Billerud AB (publ) (BLRDY) Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-04-29 18:25:24 ET

Billerud AB (publ) (BLRDY)

Q1 2025 Results Conference Call

April 29, 2025 03:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Lena Schattauer - Head of IR

Ivar Vatne - President & Chief Executive Officer

Andrei Kres - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

James Perry - Citi

Robin Santavirta - Carnegie

Linus Larsson - SEB

Cole Hathorn - Jefferies

Lars Kjellberg - Stifel

Johannes Grunselius - DNB

Martin Melbye - ABG

Oskar Lindstrom - Danske Bank

Presentation

Lena Schattauer

Hello, and welcome to Billerud's Q1 2025 Presentation, and thanks for joining us this morning. Billerud's President and CEO Ivar Vatne; and our CFO Andrei Kres, will hold the presentation. And after that, they will take questions from the conference call. So by that, I would like to hand over to you, Ivar. Please go ahead.

Ivar Vatne

Thank you, Lena, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for listening in this Tuesday. I'm excited to present our Q1 results, which we think represent an encouraging start of 2025 for Billerud. And we certainly have plenty of results we feel good about. So let's get into it, please, and next slide.

2025 is the first year of our way forward strategy. Hence, I'm excited to see so many of our outspoken priorities already going into the right direction. Recorded net sales growth, 7% versus a year ago, with positive growth figures coming from both regions and almost all categories. We make a significant profitability improvement, EBITDA up 19% and EBIT up 42% versus year ago with a margin uplift of 2 percentage points.

Region North America continues to impress us and come in yet again with a very strong quarter and 21% EBITDA and 15% sales growth that is rock solid. But I also want to highlight Region Europe, which also comes in with a clearly improved profitability with 15% EBITDA margin, and that is 4 percentage points up versus a year ago. Our cash conversion and cash generation has greatly improved since comparable period last year, and that is yet again what is highly important for us. We reached a milestone also in Q1 when we sold our first batch of locally-produced containerboard in the U.S. and more on that later.

Next slide, please. Now to get a proper read of the market and that can be a handful these days, but at least for Q1, the sentiment was pretty much what we had expected. With normal or normalized conditions for most categories and channel. So not strong, not weak, but somewhere right in the middle. Okay-ish demand and some upward pricing moves towards the end of the quarter, first and foremost in containerboard, sack and graphic paper. The only exception to call out is cartonboard and the consumer luxury channel that is still performing weaker with slower demand and quite a lot available capacity....

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