SSAAF - SSAB AB (publ) (SSAAF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-02-02 21:50:26 ET
SSAB AB (publ) (SSAAF)
Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call
January 31, 2024, 3:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Per Hillstrom - Head of Investor Relations
Martin Lindqvist - President and CEO
Leena Craelius - Executive Vice President and Acting Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Adrian Gilani - ABG Sundal Collier
Alain Gabriel - Morgan Stanley
Krishan Agarwal - Citi
Johannes Grunselius - DNB
Patrick Mann - Bank of America
Andrew Jones - UBS
Christian Kopfer - Handelsbanken
Bastian Synagowitz - Deutsche Bank
Tristan Gresser - BNP Paribas Exane
Moses Ola - JPMorgan
Cole Hathorn - Jefferies
Presentation
Per Hillstrom
Good morning and welcome to this presentation of the SSAB Year End Report. Another relatively strong year for us. Together with us presenting today is President and CEO, Martin Lindqvist; and CFO, Leena Craelius.
And if we look at the agenda, we will have Martin starting by summarizing the year and the quarter, And then Leena, as always, will present the details on the financials. And then at the end, Martin will come back with the outlook. And then, we will also have good time for questions at the end of the conference.
So by that, please, Martin, start your -- the presentation.
Martin Lindqvist
Thank you, Per and good morning. Start with some highlights in 2023. We had another strong year, not as strong as the record year last year, but still SEK 16.5 billion in operating result. We continue to generate strong cash flows. We had a cash flow before dividend -- net cash flow before dividend of SEK 16.2 billion and that gives us also a very strong cash conversion.
We continue to develop our safety performance. We have, as you know, and we have talked about it before, the ambition to become the safest steel company in the world, we are not there really yet, but we are progressing. And I would say most of our major sites closed 2023 without any lost time injuries.
We continue to lead the green transition. We have seen commercial shipments of SSAB Zero during 2023, and we continue with the pilot shipments of fossil-free steel and the transformation of the new Nordic assets have started now with the transformation in Oxelosund, then I will come back to that.
If you zoom in then more on Q4, it was impacted by maintenance in both Special Steels, Europe and Americas, and we also saw, both in Q3, but also in Q4, a weaker European market. And we saw profitability going down in all three steel divisions sequentially compared to Q3.
If you look at some business highlights and start with the high-strength steels or Q&T advanced high-strength steels in Q&T, we saw stable prices despite the weaker market. Special Steel prices were down 2% versus the record level in ‘22. We also saw that customers were more and more buying from stocks, favoring short lead times due to the uncertain environment.
We saw a continued good growth in advanced high-strength steels to automotive, where we were outperforming the general steel market volume-wise. And we are, as you know, the world leader when it comes to the [indiscernible] advanced high-strength steels, especially for cold forming....
SSAB AB (publ) (SSAAF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript