Icelandic Salmon AS (ISLAX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

It's 9:00. So thank you, everyone, for taking time to watch this quarter 2 presentation for Icelandic Salmon. My name is Bjørn Hembre. And with me today, I have our CFO, Robert Robertson. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A session where you can ask questions by raising your hand or typing the questions in the chat of the meeting. First, a brief overview of Icelandic Salmon. Icelandic Salmon AS is a company that is listed on the Euronext Growth market in Oslo and also on the NASDAQ First North market in Reykjavik. The company is the sole owner and parent company of Arnarlax ehf that performs all operational activities in the group. We are presented through the value chain with our own smolt production with smolt capacity sufficient for 25,000 to 30,000 tonnes of harvested biomass. We have our farming operations in sea in 3 fjords in the Westfjords of Iceland with a maximum allowed biomass of 23,700 tonnes, and all our production in sea is ASC certified. We also do our own harvesting in our harvest plant in Bildudalur in the Westfjords of Iceland and the capacity of the harvesting facility is 30,000 tonnes per year. And the harvesting plant is BRCGS certified, which is a food safety standard. And we also perform all the sales in the global and domestic market with our own sales department located just outside Reykjavik and see big benefits of doing that. So if we jump to the highlights of the quarter, the harvested volume in the quarter was 5,500 tonnes compared to 4,000 tonnes in quarter 2 2025. Harvest was from the 2024 generation, and we had an average weight of the harvested volume of 6.2 kilo head on gutted. The '24 generation will be harvested out in quarter 3 this year. Quarter 2 was a quarter where the EBIT-wise ended at a negative EBIT of EUR 3.2 million, improving from negative EUR 8.3 million in quarter 2 2025. Prices in quarter 2 '26 was significantly higher than quarter 2 '25. And as predicted in our Q1 presentation, the cost of our biomass taken out of stock was slightly up in the quarter. This was due to biological challenges experienced in the beginning of the quarter on our spring 2024 generation, resulting in an extraordinary expense of EUR 2.2 million. There was a good underlying performance on biology in sea, but still see some challenges related to low winter temperatures. The temperatures were lower than normal in the first half of the quarter, but increased to normal levels at the end of the quarter. The biomass in sea was 19% higher at the end of quarter 2 this year compared to quarter 2 2025. Financial performance improved year-over-year. This was driven by reduced cost base, good capacity utilization and the market price in the quarter was stronger than Q2 2025. Ore price achievement was EUR 0.58, up between years. The price achievement towards market price was good, driven by big fish sold into the North American and Asian market. The share of downgrades in the quarter was 12%. We see that there are still room for biological improvements during wintertime where extra winter wound vaccine and larger size of fish going into the first winter in sea are important mitigating measures. And we also have sites that are performing very good through the winter and especially our spring 2025 generation, where we saw a mortality ratio of 0.55 throughout quarter 2 this year. We saw a good performance cost-wise in all parts of the value chain with good utilization of capacities, strongly affected by our cost saving program that was implemented in quarter 3, '25. And yearly effect of the cost-saving program have resulted in reduced cost base of EUR 5.5 million for the coming years so far. This is, of course, an ongoing project also going forward. Smolt production was operating well, and we are in line of putting out planned amount of smolts for 2026. I'd like to mention that none of the fish groups we have in our smolt facilities at the moment have ever detected tox virus. This means that we now have that under good control. And this virus has, over the last year, caused us major challenges in the smolt production. We also got the renewal of our 10,000 tonne maximum allowed biomass license in Arnarfjorour and that license is then valid for another 16 years. I will then give the word to you, Robert.

Thank you, Bjørn, and good morning, everyone. Here, you can see the first slide of 2, providing a high-level overview of the group's balance sheet, which remained broadly stable quarter-over-quarter. Total assets decreased by EUR 3 million and ended around EUR 270 million at the end of the quarter. This change sits entirely in current assets. Fair value adjustment during the quarter contributed EUR 1.9 million. Total liabilities were broadly unchanged with a small shift from noncurrent into current liabilities. The equity ratio moved from 44% to 43%, a marginal change and comfortably within our covenant framework. And we expect pressure on covenant compliance to remain limited through 2026. Available liquidity stood at EUR 46 million at the end of the quarter. On the next slide, we present the development in net interest-bearing debt during the quarter. And net interest-bearing debt came down by EUR 7 million from EUR 131 million down to EUR 124 million at the end of June. Leasing was flat quarter-on-quarter, so the full reduction sits in net debt. So we walk through the net interest-bearing debt. Starting from left, EBITDA reached roughly EUR 100,000 in the second quarter. No tax was paid in the quarter. The production tax for the first half 2026 falls due in August. So you'll see the outflow in the third quarter. The largest single driver is working capital, which released EUR 11.2 million during the quarter, reflecting the 5,500 tonnes harvested during the quarter. Against that, net interest paid of EUR 2.3 million, leasing and other items of EUR 1 million and CapEx investment of EUR 1.1 million, making the total CapEx investment year-to-date EUR 1.6 million. The CapEx investments are deliberately low. Our investment program is weighted to the second half of 2026. So you should expect the run rate to step up from here. The total planned CapEx for 2026 will be limited with only around EUR 4.1 million planned investments for the full year which is approximately 1/3 of projected depreciations of the year. And with that, I conclude the group's financials and hand the word back to you, Bjørn.

Thank you, Robert. So if we take an update on sales and market, there was a negative development in market price from Q1 to Q2, representing EUR 0.44 decrease on our volume weighted on our own sales. Compared to Q2 '25, the price was up with EUR 0.58 between years volume weighted for our own sold volume. The price achievement was affected that we had increased share of bigger sizes that mainly go into the North American market where we have logistic advantage that is reflected in the achieved FOB price in back to Iceland and also the Asian market where China is dominant and Iceland have a free trade agreement with China that makes us very compatible in that market. The volumes sold to North America increased from 10% in quarter 1 to 16% in quarter 2. This increase was mainly due to higher share of 6-kilo plus fish available in the harvest volume. And we also, in the quarter 2, felt that the U.S. market was a bit slow due to the 15% tariffs that we had at that pipe. The access to 6 kilo plus fish also increased the volume to the Asian market, and that increased from 14% in Q1 to 19% in Q2. So in total into the European market, we sold 67% of the volume. The contract share ended at 6% for the quarter, and it gave -- the contracts gave a positive contribution to our price achievement. We also saw an increased volumes on trade sales after entering into a trade sales contract with a third-party producer in quarter 1 this year and see that as a growing part of our activity within our sales department. If we then move to the outlook. As we see it, we keep the guided volume for 2026 to 21,300 tonnes. We still see the potential for harvesting 26,000 tonnes on our existing licenses and most CapEx to reach that goal is done and remaining CapEx needed to reach that goal is put on hold until new framework for the industry is known. We foresee a decrease in cost in quarter 3 when we start harvesting on our 2025 generation and the cost reduction is driven by better biological performance on the 2025 generation with improved survival and growth ratios and also expected high superior shares on the harvested volume. And the second thing is the earlier mentioned cost saving program that we see better and better effect of in the P&L as well as generally better capacity utilization due to higher volumes produced in the second half of the year. We expect higher feed prices going forward, but we also expect that this increase will be offset with improvements that we see in the operation. This is at least with the feed price increases that we foresee at the moment. Biomass in sea was, as mentioned, 19% higher at the end of quarter 2 '26 compared to quarter 2, '25, enabling improved MIB utilization in 2026 compared to previous years. This contributes to reducing the fixed cost per kilo produced significantly. The contract share for the year is expected to be 10%. On 24th of July, we got a pleasant surprise when the tariffs to the U.S. market was set to 0%. This gives us a significant benefit compared to, for example, Norway and U.K. into that market, and we see an immediate effect of this on our price achievement in that market. We are now adapting our production to benefit from a stronger U.S. demand. This means we are adjusting what days we are harvesting and have increased the capacity for flight packing and more deliveries both to North America and also China. For the first time, we are also expecting direct flights from Iceland to China, and this is expected to strengthen our access to the Chinese market going forward. This will happen in October with 3 weekly flights between China and Iceland. The risk assessment for sailing for the 10,000 tonne license application in Isafjaroardjup is now being finalized constituting the final step towards approval for the license. The license was awarded in 2024, but revoked due to, among other things, missing risk assessment of sailing. At the end, I want to mention the work with the new aquaculture law in Iceland. A new aquaculture law was presented to the Parliament Allpingi in June, containing many positive elements, but was not approved. This has resulted in continued uncertainty on key regulation for both the industry and also for Icelandic Salmon. The lack of clarity on key regulation is unsustainable and is sadly making it responsible and impossible for us to comment to further growth and CapEx at the moment. There is a clear need for change in the regulation and particularly a change in the unfortunate and excessive high industry-specific taxes. A predictable, more reasonable and compatible tax regime with the potential for growth and more optimized monitoring from the authorities are key to continued development of fish farming in Iceland. We, therefore, hope for a resolution soon, putting in place a framework for the industry that will enable continued investments and growth, value creation and creation of local jobs in the communities we are operating. I will then thank you for listening to the presentation. We will now move into the Q&A session. So please raise your hand if you want to ask the question orally or you can type the questions in the chat of the meeting. So please feel free for questions.

So first question. Do you cut the smolt release guiding from 5.4 million to 5.1 million for 2026. And how much do you plan in '27?