Borregaard ASA (BRG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining this pre-close call for the first quarter of 2025. My name is Knut-Harald Bakke. I'm the Director of Investor Relations in Borregaard, and I'm joined today by CFO, Per Bjarne Lyngstad. And we are live from -- with inside the biorefinery in Norway, actually in a meeting room named Hollywood. Hopefully, this call will not be as entertaining as the name of the meeting room suggests. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our annual report was published today. The 2024 annual report follows the ESRS, so that's the European Sustainability Reporting Standard, and we encourage you to have a look at it on our website. The agenda for today's call is threefold. The first point is the outlook from the last quarterly presentation reiterated. Secondly, we will go through a publicly observable currency and commodities inputs, in the meantime. And finally, there will be a Q&A session. And regarding the later, you can already now start typing in your question in the chat function. Now I will hand over to Per Bjarne, who will reiterate the key points from the outlook given in our latest quarterly report.

Thank you, Knut-Harald, and good afternoon, everyone. In addition to reiterate the key points from the outlook, I will refer to comments given in the Q&A session at the webcast for Q4, which were held on January 29. I will start with BioSolutions. We expect the sales volume in BioSolutions to be approximately 330,000 tonnes for the full year of 2025 and with continued strong sales into agriculture. The sales volume in the first quarter is expected to be in the range of 80,000 tonnes. As to antidumping duties on vanillin from China, the investigation is going on both in the U.S. and in EU. The U.S. authorities have announced the preliminary and significant antidumping duties. However, if you adjust for these duties, the price on synthetic vanillin will still be below the price of plant-based vanillin like Borregaard offer. So we expect antidumping duties to have a positive effect, but it's still unclear how this will play out in the marketplace. We got several questions regarding the outlook for BioSolutions at the webcast. The first question was why we guided for about 1% volume growth in BioSolutions for 2025 despite having been able to grow specialties strongly in 2024? Our response was that the main driver for the profitability and also for the improvement in BioSolutions in 2024 was product mix, the fact that specialties grew a lot more than the overall volume growth. And that's the plan, and that's what we will continue to drive for. There will always be enough volume available for specialties. The next question was if we have lower expectations for demand growth in 2025 or if we have lignin availability constraints? The volume guidance for 2025 is based more on what we think is a normal level of supply of lignin raw material. There could, of course, be deviations in the supply, but remember that the marginal volumes are usually not a big factor in deciding the bottom line for BioSolutions. More important is the sales of specialties and also the highest priced products within other categories. We also got a question if we could elaborate on the price environment for BioSolutions in 2025. Our opinion, looking at the total world economy is that Europe is still very slow. We have seen fairly good markets in North America, in Asia, especially in the Asian countries and India. And we think that it will pick up a bit in Latin America. But in total, it's not a good climate for huge price increases. So as we have seen in 2024, the mix improvement was the major driver for the improved result, and we think that that's the best bet also for 2025. The last question on BioSolutions was how large are the antidumping duties on vanillin in the U.S. and what to expect in the EU in terms of percentage? The antidumping duty in the U.S. will be in the range of 180%. One producer in China has refused to give input data to the American authorities and have been penalized by having, we think, a double duty. But if you take the regular duty, that means a tripling of the price. But even a tripling of the price is below the price that Borregaard has for its wood-based vanillin. We still don't have any information as to what the EU will do in this situation. Turning to Biomaterials. The sales volume will be more normalized in 2025. We expect the sales volume to be in the range of 150,000 to 155,000 tonnes, which will be more or less in line with production. But the sales volume of highly specialized grades is expected to be higher than it was in 2024, so the volume will go up and the specialization rate will then be even higher than it was in 2024. The average price in sales currency is expected to be in the range of 8% to 10% higher than in the first half of 2024. The sales volume in the first quarter is expected to be in the range of 38,000 tonnes. Then moving on to Fine Chemicals. We have talked some time about the fact that EU has introduced very favorable incentives for advanced bioethanol into biofuel. Borregaard, being an established advanced bioethanol producer, has, of course, benefited from this. And these incentives have been quite good for our results for bioethanol in the last 2 years. However, these incentives are starting to work. So there will be more supply coming into the market based on agricultural waste and other sources. We, therefore, expect that the sales prices for Borregaard's bioethanol will be lower in 2025 than in 2024, and it will be more in line with the prices we saw in 2022. For Fine Chemical Intermediates, the sales volume is expected to grow even further from 2024 into 2025. In the webcast in January, we asked if sales prices similar to 2022 levels for bioethanol imply a 2022 EBITDA level? When answering this question, there are a couple of other elements which must be taken into consideration in addition to the bioethanol price. For bioethanol, in addition to price, we've seen a positive production volume development compared with 2022. For Fine Chemical Intermediates, we've also seen a positive volume growth compared with 2022, and we have also guided for further improvement in volume in 2025. Other factors like the general cost inflation will, of course, have a negative impact. We also got a question on how large is the price drop for bioethanol year-on-year? And that's hard for us to quantify because the price is not necessarily fixed for the full year for our volume. The bioethanol price will be dependent on and vary with the market balance as we go into 2025. As to costs and cost development, we have seen that the wood costs have gone up significantly over time. In the first half of 2025, we expect the wood cost to be largely in line with the second half of 2024. Remember that Borregaard's procurement of wood is a mix of different things. It's a mix of wood, pulpwood and wood chips. It's a mix of geographies. Some is brought in from abroad, some is brought from shorter and longer distances inside Norway. So when you blend all these together and look at it, it seems like it's fairly flat from the second half of 2024 into the first half of 2025. We got several questions regarding wood costs at the webcast. The first was how come you are able to keep wood cost stable? Looks like commodity prices have increased further. In addition to the comments already made, we reminded the audience that logistics costs in bulk transportation is roughly 25% of the wood cost. So logistics also have a big factor in calculating the delivered cost of wood. So when we have made our assessment of this, it seems like it's a flat development compared with the second half of 2024. The next questions were if we could elaborate more about the trend of increasing wood prices we have seen in the last couple of years? What has been the main driver behind this trend? With the guided pricing for the first half of 2025, will we now see a reversal of this trend? Our response was that there are multiple factors behind the price development of wood. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a large impact because it used to be a lot of wood export from Russia into Finland and the Nordics. When that stopped, of course, that had a significant impact on wood supply. Longer term, there are other drivers like the United Nations forest reports saying that the forest should be served 3 purposes: carbon storage, preserve biodiversity and be a raw material for bio-based chemicals and materials. The first 2 could be in conflict with the third. There are a lot of drivers in the EU and other areas that puts pressure on sustainable forest management. How much should be preserved of the forest and so forth. These drivers means that there will be less supply of wood for biochemicals and biomaterials and paper and cardboard products in the future. On the demand side, a lot of the use of wood goes into producing commodities in paper and cardboard. The question is then, if you don't see a similar cost increase in other parts of the world producing those same commodities, when will the supply of commodities come down in the Nordic region due to the high wood cost? Borregaard, as you can see, live with those kind of increased wood costs. Then leaving the wood cost, we also reminded you that the full year impact of already completed investments to reduce energy costs and CO2 emissions will get full effect in 2025. And this is particularly due to the electrification of the spray dryers for lignin-based biopolymers that was completed in the middle of 2024. As to energy costs, remember that energy consumption is normally higher in the winter season and lower during the summer. About 15% of Borregaard's energy consumption is dependent on energy spot prices for electricity and LNG. For LNG, we have a 1-month delay compared with the market price, which is the Dutch TTF. Electricity prices in Norway have on average been close to last year's prices so far in the quarter. However, the LNG prices have been significantly higher, taking the 1-month delay into consideration. With the increased flexibility Borregaard has after the spray dryer investment, we can, to a large extent, utilize variations between spot electricity and LNG. And we are also reducing LNG consumptions to reduce CO2 emissions. There are still war and conflicts affecting the global economy. And the general disclaimer at the end of the outlook is reminding you of that. We will have to be aware of that and take necessary precautions as this plays out. Having completed the outlook, we will point to one more element, which is likely to have a significant impact on the 2025 results. Borregaard has a currency hedging strategy that delays the impact of changes in currency rates. Using currency rates as of the 28th of January 2025, the net currency impact for the full year of 2025 was estimated to be positive by as much as NOK 220 million compared with 2024. And the corresponding impact for the first quarter on EBITDA was estimated to be positive by about NOK 50 million compared with the first quarter of 2024. We've seen a strengthening of the Norwegian kroner so far in the first quarter, especially compared with the U.S. dollar. If today's rates continue the rest of the month, we will see a slightly lower net currency impact in the first quarter, more in the range of NOK 45 million compared with the NOK 50 million based on the calculation from 28th January. For the full year, if today's rates continue for the rest of the year, the net currency impact will be more in the range of NOK 130 million to NOK 150 million compared with the NOK 220 million based on the calculation from the 28th of January. I will now hand over to Knut-Harald, who will lead the Q&A session with questions asked in the chat function of this webcast.

Thank you, Per Bjarne. So we now open the floor to questions from our listeners. [Operator Instructions]. But so far, it seems there is only one question and it's from Magnus Rasmussen of SEB. Does the 8% to 10% price increase guidance for BioMaterials include a better product mix or does that come in addition?

Yes. The main reason for the increase in the average price is real price increases. Mix is a minor part of that. So we have actually managed to increase prices quite substantially from the beginning of 2025.

Let's give it a couple more seconds before we finalize the Q&A session. That seems to conclude the Q&A session. Thank you for participating in today's pre-close call. We appreciate your interest in Borregaard. As a reminder, this call marks the start of our silent period during which contact with the investment community will be reduced to a minimum. We look forward to our next update and wish you all a great day ahead. Thank you, and goodbye.

Thank you for your attention.