To Q1 2024. Our objective is to have the right balance. I would say that levels at the end of March were a bit on the high side, and we aim to reduce it. With regards to CapEx, Lenzing continues to put a clear focus on maintenance and license-to-operate projects as part of its performance program, and CapEx remains on low levels of EUR 33 million in Q1, comparable to the first quarter last year. As a result, free cash flow was positive again at EUR 15 million. That was not as high as in the first quarter 2024, partially impacted by one-offs. We clearly continue to have a very clear focus on free cash flow. Let's move to the balance sheet. On the left side of the slide, we show the development of net financial debt. It remained relatively stable at around EUR 1.5 billion.
On the right side, you see the development of our liquidity cushion. It decreased slightly by EUR 14 million and reached EUR 636 million at the end of the first quarter. With this, I hand back to you, Rohit.
Thank you, Nico. Let us now move to a topic which is probably keeping every company busy at the moment, which is the U.S. tariffs. While in Q1, the key focus was mainly on the dispute between the U.S. and its neighbors, which is Mexico, Canada, as well as the 10% and later 20% on all imports from China, we saw limited impact in our Q1 result. However, the actual escalation from reciprocal tariffs followed in early April. With the now ongoing 90-day pause, we have 10% additional import tariff into the U.S. and 145% additional on Chinese imports into the U.S., while China levies 125% of import tariffs on U.S. goods. Now, this has led to both supply and demand shocks, a collapse of China-U.S. trade, and two, an impact of global value chain and supply chains.
As a globally active company, those tariffs do have an impact on Lenzing, as they make our imports of raw materials for our U.S. manufacturing site in Mobile, Alabama, more expensive. They come with a lot of uncertainty from secondary effects, which today are hard to estimate. Let me just give you one example. U.S. tariffs will make goods more expensive for consumers, which might lead to hesitancy to spend and eventually lower demand volumetrically. All in all, everybody in the industry is scrambling to deal with the situation and plan in scenarios given the high uncertainty. Still, we believe Lenzing is better positioned than other fiber manufacturers, given our global footprint.
Needless to say, we are working on a set of mitigation measures, which include switching supply routes for input materials such as dissolving pulp and chemicals, and shifting fiber volumes between our production sites to optimize for existing and possible tariffs, and really supporting our customers. In general, we maintain very close contact with our customers and regional value chains to handle the situation in the best possible way with our partners. Let's move a little bit and talk about the outlook. I can clearly say that thanks to our performance program, the operational performance in the first quarter 2025 was solid. We assume stable demand in bulk and have a cautious outlook on the generic fiber market development in 2025. We expect energy and raw material prices to remain on elevated levels.
However, market visibility is low, and that is further intensified due to the current changes in global tariffs, the potential impact of which is continuously being evaluated. We have set up a task force to analyze the situation, and mitigation measures are being added or adjusted depending on the developments. While the market has not helped us so far, we are not waiting on tailwinds from the market. We continue to take the future in our own hands, and we expect operational results to continue to be positively impacted by the performance program. Therefore, we expect EBITDA for the 2025 financial year to be higher than in the previous year. With this, I will hand over back to the operator for the Q&A.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode and eventually turn off the volume from the webcast while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. Please wait while we are taking the first question. The first question comes from the line of Christian Faitz from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. Good morning, everybody, wherever you are. I have one question, please. In light of the current challenges you just described, can you tell us a bit about the capacity utilization rates in your plants at present, possibly region by region, if any specific region is affected or whether all of your plants would be affected by the tariff discussions?
Thank you, Christian, for these questions, and I will give that to Rohit, please.
Thank you, Christian. The situation is still unfolding, and as we know, there are some specific regional impacts. What we are looking to do is using and leveraging our global footprint to be able to work with our partners and customers to continuously be able to adapt our supply chains. Therefore, at this stage, we're not seeing any material changes in our utilization of our plants. We are continuously monitoring the situation. As I mentioned, we have set up a task force, and almost on a daily basis, we are trying to get a better handle on how the situation will evolve, how the supply chains may adapt, how the customers may choose preferences in terms of locations of supply. Therefore, we are ready to be able to deal with that change in a more agile manner.
Now, in terms of specificities, that's a number that we don't generally hand out, but generally, what we have is there is no material impact at this stage.
Okay, thanks. Very helpful.
We have now a question from the line of Mr. Patrick Steiner from ODDO BHF. Please go ahead.
Good morning. It's Patrick Steiner speaking. Thank you very much for taking my questions. I would have a few, and I would like to take them one by one if possible. Firstly, given the impacts from the U.S. trade tariffs we just discussed, market prices for viscose, cotton, dissolving pulp having declined in Q1, could you give us your view on the components going into the expected EBITDA increase in 2025 compared to 2024? I mean, is this mostly driven by cost savings, relation effects, and certificate sales? How do you think about volume pricing components for 2025 compared to 2024?
Thank you, Patrick. Now, I think Rohit will start with answering that question.
Yeah. Thank you, Patrick, for that question. I'll try and give some color to it and then probably hand over some time to Nico as well to kind of give some flavor in the way we have been looking at 2025. At this stage, as you know, our performance program has got, apart from the cash generation, we have got two components, which was really about driving growth. Growth has got two components. One is what we call premiumization of our portfolio, which is moving our portfolio towards more specialty, where we see lesser competition. Those are more application innovation-driven growth. If you see what we have done in the last year, there has been a significant shift towards our specialization share of our portfolio. We talked about 90% last year.
We feel that the market that we are operating in is that we have some headroom for us to be able to continue to work with our partners and continue to grow in that environment. That reflects also our ability to hold pricing to a certain extent. Now, a second lever, of course, is the cost excellence side, and we have been relentless about that ever since we started our performance program. Those are levers that we have in our hands, and those are self-driven, and therefore, we shall continue to execute those as what we have in the plan. We do not see any impact of that changing one way or the other to have an impact on our numbers for 2025.
Now, having said that, there are various other initiatives that we are exploring and looking at to take advantage of both on the market side as well as on the cost side. Now, I'll give you an example. Our plant in Mobile, Alabama, finds itself in a sweet spot right now with the tariff situation, where a lot of our non-growing customers see that as a great position to be in because it's the only fiber plant in North America. That gives us some kind of a leg up there. Also, on the cost side, we're looking at what we can do on a material side, raw material side, which you can take advantage of in terms of the currently softening demand and material situation.
There are various levers currently coming into play, but then I can hand over Nico to make any additional comments around this issue.
Now, Rohit, I just can confirm what you are saying. Basically, it is our holistic approach with our performance program that we are tackling all areas of the P&L to improve. Might it be the top line with the shift of the product mix, as you mentioned? Might it be also our pricing points? Might it be also the volume situation? Also, going and trickling down the whole P&L, we are really tightly managing each cost position very intensively, and we are trying to get each opportunity to improve further, knocking down our cost situation and getting profitability and free cash flow generation into the right spot. Therefore, I would say this is basically the summary of all these topics.
Okay, thank you very much. Very helpful. Should we think about flat volumes, flat prices, or some kind of deviations? I mean, of course, it's very hard to see at this point given the uncertainty of the tariffs, but what's your feeling on that?
Patrick, at this stage, what we have is really scenarios that we are working with. If anybody can tell me what's coming tomorrow, I can give you a precise answer. I think at this stage, uncertainty, all what we can do is prepare the business and create conditions that can allow us to navigate this environment right now we are in. Yeah, let's see how things evolve over the next days, weeks, and months.
Understood. Thank you very much. Second question, other operating income was quite solid with EUR 15.5 million in Q1. I think half of this is probably emission certificate sales, if I understood this correct. Can you give us a bit more detailed split on the other components, if possible?
Thank you, Patrick. This is also a question to Nico Reiner. I think the other operating income, which was high, mentioned EUR 25.5 million in CO2 certificates. Any other components that you could share?
Basically, that's it. You mentioned it already. It's the key driver of the other operating income. The rest is relatively low topics. Therefore, I can only confirm what you said.
All right, thank you. Two more questions. What, in your view, are the effects of the hybrid capital and debt refinancing this year on the financial expenses and coupon payments in total? Could you somehow quantify that compared to 2024?
The questions with regards to the financing costs, this is also for Nico Reiner, please.
Yeah. Basically, Patrick, what we are doing, we are very cautiously and forward-looking managing our balance sheet. We are doing that in a very professional way. Therefore, you have seen in the past that we have done a couple of actions. Might it be the capital injection? Might it be the maturity extension? Or might it be the refinancing, which we did very professionally and also very successfully for LDC? Overall, when it comes to debt refinancing topics, as you mentioned them, we will come to the market and to the community in due course when we have to tell something. Overall, I can only confirm you we are on the topics, and we do that very tightly, very professionally, and very forward-looking.
Okay, thank you. Should we expect higher financing costs this year, likely?
Sorry to tell you, we are not guiding on the financing costs in our structure at Lenzing. I can only say that we are managing very intensively. Sorry, I am not able to give you and provide you any number.
All right, understood. Thank you. Last question. Do you plan on selling more CO2 certificates this year? What would be a potential effect on EBITDA?
Overall, also in regards to the CO2 certificates, we are looking in this position also pretty closely. We accumulated over the last couple of years quite a lot of these CO2 certificates. We are also watching and monitoring very tightly the overall development of the price of the CO2 certificates. If it makes sense, then we are acting here in this way as we did also in Q1. Overall, this optionality is still on the table. Therefore, we are doing that in the best way we can support Lenzing.
All right, thank you very much. I'll go back in line.
The next question comes from the line of Sebastian Bray from Berenberg.
Hello, good afternoon, and thank you for taking my questions. I have two, please. The first is on the trading that the company has seen thus far in April. I appreciate it is early, and there are various different proxies for volume growth. If I look at some of the more recent data from Shein and the Chinese fast fashion companies, they appear to be down between 15%-25% year on year in April after a pretty decent Q1. Is that broadly consistent with the type of China-focused volume declines that Lenzing has seen thus far in April? I appreciate you cannot give me a specific number, but is this in the right ballpark, the right direction? My second question is on financing. I appreciate several options are on the table, and I do not want to push you into one of them.
Is convertible debt something which Lenzing has not done historically also on the table? Thank you.
Thank you, Sebastian. Let's start with the first questions with regards to the start in the second quarter. Rohit, if you could answer that question, please.
Yeah, thanks, Sebastian, for the question. I think at the outset, let me kind of lay it this way. I think it's very difficult to correlate a company like Shein's performance to general market conditions because the value chains are pretty complex in textiles. Therefore, where we sit in the value chain, we are pretty much at the last stage of where everything else is downstream to us. In terms of what Shein is in a particular part of the apparel market, which is in fast fashion, they had a very large pivot to the U.S. in terms of market size. I think it's not a conclusion you can draw easily as a basis to see how the industry is performing at the moment. I would not be able to give you any specific numbers for us, as you can understand that.
What I can say is that where we sit, we are able to find opportunities as we are standing on different legs in the market from Turkey to India to Southeast Asia and China. We do believe in the mid to long term, if the situation does not change, the supply chains will adapt to various other countries to overcome the current situation.
The second question was with regards to the financing options, if we could also consider convertible. This one is for Nico, please.
Yeah, thank you very much. Look, basically, for professional management of a company, and this is our responsibility, we always have to think about in a holistic way on all tools which are generally available to manage the balance sheet. In this regard, also a convertible is a tool which you can think of. Basically, our thoughts at this point of time are clearly not on the equity side. Therefore, I would comment in this way that we are not at this point focusing on a convertible or something like that.
That's helpful. Thank you. Can I just ask a follow-up on pricing? It was helpful to see the viscose pricing displayed in April and what's happened to it more recently because of trade war pressures. Is lyocell and is modal generally behaving in a similar manner over April? It's a little more difficult to track.
Now, this question, yeah, this question is about prices. I would give this to you, Rohit, please.
Yeah, I mean, at the moment, Sebastian, the challenge is that the market, the generic fiber market prices, which we have shown, have shown a sudden weakness towards the end of quarter one, as what we have been experiencing. Also, again, just as a reminder that Lenzing's portfolio is a more premium kind of portfolio. Therefore, the market that we are serving may or may not behave in a way that the generic market price behaves. Therefore, as I mentioned earlier as well, if Lyocell is concerned or Viscose is concerned or Modal is concerned, the same factor would apply here in terms of Lenzing's portfolio. In terms of specific numbers, I can't hand out to you. I would say that for reasons of pricing, some of our portfolio may be slightly decoupled to what we see as the generic prices in the market.
Yes, there is a general trend which you are seeing in the fiber market pricing, which is softening a bit.
That's helpful. Thank you for taking my questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question for today. I would like to turn the conference back over to Rohit Aggarwal, CEO, for any closing remarks.
Thank you, Carmen. I just want to say thank you to everyone. As a preview, we will publish our results of the first half of 2025 on August 7. With this, I will close the call now. Thank you very much for your attention.