Good morning, everyone, warm welcome to Kemira's Q2 2023 results webcast. You know me, I'm Mikko Pohjala from Kemira's IR, and I'm here today with our newly appointed interim President and CEO, Petri Castrén. As you surely have seen, first thing we announce today that our President and CEO, Jari Rosendal, will leave his position in 2024 at the latest. After that, we announce that Petri Castrén has been appointed as interim President and CEO alongside his duties as CFO. In addition to that, we have, of course, published the Q2 results for January-June, with robust financial performance. As is the sort of our tradition, we'll go through the Q2 results in the presentation. Petri will also touch upon the management changes
After that, there will be plenty of time for your questions on either topic, so either on the management changes or the Q2 results. As is the case, typically, you can present your questions via the teleconference or then via the webcast tool. With this, we're ready to start. Petri, please.
All right. Very good. Thank you. Thank you, Mikko. Good morning, everyone. As Mikko started and already we announced last week that Jari is on sick leave, this time I will present the good Q2 and half year results on my own, bear with me. First of all, I'd like to comment on Jari's sick leave. We are respecting his privacy, and we will not speculate about his illness or regarding his the duration of his sick leave. We respect his privacy. We want to wish Jari all the best and full and complete recovery. That is the most important thing for him right now. Besides the two announcements.
Sorry, besides the results announcements, the two announcements that were made earlier today, first announcement was about the CEO succession plan announcement. Board actually advised even me, and the rest of the management team about this yesterday, and this succession planning has been going on for some time already. As a result of this planning, and soon Jari would have been 10 years in the company, there was a plan, and this plan had been worked together between Jari and the board about a succession. It is important to note that this succession plan announcement has nothing to do with Jari's sick leave announcement and sick leave, it's just an unfortunate timing of those two things. Separate announcement was made about Jari's backfill.
While he is on sick leave, the board asked me yesterday whether I would be willing to take the role temporarily until Jari comes back or until his successor is nominated and his successor is in place. That was the second announcement, and as Mikko said, I will retain my CFO role as well. And actually, also, my intention is that I will return to my CFO role once this temporary phase is over. Let's move on to the Q2 results. I think the title says a lot, weak pulp and paper market, but it was more than compensated by the strong profit improvement and profit performance in I&W.
In light of that weak pulp and paper market, we think that our performance was really robust. Slight organic growth with strong EBITDA margin of 18%. Pulp and paper market weakened clearly during Q2, particularly in Europe or EMEA region for us, which is our stronghold. I'll come back to that a little bit. Oil and gas strategic review continues. There's no update on that. We'll update and give further information when that's available. One of the other achievements for the quarter, EcoVadis sustainability rating platform, recognized our efforts and activities on that one, and we retained our Platinum rating from EcoVadis now third year in running. I think that's a good recognition for us. As you have seen, we have kept our outlook unchanged.
There are some changes in the assumptions, particularly addressing the weaker pulp and paper market. If we look at the numbers a bit more deeply, we see that the revenues decreased by 2%. That's the reported revenue. The organic growth eked out a small increase, 0.5%, when adjusted for FX, and also there's a slight impact from our Colorants divestment, which we concluded during the quarter. Year on year, sales prices increased, and that increase impact was more offsetting the decline in volumes, which were sort of pronounced in pulp and paper segment. Our oil and gas business continues to improve, volume growth driving profit improvement.
Maybe final comment on this slide, our cash flow has been very good. On the back of strong profitability for H1 of the year, and also some unwinding of networking capital. Looking at the segments now and starting with pulp and paper. The first comment is that the inventory, and now I'm not talking about not our inventory or even our customer's inventory, but the whole value chain from down from us to the consumer. There is more inventory de-stocking than than we saw, and most of the industry saw even some three months ago. Now this inventory de-stocking will take longer to unwind.
In Q2, this sort of, this is visible in our volumes in a more meaningful way than what we anticipated during the quarter. Regarding pricing, there we have to recognize that it's a totally different story, whether one compares year-over-year pricing or whether one compares a consecutive pricing. Actually, this time, we have offered some more commentary, even in our report about consecutive pricing, because I think that helps reader and to sort of understand what is going on in the marketplace. I'll try to do some of that here now. While I said year-over-year prices improved for consecutive periods, there was significant decline in prices, particularly in bleaching chemicals.
Obviously, these are energy-intensive chemicals, as energy prices have come down significantly from Q1 levels to or to in Q1, that. Those are formula-priced products, so that pricing is visible. Similarly is true for caustic, which is market price products, and those caustic prices have come down from Q1 level, coming back to more normalized level. Q1 operative EBITDA declined to 15.5% in Q2 from the exceptionally high level of 21.7% in Q1. All for one more detail which you may appreciate about the sequential decline. The sequential decline is in absolute terms, is EUR 44 million.
Most of that can be associated to sodium chlorate in Europe and caustic. Both the combined effect of the pricing decline as well as the volume decline in this space. Moving on to the industry and water side. If the market was weak in pulp and paper, then there's quite a bit different story in industry and water. In municipal side, market is quite robust, market is stable. This is sort of consistent with our expectations, so that's the biggest part of our water treatment business goes to municipal wastewater treatment. That is quite recession-proof and non-cyclical in terms of volumes. Here again, the volumes have held up quite steady, regardless of the external environment. There is some softness in industrial demand.
This is particularly driven by our smallish exposure to mining industry. That's the biggest driver for the decline in industrial water treatment volumes. On the other hand, oil and gas volumes are increasing nicely. They're increasing both sequentially. That's driven also by the seasonality of our oil and gas business, so we've started the tailings treatment season, but there's also a good growth year on year. There we are sort of our polymer business, particularly going into the North American shale, is continuing to grow. We are sort of having higher capacity utilization rates in our polymer plants. Obviously, that is driving improvement in oil and gas. Operating EBITDA, record high of EUR 85.8 million.
This is sort of another anecdote, that this is the first time when I&W absolute EBITDA has actually exceeded one of pulp and paper. Sort of there's a friendly rivalry between the segments and I think this anecdote is sort of positive for that continued friendly rivalry between the segments. Maybe one more comment on oil and gas. You may remember that I have mentioned that we expect more than EUR 20 million profit improvement for our oil and gas in 2023 versus 2022, so year on year improvement. I'm happy to say that we are on track, slightly even ahead of that track, to achieve that. In that sense, continued improvement in our oil and gas business.
A bit more about the EcoVadis recognition. We do strive to be a global leader in sustainable chemical solutions in water, intensive industries, and we believe in the sustainability transformation will drive profitable growth. In that respect, I think it's even more important that external platform like that recognizes our own efforts in that, in the sustainability area. It's also good to note that one does not stay on the sort of particular level, in this case, Platinum level, by standing pat or standing still. There needs to be a continued improvement, and this continued improvement was even recognized in the improved scoring. It's attributable to many areas where we are improving, covering areas like procurement to environment, labor, human rights, and our ethics.
Good, good achievement there. Regarding our strategy and regarding our strategic priorities, today's announcements have no impact, no bearing on our strategy, have no bearing on the strategic priorities. We'll continue to focus on finding growth from existing business as well as focusing on our strategy on bio-based or renewable chemistries. This will all continue. The oil and gas review will continue. Regarding operative priorities, those will remain largely unchanged as well, obviously those operative priorities are derived from the strategic priorities. Maybe one comment which we will say that this that we will make, do some actions to mitigate actions, or we'll find mitigating actions for the weaker pulp and paper market.
We strive and we are proudful, proud that we have an agile organization that can react to different environmental inputs, if you will. We were quick to react to COVID. We were quick to react to rising input costs, and we performed really well through these times. Now we are sort of being tested again, somewhat, and how we will react to the changing environment in the pulp and paper segment. The that maybe is the one change on the focus areas for the second half of the year. Moving on to the sort of financial side, I'll give you a bit more detail on some of the topics that I have already raised. Now I'm putting my CFO hat on.
First of all, revenue bridge. Organic revenue eked out the small gain of 0.5%. Volumes came down 7% and again, like I said earlier, resulting from the declining market demand in pulp and paper. I think it's important to note that this we associate it all to the market. We don't see any reduction, any loss of market share in this business, but it's really driven by market. Volumes increased in an industrial water, again, as the growth in oil and gas was more than offsetting the small decline or the decline in industrial water treatment volumes. Sales price improved year-on-year, declined sequentially.
Again, the sequential decline was mostly due to the normalizing caustic prices and the decline in prices in other energy intensive bleaching chemistries, again, covered sort of earlier. I think at the same time, when we talk about the significant changes in the energy-intensive products and the caustic, it's good to see that our sort of business model is able to and our organization is able to hold on to many of the pricing gains in other product areas. That is supporting our profitability during this period of time. Some comments about fixed costs. Fixed costs are up more than 10%, and this is driven by some good, what I call acceptable reasons, for fixed cost increases.
We actually have some higher incentive accruals on the back of a very strong profit during H1 of the year. Travel costs have normalized since last year was still beginning. Particularly, the first half was still COVID-impacted, so travel cost is increasing. There's an area which we haven't talked about much, but we have some extra costs from our SAP upgrade. We transferred to SAP S/4HANA. This is actually a topic that we are happy and not only happy, but very satisfied and proud that we actually achieved go-live status with our SAP project during this Q2, actually during May already, and we have already two monthly closings behind us.
This was a process of more than three years. It started more than three years ago with planning and some 1 and a half years of intensive work making this happen. As surely you know, that these type of ERP upgrades companies do every 10, 15 years, it's a massive undertaking and obviously it generated some extra costs. Now we're there, and this new platform will sort of allow us to sort of continue to build on our global processes, global tools, and will certainly offer opportunities for us to sort of use the newest technology and the cloud-based technologies, and all that this will bring on to us.
Also recognizing that the salary inflation is running higher now compared to recent years. Again, I mentioned the mitigating actions that we need to do. Well, there are some actions that we will need to take to address the increasing cost base. All right, moving on to this variable cost impact page that we always talk about. Here, again, I sort of emphasize that these curves that you see, the massive up and down changes that you see on the recent quarters and during the last year, these are amplified by the impact of the energy-intensive chemistries, caustic, as well as the bleaching chemical chemistries. First, moved up hugely and now decreasing rapidly and by similar amounts.
It's good to understand that otherwise, the movements in pricing are much more modest. It's almost there's a sort of a health warning in how you interpret that, cause because of the magnitude or amplification effect of these two product lines, you should be careful on what you conclude regarding other products. Remembering that chlorates and bleaching chemicals are still, what are they? Less than 1/3 of our revenue, so they are not the whole business that we do. Let's put that in perspective. Still, as you see, we increased prices, year on year by EUR 66 million, and again, sequentially, they started to decline. Moving on to our balance sheet.
Balance sheet continues to strengthen, as good profitability generated cash, and we reduced net working capital, which is sort of typical when the volumes are coming down. It reflects the inventory values coming down reflects both the reduced levels of inventory that are needed, as well as the unit costs coming down for inventories. net leverage, one time trailing 12 months operative EBITDA. I think this is clearly the lowest that it has been for Kemira. One comment about electricity assets.
As Olkiluoto 3 started its commercial operations during Q3, we changed the valuation method how we value that asset from cost basis to discounted cash flow basis, which is the valuation methodology that we use all other sort of commercially producing electricity assets that we have. This change resulted in an increase of roughly EUR 50 million in the value of our ownership in Olkiluoto 3. That increase was largely offset as we reduced the value of the other electricity-producing assets at the same time. This reduction, again, reflects the changes in the marketplace. We base the five year outlook on electricity based on forwards.
You follow that the electricity forward for the next five years have come down during the quarter, and also some of the term electricity cost and our price assumptions have come down. This value reduction is a reflection of those. Cash flow, again, sort of highlighted that the good profitability and net working capital unwinding resulted in excellent cash flow year to date, and also, strongest ever Q2 . Here, I like to sort of bring up the seasonality aspect that we have. Typically, our cash flow is very much weighted towards H2 of the year.
Because of the sort of what's been going on in the marketplace right now, this year, that seasonality will probably not repeat itself in the same way as it has done in the previous years. Finally, I'll come back to the outlook. Despite that we have adjusted some of the assumptions for pulp and paper market in for the rest of the duration of the rest of the year, we have kept our outlook unchanged. The revenues for the full year are expected to be between EUR 3.2 billion and EUR 3.7 billion, and operative EBITDA between EUR 550 million and EUR 650 million.
With that, I've gone through my prepared remarks, and slides, so we're ready to move on to the Q&A session.
Many thanks, Petri. As mentioned, you can present your question from the teleconference line, or submit your question from the webcast tool. Before we go to the teleconference line, there's one question already from the webcast tool, I'll present that to you, Petri. This is from Samu Wilhelmson. In terms of pricing and pricing power, how would you describe the stickiness of your customers and contracts in pulp and paper currently? Have you received requests on new price negotiations in the segment?
Well, I sort of alluded to that fact already with that we have not lost market share. We just held an internal presentation and heard commentary from our segment head, who was saying that we haven't lost any one single customer in that respect. I think that sort of shows the stickiness of it, that the customer retention rate is very high for us, and I would say typically in the pulp and paper industry. The price decline that is most prominent is obviously where we have formula-priced price pricing, that comes with the formula. The price increases came with the formula, the price decreases will come with the formula as well.
Some places where we have moved to more frequent price adjustments or agreed to, for example, quarterly pricing negotiations or pricing updates, yes, there we are facing these requests. To be honest with you, I wouldn't be surprised that as the industry, our customers are having some of their own difficulties, that we will be having these discussions about pricing as well. I think it's sort of a. This is business as usual. First of all, it's not nothing dramatic. It happens, and we'll need to deal with it.
At the same time, if we are seeing some pressure on prices coming down, because I think now the direction of pricing is clearly coming down rather than going up, particularly those ones that are frequently negotiated. We are getting some of the benefit from the reducing variable costs. It is sort of appropriate that we share that. We shared the pain going up, we share the pain. We share that also going down. The answer is yes, but I wouldn't turn it to any dramatic situation.
Maybe as a reminder, so as a whole in the pulp and paper segment, so Petri referred to the formula-based contract. Roughly 1/3 of the contracts in pulp and paper are formula-based, and the other ones are typically fixed.
Thank you, Mika.
With this, we go to the teleconference, and we can take questions from the webcast tool again a bit later, but we start with the teleconference.
On your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Anssi Raussi from SEB. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Hi, everyone, and thank you, Petri, for the presentation. A couple of questions, and the first one is a bit like clarifying one. Volumes declined by 7%, but could you split or give us, like, a divisional split? How much was the decline in pulp and paper, just to get our models right?
To be honest with you, Anssi, I don't remember exact percentages. As we said, volumes increased in INW, driven by oil and gas volume growth. The volume decline in pulp and paper is more significant.
It would be in the double digits.
Yeah. Actually, now I remember. Yes, it is in the double digit range, actually, it's sort of a 14% to 15%... 14% or something like that is the volume decline in pulp and paper year-on-year. I'll give you even more detail on that one. About half of that was during the last quarter.
Okay. Thank you. The next one about the division-specific trends going into Q3, so especially pricing and cost. If we talk about, like, quarter-on-quarter terms here, like, caustic soda, it has been normalizing or it has normalized during Q2. What kind of pricing and cost trends we could expect in Q3?
Well, I think Q3 on caustic will see much smaller changes than in the previous quarters. There may be a still a small change downwards in caustic prices, but we're talking about significantly smaller changes than in this past quarter or the previous quarters. Then, of course, what was sort of impactful or why the caustic impact Q1 to Q2 over Q1 was so meaningful was that the caustic volumes also came down quite a bit during Q2. The caustic profitability will be driven, of course, by the combination of these two.
What about Industry and Water division? Like, do you have a pricing negotiations ongoing there, or?
Well, industry and water, like, if you remind me of sort of how the business model is. Most of that business is municipal water treatment. Two-thirds of that is municipal water treatment, and that's almost exclusively annual contracts, sometimes even biannual contracts. Most typical contract is an annual contract. Those are fixed price contracts. These are the contracts that when variable costs are going up, they are sort of a drag on our profitability. Now when variable costs are coming down, so this is now protecting our profitability. Here I think we have much more visibility on volumes, which are resilient in particular in the municipal water treatment, but also on our pricing.
There also, it's sort of good to understand that we are negotiating against year-ago situation. The year-on-year movement, when we go into these price negotiations, are not nearly as dramatic as the sort of a more what would happen if it was a quarter-on-quarter or a consecutive quarter situation that you negotiated from. We have a pretty good outlook and pretty good comfort level that we will be holding on to the pricing levels for the, for this year.
Okay, that's all from me. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Isha Sharma from Stifel Europe. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. The first one is on paper and pulp. Could you please comment on the destocking? How much do you estimate this to be underlying weakness? The products are obviously a bit bulky, and the destocking is lasting much longer than you anticipated. My second question is on water treatment. You are benefiting, of course, from the price cost spread due to the longer contract. Have you already seen the best of it? If you look at your margin development, it's quite solid. Should we expect then the margin to somewhat normalize in the coming quarters? Thank you for your helpful comments on the EUR 20 million improvement year-over-year in 2023.
Is it equally weighted through the year, or are we going to see more to come in the H2 versus H1 ? Thank you.
I'll specify you, so that EUR 20 million you were referring to oil and gas improvement?
Correct.
Okay.
Starting with destocking, right?
Let's start with the destocking. In a way, the somewhat of a challenge is regarding this destocking, and it's the destocking in the whole value chain. We don't have excess inventories. Our products, our chemistries are consumables that our customers consume in their production. Mostly our customers, they don't have big inventories of whether it's paper products, board products, or pulp products. Down the chain, whether you're talking about importers or possible distributors, and particularly during the COVID years, these various importers and distributors had to build up stocks because the supply chains were less reliable than what they are today.
That caused, down the value chain, inventory destocking for which we don't have a good visibility, and I would sort of venture to say that even our, even our customers don't have a really good visibility of what is down the chain. That's the destocking that I'm talking about, not necessarily what our customers need to do, but what our customers', customers, and their customers need to do. That's that is there. Maybe sort of turning it to the sort of forward-looking commentary. This topic was identified, and I think six months ago, this issue was seen, but not to the magnitude, and it was sort of expectation that by H2 of this year, it would turn better.
I think that the common view is that Q3, there are little signs of improvement in that destocking. That destocking activity will need to go through Q3. Q4's visibility is not so good, there's no strong, at least no strong signals yet that this volume would start to improve significantly in Q4. We're rather looking at 2024 as a volume growth area. Hopefully, the economies will pick up sooner. We always obviously have seen weak-ish numbers from China recently and so concerns about macro environment still in North America, particularly in Europe. The macroeconomy, hopefully, does not get worse, but will rather turn better and help us in the destocking process. Water treatment margins, I think it was the next question.
Have we peaked? We don't give that type of a quarterly views on it, but certainly the peaks and valleys are not as sharp as they are in some of the, like the caustic or the electricity-intensive bleaching chemicals. I don't see any big changes there. Perhaps not improving anymore, but are they coming down fast in the coming quarters? I don't expect a significant slowness in that in the coming quarters. Oil and gas, the EUR 20 million profit year-on-year profit improvement, like I said, we're well on track, and well on track to me means that you've chronologically achieved at half year, more than half of the goal.
There's still about a half of the goal to come. Maybe that's enough.
Hope that clarifies, Isha.
Thank you very much. Really helpful.
The next question comes from Robin Santavirta from Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Hello to everybody. Now, in terms of this pulp and paper segment and the volume weakness, it seems that you expect the volume weakness to continue in H2, and then, as I understand, mainly from continued destocking, I understand the visibility for the latter part of the year is a bit weak. You also. There's some new projects, actually, a number of new mills coming online, both when it comes to paperboard and especially when it comes to pulp, and some of those we know are your customers. Isn't this going to offset some of the weakness that we see from destocking? What is your view on that?
I think one of the very concrete example where we will see, or we have started to see some positive offsetting impact is the expansion, UPM's expansion in Uruguay. UPM, obviously, is in the ramp-up phase. I don't want to comment an awful lot on how that ramp up is going, but obviously it is a ramp up phase, and while it's ramping up, it takes time for volumes to pick up. Once the... as the volumes are picking up, yes, that will increase the volume demand in South America, South America, sorry. That's not offsetting clearly EMEA, and I mentioned the EMEA pulp and paper as being soft from volume point of view.
That is the much bigger market for us and the impact is sort of in absolute numbers is more significant. One pulp mill growth in South America will not sort of offset the current low demand in pulp and paper EMEA.
I understand. In terms of the margin for that segment, you did 14% and 16% EBIT margin now in the past, you know, Q4 last year, Q1 this year, now you're down to nine. If I look at pre-pandemic times, the EBIT margin has been around 6% to 7%, so you're still clearly ahead of the margin you reported at that time. Should we expect the margins sort of to gradually reach the same levels as pre-pandemic, or is this essentially, you know, say, 9% EBIT margin or the EBITDA margin of 15% to 16% to normalized level?
I don't want to make any prognosis on quarters, but clearly, we are doing what we need to do to protect our profitability. Deterioration of margins to, let's say, three points on. Like you were describing, it would absolutely be a bad outcome, and it's not in our plans. No. We intend to hold on to our margins.
The underlying sort of, you know, essentially profitability is a bit better now compared to a couple of years back, I understand.
Absolutely. Absolutely. We've done number of things in investments and driving costs. We've done a number of things in terms of our smart pricing with our customers over the years. We're not dealing with the commodity chemicals, commodity business model, only that you take what the market allows, but we need to drive this as well.
I understand. Thank you. Finally, about the management changes, I appreciate this is quite sensitive territory, but it's a bit our job to understand what is going on. Therefore, I'm gonna ask the question. Of course, it feels a bit like quite quick change. First, Jari sort of is on, is announced he's on sick leave. Then very soon after that, it's announced that he will quit in Kemira. I say it hasn't to do with his sick leave or illness. Of course, the question comes that has there been some rapid change? Has something changed in the industry, in your company, in the strategy?
How would you sort of comment on that one?
Well, I don't comment on the sick leave at all. That's also a promise that I made.
I understand.
Regarding the CEO succession, I think the CEO succession had our Chairman as a one who should rather comment on it. I'll repeat what he said and what we say in the announcement. We are not looking for new strategy. We're happy with our strategy, which our strategy is focusing on growth in our existing businesses. It's looking at renewable chemistries as an area where we grow. This CEO change has nothing to do with the change of strategy. It has more to do that Jari has been doing that role for almost 10 years. It's a long time for a CEO. It's double the average CEO life.
This was sort of, something that our chairman was stressing very much when this was being addressed, that he has done a good job. There is no drama behind it, and it's absolutely not linked to the sick leave. That's all I say about it. Yeah, and I hope that even that doesn't get me in trouble.
Maybe still to clarify on the timing.
Yeah, I.
Jari will leave his position in 2024 at the latest, and Petri will be the interim President CEO on either until Jari returns or until the new President CEO has started. There is that optionality still, just to clarify.
Exactly. Thank you, Mikko.
Yep. Thank you for those answers, and let's hope for speedy recovery for Jari.
Indeed.
Thank you. Thank you.
Indeed. Thank you, Robin. In the meantime, I have a question here. A couple of questions, one related to the pulp and paper market that we have just discussed. This from Petri Gostowski from Inderes: "Can you give some more comments on the mitigation actions in pulp and paper, and when do you expect this to have an impact?
I honestly, I don't want to give an awful lot of comment. Obviously, we are looking at various kinds of softer things which can be implemented immediately. Looking at where we travel, how do we make sure that people take their vacation times and holiday accruals? Looking at external costs, looking at consulting costs, stuff like that. The segment itself will need to also look at some of the other mitigating actions as well. Let's leave it at that. I don't want to be speculating anything more. We're not planning anything significant restructurings or anything like that at this time.
Good. Then we continue with the webcast questions. From Henri Parkkinen from OP, there's one question regarding the pulp and paper volume. That we covered already. Pulp and paper volumes, year-on-year, were down roughly at 14%, 15%. That has been covered. The next question, Petri, on the finance costs: "Are Q2 financial costs representative proxy for following quarters when we take into account the higher recent interest rate development?
Roughly. I think there was sort of one sort of extra thing that should not repeat itself. In the finance cost, we had EUR 1.5 million of FX revaluation from our cash in a country where the currency was weakening. The finance costs are somewhat exaggerated by that amount. If again, if you multiply EUR 1.5 million by 4x , you get EUR 6 million extra finance costs. That you should at least take off. I don't remember if there was something else that was sort of a one-time. Obviously, there is sort of typical FX movements, both directions, in any quarter, but that was sort of out of the ordinary.
it is true that borrowing costs are increasing as rates are moving up. if I remember correctly, our average interest rate is now 2.6% or 2.7%.
Yes.
Where it used to be about one percentage point lower not that long ago. Yes, interest rates are coming up, but still 2.6%, I think we can find good investments that are worth more than that.
Good. I believe we have covered all the questions for now from the webcast, and we go back to the teleconference line.
The next question comes from Andres Castanos-Mollor from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. I want to also wish Jari all the best and fun recovery. I want to congratulate you, Petri, on the appointment. A quick question on the strategy. Roughly, nothing will change, but I wonder if the timings, if the intensity of the search for potential suitable M&A targets in water is still going on, also on the pace of the strategic review of the oil and gas business?
Well.
A second question.
Okay.
Later, maybe. Go ahead, please.
Address that first. Specifically on oil and gas, this will have no bearing on the strategic review on oil and gas. That strategic review will go, continue, and again, we'll update once there is a time to update on that process. I were also regarding M&A pipeline, we'll continue to progress our M&A pipeline in a similar way as we have done up to now. There's no, in my mind, no change in the strategy. Of course, how and when one executes, or the situation needs to be evaluated at that time.
I don't see that changing in our strategic focus, because we are, have identified certain areas, particularly in the area of water treatment, where it absolutely makes sense for us to use inorganic tools as a way to grow ourselves, provided that we can do it with a good financial discipline. Obviously, that all requires that we can find something that is strategically fitting for us and at the value range that it makes sense for us.
My second question, thank you, was on working capital development has been improving for a while. I wanted to understand whether there is underlying volumes improvement or we're seeing that the cost embedded in the inventories is getting lower. I wanted to understand that.
First of all, one talks about net working capital as three components, three large buckets receivables, on, and inventory, and then on the other side of the balance sheet, payables. First of all, I'll cover the receivables because that's a quick one and a very good story. No deterioration of our receivable quality, no and really, no changes in the how our receivables turn over. We have a very good and a customer portfolio, in terms of creditworthiness of our customer portfolio, we have very small bad debt provisions, and our receivables turn quite quickly, and really no changes there. On the payable side, pretty much the same story.
Payable side and no other changes, so our trade payables really steady. At the time when energy costs were really high and some of the utilities have really short payment terms, and you don't negotiate with utilities. When you get big electricity bills or big gas bills, you need to pay them quickly. We saw some reduction of payable turnover days, and that obviously is bad for net working capital. That is now normalizing, so that's helping on the net working capital side. On the inventory, which is, I think, where my focus as a CFO has primarily been on and where I think the focus ought to be.
Inventory is a combination of volumes, and how much inventory you have, and you should look at that through again, efficiency measures of how days on inventory or so. The unit impact, unit price. The supply chain difficulties made everyone to build more inventories during COVID years. Those excess inventories we have been building have been unwinding down and continue to wind down. Sorry, have been winding down. Price impacts, of course, are there, the unit cost, as they come down, the value of inventory comes down, i.e., releases net working capital.
In terms of sort of a segment differences, the, I would say that there's improvement potential in terms of our inventory levels in our pulp and paper segment, as the volume decline has been quite rapid, particularly in Q2. The inventory volumes have not fully adjusted to the lower volume demand that we have had during Q2. There's opportunity to reduce our inventories in particularly in our pulp and paper segment, and that, and we recognize that.
This is great. Thank you very much. Also wanted to congratulate the team. It's rare that you hear that an SAP upgrade has been done after it's been completed. It normally is during the implementation that issues happen. Congratulations.
Yeah, we were...
That was-
We were-
... good news.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
We actually, we pride ourselves for that. Thank you.
I believe we have exhausted all questions from the teleconference. I don't have any questions from the webcast tool either. This concludes the webcast. Many thank you for participating. Many thanks for the questions. Should you have any outstanding questions or concerns for that matter, do reach out to me, we're happy to help. I believe we publish our Q3 results on the 24th of October, but I'm sure we'll be in touch before that. With this, I think we both wish you a very happy summer and nice week. Thank you.
Thank you.