Good morning, and welcome everybody to this first quarter results presentation for Elopak. My name is Christian Gjerde, and I'm the Head of Treasury and Investor Relations. Today's presentation will be held by our CEO, Thomas Körmendi, and our CFO, Bent Axelsen, and will last for around 30 minutes, followed by the Q&A session, where we will take questions from the people here in the audience, as well as the people joining us online. With that short introduction, over to you, Thomas.
Thank you, Christian, and a warm welcome to all of you here on a beautiful spring day in Oslo. It's really great to see so many of you here in person. Q1, let's get started. As you know, some of you will know, just two words on who we are. We are actually in the business of sustainable packaging. All we do, the only thing we do, is fiber-based packaging. We do that with protecting essential commodities, not the least dairy products, but also other products such as juices, soups. In all of this work, we are committed to reducing the use of plastics. Q1, let's look at the performance here. Well, first of all, we report a revenue pretty much stable in terms of stable when you look at the constant currency.
We're reporting a 3.9% decline. On constant currency, given the exchange rate, primarily U.S., we're looking at a stable development. Secondly, as you know, and some of you who have followed us, we've had a strong, very strong development in Americas, and actually our development in the U.S., in the Americas continues with 6% growth on a constant currency basis, and also another strong quarter for Little Rock. Little Rock, as you recall, that we started up last year in April, and that has now onboarded more and more customers in line 1. Although we have seen, and we have reported earlier, somewhat slower onboarding of our customers, and when I say onboarding, it's not about acquiring customers, but it's about onboarding their designs, onboarding their materials.
That has been somewhat slower. We still remain absolutely confident in the midterm targets related to Americas. Thirdly, the EBITDA, we came in at NOK 41 million, which corresponds to around just short of 14%. We also came in at an earnings per share slightly above the previous year-on-year quarter last time. What we also see, even though we have also during this last quarter invested quite heavily in the expansion in Americas, we still come in at a very solid 2.2 leverage ratio, which is actually slightly impacted as well by the currency impact of Americas. Very importantly, of course, I'm coming back to that in a little bit broader sense, as everyone around us know, we have a turbulent world around us, particularly in the Middle East.
It does impact a lot of the raw materials, including our raw materials, and it does have a cost impact on our side as well. I will come back to some of the mitigating effects that we are addressing this with in the coming slides. On the revenue. As I said, revenue overall stable, although we report a NOK 12 million lower revenue. This is primarily related to the commissioning of filling machines. As you may remember from Q4, where we reported a very strong filling machine commissionings, the commissioning of filling machines is not a linear curve. It will vary a little bit between the quarters. If you look at the EBITDA, you could, there is a decline of NOK 3.6 million versus same period last year.
NOK 2.5 of this relates entirely to currency impact from the US dollar, the remainder, as well as the impact that we've had in this period, relates to some one-off effects that we've had. We've also seen a tough margin pressure in India, including pressure on margin, pressure on volume, we have also front-loaded some of the strategic initiatives that we've taken already to Q1. All of that impacts the EBITDA for this period. We have also initiated a program and some of those initiatives have already taken place. During this quarter, we have had restructuring effects in the likes of NOK 1.3 million, which is part of the program of reducing our addressing our costs, and these will have been adjusted in the EBITDA from Q1.
Back to the Middle East and the extraordinary cost impact. Everybody in the world now knows where the Strait of Hormuz is, very exactly where it is. Everybody knows what the impact is beyond just the surrounding countries. What you see in our world is a very significant increase in LDPE. On the slide, you will see that the LDPE increase is around 160%, which is, by the way, a picture some of us will recognize from 2022, where we saw raw materials explode as well, not the least on the plastic side, but also aluminum foil and other raw materials in general. We are now seeing the increase, right?
What we have done is that we have, of course, addressed this, these increases by implementing and introducing extraordinary surcharges on the pricing side towards our customers, given the price, the cost pressure that we're seeing. These have been introduced, they are being implemented as we speak, and they are, of course, related to an existing price level on LDPE, on polyethylene, on naphtha, but also an expected development. This carries a certain uncertainty because none of us know exactly how this develops. What we have introduced is a mechanism that will allow for this kind of uncertainty. It also brings me to the strategy of Elopak. We remained absolutely committed and confident in our strategy that consists of these three pillars.
The global growth, as we know, is not the least related to Americas, which is the big growth driver we have. We have Little Rock up and running. Little Rock is accretive. Little Rock is producing in high volumes. Little Rock is producing in multiple shifts in line one. We are establishing line two as we speak, and we have already agreed and announced that we will do line three as well. Little Rock is the foundation, or rather, Americas is the foundation of the realizing global growth. Beyond that, it's also India, and it's also MENA, where we are now working as well as we have announced earlier on expanding our portfolio, getting more aseptic products in, getting more ESL long extended shelf life products in. The second one is the leadership in the core.
As we've talked about earlier, we have a strong position in chilled fresh business in Europe. We continue to build that with a number of initiatives related around sustainability, related around the PPWR, et cetera. The third one is the one that I'd like just to spend a little bit of time on because the third one relates to the plastic to carton conversion. Of course, in times that we see now, right, LDPE increasing off the roof, we see that competitive solutions such as PET will have increased by 60% for a PET bottle with the impact of LDPE.
While, actually, while clearly it impacts everyone in packaging with rising raw materials, the situation we see now is that primarily the impact will relate to the plastics products, which will at some point potentially improve the understanding among customers, among retailers that the carton packaging in a much, much wider sense than what we have now, creates stability in cost, creates a much better transparency in cost, and is a alternative not only for sustainability reason, but also for cost reasons when it comes to packaging other products than just milk and juice. That is what we do in the third box, leveraging the plastic replacement, because this is the area where we work with the non-food products.
This is the area where we work with alternatives to plastics, which can be very closely related to our business or a little bit further related, but where we can utilize our strong know-how in liquid products, in filling of liquid and semi-liquid products. In short, the current development poses a certain amount of challenges for anyone in any industry. Primarily because it's uncertain what comes out of the ongoing conflict, but particularly for the carton industry and for packaging in our case, it does also provide the understanding, the certainty among customers that carton actually provides a whole range of advantages in their portfolio and their product portfolio beyond the fact that it is the most sustainable solution. With that, I think I will hand over to you, Bent.
Thank you, Thomas. Before we dive into the numbers, I would like to address two changes that we have done to how we report our figures. The first thing that we are doing is that we are moving the R&D activities and their associated corporate activities from the EMEA segment to what we call Other and Elimination, simply because this unit is serving both segments, not only EMEA. This will improve the comparability and clarity when we are reviewing the relative performance between EMEA and America. The second change that we are doing is reflecting an adjustment to our operating model, where the aftermarket services and spares are now run by the local regions, together with the blanks, together with the closures. Today, or in the previous reporting regime, all these financials were reported in EMEA.
The Americas part of these financials will now be reported in the Americas segments because these are services and spare parts sold to the Americas market. We think this is a logical change. The 2025 figures are reclassified in this report, and there is more information in this presentation file and in the report. Let's start with the EMEA segment. In EMEA, we are reporting stable volumes with results impacted by one-off effects and timing effects related to filling machines. The revenues are NOK 208 million, down 7% from last year.
If you look into this reduction of EUR 16.5 million, EUR 6 million is related to timing of a filling machine sold by EMEA to external customers, while EUR 9 million is related to reduced sales from EMEA to Americas, so internal sales. Altogether, EUR 15 million is basically timing related to filling machines. If you go to the carton and closure revenues, they are moderately down compared to last year, and that is a result of a negative mix impact, which I will dive into. The Pure-Pak volumes, they are stable in the EMEA segments. What you see here is that there is a decline in the aseptic juice segment. This is what we have reported before.
It's a result of the consumer preferences combined with the very high citrus prices that we have observed for the last year. We have attractive margins. We have growth in other segments in UHT milk, they are sold at a lower price point compared to aseptic juice. We see year-over-year growth in MENA, driven by growth in North African markets, we also see growth of closures as we are growing with customers that both buy our blanks and our closures together. If we look at Roll Fed, we are happy to report that we are growing the Roll Fed volumes again after several quarters with decline.
This comes from onboarding of customers in Poland, but as you know, the pricing points on the margin for Roll Fed is lower compared to Pure-Pak, so it's not enough to compensate fully. In contrast, in India, we are reporting a volume decline in Roll Fed year-over-year. We are also having, as we reported before, a pressure on margin. The revenue decline is around 13% on a constant currency basis, 26% reported, so that is related to the weakening of the rupee. As we have reported before, the supply-demand balance is pressured in India, and in this quarter, we saw, particularly in January, February, this also impacting our volume development. If you move to EBITDA, we are reporting EUR 36 million, down from EUR 40.7. The margin is 17.4%.
This contains 1.8 million one-off related to an operational matter. It also is a result of the mix effect that I talked about for Pure-Pak versus Roll Fed, but also the fact that India remains margin dilutive, and we also see the absolute impact as the results are down in India year-over-year. If we move to America, we are reporting around EUR 95 million. As Thomas explained, it's a 6% growth on a constant currency basis, but a decline of 4% because of the weakening of the U.S. dollar. The revenue growth is below our earlier expectations due to the weaker demand for plant-based, which is important for our growth in America. We are seeing consumption patterns changing into lactose-free milk, other dairy products, and there is also concern related to cost inflation.
We are working very actively to fill that shortfall with other types of business in the quarters to come. In addition, the quarter was impacted by destocking among our customers. In Q4, some of our customers were building inventory in Q4. They're now taking the stock down to normal level. That also impacted the top line in the first quarter. Finally, on the revenue side, we also have a timing effect of filling machines in America with a decline of EUR 5 million for the quarter. If we look at profitability, the EBITDA was EUR 21 million up from EUR 19.7. The margin is improving to 22%, as you can see.
This comes from the improved production output of Little Rock, with the operational leverage that we get from that ramp-up. We also would like to remind that one year ago, we had negative results of Little Rock because we have pre-startup costs in that quarter. The share on net income is EUR 2 million compared to EUR 2.5 million last year, that is so driven by the weakening of the Dominican peso against the U.S. dollar, while the underlying performance remain stable. As Thomas explained, we have the U.S. dollar has significantly weakened year-over-year, and in America results that is measured in euro, that is EUR 2.4 million down.
That wraps up America, so let's look at the bridge from EUR 44.6 to EUR 41 million. Here, the American development and the margin accretive development in America continues to be the most important growth driver for the company. In Europe, we see the negative effect because of the negative mix effect with less juice cartons and more Roll Fed, but also the impact from the result decline in India. Raw materials are largely stable. Behind that number, we have higher board cost as per our contracts. We see higher Alu prices, but lower PE prices giving this number.
In this quarter, our raw materials are not significantly affected by the conflict in Iran, but as Thomas explained, we expect these costs to affect the Q2 cost base and also onwards. On the operational costs, we have the EUR 1.8 million one-off effects, and the rest is related to the wanted increase in R&D, is related to inflation, is related to the onboarding, the frontloading of strategic initiatives in the quarter. The JV results we have addressed, and when it comes to the FX, combined for the group, that's EUR 2.5, and I just want to reiterate the fact that in Americas, we are running this as a US dollar business with dollar revenues and dollar raw material base.
If we look at the underlying result, if it adjusts for the one-off, the margin would then have been around 14.4% for the quarter, so in line with the same quarter last year. Let's move to the cash flow. If you look just starting at the net debt, that is increasing by EUR 21.6 million. The main contributor to that is actually the strengthening of the NOK against the euro. That gives a loss on our green bonds. What is important to remember is that this is mitigated by our cross-currency swaps, but we don't report the positive gains, the gains from the cross-currencies, what's in our net debt.
That is EUR 16 million. If you start to continue with the cash flow from operations, we are reporting around EUR 20 million based on the EBITDA of EUR 41 million. We have the taxes paid of EUR 4 million, and we are also reversing the accounting results from the joint ventures to get to the 20. When it comes to cash flow from investing activities, that is around EUR 12 million. This is based on the continued expansion in Little Rock. And also the normal maintenance programs, the also the replacement of equipment in Europe. Maybe one more thing before I move on to the next element is to come back to working capitals because I jumped that.
That is EUR 14 million negative effect. That can be split into two factors. It's the timing. EUR 17 million worsening is related to settlement of account payables for our filling machines. That is really a one-off because we are settling machines that we have commissioned some time ago. Structurally, we see a reduction of inventory around EUR 5 million. This is a result of the structural work that we're doing to improve the inventory turnover. Now, what we would like to say is that this reduction is a little bit more than what we think is sustainable. We expect some moderate increase of the inventory to get back to normal levels. Filling machine inventories also went down following the sales in the quarter.
We are ready to go to the cash flow from financing and loan payments, which is minus EUR 14 million. That is the increase in the lease payments, the interest payments, and also purchase of treasury shares. This brings us, including the FX effect, to EUR 286 net debt. The leverage ratio is 2.2 compared to 2 at the end of the previous quarter. This is following this technical increase of the net debt brought by the FX effects, but also the continued investment in the U.S. plant. The ROCE declined by 0.6, and that is a result of a lower last 12 months adjusted EBIT. The capital employed actually is now stabilized since year-end.
The accumulated investment in the U.S. plant is $106 million, and we have around $22 million to go to get that will take us to the full three lines in Little Rock. Before I give the word back to Thomas, let's just address how we think about where the quarter is ending compared to what you would have expect. As you know, we are not guiding individual quarters in Elopak, but if you go to our Q4 earnings release, we said that we would deliver on our midterm targets. If you convert that into implied Q1 guiding, that could be an expectation of EUR 50 million and versus a reported adjusted EBITDA of EUR 41 million.
This gap is 50/50 between structural market implications, market effects and one-offs. Within the 50% market effects, 30% is Americas, 10% is Europe and MENA, and 10% is India approximately. The remaining 50% is related to the phasing of filling machines, phasing of fixed cost and also one-offs. In addition, to the price increases that Thomas was talking about, we are obviously working with our cost base to delay and reduce spend where it makes sense without jeopardizing our long-term value creation. With that, this concludes the financial section. Back to you, Thomas.
Thank you, Bent. Overall, I think it's fair to say that we have seen somewhat softer market conditions generally in Q1 than what we've seen earlier. And one of the impacts that Bent just mentioned was, of course, the plant-based, which is a significant business in U.S. and part of the growth that we are looking for in U.S. What we also see, and that is very important for us, is to say the ongoing crisis, ongoing situation in the Middle East causes extraordinary cost increases in all industries, including ours, and we are now mitigating this with price increases, in fact. We call it surcharges, but it is higher prices to compensate for this. We are seeing that, but we are also doing, as Bent explained, the other side of the, of the, whatever it's called.
We're also looking at our own cost base and at the same time taking some steps to ensure that we are adapting and keeping our costs at bay in times like these. I think also, though, it's very, very important to remember, and for those of you who were with us from the IPO, where we had a year of 2022 with increasing costs, with increasing a lot of turmoil, this is a resilient business. This is a business of basic food, basic foodstuff that people need. Even if we have ups and downs, as we do have, like any other industry, we are in a very resilient world.
The demand for our kind of products will continue even when economies around the world and including the part of the world will be more or less constrained through consumer spending. What we are saying is despite this volatile political, geopolitical situation that we're in, and with all the potential impact, we expect to continuously also improve from Q2 and onwards our results in a moderate and graduate way. That is how we look at the year, and that is how we are going to address the year and the cost situation that we're experiencing. With this, I'd like to thank from my side and hand over to you, Christian, please.
Thank you, Thomas. Thank you, Bent. With that, we will move to Q&A, starting with the people here in the audience first. If you raise your hand, I will come out with a mic. Please state your full name, the company that you represent, and make sure to speak into the microphone.
Thank you. Elliott Jones from Danske Bank. Thank you for taking my questions. Just firstly, you mentioned some plastics prices up 60%. Obviously it's a near-term headwind for you guys. I'm just wondering your, some of your plastic competition, is this something that customers have started talking about that you're hearing? Is that something you can capitalize on kind of longer term?
You know, what I did say is that PET in specific, you would look at the cost of a PET bottle would have increased about 60%. If you look at the LDPE that is being used in our cartons as well, we're looking at, as you saw on the slide, somewhere around 160% cost increase. Really significant. What you typically see in the industry, and many of our customers will have a mix of plastics and cartons, right? They will, depending on where they are, provide private label and/or their own brands. The decision they make then is, "What kind of format am I using?" If it's a brand, you don't easily change from one format to the next, for all the obvious reasons.
What does happen in times like this is that the consideration is what is the right format moving forward is much more relevant when it comes to costs as well as sustainability. We have been very clear that from a sustainability point of view, the carton solution is the absolute superior solution versus plastics, both from a renewability point of view, from a CO2 point of view, and also eventually, as we move on, you'll see it from a recycling point of view.
What we're seeing here is that with the insecurity that is created in PE pricing, when you are a customer, when you are a retailer, you are looking now at carton saying, "This is creates a stability, it creates transparency, it creates a predictability in cost that plastics cannot guarantee, because it's all about the oil price." It doesn't mean, though, short term, that everyone changes into carton, sadly. That's not gonna happen because of equipment, because of industrial production, et cetera. These take time, but it's very, very important in the longer perspective and very important for the new areas that we're discussing where the consideration should we, should we not suddenly tilts, hopefully more towards, "Yes, we should go carton.
Thanks. Just two more quick ones. Just on the Americas segment, you talked about this being affected by garments and plant-based. Can you kind of provide more color as to how that could affect maybe your medium-term growth targets in the Americas? Would that kind of delay the pathway to 100% utilization rates in the lines that you've announced? Or do you see it's easy to kind of replace those volumes near term?
I would never use the word easy, right? I think what is very important is we commit to our midterm targets for Americas. That is the simple story, you know. We are absolutely convinced with the plans we have in place that we are going to deliver on these midterm targets. Remember, that's NOK 480 calculated on the exchange rate.
At that time.
At that time, right.
In September 2024.
We don't know what happens to the exchange rate, obviously. That plan still will be delivered accordingly.
Got it. Just on the EMEA mix effect, am I right in thinking that it's not obviously an easy fix in terms of reversing that in Q2? Should we expect that kind of mix effect to continue maybe in the, you know, the next few quarters?
When it comes to the juice development, that is a trend that we have reported for quite a few quarters. We expect that trend to continue. It depends a little bit on the citrus prices. I think we need to distinguish between the consumer preferences and focusing on sugar versus the cost of juice because of the citrus prices and the diseases that have been worse in recent years. Yellow dragon disease, I think it's the name. That has reduced the supply of citrus. That is not a quick fix at all. When it comes to the Roll Fed business in the Europe, we have then finally been able to grow that business after several quarters with decline.
Some of that decline was related to the tethered cap regime, back in them days.
Yeah
1st of July 2024, which is more of a one-off, and there also have been increased pricing competition. What's going to happen to the Roll Fed business, whether we are able to continue to grow that business, it depends on the whole raw material situation and the whole Iran conflict because Roll Fed is the most competitive product group that we have in Elopak. Yes to juice. On Roll Fed, we will wait and see before we can call it a positive trend. We need some more quarters in the bank.
Thank you.
Right. Ole-Petter Sjøvold, SB1 Markets. First a question on the contracts for Little Rock. I mean, as we understand it's no take or pay, but it's when the customer take materially lower volumes, the price could be up to negotiation. Could you give some insight into this, and could we potentially then see some sort of compensation later this year that should relate to Q1?
Yeah, I It's a little bit difficult to answer. If you take the mechanics in this, right? The way we normally do this, we have, of course, some very, very big customers around the world, including U.S. These customers will say to us, "Look, we would like to, we would like you, please, to produce X amount of volume," and we will then agree a price on that volume. When they make that commitment, which is a commitment, it doesn't necessarily mean that if you do something less, then there is a compensation. We also have those models, I have to say.
In these, in the bigger context, it is much more of, I say, "Can you fill our needs?" What would typically happen is, after a while, if we're not seeing the volume coming for different reasons. Typically one reason is they have more stock than what they thought. Honestly, you would think they know, it's actually in some cases many plants, and there are many. So the volume will arrive later. That's one area. The other areas, of course, there can be, they say, "Well, we're going to use more suppliers simply for contingency reasons and procurement reasons," et cetera, et cetera. In the latter case, right?
We say on a more continuous basis, we're going to see lower volume than what we have agreed. We will renegotiate price. Price and volume always correlates. If you're not delivering the volume, we need to have a different discussion on price. If you're saying we're not delivering volume because of some stock reasons, typically would not happen.
Got it. I have a final question for me. On the price surcharges you're implementing right now, I mean, you guys typically hedge LDPE prices and aluminum prices in Q3, Q4, on the majority of your exposure. Are you able to increase prices for the full extent of what your price or cost should increase if you didn't hedge, or is it only your open exposure you're able to push out to increase prices?
That's a very good question. The reality is, of course, that we, as well as our competitors, right? Everybody hedges as you would do normally. When we increase our price, we have to think about our competitors as well, and we keep that in mind. Typically, what you would see in extraordinary situations like this is that everyone tries to limit the cost increases that are needed to cover the costs, right? We live in a competitive world, we do the same. It's also very clear that hedges are for this year, right? What happens next year when you need new hedges, and we don't know where the raw materials will be at that time.
That's another set of increases that would come on top of that. We are not in a position that we can increase only based on our own costing. We have to look at market conditions as well, of course.
If there are no further questions from the audience, then we will move to the questions that we have received online. Starting with the question from Gary Colson. More than 90% of your revenues comes from cartons and closures. Could you provide some color on the revenue mix across key end markets such as milk, juice, liquid detergents, and other categories, and highlight where you are currently seeing the most, the strongest growth?
Yeah. With our disclosure principles, we do not report on end user segments. I would say when it comes to the biggest contributor or growth, that continues to be America for us, and America for us is milk. It's a combination of plant-based, in particular for the growth in Little Rock, but also dairy. Juice in America is limited. Milk America is the biggest contributor. As far as what we call non-food is concerned, it's still a very, very limited part of the business as of today. We will believe that to be an interesting and significant business opportunity in the long term. That really depends on the hunger for green alternatives, to which extent green is back on the agenda again because of the new energy crisis.
There's a lot of discussions in media whether this is now a forced green agenda coming from the conflict. I think this is probably where I should leave that comment, IR.
I think you are right, Bent. Thank you for that, Bent. Moving to the next question or questions, I would say, coming from Håkon Fuglu. I'll do them one by one.
Thank you.
To make it easier for you. His first question: Have you been impacted in the quarter by raw material cost and/or logistical costs?
The implications of the RM conflict is very limited, so we haven't commented on those in Q1. There could have been some freight increases in the region in the beginning or in the end of the quarter. When it comes to the raw material impact, which is the big part that has not impacted Q1, let me remind that we have an inventory turn of around two to three months. Which means a spot price increase end of March will take at least two months for that to impact the reported costs in our accounts.
Thank you, Bent. Moving to Håkon's second question. What's your hedge position on raw materials for EMEA? Should we expect similar price increases this time as we witnessed during 2022?
When it comes to PE, we are hedged south of 80%. When it comes to Alu, which is a smaller part of the cost, we are hedged mid-fifties. PE is around 11%, 12% of the material cost as reported in our P&L. Aluminum is around 5%, if I remember correctly. To your second question, I think the difference between 2022 and 2026 is that in 2022 it was PE, it was Alu, it was electricity, which was maybe the biggest relative increase we had. It was pallets, it was inflation on almost everything. The situation that we're looking at right now is a situation mainly related to PE. We saw the price increases on the chart and also the Alu. The breadth of the inflation is not the same so far.
It's not the same as 2022. I think the situation reminds me more of 2021 when we saw the raw materials started to increase following the aftermath of the pandemic. In 2021, this was not yet a broad inflation. 2026 reminds me more about 2021, and I hope that 2027 will not become a 2022.
Thank you, Bent. A couple of more questions from Hokkon. How much of the phasing/one-off costs for the quarter is related to Americas?
I have to think about that. When it comes to America, there are some one-offs related to the destocking effect. We have not quantified that in the report. It's part of the picture, it's when you start to generate the result, you see the impact of that destocking effect. It's there, but it's not a major effect in our numbers. The main proportion of the one-offs is related to EMEA.
Thank you, Bent. The last question from Håkon. Is production line two at Little Rock ramping up according to plan?
Well, it's actually too early to ramp up production in Little Rock on line two. The plan was not that it would ramp up yet. You could say it's according to plan, if you like. We are not ramping up yet. We're installing, we're preparing, but we have not ramped up the production yet on line two.
Thank you, Thomas. We have a question from Cole Horton. Focusing on surcharges and price increases, firstly, can you give some color on how you approach this commercially with customers? Are the surcharges just for logistics or polymers as well? I'll take that part of it first.
What we do is we sit down with our customers, we explain them the situation. In all of the agreements we have, we have what is called sit-down clauses. Clearly, this is an extraordinary situation, extraordinary event, hitting pretty much all industries, definitely also ours. There's a wide understanding that that's needed. The cost surcharge that we are introducing relates to both PE as well as logistics.
Thank you, Thomas. The second part of Cole's question. Have our liquid packaging board suppliers also approached you for logistical surcharge costs?
This is actually, maybe I should have qualified my previous statement. When we deliver our material from our plants to our customers, there's a mix of Incoterms. Some will pick it up themselves, some, in some cases, we will arrange the transport, et cetera. With our suppliers, it's the same thing. It depends on who it is and what the Incoterms are. In some cases, it's very transparent. We simply pay whatever the transport is, and in some cases it's included in the price. It's difficult to give a one answer on that.
Thank you, Thomas. We have a question from Niklas Gelin in DNB. You write in the report that you are confident in reaching your midterm targets for Americas in 2028. Can we also expect for you to reach your midterm targets for 2026?
Well, you know, you have to take the outlook statement for what it is. I think the way we have phrased it is we think the underlying business is doing well. We also recognize the fact that there is a lot of uncertainty around us out of our control, one of which relates to, of course, as we keep saying, the Middle East, but also other impacts. For that reason, we are not guiding on 2026 beyond what we said in the outlook statement.
Thank you, Thomas. We have a question from Mikael Gavasheli at Pareto. Assuming price hikes, price increases will not be fully passed on to customers before later this year, so some lags in the implementation of that, should we expect near-term, margin squeeze? Are the ongoing price increases sufficient to fully offset the cost increase that you are seeing today?
Should I take the first part?
Yeah
of the answer?
I can think about the second then.
Yes. I will speak slowly.
Yeah. Exactly.
When we are looking at this, we need to consider a couple of things. One thing is this inventory speed. When we have a price hike in the spot prices, how long time will it take before it will hit the cost base in our P&L? The second element is the timing that these surcharges becomes effective, and we are in the process of working and implementing those price increases as we speak. Based on the information we have today, it's difficult to assess, you know, which force is the stronger. We stick to what we say in the outlook, that we believe that second quarter overall will start a gradual improvement compared to Q1.
The second, repeat the second question, please. Exactly. Sorry.
The second part of the question is basically asking are we passing all the full net, so open price increase to our customers?
I think when you think of the price surcharge, right? This is based on partly what we know, i.e., the existing price levels of PE. It's also based on what we think, and we don't know how long these price impacts will last. What we have passed on now is actually what we need to cover the cost of the significantly increased cost that we are experiencing. If these costs tend to, for whatever reason, become even higher, then it's a different situation, right? We need to reassess, and as I said before, we've put in a mechanism that will allow for some movement in this. It's very important to understand for everyone, including our customers by the way, that this is a volatile time.
We have little to very limited visibility on how cost will develop, and we have various indexes when it comes to PE, et cetera. They tend to be, let's just say, not very accurate historically. We have to look at it, but we are implementing a plan. We're implementing a surcharge to cover for the costs.
Thank you, Thomas.
It's important that we cover for cost, and it's just like in 2022. When you cover, if you look at it from a margin point of view, it does have an impact. There's no way around it. If you increase by the cost levels you have in price, there is a margin impact on that.
Thank you, Thomas. We have a final question from Martin Melby at ABG. Could you please comment on the change in the competitive situation in Europe?
I'm not entirely sure what the question means when it change compared to what, to compared to when?
I think he's referring to the update that we gave to the market in February, where we talked about increased price competition in Europe.
Right. What we have seen during the end of last year is more intense competition in the core markets of Europe, in the chill business, in our core business. That, in a way, to be honest, is not surprising given that we have had good development and success in building our market share from a strong point to an even stronger point. Of course, at some point, you will expect that there will be reactions and competitors trying to win back lost territory. That has been the case, that attempts have been made. So far, knock on wood, we have been in a good position to defend our positions and defend our strongholds where we are now.
Since then, nothing significant has changed in that respect. I think it's also absolutely normal and expected, whether it's in Europe or in America, that competition, as we are growing, as we are building our business, competition will try to fight back. We will try to do our very best to defend our positions and keep growing the business as we have done for the last many years.
Thank you, Thomas. I see now that that concludes our online questions for today. Thank you everyone for joining this fantastic morning in Oslo.
Thank you.
Wish everyone a good day.
Thank you, Thomas.
Thank you everyone for listening to me for so many times. Thank you, and, all the best.