Good morning everyone and welcome to Kemira's 2023 Results webcast. I'm Mikko Pohjala, if you don't know me, from Kemira's IR. Today here with me I have our Interim President and CEO Petri Castrén and also our newly appointed President and CEO Antti Salminen, who will start next week. During the webcast today, Petri will go through the main events and the financials of the quarter. After that, Antti will say a couple of introductory remarks. Sorry, before that, Antti will say a couple of introductory remarks, and then we will go to your questions. As before, you can ask your question on the teleconference line or then send your question over the webcast tool to me. With these short introductory remarks, Antti, please go ahead.
Thank you. So really glad to be here. Many of you probably already know me from my 13 years with Kemira. I've been leading lately, for the last 18 months, the Pulp & Paper segment. Before that, the Industry & Water. And before that, I led our global supply chain organization. So I know the company pretty well. And I'm really excited to take on this new responsibility. And excited, of course, for the opportunity, but especially for the shape the company is in. As you have seen from the results, the company is in excellent shape in all regards: the business performance, customer satisfaction, anything that you can look. So really good starting point for me as the new CEO. And we will basically continue executing the sustainably driven growth strategy, which has given us these results. Continue on that strategy execution.
But also, of course, we want to accelerate the execution in order to create more shareholder value. So this day here and these results, I'm happy to hand over to Petri to present them, who I'm sure is very proud and glad about his excellent performance during the past seven months as the Interim CEO. And I have to thank him for the really excellent work he has done. It is a challenging example to follow.
Well, thank you, Antti. And obviously, good morning to everyone. Also, of course, I want to take the opportunity in this form also to congratulate Antti for his CEO role. And I can, with full comfort, sort of finish my CEO position or interim CEO position, knowing that Kemira will be in excellent hands going forward with Harri on the helm, with Antti on the helm. There was a little bit of a slip of a tongue because we also appointed a successor, interim successor for Antti as the head of president and pulp segment as of today or as of Monday. Harri is also very experienced, and he has been leading our Pulp & Paper EMEA commercial section, commercial area, which is the largest commercial area in a number of years.
Very successfully, I must say, again, what the numbers that you will see or you have already seen this today indicate. Harri will be a great addition to our leadership team going forward on an interim basis. As Antti said, Kemira is in excellent shape. We had record profitability for the year with excellent, strong Q4 to finish the year. The market is challenging, in doubt. This performance, again, I think it demonstrates the resilience and how Kemira's business model works in different environments. Our business model works well when there is an upcycle and volumes are going up. It has proven now again that it works well when there is perhaps a downcycle in the business. Our business fundamentals are strong. Also, our balance sheet is the strongest that it ever has been. Again, forms a great basis to accelerate our growth strategy.
But as Antti said, the year is not only about financial performance. Underlying factors that have helped achieve this, obviously, include highest ever for us customer satisfaction survey results. Also, our employee engagement results improving. And obviously, thanks to this good result, goes to our whole employee base. Importantly, now that the Oil & Gas investment has closed in early February, we are entering a new year, a new phase with a focused portfolio. I'll continue with that business portfolio theme. Oil & Gas investment, as I said, closed a week ago, last Friday, February 2nd. And now, with this more focused portfolio, our business will be even less cyclical and seasonal. Adjusted for the Oil & Gas investment, our margin structure and capital efficiency will also improve. As you can see, we separately disclosed or reported pro forma or alternative performance measures adjusted for the Oil & Gas investment.
EBITDA, for example, EBITDA for the group, as well as the Operative ROCE for the group, improved roughly 1 percentage point or almost 1 full percentage point. Investment proceeds will, of course, also strengthen further our balance sheet and improve our capabilities regarding future M&A. This also clarifies our sustainability-driven strategy, which is focused on growing our business in water treatment, in leading renewable solutions, and related digital services. Deal terms are, as already announced in December, total consideration around $280 million or roughly or approximately EUR 260 million. 3 manufacturing facilities in the U.S. were transferred to the buyer, Sterling Specialty Chemicals, as well as novel liquid polymer assets in our site in the Netherlands. There's 1 site in the U.K. that's the smallest site in the scope that has some site-specific closing conditions. That site will be transferred once those site-specific closing conditions are filled.
Talking about customer satisfaction, so our NPS score, which has already been in a very good level, increased to 57, which again is an all-time high as long as Kemira has been recording this. Why this matters? Of course, we wouldn't be able to get these types of financial results without satisfactory customers and also engaged employees. We pride ourselves on being a customer-focused company. This, for example, shows the benefit to our customers with our focus on supply certainty, which has particularly been very valuable for our customers. They have commented on this particularly during the more difficult times. Engaged and energized employees accomplish big things. Big thanks, of course, of this successful year go to our employees. Employee engagement increased this year again. It's now six points above the industry benchmark. Moving to the financial highlights.
So reported revenue declined 13% in Q4 and 2% for the year. The big decline on quarterly comparison is against a very tough comparison. And if you remember, a year ago, we were talking about caustic prices. Caustic price was extremely high at a high level. And also, energy costs were high. And that now can say inflated, in a way, the energy-intensive bleaching chemical prices and sales in that way. And the normalization of those prices really took place only after Q1. So in that sense, we will have one more tough comparison quarter ahead of us. But what is really noteworthy about the volume development is that we actually increased volumes in Q4 over Q3. So we are seeing a sequential volume increase against a seasonal pattern of decreasing revenues in Q4. And obviously, this was driven by our Pulp & Paper segment.
Very good performance there. I'll have a bit more detail about coming up. Profitability for the quarter and year at very good level. All-time highs for both segments for the year. Cash flow very strong, resulting in further deleveraging, as mentioned. EPS, of course, was impacted primarily negatively because of the Oil & Gas investment and the related... My phone is ringing. And the related loss from that, but still, was €1.28 per share. The board is proposing to increase the dividend by EUR 0.06 to EUR 0.68 per share. Talking about Pulp & Paper, which had an excellent quarter. The market continues to be challenging. Of course, our customers have quite recently talked about that. They've also talked about expectations of a modest recovery going into this year, 2024. The market really hit the bottom in Q2. We've seen a modest increase since then.
Looking at the comparison, the tough comparison from a year ago. So organic growth for the segment was -21%, which is a huge number on itself. But over half of that was the decline of caustic price and the electricity impact in Finland alone. If you look at the rest of the parts of the bridge, year-on-year volume decline was much more, about 4% in Q4. Prices about 5%, excluding the caustic and the bleaching chemicals that I was just referring to. And again, important is the volume increase that we saw during Q4, roughly in a high single-digit from Q3 to Q4. So in this marketplace, a very good achievement of volume increase. Here, we probably had faster or bigger volume growth compared to the market. And it was helped by a couple of things.
One is we obviously have one big customer ramping up. It's pulp mill in South America. And that, of course, helps us both year-on-year, as well as sequentially. And secondly, we were able to use the excess capacity that we now have in our chlorate manufacturing plants in Nordics, particularly in Finland, and ship that to the spot markets in Asia. And that has helped also the performance in APAC. APAC is a clear highlight for the segment. So the year-on-year EBIT improvement for Pulp & Paper APAC is more than EUR 10 million, which starts to be a significant number. And they've been sort of picking up the pace throughout the year, but really stepped up the improvement in Q4. So good performance there.
So as we and our customers expect some moderate market improvement going into 2024, we feel that this segment is in very good shape, very strong position, and going into the new year. Overall, fantastic performance for INW for the year. Over EUR 110 million EBIT improvement year-on-year. So this year has actually demonstrated or has demonstrated the beauty of this business. And growing our water treatment business is one of the key cornerstones of our strategy going forward. Regarding the performance and market, municipal water treatment market very solid and resilient. Some softness in the industrial demand. Volumes thus relatively flat year-on-year, with Oil & Gas having some volume growth and offset by industrial weakness. And some of this weakness came from the mining business that we have.
In contrast to almost anything else that we have in the INW, which is contracted business in water treatment, the mining business is more or less a sort of spot type and less predictable. And therefore, the deliveries and the volumes vary a fair amount by quarter. So nothing to worry about there. I think the organic growth rate about -2%, that's a reflection of price pressure or price decline in the segment in the year. So again, fairly modest price decline in the year. Finally, while Oil & Gas has shown good growth and improved profitability, it has continued to dilute our margins. And the dilution level, again, as you can see from the separately published numbers adjusted for the divestment, almost three percentage points. So fairly significant dilution. Moving to sustainability.
So we have set ourselves challenging sustainability goals in line with our strategy and in line with our long-term commitments. On safety, we had a modest but clearly below target improvement in our safety record. Regarding our diversity target, we made excellent progress as we are now among the top quartile of companies in the cross-industry survey. This is a measurement that is focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our long-term goal and towards which we are driving the company and our people practices is to be among the 10% of companies in this same index in the survey. Freshwater intensity improved. On circularity, we are making progress even if the reported bio-based revenue declined due to the Pulp & Paper market conditions and related price declines. But we continue to be firmly committed to the EUR 500 million target by 2030.
Finally, we reduced our Scope 1 and 2 emissions in line with our SBTi commitment. We introduced this strategic priority slide in Q3. I still wanted to bring this up again because this has been a very good and simple way of illustrating what are our strategic priorities, whether we are communicating internally or externally. Regarding these priorities, we announced in December that we are forming a joint venture with IFF. The intention is to build a market entry unit here in Finland for the alpha glucan product. And this is now a fully bio-based product, and we will be going to the market once that plant is up and running, maybe a couple of years still manufacturing time. In general, we are seeing strong demand and strong interest in general for renewable solutions.
A great example is our biomass-balanced water treatment polymers, where we saw strong revenue growth in 2023. For water business, we want to grow both organically and inorganically. Now we have the capacity to execute M&A. Depending on availability of suitable targets, we may need to patiently wait or we may need to actively execute on these opportunities. In the meantime, we obviously continue our organic investments and growth investments where it makes sense. And again, an example in case is the ongoing coagulant investment that we have in the U.K. Moving now a little bit to my CFO role and touching on some of these numbers a bit more deeply. 16% reported decline was 2% volume, 11% price, 2% currency, and 2% was the impact from others. And this is primarily from the chlor-alkali divestment that we did earlier last year.
Again, price decline dominated by the high caustic price and the electricity impact during the comparison period. Excluding these, the net price impact was much more modest decline, approximately 3%. Regarding the volume development, I already talked about this during the quarter. The 2% year-on-year decline is clearly the lowest quarterly decline that we have had during the year. So if you look at our quarterly reports where we have in the bridge breaking out the volume decline, we are now reporting the lowest quarterly volume decline. And again, more importantly, I think we are now seeing sequential growth against a seasonal pattern. Variable costs show again a big positive caused by the reduced energy and caustic prices. But overall, we saw a decline in our raw material basket, particularly during the second half of the year.
This is basically summarizing the four quarterly reports that you have seen over the year and basically how we are achieving more than EUR 100 million of profit improvement. And here you see that we have had a very successful pricing and sourcing management. And this is the core competence that we have been able to develop and hone our skills during the shock periods when we saw raw material costs quickly accelerating and then coming down, primarily driven by the energy, but in some other areas as well. And this skill is really important and going forward as well. This picture actually on the left shows the shock. It's an unprecedented raw material price shock that we have seen in recent years.
Now that we are looking, and I hope that I don't regret these words, but the raw material environment looks much more stable and much more predictable than it has any time in the last 3-4 years. Therefore, going into 2024, we expect that our raw material basket will be roughly flat. There are some alarm signals, and we always have to be mindful of those. One of those alarm signals, for example, is other cargo rates, which have gone up now that the... because of the Middle East tension, particularly impacting China-Europe routes. Finally... and not finally, but going through the items impacting comparability. The big loss was from the divestment. This was already announced earlier. And we report EUR 97 million in Q4. And this reflects the difference between purchase price and the transferring assets plus a goodwill write-off.
We are also booking an additional EUR 12 million provision related to a single-asset power company in Finland. This asset is currently underutilized. The provision covers our responsibility for fixed costs for future years until we expect that utilization will improve. Quickly on balance sheet, it is now strongest that it has ever been, net debt at EUR 535 million and leverage ratio 0.8. Capital efficiency continues to improve. Operative return on capital employed exceeded 21% for the year. Going forward, we will be increasingly focusing on our capital efficiency. The board has actually set for the management long-term incentive plans operative ROCE return on capital employed as the key financial metric of how the long-term incentive payouts will be determined. That was the first time a year ago. This year, actually, the targets were even increased.
No matter how one looks, cash flow was very strong. Operative cash flow EUR 546 million. Free cash flow after investing activities almost EUR 350 million. Cash conversion over 50%. CapEx excluding M&A EUR 205 million for the year, modest increase over the previous years. Largest ongoing projects are the ASA sizing capacity increase in China and the coagulant expansion in the UK that I already mentioned. This year, 2024, we expect a slight increase in CapEx as we include renewable solutions projects in our CapEx plan for 2024. Our dividend policy is to pay a competitive and over time increasing dividend. Following our excellent financial result, the board is proposing a dividend of EUR 0.68 per share for the AGM. This is a EUR 0.06 increase from last year.
Again, consistent with our past practice from previous years or last few years, the dividend will be paid in two installments, first one in April and second one in November. Finally, to the outlook, let's first touch on the parts, the assumption part of the outlook. First, we expect that our end markets continue to improve at moderate pace and grow slightly in 2024, namely recovery in Pulp & Paper markets. Water treatment, we expect to be steady. Input costs, we expect to be rather steady, of course, and rather steady, of course, variance between some raw material groups. With the stated assumptions, we expect that revenue will be between EUR 2.7 billion and EUR 3.2 billion. Operative EBITDA, we expect to be between EUR 480 million and EUR 580 million. Importantly, the outlook is now without Oil & Gas business as of last Friday.
We have published these additional performance measures for the group and at segment level that may help you in the analysis. With that, let's turn to the Q&A session. Yes, and as before, so you can present your questions on the teleconference line or then send via the webcast tool. And do note that this question session is more focused than on the full year results, not on the new CEO's next steps. We let Antti start first. With that, I think we go to the teleconference line first.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Robin Santavirta from Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. First, I have a question related to the Pulp & Paper strong performance in Q4, especially when it comes to the margin. The margin performance was quite significantly better than not only the past few quarters, but if we go a couple of years back, it's clearly higher. What are the key reasons for this improvement compared to a couple of years back? Is this... what I'm sort of striving to understand is that is this mainly driven by low variable costs or are there also operational or other elements that have supported the margin in Pulp & Paper? First of all, this is operational performance. There are no exceptional items that would be explaining the good result. I was referring to that commercial excellence and the sourcing excellence and the pricing excellence that we have honed during these times.
So obviously, that is being demonstrated. And the business model is such that we can... and of course, now we were able to get some volume growth over Q4... I'm sorry, over Q3, consequent volume growth. So that, of course, helped. So... Robin, it's just good management.
I understand. I understand. Good to see. Can I ask you on Pulp & Paper volumes going into 2024? We have seen your customer have had an exceptionally tough year in 2023. And that, of course, is also visible to some extent in your volumes, although the improvement in Q4. But now we go into 2024, we hear some of your customers more or less optimistic about the recovery. Could we see... could we see volumes year-on-year grow already early in the year or should we expect sort of that to happen later on in the year?
Well, as you see from our assumptions, we are saying that we expect the volumes to grow year-on-year for the full year. Now, when we made that statement, that did not take into account a quarterly comparison. And you remember last year, Q1 was still quite strong and then the markets collapsed or crashed. Very strong decline in Q2. So I'll pass on that question. And I think it would be a bit careful to give that type of a quarterly guidance anyways. But for the year, we're confident that the volumes will grow.
I understand. Thanks. And the final question I have is related to the somewhat declined energy prices in Europe. And you have had a quite nice setup with good self-sufficiency of energy in energy-intensive chemicals in your production. Now we can see energy prices declining to some extent in Europe. Do you worry that this might put some pressure on the pricing of energy-intensive chemicals and in a way your competitive advantage not being as strong or are there sort of other levers that sort of make this unimportant?
Well, Robin, if you look at a bit in the past and you look at, let's say, Q4 of 2022 and Q1 of 2023 when energy costs were really high, then of course we had a huge benefit from our energy costs. Some people were calling it the tailwind for us. So we're not counting on that sort of but our energy sourcing is very beneficial in any case, which is sort of proven that we are actually producing here in Finland very energy-intensive sodium chloride and drying it and shipping it to APAC and making a nice profit with that. And so no, we're not worried.
worried about the energy prices as such. We have a sort of a... we are in a good position as demonstrated by the profitability and the fact that we can ship to APAC. Yes, we may not see the same type of profit margin from caustic that we saw a year ago. And that's, of course, reflected in our guidance or outlook for the year.
I understand. Thank you very much.
And in between, I'll ask Petri one question from the webcast too. So this is from Petri Gostowski from Inderes. What is the target level of the Operative ROCE for management incentives you mentioned? If you can give some color.
I think it will... that hasn't been... but it's in the... the target level is in the high teens. To be honest with you, I don't even remember what it is. But it's clearly in the very high teens.
Good. And then we go back to the teleconference line.
The next question comes from Tomi Railo from DNB. Please go ahead.
Hello, good morning. It's Tomi from DNB. A couple of questions. Firstly, maybe on the pricing assumptions for the current year. Volumes guided slightly up. I'm calculating based on your comparison 2023 and the guidance suggesting sort of a midpoint 2% growth. Is that suggesting that you expect rather stable pricing for the year? And maybe to add some color, what kind of discussions have you had with the customers?
Well, if you look at their assumptions and I grant it, we didn't give all the assumptions for P&L in it. But we expect volumes to grow. We expect variable costs to be rather flat. But still, like you were talking about midpoint, it is below where we were this year. So there is some leeway for impact for fixed costs, but also perhaps some modest price declines due to the market. But again, we expect that the... we have been proven that we've been able to hold on to our prices quite well with roughly 3% price decline during this year when raw materials have been on the decline. And so modest price decline may be in the cards still next year as well. But again, we maintain... we expect to maintain very good profitability.
Maybe as a follow-up to the earnings, at the high-end EUR 16 million decline to almost flat and low-end over EUR 100 million decline, can you just maybe talk about the assumptions? What would need to happen to hit almost flat profits compared to comparable last year and vice versa? What is the worst-case scenario assumptions?
Well, if you look at the last few years, the years have been quite difficult to estimate at the beginning of the year. So we've seen huge volatility in raw material prices and also quite significant... quite large volume declines and market disruption, particularly in Pulp & Paper. And by the way, this impacted Pulp & Paper EMEA the most. I think we gave enough assumptions. I think it would have to be these types of shocks that would move this towards the... particularly to the low end. Because as you have seen in the past, it always takes a couple quarters for us to react through P&L. Before the reaction is visible in P&L, let me rather put it this way, if there was, for example, a sudden increase in variable costs. So it reflects those types of scenarios, which we're still in quite an uncertain macroeconomic environment.
And one caustic soda price assumption you don't really mention in the report. Can you just maybe talk about that as well for 2024?
Pretty flat development regarding where we are today. But of course, it was so high during the comparison period that that's why we took it up separately in the report.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Maybe here in between, I'll ask a question from the webcast too, Petri. This is from Andrea Puccini. With regard to the inorganic growth, what kind of M&A budget should we expect from Kemira in the coming years?
Well... I hate the term budget because budget means that you have to use it or you lose it, at least in some instances. So let's not talk about M&A budget, but let's talk about M&A capacity. With this type of balance sheet that we have and this type of liquidity that we have, we've seen simulations where we can add on EUR 1 billion of debt and maintain our sort of implicit investment grade rating, possibly even more. So I think that's a ballpark of the number of what kind of type of capacity we would have. And I think maintaining our investment grade rating or maintaining the credit profile of an investment grade rated company is significant going forward. So that's a ballpark, but again, it doesn't mean that we are looking for EUR 1 billion acquisitions necessarily.
The next question comes from Isha Sharma from Stifel Europe. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. I have two questions left, please. Could you talk a little bit about what you see in Industry & Water?
You have mentioned that in the outlook, you expect the business to be stable. So should we expect sort of no volume growth for 2024 or is there some areas where we can expect some improvement? Because I think that the industrial business is the one that is right now suffering and if you see any development there. And also on the margin side of things, so if we think about the spreads, they have normalized a little bit. In the past, we had given the raw material volatility that you have seen over the last four or five years, it's difficult to imagine where we settle now. But is it fair to say that we are still at an inflated level and that any price declines from here are probably being too pessimistic?
I forgot the first part of that.
Volume outlook for water.
Volume outlook. Well, we've been talking about the municipal water business, which is about two-thirds of our water treatment business, tends to be resilient and stable. So for that part, we expect that to be stable. The industrial part, I think there we have opportunities to regain back some of the volume that we have lost. And I think the other part was about pricing and margins. Isha, I don't like the term inflated margins. So I would never underwrite that we have inflated margins. We've been able to really perform well, both on our commercial and sourcing side, and we've been able to improve our margins. And particularly on the municipal side, as we talked about, we have primarily annual contracts.
So there we can not only predict the volumes relatively well because the consumption of wastewater where this primarily goes is pretty predictable, but our prices, as they are, typically agreed for one-year durations and the portfolio of our customers rolls over sort of pretty evenly. So we have a pretty good visibility on the revenue side. And I think the same applies. I made the comment that we may see some pricing pressure, but it's very modest. So I don't think that we will have any... I don't foresee any drama on the margins or pricing in the water treatment side either.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Isha. In between here, Petri, I'll ask another question. This is from Andrea Noel. Could you talk about adjacent markets that you may be considering? Is there a way for Kemira to capitalize on expected growth areas of data centers, semiconductors, and lithium filtration, etc.?
Well, we're looking at a number of sort of adjacent markets. Those are... and we've been talking about the textiles for sustainable textiles, whether those are sort of recycled textiles or whether those are using wood fiber type of textiles. On the ones that you specifically mentioned, we are primarily focusing on the water treatment, on the municipal water treatment. So we're not so much on the industrial processes where I think the semiconductor would fall in. So it's not the most natural adjacency or easiest adjacency to get into, but certainly worth looking into.
Thank you. There seems to be one more question on the teleconference line.
The next question comes from Martin Roediger from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Hello, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I start with the first one regarding the EBITDA margin, which was nearly 20% in 2023. Based on your guidance, the implied EBITDA margin will be 18% in 2024. Do you... I mean, do you need to adjust your midterm margin target or is it still too early and we have to wait for the next capital markets day?
Martin, that's a fair question. Obviously, received that question already, I think after Q3. Q3. I've sort of answered that. Let us... or let's allow the new CEO come online because I think this is the type of question and topic that the new incoming CEOs typically look. They may have other looks of the organization, how it operates, but also how we should guide, what types of financial KPIs, financial metrics, how we should guide the market for longer term and what the levels would be. But Martin, very fair question.
And the second question is regarding after the disposal of your Oil & Gas business. And I know that some of your business was in Canada, in the U.S., and so on. So I would assume that the disposal will lead to a higher tax rate at Kemira. Is that right? And if so, what is your best guess? What is the underlying tax rate going forward?
So regarding tax rate, and you touched on a topic which I didn't cover here. So effective tax rate for last year for 2023 actually did increase significantly, 27%. This is due to the biggest part or most of the loss from the divestment is not tax deductible or we have not deducted that in taxes. So the tax rate, effective tax rate for last year was high. But going forward, we expect and forecast that we will return to the sort of 22%-23% effective tax rate as our business model. It's sort of bringing most of the profit or a lot of the profits to Finland where the statutory tax rate is 20%.
My final question is again on water treatment and your, say, guidance that this business will be steady in volumes. I recall that you have been upbeat about the strong opportunities in water treatment with some, let's say, what you call accelerated growth focus where you saw in some niche markets such as, let's say, energy efficiency 8%-9% or in phosphorus recovery 6%-7% growth rates or 5%-6% for micropollutants removal. When will you benefit from these growth opportunities?
That's true. And for example, the biomass balanced polymers in water treatment are growing at a very fast rate, well in excess of 100%, but they're coming off a very small base. So in the scope of our global numbers or group numbers, they don't... they are yet rounding errors. But of course, smaller numbers will become bigger in a few times. They accumulate when the growth rates continue to be high.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Martin. I'll continue with the webcast tool questions. This is from Petri Gostowski from Inderes related to our investment in Uruguay. What kind of profitability and earnings impact do you expect in Pulp & Paper in 2024 when getting to full speed?
Well, we are a little bit careful of talking about individual investments and individual contributions from different investments, particularly when they are customer specific. And actually, in this case, we expect relatively bigger contribution on the profit side than on the top line because we are... we had some capacity in the past which we are now allocating towards our customer in Uruguay. And in the past, some of that was exported out. But again, it's improving profitability. So I shy away from giving you a guidance on that one, but clearly it's a good investment.
And again, one can typically say that sort of the brownfield or following investments like this one are typically much more capital efficient than the original greenfield investment. So in this case, as you know, we are expanding our manufacturing capacity in Fray Bentos, which is also co-located with the customer, but then shipping the additional capacity or the product to the other plants, other pulp mill in Uruguay.
Thank you. And there still seems to be one question on the line.
The next question comes from Tomi Railo from DNB. Please go ahead.
Yeah, it's Tommy again from DNB. To start with, actually, congratulations, Antti, for the appointment. And I heard Mikko suggesting that this is not the place to ask questions about the future focus points, but maybe I can still try and start with when should we maybe expect something? Is it the first 100 days or during this year we should maybe expect something fine-tuning in the strategy? Are you happy with the structure and it takes from Pulp & Paper to industrial water? Where do you see improvement potential and so on? But maybe if I'm kind on the timing to start with.
Well, let's make an exception and give some answers, but really, as you mentioned yourself, so I haven't even started yet. I have a long history with the company. I know the operation and as communicated, our current strategy, I think, serves us very well. So we will continue executing on that. We will, of course, seek ways to accelerate the execution in order to generate more value. And as any new CEO, I will be then reviewing all parts of our operation and making my conclusions together with the management.
There's no 100 days in real life. I mean, it takes what it takes and we go. Good thing is, as you've seen, the company is in really good shape. So there's no burning platform anymore. We have the luxury of start looking at the changes and new developments like in all peace and kind of with a very planned manner. And Tomi, I can say that from Q1 report, Antti will be reporting the CEO part.
And Tomi, if and when there is a capital markets day, we'll make sure to invite you there as well. But no plans yet, official plans.
Thank you.
Thank you. Any more questions on the line? Apparently not. So this concludes the webcast. So thank you for your questions. Thank you, Petri and Antti, for the presentation opening remarks. If there are any follow-up questions, so do reach out to me. With this, thank you and have a nice weekend.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you .