SSAB AB (SSAAF) Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-04-29 15:39:05 ET

SSAB AB (SSAAF)

Q1 2025 Earnings Conference Call

April 29, 2025 03:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Per Hillstrom - Head of Investor Relations

Johnny Sjostrom - President & CEO

Leena Craelius - Executive Vice President and CFO

Conference Call Participants

Kaleb Solomon - SEB

Alain Gabriel - Morgan Stanley

Adrian Gilani - ABG Sundal Collier

Tom Zhang - Barclays

Tristan Gresser - BNP Paribas Exane

Anders Akerblom - Nordea

Bastian Synagowitz - Deutsche Bank

Patrick Mann - Bank of America

Christian Kopfer - Handelsbanken

Presentation

Per Hillstrom

Good morning, and welcome to this presentation of the SSAB Report for the First Quarter of 2025. My name is Per Hillstrom, I'm Head of Investor Relations at SSAB. And presenting today, we have our President and CEO, Johnny Sjostrom, and also our CFO, Leena Craelius. And if we go to the agenda, could we -- I'm just asking the operator to please, if we can have the slides. Yes.

Thank you. And the agenda for today, Johnny will start with the first quarter in brief. Leena then present more details on the financials, and then Johnny comes back at the end with the outlook and the summary. And after that, we will open up for questions. So please, Johnny, the floor is yours.

Johnny Sjostrom

Thank you very much, Per, and good morning to all of you. I will start by going into the highlights of Q1. And within SSAB, safety is a priority, hence the reason why we always start with safety. Looking at our safety performance, it is on a good level, touch wood, and it continues to be a high focus area for all our employees. So that's a very strong highlight for the quarter.

Now looking at the financial performance, looking at the operating results, we ended up on an expected level of SEK 1.3 billion roughly. I think one of those highlights is actually Special Steels' performance. They bounce back when it comes to volumes, but at the same time they were able to maintain prices all the way through Q4 last year but also Q1 this year. We've also seen sort of a recovery on the American market, and I will get back to that later on in the presentation. The topic on everyone's lips right now is the tariffs.

I think it's important for us to try to explain our production footprint. And we have roughly 2.4 million metric tons of production capacity in United States, and we are a market leader when it comes to plate deliveries, which means that we are not importing as much into United States or exporting from the Nordics. That gives us flexibility, and I think that's important to highlight. However, of course tariffs is not something that we would like to see. We are very dependent on exports.

We're dependent on free trade and fair trade. So for us, it is a worrying sign, of course. And long term, we don't know what the consequences would be. But short term, we have the flexibility to do production locally in United States. I started off talking about one of the highlights for the quarter was Special Steels' performance.

And we increased our sales in Q1 to roughly 336,000 tonnes. It is a fairly good performance, also in line with our expectations. And the financial performance was roughly SEK 1.4 billion, so in line with our expectations, but it shows the unique customer value that Special Steels are able to supply into the market and that the market is willing to pay a premium for these kind of products. One of the things that I also want to highlight is that a decision was made by the Board to continue the transformation of the Mobile production facility into a more special steel production facility. So an investment of a tempering furnace was approved, which is very important for us in order to produce the most advanced grades we have within Special Steel....

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