SSAAF - SSAB AB (publ) (SSAAF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-04-24 18:51:09 ET
SSAB AB (publ) (SSAAF)
Q1 2024 Results Conference Call
April 24, 2024 03:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Per Hillström - Head of Investor Relations
Martin Lindqvist - President and CEO
Leena Craelius - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Alain Gabriel - Morgan Stanley
Adrian Gilani - ABG Sundal Collier
Tristan Gresser - BNP Paribas
Patrick Mann - Bank of America
Viktor Trollsten - Danske
Christian Kopfer - Handelsbanken
Bastian Synagowitz - Deutsche Bank
Andrew Jones - UBS
Tom Zhang - Barclays
Moses Ola - JPMorgan
Presentation
Per Hillström
Welcome to the presentation of the first quarter 2024 from SSAB. My name is Per Hillström. I'm Head of Investor Relations. And with me today here is our President and CEO, Martin Lindqvist; and our CFO, Leena Craelius. And the agenda, we will start with Martin giving a brief overview of the quarter.
Then Leena comes with the financial details, and then Martin will close with the outlook and summary. And after that, we will be able to have a Q&A session as well. So by that, please Martin, begin.
Martin Lindqvist
Thank you, Per, and good morning. The super summary of Q1. It wasn't an easy quarter. We had strikes and so on and I will come back to that. But the super summary is that we see clearly that we have more resilience in our niche products, the advanced high-strength steels and the Q&T.
They are holding up volume-wise and price-wise in a fairly good way. But if we look at the total quarter, we had a lower result than Q1 '23 and that was, to a large extent, due to lower plate prices in North America coming down from a very high level. We made almost SEK 3.2 billion or SEK 3.157 billion in operating profit which is quite good. What is also very satisfying is that we continue to develop towards our targets to have 0 accidents and 0 incidents at our mills.
We are now at an LTI frequency of 0.81, not at 0, but approaching and with the ambition to become the safest steel company in the world. And that work is ongoing and this is way -- work of changing or continue to enhance the culture within SSAB. If we look at the division, Special Steels holding up quite well, increased sequentially, shipments compared to Q4.
We had an operating result of almost SEK 1.8 billion, so on a good level. Prices were slightly down, 2% versus Q4. One very important part of Special Steels during Q1 was the launch of the world's first emission-free steel powder for commercial deliveries. So this is a new product where we produce in Oxelosund to start with fossil-free steel powder. And that powder combines the properties of our high-strength steels with the light structural possibilities of 3D printing.
And I'm convinced that this will over time grow into a very important and profitable product segment for SSAB. So that's really good that we have launched that on the market now with big interest from potential customers and already existing customers. If we look at SSAB Europe, we saw, as we usually see, a seasonal improvement versus Q4 when it comes to shipments. We were -- or we were not having, but there was a political strike in Finland and the cost of that strike for Q1 in SSAB Europe was around SEK 350 million.
We will also see a lag effect and see another roughly SEK 125 million affecting Q2. I think we handled it in a good way, but the strike with harbors being closed for 4 weeks, reduced the shipments by 100,000 tonnes....
SSAB AB (publ) (SSAAF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript