Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to Boliden's 2026 capital markets update. My name is Olof Grenmark, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. Today, we will have a presentation led by our President and CEO, Mikael Staffas, and our CFO, Håkan Gabrielsson. We will also have a Q&A session via the web chat, and it's possible to already now to submit your questions via this chat. Please do so, and I will read your questions. Mikael, the stage is yours. Welcome.
Thank you, Olof, and welcome to all of you out there in the other end of the camera that I have in front of me. I would like to start today with a quote from a Swedish very well-known author whose name is Erik Axel Karlfeldt. Erik Axel Karlfeldt won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1931. He is also from a small township called Karlbo, which is about today a 20-minute drive from Garpenberg, so he's very local hero in that sense from our point of view.
He wrote towards the end of his life, where he thought that everybody were getting so nervous about things, he wrote one of his most famous poems that starts in Swedish the way it's written there, "Nu är den stolta vår utsprungen, den vår de svaga kallar höst." This is my Mikael Staffas translation of that into that, and as you know, it's not always that easy to translate poetry. The proud spring is here in full blossom. The spring, the weak call autumn.
His background for that, and that's why I took this up today, is that when everybody saw just everything being negative around the world and could not see the powerfulness of the spring and the hope that comes with spring, people are pessimistic generally and just call it fall or call it autumn. I think it's very true today as well, when you look around the world, that to some extent we can be extremely negative what's going around in the world about the geopolitical situation, about where the way the economy is turning, and so on.
On the other hand, it's also important for us as business leaders and others to look at the true picture, and we can also see that we have, at least from our point of view, a very strong situation where we're actually earning more money than I think we've ever done before, with very high prices and terms and a very good situation generally in our company, the company that we have built over so many years. Today, we're gonna have a capital markets update, and the agenda or the things that we'll talk about, me and Håkan together, will be first, we're gonna go through new CapEx decision that we have, and we have two new CapEx decisions that we're announcing.
We're announcing that we're gonna build a hoist in the Garpenberg mine, and I'll come back to the rationale and why we're doing that. And then in Rönnskär, we will have announced that we will put in what will be called a demonstration plant, but it's relatively full scale plant of a new cement replacement product, and I'll come back to that as well. We will then talk about our existing big projects and how we're coming very close to the end in the other expansion, Rönnskär new tank house, how that one is going, and the Boliden tailings sand recycling project, and how well they are developing in general.
We will then also come back to the general increase in volume that we have in our business with the higher grades coming up in our two open pits, the increased throughput that we're expecting in Aitik, and we'll also talk a little bit about the Tara ramp up and other things as well. We'll also have a little bit of a session on the growth options that we have, and we'll compare a little bit to where we were a year ago and how it moved forward and, as we wrote here, the increased confidence that we have in our growth options. Confidence come from two angles. One is that the projects themselves are developing from an engineering point of view, and second is, of course, that the price and terms are generally pointing the way towards these investments.
Before we go into all of that, we also had a situation over the weekend where we've had seismic events in Garpenberg on a scale that we haven't really had before. Somebody said to me that, you know, "Did you plan your Capital Markets Day so that you could talk about this one as well?" Of course, we did not. It was more of a coincidence that it happened at the same time. Just to go through what happened, we had a rockfall. We had a collapse of a stope that fell in. This is something that happens in a way all the time, but this was a much bigger one than usually happens.
The fall of the rock created an air pressure wave that went through the tunnel outside, and there were four people working in the vicinity, and they were knocked over by the shock wave, and there were two more that worked a little bit further out that also got noise-related or ear-related issues that they wanted to check. Altogether, six people were in contact with healthcare in different ways. Everybody has been released. Everybody's home. You can always argue whether a fracture is minor or not a minor thing, but it's not more than fractures and concussions that we have gotten from that. It's also pointed out that it had nothing to do with the direct from the rockfall. It was the indirect effect of the air pressure wave that came.
Separated from this, I think the rock mechanics will argue whether it is really separate or if this coincidence happens, but it was actually 12 hours later, maybe 10 hours later, after the rockfall that we started getting an increase in seismic activity. You see here on the graph the seismic activity as it grew up. You can also see to the left that we have seismic activity all the time. We're not unused to that. That happens, but we are not used to the ones on this scale that we got here as big as these ones were. At 10 PM on Saturday evening, it was decided to abandon the mine and stay out.
That's when the peak that you see, the first peak was around 3:00 AM, I think, in the night between Saturday and Sunday. You can then see that we had another. It came down, but it was another burst at night between Sunday and Monday. After that, the activity has gone down. We have this morning been able to send people on the ground for the first time, and we feel safe about doing that. The first thing is, of course, to go down and do inspections to infrastructure, see whether anything has been hurt or not. As we will develop this, we'll have to come back to you with a press release regarding what the remediation plan is. We simply do not know if there are any major injuries or major breakdowns in the infrastructure underground.
With that, we feel relatively confident around this. As I said, the Garpenberg always had seismic events, although this one is larger than we've ever had before in the 20 years that we have been measuring this, in the way that we measure it today. I've gotten many questions, is this likely to happen again, and so on. I think the answer is that at some stage, maybe yes, but not really. This must have been stress that had been built up over a long time that released itself over this time period. At least this rock stress is gone, and we should be able to continue to work pretty normal from here on. Also talking before we get into the details around things is around sustainability performance.
I think it's important to forget about this even though that's not the top of what everybody wants to discuss these days. We've had a strong year on safety last year. We have continued with the focus on productivity and safety culture. We're now up to 18 consecutive years of fatality-free operations, which I think is unique in this industry, and we are working very hard to make sure that we prolong this stretch even further. We had around a 30% decrease in the LTIF or the LTI frequency for employees and contractors, 25 vs. 24. On the climate side, we are continuing and following our roadmap, and we're on track with the roadmap that we have already in place with the 42% reduction till 2030.
We have also initiated work, and maybe that's something we'll come back to in later Capital Markets Day in a year or two. We have initiated work to define targets beyond 2030 around how to follow this going forward. On the tailings management side, we have, during 2025, made ourselves in conformance for all active facilities regarding GISTM. We are planning, or we are in the process of getting in conformance for all the closed facilities by the end of 2026, by the end of this year. Once again, we feel also good about our dam safety standards and the work that's been done on that. With that, I would like to move on to these things that are coming new today.
Garpenberg, just to put this in perspective, it is, those of you who follow us know this, but it is by far our most profitable mine. It had a very good development, and we are marking here 2014, which was the year we did the expansion in Garpenberg when we went from 1.4 to 2.5 million tons. We went with a new shaft at that time that lowered the cost for the, for getting the ore up to surface. We've then also been able to nicely, after those years, been able to de-bottleneck and get the production up from the two and a half design to the three and a half where we've been in the last years. As you see, it's a high profitability.
Not only is it a highly profitable operations that we are mining, but it seems like no matter how much we mine, we cannot stop finding more. I'll show you a little bit about where exactly we find it, but we have been able to increase both reserves and resources very successfully, and we're up now combined to about 250 million tons. It's of course obvious that with this amount of resources, it is necessary to at least consider how to increase production. There is a good lots of material to do that. Therefore, we have, as you know already before, asked for a permit to go to 4.5. We have the permit.
It's still under appeal, we should say, but we're pretty confident we'll get the permit for 4.5 million tons. We will short-term be able to fulfill the 4.5 million tons by trucking ore to the surface from shallow positions. That's a relatively short-term solution. In order to be able to do 4.5 over time, we will need to have a new shaft. But this new shaft is not only to be able to get production up. It's also getting closer to Huvudmalmen, which is the ore body that you see here in green, which is the areas that we have been most successful in exploring in the last couple of years. We have further good potential that is not in the reserves and resources.
As you can see, this is further to the depth, which would have meant that producing this, even if you don't wanna expand and keep at 3.5, producing it through the existing shaft would have been very expensive 'cause it would have involved lots of underground trucking uphill. We need to get a deeper shaft. This is what we're achieving by putting a new shaft in, putting it closer to the new ore body. The old shaft will continue to operate with the Lappberget ore body in a very efficient way for the upper positions in Kvarnberget and in Dammsjön. This new shaft will make it possible to get into Huvudmalmen in a cost-efficient way.
The project includes everything that you need for a shaft and a hoist, including underground crusher, underground loading facilities, and also when coming to surface, the surface transport to get included into the existing ore storage and system to get into the existing mill. The CapEx is SEK 4 billion. This takes a long time. This is a six-year project, and it's gonna been done in many different stages in order to get all the way down. It's a total of SEK 4 billion. The peak spending is around 2029-2030, and the commissioning is in 2032. It's a long project, as I said. What's the rationale for it? Well, I was part of that.
Without the hoist, Garpenberg would not be able to sustain a 4.5 million ton production level. We would have to reduce the production over time. Without the new hoist also, the ore hauling will become increasingly costly because of longer transportation underground. Also another thing that's maybe we should talk about in exactly these days, we have no redundancy. We are very dependent on the hoist and the shaft working. If it doesn't work, we will not be able to produce. By having two shafts and two hoisting systems, we will have more redundancy to manage in the system. The benefits are that we're enabling continuing production as at 4.5 million tons per year with redundancy between the two shafts. We will be able to get into the new levels in Huvudmalmen with world-class productivity as well.
This will also facilitate going from diesel to electric hauling because we will not need to haul upwards, which is a problem with the electric hauling that drives a little bit sticking to diesel hauling underground today. This will facilitate that, and it will enable expansion as well beyond 4.5 in the future. That is gonna need quite a lot of other investments. You know, we're gonna need to have a second, you know, more facilities on surface, more speed in underground development. We will need to have more capacity regarding tailings and so on. That's nothing here, but this is a step of being able to bridge at least that part of a potential further expansion.
The 4.5 million tons, as I said, this today is meeting in its own right the IRR requirements that Boliden has at the long-term, I should say, price and terms. The potential expansion above 4.5, which we haven't decided any details on, but we could say that that expansion, once we get ready to talk about that, and Håkan will come back to it a little bit, is well above the IRR requirement that Boliden has generally. With that, we'll move on to Rönnskär and the cement. I know I'm not allowed to say cement, so I will make that clear that if I say cement, I mean cement replacement product. It's not a cement from a technical point of view.
This is a SEK 1.5 billion CapEx project. It's a capacity of 280,000 tons per year. It's a patent technology. We have developed this technology ourself. We have a patent around it. Not that we necessarily want to be a technology company that sells technology or licensed technology, but it opens up that possibility going forward as well. The construction will start in the first half of this year, and we will ramp it up in the first half of 2029. The finances of a product like this is quite interesting to calculate on because there are lots of inputs that are a little bit unclear. This investment meets the IRR requirements at the current cement prices well, and also at Boliden's current long-term metal prices.
There are quite a few expectations in Europe that cement prices should go up because of CO2 regulations. There are also people who think that won't really happen, but they don't want that to happen. We'll see where it ends up, but at least this is a positive on the side and also the rollout of technology. This is a demonstration plant that it could then be used in other places as well. Those are the other kind of reasons behind this. We should also, apart from what I just said, as I said, we are improving metal recoveries from this. We get about one-third of the metal, the remaining metal that today goes to deposits will be able to be recovered. That's a very important part of the economy of this project. It's adding a revenue stream.
The cement is a revenue as well. It is a first step towards waste-free smelting, which is important for us, but it's something that we really want to happen. I think it's important for the whole industry, and it's important for Boliden. Boliden is also a pretty large user of concrete. We use concrete in our mining operations and in other places, and of course, this helps us to increase the self-sufficiency of concrete raw materials for our own operations as well. On the market side, this is a fully scalable and energy-efficient CO2 abatement technology, so this should not have any problems to sell. There is also limited and increasingly limited availability of what we have today as cement-replacing products.
Some of those are linked to, for example, blast furnaces and steel mills and so on and are likely to become less available. We have low CO2. Then also what's important here is that we have a good cooperation with the next step in the value chain, i.e., we have a good cooperation with the concrete companies, the ones who are using this as a raw material in their mix to produce concrete. That's also important to get this certified. This material is not, as of present, certified. This is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem 'cause we cannot, in our lab scale, get enough material to get everything tested to get it certified. We don't see any problems with getting this product certified, but this has to happen as we ramp up the production.
With that, I'll step in a little bit to the existing projects. On Odda, we are very, very close to actual commissioning or full commissioning. As of this morning, we have started to heat up the kiln. In about five days from now, we should have the first feed and first production soon after. It's been a long project, and it's been a little bit of a headache, as all of you know, but we are now coming toward the end. Of course, it feels good to come at the end. It feels good so far. Knock on wood, we haven't had production yet, but we're very close. The ramp up or the commissioning has worked relatively well throughout.
What I also spoke about was the roaster and the acid facility that were last in line, all the other pieces that are needed, including tank house, foundry, leach product, the old P production facilities. They've been in operation since long, and the leaching facility is fully commissioned, and we're just waiting to get working. As we said before, this is a 150,000-ton zinc expansion. That's one part of it. I think the big part that was always the reason why we wanted to do this project in the beginning was to increase recoveries. That has, of course, gotten even more relevant with the recent short-term developments. We're reiterating here just what we said before around the increased recoveries that this will give.
As we said before, at Boliden long-term price and terms, this is around EUR 150 million of EBITDA every year at the signed feed mix. As of today's price and terms, that number is rather EUR 250 million than EUR 150 million. It's also important here to say that it's a designed feed mix. We will need to ramp up the production is one thing, but then we will also over time need to ramp up the amount of silver-containing materials that we dare to do because we also need to fine-tune the recoveries in the silver recovery. That will take over time. We will increase depreciations, and I think that's a well-known number.
On the Rönnskär tank house, you all know this is a state-of-the-art production facility, annual copper cathode production of around 230,000 tons. The ramp-up will be in the last quarter of this year. This is a scalable operations. If for some reason we would like to increase the capacity in Rönnskär going forward, this can relatively easily be scaled up to 280,000 tons, for example. The annual EBITDA of this one is around SEK 1 billion at the long-term prices in terms of Boliden. As of today's prices in terms of today's gold price, it's about SEK 1.5 billion EBITDA that comes with this investment. Once again, it's a good timing, and it feels good to have these investments in place right now.
The CapEx is just reiterated at SEK 4.8 billion. Another project that's very important doesn't get so much attention because it's not really given any expansion in the sense of more annual production, but it's very important for the Boliden area and the longevity of the Boliden area as an operations. With the sand recycling, tailings sand recycling project, we will get Renström's capacity up till the late thirties, which is important. Also, given how important this area is becoming now with the high gold prices, it is an important area. We've also in connection with this, the other thing that makes this one really smart, it has to do with the way that we have improved our reclamation technology in Maurliden. This is also a relatively new way of reclamation.
We have also now, after a long line of things, have this reclamation method fully permitted, as of end of 2025. So far the project is going on time and on budget. I would then just reiterate what we said last time with the open pits and the higher grades. We are looking at higher grades coming up in Aitik. You can also see here, which I think is the kind of most positive thing everybody who's read the R&R statement will notice already. The average grade in Aitik has gone up from 0.23% to 0.24%, which you can see in the graph to the left.
This is, you know, shows that we have successful exploration, but of course, also it's a little bit of a mathematical game that when you mine under reserve grades for a couple of years, the average of the remaining becomes larger. You see here now the latest guidance on the ramp-up of the gray curve. In Kevitsa, it's similar, and I think you recognize more of these curves from last year.
You can also see here, if you look at that all now up until 2034, which is now a relatively definitive end of life of mine for Kevitsa, as those who have read our announcement know that we have paused any operations and any going forward on our stage five project there due to very unfavorable conditions. Combination of low nickel prices, increased environmental degradation, and increased taxes has made the expansion at present not financially attractive. With that, I will hand over to you, Håkan, to talk through some of the financial aspects of this. Thank you.
Thank you. Good morning. I'd like to start with the capital employed, or the return on capital employed. We have, as you all know, a strong return on capital employed through the cycles, and there are a few points I'd like to make in connection to this slide. One is, of course, the average. Over the last 10 years, we have generated an average of 18% return on capital employed, which I think is a strong number. The second point that you can see on the chart to the right is that we have two business areas that both are generating good returns. Mines on average a bit higher, but more volatile, and smelters more stable. In particular, I'd like to highlight the last couple of years in smelters. We have received quite a few questions about smelting profitability from investors.
Last year with relatively low TCs, we had close to 15% return on capital employed in our smelting division. The final point on this one is that the combination of the two business areas evens out or stabilizes the return profile of the company as a whole, which is a plus. Now good returns is a function of good work in the company, but also of an attractive metals mix that we have. We have a combination of base metals with a good demand profile and precious metals. This chart is based on the sensitivities that we reported with the prices at the end of 2025.
You can see that copper has a 30% share of our gross profits, zinc slightly lower than 30%, and the combination of gold and silver is now in excess of 30%. Of course, as prices go up, the share of silver and gold is increasing further. We like the exposure to precious metals, and we have not streamed away anything of that historically. We've inherited a couple of streaming contracts with the recent acquisitions, but apart from that, we have a full exposure from precious metals which we like. For those of you that are modeling our result in more detail, I've added a breakdown on the most recent sensitivities that we released. You can see it here by business area.
I'm not going to comment on that further, but you have it here for those modeling. Instead, I'd like to go on to CapEx. We've increased the guidance for the year with SEK half a billion, and the reason are the two new projects that Mikael talked about. That now leaves a CapEx guidance for 2026 of SEK 15.5 billion. The breakdown of that is that we have SEK 6.5 billion in mine-sustaining CapEx, which has already been communicated in connection to the guidance in December. We have SEK 4 billion in expansions and strategic projects, and those are listed below. You have the Odda expansion, the Rönnskär tank house, the sand recycling in the Boliden area, and the recent decisions in Garpenberg and the cement replacement material. That adds up to SEK 4 billion.
The remaining SEK 5 billion is what we call "stay in business" CapEx. Here I include replacement investments, efficiencies, sustainability, everything that is required to extend and develop the business in a competitive way. When it comes to guidance beyond 2026, we'll come back to that when we have decided on our CapEx plan and are ready to communicate that, which we're planning for December this year. A couple of comments are. I'll be able to make anyway. We expect the mine-sustaining CapEx to increase by about SEK half a billion to 2027. There is some decrease in Kevitsa, but as a net we expect an increase due to more costly method of raising dams.
Centerline dams are slightly more expensive than the old versions, and we have centerline dams now in Aitik, Kevitsa, and Garpenberg. We also expect some increase in stay-in-business CapEx, and that's primarily in Aitik, where we're looking at mining closer to our industrial area and some of the water management. It's pipes for process waters. Both of these have to be moved over a number of years, which will push up the replacement CapEx somewhat. We're also getting closer to the truck replacement to a major truck replacement in our open pit mines. The exact time hasn't been set yet, and we'll come back to that, but that will add to this number somewhat. On the other hand, the expansions and strategic projects net will be lower. We are completing the Odda project.
We are completing the Rönnskär project. The tailings sand project in Boliden is at least close to completed by the end of this year. It will be some spillover into next year. The ramp-up of the newer investments that we have talked about will not happen quickly enough to compensate for this. Net, there's a substantial decrease in this area for 2027. Again, we'll communicate the full plan later this year. Moving on to future investments, future growth options, future value creation. We have an attractive portfolio of growth options. We talked about that in the last capital markets day for the first time in this format. A few things have happened since that. We've had two projects being decided, the cement replacement material and the Garpenberg hoist. We've added one project, that's the Semblana extension in Somincor.
We are continuing the work with most of the other ones, and then one has been excluded and paused, which is the Kevitsa stage five, which we no longer see as a project on this list. That leaves us with a chart looking like this. You can see we've marked the decided projects in green. The one that we've paused or excluded is marked in gray. That's the Kevitsa stage five. Now Semblana, that's a project that in some ways is similar to the Rävliden and Kristineberg expansion that we did in the Boliden area. It's an inferred resource of just shy of 8 million tons containing copper and silver, and we're looking into putting that in production with a decision possibly next year.
Nautanen and Älvträsk have somewhat adjusted timing, but the projects are interesting and work continues. We have the larger expansion in Garpenberg, now marked for a decision around 2030. This is mainly an expansion of the mill, including a paste expansion and similar. We'll come back to that in due course. What I do want to highlight though is that a dam is not included in this number. Now, we'll need a dam regardless of expansions in the first half of the 2030s. That decision will come anyway sometime within the next few years. Now, moving on to some information for those of you that are into detailed modeling of our results. You know, we typically focus on EBIT excluding process inventories.
In order to assess the earnings per share and the net result, you also need to cover the process inventory side of the P&L. I just want to highlight what you can do to get closer to your estimates on that. First, process inventory, that's the material that is tied in the production processes in our smelters. It's a fixed volume, and it's not hedged. So any price movements in the market will have an impact on this line item in the P&L. The way we do the valuation of this amount is that we use the lowest of the average for the last month of the quarter and the prices at the end of the quarter, the last day. The difference between the valuations will be charged to the P&L.
Now, there are some things that are difficult to predict from the outside. It depends also on the production cost and raw material mix. You will get very close by just using the prices and the tonnage that we publish in every quarterly result. This is a busy slide, but then as an example, if you look at silver, you see that the lowest of closing and average prices in September was the average SEK 12,800 per kilo in this case. The lowest price in December was SEK 19,000. Again, the average price. Difference between those two is SEK 6,400 per kilo silver.
Multiplying that with the 80,500 kilos in process inventory, you get a P&L impact of just over SEK 500 million, which is what we had in Q4. Adding all metals together, that gave in Q4 a positive impact of 1.7 billion SEK. The reported number was very similar to that. You can get fairly close to this, and this is an Excel chart that Ula will be able to help you with, going forward. Also, for those modeling the result, a few comments on Q1. Mikael already talked about Garpenberg. So far we lost four production days, and we have to give further updates through press releases as we learn more about the situation.
Last quarter in connection to the Q4 report, we talked about heavy rains in Portugal. We've had to stop the mill for one week in Q1, so that would be an impact on the quarter. As the mine is normally the bottleneck, the mine and not the mill, we expect to be able to catch up that loss during the years. We have not changed the full year guidance. There's still a lot of water in the system, so we're not completely out of the risk yet, but it has improved significantly since the time when we published the Q4 report. Mine taxes. No news compared to the press releases that we've already given, but just a clarification that we do not expect any one-off restructuring cost in Q1.
If that happens, that will be later on. Great guidance unchanged, although there is, of course, some risk in Garpenberg here, but we'll have to come back to that. Now, I'd like to finish this presentation with the balance sheet. Now, on the slide you can see a chart with the net debt to equity ratio, the gearing including the net reclamation liabilities, and this is the KPI that we use when we discuss extra dividends and similar. As you can see, we increased the gearing quite a lot at the acquisition, and we also dimensioned the balance sheet to be able to cope with the severe downturn. Now, we didn't get a severe downturn, instead we got a rally in precious metal prices, so we have delevered quite quickly after these acquisitions.
You can see now that, including net reclamation liabilities we were at 27% at the year-end, and if you pro forma add the dividend that has been proposed by the board, that adds up to 32%. We are trending downwards quite rapidly with these prices, so we're in good shape balance sheet-wise. Then just to reiterate what we say every year, there is a long-term commitment to our dividend policy. We have a dividend policy of one-third of net profits, and if the net debt to equity is lower than 20%, after regular dividends including reclamation liability, there is room for extra dividends. We feel strongly committed to this, and the dividend proposal that has been done by the board is fully in line with this. Mikael, you want to wrap up?
I will do that. Thank you, Håkan. I would just like to reiterate and coming back to the agenda that we had in the beginning, we have been able to hopefully go through with you that we have put two new CapEx projects in place. They are both standing on their own feet, but they're also enabling a potential growth going forward that we feel very good about. We've gone through the existing projects. We are delivering well on the existing projects, and they are in the case of Odda they are on the kind of revised timeline as it's been revised over time, but the other projects are also working well on their original timelines. We are seeing increasing volumes going forward from our existing operation, not just from Odda and Rönnskär.
Håkan has talked about the growth options that we feel actually pretty good about, both that they, apart from the one in Finland, have gotten more concrete and look better as we're working with the detailed engineering around them. Also of course prices and terms are making these more likely to move ahead, but decision time is still a little bit out. I would also like to point out that we made the point in the beginning that even though sustainability does not have a major part of this capital market update, sustainability is one of the key aspects of our company, and we feel very good about the performance that we have, both in terms of environmental compliance, in terms of occupational health and safety, and also around our climate targets that we have.
I'll just like to step back to Erik Axel Karlfeldt and his poem that is now almost a hundred years old. It will be a hundred years next year, where he spoke about, not just in this poem but in the whole collection of poem that he sent out, that one of the problems in the world is that people tend to get too pessimistic and just look at all the problems that you have in front of you. We feel quite good about the future going forward. We're still producing the metals that the world needs. We're producing them in Europe that has a substantial deficit of these metals. We're doing it in a very sustainable way, and we have a good set of growth options going forward to continue our development.
With that, I will remind everybody first that we're building the company on our, the purpose that we have and our vision and our core values, and I'll leave the word to you, Olof, to take us through question and answers.
Thank you, Mikael. Ladies and gentlemen, that opens up our Q&A session via the web for this capital markets day. I'm happy to see that we have several questions coming in through the web, and it's still possible to submit your questions. I'll do my best here to read all those questions. As we speak, we have some 15+ questions in the pipeline. Let's get going, and the first question is actually for Håkan where you ended, and it's from Daniel Major at UBS, and it goes like this: "Is Boliden's dividend policy rock solid, or what could make it change?
In my view, it's rock solid. I mean, it has been around for more than 15 years, and we're very happy about how it has served the company over the years. In our governance, it's the board that recommends and the shareholder meeting that decides. My view is that there is great support for this policy, and I don't see it changing.
Okay. Now I have several questions, and you choose who answer. The second question comes from Adrian Gilani at ABG. It's regarding Kevitsa. When is your latest deadline to take a potential new decision to pause the pushback number five?
This is a good question, but also a little bit tricky to answer. The situation is that you could maybe do this as late as you want to. What is happening now is that, and those of you who are now in Finland will notice, that we have started negotiations with the unions about reductions in workforce. This is a reduction of people that would otherwise have worked on this investment. If we were to make the decision, say in a year, it's much less, you know, good than doing it now because we would then try to, we need to find people again. The ones that we've dismissed might not be available to come back, so we have to find people.
We'll also have to find equipment, and we'll have to do it. We have to do all the pre-stripping much quicker in order to be secure on having a continuous production. This is all kind of doable for a year or two, or maybe even three years, but we're on a slippery slope because for every day we wait, the kind of economics gets worse because of this, you know, lack of good planning. I don't know if that answered your questions, but the answer is we could do it in a while. It's something we're to totally change. We could still make the decision for another couple of years, but it would be ideal to do it now, which we cannot because we don't have a profitable business case.
Here's another one from Liam Fitzpatrick, working for Deutsche Bank. Which quarter should we expect a major uplift from the Odda expansion?
Production-wise, if you produce zinc, you will see a major uplift already in Q2. In terms of financing, I'll look a little at finances. I'll look a bit you Håkan because I don't know exactly what the feeding schedule is for the more, you know, silver-rich concentrates are getting.
Yeah. No, I think you ask about a major uplift. I think that will be very much gradual because a big part of the financial side of this is precious metal containing concentrates that we can then recover silver and gold and similar. We'll increase that slowly because we want to see the recoveries before we buy most of the feed with complex and expensive raw materials. I think that will be more a gradual step up quarter by quarter towards the number that we have guided for the full project once it's up and running in all aspects.
Excellent. Marina Calero, RBC Capital Markets, has the following question. The recent issues in Garpenberg, do they impact the mining method? Do they impact potential future resources? In English, the reasons for the large investment announced today.
As of our best understanding as of today, it will not. We have not intended to change any mining methods, and we do not think that this will sterilize any part of the mine, and they will all still be available. Exactly that will of course be better known over time if you start inspecting it, but we do not envision that what happened over the weekend will make the mining method invalid or make parts of the mine not mineable.
Alexander Ripe, Pareto Securities, has a similar question. In a dream scenario, when everything goes exactly as planned in Garpenberg, when are you up and running again?
I mean, in a dream scenario is that the inspections today said there's absolutely nothing has broken down, and we can start, like, in a couple of days. We will, let's see. It's it could be that short, but that's really a dream scenario.
A question for Håkan from Igor Tubic, working for DNB Carnegie. The sustaining CapEx that you indicate then for 2026, is it fair to assume that that one will stay unchanged going forward, roughly?
This is the mine-sustaining CapEx. I mean, the numbers for 2026 is what we have guided, and that we don't expect to change. If you look at the mine-sustaining CapEx for 2027 and beyond, I indicated an increase of about half a billion SEK due to above all dam raising methodology.
Gotcha. Viktor Trollsten, working for Danske, has another question regarding Kevitsa, and it goes like this. Is the grade profile for Kevitsa affected by the decision to pause pushback 5?
No, not really in any material way. The grade profile that you see and that we have guided, you know, indicated to you is based fully on pushback four and nothing else. If there, for some reason, will be a pushback five for some, you know, then there might be some parallel going of four and five that could impact the grade profile for those years. The one that you're seeing is fully for pushback four without any pushback five in it.
Ladies and gentlemen, please add your questions to the web chats if you want to. I'm happy to say that we have quite a few more here. Let's get going, gentlemen, again. Now, it's Ioannis Masvoulas from Morgan Stanley. He says like this. "There's rumors and news in the industry that the smelters get a less good situation for treating precious metals. The payability is heading south." Can you please comment on that one?
Not really. We tend not to comment on, you know, commercial undertakings when we buy raw material for our smelters from the outside. You know, these are very active negotiations every year around lots of things and prefer not to kind of comment on them in more detail than that.
Okay. Richard Hatch, he works for Berenberg Bank, and he would like to have, please explain once again, why did the Aitik grade curve flatten out?
It flattened out a little bit, but you saw that the average increased. This is one of the things that is kind of the pros and cons of releasing these grade curves. You who've been around for a few years know that a few years back, we didn't even want to release them because our plans change from year to year around which sequence to do certain things around that. That can have to do with that we've had issues and certain pushback. We have to take them slower. We have to take more from another one. Gives us a different grade profile around that. I don't wanna go into the details just exactly around this. I just wanna point out that the average has not gone down, the average has gone up.
There's been some timing and, you know, everybody can kind of figure out if that average is supposed to work, you must have pretty good years in the second half of the thirties. Yeah, we have pretty good years in the second half of the thirties.
I might suspect what you will answer here, Håkan. Boris Bordier working for Kepler Cheuvreux, he says like this, "If I do my math right, CapEx will decrease in 2027, right?
Well, again, there's a reason why we don't guide for that, and that's because we haven't decided. We don't know the timing of certain projects like truck replacement yet, and so we'll just have to come back to that.
Excellent. Marina Calero working for RBC has a follow-up, and it's regarding Kevitsa again. Is there a nickel price where you would reconsider your recent decision?
I mean, the answer is yes. Yes, it's not a spot nickel price, but of course it's a long-term nickel price. If something special were to happen in the world that the nickel price would objectively be seen to be higher long term, yes, that would work into our calculations. Now we are relatively conservative and don't change our long-term, you know, long-term prices that we work with or planning prices very quickly, so it would have to be something drastic that would happen. It's important to point out though, that the reason we say put on hold, but we basically canceled the investment even though, as somebody pointed out before, it can be, you know, taken back if something were to change still for a couple of years. It's a couple of things.
The mining tax in Finland is one. The trade policies in Europe is a second one, which is part of this discussion as well. As well as some new water quality regulations coming from the EU that also affects the total economics of the mine. There are a couple of things, and yes, a higher nickel price, yes, a lower mining tax, and yes, some more practical way of handling you know, the some of the potential environmental demands, all of that would play in. As I said, in our best estimate of all these things together right now, the project does not meet our requirements.
Caleb Solomon, who works for SEB, coming back to sulfuric acid prices. Can you please once again try to highlight where what is the net exposure to spot sulfuric acid prices? How important is it that you increase the capacity to produce sulfuric acid in Norway, in Odda?
I don't wanna get in too much around exactly how these commercial setups works, but we are with some kind of delay exposed to spot prices. They are setting the price that we receive, although we might have, you know, yearly prices sometimes. Sometimes we have quarterly prices. We have a whole set of mixtures of formulas with our customers around it. The spot price is important, and it will come through into our P&L. I think the second part of the question, how important was sulfuric acid to Odda? Well, as I pointed out, we had a long term and our long-term assessments, and that's metals but also things like sulfuric acid. We have around EUR 150 million of EBITDA.
Right now, it's SEK 250, and of course, the increase in the sulfuric acid price is also contributing to this positive factor right now. Therefore it is important. It's helping that. Otherwise, in our long-term prices and assumptions, sulfuric acid doesn't contribute that much. Of course, short term with these kind of prices, it does.
Maybe I can add that if you want to get a feeling for the magnitude of the movements, there is a line in our EBIT bridge that is called byproducts, and the biggest one causing the changes in there is sulfuric acid. Typically, when we had runs or decreases, it moves quarter to quarter, you know, SEK 150 million or so. That's the order of magnitude that we typically have seen historically.
Pavel Kirjanovs, he works for Bank of America, and he works in teams with Jason Fairclough. He has a question about, can you please elaborate a little bit more about your new bubble in Portugal, the Semblana, possible investment? What's it about?
It is a separate mineralization, a few kilometers away from the existing infrastructure of the mine, so there will be some investment to get to that mineralization. It has decent grades or even better grades than the mine itself. I think just to get an order of magnitude, if we were to mine only this mineralization, it's about a two-year extension life of mine. We will, of course, not mine it in two years, and we will not mine 100% from there. We will do that in parallel with using other existing facilities, but that alone is about a two-year extension you could say.
Thanks. Igor Tubic working for DNB Carnegie. In terms of the balance sheet, are there any large debt payments coming around the corner? Well, anything special on the finance side that we should be aware of?
No, I think that we've extended our revolving credit, which is good. I think that we have. You know, there's a breakdown of the maturities in our quarterly report. There is some debt has to be refinanced over the next two years. For example, the term loan after the acquisition is fairly short term.
Mm-hmm.
We're keeping busy from that perspective, but nothing really out of the ordinary. It's pretty stable.
Gotcha.
Mm.
Amos Fletcher working for Barclays, he has the following question, and that is that you have earlier said that you would produce 4.5 million tons milled volume in Garpenberg around 2030. Now, given today's investment, can you be more specific?
No, it's still around 2030. You can say today's investment doesn't really impact that because the investment we're doing is only gonna be operational in 2032. The step up from where we are today up until 2030 is all about, you know, increased developments. You will have to increase some people and some equipment and starting mining the shallow position that we still have on, you can say, trucking distance.
Question for Håkan from Richard Hatch, working for Berenberg Bank. Please help us again. How should we think about revenues and costs for the smelter plant? How should we think about the modeling there?
Yeah. We haven't provided for that, but I think we said that in a base case with current cement prices, you know, I think we gave the revenue per year, right, in the release. Then from the IRR, I think you can work your way back to what cost level we expect.
Excellent.
Mm.
Okay. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I remind you, if you have questions, please go ahead to the webpage and submit them there. I have a few left here, and the next one is from Daniel Major at UBS again. These uplifts that you're talking about both for the other expansion and the new tank house in Skellefteå, can you once again tell us about the ramp up? When will we reach the indicated levels in a scenario where everything goes well?
Will you take that one or should I?
Yes, you can do it then.
No, I think if we start with the tank house in Rönnskär, it's commissioning Q4. It's three sections. They will, as it looks right now, all be commissioned in the same quarter, starting in the beginning and then coming towards the end. In a tank house, typically when you commission it, you very quickly get up to speed because you cannot really drive it so much at half speed. You get up to 80%, and then you get up to 90% relatively quickly. That means that we will then, you know, stop selling the anodes somewhere towards the end of this year.
We should see that extra money with maybe some month or so delay as we can make sure that we get it through the precious metal plant. We don't get paid for the precious metal part right away when we sell the anodes. That's on that one. On the other one, it's from a production point of view. It should go relatively quickly, but as we pointed out before, we will be very conservative in the kind of silver grades that we will be willing to put through, just to make sure that we do that very carefully in measuring that we get the right yields out of the different steps in the silver recovery process.
Okay. I actually only have three questions left. We'll see if they come in any more questions. This one is from a gentleman called Mats Jonsson. He doesn't say his company. I assume it's a private investor. It's for Håkan. What are the short-term and long-term CapEx projects plans for the Neves-Corvo mine? That is our name, Somincor.
Well, yeah, it's, we haven't sort of given the CapEx guidance, year by year. For the Somincor, for the two mines combined, we added about SEK 2 billion per year in investments, and that's roughly stable. The only sort of larger thing that we have talked about in relation to Somincor is the potential to add the Semblana mineralization. You can see on that chart with the bubbles a rough estimate of the cost. It's a fairly low-cost project than compared to the other expansions that we have.
There's a follow-up again regarding Garpenberg from Liam Fitzpatrick working for Deutsche Bank. It is, can you give any high-level indication on when you expect to get the permit for Garpenberg? And also, can you please indicate what's included in the second bubble on the bubble chart that is the Garpenberg so-called stage two potential expansion?
Yes. Well, if we start with the permit, you never really know, but we think it might take towards the end of this year until we get it fully through the appeals process. It should be pointed out that number one, we don't think that there's a, you know, normally we should not get a considerable materially worse outcome in the appeal process than we got in the first round. You of course never know.
What we said also, and I think it should maybe clarified here that regarding these investments into the new shaft, if we for some reason were to be denied the permit of 4.5, we would have to reiterate that and we would not have spent too much money because the big investment is further down the line, and we want to make sure that we got this timing right. That was on the CapEx. What's the second part of the question?
What's included in the Garpenberg beyond?
Oh, yeah. In that one, in the bubble that you see has to do with lots of, you know, this is a very rough estimate by the way, but it's a new concentrator on the ground, a parallel to the one that we have because it will probably have to be bigger than that. We have all the kind of, you know, additional storage and so on surface, and that's part of that. Also things like paste and other infrastructure that needs to be strengthened if you were to produce that. That has to do also with, you know, we need to get more power into the mine and everything else.
Once again, this is a 2030 kind of timeline and very rough numbers, but we want to give you that kind of order of magnitude.
Yeah. What I think is worth repeating though is that a dam is not included. The logic to that is that we will have to to extend the dam capacity anyway, even without an expansion. That decision could come, you know, anywhere the next few years. We will need, regardless of expansion, new tailings capacity sometime during the first half of the 2030s.
Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, we actually have a final question, and it's a follow-up from Marina Calero, working from Royal Bank of Canada, and it goes like this. You said that 2014 decision or the new expansion in Garpenberg that was ready in 2014 was a game changer. We understand that this decision today could be a game changer in terms of new volumes. Is it a game changer again, in terms of productivity?
It's a very good question, but you have to remember what's the kind of zero case or the base case that you're comparing against. Garpenberg today is an extremely efficient mine, as most of you will have seen. It's probably the most efficient underground operation that there is in the world. The main reason for that is the placement of the existing shaft very close to the Lappberget mineralization. If we were not to do this investment over time, Lappberget is depleting not overnight, but slowly, and the volumes are getting less, and it will be replaced by volumes from other parts of the mine, which will be much more expensive to mine than the existing one close.
By adding this new shaft very close to the Huvudmalmen, we will be able to continue to have very, very efficient low-cost operations with very short transport distances underground also for mining Huvudmalmen. We will also be able to use an existing, you know, to transport on the same surface or the same level volume from the lower part of Lappberget also into the new system that otherwise would have to be trucked uphill for a couple of hundred meters. Mostly things I would say, I think it's keeping the game changing alive and keeping it making a game changer also for the Huvudmalmen mineralization.
Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our Q&A session for this capital markets update 2026. I leave it over to you, Mikael, our President and CEO to conclude this event.
Well, thank you Olof, and thank you Håkan and thank everybody for listening. As I already concluded a little bit before, I wanted to make the point again that we feel very strong. Even though we've had an event over the weekend that maybe sometimes will make you a little bit nervous about what we're doing, and we're working in an environment where surprises happen. We feel very strong about where we're standing, the products that we are producing, the customer base that we have, the physical location, and our projects, and we really look forward to the next couple of years. Thank you everybody for listening.