliden AB (publ) (BDNNY)
Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call
April 23, 2024 03:00 ET
Company Participants
Olof Grenmark - Head, Investor Relations
Mikael Staffas - President and Chief Executive Officer
Håkan Gabrielsson - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Adrian Gilani - ABG Sundal Collier
Ioannis Masvoulas - Morgan Stanley
Liam Fitzpatrick - Deutsche Bank
Viktor Trollsten - Danske
Jason Fairclough - Bank of America
Amos Fletcher - Barclays
Christian Kopfer - Handelsbanken
Johannes Grunselius - DNB Markets
Ola Soedermark - Kepler Cheuvreux
Richard Hatch - Berenberg
Igor Tubic - Carnegie
Presentation
Olof Grenmark
Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to welcome you to Boliden’s Q1 2024 Results Presentation. My name is Olof Grenmark and I am Head of Investor Relations. Today, we will have a results presentation led by our President and CEO, Mikael Staffas; and our CFO, Håkan Gabrielsson. Mikael, welcome.
Mikael Staffas
Thank you, Olof and good morning to all of you out there. We are today broadcasting this from the city or the town of Boliden. We’re doing that as part of our 100-year celebrations. We will later, today, have our AGM. And in connection with this AGM, we have had a full week here of activities, all commemorating our 100 years of history. So it’s good to have all of you here as well, even though it’s in an electronic form. Now when we look into the quarter that we’ve just had, it’s been a – in a way, in a sense, a tough quarter. But it’s also been a kind of difficult quarter to – for you all to be calculating on.
If you look on the positive side and start on, we’ve had a important steps happening during the quarter regarding the future-proofing of the business. As you know from the Capital Market Day, we have gone ahead with the new investment in a tank house in Rönnskär. We’ve also gone ahead with the extension of the Boliden Area, as was talked about then. Also the Odda, the Aitik and the Kristineberg projects, the big projects we’ve been doing for the last couple of years, are approaching completion. And that’s still going on well.
The autonomous hauling trucks in Aitik have been inaugurated during the quarter and have worked out fine so far. And we also continued our – developed our portfolio of low-CO2 products, and we have launched our low-CO2 nickel in this quarter. A large part of the – what’s happened to us during the quarter has been the political strikes in Finland. These strikes have been number one, not part of our discussion. It’s not been us who has been a part of these negotiations. It’s been other people, and we have only been the consequence of it. We have, first, had two relatively short strikes, but that hit us very hard and meant that we lost maybe up to 7 days from those two strike together as Finland was closing down for officially 2 days at the time, but for us, ramping down and ramping up took more time. And then towards the end of the quarter, we had a almost 4-week long blockage and strike in the ports and the railroad system in Finland, which made it difficult for us to operate, but we managed to produce through it, but we have problems delivering. And we’ll get back to the numbers around that.
In the beginning of January, sometimes you lose when you’re going into spring. You’ll forget about that it’s just about a month ago, it was real winter, and the winter in Northern Sweden and Northern Finland was, even for our own conditions, very severe. We had minus 35 degrees for a long time. And we had problems in the mines but maybe even more in Rönnskär that was linked to this, which also was – caused power outages and other problems that we had to get production going. Generally speaking, for the quarter, the production mines has been stable. It’s been very good, and we have even a production record in Garpenberg in the quarter....
Boliden AB (publ) (BDNNY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript