Mikael Staffas om Bolidens resultatkross

Talking too much.

It seems we have some sound problems there. Now you can hear me.

That's good. Now I haven't heard what you said so I might repeat it all. But it has been a good quarter. We have had a good quarter and we start with things that are not talked about so much. We have had good development in safety statistics. We have had good environmental performance. We have the lowest sick leave we have had since covid and so on. We have had good production really throughout. Our large projects are rolling on well and then we have had a good result and a strong cash flow.

So very very positive in the quarter.

Yes, so revenue in Boliden is a figure we very rarely talk about and that doesn't play a big role. This is about, for example, we buy in a rich concentrate with a lot of precious metals to our smelters, then most of it just passes through and we get paid when we sell, but it's a pure purchase cost. So our revenue can be inflated by the type of concentrate we buy. It can be inflated by higher metal prices. That is a figure we don't look at much; for us, it's important what earnings we get from it, and that is seen in free metals and in our processing production.

So that's it regarding the revenue. But as said, we have had good earnings and that earnings is good. It is worse than last year but then we had various insurance items and other results, so it is a good result here compared to the previous year.

We have had very good production, especially waste rock production. It is so that you have to mine waste rock to later be able to extract ore, and we have been a bit behind in waste rock mining for some time. Now we have worked hard on it and are starting to catch up well. This is important for production in the coming quarters, so it looks good. During the quarter itself, we still had problems with these diorite limitations on how much ore we can take in. This is something temporary. It may last a few more quarters. And then, so overall production has been good regarding the ore line as I said. Then we have very low grades. It is the lowest grade we have ever had and yet we have such a strong result. But this is something that can only get better as we go forward, and we have already talked about it at our capital markets day in March that grades will start to increase already to 2026. Maybe not much but a little, but towards 2027-2028 it will be clearly better grades.

Yes, that's correct. One can say that everything has gone well in the quarter. However, we have challenges in Tara. It is a restarted mine. It is restarted in a slightly different way than when it operated before. Above all, significantly fewer employees, in a way that should give higher priority and has given higher priority, but we are not quite up to the priority we had counted on, and therefore we cannot quite achieve the production level we had intended. So it is a work item we have to continue working on in that context. But otherwise, we repeat all our guidance from before.

Yes, the best way to measure share of business in different ways, but we usually look at our sensitivities, and then it is zinc and copper that are our most important metals, and then third and fourth come gold and silver, and they are about half as important as copper and zinc if you take a rough measure. And regarding that package, actually everything has gone well during the quarter, and that helps us naturally with profit from the general increase. And then it is so that in our accounting model, we live in a world where there are lots of provisional pricings and eventually a final pricing that lies far in the future. And that means that for us, the balance sheet prices are more important than the average prices. And we had a situation where prices increased throughout the quarter and ended at a high level on September 30, and that helps us in our result really.

and then there has been a big focus on tariffs, trade agreements, especially on rare earth metals between China and the USA. Also the EU has introduced steel tariffs on US aluminum and now the US is investigating imports of critical minerals.

Yes, that is a long piece. I have said several times, just take it easy, the direct impact of tariffs in the US on us is basically zero. We sell nothing in the US and it affects us quite little. But the indirect effect that is now being talked about is there. If this changes trade patterns, if it changes general growth and so on. It can be both negative but it can also be positive for a company like Boliden, and we may notice a bit of that now because Europe is so heavily dependent on imports from other parts of the world, so a certain supply risk awareness is starting to appear among our customers or potential customers, where there is a certain interest in having more Boliden in their supply chain than, for example, metals from other parts of the world, and that helps us in some way. It's not a big money today. Maybe no money at all, but somewhere in a politically uncertain world, it's not stupid to be the dominant metal supplier in a continent that has a chronic metal deficit. And otherwise, I can say that there is a lot of talk about these critical rare earths, and they are critical right now because they don't really exist. But if there were no copper, I can tell you what would be really critical in the world. It is clear that it is copper and zinc and nickel and lead that are the industrial metals that make the economy function. There is a functioning trade around them, and therefore there is not as much discussion about them as rare earths, which are very small volumes for a mining company, actually quite uninteresting because even if you were big in rare earths, you are still small overall.

Yes, exactly what we will prioritize and so on and how it will look for 2026. We will come back to that in early December where we have a review and a guidance session around it. But generally, we have presented at the Capital Markets Day. We presented eight that I called options, i.e., possible projects that we don't have to do any of them. They are not mandatory. And we think that portfolio looks quite good. There is a project that is very exciting on the smelter side. A whole host of projects on the mine side. Both linked to classic base metals and also some projects linked to other metals. And we are working on all these projects and then we will see which ones come forward and can climb over all the requirements we have to start projects.

Yes, so number one, I see it as quite strong regarding the economic situation both now and in the near term. We see quite good demand. But your important question is how do we prepare to also handle rainy days? And that is a cornerstone in everything we have. It is both linked to how we have our financial planning, how we position our balance sheet, how we use hedging instruments and so on, all of which is linked to how we will handle bad days. Because we know that sooner or later there will be a real crash, a real commodity crash around this, and then it will be tough. But we feel that we have good preparedness in how we work, so yes, it will be tough but I think it may be less tough for us than for many others.

Yes, we haven't counted on it happening but we prepare for it.

We have bought an umbrella but we hope not to have to use it.

Thank you very much yourself.