Goodmorning and welcome to Lassila & Tikanoja's January-December 2025 Earnings Release. Today with me, I have Joni Sorsanen, our CFO, and later during the presentation, he will go through the deep dive into the financials. Both of us will be available for questions after the presentation.
We have renewed our presentation to mark the new beginning of Lassila & Tikanoja. The agenda for today's webcast is as follows: First we will go through the highlights. Then we will dive into the market environment. Then we will look into how we have succeeded in our growth strategy execution.
We will go through the efficiency and operations, then sustainability, and financials outlook, then we are ready for your questions after the presentation. First, a few highlights. Overall, I'm very pleased with our performance in 2025. Our net sales grew by 0.7% to EUR 426.6 million in a quite difficult market environment. Our adjusted EBITDA was EUR 84.3 million, and our adjusted EBITA was EUR 40.6 million, and this is in carve-out basis. Joni will go through later in the presentation, sort of what is the difference between carve-out basis and how we reported earlier in 2025, segment basis strong.
Our operating cash flow after investments per share was EUR 1.08 compared to EUR 0.90 year earlier. Board's proposal, dividend proposal to the annual general shareholders' meeting is EUR 0.42 per share. Few operational highlights as well. I will go deeper into this during the presentation, but I'd say this successful completion of the partial demerger was a pretty big undertaking, and it also shows in our sort of costs of non- or one-off costs that were quite significant for 2025. Another major undertaking was the rollout of our cloud-based ERP system across our operations, and this was quite a success
We had basically no major disturbances, and we were able to run our operations smoothly throughout this very extensive rollout project. We completed three acquisitions, and we also made an investment into our plastics recycling in Merikarvia. On sustainability front, our carbon footprint continued to decrease, and our recycling rates increased quite nicely. Let's start with the sales. Overall, our sales grew, as I said, about half a percent.
When we look at the sort of first half and second half, we had a very healthy growth in the last six months of 2025, where our sales grew by 5.4%, and in quarter four, our sales grew by 5.5% compared to the previous year. Good development there. If we look at the sales development by our different businesses, in waste management and recycling, we suffered from the sluggishness of the Finnish economy in general. Even though we had a benefit of the pallet recycling business for seven months, we still declined our sales in this part of our business.
In hazardous waste and remediation business, on the other hand, we had a very good performance, and especially in the remediation and environmental construction part of our business, the demand for our services was very high, and the sales increased by 12% to EUR 73 million.
In industrial services and water treatment, again, in quite difficult market, we were able to keep our sales at the previous year's level, EUR 81.3 million. EBITA performance or adjusted EBITA performance, you can see here the typical seasonality of our business. We have here, for your benefit, we have shown what would be this development on comparable basis.
We have, in a way, the carve-out basis and then this old segment basis. Our adjusted EBITA for the circular economy business, as it was reported early in 2025, was EUR 42.1 million compared to EUR 44.7 million, and this 42.1 is approximately 10% of the sales.
O ur relative profitability remained at good level, and especially the efficiency measures implemented during the year helped us to adjust our production to the slow market conditions. On the other hand, because of this rollout of ERP system, we did have some extra costs. We have estimated that those extra costs were about EUR 1 million.
They are part of our operational costs, but they should melt away 2026 and will not continue after that. Also, we have now higher depreciation related to this new ERP system, and obviously, that will remain, and we will need to continue our efficiency measures to offset these higher depreciations. We have a new section here in the presentation. This is market environment. What we have tried to do here is to open a little bit more what is happening in the sort of recycling market in Finland, especially, and hopefully later on, what is happening in Sweden as well. Here we have focused more what is happening in the Finnish market.
Here we have two graphs that illustrate very well what has happened during the past four years in the Finnish market. On the left-hand side, we have the development of retail industry in Finland. Here you can see that in euros, it has been pretty much flat, but in volumes or tons, it has declined significantly. We are basically at the same level as we were seven years ago in terms of volumes in retail. This is visible also on the right-hand side, where we have the municipal solid waste development volumes again, or tons, in the Finnish market. It has declined more than 25% by the end of 2024.
We don't have the statistics yet for year 2025, but our expectation is that it is very similar as the development of retail volumes. The good thing here is that if you look very carefully, the retail volumes development, you can see that it is starting to pick up.
This is what we expect to see as well, that during 2026, we will see that gradually the volumes start to pick up in retail, but more importantly, in general, in the Finnish economy. Another view to the market development is the housing building index, and like normally, sort of the renovation business is fairly stable.
It has declined a little bit, but the new building volumes have declined significantly, about 30%, and this is very well visible in our volumes as well. We are or most of our construction business comes from partnering with companies that do new building development, therefore, we are very much exposed to the development of that part of the construction. We work less with the smaller renovation companies. Therefore, as I said, our development follows very much the sort of new build development. Even though this looks pretty gloomy with a 30% decline, the fact is that we have, according to our estimate, reached the bottom.
When it starts to recover, obviously there is a big upside potential for us in this construction segment alone. We have estimated that it is more than EUR 10 million that we have lost our revenues because of the decline in the construction segment. Another important factor that has affected our business, actually, a few years already now, is the municipalization. There was a new legislation passed on in 2021, and it started to take effect in 2023. This picture gets more clear sort of day by day, but this is our current view of the development till 2028.
As you can see from here, the sort of free market, if you will, or the contract-based market, will decline from the levels of 2023 by EUR 100 million, when at the same time, the tendered municipal market will grow by EUR 60 million. Our market share is roughly 30% in Finland, so we feel this change according to our market share. How we have addressed and how we will address this market change is that we will have a very disciplined tendering process.
We see that this municipal market is still an important market going forward, but we have to make sure that when there are, let's say, overaggressive tender prices, we stay away from those and make sure that our business in this segment is healthy. Obviously, this is not a huge part of our business, but still important factor that needs to be understood when you look at our numbers and development in the past few years. Another thing that affects us is the price development of selected recycled raw materials.
We have taken here, let's say, the most important fractions and certain selected indexes that illustrate how the price level of these materials has developed during the past couple of years. As you can see, there is no clear trend here. On a high level, I would say that the impact of the recycled raw materials' price development has been neutral to us. For some materials, it has been positive, for other materials, it has been negative, but on sort of high level, it has been pretty neutral.
Obviously, if and when, the economy in Europe, in general, starts to pick up, we expect to see, that also prices for recycled raw materials start to, get healthier, and this also should support our, sales development and also profitability development going forward. Oops! Then, another thing that affects us is the regulatory environment, and we have taken here a few examples of recent development in that front. These all relate to the, let's say, the role of, municipal waste companies in the B2B market and sort of boundaries where they can operate.
I'd say most significant one is on the right-hand side, which is the EU court ruling, where this was a Dutch case, where the ruling confirms that public entities operating through group structures cannot exclude their subsidiaries' activities when assessing eligibility for the in-house procurement exemption. In sort of more plain language, this means that if, and like it is case in Finland as well, that the municipal waste companies have a number of subsidiaries, not all of them, but some of them have. When there are rules how much they can sell to the, say, private B2B customers, they cannot sort of hide their sales behind this subsidiary structure.
At the same time, there is a proposal of Finnish government that there would be much stricter rules regarding the sales to B2B customers, so it would be halved from 10% to 5%. Combined, these two things would mean that the municipal waste companies' ability to operate in the B2B market would be restricted going forward significantly.
This obviously is an important thing for us and other private recycling companies, because often in our view, the municipal waste companies are abusing their sort of monopoly position, and then sort of burdening costs with their sort of monopoly part and then doing some cherry-picking in the B2B sector, and now this would be limited going forward.
This is, however, a proposal that is not yet as a legislation in Finland yet, and during this spring, we will see if the legislation will be passed as proposed by the Finnish government. An important thing, and should work in our favor, is if this goes as it looks like right now. This is a little walkthrough of what is happening in the market that is affecting our business. Next, let's dive into the growth strategy execution. As you probably remember, we published our new midterm strategic goals late last fall, where we said that we would aim to grow our net sales over 6% in midterm, with adjusted EBITA margin of 11%.
Now I will focus in how we are doing in this execution of our growth strategy, and how we are doing in our operations and efficiency measures. Our target is to grow more than 6% in the midterm, and on top of underlying market growth, this growth should come from strengthening our position in our current service markets, from geographical expansion into Sweden, and also waste to value and remediation growth, so getting further in the value chain. I'm happy to say that we have made very good progress, in my view, in all of these areas in 2025.
Organically, we have gained a number of important new customers, quite important and big customers. We have renewed contracts with many of our important old customers, organically, we have done really well, considering the overall market development. On top of that, we have made three acquisitions.
As I said earlier, Reinikka acquisition in Kokkola area will strengthen our position in general in that area, and that is a very active industrial area in Finland. Especially it will strengthen our position in industry and industrial and water area. We made a small acquisition in Sweden called RecondConcept, and this will improve our capabilities in chemical cleaning.
We are quite optimistic that even though the company is fairly small, the capabilities it brings to our industrial and water treatment business will help us to grow organically quite nicely in the future. We acquired a bankruptcy estate in Merikarvian Konepaja Oy, and we have made a lease contract with the municipality of Merikarvia to continue to operate in mechanical plastic recycling in that area. Once we have, let's say, improved the machinery, cleaned up the place, and redirected the production, this will double our capacity to take recycled materials. Actual recycling rates or recycling capacity will increase by 50%.
It will take pretty much all of 2026 before we get the operations up and running. Overall, we will have a very nice addition to our plastics recycling business through this acquisition of the bankruptcy estate and the machinery. Obviously, this is a very cost-efficient way to increase our capacity.
Also, like I mentioned earlier, we made the acquisition of pallet recycling business, which will support our position in our current markets, but also helps us to move further in the value chain. Overall, I'd say we have been very successful in all of these growth areas that are sort of key pillars of our strategy. Efficiency and operations.
I'm really proud of this. This was a huge undertaking. We have made a transformation, and we are now 100% cloud-based. We have one data platform, which is surrounded with the operational systems that are mainly based on Microsoft D365 technology. It is very well-suited for our business, and this will be the sort of basis of our operations for years and years to come. We have an excellent starting position now in 2026 with this new ERP platform. This will help us to enhance our customer experience. It will increase our operational efficiency.
It will certainly help us in data-driven decision-making, and it will help us to make also more bolt-on acquisitions in the future because this is easily scalable. We have still sort of final part, which needs to be put into this platform, and that is our finance system. The timetable is such that we will be done with the implementation of our also D365-based finance system by the end of H1 in 2026. Overall, really good work from the organization, and as I said, we had no major disruptions during this rollout, which was a pretty big effort from the whole organization. Efficiency measures.
Obviously, especially during market conditions like we have right now, it is really important to make sure that we do everything that we do as efficiently as possible. We have ramped up our efforts in procurement, we have seen already good development in 2025. We expect to see more development, positive development in this area in 2026 and forward. Also, we have made a number of cost efficiency measures in our sort of sales and general administration costs. Actually, our fixed costs were at the same level or lower on absolute terms, as they were year earlier, even though we have made a number of acquisitions.
We have increased our efficiency quite a bit during 2025, and obviously, we will continue this work in 2026. Perhaps the more important part here is that we have a excellent platform. It is in very good shape. As I said, once the economy in Finland starts to pick up, and we will, obviously, through our sales efforts, get more volume, but also, through market growth, get more volume, the sort of the leverage of this efficient platform will help us to improve our profitability going forward. Sustainability highlights. We have this net zero 2045 climate target, and we have made excellent progress towards that.
We have halved our emissions, actually five years ahead of our original timeline. Our emissions from 2018 have been halved by the end of 2025. Original target was 2030. Excellent progress in that front, it is done based on very sort of systematic and organized work.
The share of renewable diesel has increased to 28% of our total fuel consumption, for the future, even more important is that in 2025, 38% of the investments were directed towards low emission, either gas-powered or electric equipment. This will then accumulate and help us to reach our net zero targets. A few other highlights here. Carbon footprint, I already spoke about.
Our recycling rate increased to 61.8%, which is excellent result. Sort of behind this, our plastics recycling rates increased more than 30% in 2025. We, in sort of selected areas, we have made even faster progress than the sort of overall recycling rate. Our work safety reached all-time record.
Obviously, high number is bad here, but all-time low in terms of TRIF. This is one thing that I'm really proud of. Even though we had the demerger, we had the ERP rollout, and we did have difficult market conditions, our customer satisfaction remained on excellent levels, and our Net Promoter Score was 44 in 2025.
I will not go through this here and now, but here we have broken down how our sort of climate impact comes from Scope 1 and Scope 2 and Scope 3, and also how our carbon handprint has developed, and where sort of what are the components of that. This is something you can look at if you want to get sort of more details of our sustainability work in the value chain. Next, I will hand over to Joni, and he will go deeper into the financials. Joni, go ahead.
Thank you, Eero. Good morning, everyone, and happy to present you the financials of new Lassila & Tikanoja for the very first time. As Eero already noted, 2025 was another year of resilient and healthy financial performance for Lassila & Tikanoja, irrespective of the challenging market environment.
We have a strong balance sheet from day one, despite the fact that a large share of financial debt of old Lassila & Tikanoja was transferred to new Lassila & Tikanoja in partial demerger. We believe we can utilize this strong balance sheet when executing our growth strategy. Cash flow generation improved compared to previous year, thanks to very strong Q4. Especially the net working capital release was very positive in the last quarter.
In 2025, we continued to invest in growth, and at the same time, we are able to pay dividends in line with the group's strategic target, which is to pay more than 50% of annual income as dividends. Let's start the deep dives by looking at net working capital development. As I said, the net working capital release in the fourth quarter was strong, almost EUR 24 million, although it's good to note that the at the end of the third quarter, net working capital was affected by, for example, project-driven business mix of environmental construction and also the timing of annual maintenance breaks invoicing, which we can now see that were released during the fourth quarter of the year.
Good to note here that we have not fully completed the 1st and 2nd quarter of 2024, that's why we have here provided the sort of illustrative figures of those specific quarters to give you an idea what type of seasonality the new L&T has in its net working capital. All in all, net working capital around minus EUR 30 million at the end of the financial year, compared to minus EUR 28 a year earlier.
Moving on to capital expenditure, there was an increase of EUR 5.6 million in capital expenditure, driven by investments or business acquisitions, and as Eero already mentioned, we had three acquisitions in 2025. We acquired Stena Recycling's pallet business in June. Then in the beginning of December, we completed the acquisitions of Viemärihuolto Reinikka and RecondConcept.
When looking at the organic capital expenditure, we can see a decrease of around EUR 5 million, which is mostly due to decreased ICT-related investments. Depreciation and amortization increased. As already noted, we started the amortization of our new ERP system in June, which resulted in increase of EUR 1.1 million during the seven months of 2025.
Here we have provided you with a cash flow or free cash flow bridge from adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow. If we start from adjusted EBITDA, which amounted to EUR 84.3 million, and we deduct the items affecting comparability, which for the most part relate to the partial demerger, and we deduct change in net working capital and the interest costs and taxes, we end up with EUR 73.4 million, which is our net cash from operations.
That is almost on the same level as in previous year. If we look at the cash flow impact from investments, in total, EUR 32 million, EUR 11 million of which was from acquisitions and EUR 21 million from organic CapEx, we end up with EUR 41.4 million, which is EUR 7 million more than in 2024. If we compare free cash flow to reported EBITDA, we can see that a bit more than half of EBITDA was converted into free cash flow in financial year 2025.
Looking at the balance sheet, as already noted, we believe we have a strong balance sheet from day one. If we take this adjusted EBITDA and compare that to our net interest-bearing liabilities, which totaled EUR 150.2 million at the end of the year, we end up with leverage ratio of 1.78, which is well within the range we have set ourselves for the midterm, which is 1.5-2.5. Equity ratio and gearing ratio on a healthy level at the end of the year, 35% and 87%.
As for financial position, it's good to note that when we look at the comparative or comparison periods, which have been completed on a carve-out basis, those are not, so to speak, meaningful figures, so that's why we have not provided here any comparison figures for the balance sheet.
Looking at our financial debt in a more detailed way, we can see that EUR 125 million of financial debt was transferred from old Lassila & Tikanoja to new Lassila & Tikanoja. This consists of outstanding notes of EUR 75 million, which are due in 2028, and then a bank loan of EUR 50 million, which is due in 2030, assuming the utilization of two-year extension included in the agreement. We had a strong liquidity position at the end of the year.
Cash and cash equivalents totaled EUR 37 million, the committed revolving credit facility of EUR 40 million was completely unused at the balance sheet date. The average interest rate of our long-term loans, so this EUR 125 million, is 3.2%. Also good to note here that last week, we completed an agreement to establish a new commercial paper program of EUR 100 million with three banks.
This obviously constitutes an additional source of funding for short-term needs for the company. I would like to conclude this section by highlighting some other selected KPIs for financial year 2025. Reported return on capital employed was EUR 10.6 million, however, impacted by items affecting comparability as well as certain carve-out principles.
If we would adjust for items affecting comparability as well as these certain carve-out principles, a more comparable figure for return on capital employed would be 11.3%. The same for return on equity. Reported carve-out-based return on equity was 12.1%, and also here, adjusting for items affecting comparability as well as certain carve-out principles, impacting the amount of shareholders' equity, we would end up with 16%, which we believe give you a more fair picture of the return level. LNT's share of our joint venture, Länia's profit was EUR 1.9 million, declining from EUR 3.2 million in 2024, and this was due to exceptionally warm spring, which reduced the demand for energy wood. However, already in Q4, also Länia's result in line with previous year.
Finally, dividend per share, the board proposes a dividend of EUR 0.42 per share. What is new here in 2026 is that the board proposes that the dividend would be paid in two installments, so EUR 0.21 in May 2026, and the latter part of dividend EUR 0.21 in October 2026. Okay, I will hand over back to Eero.
Thank you, Joni. We have left the outlook for 2026, and also here we have taken a sort of a new practice. This is especially because we have a sort of carve-out basis and then sort of segment basis, and we have sort of a little bit complex set of numbers. To make it as easy as possible, we have our outlook as follows. Net sales are estimated to be EUR 420 million-EUR 450 million, and adjusted EBITA from EUR 38 million-EUR 44 million. In 2025, the company's net sales amounted EUR 426.6 million, and adjusted EBITA was EUR 40.6 million on a carve-out basis.
That concludes our presentation, and now we are ready for your questions.
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 Nikko Ruokangas from SEB. Please go ahead.
Hello, this is Nikko Ruokangas from SEB. Thank you for the presentation, and congratulations on the completed demerger. I have three questions I'd like to ask, and I'll go one by one. Starting with that you showed strong growth in hazardous waste and remediation in Q4, was this driven by project timing or some extraordinary one-off types, or do you see kind of a similar trend of strong development continuing in 2026?
This was a partially project timing, but there is also a very high demand for remediation and sort of very demanding environmental construction projects, which is our specialty. Overall, that market looks very positive right now.
Okay, good to hear. Thank you. Still on municipalization, you touched upon earlier in the presentation, so if you kind of compare the impact of municipalization in 2025, how big negative impacts do you see to the market in 2026 now?
This, I have to sort of go a little deeper into what this municipalization means. It happens sort of municipality by municipality, and then it depends how big market share we have had in certain municipality. In general, I'd say for us, the impact in 2025 was very similar that we expect 2026 in municipalization. This sort of situation develops all the time, and what we showed you was our estimate on how the municipalization will happen.
There is a chance or possibility that the timing will still be different because they need to be handled by the let's say, official bodies in each municipality before then the decision is made, and then there is a transition period. Still, this is kind of the best estimate when things will happen. If it changes from what we showed you, it will be sort of further delayed towards 2028.
Okay, thank you. Final one from me related to costs. Do you see now elevated costs in 2026 that are not adjusted in adjusted EBITA coming from operating now as independent company compared to last year? Also maybe on the Merikarvia acquisition, do you see there also kind of requiring notable OpEx investments now in this year?
To the first part of your question, yes, especially during the first six months, we see a little bit elevated cost level. Perhaps more in general, the benefits of this sort of ERP transformation will be visible partly, second half of this year, but much more in 2027 and 2028 once we sort of get the optimization done and get the efficiencies from the system. For example, in our customer service, we are replacing our old system with a new system still this spring.
There is a tail end of this transformation that will still happen, especially in the first part of 26, and will therefore affect our operational costs little bit, not as much as it did impact our performance in 25. Then when it comes to Merikarvia, yes, there will be some operational costs, but I'd say more there will be CapEx, but very reasonable CapEx to this renovation and improvement of this production machinery.
I don't expect to see sort of any major negative impact from the work that we will do in Merikarvia to increase our plastics recycling capacity. We have the material in our possession already, and once we get the production line up and running, I think it will be quite a nice boost for our recycling business 27 onwards.
All right. Thank you.
Perhaps.
That's a good answer. I'll leave the floor to others. Thank you.
Thanks, Nikko.
Okay.
Johnny, you have an addition.
Just a short, addition.
Sorry.
Obviously, the amortization that we now begun in June 25 will then now in 26 be for 12 months instead of seven months in 25. There will be increase in amortization related to these ICT systems.
Yes, that is correct.
Yeah, understood. Thank you for the addition.
There are no more questions at this time. I hand the conference back to the speakers.
Thank you very much for joining us. There is a question from line.
We have few questions on the line. First one, how much dependency still remains between L&T and Loiste?
There is no dependency between L&T and Loiste. We have a certain transitional services that will last till end of April, maximum end of June, but that is a very sort of minimal, and it is around administrative functions. There is no dependency between these two businesses.
Okay. According to the report, the company is guiding for adjusted EBITA of EUR 38 million-EUR 44 million, which is at the 25 level. This Lassila & Tikanoja's management can fully focus on managing circular economy businesses without real estate services. How quickly can this be seen as an improvement in the company's results? Is the market situation getting worse at the same time, in which case the results will not improve?
Well, our expectation is that the market will start to recover second half of 2026, and recovery will be faster and will pick up in 2027. As we have gone through during this presentation, we have a number of efficiency measures and a number of investments that should yield positive results. Some of them already 2026, but mostly 2027 onwards, so at least I'm optimistic and actually quite confident that we will see also earnings pick up 2027 onwards.
Thanks for the comments on market and regulation. What is the current market share of municipal waste companies in the B2B markets in total?
We don't know that. We will try to get more information on that, and then hopefully we are able to give you some of that information later this year. Many of the companies publish their results only once per year, and municipal companies especially hide their sort of results very carefully and are not transparent at all. Hopefully this new regulation will open up and make sure that we get little bit more transparency also to that part of the market.
What kind of negative impact you expect from the municipalization of waste for your businesses in 2026?
Well, we showed in the presentation what the impact is in totality in Finland. As we said, our market share is approximately 30%, but it very much depends on sort of which municipalities will, be, municipalized, during 2026. I don't want to give a sort of a specific number, but, I think you can estimate from the, from the graph that we showed what the, what the impact might be for us. I'd say it is not significant.
The next one: Do you have an estimate how the regulatory proposals by EU would impact your numbers?
No. Well, obviously, there are a huge number of regulatory changes that are currently being prepared at EU level. Most of them are positive for us, and they will... EU actually quite, I would say, actively promotes sustainability and recycling, and reuse of material, and it is positive, but it is very difficult to say a number because obviously we don't know when the legislation is passed, and then when it is passed in Finland then, and what this sort of the application of in Finland for that legislation, but in general, it is positive.
Can you say something on the outlook for 2026 for Länia? Perhaps also, how do you see the role of Länia for L&T going forward?
No, I don't. I can't, and I don't want to because Länia is not a listed company, and we report the numbers as required. What is the role of Länia going forward? Well, that remains to be seen, but right now we are quite happy how things are with Länia.
This question is a little bit same as earlier, but it was difficult to follow the impact of the regulation on the Finnish market and how you see L&T either losing or benefiting from the shift. Can you please clarify?
Yes. The regulatory changes proposed in Finland are definitely positive for us because they limit and restrict the role of municipal waste companies operating in B2B market. So that will make us or make sort of the market bigger for us in the municipal solid waste going forward, if the regulation is passed in the Finnish Parliament.
No more questions. Thank you.
Thank you. Excellent questions. We wish you a very nice continuation of the spring and a very good weekend, and thank you all for listening our presentation. Thank you very much.
Thank you.