Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining. I am Triin Veermäe and I welcome you all to the AS Tallinna Vesi webinar. This webinar will be hosted by Aleksandr Timofejev, CEO, and Taavi Gröön, CFO. Aleksandr and Taavi will introduce the highlights of the second quarter of 2025. The presenters will also speak about Tallinna Vesi's operational and financial results of six months. Aleksandr will give an overview about some of the investments made in the second quarter of 2025. Right after the presentation, you will have the opportunity to ask questions. It is also possible to type in your question during the presentation, but these will be answered in the end part of the webinar. To submit your questions, please use the question box on the right side of the screen. Now I will hand over to Aleksandr and Taavi. Here you go.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Tallinna Vesi's webinar. Today we will cover some operational and financial results from the second quarter. I'm really happy that the second quarter was very good for Tallinna Vesi. Our financial results were outperformed if we compare them with the budget. If we speak about the sales, during the second quarter, the sales reached EUR 19.4 million and the net profit was EUR 1.4 million. Taavi will cover financial numbers in detail, and if you have any questions, we are happy also to answer them a little bit later. If we move on to the operational results, I would like to say that the water quality from the tap was according to all standards. We took during the first half of the year over 1,300 samples from the customer staff, and all samples were according to the legislation.
During the second quarter, we took over 500 samples. If we speak about the wastewater treatment plant, our effluent quality was better than the law requires. If we speak about the phosphorus, it was 0.3, and if we speak about the nitrogen, it was below 10 mg per liter. I would like to say that during the second quarter, a lot of rains have been in Estonia, so we treated during the first part of the year 6% more wastewater than we budgeted. Of course, as we mentioned before, we do everything to fulfill obligations and offer the vital services to our customers. During the second quarter, we also produced a lot of electrical energy and the heating power that is needed for our treatment facilities.
During the second quarter, we produced over 2.8 GWh electrical energy, and if we speak about the first half of the year, we outperformed 5 GWh electrical energy production that we used in our facilities. I would like to say that our aim is to install the smart meters to our customers, and by the end of the second quarter of 2025, over 72% of our customers actually used the ultrasonic smart water meters. This gives us a better overview about the consumption in the city and, of course, also helps customers to save their time during times of rains. Customers who have a smart meter do not have to send their readings to us. During the second quarter, we had one working accident that happened in the water treatment plant. One of our employees fell down into the opening, but he opened himself.
The person is at the moment on sick leave, and we hope to get him back to work soon. All similar locations were checked by our Health and Safety department, and of course, we take Health and Safety very seriously in the company. We do everything in the future to keep zero tolerance with the Health and Safety issues. If we move on to the next slide, I will speak a little bit more about our investments. During this year, we plan to invest up to EUR 61 million into our assets. Why do we do that? The main reason is to keep a very high level of services for the water and sewage services, and of course, contingency.
It is important that our customers get water supply 24/7, and if there's any crisis, then we're ready to handle that so people can use water and wastewater services also during the crisis time. We reconstruct a lot of pipelines in the city. We do it together with the City of Tallinn, other municipalities, and some other utilities. During the first six months, we reconstructed over 20 km of pipelines. Approximately 50% of that was done with the trenchless method. By the end of the year, we plan to complete 45 km of pipeline reconstruction in Tallinn. This is for water, sewage, and stormwater pipelines. You can see also on the slide some streets where we do work at the moment. We are sorry if these reconstructions somehow impact your everyday life, but without these works, it is not possible to keep the high level of services in the future.
A lot of investments are also done in the treatment plants. We completed the filters reconstruction at the water treatment plant, and huge reconstructions at the moment are ongoing at the wastewater treatment plant of Paljassaare. We install the primary screens to the main pumping station, and we also reconstruct the screens in the treatment plant itself. It will help us better comply with the mechanical treatment during the storm events. Due to that, we can get from the process more screenings, and this will positively impact the next stages of the treatment, such as the biological and the chemical treatment. The secondary sedimentation tanks are also under reconstruction. In total, we have to reconstruct 12 tanks, and by today, four of them are reconstructed and the construction works are completed. This year, we start with two extra ones, and the rest would be completed during next year.
Of course, as I already mentioned, the contingency, we continue to install the generators into our pumping stations. During the serious energy cut, we can cover the main areas with water supply and also the wastewater discharge. By the end of this year, 40 generators will be installed in our strategical pumping stations. If we move on to the next slide, you can see our main targets. As I mentioned before, the tap water quality is at the top level. 60 public water taps opened in Tallinn. From there, 24/7, it's possible to get drinking water. The wastewater treatment plant is working according to all standards, even outperformed them. Our effluent quality with that is 100%. The leakage rate is similar to last year. We do a lot of work to investigate and find out the leakages.
Of course, the reconstruction of the water pipes helps year on year as well with that. Our leakage level is on a very good level if we compare us with similar-sized cities. We do everything to maintain the same level of the leakage rate in the future as well. One of our aims is to decrease the length of the water interruption. We try to plan our works as good as possible. If we look into the second quarter of 2025, the average water interruption took 2 hours and 15 minutes. That is much better than last year. As I mentioned before, the rehabilitation of networks is ongoing. During the second quarter, 13.7 km was constructed. If we speak about the six months, over 20 km of pipes have been completed. A little bit about the customer satisfaction as well. Satisfaction is important for us.
We do a lot of cooperation with customers. We investigate what are the expectations and what we can do better. During the second quarter, our response was 4 out of 5. That is quite okay and a little bit better than last year. Our aim is to get the response that is equal to 4.2. We continue to do the cooperation with our customers. We try to find better ways how faster [ reagate] on emergencies. Of course, the aim is to give the feedback to the customers as quickly as possible. We try to do everything to cover the topic within one letter, not having the long conversations with the customers because the time is important. Overall, everything is good. We are moving towards the third quarter with great results. I will hand it to Taavi now, who will go into details of the financial results. Thank you.
Thank you, Aleksandr. In the next slides, we'll take a look at the sales volumes and also financial aspects of the second quarter and six months of this year. Now, starting off with service volumes, in two main customer segments, private and business customer segments, for the second quarter and also for the six months, we have slight decreases. For the six months, the decrease in volumes is less than 1% in both segments. There are no clear outliers. There are factors like rainfall and industrial consumption that are affecting the small variations in consumption, but all in all, it's in the same range that it was in last year's same periods. We don't expect any sudden changes also in the near term. There's a more significant change in consumption in the outside service area.
Compared to last year, this is mainly due to consumption of pure water in the Harku region. For that time, in 2024, we supplied Harku region with additional clean water, which after a certain time period was replaced with poor well water. This volume is not being sold in 2025. There will be a slight variation also for the total of the year. Now, going forward, looking at the revenues of the services, we see a significant change in private customer sales volumes for the second quarter and also for the six months, and also a significant change in other customer groups. What drives the private customer revenues and pricing most is the regulation requirement to equalize prices between customer groups, specifically private and business customer groups. Right now, there's a price difference in clean water and wastewater.
We have done two significant price adjustments in 1st of J uly 2024, and 1st of May 2025. As a result, the business customer pricing is decreasing as the prices for the business customers are right now higher, and the private customer prices are increasing due to the price equalization. There will be one more adjustment to equalize clean water in 2026. Wastewater prices will remain different, but they will not be based on customer groups, but on pollution load of the wastewater. Outside service area prices have increased primarily due to investments in the area, which also affect the overall changes to all customer groups as well. The main driver for after the price equalization is investments that we do in the sustainability of our services. In the next slide, we'll take a look at the total cost of goods sold.
Total cost of goods sold for the second quarter increased EUR 2.9 million. It's a significant change, but there's one clear driver for that. That's construction services cost accounted for EUR 2.5 million of this impact, and it is in correlation with the construction services sold. There are some more or less relevant changes in the impact of total cost of goods sold. For example, total direct production cost decreased slightly, less than 4%, primarily driven by our own production of electricity, which, as Alex mentioned, has been strong for the second quarter. There are some increases in staff cost due to increases in salary cost and depreciation cost related to investments. The main driver remains the construction services. That is also, and these are services that we use to provide construction services to our external partners. Now, in the next slide, we summarize the impact on net profit.
You see here that the net profit in total for the second quarter is around EUR 0.8 million lower. The main driver for this lower outcome compared to last year is corporate income tax. We'll get into that in a moment. First off, starting with the sales, as already mentioned, construction services is the largest impact on the sales change in Q2. This is very much related to how the construction projects are timed, how they're contracted. We had around EUR 2.7 million of construction revenue impacting this EUR 3.7 million change, and the rest is primarily due to price adjustments in water services from 1st of May. Construction services' impact is also seen in the cost of goods sold. We have some less important changes in fixed cost and the positive impact from net financial cost.
Coming back to the income tax, this income tax increase is related to changes in corporate income tax regulation. Income tax is paid on distributed dividends. Distribution of dividends was done in the second quarter. The income tax paid on the dividends increased significantly in 2025. First off, the rate increased to 22%. The lower tax rate applied to consistent dividend payments, 14%, was not applied, it was abolished in 2025. All dividends are effectively taxed with a tax rate of 22%. Now, looking at the next slide, we see our cash position has decreased by EUR 6.4 million compared to the end of last quarter. We're not targeting to maintain a high cash position, so this is within our set business operations and targets. We work on the principle that we operate our cash and most effectively we can and secure our liquidity with sufficient financing and debt contracts.
Main use of our cash flow is in investing activities. EUR 12.4 million impact from our investments also on the cash position comes from investment activities. Financing cash flows don't show a significant net impact, but included changes related to dividend payments and at the same time on the other side, changes in long-term debt. Finally, let's take a look at our investment track for this year. We have stated that we are aiming to invest around EUR 61 million this year. We are well on track regarding this target. We have invested in the six months of this year, EUR 23 million on the balance sheet. It must be noted that the first half of the year is always slower due to construction timings. We expect to be close to the set target. The majority of those investments, around 85% of those investments, are related to regulated assets.
This is where we earn our profitability. From the capital that we invest, we earn regulated return. This is the core of our profitability and business. The regulated asset base is reviewed during the price approval process, and the last change was, as mentioned, applied from 1st of May. We have two other groups that form the 15% stormwater network development and customer connections, which is financed respectively by the City of Tallinn and by connection fees from customers. All in all, we had a strong quarter, negative impact from the increase in corporate income tax, but we are well on track with our price adjustments to perform the investments necessary and achieve the results that we are targeting for this year. With this, I will conclude my part in today's presentation. Thank you very much. I will hand back to Triin.
Yes, thank you for the presentation, both of you. Now we will proceed with the questions. You will have a few minutes to submit your questions. Please feel free to type in any questions you might have. We will give you a bit of time for that.
For the time being, we've had no questions in our webinar event, but we received one question by email regarding the choice of language in the webinar, and specifically why it is done in English. Would like to answer that right away here. The main reason for that is to make this information and data more accessible for the whole region of investors. We'd be very happy to do the presentation in Estonian, but we also have to keep in mind that we have investors in the Baltic and Nordic regions. Our consideration has been that English will provide an opportunity for those investors as well to receive the information.
Thank you, Taavi. It seems that we don't have any questions. The recording of the presentation will be available in Tallinna Vesi's YouTube channel in a webinar playlist shortly. The presentation materials and reports can be found on our web page. Thank you, Taavi and Aleksandr, for the overview. Thank you all for joining. Have a good day.
Thank you.
Thank you, have a good day.