SSAB AB (publ) (SSAAF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-01-29 11:06:23 ET

SSAB AB (publ) (SSAAF)

Q4 2024 Earnings Conference Call

January 29, 2025 03:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Per Hillstrom - Head of Investor Relations

Johnny Sjostrom - President & CEO

Leena Craelius - Executive Vice President and CFO

Conference Call Participants

Adrian Gilani - ABG Sundal Collier

Kaleb Solomon - SEB

Tristan Gresser - BNP Paribas Exane

Tom Zhang - Barclays

Patrick Mann - Bank of America

Dominic O'Kane - JPMorgan

Bastian Synagowitz - Deutsche Bank

Johannes Grunselius - DNB

Presentation

Per Hillstrom

Good morning and welcome to SSAB's Quarterly Review. Yes, good morning, everyone. Thank you everyone and wanted to start off here. Welcome to this presentation of the year-end report. My name is Per Hillstrom. I'm Head of Investor Relations at SSAB. With me today is our President and CEO, Johnny Sjostrom; and CFO, Leena Craelius.

And if we look at the agenda, we can see that Johnny will be starting here with an introduction and also look at Q4 and the year. In the introduction, Johnny will talk a little bit about the strategic path going forward. And then the Q4 as normal. Leena will then come back with the financials. And at the end, Johnny will close up with outlook and a summary. And as always, we have -- you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end.

So by that, please, Johnny, the floor is yours.

Johnny Sjostrom

Thank you, Per, and good morning again everyone. We just briefly went through the agenda, so I will not go through that again. So looking at our vision, this is a vision we've had for a very long period of time, but I just want to emphasize the importance of it, and it's more valid now than ever. SSAB is a company with a long history of product development, working with uniqueness, unique products. And our vision is to make the world more lighter and more stronger and more sustainable through our advanced high-strength steels that we are developing and producing and selling.

I also want to take the opportunity to sort of to highlight the cornerstone of our strategy. So we've had for a long period of time, a market leader, a home market leader strategy, both in the Nordics. And as a part of that, of course, we have the subsidiaries, Ruukki Construction and Tibnor but we also have a whole market leader position in United States, something that we would like to maintain. But one of the things that is extremely important for me, and I think that we are also very, very good at is the global leadership in special steel and premium steels. We have seen a very strong growth, not only in Special Steels, but also in SSAB Europe, where we've had record sales to the automotive industry selling advanced high-strength steels.

And then, of course, we cannot forget about sort of leading the green steel transition or transformation, something that we have been good at, and we continue to do that. And we have a lot of customers asking for corporations with us so they can get green steel for their electrical vehicles as an example.

Now looking at sort of the Lulea investment, if you take that as an example, there have been some questions about the logic behind the transformation in Lulea. I just want to highlight that the Lulea investment is not only related to a green transformation. The fact is that we have today a setup where we produce slabs in Lulea and transported by train all the way down to Borlange and then we produce the plate or sheets in Borlange.

The whole strip mill we have in Borlange is from around 1965. It's quite old. We have a need to upgrade our equipment to make it more efficient and also to be able to make more advanced steel and increase our capabilities. That is extremely important for us. But one of the things that I just want to emphasize that we're also building a cold mill complex in Lulea. The cold mill complex will give us additional capacity in the bottleneck production processes, such as continuous annealing that we have in Borlange. That is where we do our very unique products, but we also have a bottleneck in our galvanizing line number 3 in Hämeenlinna and we need more additional capacity there....

Read the full article on Seeking Alpha

For further details see: