Boliden Stock

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to Boliden's Q3 2026 Results Presentation. 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, Hakan Gabrielsson. We will also have a Q&A session, which I will moderate, and we will start here in Stockholm. Mikael, welcome.

Thank you, Olof, and welcome to all of you here in Stockholm and everybody who is listening to this online. It is, of course, an especially pleasant day to come and visit you all. We have presented our quarter results, and it's the best quarter result ever, which always is good to say. Of course, helped by the fact that we have very good price and terms, but also from a very good production quarter in general. So let's jump into the material, more easily said than done. And here it goes.

So the highlights, as I already pointed out, we have strong earnings of about SEK 4.9 billion. We had a solid performance in general across the mines. I'm picking here specifically Somincor, which is doing very well and also Kevitsa, which is doing well. And the ramp-up plan in Garpenberg is also going very much according to what we have said we're going to do, even though we're, of course, still much below where we were last year.

We also have in our smelters, especially Harjavalta, a very strong quarter, I would say, almost exceptional availability of the equipment in Harjavalta, and we also have a new record in Harjavalta in terms of nickel feed.

The Odda smelter is moving on in a much better pace than it has in previous quarters. We have come up to an availability in the quarter of about 50%, way up from the 17% in Q2. And in the last month of the quarter, in September, we had 70% availability. So the curve is clearly going in the right direction as of right now.

And then during the quarter, as you all know, we also announced that we are going to go ahead and acquire, first of all, the Mota Tim stake in Nexa and then after that, also continue with a broader offer for the minority shares.

Looking at the financial performance, you can see here very clearly a big uptake around these ones. We have the operating profit of SEK 4.9 billion. There's a little bit of planned maintenance in this quarter as well, although much less than in Q2. We have a positive cash flow. Hakan will come back in a little while and talk a little bit more about the details. We have the net debt to equity, the gearing is now down to 21% again. And CapEx at SEK 3.4 billion, right exactly how we guided and what we also had planned for.

The key projects, I'll start with the Ronnskar tankhouse because as we have always said, we intended to start it up in Q4 of this year. And earlier today, we actually had power on in the first of 3 sections in Ronnskar. So the tankhouse is, as I'm speaking right now, already producing on that first section. The other 2 sections are intended to have the power on later during the quarter. And as we go into Q1, we should have a full pace of production.

The Boliden Area sand recycling is working according to plan. The Ronnskar mentum is still very early days, but for ramp-up in the first half of '29. The Garpenberg project, those who read Swedish news will know that we had the official start of the project with the ceremony for the first excavation for the new shaft the other day, and that one is on track as well, although it's very early days, but that looks good. And then the Odda expansion, the ramp-up is ongoing. The availability of the roaster is increasing. As I said before, we saw 50% on average for the full quarter, 70% in September, and this is clearly moving in the right direction. The mechanical issues that we had in the beginning linked not so much to the assured critical equipment, but linked to things like transport and other things have now been cleared out to a large extent.

On the ESG side, we did not have the best of quarters in terms of lost time injuries. There's also been a fatality during the quarter or actually right after the quarter in early October, a very unfortunate event. It's still a little bit unclear to us what really happened and also a little bit unclear whether it is a workplace-related fatality or whether it is a sickness fatality. It doesn't really matter. We've had a fatality. We're working around it, trying to figure out what really happened and how we can get better from that. The other lost time injuries also in the quarter was not brilliant. So we had a higher level than what we had last year, and we continue to work with these issues relentlessly.

The sick leave, however, is going towards the right direction. We now had 4.0% in the quarter. That's around the level where we were before the pandemic. We have been on much higher levels. And you can say this is the first time we're back to pre-pandemic levels.

And then the greenhouse gas emissions is going according to our plan.

Market development. I think that you all know that we have good price terms. And you can see here that when the Boliden index, which is the red line here, has plateaued, but on a very high level compared to before. And just from 2021, we're at index 175, so 75% up for the mix of metals that we have. And also the currencies are helping, although a little less scale, but the currencies have also been helpful in this situation.

I also must point out the sulfuric acid prices, which are also helping quite a lot in this situation.

The prices for copper and zinc, I'm not going to do any detailed market analysis, but you can both see that compared to the cost levels in the industry, we have high price levels most everybody in the industry makes money. You can see that in the copper side, actually costs are going up, which could be an indication that the margins might get a little bit smaller going forward. This cost increase on the copper side has to do with diesel prices going up, also has to do with the sulfuric acid prices going up, which for many copper mines is a cost.

On the zinc side, also a good margin on this one and more of a flattish cost level development across the industry.

If we then go to Boliden and look at our production, as I said earlier, we've had a good production. Aitik has a mill volume of 10.3 million tonnes, which is clearly better than last year, also strong mine production when you add on the waste rock production, the stripping going on is very strong. The copper grade is in line with previous quarter, higher than last year, but it is lower than we had indicated in the guidance, and we will reduce guidance for the copper grade for the whole year in Aitik based on this, but we will increase the guidance for throughput for the year.

Boliden Area, very stable operation, looks very good. The Garpenberg, yes, it's not a good thing that we don't have the [indiscernible] available, but given that situation, very good production in the quarter, producing according to the plan that we had internally and that we've given to the market, actually slightly better grade than we had guided for.

Kevitsa, record volume, very good. I mean it's a mixed grade, but it's still a relatively good level. Somincor, very strong, particularly copper. We are very positively surprised by Somincor coming into the family. Tara, a little bit lower than what we had liked to, but still within reason. And Zinkgruvan had stable operations. So mixing those together, very good mine production.

On the smelter side, let me take Harjavalta first, which is outstanding in terms of equipment availability, has had a very strong quarter in general, and it's a quarterly record in terms of feed on the nickel line. Kokkola, also very strong production, which is clear that we also get better production than last quarter, very strong production. [ Ronnskar ] has had a maintenance stop around that and also lower silver production due to lack of availability of one of the silver furnaces that is now fixed. And as of Q4, we're full speed also on the silver line. And then Odda, as I said, we've had the availability going up, which is much better than it was before. We have, however, encouraged somewhat of a difficulty on the old Odda roaster and the associated acid plant, which means that we have more planned maintenance going into the old roaster and the old asset plant in Q4, and we're also, therefore, guiding up for total effect from maintenance stops for smelters from 450 to 500.

With that, Hakan, go through numbers, please.

Thank you, and good afternoon. So as Mikael pointed out, a strong quarter. We are reporting an operating profit of NOK 4.9 billion, which is clearly up to the comparisons. And it is, in fact, the best quarter so far for this profit level. CapEx, SEK 3.4 billion, in line with guidance. We also, in this quarter, had SEK 219 million payout for acquisition activities. That is the contingent consideration for the acquisition of Somincor and Zinkgruvan. These 2 newer assets have had a really good development, both in terms of operational development and also prices. And as we have kind of a profit sharing in the contingent consideration, there is a payout going to the sellers.

Free cash flow, SEK 1.1 billion. I'll come back to that.

Looking then per business area, as you can see both in the charts and in the table, there is a good development in both business areas, starting with mines up to close to SEK 4 billion. Compared to Q2, mines are helped, of course, by the strong price development, but there is also a significant effect from Garpenberg producing in line with the guidance.

Also a good development in smelters. And there, you have to remember that Q2 was, as usual, impacted by quite extensive planned maintenance. And of course, smelters also has some help from prices.

Moving into operating profit deviation, the EBIT bridge year-on-year, starting first in Q3 of this year compared to Q3 of last year, we have a significant -- a very big impact from prices, SEK 3.2 billion. This is, of course, mostly metal prices, where we have a good development of copper, zinc and gold to take them in order of importance. It also includes a significant effect from provisional pricing. But it's not only the metal price, it's also a small, but significant increase of byproducts. We have in here about SEK 200 million from sulfuric acid.

Volumes are down compared to last year, and this is overexplained by Garpenberg. So we have lower production in Garpenberg and then as a result of the seismic events last year or early this year, but it's partly offset by better production at other sites. Some that are worth mentioning are Aitik with a good production, Somincor performing well and Harjavalta, which Mikael talked about.

Costs compared to the same quarter last year are up by about SEK 600 million. In there, there is an oil-driven inflation that hits oils, it hits chemicals and it hits transports. But we also have some additional costs in Odda during the ramp-up. And also due to the fact that we have a strong third quarter, we've had to increase the provisions for our profit sharing programs that goes to [indiscernible].

In the other line, the plus NOK 259 million, there are different things, foreign exchange and others, but the biggest individual item there is the sales of excess electricity that we do in Odda. Of course, when we'll get up to full capacity there, this part will disappear because we'll consume the electricity ourselves. But for now, there is a significant impact from sales of electricity.

Comparing instead sequentially Q3 to Q2, it's a similar story, a good development of prices and terms. Again, it's copper, zinc and gold primarily, but also about SEK 100 million each from foreign exchange and sulfuric acid. Volumes compared to Q2 are up 900 million. Getting Garpenberg up from where we stood in Q2 to the current rate in Q3 is about 1/3 of that amount, meaning then SEK 300 million. And then in addition, we've got better grades in Aitik and good production in Somincor, Zinkgruvan and less planned maintenance in smelting. So good volume quarter.

Costs are lower than in Q2. That's 2 parts in that. It's less planned maintenance this quarter. And then we also have some seasonal effects where we have a little bit of a lower cost during the vacation period that we had in Q3, even if it's easy to forget now when we are in October.

Depreciation is up SEK 80 million. That's largely Odda. Odda is not depreciating in full pace yet. And we expect another SEK 150 million roughly in pace in Q4, and then Odda will be depreciating at the full pace after the expansion. But we had some impact already in this quarter.

And then further on for next year, we will, of course, have an effect in Ronnskar also when that is producing.

Moving over to cash flow. I think we commented the operating profit and the investment side. Working capital is minus SEK 1 billion. That's 2 things that are worth highlighting. With the price development that we've had, we get a quite significant impact on working capital for better prices. We tie more inventory in Swedish krona than if we have a higher copper price and high zinc prices and so on. So that's a significant part. But we haven't quite been able to reduce all of the working capital that we tied in Q2 either.

Looking forward on the working capital side, I'd just like to remind you that in Q4, we will tie working capital in the tankhouse in smelter in Vunhar. We mentioned a number of SEK 2 billion last quarter. And since then, prices have increased even further. So filling the tankhouse with with copper and gold and so on, that means that we're going to build some working capital. So for those of you modeling, please include that.

Apart from that, I think we've covered the remaining parts in cash flow. And that leaves us with this final slide from my side. It's a strong balance sheet. We've got 20% debt-to-equity ratio, which I think is a good level to be when we look back at the Lundin acquisition, and we look forward to the next acquisition. We have a net payment capacity of SEK 19 billion, and all in all, a strong balance sheet. So Mikael, do you want to continue?

Thank you. Thank you. So first of all, just to remind you about the Capital Markets Day that we are planning for March. It's very high time to report your participation if you want to join us.

Outlook going forward, I think we touched upon this very much. There is a lowering for this year of the grades in Aitik, but a hiring of the throughput in Aitik. Apart from that, there's not really anything that changes. There's a little bit of a difference of the classification on the CapEx on the mining side with a larger part going to mine sustaining and a smaller part to other mines. But otherwise, the guidance is very stable.

Well, I should also, by the way, mention that as I said before, smelters planned maintenance was up from SEK 450 million to SEK 500 million. So with that, I leave the floor open to questions and for Olof to monitor us through this session.

Ladies and gentlemen, that opens up our Q&A session, and we will start here in Stockholm. And we have Johannes Grunselius from SB1 Markets, please.

It's Johannes Grunselius, SB1. Two questions, please. The first one on Altik. You have lowered the grade guidance for us to 0.16. How should we think about 2027? I know you're going to talk more in depth in December, but could you give us some color at this point?

Not really. You're absolutely right. We're going to talk about in December and the mine plan for next year is not finished yet. And until it is, I'm not going to comment too much.

But if we look at the previous guidance, that implied an uplift in second half year, which is not coming through. Should we think that, that is basically pushed 1 or 2 quarters? Could you help us with that?

But that is -- I can give you a little bit of light, but there is some -- there's part of that is being pushed out. And there is also one thing that we hope is more of a one-off effect of this one that we're having a couple of benches, which have a higher waste rock dilution than we are used to in Aitik. And that's also linked to why we're having a higher throughput is that we are not trying to separate this waste rock. We're loading it all through the mill, helping on the volume, but being negative on the grade. We, of course, need to look around this. We have a sense that Aitik should go back to normal i.e., that we don't have much of waste rock dilution as we come to the deeper benches, and we've been trying to check for this as this thing has happened. So it's unexpected waste rock dilution and a combination also that we're by mining a little bit slower than initial thoughts, it takes a bit longer to get to the better grades.

Then the other question I have is on sulfuric acid. I think you said was it SEK 200 million plus in delta year-over-year. I know you have plenty of annual contracts in your portfolio. Do you expect sort of more incremental profits from acid sulfur going forward given where prices are right now?

To that, yes. If you want to know how much, I need to look at my neighbor.

I'm not going to guide how much, but we see a positive trend in there. So I think that we'll see a positive number also next quarter, but I'm not going to give an exact number on that yet.

Johan Sjoberg, Nordea Securities, please.

Could you talk a little bit upon the EBITDA contribution from [indiscernible] from Ronnskar when you're ramping up that given the current metal prices? And also sort of how we should look at that into Q4 given the positive trends in -- sorry, Odda and then also when it comes to Ronnskar tankouse, when we should start to see the positive impact on EBIT from that?

It's good to hear somebody saying Ronnskar. It's been a long time since I heard that word last time, but it's a nice name. I will give it back the numbers exactly to Hakan, but just a sense of it. We haven't had anything come through yet in [indiscernible], and therefore, it's all ahead of us the positive impact that we're going to see.

On Odda, it's a little bit more complex. And so as you saw, we've gotten much better -- as I said, we've got a much better throughput. There is more still to come. But there also in Odda, we have been holding back on silver-rich concentrates because until we have everything under control, we don't want to waste -- risk wasting silver into tailings, and therefore, there, you will get the effect once we will start daring to take silver-rich concentrates in there. Hakan, numbers.

Yes. Well, I'm not going to give you an update on numbers for both cases because there are so many moving parts with sulfuric acid zinc and so on. But I'd rather refer back to the Capital Markets Day where we gave an update. And then, I mean, it has moved in the right direction since then. Only additional comment is that for, Odda, I think it's important and also for [indiscernible], there is -- there are a few weeks before you sort of put it in until you get it out. So for example, in Q3, we had almost no extra effect from Odda even if it's moving in the right direction. So I think it will -- there is some lag, but we'll see money starting flowing in, in in Q4.

And then a follow-up question on Johannes on sulfuric acid and the contracts. Given -- so how big share of your volumes have been exposed to these price increases, i.e., how much is sort of renegotiated next year? So the delta between Q1 and Q4?

Well, the -- there are all kind of versions in there. It's a fairly small part that is directly linked to spot. In particular, if you read in the newspapers about global spot prices, that's a very tiny part of our sales. Most is connected to European indexes of various kinds. And then contract by contract, it differs on how often it's reset. But if anything, I'd say that 80% of the production we have is connected to European index on some frequency yearly or shorter.

Okay. But how big share have you seen already being impacted by higher prices? And how much is sort of yet to come next year?

That comes gradually. But I think when we're through with this year, we'll have a fairly recent impact on all of the sales. But it's -- there are a few contracts reset every quarter. So it's continuous, if you like.

Kaleb Solomon, SEB.

In Q2, you expected Odda to reach full production during Q3. And you said roaster availability averaged 50% this quarter. And I think you said it was 70% by September. Is that a fair sort of run rate to assume for Q4? And what still needs to be resolved before you can sort of sustain full production?

As always, when you have these things, I should say, by the way, that when we run, we run 100%. So we don't really run it slower. The question is how do you avoid having to stop as many times. And I think you've had the discussions we've had mechanical issues. We've had issue with the safety system that has blocked out at different stages when it should not have and so on. And we're getting better and better at this. And I think that 70% should be kind of the new floor and then moving up towards somewhat like 90% where the availability should be for equipment like this.

So I think we're we're quite close to getting there to get the ramp up. And then once we have the ramp-up, just to get everything clear, once we have the ramp-up, when we have the full feed, that's the only time we can start using all the later stages, the leaching and everything else going on full pace. And that's when we also need to make sure that we get the recoveries of silver right and start mixing in more silver-rich concentrate. So it will take some time to fine-tune this thing. But I think the mechanical problems that we've had, which has been the problem, especially in Q2, mechanical problems that shouldn't happen, they are behind us. The mechanical issues are solved.

Okay. That's helpful. And just on Aitik volumes, when we ask you about the sort of very good development last quarter. You partly mentioned seasonality and less relining. But is it fair to sort of interpret you now as this being a lasting improvement? And should we expect this to carry into next year?

Yes, we had a very good Q2. Q3 is a little bit slower than Q2 because of the reasons you just mentioned, we think we reached a better base level, if you want to say so, in Aitik.

Anyone else here in Stockholm? Okay. Operator, then we start with the international guests, please.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Alain Gabriel from Morgan Stanley.

I have a couple of questions. Firstly is on Oda. I think, Mikael, you mentioned that 70% utilization is a new floor. Is the ramp-up to 100% going to be a straight line from here? Or will it be more of a hockey stick trajectory? And over what time period do you expect that now that you're over the mechanical issues to get to 100%? That's my first question.

And here, you should be careful with 100%. We never have 100% availability. There's always some downtime in a roaster. I have said that 90% is probably a reasonable full availability. And we hope that we're going to get there pretty soon. Now our self company is not so strong regarding Odda because I said that before. But generally speaking, we should get there pretty soon to get the throughput in place and working with the other parts.

And the second question is on the [indiscernible]. Do you have any update on the NCO process for Peruvian listed subsidiaries? I believe the last public comments you made, you had given an estimate -- a rough estimate of around SEK 3 billion to take out the minority payers. Does this figure still stand? And what are the next regulatory or legal steps that are needed for you to move forward with the process?

I'm going to have to come back to -- I'm going to answer the way I hate to answer, but I'm going to answer that due to legal advice regarding both the voluntary tender offer and the mandatory tender offer, I will refer to what's in the press release and not say anything more.

The next question comes from Adrian Gilani from ABG Sundal Collier.

I guess, first of all, on Garpenberg, you're right that the ramp-up is going as planned. But if anything, you seem to be above the 30% utilization rate that you talked about previously. Is that just sort of a normal quarterly fluctuation? Or can there be some upside to the ramp-up time line you communicated before in Garpenberg?

Well, I mean, the guidance we've given is the 1.5 million tonnes for the whole year, right? So that's what we need to deal with. And then you can say a couple of 10,000 up and down in a quarter is not really relevant. So we are very much in line with the guidance we've given. Somebody made a little bit of a smart comment that, okay, you're going to go from 100,000 tonnes to 200,000 tonnes, is that happening on New Year's Eve? No, it's not really happening on New Year's Eve, it's happening gradually. So yes, theoretically, we could go a little bit faster in Q4. We're not going to be at the pace of 200,000 tonnes per day on January 1 either. So it's going to be a gradual piece, but we're guiding for whole years.

Understood. And then second question, could you talk a bit about your view on benchmark [indiscernible] heading into 2027? If [indiscernible] not be negative, would you still stick to your policy of [indiscernible] benchmark?

We will stick to that one because we have those contracts already in place. So we cannot really step away to a large extent from the strategy that we have. We will have roughly 80% on benchmark even if they go negative. So I'm not going to speculate what the number will be. The number will be what the number will be. I was just making a general comment that if you add in the very bad treatment charges with the very good value of free metals and the good value of the sulfuric acid, smelter terms as a package are not that bad.

The next question comes from Liam Fitzpatrick from DB.

Three questions from me. Firstly, on Odda, you mentioned Hawkan excess power sales in Q3. Could you quantify for that number for us? Second question is on working capital. Was any of the SEK 2 billion build related to Ronnskar in Q3? Or is that all in Q4? And then related to that, we normally see a seasonal reduction in working capital in Q4. I mean, ex Ronnskar, should that still come through? And then the final question is a bit of a follow-up on treatment charges. It's tough to model the TCs into next year given we're now in negative territory. So are you able to give us some sort of number for copper TCs, like if we were to see -- or if 2026 was a negative TC of, say, minus [ SEK 100 million ], what would that have meant in terms of impact on EBIT this year?

Do you want to start, or would you like...

You can -- I think this is yours, all of them. So you go ahead.

Yes. Okay. Starting with then the excess electricity, excess power, I think it's about in the quarter, just over SEK 150 million. Working capital, nothing in -- nothing of the Rönkä tankhouse working capital that we're going to tie the SEK 2 billion, nothing of that happened in Q3. All of that will happen in Q4. You're right, seasonally, we typically have a good fourth quarter when we come to working capital. I'm not -- I don't think -- I think it's going to be -- the underlying development is probably going to be pretty okay, except the capital build in [indiscernible], but perhaps less so than last year. We ended last year on very low inventory numbers, and I don't think we'll be at quite the same level this year.

Then also, I can just mention that in a copper smelter, the value of the inventories is very big. So it doesn't take very much of a hiccup in the ramp-up to build extra working capital in there. So I'm a bit conservative in my estimates for Q4 working capital, but you're right, the seasonality is still there. So that's a fact. And then could you please repeat the last question? Or did you get that?

What's the impact of negative 100 TC or whatever done? I don't know -- we published the TC sensitivities.

Yes, we have the sensitivity in the [indiscernible], but it's a bit -- Around... Yes. I think we'll have to redo those. But what we do see right now is that I think if you just work at the feed level, I think you can get the general idea. But TC is a very small part of the money we make in smelters. In our case, it's positive, though, because we do get payments for complex material in the feed. But I have to come back to some form of sensitivity on those TCs.

The next question comes from Jason Fairclough.

Just 2 questions for me. One, any thoughts you could frame for us on how the smelters are under-earning relative to their capitalization and the recent investments that you've made? That's the first one. Second one, Mikael, you seem quite excited about Somincor. I'm just wondering how you're thinking about the optionality in this asset. Is there any option for a low capital cost debottlenecking there?

If we start with the second one, the answer is yes. There are -- and we've talked about that many times, there are geographic or geological potential in there. If you read the European Union list of strategic projects, there is an expansion in Somincor in there. So yes, there are clearly options for, as you described, typical greenfield expansions with relatively little CapEx. So I would say, yes, the answer is yes.

The first question, just to understand, you were talking about the underperformance of smelters, and it depends, of course, where you put your baseline. I'm not sure that there is really an underperformance of smelter, but there's an upside of smelters, which I would argue is all of the guided uptake in EBITDA in Ronnskar because nothing of that has happened as of Q3. And it is most of the indicated EBITDA uptake on Odda, even though some has happened, but that as Håkan pointed out, with the fact that there is a timing delay between the time you can feed, which is linked to the availability until you get the product out, most of that has not come out yet. And we've also had still somewhat higher cost for adapt options we need to do. So I would argue also that most of the upside as communicated in the Capital Markets Day in Odda is ahead of us.

So sorry, Mikael, could you just remind us what EBITDA outlook potentially see any the year here?

In the Capital Markets Day, I'm looking at Hakan to remind me if I say the wrong thing, but I think that we said it was EUR 150 million in Odda at the Aitik, which was at the time of the Capital Market Day, EUR 250 million with the price and terms as of March this year. And for Russia, we said SEK 1 billion to start with, that we said, I think, had gone to SEK 1.5 billion, right, with the prices and terms as of March this year. And since March, the prices and terms have improved. So this number should be slightly higher today, but we don't have -- at least I don't have an exact number.

Okay. So overall, we should be talking about, call it, SEK 2 billion to SEK 3 billion improvement once things are running properly...

Yes. If you add what I said, it was SEK 4 billion.

The next question comes from Amos Fletcher from Barclays.

A couple of questions. First one was just on the subject of NEXA. It had a credit rating downgrade to junk earlier this week. I just wanted to ask what are the implications if we get another agency downgrading the bonds get put to the company.

You can put this in 2 ways. There will be the opportunity for the counterpart to ask for a prepayment on the bonds. This particular one that happened is going to have a quite limited impact. The other ones could have a bigger impact if they were to happen. And then it's a question whether anybody wants to prepay or whether they would like to stick with them anyway. And I would say that this is a little bit of a complicated matter has to do with many things, but we feel relatively good about the situation.

Okay. And then just, I guess, a little bit more clarity on the working capital side. Just whether you have built all of the concentrate inventory at Oda that you are requiring for the full ramp-up or whether there's going to be any more ramp in Q4 that we should be aware of?

I think basically, we've built all we have to build in Odda, and we haven't built anything that we need to build in. I think that's the easy way of putting it.

And then I just wanted to ask on -- I suppose [indiscernible] on the Odda ramp that you're saying to get to 90% [indiscernible]. And then what kind of time frame for getting the recovery right and then putting the more silver-rich concentrate feed through the plant. Is that something that happens kind of through H1 next year? Or is it likely to take a bit longer?

As I said, my kind of self-confidence in promising things in other is a little bit low, but I would say it should clearly happen in the first half of next year.

Okay. And then I just want to ask on -- you're mentioning about D&A uplift or depreciation from Ronnskar as it ramps up in 2027. If you have any sort of guidance on the quantum of D&A [indiscernible]...

On depreciation, it's about, let's see, SEK 150 million we're talking about roughly a quarter.

The next question comes from Daniel Major from UBS.

First one on Garpenberg, last couple of quarters, you've given us quarterly EBITDA, EBIT kind of run rate just to help us model through the year. Clearly, volumes improved. Can you give us the same or frame it a different way, how much of the volume delta in mines quarter-on-quarter came from Garpenberg?

See if I can -- starting to think what I should say. I think if we compare Q2 to Q3 and talk about the volume aspect, there was about SEK 300 million in volume uplift between the quarter. And that also brought the mine from a slight loss to close to SEK 300 million EBIT profit Q2 to Q3.

So around SEK 300 million. Okay. The second one, I think a little surprised both mining and smelting had a positive cost benefit in the quarter given some of the fuel pressures. Can you just remind us the fuel sensitivity from a perspective of any time lag if the status quo for European diesel pricing remains the same Q4 and into next year, what would the delta -- cost delta be?

Well, there is a little bit of a time lag, but I can give you the overall numbers that we spent in the quarter and then you can apply various percentages. On oil and diesel, we spent about SEK 400 million in the quarter. So depending on price developments from here, that's the base. Power, we spent about SEK 700 million in the quarter. And on other forms of energy, it's about SEK 100 million. So that's what we have. And then in addition to that, the diesel also impacts transport, chemicals, although with some lag. So I think if we spent $400 million on diesel, I think -- oil and diesel, I think you can add roughly the same amount on chemicals and transports. So that's the base, and then you can apply the percentages that you want to apply on that.

Okay. If I could just follow up on that, you said there's some time lag. I mean if it just remain in Q4 and into next year, would that be material? Or would you realize kind of uplift in the spot price this quarter?

I think we would largely have it in. I guess it's a month lag or something like that. It's not -- we will have most of it.

Okay. That's clear. And then maybe a final one. What was the provisional pricing impact on the quarter?

Provisional pricing was about SEK 200 million positive. And when I say provisional pricing, then, as usual, I refer to the preliminary price volumes at the end of Q2 that were then finally priced in Q3. That had a positive effect of SEK 200 million.

The next question comes from Matt Greene from Goldman Sachs.

Mikael, just a quick question on Garpenberg just on -- you touched on production is recovering as planned. But just more on development meters, it's fallen again quarter-on-quarter. Where do you need to get those rates to to support -- sorry, 2.3 million tonnes next year? And I guess just trying to sort of see if there's any technical personnel or equipment constraints in you being able to lift those development meters, appreciating that you do need to open up new mining areas given 70%, 75% of your working areas were lost with [indiscernible].

I think we are at around 1,300 meters, right, [ 13,350 ] meters of development. And that's roughly what we need. So we are not with a big margin, but we are tunneling at roughly the pace that we need to tunnel in order to be able to meet what we have guided for and also to be able to do the tunneling that's needed for then the new shaft that is also now starting to be put in place.

The next question comes from Krishan Agarwal from Citigroup.

Most of them have been answered. A quick follow-up on the Nexar process. So you've announced in the release that you've got an approval on October 27 for one of the water FDI in the Swedish market. Can you help us with any of the other major regulatory approval that are still pending for the transaction? And also the vote which you're going to held on November 23, that has to be the simple majority or the super majority?

So to start in the back where that's the simple majority needed for that in our AGM. And then if you look at -- there are altogether roughly 15 regulatory approvals that we need. That's a combination of the ones we've already gotten, the foreign direct investment in Sweden. There's a combination of the permit that we need in Brazil for owning some natural resources and then anticompetition rulings that we need from roughly 10 countries. All of them are well in progress and well processing, but it's only one so far that we've really gotten. But we feel that the process is okay for a closing in Q1, but you never know. We don't control the process.

And then [indiscernible] China?

No, not China. China is not on the list.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Christian Kopfer from Arctic Securities.

All right. A few follow-ups from my side. Firstly, you talked about the guidance in Aitik. And I appreciate that you update on the grades there in second half. And I also -- if I understood you correctly, it seems that there is some upside to volume guidance in Garpenberg for Q4. If I look at pretty much all other mine assets and if I try to square those production numbers to your full year guidance, it seems like there is upside more or less all over the place, including grades. So I mean, are you just being cautious? Or should we expect pretty much haven't down in Q4?

I think that we've always warned everybody to try to -- when you're standing at Q3, you get a full year number and you're trying to kind of work out what Q4 is by taking the full year minus the 3 quarters that have been presented. There is always a big kind of risk in taking that too long. And I would also say that don't take that too seriously. When we don't change the guidance, that means that we're more or less going to continue the way that we have guided before and don't take that too long. So it looks pretty good, but don't overdo it, Christian.

All right. And then just a small detail perhaps [indiscernible] -- sorry if you already talked about it if I missed it, but you had some minus number on metal premiums. Where is that coming from? And also pretty big minus number on TCRC. Is that related or what's going on?

Well, Hakan, I'll let you go into the detail, but TC/RCs must be spot related. I mean we do have some spot in the mix that will go through there. The premiums, Hakan, help me.

Well, as you say, the TC level or the premium level is related to spot during vacation periods. And the TC that's -- I'll have to get back on that. I mean we're following the benchmark, but then you have quarterly variations depending on the amount of complex material, the amount of, for instance, Mercury and similar that we get extra payments for. So it is a variation. And given the ramp-up of Odda, it has been a bit -- the flows have been a bit more volatile than usually. So I'll come back to you separately on that, I think.

But that's a good point just if you're comparing premiums Q-on-Q, we always have lower premiums in Q3 because of the vacation period and thus selling more overseas with lower premiums when industry in Europe take vacation.

The next question comes from Eric Ruger from Fernley Securities.

I had a few questions. On Tara, I see unchanged full year guidance. This approximately 500 kilotons milled in 4Q, which is roughly 60% above 3Q and subsequent previous quarters. What supports this implied acceleration going forward?

Once again, I will refer to what you said, you have to be a little bit careful exactly how you look at the guidance and exactly what kind of conclusion you do draw for Q4 individually. I also pointed out by Christian just a way ago, I think that there is some upside to certain numbers, there could be downside to certain numbers as well in terms of guidance, and we have not overspent going into the exact details of certain mines. In general, we -- Tara is continuing more or less where it is, maybe slightly better in Q4 because things are sorting itself out, but it's in line with what has happened before.

Also following the proposed next acquisition, should we expect the balance sheet and deleveraging to take priority over additional growth investments? I'm thinking, for example, such as [indiscernible].

Well, it's a good question, but it's a little bit difficult to answer right now. We will answer capital commitments to projects like [indiscernible] or [indiscernible] as they mature and what you will take a look into what the balance sheet will look like in every time.

Now having said that, you know that those 2 big ticket items are a couple of years out, which means it gives us a few years of hopefully good positive cash flow to make sure that we have a balance sheet where we want it to be.

And that's a good segue for my last question. On Garpenberg, you're reiterating the 2.3 million tonnes production target for '27. I still mention of ongoing permitting process for additional waste following the seismic event. How confident are you that the necessary approvals can be secured in time? And does your 2.3 million tonnes guidance assume that the new stockpile is operational for the first half of '27?

You're referring to and now just for everybody's clearance, there's been some discussions in Sweden that we have asked for a permit to store more waste rock above on surface for our plan going ahead in Garpenberg and that the county Board who can give an exemption have decided this is too much of a change to give an exemption. We need to get an altered environmental permit from the court. And that's what you're referring to.

I think just to be very clear, we do not have any issue to handle the waste rock. There are many other ways of doing it, including the kind of very simple one to just put it through the mills and put the tailings out in the tailings facility because we have full permit for that. It's a little bit stupid to spend energy on grinding waste rock just to put it in a tailings facility, and I think everybody is aware of this. So I don't think that in the end of the day, this is going to be any issue whatsoever. And there are lots of plans that might not be the perfect plans if for some reason, this permit gets delayed.

The next question comes from Boris Bourdet from Kepler Cheuvreux.

It's a follow-up on Garpenberg following your comments on the SEK 300 million sequential improvement. I just wanted to check that's an EBIT figure as far as I understand, and that compares to something that was close to 0 in Q2. And I would be interested in getting if that's actually EBIT contribution, how much is the related depreciation?

It's an EBIT number, but the depreciation is not very variable. So it's fixed. So it will be the same in Q2 and Q3. So the EBIT change is pretty much the same number as you get as a revenue change. The variable cost is very limited in this situation.

Okay. So last year, the depreciation was [ 650 ] million. So we would divide that number by [ 400 ] depreciation by quarter, right?

That's correct with the addition that we wrote off a few hundred million SEK and that goes away from the depreciation base. But apart from that, you should be pretty close to what you're saying.

So with that, it looks like we're coming to the end of the questions. Then I would just like to wish all of you a very happy All Saints Day if you're in the part of the world that celebrates All Saints. I wish you also then a very good end of the year, and I look forward to seeing most of you in -- well, some of you, we will talk to at least through a press release in early December with the guidance. Otherwise, we'll see you all in this setting in 3 months from now. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to this webcast based on today's press release. 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.

Mikael, welcome.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this webcast regarding the announcement we just made this morning about the acquisition of a majority stake in Nexa Resources. We will go through -- I will go through some of the key features of the -- both the target and of the deal, and then we will open up for questions and answers.

So if you look at this from a Boliden point of view, Boliden is clearly ready for -- to take a next step. We've had a strong financial position for a long time, and we have a good balance sheet. We built a leading position in Europe that we already have with strong ESG potentials. We've shown a continuous organic growth based on profitable investments and successful exploration. We have a well-developed portfolio of projects, robust and efficient productivity and seamless integration of recent acquisitions. So we clearly feel ready for taking a next step.

So what are the rationale for this transaction? Well, number one, it's an excellent fit, and it provides an entry point into Latin America for Boliden on a very low risk compared to any other alternative. We are getting good operating cash flow generating assets with an existing management that will largely stay around to be able to manage this. We will also have one of the more important financial and industrial partners in South America to help us as they become a shareholder in Boliden. And Latin America, of course, is attractive mining jurisdictions and also fits well with a low carbon profile that is well known to Boliden.

This also gives us access to Nexa's local sourcing. As you know, we today need to source about half of the concentrate for our smelters on the international market, which is basically a lot of South America, and this will make us better in those procurements. And as I said, we will become -- get Votorantim, one of the biggest industrial groups in South America, to come in and partner with us and become a shareholder in Boliden.

This is creating a globally diversified and resilient operations. We're getting a significantly increase and become a significant player of zinc globally across both mining and smelting, a highly relevant portfolio of base metals and precious metals that will come with us, and we will continue to focus on the operations as we've done historically as well as focus on safety. And here, the culture of the 2 organizations are quite similar. The transaction is immediately accretive to the Boliden shareholders. This is -- as I said, this is a company that has positive cash flows and positive results coming in from day 1. And it's about an 8% or better contribution to EPS.

So what about Nexa? Well, Nexa is a mining and smelting, actually long smelting just as Boliden, although with a slightly higher degree of integration. It has assets across Brazil and Peru, and we'll come into the actual assets as we go forward. It is mainly a zinc producer, as you can see here in terms of zinc metal, it's the zinc metal from the zinc smelters. In terms of mine production, it does, as always, you get by credits coming from copper, from silver and from gold.

If you look at then the mining operations of Nexa, puts altogether 5 mines with a variety of history, Aripuanã is the youngest and newest operations. It's a long life of mine that's coming into play, about 2 million tonnes per year. Production has been ramping up and is now producing well since a while back. Vazante is a little bit of a specialty miner in the sense that it produces a specialty concentrate that is very well integrated with the Três Marias smelter, and we'll see on the next page, about 2 million tonnes per year as well in terms of size, and it's been producing for a long time.

If you move over to Peru, there is the Atacocha mine up in the Cerro Pasco area. It's been in production a long time. It's had its ups and downs, but it has a concentrate plant capacity of 1.6 million tonnes, and moving on. It is very close geographically to El Porvenir, which is the last one here on the slide, which are going to, as we move forward, going to be operating more and more in combination. And then there's the Cerro Lindo operation, which is the biggest underground mine in Peru. Annual concentrate goes around 7 million tonnes, I should say, but also with a good long historic development.

On the smelting side, there are 3 smelters. In Brazil, there are 2 smelters, Três Marias, which is a somewhat of a specialty smelter specializing on the concentrate quality that comes out of the Vazante mine, but can also take other sources and is producing around -- well, more 150,000 tonnes in a good year. Juiz de Fora is smaller, more specialized smelter doing lots of zinc products, not just pure zinc, but zinc specialty products and also using on top of virgin feed also quite a lot of recycling of zinc. And then there's Cajamarquilla, which is the big smelter, which is located in Peru. It's the largest zinc smelter in South America, production around 350,000 tonnes per year, very similar in many of the technology choices to our Kokkola smelter in Boliden and in size also similar to the Odda expansion that's where we're working our way forward.

So if you look at Boliden on a stand-alone and with Nexa consolidated in, we see that zinc increases a lot up to -- if you account for 100% of the Nexa production up to well over 650,000 tonnes per year. There's also an increase in copper and in lead production. Precious metals as well, especially silver comes up significantly, whereas gold has a marginal increase. And we will also see that zinc resources and reserves come up quite a lot in line basically with production. And we also see the zinc metal production coming up and the combined will be over 1 million tonnes of zinc per year.

This will make the Boliden-Nexa combination one of the largest zinc miners in the world together with Hindustan Zinc and Glencore, with a variety of assets, basically in second and third and fourth quartile assets, where, as you can see, again, the Nexa assets fit well in within the Boliden assets, and that's not a surprise given that they're very similar in many senses in terms of geology, in terms of technology and so on moving forward. And if you look over to the smelter side, this will also pro forma put us over 1 million tonnes, similar to Glencore and Korea zinc in terms of size, with cash margins once again spread over the large part of the cost curve.

So with that, Håkan, I'll leave it over to you to talk a little bit about the financials.

So thank you, Mikael, and good morning. As Mikael pointed out, the financials in these transactions are attractive. The assets we're looking at, the assets involved are good assets that generate cash flow. We also see from the combined entity, a strong consolidated EBITDA with limited additional CapEx. For the 2 units -- for the 2 companies combined, consolidated rolling 12 months EBITDA amounted to about USD 4 billion, whereas the CapEx amounted to roughly USD 2.1 billion. Mikael also pointed out that it is an accretive transaction with an immediate contribution of about 8% to EPS based on broker consensus. And looking at Nexa Resources, they have been generating a strong return on capital employed with about 20% in the most recent quarter.

Going into a little bit more details about the transactions as such. The consideration is that Votorantim will receive 0.25 Boliden shares for each Nexa share. And that means that they will own about 7% in Boliden. That puts the equity value of Nexa of about USD 2 billion on a 100% basis. Regarding the structure of the acquisition of Votorantim shares, that represents just shy of 65% of Nexa's capital will be paid by newly issued Boliden shares. It has also been agreed that following closing, Boliden has agreed with Nexa to launch a voluntary tender offer to purchase for cash any Nexa shares not acquired at closing at a cash price determined by reference to the fixed exchange ratio agreed with Votorantim &im and the 20-day volume weighted average price of Boliden shares prior to closing.

Following the closing, Boliden will also launch a mandatory tender offer to minority shareholders of Nexa's listed Peruvian subsidiaries. Regarding approvals and conditions, this is subject to Boliden shareholder approval where a simple majority is required. There is also the customary regulatory approvals needed and certain other closing conditions that are customary for a transaction of this kind.

This slide doesn't change. Anyone can help change the slide for me. Take the next slide. Sorry, it seems to be in the slide here. Let's see. Sorry about this. So the key transaction milestones is that we are expecting closing in Q1 of 2027. That's the best estimate as of now. And before closing, we will need Boliden EGM for the shareholder vote. Nexa will also need an EGM, and then we have the regulatory approvals. And after closing, we've talked about the voluntary tender offer to remaining shareholders in Nexa Resources as well as the mandatory tender offer to minority shareholders in Peru.

So Mikael, with that...

Well, thank you, Håkan, and I will not really say anything more than just summarize this, that we will be able to put a strategic fit and to put a new entity into our working, which is very similar and familiar to us with a metal and mining jurisdictions that we like and providing also portfolio diversification to us. We will continue with integrated mining to smelting model, which is an excellent fit with Boliden's existing operations. There will be additional cash flow generated to this for the mining and smelting units, significant growth opportunities with development upside, and the transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to Bolin shareholders.

So with that, I will turn it over to the operator and start the questions and answers.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Alain Gabriel from Morgan Stanley.

I have 2 questions from my side. I'll take them one at a time. Firstly, on the capital structure, Mikael, you have arranged for $2 billion of financing, which is much greater than what you could possibly need to acquire the minority shareholders. Firstly, why was this financing arrangement needed? And then second, on a pro forma basis, your potential acquisition of minorities could push your gearing towards the high 30s or low 40s, which is much higher than what your target is. How does that feed into how you are thinking about your capital structure? That's my first question.

Yes. And just to put in perspective on this, the minority, we have agreed to extend an offer to the minority, which is similar to the one that we have for the majority. It is a cash-based offer and that has to do with legal basis around that. We do not know, just to be very frank, what the uptake will be. But as always, when you do things like this, you want to make sure that you do not stand without liquidity. So yes, you could argue that the backstop facility that we have arranged is more than covering this more than ever needed.

But as I said, you don't want to stand dry in a situation like this. So that's a lot of extra liquidity. Regarding the kind of balance sheet numbers, as you pointed out, yes, if we get 100% uptake, we will get up to the numbers that you mentioned. On the other hand, if we do get 100% uptake, we will also get 100% of the cash flow that comes out. And we're pretty certain that we will be able to work down the debt levels very quickly in that situation. And we -- just to kind of put on the obvious, we do not intend to change any of our capital structure goals over time because of this transaction.

That's very clear. And the second question is on the synergies. This deal could be somewhat transformative to the Boliden investment case. However, there was no synergy number attached to the slides or to the communication earlier today. How should we think about the synergistic value of this deal? What value do you bring to the table by combining the 2 assets? Are there some numbers you can just share with us?

No. And well, number one, we have not, and that's on purpose, you have said there is no synergy numbers out there. There are potential synergies that we will look at over time. It depends a little bit also on what uptake we will have. But the fields of synergies are that there is clearly a synergy of technical sharing. There's a potential synergy of procuring concentrates in South America. And then the other synergies are more in line with having a wider portfolio and thus a less risky portfolio over time. But we have, on purpose, not put a number to these, and this is not a deal that is dependent on a high synergy number.

The next question comes from Adrian Gilani from ABG Sundal Collier.

Two questions from my end. I guess, first of all, can you talk a bit about the sort of investment needs of the new assets? And if you were to sort of put any potential bigger investments like mine life extensions into the current CapEx pipeline that we're familiar with for you guys?

Just on investments in general, these assets are today cash flow positive or excess cash flow positive with ongoing maintenance CapEx as it stands. There are not foreseen in the short-term foreseeable future, any major investment for prolongations. There are prolongation kind of projects, but they will not be of a major CapEx extent. Then there's a whole set of potential in the portfolio of Nexa that will require CapEx, but those are, number one, voluntary and number two, probably a few years out. So there should not be any cash flow -- any need to provide cash flow into the Nexa system.

Understand. And I guess as a follow-up, can you walk us through sort of what underpins the cash cost position of the mines? They are all above the median and especially considering the significant silver byproduct, what is pushing them above the median cash cost? And are there clear improvements here that can be made fairly soon?

You always have to be careful with these cash cost curves that you get and you have to look into detail what silver price they have assumed the consultants when they make these assumptions. I don't think the silver price was really that high when they did these assumptions. So that's one thing that could be improved. Otherwise, it's fairly clear that these assets operate roughly at the level where they are. There is always somewhat of an improvement potential, but it's not a step change that would require CapEx as well, but we are -- these assets operate relatively well on regular operating maintenance CapEx.

The next question comes from Liam Fitzpatrick from DB.

First question is just on the timing and a bit more on the rationale. I guess on timing, why now? You do have some challenges within your current business in terms of Garpenberg, ramping up Odda, Rönnskär, et cetera. And this deal is clearly going to add another layer of complexity following a deal that you did not that long ago for Lundin's assets. So yes, anything -- any color around the timing? And then in terms of the fit, I mean, I understand the scale argument, but the assets are geographically very far apart. So is there anything that's going to be flowing out of this in terms of concentrate between the different groups where there are some potential benefits?

As I said on the previous question, if you start with #2 here, the synergies in that sense are not very big. Even though that you can potentially at certain times, have some concentrate going between the different continents, in essence, both Nexa and Boliden net buyers. So Nexa doesn't really have that much concentrate to sell. They might have some odd quality sometimes. But it's all about buying in South America from independent mines, both for Nexa and for Boliden. And Nexa is, of course, being a local South American company quite used to this and have a well-established procurement resources. So that's on the -- the first question was...

The timing of...

The timing, yes. Well, timing, you can argue a million times about timing. And also as a buyer, you don't really choose the timing always yourself. But having said that, we feel that the timing is actually quite good. We feel that we are actually through, even though you can argue we're not quite done, but we're through a major part of our investment programs. We're getting lots of things up and running slowly. So in that sense, the timing is relatively good for us as well. The integration of the Lundin assets, you can never say that it's behind you, but it's very well advanced. And we, of course, feel strengthened by the relative ease that we've seen in integrating those 2 assets into the Boliden operating model.

If I could just ask 2 more as well. The release mentions post-closing mandatory tender offers for some of the subsidiaries in Peru. Can you quantify that for us in any kind of way? And the second question, I guess, is just around your views on zinc smelting. Nexa is also net long smelting capacity. We've seen TC terms or spot terms plummet into negative territory. So is this deal -- is your long-term fundamental view that we are ultimately going to see a rebalancing and the economics for smelters improve from where we are currently?

Well, I'll start with the second one and saying that economic terms for smelters is not that bad. Even though TCs are very low, the free metals that you get out of it and including sulfuric acid actually makes smelting a pretty good place to be in. you could always get better, but it's not a bad place just to kind of get that established first. The other one was around...

The quantification of the minorities in Peru.

Yes, the minorities. We don't know exactly how much it's going to cost because it will be Lima Stock Exchange rules that set exactly the level of the offer price as it will have to go transparent through this. But we have estimated that if we get 100% uptake, that will be about SEK 3 billion.

The next question comes from Kaleb Solomon from SEB.

Just 2 for me. You said the sort of ability to realize synergies partly depend on the tender offer take-up. Can you maybe give some color on what sort of initiatives would be harder to implement if Boliden only retains a sort of sizable portion in Nexa?

If there is a minority in Nexa that remains, of course, any kind of commercial transaction between Boliden and Nexa will have to be done on arm's length relationships, and it's not going to be possible, for example, to integrate the trading activities as Nexa has trading activity and we have trading activity today. So there are certain limitations if we don't get up to 100% shareholding. Having said that, we will be able to do things already with the majority position but it will be a little bit cumbersome as we always need to make sure that we don't mistreat the minority in Nexa.

Okay. That's clear. And can you just clarify if the sort of expected EPS accretion of 8% include any contribution from synergies or operational improvement? And if not, can you give some color on what those could be?

It does not because those -- that 8%, as mentioned, there is based purely on analyst estimates, so prior to the deal. And as I said, we have not and we will not give a number on synergies, but it's going to be a relatively small number, at least initially. So the 8% is based purely on existing operations.

The next question comes from Jason Fairclough from Bank of America.

Congrats on the deal. Look, a couple for me. First, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you see the increased risk for Boliden from the exposure to these LatAm countries versus the potential benefit from having a bigger footprint and ultimately running more assets.

Jason, of course, we've had lots of discussion about risks of entering South America in different ways, given that that's an interesting place to be given geology and everything else. We have concluded that what we're doing right now is the lowest risk that we've ever been able to establish around doing this. We get well operating existing positive cash flow assets with management. And we also get a partner in the Votorantim Group that is local in South America to help us. Regarding Sweden and Brazil, there is a long history around that with defense or cooperation, in very tricky sectors, including defense and aerospace.

So from that relationship, we feel quite confident around the geopolitical risk. Peru, it's a little bit more risky. But once again, we also feel relatively confident. And Peru has been through lots of political turmoil in the last 10 years, but relatively stable operating conditions for mining companies anyway, although there is a higher risk there, but we feel that we are relatively well positioned to handle those.

Okay. Second question, if I could. And look, maybe my information is out of date, Mikael, but my understanding was that at least one of the mines had been loss-making and was being effectively run at a loss, but to keep the smelter running. Is that true? Or has that situation evolved?

I think that that's not true, but there's partial truth to what you said. The Aripuanã mine, which is a relatively new mine, was clearly behind schedule in its ramp-up and was losing money initially. It will still continue to ramp up because ultimately it was going to make money, which it is right now, and I would say it's more or less fully ramped up. I would argue, even though you have to ask an excellent management of that, but that was not done in order to feed any smelter. It was done in order for -- to get the mine up and running. There has not been any kind of other cross operation.

There is a trick on how you manage things between the Vazante mine and the Tres Marias smelter because the Vazante concentrate is of such a quality that is not really sellable on to anybody else. Only Tres Marias has a special equipment to handle that. And it's the same way Tres Marias can take in external concentrate, but not to a big extent. So those 2 have to be looked into in combination, and it's always been profitable in combination. Then you can argue a little bit about the transfer pricing between those units because the classical benchmark TCs that are used is not really relevant because of the concentrate quality.

Okay. Just to come back to a point that a few people have asked, you long smelting. This group is long smelting. And obviously, the group has a history of procuring concentrates to keep the smelters full. Is there actually room here to think about rationalizing some of the smelting footprint between the 2 businesses?

Well, lots of things can be done over time. But as I said, as long as we have a minority, we cannot really look across the 2 units. We have to look at the individual units. And I think that there -- we have to see what can be done in Nexa over time. It's a little bit of a difference here between Peru and Brazil, where Peru, it's pretty easy to be long smelting. There's lots of mining capacity in the area, lots of concentrate to buy. Brazil is a little bit more challenged situation, but I think this will evolve over time, and we'll see what we can do.

The next question comes from Matt Greene from Goldman Sachs.

Mikael, you mentioned there's limited synergies at the moment. And I guess it is accretive because Nexa is cheaper and possibly because this company has faced a number of challenges on several fronts in recent years. So I guess, at this point in the cycle, do you see better risk-adjusted returns in Nexa versus your existing organic growth pipeline?

Well, you're saying the word risk-adjusted, and it, of course, depends on which risk you use. But I will say that short term, the risks in Nexa, we feel are quite limited. The technology risks are more or less behind them. There is always a geopolitical risk. But as I said before, we don't think it's too much. And everything else equal, Nexa has good cash flows. Now we haven't really talked too much about this, but also Nexa has a higher debt level than we're used to. So we will bring up our consolidated debt level, not immensely, but to some extent. And we would, of course, also be quite happy to run down the debt level in Nexa to some extent as we now start getting good cash flows.

Got it. Okay. I guess in your due diligence, what were the top areas of risk that you see? Is it more around technical? Is it more around cultural? I mean, obviously, Peru is they faced some social issues there as well. Can you just flag where do you see the key risk here on the execution front?

Well, I mean, you mentioned a whole set of them, and we've looked into technological and geological situation that we feel very comfortable. We also feel comfortable with geopolitics. Another area which you haven't asked yet, but if those who read the Nexa annual report, we figure out that Nexa has had quite some tax issues, which are well known to us, and we have looked into them, and we have spent quite some time in the due diligence understanding the tax situation, especially in Peru, which has been a little bit tricky to them. Yes, those have been -- we've also looked into the people side. We looked into the health and safety area. Nexa has worse numbers than we do, but we have a sense that they have a program already in place and that we could probably enhance a little bit to get health and safety culture to an even better level.

The next question comes from Richard Hatch from Berenberg.

Just a few questions from me. I'm still going to follow up on this bridge funding. So 35% of the company you don't own is $715 million in value. And then the minorities in Peru are guided to SEK 3 billion or about USD 315 million. That gives me about USD 1 billion. So again, like why do we need to have a bridge facility of $2 billion? Is that just purely conservatism? Or is there something else that I'm missing there? That's the first one.

It's purely conservatism. And what you have to, of course, always know is that if there's something that you could be fearful about is that next week or in a month from now, we will somewhere between signing and closing, we get a major recession on our hand. That is, of course, always a risk. Over time, these things will go up and down. In that number, we have also calculated in that we will survive through a major Lehman-type crash in the midst of this thing. So yes, you can call it conservatism.

Okay. And then can you just help me -- and can you just help me on the Board composition? So you're saying that it will have -- I think Nexa has got 9 Board members at the moment. I guess some of them are not independent because of the Votorantim stake. But then you're going to have 4 Board members. Can you just help us think about like how that Board composition is going to look like? For example, will you sit on the Board of Nexa, Mikael? Or how are you thinking about the Boliden representation on the Board? That's the second one.

We will have Boliden representatives around 4 people. And as you said, 3 independents, that makes the Board of 7. Regarding the exact competition and -- composition and the exact names, we will come back to that when we will have the summer for the next EGM that will do the changing of the Board. But yes, I will be personally involved in the Board.

Okay. And third one is just -- I mean, clearly, you take nearly 65% of the company you have control. You suggest that there are potential synergies there, but they could come over time. So the third question is, why not just go more aggressive and just take the whole thing out right here right now and get on the track of getting on to those synergies rather than sort of take a half sleeping position in owning the business?

The present setup where Nexa is a Luxembourg Incorporated company with operations in South America and the New York Stock Exchange listing makes things a little bit challenging to do that, which we maybe would have liked to do. There is, for example, no sweep. So we will have to -- in order to really make sure we get 100%, we will have to make the offer very attractive to get even the last shareholder across the line, which would have been perceived to be maybe too expensive, at least if we're going to make it that sweat. And we've decided that we will do a voluntary offer.

And we have to be careful because I'm not allowed to say anything except exactly what's written in the press release, but we have made sure that the shareholders the minority shareholders are treated in a way equal to the majority, then somebody would argue why don't you just issue shares to them? Well, due to once again the set of regulations, it is very -- almost impossible for us to issue shares to a small shareholder in the U.S. due to the prospectus requirements of the New York Stock Exchange. Therefore, that will be a cash consideration there.

Okay. That's helpful. And then one last one, Håkan, just a quick one on how you're going to report this. So you say you're going to report it as a separate segment. So just -- can you just give us any kind of steer as to how we should think about the modeling of this because it will be an interesting one?

Well, I think it's good to treat it as a separate segment. And then regarding the consolidation, if you have a majority ownership like this, we will get the full numbers in. We will get the full EBITDA, the full revenue and the full all of it and then we will have a liability reported to the minority. And then apart from that, it will be kept as a listed company with their filing requirements and as a segment in our books.

The next question comes from Johannes Grunselius from SB1 Markets.

I also had a question on the consolidation going forward. How should we think about the balance sheet in Nexa? Will that be consolidated in Boliden or will it be separate?

Well, when it comes to financial reporting, if we talk about consolidation in financial reporting, then we will include -- the way you do is that you include the full balance sheet and then you report a liability or a share of equity that belongs to minorities. So in all the numbers, you see you will have the full Nexa balance sheet. Then, of course, Nexa is still a separate listed group with filing requirements and their own balance sheet and so on. So we will keep it apart from that perspective. But looking at an annual report, for example, of Boliden, you will see Nexa numbers included everywhere.

Okay. Okay. That's good. Also I wonder about, yes, forecast here. You referred to consensus estimates. I think there are a handful of analysts covering this company. But I guess your own sort of forecasting is aligned with consensus. Can you comment on that?

It's always very difficult to comment on those things. But and as also pointed out, there are relatively few analysts following Nexa, but there are a couple or a handful. Put this way, we don't feel that they're over aggressive on the Nexa opportunity.

Okay. Good to know. And my final question is that if I look at the last few reports, quarter report from Nexa, would you say that those operations are representative for what you expect for '27, '28 in terms of operation or any deviation we should be aware of?

Well, I mean, I think you can read that into the Nexa guiding, and it's not made possible for me to guide anything about the future of Nexa given that it is a separate traded entity.

The next question comes from Ian Rossouw from Barclays.

Just a couple of follow-ups on the risks. Just was curious whether you could just quantify the sort of rehab liabilities within Nexa and whether you're comfortable with the methodology of sort of estimating of that and whether there would be any changes if it's aligned with your, I guess, measurement and standards? And then just wondering on sort of other liabilities within the business, such as the sort of tailings, whether, I guess, Nexa is committed to aligning their tailings to the global standard and whether you see any sort of need for remediation work and CapEx on that front?

Well, we do not see any immediate need to change anything on the dam side on any CapEx into that. They are relatively well managed and well handled dams. On the reclamation reserves, yes, we've been through that. There is, of course, always a risk that you're under reserving for reclamation questions. But we have a sense that what is reported in the Nexa reporting is accurately reflecting the technical reports that are in place.

Okay. And can you just confirm that the enterprise value you gave in the release that does not include those reclamation liabilities?

That's a very good question that I need to look at. The reclamation liabilities that are on the balance sheet are in that value -- and whatever is not on the balance sheet, as I said, we don't think it's that much because I think the balance sheet is fairly reflecting what we read on technical reports.

The next question comes from Boris Bourdet from Kepler Cheuvreux.

Two questions on my side. Boliden used to be quite balanced between copper and zinc. Obviously, this operation increases the weight of zinc. So is it the first step of repositioning towards a priority on this commodity? Or do you see this new footprint in LatAm as a way to further expand also maybe later in the copper? That's the first question. And the second question is on Votorantim 7% ownership. What visibility do you have? What's the commitment of Votorantim on that?

Zinc versus copper, I think this is the same answer as many -- I've gotten many times before when we do something somewhere whether we're changing the balance. Now the answer is we like copper and we like zinc, and we like both of them. I've said many times that for us to grow inorganically in copper is quite unlikely because copper asset prices have been come to a level where it's very difficult to motivate the price when potentially buying them. Whereas zinc, we feel is a little bit undervalued and it's a higher chance.

Now if you look at Nexa, Nexa, we're also getting a portfolio of projects with it. These are projects in various stages. None of them are ready for investment now and they're kind of into the future. But there are quite a few copper projects in the Nexa project portfolio. So yes, potentially, we could get more copper coming out of South America over time through this acquisition, but there are many ifs and buts before we get there.

Regarding Votorantim, Votorantim have committed to being on the Boliden Board being an active shareholder in Boliden. They have also agreed to a lockup period, which is step-wise coming down, but basically a 3-year lockup period for some of the shares, indicating that they are at least in the kind of short to medium term, very much committed to staying around.

The next question comes from Alain Gabriel from Morgan Stanley.

I just have one follow-up question on Nexa. So basically, they do have a U.S. listing. Do you see this as an opportunity? Or do you see any advantages in having multiple listings for Boliden and tapping into a broader set of investors? Is this something that you have considered while going after Nexa? That's my question.

No, I would rather say we looked at Nexa as an operating entity, and that's what we're looking for. The U.S. listing has been something that is part of the Nexa history and part of what we need to deal with there, and we're going to deal with it accordingly. But I don't think that we will be looking at diversifying Boliden's listing into the U.S., if that was your question.

The next question comes from Jason Fairclough from Bank of America.

So another round 2 question. Just in terms of the mechanics of a potential squeeze out, I've asked ChatGPT this morning about how that could work. And I got a very long answer that doesn't actually give me an answer. How are you thinking about how a potential squeeze out might work after a voluntary takeover offer?

Number one, this is on a long-term scale. In the short term, a little bit unclear, but it would have to include maybe something like re-domiciling or relisting, which all these things are not quite easy. And therefore, we said that we do not have any plans like that. We might have something that we could consider in the future. But as of right now, we will, for the foreseeable future, be having a minority ownership and the New York listing.

So Mikael, just to make sure that I understand. So the deal completes sometime early in 2027, do you immediately launch the voluntary takeover offer for the minority shareholders in Nexa? Yes?

Yes. Yes.

Okay. And then if we were to consider a voluntary -- sorry, a squeeze out, that would happen sometime after the completion of the voluntary takeover offer, but no specific -- no specifics here on the timing.

No specificity more than that we have promised the Board -- the existing Board of Nexa that we will not do it at least in the short term.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Richard Hatch from Berenberg.

Yes, just here we go again, some more questions. Just can you just help us -- so firstly, can I just clarify the long-term intention here, it sounds like you want to control the whole business 100%. So should we interpret this as being it's really only a matter of time before you find ways to either redomicile the business, delist it or relist it, sorry, and find a way to take your ownership up from that sort of 64.5% to the 100%. Is that the right way to kind of consider how this goes into the medium to long term? That's the first one.

And the answer there is that we are committed to Nexa long term. Exactly how that will play out, we'll have to see. The first unknown in this is what is the uptick going to be in the voluntary offer, which we do not know. And that outcome then might make us think about how we do in the next step.

Understood. Okay. And the second one is perhaps I should also engage in the big ChatGPT. But if I look at the Nexa shareholder register, it would appear that it's pretty -- there's quite a lot of very small shareholders that own the stock. So are you able to step into the market to buy some of those shares? Or is that something that you are unable to do without -- from a securities regulation standpoint. Just wonder if you can -- after the voluntary, if you don't get what you want in the voluntary, whether you can step into the market and start buying on market. Is that an option available to you in time?

There are -- in the agreement that we have with the President Nexa Board, there are some time limitations to that and some limitations to how we can do that. But fundamentally, from a regulatory point of view, we can do that.

Okay. Without triggering a mandatory -- well, I guess, without triggering mandatory takeover.

No, we are not triggering a mandatory. We would have the other way around, had we triggered a mandatory, we might not have been so sorry about that. So therefore, we are giving you voluntary because this does not trigger mandatory in the combination of Luxembourg and New York.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

I'll just make a very quick comment. Thank you all for listening. As you understand, there is -- this has been a very long thing in coming and doing. I got the question earlier this morning from some of the journalists, and I've made a very clear point that because there was a question, who initiated this thing? Is it the seller or the buyer? And I said that's almost impossible to tell because we have been discussing different things for the last, I would say, almost 10 years, not quite, but at least 5 years with Nexa about potential projects and about potential cooperation about different things and exactly who came up with the idea that eventually led to this conclusion is a little bit difficult to put a pure number on.

But lots of people have worked on a long time. Lots of people in both organizations have also, of course, spent lots of time getting this deal together. It has not been an easy one given the fact that we had the combination of a Swedish buyer, Luxembourg target with listing in the U.S. and operation in South America has kept some lawyers busy for a while. But I'm very proud of the solution we've come to, and this is very good going forward. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to Boliden's Q2 2026 Results Presentation.

My name is Olof Grenmark, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. Today, we will have a results presentation led by our President and CEO, Mikael Staffas; and our CFO, Håkan Gabrielsson. We will also have a Q&A session led by the operator. Mikael, welcome.

Thank you, Olof, and good morning to all of you out there. Let's just jump into this presentation right away, and then we will see what discussions we'll have and what questions you have coming up afterwards.

The highlights of the quarter, I just first want to point out that we have a strong quarter. We have about SEK 2.9 billion in EBIT ex process inventory revaluation, clearly up from what we had last year.

We have a quarter with relatively weak cash flow. This cash flow is both seasonal in the sense that we have maintenance stops in Q2, which typically is that we're tying up capital in our inventories, but it's also linked to a little bit of timing events again around the end of the quarter. Actually, the inventory buildup is much bigger than this SEK 2 billion because there are some other parts in working capital working the other way around. And the high inventories, and we'll get to that also affects the internal profit elimination, which is also a bit of discussion here. We have, of course, significantly lower earnings from Garpenberg compared to any comparison quarter, both first quarter and last year. But we are very positive around Garpenberg.

Garpenberg has started up according to plan, has delivered according to the plan we gave in Q1. We have now all infrastructure in Garpenberg up and running with the exception of the personnel hoist, which is not really crucial and will come roughly in September. But otherwise, everything is up and running, and we're up and producing. And we're also up and developing and not losing any time in trying to get to the other ore bodies in the area now that Lappberget is going to be impaired for quite some time.

So Garpenberg moving nice according to the plan that we had last time. We have -- and we just want to make that point, a very strong contribution from the acquired mines both Zinkgruvan and especially, I would say, Somincor is producing clearly better than our own expectations, and we're quite pleased with the developments that are going on there.

In Aitik, we have also a strong quarter, clearly improved mill volumes and the total volumes mined, if you also include the stripping, it's a record high of ever. You know that one of the challenges that has been over time that we have been a little bit behind in stripping. We're catching that up, and you're also seeing that now as we can get the ore volumes up as well, which we also feel very good about.

On the other side, what has not worked perfectly? Well, the Odda ramp-up has not been ideal. We encounter quite some issues on the ramp-up of Odda. Just to have a sense of it, it is nothing that is fundamentally problematic. The roaster works at full capacity when it runs, but we've had way too many shutdowns linked to both IT and control systems and linked to some parts of the conveyor system and others that have not been able to produce.

So the financial performance, as I said, in EBIT, excluding profit and inventory revaluation of SEK 2.9 billion, clearly up against last year. The financial impact from the planned maintenance came in at SEK 350 million, which is a little bit in line with last year and very much in line with the guidance that we had given.

Cash flow, as we said, clearly negative, partially seasonal, but also partially a timing issue that comes in around that. CapEx at a little bit more than SEK 4 billion, right around where our guidance is.

On the Garpenberg update. So we had the abnormal rockfall and the seismic event back in March. All the infrastructure, including the ore hoist is now up and running and operational as of end of Q2, you could say. The only -- it's only the personnel shaft that is still being repaired, but it's not crucial for production, and it should be done in the end by September. The production has restarted according to guidance, exactly as we expected.

Also the developments have come along according to what we thought ourselves. So that's also working well. The paste production, which is important because as you know, we have a big void after we had the ore body go down and this void needs to be filled, both for safety reasons and water reasons, all kind of reasons.

That has been -- it's not quite completed, but it's very well underway. In order to do this, we have also managed to produce paste and produce paste from the existing -- using tailings from the existing tailings dam. I think we've been very quick at developing and rebuilding in the concentrator to be able to take tailings sand the other way that you usually don't do it to truck it back from the dam as opposed to get it to the dam.

The ambition is still to have a full production by -- here it is 2032, as a full year, but to get the new hoist in place by 2031, so that we will be full mining in Huvudmalmen in the bottom part. And we're not changing any guidance. We're having the same guidance at 1.5 million tonnes for 2026 and at 2.3 million tonnes for 2027.

key projects, if you go through, the Odda tank house project is also moving on very nicely. We have it scheduled for ramp-up in Q4 of this year. The sand recycling project is also on track, and it looks quite promising, both on a kind of technical point of view, but also to make sure we get the environmental size right, and we're about to start during the next winter to start commencing using the equipment. Rönnskär SCMentum and Garpenberg 4.5 million expansions are in very early days, but so far, so good. The other one is, as I spoke about, is the Odda and the Odda expansion. Ramp-up is ongoing. It is at a lower pace than expected. And the challenge has been with the roaster. So that's where we can isolate the issues around that.

There has been one set of issues linked to automation and programming, where the roaster went into emergency stop way too easy, and we got emergency stops early on. And with the roaster, as you know, it could take several days to cool down, so you can go in and do some adjustments to sensors and other thing, and then it takes several days to restart. So we've been spending way too many times cooling it down and warming it up again to fix things around that. We have that now, I would say, more or less under control. We have now put that in a good situation, and it doesn't put emergency stops where it's not supposed to. We've also had some very mundane issues also around the roaster, for example, with conveyors. Conveyors is nothing high tech or fancy, but we've had issues with them that we have tried to repair, and we have them now up and running.

So as I'm speaking, we're running at full speed in Odda. And we have been running at full speed when we've been running, but we went down way too much. And I would say it's quite some confidence that we feel that we sorted out several issues. We might encounter some more issue, but there is nothing fundamental with the design of the roaster or anything else.

We have also -- in the time we have been running full, we've also been able to check the equipment that's been ready for quite some time, including the tank house and the new foundry and the leaching section. We've been able to test that at full capacity for shorter times, and we've also done that very successfully.

If you then move over to the ESG development, we've also had a very good and strong second quarter. We have an injury frequency, which is one of the lowest one that we've ever had, maybe the lowest for any individual quarter, and we've had quite some good development on that side for quite some time. The sick leave that went up during COVID is now more or less back on pre-COVID levels and is sticking on that level. and we are on our plan regarding the greenhouse gas emissions. That's a little bit difficult to see in this graph, but you have to remember here that we have not restated any history regarding the acquisitions from Lundin. And therefore, it looks like we have an increase of CO2, whereas in reality, we have a decrease.

If you look at market developments and those of you out there, you will notice relatively well that we had, of course, a very good pickup of market developments in the early part of this year. During the quarter, it's been moving more sideways or actually, to some extent, a little bit downwards, but it's still just on compared to historic level, very high metal prices that we have right now. We also have a slightly higher dollar that helps us as well. A little bit weaker spot TCs working against us, but then we have the very strong sulfuric acid prices, which helps us maybe not as much as you think because we have a lot of our acids sold on long-term contracts with slow-moving prices, but of course, it is helping for the spot volumes that we're selling with the very high spot prices on sulfur.

If you look at the development in the world on the copper price and where it's going, you can see that the copper price is at a high level and most copper mines in the world make quite nice money. You can also see that the cost level has started to nudge up a little bit in the last quarter, I think, with a combination of both a lower gold price that puts the copper price up, but also the costs related to the -- what is happening in the Persian Gulf starting to show through a little bit. On the zinc side, we've had a little bit slower development, but the prices are now on a quite a healthy level. And here, the cost level in the world mining is still going downwards.

Looking at our production, as I said before, Aitik comes out very strong with almost 11 million tonnes. So it's close to 44 million tonnes on an annual pace. We feel good about that. We have a record mine production if you also include the stripping. And as you know, for a long time, stripping has been a challenge. So Aitik actually looks quite good. The copper grade is nudging upwards.

And as you know, since before, we're expecting to continue to nudge up and go up during the second half of the year, which looks good.

Boliden Area, very stable operations. Now Boliden has had so many records in the last couple of years. So it's difficult to beat those, but we are clearly adding another very strong quarter in the Boliden Area. We talked about Garpenberg around that.

Kevitsa, slightly lower mill volume. But once again, the permit is the limiting factor in Kevitsa, and we will, for sure, going to use the full environmental permit for the year.

Somincor and Zinkgruvan, strong production, developing well. The challenge that we have is Tara and the ramp-up issues that we're having there since the care and maintenance. And we're also guiding down the total production for the year in Tara.

If you then move over to the smelters, of course, this is a quarter where there's been big maintenance stops, which, of course, has an impact. One unit that it has not had maintenance stop that has it in Q3 is Bergsöe.

They had then had -- it's a smallest unit, but it had -- they've had record production of lead alloys in the quarter, which we feel good about. And Harjavalta and Kokkola, both, of course, marked by the high level of maintenance that we've had we had there.

Rönnskär had also a high level of maintenance in that -- in Rönnskär, we had some ramp-up issues after maintenance. I wouldn't say major, but there were some -- took some extra days to get going after the maintenance stop was done.

And finally, then regarding Odda, we've spoken about Odda that we have continued with the ramp-up as we have, but it's been slower than expected due to issues with the new roaster and the roaster has been a challenge.

With that, I'll leave the word to you, Håkan, to comment a little bit more on the financials.

Thank you, and good morning.

Good to talk to you. I hope my voice manages it. It's a bit -- it's not what it typically is, but let's go.

You've seen the result. We delivered an EBITDA of SEK 5.5 billion. And operating profit, excluding process inventory of SEK 2.9 billion and an EPS of SEK 7.81.

All of those numbers are clearly up from last year, but lower sequentially compared to Q1. CapEx is SEK 4 billion, which is in line with plan. Free cash flow is a negative SEK 2 billion. We've been successful in a number of quarters going back to reduce working capital in spite of higher prices. And this time, we had some build, and I will come back to that later on.

Looking by business area, what I said about up substantially year-on-year and a bit lower than Q1 still holds for both of them. And the reduction sequentially in mines is all Garpenberg and the reduction in smelters is mainly the maintenance -- the heavy maintenance that we do in Q2.

Looking at the EBIT bridges and then starting with the comparison year-on-year comparing Q2 of '26 to Q2 of '25. As you can see, we have a major support from prices, and that's metal prices across all metals, basically, base metals, precious metals that really supports the result.

The negative impact there of about SEK 1.2 billion in volumes is all Garpenberg. It's fully explained by Garpenberg. Looking at the other business apart from Garpenberg, we have a good contribution from the acquired mines. They have been running well. And then also Q2 of last year, there were 2 weeks that we didn't own them. So it's a full quarter.

But then on the other hand, we have slightly lower grades in Kevitsa. But again, the big impact on volumes is Garpenberg. Costs are a bit higher. There is an effect of full quarter with the acquired mines also there. But we're starting to see some oil price-related cost inflation. We're talking about, excluding electricity, somewhere in the range of 2.5% to 3% inflation after having been at much lower numbers for a while.

I think with that, I leave this bridge and move on to the sequential one comparing quarter 1 with quarter 2. As you can see here, prices are more or less flat. There are some moving parts. We have weaker metal prices, which is then offset by a stronger dollar and a better sulfuric acid level. But all in all, the impact from prices is quite small. Again, volumes, we have a significant drop there from Garpenberg out of the SEK 1.5 billion, if we round it in this chart, SEK 1.4 billion comes from Garpenberg.

And in addition, we have maintenance in smelters and then the rest slightly positive. Costs are up compared to last quarter. It was a fairly expensive quarter, this one. A big part is maintenance. The maintenance stop drives costs. So we have -- the cost part of the maintenance is about SEK 200 million compared to last quarter.

And again, there is some oil-related inflation also in these numbers. Depreciation, maybe I can say something about that. We have basically no major change sequentially. We've had SEK 2.3 billion in the quarter, and we had a similar level last quarter. Not including then the impairment we did in Garpenberg.

If we look forward for the rest of the year when Odda starts depreciating, I estimate that to be about SEK 2.6 billion, so moving from SEK 2.3 billion per quarter to SEK 2.6 billion per quarter. But so far this year, not a big change. The one-off items affecting comparability is the big write-down that we had last quarter, and that concludes this EBIT bridge.

Moving on then to cash flow. As I said, we had we've had over the last couple of years, a quite good run with working capital in spite of higher prices. This time, we built some capital. It's a lot of timing. One part is the slower ramp-up in Odda where inventory piles up. And then also Mikael referred to some ramp-up issues in Rönnskär. A bit minor, it still has had an impact on inventories. And then a lot is timing on shipments.

So it's been -- it hasn't been an ideal quarter when it comes to working capital. My expectation, though, is that if we look one quarter ahead, especially towards the later part of the quarter, we'll revert that for ongoing business. So if it's just regular ongoing business, I think that the SEK 2 billion should come back next quarter.

Having said that, we will start to prepare for the ramp-up in Rönnskär shortly, and that means a working capital build that we've guided for in the vicinity of SEK 1.5 billion to SEK 2 billion.

So if you put all of that together, my best estimate right now is that the working capital contribution to cash flow in the quarter to come is around 0. Finally, looking at the balance sheet and the capital structure, still a very strong balance sheet. We've had an increase of net debt of SEK 5 billion, SEK 3 billion of that is the dividend that was paid and SEK 2 billion is the negative cash flow we just talked about. But all in all, a strong balance sheet with a gearing of 24%.

So with that, Mikael, I hand over to you.

And I'll just conclude the session with the outlook page. And as we all referred to, we're repeating all the guidance for the full year with the exception of Tara, where we're going down the throughput from 1.8 million to 1.6 million tonnes.

And the only 2027 guidance that we have out, which is the guidance in Garpenberg is also unchanged. So with that, operator, we're ready to take questions.

[Operator Instructions]

The next question comes from Adrian Gilani from ABG Sundal Collier.

Two questions from my end. First of all, regarding the Rönnskär tank house ramp-up, how -- can you help us how to think about the time line for that considering that the Odda ramp-up has encountered several delays. Are you more confident that, that will be a fairly quick ramp-up? Or can that be drawn out as well?

Well, we can say that we said many things about Odda, but Odda has also built a tank house and the tank house in Odda ramped up exactly according to plan. So it's quite a difference building a roaster and building a tank house. We are quite confident that we will be able to start the tank house quite on time and very quickly reach a very high utilization level.

Okay. Perfect. That's helpful. And then the second one is on grades since you have several mines that have been running below the full year grade guidance in the first half of the year. I'm thinking mainly of Aitik, which you mentioned, but also Boliden Area on zinc and silver and Tara as well on zinc.

How confident are you in the implied step-up in grades for the second half of the year that is sort of baked into your current guidance? Was this always the plan for the first half to be lower than the second half?

Yes. It was always -- I think we said that clearly that the first half would be slower than the second half. So it was always in the plan. Then it's a little bit different in different locations, but we are operating more or less according to plan regarding the grades.

The next question comes from Alain Gabriel from Morgan Stanley.

I have a couple of questions. First, a high-level capital allocation and strategy question. What are the merits of growing your zinc smelting footprint and expanding any jurisdiction that is a bit outside of your core European markets? So it would be great if you can help us put any M&A ambitions in the context of your group strategy and the broader capital allocation framework? That's my first question.

Let me just comment on that one. I mean just to put it in context, we are constantly talking to many other players in the industry about potential next steps. We have, in the last 10 years, we've done 2 deals, including 3 assets.

Now looking at that, as a percentage out of the total discussions we've had, it's a relatively small percentage. And we typically, at any given time, have these kind of discussions ongoing with quite a few people. The only reason why we have made the Nexa discussions public is that there was a leak in Brazil around this where we were specifically mentioned, and we had to, because of stock exchange rules, confess that we are having discussions.

Just to be very clear, we -- we have not commented on what kind of deal we're actually talking about or what kind of price we're talking about and what kind of other things we're talking about, just to take that first.

Now secondly, why are they at least kind of interesting to talk to? Well, Nexa has a couple of mines that are very similar to the mines we have in terms of technical challenges and opportunities that we think we can work around. They have a couple of zinc smelters where at least one is very similar to the ones that we have and where we feel very good about the way that we operate our own zinc smelter and the way that we could operate that. So we feel that we would be a good operator there. And we also feel that the jurisdictions are not that strange and that it would provide potentially an easy next step. But as I said, there are many things that need to fall in place for there to be a deal.

That's very clear. And the second question is on Odda. So you touched on the roaster issues you faced during Q2. How is the exit rate in Q2? And what signposts we should be expecting over the course of Q3 to give us a bit more comfort that the ramp-up is now back on track or at least back on the new revised trajectory?

Well, I think that one comfort you should have about going forward is what I said, there is nothing -- there has not been any kind of fundamental design issue or anything else. The roaster is there. It's working. When it worked, it has been working at basically full capacity. So that's a good thing. We've had the problem with the stoppages.

And as I said, when you stop a roaster, we have to go in and do some maintenance in the roaster. It unfortunately takes quite some time. You need to cool it down and then you need to do whatever you need to do and then heat it up again, and it could be a 10-day thing for a relatively small thing.

So what should keep you comfortable is that I think that we had many of the initial automation issues that we've faced, we have them behind ourselves. We have some of the simpler mechanical issues regarding conveyors behind ourselves, and we don't have a fundamental problem. Will we encounter something else? Yes, we will encounter something else at some stage. But for everything that you encounter, we have so far been able to manage it.

And as we're speaking, the roaster is running full speed. So it does run full speed when it runs, and we just need to get more running days out of this one. And it feels relatively good from the level we are today.

The next question comes from Kaleb Solomon from SEB.

Just 2 from me. On Garpenberg, going from sort of 10% of the previous run rate to 30% in Q3, can you just help us size the sort of sequential reduction in under-absorption headwind?

Just to -- if you start the -- with going from 100,000 to 300,000, you can say that during Q2, we have more or less only operated with production for a month. So we've been operating at that 100,000 tonnes per month pace, and that's what we will have now for every month in Q3. So that's the operating part of it.

Regarding costs, -- most of the costs in the mine are fixed, and that's something Håkan didn't mention that, but it could be also a bit regarding cost that we -- even though we have much lower production, most of the cost is actually fixed. And as we then start ramping up production, we should not see that much extra cost increase because we're already carrying especially the personnel costs already there.

Okay. That's clear. And last quarter, you also mentioned that if sulfuric acid prices holds up, there would be a sort of meaningful impact in the second half this year as contracts sort of start to roll over.

Can you give us any sense of the magnitude of that tailwind relative to what you saw in Q2? And maybe sort of the same question of how much rolls over in Q4 versus Q3?

Håkan, do you know that?

Well, most is connected. I think one important point is that most of what we have is connected to the European indexes. And that hasn't had as dramatic swings. I think we had a positive amount in the EBIT bridge of SEK 100 million this quarter. I'm not going to guide for it going forward, but it should definitely be higher than SEK 100 million.

That's clear. And maybe just a last follow-up on Aitik because production was abnormally good this quarter, but you're keeping your production guidance. So I'm just wondering if there was anything specific sort of causing abnormally good production? Or should we sort of assume quite a slowdown in Q3?

Well, number one, we had a slow Q1. So we had to kind of make up for that in order to kind of move our guidance. We usually don't talk about maintenance in the mine so much, but we had a quarter which had maybe a little bit less of lining -- relining than a normal quarter.

And then we know from a seasonality point of view that Q2 is usually one of the best quarters we have in Aitik. Winter is always a little more tricky. But when you come into spring and summer, it's usually easier. Q3 is also pretty good. So with that all taken into account, we have stuck to the guidance. It's pretty much -- if you look at the whole first year, we're pretty much on this one. So that means that we're not expecting it to fall if you look on a half year number.

The next question comes from Liam Fitzpatrick from DB.

First one, just on Nexa. I appreciate this is a leak that you didn't want to become public. But can you just talk about the timing of this? Because obviously, over the last year and beyond, you've had some challenges at several assets. You've already got 12 assets. So this would be increasing the complexity of the business, perhaps not at the right time. So do you actually think now is the right time to actually bring more assets into the business? That's the first question.

Well, linked to that, I mean, I would say that we are ready to do it. The exact right timing when you're buying is always difficult to get because it's a seller who kind of sets a time line rather than the buyer. But we said and I said many times that when things are moving in this industry, we are interested in looking at it.

Okay. And then just a couple of questions on Garpenberg. Can you just give an update in terms of where the review and the whole studies on, I guess, the recovery in production are at the moment and whether we're going to have to wait until the 8th of December or whether we could find out a little bit earlier in terms of the production profile for that asset over the next few years?

And then perhaps one for Håkan. I appreciate Q2 was low volume. So perhaps we shouldn't read too much into it. But mill throughput was very low at Garpenberg. The grade was very low, but the cash cost also remain very low. So some explanation around that would be helpful.

To the cash cost and how we calculate that one with rolling 12 and things like that.

Regarding Garpenberg and the geotechnical studies and so on, you're highly unlikely to get any more information regarding '28 and beyond until December.

We will run that through our due diligence process in the normal course that we every fall build up a life of mine plan. And I suppose it's only if we find something very strange that we'll have to say it before. Otherwise, we'll have to wait until December.

We will also, in parallel, and of course, I don't know if we're going to publish it or which way you're going to publish it, but just for you guys to know, we're also, of course, working on establishing what happened, why did it happen, if it has any consequence anywhere else. We're doing that one quite thoroughly, both internal, and we have external third party looking into that one. We also expect to finish those studies in the second half of the year so that we know which also plays into -- we don't want to run into the even if it's theoretically possible just to create another seismic event. So we need to be better understanding what exactly caused the ripple effect that eventually led to where we are right now.

Okay. Just going into the cost, I think just to repeat what Mikael said is that a big part of the mining cost that we see is fixed. The cost that we've taken in Q2 is marginally lower than Q1.

So we have basically been running more or less at the same cost level because of repairs and other things. In Q2, the mill throughput was exactly in line with what we said.

And I think the way to look at it forward is that we guided for the mill throughput and then cost is what it is. Then when it comes to the cash cost, there is a lot of moving parts in there. I mean we have the TCs that is one component. The silver prices is one component. We have -- we're looking at rolling 12 months where this has moved a lot. So I think it's -- I'm not sure if I can comment in too much detail on that right now. But I think if you look at the overall message that Mikael gave, I think you should get that right going forward at least.

And I will say a little bit different, Håkan, I was just saying that you should expect the published cash costs to go up over the next few quarters as we roll in bad quarters into that 12-month rolling average.

Okay. So there's an inventory effect, I guess, is what you're saying?

Well, there's an inventory effect, but also when you take the average cost per tonne for the last 12 months, you have to remember that we had 9 months or at least 8 months that were pretty well producing. So -- but if you look at this a year from now or 9 months from now, you will look at 12 pretty bad producing months. And then, of course, the cost per tonne will go up.

Understood. If I could squeeze one quick one in. Just on acids, Håkan, could you confirm what the uplift was Q-over-Q from acid prices for the smelters?

I think that we had year-on-year, I think it's available in the bridges in the report. I think we had an uptick of about SEK 100 million, something along that line. And if we stay at these prices for European indexes as the contracts are renewed because they are not renewed every quarter, that should gradually improve the price level, and thus, we should see similar or better upticks year-on-year in future quarters.

The next question comes from Marina Calero from RBC Capital Markets.

I have a question on Garpenberg. What sort of development rates do you need to achieve in Q3 and going forward to hit your 2026 and 2027 guidance?

That's a good question that I might not be able to answer straight of the how much development we will actually need. I don't know if you know that, Håkan.

No, that's -- I think that's a part of the revised mine plan that we're doing. I mean we keep the same cost base, but a part of the personnel is spending work with development instead of mining. And we'll have to see whether some of that will go into CapEx or not.

But the cost -- the underlying cost base is relatively unchanged.

But I can get a frame of it. We are producing now and we'll continue to produce roughly 100,000 tonnes per year from the existing Lappberget and -- sorry, from the existing Kärnberget and Dammsjön ore bodies. For that, we don't need any accelerated development. Those developments are well in line and everything else.

The challenge, which I think you're referring to, Marina, is that in order for us to go up to about 200,000 tonnes per month, which we have guided for 2027, we will then need to have another 100,000 that comes from other places.

Part of that will come from things that are already developed and could be easily taken out, for example, in Kaspersbo, where we have some smaller pieces. It could be taken out from relatively easy to get to developments in the lower part of Lappberget. But I suppose your question is, do we -- are we sure that we also have enough speed in our developments to get to all of that uptick from 100,000 to 200,000 tonnes per month.

And I will say just on the bottom from the gut feeling, that is going quite well. Developments are going quite well. But exactly the amount of meters we need to reach this year in order to be able to start getting these other positions in place by January, I cannot say right now.

Okay. Understood. And another question on capital allocation. I understand you have your ratios -- target ratios through the cycle. But how much flexibility do you have in debt generation in the event an acquisition like the one you are discussing with Nexa happens?

How much flexibility we have in the gearing numbers that we communicated. That's what I understand is the question.

Well, we want to keep the gearing less than -- I mean, we can accept the gearing of around 50%. But then I should emphasize that, that is always in a stressed scenario. So we should stay below a 50% gearing even if we get a severe downturn for a year or so. And that typically means because we don't end up in those downturns every year that we stay at substantially lower levels. I think you can look at the recent Lundin acquisition that was in our stress test, close to those high levels that we were talking about.

Then obviously, we didn't get the downturn is that we got a spike in gold prices. So we never really climbed that high. But that's the flexibility to go up to 50% or possibly slightly more 55%, but then in a simulated severe downturn.

The next question comes from Matt Greene from Goldman Sachs.

I have a couple of questions on Garpenberg. Could you just touch on if there's any ongoing regulatory investigations relating to the incidents? And could the outcome of this actually impact the restart time lines or your operating rates in the next 18 months?

There is an official inquiry into the occupational health side of things. Did we pose a too large risk to our employees there. That is ongoing with the authorities. I don't think that, that will, in any way, affect the production rate. It could theoretically affect that we will have a fine. It could also theoretically lead to that we would not be allowed to use certain mining methods that are then deemed dangerous and that would then have an impact.

But I think that's very far-fetched that they would come to that. Apart from this investigation linked to occupational health, there is not really any investigation ongoing. And in the Swedish context, we manage this whole thing without breaking our environmental permit on any level. So there's no ongoing investigation on that side, which is basically where you could otherwise get a problem when things like this happen. Is there anything else, Håkan? No, I think that's -- so those 2 are -- there's only one ongoing.

There could have been a second one. And then in the Swedish context, just to be very clear, the ones who have the right to really stop production if they feel it's necessary are the unions. The unions have a very strong position to stop any kind of work that is perceived to be unsecured. We are, of course, the unions are also following very closely what the authorities are coming up to and also our own internal investigations. We do not foresee that the unions will come to a conclusion that we, by doing the way that we operate at Garpenberg put our employees at a too high risk. But that's the one. And I know they're looking into this, but I don't foresee that as a big challenge either.

That's great. And just another one on -- just following on from the previous question is you touched on development rates, but are you happy that your fleet size, the ventilation can support your development and mining activities as you go deeper more laterally to mine from these alternative ore bodies?

The answer is yes. And that is because we have always planned to go to these alternative ore bodies. So we have already planned that ventilation in advance. So we are not short of air in Garpenberg for this production. And of course, being lower in the actual production level, even if some of it comes horizontally, as you're pointing out, and maybe it's not from the old place, but we are emitting less by mucking less.

The next question comes from Christian Kopfer from Arctic Securities.

Just a few follow-ups from my side. Firstly, sorry if you mentioned it already, but what was the final pricing effect on Q2, I guess, versus Q1?

Positive about SEK 150 million.

And then on...

Just to clarify, but that's perhaps obvious.

And then on the smelter side, if I read your comments on specific smelters, you seem to have been running into perhaps minor, but still issues in all the smelters in the quarter, except for Bergsöe.

So those -- I mean, I know that you have commented on, so maybe one more. But those issues have those in general been sorted out?

A little bit uncertain exactly what you're referring to. But of course, we've had maintenance that has been a big part. Otherwise, yes, there's been a little bit of issue with the silver furnace and the precious metal plant in Rönnskär that has an effect that it builds up some inventory because we have to store some intermediaries before we can work on that one.

But otherwise, I would say that the smelters have been running relatively strong and not without much deviances apart from the maintenance, which is, of course, a major distraction.

Okay. But for example, Harjavalta had leakage in the boiler, Kokkola disturbances in the boiler, Odda, you have mentioned ramp-up issues after maintenance. So it seems that you have issues in pretty much all the smelters.

Yes, but still relatively small. Apart from Odda, we will call a more substantial issue with the ramp-up.

The next question comes from Daniel Major from UBS.

The first one, and I know we've had a few on Garpenberg already, but a little bit further since the incident when you assess the ore body going forward, would you say there's -- how would you assess the probability of being able to access any of the Lappber ore body before the shaft is completed? Is that outlook improved? Or should we assume the base case is just keep the flat run rate similar to 2027 out to 2032.

Well, you're asking, of course, the right question, and you're not going to get an answer from me. But I can put -- I can say something of a admission. You're absolutely right that we have nothing in the Lapp production for the guidance that we have for '26 and '27. The trick that we're working with is, of course, to get to see how much of Lapp area we can mine in '28, '29 and '30 and which part. And I said to some people, I would be very surprised if the number will be 0 because there are parts of the ore body that looks relatively good.

I would also be extremely surprised if we managed to mine all the 14 million tonnes that was in that part. Some of it will be sterilized and lost forever. How much of which I will not say then because it's -- it will be too much of a guidance. But we'd be very disappointed if it's 0, put it that way.

Okay. That's useful. And then a few specific items just trying to help us a little bit on the short-term financials. Maybe a few for you, Håkan. You specifically mentioned sulfuric. I just wanted to clarify. I mean, the bridge on the smelter of SEK 98 million increase quarter-on-quarter on byproduct pricing. Did you say that you would expect a sequentially higher positive contribution if sulfuric acid prices stay today, so implying over SEK 100 million improvement from sulfuric. Is that the right read?

Probably around SEK 100 million, possibly slightly better year-on-year for each quarter going forward as we roll over the contracts.

Okay. But year-on-year, the change is SEK 47 million and quarter-on-quarter, the change was SEK 98 million. So you're saying what would the sequential be like relative to Q1?

That's a good point. I'm not sure if I have that number, but it's -- I don't think I can provide a good answer to that. But what we're seeing still is that -- I mean, you see the magnitude of numbers. We've had roughly SEK 100 million, and I think we can continue with improvements in that order of magnitude.

I mean sometimes far bigger numbers have been suggested, and that I don't think we should count on, but we should be able to deliver some further improvements.

Okay. And then just another few clarity. You said depreciation would lift to SEK 2.6 billion. Was that exit rate of this year or sequentially into Q3?

No. What I said is that we had about SEK 2.3 billion in Q2 and -- the reported number. And then what I expect is SEK 2.6 billion in total depreciation for each of the quarters, Q3 and Q4.

Okay. So that should be SEK 2.6 billion in Q3. Okay. That's good. And then just a final one. You talked to the SEK 600 million of sequential cost inflation across the group quarter-on-quarter being predominantly maintenance and smelters, but the increase in cost and smelters is only SEK 300 million, implying the rest is in mines. What is the impact of the fuel on costs? And if oil prices stay the same, would fuel be a positive or negative delta into Q3?

If we start with the maintenance, I think that was about SEK 200 million that we had sequential increase the maintenance cost. Then I think I gave the numbers for oil and power in the last quarter. And I can just say that this quarter, we spent about SEK 400 million on oil, and we spent about SEK 550 million to SEK 600 million on power.

And the movements are it's quite -- moving quite quickly. But then you have to spend for this quarter at least. And then I think you can compare that with what we talked about last quarter to get a feeling of the development.

The next question comes from Amos Fletcher from Barclays.

I guess first question was just on Garpenberg. Can you give us the Q2 EBIT contribution from Garpenberg, which could then help us think about what the Q3 delta should be?

Let's see if I recall that the Q2 EBIT contribution, I think that was around 0 from Garpenberg. Obviously, since it didn't produce most of the quarter, I think -- I mean, we're quite happy with that result. We were helped a little bit in the beginning of the quarter by sales out of inventory, and then we got the production up. But that's where we stand about 0 result in the quarter. EBIT.

And so yes, I mean, is there any rough estimate for what that could do into Q3?

No. It all depends on prices. But basically, the production level will triple going into Q3 compared to Q2. So I think with that, it should be clearly a better position.

Okay. And then I wanted to ask a question on Odda. You're mentioning that ramp-up should continue over the coming quarters. Is it reasonable to assume we get to full production, say, by the end of the year or sooner or later? What do you think is a reasonable assumption?

Of course, when you're standing today, you have a little bit of a broken self confidence regarding Odda, -- but I will say that I expect to get to full production in Q3. I might have to revise that when we talk at the end of Q3. But during Q3, we should get up to full production.

As I said, or maybe I didn't say it clear enough, but just to get the whole thing a bit, Odda is many things. We have checked out the tank house before that it works, but it was never tested at full capacity because we couldn't do that. It's now been tested at full capacity that worked out. Unfortunately, the test was only a week long, but at least for a week, it worked out, then we didn't have enough material to test it. We have tested the foundry for about a week as well, and it also worked very well in the full pace. And so that one has been test. We have been testing the leaching system, also at full pace only for about a week, but also kind of qualify those testing. So we can kind of, in a way, feel secure that there shouldn't be any issues outside the roaster and acid plant. And the roaster has so far been the trouble child that hasn't really gone enough. My sense is that we are getting very close to it. We've gotten through the automation system. We've gotten through a little bit of other -- not just the kind of too early stops, but also heat distribution and so on that's now worked out very well once we got the automation system well.

We have these mechanical failures, which are a little bit unexplainable and extremely, you can say, upsetting and extremely bad feeling. -- why can't you build a conveyor that actually works. We shouldn't have a long discussion about that one, but we feel good about those as well. And once these positions are in place, yes, there will be some further issues somewhere, but it's a little bit unclear exactly what it will be. It's not that we're waiting for a long list.

Okay. And then I guess, the last question was just on Tara. Is there -- is it reasonable to infer that the time line to get back to full capacity at Tara is going to be a bit more extended maybe out into '28 or so, just given how ground stability has performed, how the workforce is coping with the higher workloads you put on them?

We're not guiding for '27 now. But of course, you can say that the fact that we're not quite reaching where we should be in '26 maybe implies that we'll have to revise budgets and so on down for. And thus guidance for '27 down from what it would have been otherwise.

But I don't know by how much. And we'll have to see that. That's why we do a full budget cycle every year to make sure we get this right.

The next question comes from Johannes Grunselius from SB1 Markets.

It's Johannes here. I have a question on Odda...

A question on your expected earnings impact kind of in absolute terms because I know you've given us -- helped us with your expectation about annual EBITDA contribution from the new Odda.

Since then, a lot of things have obviously happened with prices and currency and so forth. So could you please provide us a new update on the EBITDA contribution, please?

I'm afraid I haven't done an updated analysis on that. So I'll have to pass on that question.

But you can say last time we spoke, we said SEK 250 million, right? And with the market conditions at that time, just to get an order of magnitude on things, silver prices are down, which is, of course, a little bit making that number slightly lower.

Zinc prices are actually up since we said that, which will make the number slightly better. TCs are down, which will make the number slightly worse and sulfuric acid are higher, which will make this number slightly better. Without doing the depth of the math, I would argue that those SEK 250 million probably hold. So that's it on the EBITDA and then you have to add the depreciation or just subtract the depreciation just as Håkan said.

Okay. That's very helpful. And then we talked about depreciation for the group it's stepping up in Q3. Is that due to that you activate the Odda D&A in the third quarter?

That's the reason, yes.

That I think is the only reason, right? Everything else is more than.

We will see a slight increase in Aitik because there is some that is depreciated as a function of metal production. And with better grades, also depreciation should climb up a little bit. But that's kind of almost rounding in that context. So it's basically Odda.

I also have a question on your thinking about or what you see in the market regarding price premiums on top of LME prices, especially in the light of sort of more complicated logistics, higher oil price kicking in for transports you provide -- your customers are in Europe. Do you see a push up on premiums these days?

I would say that we're seeing a slight push up on premiums. You're actually right. On the other hand, if you look at net premiums when you subtract the logistics costs that we have to support that is maybe more flat.

The next question comes from Richard Hatch from Berenberg.

Just 2 questions from me. First one, just on Tara off the back of the discussions around the ramp-up pace. Can you just clarify whether the restart did envisage the mine milling 2.2 million tonnes per annum in line with previous capacity or not? And then secondly, I'm just curious as to why silver volumes materially dropped quarter-on-quarter. Last year, you -- last quarter, you smelted 2.5 million ounces this quarter, 1.6 million.

If you take the silver one, I think I a little bit answered that one by the latest comments that we do have a silver furnace linked to the precious metal plant in Rönnskär that is down. And that is, I think, explaining or even overexplaining the lower silver production out of the smelters. Tara, the ambition is clearly to get that to 2.2. I think I alluded to in a previous answer that how quickly will that happen? We will have to get back to that once we see exactly where we'll end up in '26 and once we are through the budgeting process in the end of the year.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the President and CEO, Mikael Staffas, for any closing comments.

Well, thank you all. Thank you all for watching, and thank you for all your questions. I think we've had a good session. I want to take this chance to wish all of you a very happy summer. We have very nice weather here in Stockholm today. I don't know what it is like where you are after having had quite bad weather for the last couple of days. And maybe some of you are after this reporting season now heading for vacation. I hope you'll all have nice vacations. With that, thank you, everybody.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to Boliden's Q1 2026 Results Presentation. My name is Olof Grenmark, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. Today, we will have a results presentation led by our President and CEO, Mikael Staffas; and our CFO, Håkan Gabrielsson. We will also have a Q&A session led by the operator. Mikael, welcome.

Thank you, Olof, and welcome to all of you. We are welcoming you from Askersund. For those of you who are maybe non-Swedes and wonder where that is, that is the closest bigger municipality to Zinkgruvan. We will have our AGM here in a couple of hours, following the tradition that we try to have our AGMs close to operating sites.

Now regarding the quarter. The highlight for the quarter is that we've had a good production quarter. We're coming in with an EBIT, excluding the process inventory revaluation of around SEK 4.4 billion and also a strong cash flow, strong cash flow also considering that Q1 is normally a relatively weak cash flow quarter. We've had solid performance in both of our operating units. So we've had it in mines and in smelters. And then on top of that, we have strong metal prices.

And with our business model with definite pricing coming a little bit later, we, of course, benefit from having strong metal prices when reevaluating previous periods deliveries. The gold and silver production has also been very strong in the smelters.

Regarding the Garpenberg incident, I'll come back to that one, but the impact on the financials for the quarter has been SEK 400 million negative on volumes and SEK 700 million negative from a one-off write-off of assets connected to that. In Odda, we have managed in the quarter to start the ramp-up of the expansion project. We had the first feed, I think, on March 31. And I'll come back to that also in a little while.

So the financial performance in general has been strong with a strong cash flow. The CapEx in the quarter is right around where it should be according to our budget and according to what we have guided to you. On Garpenberg, I think it's time to take a little bit just so we get these numbers more in perspective.

As you all know, we had a rockfall and followed by seismic events that happened in mid-March. What then happened is basically 3 things that we need to separate. In Garpenberg, we have altogether 105 million tonnes of reserves. The upper part of Laver is 14 million out of those 105 million, and we have 91 million, which is other positions. Those other positions were basically totally undamaged, whereas the damage to the upper part of Laver was substantial.

And then we have all the infrastructure in Garpenberg that was damaged, but not very severely. So what has happened now? Well, given the fact that we have all the 91 million tonnes left, but it's largely undeveloped. The most critical thing -- the critical path for us is to get development going. And I'm very happy to say that as of last week, we had our first development explosives and the tunneling is now going on at full speed. We have gotten all power restored. We have pumping restored. We have ventilation restored. We have pumping water restored. So we are able to do lots of things.

There are certain infrastructure. I would say also the workshops by the way are restored and working fully. There is some infrastructure linked to the paste infrastructure in the mine and also linked to the ore hoist and the personnel shaft that are still being repaired and will take another couple of weeks or a couple of months to get ready. But I said the critical path to get the developments going has been passed.

Regarding the guidance for 2026, we had to give a very rough estimate that once we get up to production, we will produce roughly 100,000 tonnes per month. And we're standing by that. So if you -- we're going to be able to get only later in this quarter up to production. So we have 100,000 in Q2 and then we have about 100,000 per month for the rest of the year. If you add that up together with what we have already produced, you get around 1.5 million tonnes. So the guidance for 2026 is right in line with what we had said before.

Now we are now issuing 2 new pieces of guidance, which I think are very important. Number one, we are saying that for 2032, we should reach full capacity and full capacity is not just the 3.7 million tonnes that we had before this happened, but the 4.5 million tonnes that we had guided for at the Capital Markets Day. So we will reach the higher production level in 2032 that we're going to do. And we're also issuing that we're going to be able to get to about 2.3 million tonnes or just shy of 200,000 tonnes per month in 2027. So the developments are going ahead as expected and actually faster than expected so we can get mining from the other ore bodies up into speed.

In this plan, we have not put anything in Laver because the upper part of Laver is still very much unclear. We have not been able to get our arms around fully inspect been able to think what we potentially can produce and with what method and at what cost can production be done.

We have hopes that this is going to be able to get production out of there to some extent, and that's going to help us for the years '28, '29 and '30 and so on, but that's still very much unclear, and we'll get back to that once we've been able to get our arms around the Laver situation. So that's hopefully giving you somewhat of a good understanding of where we're standing on Garpenberg.

If you look at our other projects, I already learned to Odda. We're happy to announce that we had first production, even though it was on the last day of the quarter, we've got some low production in there. We've had some teething problem during April to get this one up to speed. We've had to change some elements in a boiler. We've had some pumps and we've had also some other smaller that needs to be changed.

As we're speaking right now, it is up and running again. We haven't produced much in April. And hopefully, we'll get up to speed and have good production in May and then in June going forward. The other projects, the Russia tankhouse is progressing very well. We're still -- just as we have said on the Capital Markets Day, we're aiming for a start in Q4 of this year.

Boliden Sand Recycling project, very much running forward on track. And on Garpenberg, the expansion with the new shaft, that project is also, although it's very early days, moving ahead, and we do not see that, that will be impacted by the seismic events. We should be able to pursue that project according to the original plan.

On the ESG side, I'm happy to announce that the positive development here is that we're going down in the sick leave, and we're about to hit pre-COVID levels finally after having been way above that for a while. So sick level is really going the right direction.

The LTI frequency is -- we've had a little bit of a setback in the quarter. Now the numbers are still quite much lower than they were if you go back a couple of years, but we're slightly worse than we were in the same quarter last year.

On the greenhouse gas effect, it might look silly here as it looks like we're increasing it. But here, you have to remember that we have not restated the numbers for the Lundin acquisition. And if you do that separation, we're very much on our plans for our decarbonization program.

Market side. The market side has, of course, been what has been really pushing us up in the last couple of quarters. You can see here from the graph that it's -- the metal prices have gone up. And even though they peaked a little bit early in the quarter and they came off a little bit during the quarter, it's still on a very high level. At the same time, you can also see down there that as the metal prices tapered off a little bit, we actually got some positive push again from the currencies in there.

We also have relatively weak TCs, although TCs is getting less and less important as part of the revenue mix for a smelter. We also see byproducts, especially sulfuric acid prices growing on spot. We have a contract portfolio that doesn't really contain any spot on sulfuric acid prices. So we haven't really seen the uptick yet. But if these levels continue to be on these levels as we see them today, of course, that will slowly also get into our longer-term pricing that we have.

If you start looking into the outside world and where we're standing, you could see that copper prices have remained on a relatively high level, actually going up a little bit here lately. You can also see that the margins for copper mines in the world are actually very large, and it looks like every copper mine in the world is good at getting cost out. This is, of course, not quite true because the reason for the cost reduction is very much linked to the high gold prices that comes as a negative to the cost level.

The same thing on the zinc price, you can also see there that the price levels stabilized on a decent level. Costs are coming down very quickly. This has to do with the silver content in the mine that comes in as a negative cost. If you look at our production, I would say that Aitik is producing more or less according to plan. We've had a winter quarter and then still working through the diorite issues. The grades are relatively low, but we are unchanging the guidance for the year. We still expect higher grades to come later in this year.

What you don't really see in the picture here, but we just want to make the point is that after having had a couple of years of quite low stripping development, we have been able to push the stripping quite a lot already in previous quarters and in this latest quarter, it was another very strong mine production quarter in the sense of lots of stripping going on, which we felt very good about.

Garpenberg, we've spoken quite a lot about. I think that we don't have to say much more about that right now. In Kevitsa, stable and reliable production. It's been a good production quarter. Here, the grades are picking up according to exactly what we have also guided and also very happy that the recoveries are also going up in Kevitsa. That is sometimes actually related to exactly to the higher grades.

Somincor, despite the fact that we lost -- as we've spoken of before, we lost a week in the mill due to very heavy rain, we managed to keep on producing in the mine, and we've caught up maybe some of that already in the quarter and the rest will catch up during the rest of the year. So we had a very stable production and a good production coming from Somincor.

Zinkgruvan, where we're standing today, also had good and high milled volume. Tara, slightly below expectations, but still in a ramp-up phase, and we still feel relatively good about that. On the Smelters side, also good production quarter, improved process stability in Rönnskär, increased silver production coming out of intermediary products, which has helped us. Harjavalta also stable production, copper cathodes coming out in a good way. We have slightly lower nickel production due to feed mix where we've had to add pyrite to get the energy balance right.

Kokkola, strong production, generally speaking, Bergsöe, small unit, but very strong and stable production. And Odda, we've spoken about a little bit. We had the first feed in the quarter, but we have not been able to speed that up and get it into meaningful production numbers. So with that, Håkan, I'll leave it to you and talk a little bit about the numbers.

Thank you, Mikael, and good morning. As Mikael said, we had a good quarter. We delivered an operating profit, excluding process inventory of SEK 4.4 billion, which is actually one of the better quarters we've had. Free cash flow at SEK 1.7 billion and earnings per share of SEK 13.45. So all in all, a good quarter.

Looking by business area, you can see that both mines and smelters are roughly on par with the profits from Q4. Mines is on par with Q4 in spite of a hit from the Garpenberg event of about SEK 1.1 billion. Smelters is on par with Q4 in spite of Q4 being positively impacted by a one-off in Rönnskär of SEK 400 million. So all in all, a strong underlying performance in both business areas. Internal profits, roughly 0 in the quarter.

Looking at the EBIT bridge year-on-year comparing to Q1 of last year. As you can see, we are helped by stronger prices, close to SEK 1.8 billion positive impact there. And that's, of course, mainly a result of the strong development of metal prices that we've seen. Metal prices alone contributes by more than SEK 3 billion. It's mainly gold, silver, but also copper.

And then on the negative side, you have currencies and a little bit of TCs that adds up to SEK 1.8 billion in total. Volumes are higher, and this number is explained entirely by the acquisitions of the 2 mines from Zinkgruvan and Somincor. Then on top of that, you have a negative impact from Garpenberg, which is then offset by positives in other operations. Same thing with costs. That number is entirely explained by adding 2 new mines, comparing -- excluding those new mines and comparing apples-to-apples, costs are more or less exactly flat. So we see an inflation roughly at 0 and good cost control in the operations.

And then you're aware of the one-off that we've had here, and that's the write-down in Garpenberg of SEK 700 million. Comparing sequentially, again, very strong development in prices, positive 1.3. It's basically across the line for most metals, but with gold and silver being the main contributors. I should also say that the provision and the definitive pricing of contracts that were open at last quarter end December 31 contributed by about SEK 450 million.

And I think those of you that are modeling it in detail would have that number in there. Volumes, a negative impact, mainly as a result of the Garpenberg seismic incident. And then Q4 -- or costs are significantly better than the fourth quarter. The fourth quarter was an expensive quarter. It typically is. We had a lot of contractors and external services. And also as we had a good run of prices towards the end of last year, we had to adjust provisions for profit sharing and similar, which weighed on the cost in Q4. But good cost control.

Moving on to cash flow. When we talked about the earnings, we talked about the CapEx, Mikael did. I'm happy about the working capital side. Typically, we tie about SEK 1.5 billion in Q1. Q1 is normally a weak quarter for working capital. And this time, we're roughly flat in spite of stronger prices. So it's good work in the smelting divisions behind this, working with working capital, working with inventory reductions and then also a little bit of impact from the situation in Garpenberg.

Another thing that stands out here is the tax side. Again, we had a good run of prices towards the later part of next year, and we've been catching up in tax payments. There is always a delay there, but you see it's a significant amount paid in Q1. All in all, this leads to a strong balance sheet, net debt to equity of 18%, payment capacity of close to SEK 22 billion and all in all, a strong balance sheet.

So with that, Mikael, do you want to continue with the outlook?

Thank you, Håkan. And regarding the outlook, it's easy to say first that regarding guidance for everything except Garpenberg, we have no changes. It's all the same guidance for the full year as we had before. That's also true for CapEx levels and so on.

And just to repeat regarding Garpenberg, we are now guiding for 1.5 million tonnes in 2026. That is roughly a run rate of 100,000 tonnes or so per month for the last 7 months of this year and then adding on to production that we have had already in Q1, very much in line with the very preliminary guidance that we issued in connection with the profit warning once we had the seismic event.

Regarding then 2027, we have a new guidance that has not been issued that is basically doubling production from the 100,000 tonnes per month pace to almost 200,000 tonnes per month or 2.3 million tonnes for the full year of 2027. And then we are now also guiding that in 2032, we should be up to the new estimated full production of 4.5 million tonnes, which is then clearly above what we were producing before the seismic event at 3.7 million tonnes. Also, grades are the same.

The grade for Garpenberg for this year has changed slightly, slightly lower zinc and slightly higher silver as a consequence of other position being mined and the Laver positions. We are also here just very clarifying that we are guiding for the maintenance impact in smelters, where the big chunk of the maintenance for 2026 will come into Q2 of SEK 350 million.

With that, operator, I think we're ready for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Adrian Gilani from ABG Sundal Collier.

My first question is on the 2027 guidance in Garpenberg. Just to clarify in that guidance, is it included that you also expect to reach a run rate of 3.7 million tonnes at some point during the year? Or do you expect to be below nameplate capacity for all of 2027?

We will expect to be below nameplate capacity for all of 2027.

Okay. Understood. And I guess also a question you talked shortly about asset prices and not having any spot exposure. Can you talk a bit about how that contract portfolio is structured and when you will see a P&L effect if the high prices were to remain? Is this something that should boost earnings in Q2 already?

Most likely not so much in Q2, but for the second half of the year, it would. We are -- we have a portfolio which is a little bit complex and combines all kind of length of contracts and they have longer contracts with adjustments that are kind of slower to spot prices and so on. But if the current spot prices will hold on, we will see some meaningful effect in the second half of the year.

Okay. Just to follow up quickly. Can you say roughly how much of the volume will be priced on current prices in the second half of the year? Is that possible to say?

This is now when it gets really complex because, as you know, there is one kind of European spot price and there's a global spot price. We have much bigger exposure to the European spot price than we have to the global spot price. The European spot price increased already a little bit in '25. So we had good byproducts there already. And it has not spiked as much as the global one in so far this quarter.

So -- and that's the most important one to us. I don't know, Håkan, if you have a number what it could be if that one were to stay. And then we have some that's on the kind of international global spot price, but that's a relatively smaller part.

I don't have a number apart from the fact that it's less than 20% that is exposed to the global spot, most is European levels.

The next question comes from Alain Gabriel from Morgan Stanley.

Again, on Garpenberg, you've given the guidance for grades for the average for '27. How should we think about the sequencing of the grades for both zinc and silver over the course of the year and into '27? That's one. And then two, on the run rate you've given for next year, the 2.3 million tonnes.

If I may interpret your comments suggesting that there's a wide range of outcomes. How should we think about the bottom and the upper end of that range? And what needs to happen for you to meet the bottom or the upper end of the range for '27 mill throughput?

Just to clarify on that, and it has to do with the Laver ore body. We do not presently expect to be able to mine anything at all from Laver in '26 or '27. We have not yet been able to conclude that investigation. We have hopes that we can mine something coming to '28 and beyond. The 2.3 million that you've seen is then based on no Laver.

Of course, there's a potential upside if we were to be able to produce out of Laver, but we do not think that we will, even though we do not know. I think that the 2.3 million is based upon getting access to Kankberg, [indiscernible], and more positions in [indiscernible] and [indiscernible] with relatively little risk. So we would feel pretty good about the 2.3 million. We have not guided formally for grades for 2, they are similar to the grade for 2026.

Regarding sequencing, no comment really on that. We tend to avoid to guide on grades for the individual quarters.

And a follow-up on that as well on the flow of material from Garpenberg into your smelting system. Do you expect some disruptions? And how do you plan to mitigate this disruption? If you can give us some financial indications of what we should be expecting as a fallout from the concentrate shipment disruption.

I think that the financial implications are relatively small. There are 2 potential issues. There is very little risk that we will not get zinc units, so we cannot produce. That was close to 0. We have already basically procured zinc enough to be able to mitigate Garpenberg. There is a little bit of a financial impact that, of course, when we procure something, now we have to buy it at spot terms. And of course, spot TC terms are not that good right now. So there is a little bit of a financial impact from that.

There is a second financial impact, which is very much difficult to get your arms around, but it shouldn't be that big. As you know, in zinc smelting, it's not just having the enough amount of concentrate. You're very dependent on making sure that you can get the right recipe to be able to feed it well through the Smelters, losing Garpenberg, which is a very good and a very useful ingredient makes it difficult to replicate the recipes, which might impact a little bit on throughput availability and so on and some of the performance in the Smelters, but we don't think it's going to be a major financial impact.

The next question comes from Liam Fitzpatrick from Deutsche Bank.

A few questions on Garpenberg. The first one, just to step back a bit, can you just explain in a bit more detail what you mean by substantial damage to Laver just to give us an idea of the challenges you're facing? The second question is just around how high production can get through other areas if you can't reaccess that part of the ore body.

Is 2.3 million tonnes sort of about the limit? Or could you push that higher before the second hoist or the new hoist comes in? And then what you haven't told us is sort of additional CapEx the development work to open up the new areas. Is that expected to be substantial? Will that have some impact on 2027 CapEx?

If we start from the back, CapEx relatively not so substantial. I think it's part of the more normal development. On Laver, just for you to give -- just to have a sense of what has happened. And this is, of course, very much oversimplifying things. But you can imagine that Laver, which is kind of 300-meter wide, 150 meters thick and kind of from 1,100 up to 400 to 700 meters tight.

Without going into kind of any detail, I would say that this thing has fallen down 5 meters. The whole thing has fallen down 5 meters. What's the challenge with that? Well, of course, all the kind of development that we have done in the ore doesn't match the developments on the outside. That might be the simpler thing to kind of fix if that will be the only problem to get that to happen.

The much more challenging thing is that when this has happened, how has the ore body cracked. If this has just kind of moved down, you could imagine going into the ore body and keep on mining the way it was mined before. It will be very easy. Most likely, it has cracked, not uniform in the same part, but it has cracked in different pieces. And where it's cracked a lot, it might be impossible to go in because as you start going in and try to tunnel things, you'll just get rockfall over you. So it will be unsafe to do that. In other areas, it might be possible. It might be possible with smaller dimensions. It might be possible if you mine slower.

So these are all the issues that need to be answered. Then on top of that, there is a kind of another challenge. The Garpenberg mine has quite a lot of water into it. And as this kind of thing has fallen down, there is also the need to make sure that we control the water levels within the ore body.

And with the new cracks and everything else, we might have a different level of water and a different way for water to go through, and that also needs to be investigated thoroughly so you understand what it is. So therefore, coming back to what I said, we think this is going to take months until we kind of have our arms around what can really be done. And we think it's not going to be easy.

We hope that we're going to be able to mine. But as we said before, we don't think that we can mine anything in '26 or '27. So the 2.3million that we have guided for should be fine. We should also, even without Laver, be able to gradually step up in 2028 and '29. But it might be that it will be not stepping up so much if we don't get Laver until we get the new hoist in '32.

Okay. That's very helpful. Just a quick follow-up on seismic activity. Is it kind of back to normal? Or are you still experiencing abnormal...

It's back to normal. After the 48 hour of roller coaster, if you want to use that word, it's basically been back to normal since. So there is no increased seismic activity at the moment.

The next question comes from Marina Calero from RBC Capital Markets.

I have a couple of questions. One follow-up on Garpenberg. When do you think you'll be in a position to announce the market to the extent that you can recover mining at the [indiscernible] ore body?

And then my second question is on inflation. You've had very good cost control so far. Given the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, do you expect any inflationary pressures in the second half of the year?

I heard you a little bit pori, but if I understood you right, your first question was about Garpenberg and about laver. And did I understood right how we could mine that one? I didn't really understand the question. But I can repeat what I just said, hopefully answering your question that Laver, it will not be mined exactly as we have historically mined it, I'm pretty sure, but it doesn't mean that it cannot be mined and it might have to be mined with a smaller, more small-scale type of mining method, and it might mean that we might need to leave more pillars. There are lots of issues around that. And when will we know that?

As I said, it will be months. This is very difficult to push these kind of investigations. It will be towards the end of the year. Hopefully, we'll have some more feeling around the 2028 and beyond.

Regarding inflation, Håkan?

Yes. I think that's not an easy question. I mean there is obviously a great deal of uncertainty. But I mean, we're obviously monitoring the development of oil prices and so on. But just to give -- so I guess that's -- if we get inflation, that's mainly connected to oil. We spend each quarter a bit more than SEK 300 million on diesel and oil. So any increases will have an impact on that.

On top of that, we have about SEK 700 million spend, which is chemicals, explosives, transport and similar, not directly connected to oil, but with a significant impact. So that might also have an impact. And then as a follow-on, an additional SEK 700 million roughly per quarter on electricity. So all that will depend on what happens in the Middle East, et cetera. So we just have to monitor that.

The next question comes from Amos Fletcher from Barclays.

A couple of questions. I guess the first one was just to think about the EBIT bridge into Q2. Could you give us what the Garpenberg EBIT contribution was in Q1?

I think that Garpenberg had a contribution of about -- let's see if I get this right, about SEK 1.4 billion, SEK 1.5 billion in Q1. So we'll lose a fair part of that gross profit. As you saw the SEK 400 million impact that we talked about, that was just for the couple of weeks that the mine was closed. So that will have an impact.

Then prices, I mean, we'll see what happens. And then on top of that, we'll have some maintenance in Smelters. I think those are the main components. And then Odda we'll see how much impact we get of that.

Okay. And then I just want to ask on the working capital side. Can you give us any guidance for future quarters? Obviously, as you noted, Q1 was a very small build versus normal seasonal patterns?

Well, I think typically, Q2 is a quarter that is relatively flat on working capital. But as Odda gets up to speed, we will tie a little bit. It's not as much in a zinc smelter that compared to, for example, a copper smelter, but I would expect a flat quarter with the exception of the build from Odda, which could be about SEK 0.5 billion or something like that.

Okay. That's great. And then final question was just on -- just kind of related to Marina's earlier question on diesel. I was just interested to know your purchasing position because obviously, it seems like there's very little effect realized in the financials for Q1. Is that just the inventory position that you hold?

And I was just wondering how big that is, how many weeks that is and when we might start to see higher prices flowing into the financials Q2.

I don't have an exact number, but you're right. It's 1.5, 2 months of lag before the diesel hits the P&L because of the inventory positions of the material we've already bought. So...

The next question comes from Krishan Agarwal from Citigroup.

Can I clarify that the guidance for 4.5 million tonnes for Garpenberg by 2032, does that include any of the mining happening into the Laver area?

Sorry, does it include any of the what?

Laver.

The 4.5 million, then we're into the new hoist and it doesn't contain any Laver.

I understand. I understand. And then the second question, more of a clarification. The Odda smelter ramp-up, I mean, is it on track for the Q4 full run rate? Is that a fair assumption?

Yes. I think it's still on track for a relatively full ramp-up rate. Of course, the challenge with running up the Smelter is not really getting it -- we exactly get the first -- the last percentage. We need to make sure that we get production going. And as I said, as of right now, when we're speaking, we're producing fully and it looks relatively good.

So it looks like these teething problems with the boiler and with the pumps that we had seem to be now all working. Does that mean that we will not find something else or maybe something else will also show up in this ramp-up period, but we should clearly be able to ramp up during the next few months. It shouldn't be that long.

Understood. And the final question is on the tankhouse. So I remember, I mean, you're saying that, okay, the tankhouse building you are doing is essentially a higher capacity than the earlier one. Would you be able to give us some kind of a sense of how much of the production we should expect after the commissioning of the tank house in the Q4 and probably full ramp-up in '27?

The tankhouse that we're building has 230,000 tonne capacity, which is very much in line with the one that burned down. So we are not increasing capacity because of this. This means that if you combine the 230,000 with 170,000 that we have in Harjavalta, we will be slightly long tankhouse capacity. We are unlikely to buy anodes because of logistics and other things. So the limiting factor is going to be our anode production and not the tankhouse going forward.

The next question comes from Daniel Major from UBS.

Just a follow-up again on the Garpenberg kind of earnings bridge from Amos' question. Can you provide us an estimate of what split in the cost base is fixed versus variable? If we look at 2025, your reported costs defined as revenue less EBITDA was about SEK 2.1 billion. Yes, can you just give us a sense of what the cost base will look like when you're running at a lower volume?

I can at least try. There is obviously some uncertainty still. But you're right, it's -- we had, I think, about SEK 550 million, SEK 560 million in the first quarter. So it adds up to the number you gave for last year, just to confirm that.

We typically consider about 30% to be variable, meaning energy, consumables, et cetera. And there will be some savings on that. However, we will use more resources for tunneling, not in the ore body, but to new ore bodies, and we'll have to decide whether that should be treated as CapEx or OpEx.

And then on top of that, there will be some repair costs. So without giving an exact number, 30% is variable, but I think you should treat the cost savings quite conservatively on your -- in your assumptions because there is a lot to do to get this up and running again.

Okay. That's good so much closer to the SEK 550 million than SEK 550 million less 30%. Is that the right way of thinking about it.

The next question comes from Richard Hatch from Berenberg.

Just a few questions. Just firstly, just quickly on Tara. Just wondering if you can just give us a bit of a steer as to when you hit that 1.8 million tonne run rate. Should we expecting that to be occurring over the coming quarters? Or should we be going below that? That's the first one.

And then just the second one is just on grades at Garpenberg in '27. I don't think you've given guidance, but I just wonder if you would be able to give the direction of travel? And then thirdly, just you mentioned that you were comfortable in obtaining zinc material for the Smelters to offset the Garpenberg reduction in volumes.

But can you just perhaps just give a bit more color around just what you're seeing in that zinc concentrate market, if you do see it tightening over the next couple of years or if you feel comfortable that you're going to be able to secure the material you need while Garpenberg is off?

Tara, 1.8 million. We haven't changed the full year guidance from 1.8 million, which means that we need to reach that level within the next few quarters to keep the full year guidance. Grades '27, order of magnitude similar as 26 without going into detail. And then zinc material, we don't see and we don't foresee there being any issues in finding the zinc material. It's a matter of cost and where the spot TCs will develop on zinc, I think your good is as good as mine.

Okay. Mikael, can I just push you a bit on Tara? I mean your run rate is currently well below that 1.8 million, right? So what are the challenges, the bottlenecks? Where are you sort of seeing the areas to improve and get to the level you want to get to?

It has been developments. We have not been able to keep developments up to the level we need. We have done efforts to increase developments. They have not given quite the effect that we wanted, but they've given some effect. So developments are coming, and we're working hard with developments also now in this quarter. And as I alluded to before, we've actually sent some crews from Garpenberg over to work with developments in Tara as Garpenberg has been down.

The next question comes from Boris Bourdet from Kepler Cheuvreux.

The first one is on Garpenberg about the seismic activity. Now that you have more insight into what happened, can you say whether that was linked to the mining operations, this rockfall or whether it was connected to external seismic activity?

I'm asking the question because recently, we had medium magnitude seismic activity in Norway and Sweden on the western part of Sweden. And the second question is on Aitik grade. We see the grades further going down. So what makes you comfortable that the grades will go up in H2?

Aitik grade, I think we were very clear in our early communication that the first half would be lower and the second half would be higher when we communicated the 0.18%. We have a better position -- better positions that we're coming into the second half of the year with higher grades.

Garpenberg, why? This is, of course, something that we cannot definitely say why, and that's part of the investigation why this happened. I think it's fair to say that it's because of our mining. This is an area that is quite seismically stable and should not normally have sales activity. But maybe theoretically, there was also an outside event that triggered this thing, but that we do not know and we can absolutely not say for sure. I think it's more likely that this has been triggered by our own activities.

And of course, we need to take the learnings from that to make sure that this doesn't happen again on this scale. But as I said, this is very early days and the investigations are still ongoing to both why this triggered and why it triggered in the way that -- once it triggered, why it continued the way that it did.

And maybe just to follow up on Garpenberg. So if I get you right, there is no specific additional costs or CapEx or I mean, no significant amounts to be expected on top of the already impaired SEK 700 million and the missed volumes -- or should we include additional things?

I think this was Håkan said that there will be some repair costs, but those repair costs might be more seen as not getting down the operating cost for operating only at 30%. And I think that that's more the way to see it. I don't think there will be any increased costs as such, but maybe not quite as much lower as you would have expected otherwise. And we don't see any additional needs for write-downs or so on.

The next question comes from Pavel Kirjanovs from Bank of America.

I just had another one on Garpenberg, and apologies if this was asked previously. But as we think about Garpenberg through 2032, what would allow you to reach that earlier potentially?

Well, I would say that the way to reach it earlier and the only way to reach it earlier would be that we will get significant mining coming in Laver because we will not be able to develop the other ore bodies any faster. This is in line with the development pace that we have. So it will be -- that will be dependent on getting mining and some meaningful mining out of Laver. And just to make sure, again, we do not, in any way, promise that we do not know. We hope, but we do not know the situation in Laver.

[Operator Instructions] The next question is from Daniel Major from UBS.

A couple of follow-ups, if I may. Just on the depreciation line, I'm assuming this quarter, the SEK 700 million write-down at Garpenberg went through here. But can you just provide us a guidance level on the quarterly run rate of D&A across the group following the changes at Garpenberg? And then a second follow-up, I've asked many times before, but why do you focus on EBIT, not EBITDA when all of your peers focus on EBITDA?

I'd say the depreciation then, we take out SEK 700 million from the asset base, which is depreciated over a quite a long time. So if you just spread it across the lifespan of those, that's mainly development. So that is a fairly low change in -- fairly limited change in depreciation.

What will happen, though, is that when Odda gets up to speed, we will increase the depreciation there, as we talked about earlier. And also a reminder is that Aitik is largely depreciating based on metal value produced. So also the depreciations in Aitik will increase. Regarding EBITDA and EBIT, well, I don't really have any specific comments on that. I'm aware that many people focus on EBITDA.

We have -- we're working with EBIT excluding process inventories. And then I think it's easy to get the EBITDA number as well. But I guess we might have to think about that. But until further notice, we're sticking to our regular follow-up.

Just to push you on that slightly. So what would it be a sensible run rate with those moving parts on depreciation through a quarterly basis through the remainder of the year?

Let's see. I think that we're going up in Odda from about SEK 200 million, SEK 300 million to about SEK 800 million per year. So that will be the change there. I think it's not so much this year, but as we go over the next few years and getting closer to higher grade areas, that will be fairly significant numbers, but it all depends on what exactly you're looking at. But for Odda, it's about SEK 200 million something to SEK 800million something.

Per year?

Per year.

So increasing about SEK 100 million...

Through the remainder this year.

Yes, about SEK 150 million or SEK 200 million.

And then slightly lower because of the SEK 700 million, but that's maybe SEK 350 million comes out or something like that.

Yes, I'd say less because it's quite long depreciation times on those assets.

All right. So we should take the base, which is this quarter less SEK 700 million and then add those variables on. Is that the right way of thinking about it?

Add about SEK 150 million, SEK 175 million per quarter, then I think you should be fairly spot on.

Okay. Versus this quarter, less SEK 700 million?

Yes.

Okay. And just one other follow-up, if I could. Just a clarification that you mentioned earlier. Did you say that the net provisional pricing impact was a positive SEK 450 million this quarter total?

It depends what you mean by net, but the value in the Q1 profit that came out of preliminary price volumes at the end of Q4, and that was then definitively priced in Q1, that was SEK 450 million.

And if you refer to the EBIT bridge, you'll have to compare what we had for -- what the impact was in the respective quarter prior. But the impact on this P&L was SEK 450 million this quarter.

The next question comes from Liam Fitzpatrick from Deutsche Bank.

A couple of quick follow-ups on the numbers as well. Just on that SEK 1.4 billion number that you gave us forecast for Garpenberg, I assume that's before the impairment. I just wanted to confirm that.

And then you kind of suggested that you're still not entirely certain or clear in terms of how you're going to classify between OpEx and CapEx at Gothenburg in terms of the additional development work. In terms of what you're sort of guiding to us at the moment, are you assuming that most of this sort of additional tunneling work and so on is flowing through OpEx -- or is it sort of split? Or how should we think about it?

When we say that be conservative on your estimates of OpEx that we will not be able to save that much on OpEx, that's based on the fact that we still have to do the tunneling.

Then if we decide to classify some of it as CapEx, then you will see slightly lower OpEx and slightly higher CapEx, but it's -- I think we're talking about SEK 100 million or SEK 200 million order of magnitude. But what we've said today is basically based on that being mainly OpEx. But normally, when we develop towards a new ore body, that will be CapEx. So we'll just have to come back on that. But it's relatively small numbers anyway.

Okay. And Garpenberg, SEK 1.4 million, is that pre the impairment?

Yes.

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Okay. Thank you all. Thank you all for very insightful questions. I am personally going to go out for a few minutes and enjoy the sun here that we're having at Zinkgruvan before we continue with our AGM. I hope that wherever you're standing that you're having a good day as well. Thank you, everybody.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to this Boliden telephone conference. My name is Olof Grenmark, and I'm Head of Investor Relations.

Today, we will have an update by our President and CEO, Mikael Staffas, based on the press release that we sent out last evening. We will also have a Q&A session where our President, Boliden Mines, Stefan Romedahl, will also participate alongside Mr. Staffas.

Mikael, I hand over to you. Welcome.

Thank you, Olof, and welcome, all of you out there. I will briefly, in a couple of minutes, just go through the general situation covering what we have already sent out in the release last night, and then I will leave the floor open for questions.

But just to go back and look at what has been positive development. The first and maybe the most obvious positive development is that the seismic activity that caused the problems in the first time has gone back, and we're now back to normal levels. That's good.

We managed to start inspections already a week ago, but those inspections were somewhat slow and somewhat tedious. They were done under special safety protocols, which meant that only very few people could be involved in it. And also, as we have been able to restore some of the safety infrastructure, including rescue chambers, we can now get larger crews underground and start working on the repairs that need to be done. So this is all good.

The other part that's good is that we have now seen that lots of the big infrastructure pieces that we have underground, including the crushers, the hoist system, the workshops and so on, are either not damaged at all or only moderately damaged, which is good. And also the media underground, including ventilation, water pumping, power systems, compressed air systems, so on, they have been hurt to some extent, but we don't think it's going to take very long to repair them. We're talking about 1 or a couple of weeks.

So these are the good things. The other thing that's good is that the majority of the ore that we have underground is in a very good condition. So that's also good. So we have a good position on Kvarnberget. We have a good situation regarding Dammsjon. We have a good situation regarding the lower parts of Lappberget. We also have good situation regarding the Huvudmalmen, which is an area where we're not producing at all right now, but what we can see there, it also looks like that's all good, which is linked to the new hoist and so on.

However, the issue is, and that's very clear, that the area that has been most severely affected is the upper part of the Lappberget ore body. That's where we have the majority of our production. Around 70% of the plant production is in those areas. And even though we haven't done detailed inspections finished yet and even less than any kind of planning, it is obvious to us that the damages here are big enough that it's going to be very difficult to restart mining here in the short term. And in some positions, probably also forever, that we will lose some of these tonnes.

Just to get a sense of order of magnitude to all of you guys. If we were to lose all of it, which we don't really think, but if we were to lose all of it, that's about a little bit north of 10 million tonnes, maybe up to 13 million tonnes, out of the 104 million tonnes that we have in the reserves. So that's a little bit more than 10% that we lost, but we still have 90 million left. And out of the 150 million that we have in resources, most of that is very undamaged and still around. So the long-term prospect for the mine is still good, even though the short term is tricky.

So the time plan for us now is that basically, as of today, we have started the repair works. It will take a couple of weeks. We don't know exactly, but that's that the order of magnitude to get the things in place that we will need to have in order to start producing. We will then start production, and we will start hopefully at around 30% of normal capacity. And that's what we get from Kvarnberget, from Dammsjon and from the lower parts of Lappberget.

It is then very difficult for us to have assessments of how things will develop going forward. We still have to work on those plans quite a lot. But we're, of course, working in 2 directions. One is to see what can be done out of the upper Lappberget. Is there something there that can be rescued? That's probably going to take a while and it's going to be relatively low volumes, but we will look into that.

The other one is, of course, how can we speed up developments in our other ore bodies, the ones that are unhurt, so that we can ramp up production there? It's also, as those of you who have done a mine plan know, quite difficult to know exactly how fast that can be done when you haven't really tested what is doable and so on.

When it comes to the other kind of financing consequences, we have gone out today that we will have in Q1, we are losing about SEK 400 million compared to what somebody could have guessed. It depends a little bit on what prices and terms you use. But if you use prices and terms of today or a couple of days back, that's the order of magnitude.

On top of that, we have not yet assessed whether we will need to make a write-down of some of the infrastructure parts linked to the Lappberget ore body. That's, of course, a fully noncash item, but we will have to come back to that as well.

So that's the kind of general information that I wanted to convey to you. And with that, operator, I leave the floor open for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Adrian Gilani from ABG Sundal Collier.

Appreciate you setting up this call. Two questions from my end. First of all, in your mine plan for Garpenberg prior to the rockfall, was the upper Lappberget zone supposed to account for the majority of production for many years to come? Or was this a zone that you were sort of gradually moving away from anyway in a couple of years?

Yes. I can take that one very quickly. It would have been -- the answer is yes to both of your questions. It would have been the majority of the production for a couple of years forward, but it was slowly getting less as it was coming slowly towards an end.

Okay. And second question. Is it -- or I guess, how much of the cost base would you be able to scale down on fairly short notice, I'm thinking for 2026, while you are on this lower production? I'm just trying to get an understanding of the under-absorption effect on the lower volumes.

Yes, I understand that. And that's a very good -- another good question that I don't have a good answer to. Some of what would have been OpEx otherwise is likely to become CapEx because we are likely to do much more drifting and development, which comes as a CapEx rather than OpEx, although it cash-wise might be the same kind of cost.

Then we will save some costs, but it's a little bit difficult to say exactly how much on the -- in the mill, where we will use, of course, less power and we'll use less chemicals and so on when we are producing less. But we'll have to come back to those questions as well in more detail.

The next question comes from Alain Gabriel from Morgan Stanley.

A couple of questions. One, Mikael, you talked about the 30% production level towards the back end of Q2. What are the practical and physical limiting factors to you lifting your throughput rates above the 30%? That's my first question.

Development. We need more development. We have development roughly in place for those 30%. So I can answer that one quickly.

Okay. And the second one is on the expansion plans for Garpenberg. I guess it's still early stage, but preliminarily, do you think that this incident now will prompt you to put all the expansion plans on hold for now? Or how are you thinking about the expansion projects?

From a practical point of view, we don't really know yet. Of course, we will have to do certain things around the new hoist and see whether there has been some geotechnical changes and so on.

But from a strategic point of view, that investment becomes even more important. That one is there in order to be able to develop Huvudmalmen, the next kind of big one, towards the depth. And if we're now losing tonnage in the upper part of Lappberget, we will have to get to Huvudmalmen sooner rather than later. So it puts the strategic rationale even more in the forefront.

The next question comes from Marina Calero from RBC Capital Markets.

A couple of questions from my side. First, do you know what caused these events? And do you see any risk of this happening again in the short term or in the medium term? And then the second question is, do you have an insurance in place that could help you to cover the potential infrastructure cost or repairs that you have to do right now?

I will take the second one first and I'll leave the first one to Stefan to get into in a little while. Regarding insurance, yes, we do have some insurance. It is on a very low level because there are very few things underground that our insurance covers. So it's -- there is likely to be some kind of insurance money, but it's going to be on a very small scale.

I can say it's absolutely not going to be more than SEK 1 billion, because that's the ceiling. But it's likely that it will be less because there -- actually the things that are insured underground are the ones that have been actually doing pretty well. And the things that are not insurable underground are the things that have been faring worse. But this will be a long discussion.

Regarding the cost of the event, I will leave it over to my mine director to see if he can make some sense of that so you all understand.

Yes. This is quite complicated in one way. But if we start with a simple answer, is that if you are doing mining as we do, then we will have a seismic event. Even if we're backfilling the voids that we are creating, that backfill will not prevent seismic events. So we will have seismic events even going forward. The thing is that the mining method as such should be possible to put up in a way that we should be able to mine even if we have these seismic events.

In this certain occasion, it has been a really long-term buildup of stress in the rock mass. And these have been released in a way that we not have seen before. And after these have happened, it was in 2 phases actually, first one, big one, and then later on, a smaller one, going down in the number of seismicity as well as amplitude of the events. So the stresses around the rock mass around our ore bodies have changed now after these events. And that will take some time to build up a new stress before -- stress in the rock mass before the next relief of that.

So this will have an effect how we are looking into the mine method -- mining method and if we should do changes to that, of course. But the main principles is the same. It will be stope production and it will be paste that we are using for backfilling. So we can't say that this kind of events will never happen again. It will. But we hopefully will be more prepared to steer them in an other way than it has happened this time.

The next question comes from Liam Fitzpatrick from Deutsche Bank.

Just a question on the flexibility that you have to kind of pivot your mine plan. I know you're still working through all of this. But if we take the scenario that you can't get back into the upper parts of this section of the mine for the foreseeable future, what sort of time frame do you think we'll be looking at or could be looking at to open up new areas and get back towards that pre-incident type levels of production and throughput into the mill? Is it 1 to 2 years? Could it be a lot longer? Could it be shorter? Just any kind of color on that would be helpful.

You will not get much color because I will say what I said before, we have not done the plan yet. And before you do the plan, you should be very careful about saying things. And there are so many things that you need to coordinate, not just getting the development media done. They need to be done in the right sequence, in the right order, to make sure that everything from ventilation to other things work out fine.

So I will not give you another number on that yet. Hopefully, we'll be able to say something more as we release the Q1 report.

Can I maybe try and ask it a slightly different way? If you want to expand production from the other unaffected parts of the ore body, is there scope to kind of -- to ramp up production from those fairly short order?

I mean it's -- whether it's shorter or not, it's a little bit of a question. But yes, we will probably try to use -- those of you who have been in Garpenberg, you will know that there are other smaller ore bodies around that we have been mining before where there might be positions left, places like Kaspersbo, Strand and so on.

So we will look at everywhere to see where we can find volume in a useful way. But let us do the planning first, and then we'll come back to you once we have a sense of how this can be done.

The next question comes from Krishan Agarwal from Citigroup.

Could you elaborate on which of the smelters are actually dependent on the Garpenberg feed? And is there any kind of rerouting of feed for the smelters you will have to do post this incident?

The Garpenberg feed goes -- it goes to many places. But the main part is, of course, the zinc concentrate that goes to Odda and to Kokkola. Without getting into too much details, of course, we're working on trying to make sure that we can work on our concentrate book to not get too much of an impact. But we'll have to come back to how we can manage that as well.

Then there are smaller feeds of lead concentrate going both internally and externally, some copper concentrate going both internally and externally. But I think in those cases, the damage is probably less on the receiving end. We have, of course, called force majeure on all our deliveries because of this.

I understand. And then I'm assuming that the SEK 400 million impact, which you have guided, include any kind of impact from this concentrate rerouting as well?

Yes. Yes, it does because we have not had the issue so far. I mean it's -- there is enough to handle the smelters during Q1, during this kind of 2 to 3 weeks that you have until the end of the month, rather than what it will be longer term if this has gone for a long time. But we'll come back to that as well.

Okay. And then finally, a quick clarification. So the incident happened or initially was reported in early March. So the SEK 400 million impact which you have given is essentially for like 3 weeks impact?

Yes.

The next question comes from Amos Fletcher from Barclays.

One question for Stefan. I just wanted to ask, have you changed the mining method or the pillar sizes in any parts of the mine in the course of recent months or years that could possibly be a contributory factor to this happening?

Not really. It's a panel stoping mine plan that we have -- the mining method that we have used. And we are in -- mining secondary stopes mainly. So all the primers is taken out. We are following the sequence for the secondary stopes. But it's no big changes in the design of the stopes. But the ore body itself is quite wide, so it's about 120 meters thickness. And that means that you divide those primary stopes and secondary stopes in more or less 3 levels when you're going in. And that also makes the full void, if I say so, with Lappberget to be quite extensive, both in height and width and depth.

So it's the number of -- the amount of backfill paste and the remaining secondary stopes that have collapsed together, if I say so, based on the seismic events.

Okay. Understood. And then the second question was just on CapEx. Have you got a sort of preliminary estimate of the capital cost to restore production back to 30% and then potentially back to 100% over the medium term?

No. But up to the 30% should be relatively low. As I said, these are minor repairs. So that one, I can -- just a low -- very low number, not material. The number for getting up to 100% could be more material, but we need to get back to that.

Okay. And then just final question was just around have you got any sort of indication you could give us on grade and throughput for 2027 at this stage?

I will be very careful with that. As you understand, we have -- we're now going to have to redo the mining plan for '26. We have given some estimates there because we know roughly which position we're going to go to, and we know that it's slightly higher silver grade and average for the whole thing and slightly lower zinc grade, maybe similar NSRs adding them together. '27, it's going to matter a lot how we decide to speed up development and which positions we're going to be able to get to.

The next question comes from Boris Bourdet from Kepler Cheuvreux.

I will ask 2 questions. The first is to try and assess the financial impact for the full year. So if I look at the press release, you indicate that there is 0.8 million tonnes to be produced in Q1 and then 0.1 million tonnes per month. So that leads to 1.7 million, 1.8 million tonnes per year, for this year. It's roughly half of what was expected initially. So should we cut EBITDA contribution in 2? Would that be a fair way to assess the broad financial impact for this year?

And the second question is about the implications for the ongoing appeal. Do you see this event as some -- adding some risk to the conclusion that's to be taken at the end of the year?

I don't think that this will impact the appeal process on the environmental permit at all.

Regarding financial impact, just to help you on the tonnes, we basically said it's going to be 800,000 in Q1 and then it will be maybe a month where there's nothing. And then if you do 100,000 per month for the last 8 months, and it's like 1.6 million, so that's less than half. So we're going to lose more than half for the year. And of course, in the quarters, in Qs 2 and 3 and 4, we will, of course, be less than half of that. But it's -- so that's just an order of magnitude. It's not a detailed guidance.

The next question comes from Johannes Grunselius from SB1 Markets.

Johannes here. So most of the questions have already been asked. But would you think, Mikael, that when you report the Q1, that you are able to provide some kind of 2027 guidance on ore production on Garpenberg? Or do you need more time to work through the mine plan?

We're going to need more time. I will be happy if I can have some more light on Qs 3 and 4 of '26.

Right. Then on Lappberget, I understand this is usually difficult, but you say, worst-case scenario, you leave Lappberget, which is 10 million tonnes of rich silver and zinc ore. But are you able to sort of provide any kind of rough estimate on the risk here for such a scenario?

That's also very, very difficult and it will have to do with timing. Actually, Stefan should answer this question more than -- because I've asked this so many times so I kind of know the answer. And the answer is that there is a risk that we will leave all of it. That might not be the total risk. But whatever will be mined will not be all of it, and it will be mined in a slow pace. Correct me if I'm wrong, Stefan.

No. I mean if we do rest mining, which will be the case in this situation, then it's a really detailed planning to do that. And you can't really say that you should do that in a high pace. So you have to be very gently when you're taking out some of the ore.

I think it's doable, but it's a lot of engineering needed to be done to make sure that we don't worsen the situation. Because if we just mine out areas that we are -- can start mining, if I say so, then we will increase the open void, and that will -- might affect the seismicity going forward also. So we'll have to be very careful how we are processing here.

The next question comes from Richard Hatch from Berenberg.

Yes, just a couple. So firstly, have you got any stockpiles that you can use at the moment to fill the mill while you're impacted by hauling and hoisting primary ore? That's the first one.

Yes, but not of any -- I think we had like 5 days' worth of production on-ground that we could process at some stage. It's something, but not really meaningful.

Okay. And then secondly, I'm just trying -- again, like we're trying to understand the cost impact. So have you got a steer as to what percentage of the operating cost of the mine is fixed versus variable?

No, I think I will pass on that one because there's lots of costs here that are semi-fixed and semi-variable, and we need to get our arms around exactly how they work out. Just one thing just to be very clear, we have still not really worked out how we're going to run the mill. Most likely we'll batch it and they will be working for a couple -- for a week and then standstill and so on. How that affects consumption of chemicals and so on is something we need to look into as well.

Okay. And then just 2 more. The first was just a clarification point. I didn't hear you fully. So did you say you are or are not going to have to declare force majeure on your -- on the smelter feed, from the smelter?

Yes. We will because we're fully sold out. And of course, we're only going to be able to deliver maybe 1/3 for the rest of the year compared to what was expected. So yes, we will. And it's a question how we will negotiate with the customers around that, if we can postpone deliveries and all these things that you do in these situations.

Yes. Got you. And then the last one is just on the technical side of it, like, are you confident that you weren't overmining the ore body? And I appreciate it's a fluid situation, but in some of the deep-level South African mines, they have to destress the ore body, right? So is this something that you're considering now? You did mention it sort of slightly earlier on, but are you confident you weren't overmining? And secondly, are you considering destressing in the future to avoid this sort of thing?

We are looking into this from a rock mechanical point of view. And as I mentioned before, the dimension of Lappberget and the void that is backfilled with paste as well as remaining part in secondary stopes, that full, solid, if I say so, void, that have to be analyzed from a rock mechanical point of view going forward, of course. But the width of the ore body is a challenge when it comes to stability over time. But this incident with this high release of stress, that was not in our plans.

Okay. So you don't think you were overmining?

Yes. Are we going to a new way of mining? No, we will keep more or less the same way of mining. But we might look into the details how to get things right.

The next question comes from Jason Fairclough from Bank of America.

Just to kind of follow-up on the actual technical issues here. I was wondering, could you talk a little bit about any history of seismicity at this mine? And again, it's kind of been asked already, but has something changed to actually cause this problem?

So if we look elsewhere, when we've had these sort of, I'm not going to say catastrophic, but these big seismic events, typically, it's been because of a change in approach to mining. So Kamoa-Kakula, for example, they were behind on backfilling, it sounds like. So I'm just wondering, has something changed?

Not really. If you start with the seismic activities, we have normally about 20 to 50 events per day. That's quite normal. It's small seismic events as well as a bit bigger. So that's a normal situation. In this case, it's starting to pick up the numbers quite dramatically when it comes to events. So when it was at worst, we had about 400 seismic events an hour. So that's a huge change. And the amplitude was up to about 2.

But this is starting activating to known [ geology ] structures. One in the hanging wall, as well as another structure that is known since before. But the view is that the total void, the volume of the total void, have -- is quite big.

But we haven't changed the mining method as such and we are not more behind now than before when it comes to backfilling. So that has been in the same kind of level. It's just that more have been mined out or refilled over time.

So again, does this have any implications then for the plans to increase the mining rate longer term? So are you actually -- and I guess this is what Richard was getting at, are we going to run up against sort of natural limitations in the ore body in terms of how quickly you can actually mine here?

Yes, that can be a consequence of it. If you look at Lappberget, with this kind of geometry that Lappberget have, even it is worse [ depth ]. But the main ore bodies going forward long term, that's Huvudmalmen, and that's another kind of geometry. It's always also wide. But this is a few years from now before we are there.

But anyhow, it will affect the way we are looking into it when it comes to the primaries and secondaries. The sequence of how we do it, of course, we need to have a look into that. But even so, I think that we will have enough mining areas to increase production towards the target that we have in the long term.

Okay. And last one. I mean in terms of backfilling, you said that on the one hand you weren't behind on backfilling. But on the other hand, maybe the void was a little bit bigger than normal. Can you just help me understand that?

Yes. The paste filling in that room that was starting, one of the first collapse in the secondary room, here normally we had paste pipes going in to several kind of positions in the roof. And that was, unfortunately, 2 of those positions was taken out of operation. So we have -- it was starting to get like a slope down over these 60 meters, if you can see it in front of you. Basically based on that, we couldn't fill up in a really equal level based on the miss-out of those 2. So that made a bit of a slope.

And then when we have this fall in the secondary stope, that's then we had a bit of an air shock coming out. But that's -- this is not directly connected to the seismic event that's happened a few hours later. But it could be, of course, a related thing over time when it comes to the stress buildup.

I might just be a bit cheeky here. So Mikael, in terms of thinking about safety, do we call this a -- what would you call it, a high potential incident or a near miss? How do you think about that? And how does it potentially impact how you run the business?

Well, number one, it is an LTI, the first event. It was an LTI because we had the air shock wave that fell people over. We should be very clear that there was not really any risk for anybody getting on to rockfall.

And then we had the actual seismic event. We have clear instructions of when we will evacuate the mine, and we did that. And everybody were out, I think, by 11:00 p.m. And the big seismic activity started around 2:00 a.m., 3 hours later. So I don't know what you call that. I suppose you call it an incident. But all the routines were followed and nobody was really close to being hurt in the second -- in the actual seismic event.

[Operator Instructions] the next question comes from Alain Gabriel from Morgan Stanley.

Just 2 quick follow-up questions. Mikael, I guess, how long do you think it will take you to figure out what the right mine plan is going forward? Is it with the Q1 results that you've stated? Or is it going to take longer for you to update the market? That's my first follow-up.

Well, I think that we will have some kind of update in the Q1, but it might not be a complete update.

Okay. And the second question is on the grade differential between, if I pronounce it correctly, Lappberget and the second one, which is Huvudmalmen. Sorry, if I've mispronounced it. But what is the grade differential between the 2 different sections of the underground?

Regarding Huvudmalmen, I'm actually not quite sure. Stefan might be able to answer that one. But right now, the differential between Lappberget and Kvarnberget and Dammsjon, which are the other 2 active mining areas that we're using, is not a big difference. It's about the same NSR. It's actually maybe slightly higher in Kvarnberget and Dammsjon because they have higher silver grades but slightly lower zinc grades.

And then regarding Huvudmalmen, Stefan?

The difference between Lappberget and those ore bodies that Mikael was talking about here also, it's size. Lappberget is much bigger and so on. So the other ore bodies is smaller.

Huvudmalmen is looking really big, going downwards towards depth here now. But there, we're not -- we haven't prepared Lappberget for -- Huvudmalmen for production yet. So that will come in the next years.

And then the grade differential?

And the grade, what was the grade in Huvudmalmen? I actually don't know. I'm looking at Stefan. We might have to come back to you regarding that one. I don't know exactly.

But it's not a major difference, but maybe slightly lower, but I'm guessing.

We can say like this. You have some high-grade areas, but that's towards depth in Huvudmalmen. And then you have quite many tonnes with average to low grade also. So it's a mixture of the different grades here depending on where you are in the ore body.

The next question comes from Richard Hatch from Berenberg.

Sorry if this one has already been kind of half-addressed. But I'm just sort of looking at the plan of the Garpenberg mine, and I just wonder if an early consideration would -- a medium-term consideration would be to drift into that new -- I'm sorry, I'm just going to butcher the language, Huvudmalmen area, so you can access some more and at least sort of drive into it from your existing workings? Or is that not an option?

I can say the following, but this is very kind of very, very preliminary, the timing is unclear. But we will be drifting close to Huvudmalmen or tunneling close to Huvudmalmen and ramping to get down in order to get the base position for the new shaft anyway.

It was not envisioned to do -- to use those for getting access to the ore, but maybe we could. And that's kind of one area that should be looked into. But in what time scale and when, I think that that's way too early to tell. But we are looking to kind of ways to get to Huvudmalmen earlier. But exactly what the smartest way is, it's kind of too short time to think for that.

Operator, is there anybody else?

There are no more questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Okay, guys. Thank you for listening to us for these last 45 minutes. I hope that we've been able to shed some more light on both what happened and what the actions are that we're doing.

So with this, I wish you all a good afternoon, if you're in kind of our time zone. Otherwise, a good day if you're in North America. And I look forward to talking to most of you again as we come into Q1 results in about a month from now. Bye-bye.

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, Hakan 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. Axel Karlfeldt won the Nobel Prize for 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 1 of his most famous poems that starts in Swedish, the way it's written there, [Foreign Language]. I have -- this is my Mikael's Staffas translation of that into that. And as you know, it's not always that easy to translate poetry, but the proud spring is here in full blossom, the spring, the weak called 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.

And 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 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 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.

So today, we're going to have a capital markets update. And the agenda or the things that we'll talk about me and Hakan together will be, first, we're going to go through new CapEx decision that we have, and we have 2 new CapEx decisions that we're announcing.

We're announcing that we're going to build a hoist in the Garpenberg mine, and I'll come back to the rationale and why we're doing that. And then in Ronnskar, we will have announced that we will put in what we call 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, Ronnskar 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 2 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.

And then we'll also have a little bit of a session on the growth options that we have, and we will 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 2 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. So somebody said to me that did you plan your Capital Markets Day, so you could talk about this one as well.

And of course, we did not. It was more of a coincident happened at the same time. But just to go through what happened, we had -- we started with had a rock fall. 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.

And the fall of the rock created an air pressure wave that went through the tunnel outside, and there were 4 people working in the vicinity, and they were knocked over by the shock wave. And there were 2 more that worked a little bit further out that also got noise-related or air-related issues that they want to check.

So altogether, 6 people were in contact with health care in different ways. Everybody has been released, everybody is home with -- you can always argue whether a fracture is a minor or not a minor thing, but it's not more than fractures and concussions that we have gotten from that. But it's also pointed out that it had nothing to do with the direct from the rock fall. It was the indirect effect of the air pressure wave that came.

Separately from this, and I think that rock mechanics will argue whether it is really separate or if it's coincident happens, but it was actually 12 hours later, maybe 10 hours later after the rock fall that we started getting increase of seismic activity. And 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 have -- so 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. So at 10:00 p.m. 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 a.m., 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. But after that, the activity has gone down.

We have this morning been able to send people underground for the first time, and we feel safe about doing that. And the first thing is, of course, to go down and do inspections to infrastructure, see whether anything has been hurt or not. And we will -- as we will develop this, we'll have to come back to you with the 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. So with that, we feel relatively confident around this. As I said, I've 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? And I think the answer is that at some stage, maybe yes, but not really. This must have been stress that have been built up over a long time that released itself over this time period. And then 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 not 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 a 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. And we had around a 30% decrease in the LTIF or the LTI frequency for employees and contractors '25 versus '24.

On the climate side, we are continuing and following our road map, and we're on track with the road map that we have already in place with the 42% reduction until 2030. And we have also initiated work and maybe that's something we'll come back to in later Capital Markets Day in a year or 2, but 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. And 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.

So 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. And 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's been 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 million to 2.5 million tonnes. We went with a new shaft at that time that lowered the cost for getting the ore up to surface.

We've then also been able to nicely after those years, been able to debottleneck and get the production up from the 2.5 design to the 3.5 where we've been in the last years and as you see a high profitability. And 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.

And I'll show you a little bit while exactly where 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 tonnes. And it's, of course, obvious that with this amount of resources, it is necessary to at least consider how to increase production, and there is a good lots of material to do that.

And therefore, we have, as you know, already before, asked for a permit to go to 4.5 million. 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 tonnes. We will short term be able to fulfill the 4.5 million tonnes 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 million over time, we will need to have a new shaft.

But it's not only -- 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. And 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 want to expand and keep at 3.5, producing it through the existing shaft would have been very expensive because it would involve lots of underground trucking and underground trucking uphill.

So we need to get a deeper shaft. And 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 and also for the upper positions in Kvarnberget and in Dammsjon. But this new shaft will make it possible to get into Huvudmalmen in a cost-efficient way.

It's of course or of course the project includes everything that you need for a shaft and a hoist, including underground crusher, underground loading, 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 at SEK 4 billion. This takes a long time. This is a 6-year project, and it's kind of 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 to 2030 and the commissioning is in 2032. So it's -- as I said, it's a long project.

So what's the rationale for it? Well, that was part of that. Without the hoist, Garpenberg would not be able to sustain a 4.5 million tonne 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.

And also another thing that 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 2 shafts and 2 hoisting systems, we will have more redundancy to manage in the system.

So the benefits are that we're enabling continuing production at 4.5 million tonnes per year with redundancy between the 2 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. So this will facilitate that. And it will enable expansions well beyond 4.5 million in the future. That is going to need quite a lot of other investments. We're going to need to have a second -- more facilities on surface, more speed in underground development.

We will need to have more capacity regarding tailings and so on. So that's nothing here, but this is a step of being able to bridge at least that part of a potential further expansion. So the 4.5 million tonnes, as it is today is meeting in its own right, the IRR requirements that Boliden has at a long term, I should say, price and terms.

And the potential expansion above 4.5 million which we haven't decided any details on, but we could say that, that expansion once we get ready to talk about that, and Hakan will come back to it a little bit while, is well above the IRR requirement that Boliden has generally.

So with that, we'll move on to Ronnskar 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 Cement from a technical point of view. This is a SEK 1.5 billion CapEx project. It's a capacity of 280,000 tonnes per year. It's a patent technology. We have developed this technology ourselves. We have a patent around it.

Not that we necessarily want to be a technology company that sells technology or license the 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 project like this is quite interesting to calculate on because there are lots of inputs that are a little bit unclear.

But this investment meets the IRR requirement 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 where that doesn't really happen, but that doesn'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 plan that it could then be used in other places as well. Are there other kind of reasons behind this. But we should also -- apart from what I just said, as I said, we are improving metal recoveries from this.

We get about 1/3 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. But it is the 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. And 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. And that's also important to get this certified.

This material is not as a present certified. It's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem because we cannot, in our lab scale, get enough material to get everything tested to get it certified. We don't see any problems in getting this product certified. But it 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 5 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.

And of course, it feels good to come at the end. It feels good so far, knock on wood, we're not -- we haven't had production yet, but we're very close. And the ramp-up or the commissioning has worked relatively well throughout. So with now -- and what I'll 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 to get working.

As we said before, this is 150,000 tonne zinc expansion. That's one part of it. But I think the big part that was always the reason why we wanted to do this probably in the beginning was to increase recoveries. And that has, of course, gotten even more relevant with the recent short-term developments. We have -- we're reiterating here just what we said before around the increased recoveries that this will give.

And as we said before, at Boliden long-term price and terms, this is around EUR 150 million of EBITDA -- of EBITDA every year that the designed 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 design 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. So that will take over time.

We will increase depreciations, I think that's a well-known number. On the Ronnskar tank house, you all know this is a state-of-the-art production facility, annual copper cathode production of around 230,000 tonnes. 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 Ronnskar going forward, this can relatively easily be scaled up to 280,000 tonnes, for example.

The annual EBITDA of this one is around SEK 1 billion at the long-term prices and terms of Boliden. As of today's prices and terms with today gold price, it's about SEK 1.5 billion EBITDA that comes with this investment. So 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 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 tailings capacity up to the late 30s which is important, also given how important this area is becoming now with the high gold prices and is an important area. We have 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 what I think is the kind of most positive thing, everybody who's read the R&R statement will notice already, but 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 -- shows that we are successful in exploration, but of course, also it's a little bit of a mathematical game that when you mine under reserve grade for a couple of years, the average of the remaining becomes larger. And you see here now the latest guidance on the ramp-up of the grade curve. In Kevitsa, it's similar, and I think you recognize more or less these curves from last year. You can also see here, if you look at they're all now up until 2034, which is now a relative definitive end of life of mine for Kevitsa as those of you who have read our announcement know that we have paused any operations and any going forward on our Stage 5 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 leave over to you, Hakan, to talk through some of the financial aspects of this. Thank you.

Thank you. So good morning. I'd like to start with the capital employed and 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 2 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.

But also last year with relatively low TCs, we had close to 15% return on capital employed in our smelting division.

And the final point on this one is that the combination of the 2 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. And 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 profit, zinc, slightly lower than 30% and the combination of gold and silver is now in excess of 30%. And 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 results 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 0.5 billion, and the reason are the 2 new projects that Mikael talked about. So 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 Ronnskar tankhouse. 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. And the remaining SEK 5 billion is what we call stay-in-business CapEx. And 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. But a couple of comments are -- I'll be able to make anyway. We expect the mine sustaining CapEx to increase by about SEK 0.5 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.

Central line dams are slightly more expensive than the old versions, and we have central line 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.

And 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 Ronnskar 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. And the ramp-up of the newer investments that we have talked about will not happen quickly enough to compensate for this.

So net is a substantial decrease in this area for 2027. But again, we'll communicate the full plan later this year. And moving on then 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 then. We've had 2 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 then the Stage 5 extension in Kevitsa, which we no longer see as a project on this list.

And 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 [indiscernible] that's Kevitsa Stage 5. Now Semblana, that's a project that, in some ways, is similar to the Ravliden and Kristineberg expansion that we did in the Boliden area.

It's an inferred resource of just shy of 8 million tonnes containing copper and silver, and we're looking into putting that in production with a decision possibly next year. Nautanen and Algtrask have somewhat adjusted timing, but the projects are interesting and work continues.

And then we have the larger expansion in Garpenberg now marked for a decision around 2030. And this is mainly an expansion of the mill, including a paste expansion is similar. And 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. So 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. Now we typically focus on EBIT, excluding process inventories. But 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.

And I just want to highlight what you can do to get closer to your estimates on that. But 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. And the difference between the valuations will be charged to the P&L.

Now there is some things that are difficult to predict from outside. It depends also on the production cost and raw material mix, but you will get very close by just using the prices and the tonnage that we publish in every quarterly result. And 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 one, SEK 12,800 per kilo in this case.

And the lowest price in December was SEK 19,000, again, the average price. Difference between those 2 is SEK 6,400 per kilo silver and multiplying that with 80,500 kilos in process inventory, you get an EBIT -- or 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 SEK 1.7 billion, and the reported number was very similar to that. So you can get fairly close to this, and this is an Excel chart that Olof will be able to help you with going forward. Also for those modeling the results, a few comments on Q1.

And Mikael already talked about Garpenberg. So far, we lost 4 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. And we've had to stop the mill for 1 week in Q1, so that would be an impact on the quarter.

But 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 year. So 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.

And then mine taxes, no news about compared to the press releases that we've already given. But just a clarification that we do not expect any one-off restructuring costs in Q1. If those happens, that will be later on. Grade 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 debt-to-equity ratio, the gearing, including the net reclamation liabilities. And this is the KPI that we use when we discuss extra dividends [ done ] 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.

So you can see now that including net reclamation liabilities, we were at 27% at year-end. And if you pro forma add the dividend that has been proposed by the Board, that adds up to 32% but we are trending downwards quite rapidly with these prices. So we're in good shape balance sheet-wise.

And 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 1/3 of net profit. And if the net debt to equity is lower than 20% after regular dividends, including reclamation liability, there is room for extra dividends. And we feel strongly committed to this and the dividend proposal that has been done by the Board is fully in line with this. So Mikael, do you want to wrap up?

I will do that. Thank you, Hakan. 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 2 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 time line as it's been revised over time, but the other projects are also working well on the original time lines. We are seeing increasing volumes going forward from our existing operation, not just from Odda and Ronnskar. And Hakan 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, but also, of course, prices and terms are making these more likely to move ahead, but decision time is still a little bit out.

I'd also like to point out that we made the point in the beginning that even though sustainability does not have a major part in 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.

So I'll just like to step back to Erik Axel Karlfeldt in his poem that is now almost 100 years old. It will be 100 years next year, where he spoke about not just in this poem but in the whole collection of poem that is 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 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. So I'll do my best here to read all those questions. As we speak, we have some 15-plus questions in the pipeline. So let's get going. And the first question is actually for Hakan, 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 a 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 in the shareholder meeting that decides. But my view is that there is a 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 #5?

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 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, we would have -- it's much less good than doing it now because we would 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, but also have to find equipment.

And we 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 2 or maybe even 3 years, but we're on a slippery slope because every day we wait, the kind of economics get worse because of this lack of good planning.

So I don't know if that answered your questions, but the answer is we could do it in a while. If something were 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, finances look bit at you, Hakan, because I don't know exactly what the feeding schedule is for the more silver which concentrates again.

No, I think you asked 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 recover silver and gold and similar. We will increase that slowly because we want to see the recoveries before we buy most of the feed with complex and expensive raw materials.

So 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, RBS 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 we 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 minable.

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, dream scenario is that the inspections to they said there's absolutely nothing has broken down and we can start like in a couple of days. Let's see, let's see. But it could be that short, but that's really a dream scenario.

A question for Hakan 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 that we -- 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 '27 and beyond, I indicated an increase of about SEK 0.5 billion due to above all downraising methodology.

Got you. 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 indicated to you is based fully on Pushback 4 and nothing else. If there, for some reason, will be a pushback 5, for some -- then there might be some parallel going of 4 and 5 that could impact the grade profile for those years. But the one that you've seen is fully for Pushback 4 without any Pushback 5 in it.

Ladies and gentlemen, please add your questions to the web chance if you want to. I'm happy to say that we have quite a few more here. So let's get going, gentlemen again.

Now it's Alain Gabriel from Morgan Stanley. He says like this. There's rumors and news in the industry that smelters get a less good situation for treating precious metals. So the payability is heading south. Can you please comment on that one?

Not really. We tend not to comment on commercial undertakings when we buy raw material for our smelters from the outside. These are very active negotiations every year around lots of things and prefer not to kind of comment to them more in 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 know 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.

And that can have to do with that we've had issues in certain pushback. We have to take them slower. We have to take more from another one, gives us a different grade profile around that. So I don't want to go into the details exactly around this. I just want to point out that the average has not gone down. The average has gone up.

And there's been some timing and 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 30s. Yes, we have pretty good years in the second half of the 30s.

I might suspect what you will answer here, Hakan, that Boris Bourdet 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 track replacement yet. And so we 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 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 to we say put on hold, but we basically canceled the investment even though as somebody pointed out before, it can be 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 the discussion as well as well as some new water quality regulations coming from the EU that also affects the total economics of the mine.

So 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 some of the potential environmental demands, all of that would play in. But as I said, in our best estimate of all these things together right now, the project does not meet our requirements.

Kaleb Solomon, who works for SEB coming back to sulfuric acid prices. Can you please once again try to highlight what is the Boliden 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 want to 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 yearly prices sometimes, sometimes we have quarterly prices.

We have a whole set of mixtures of formulas with our customers around it. But 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 assessment and that's metals, but also things like sulfuric acid, we have around EUR 150 million of EBITDA.

Right now, it's EUR 250 million. And of course, the increase in the sulfuric acid price is also contributing to this positive factor right now. So therefore, it is important. It's helping that. Otherwise, in our long-term prices and assumptions, sulfuric acid doesn't contribute that much. But 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. And typically, when we had runs or decreases, it moves quarter-to-quarter, EUR 100 million, EUR 150 million or so. 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. And I think just to get an order of magnitude, if we were to mine only this mineralization, it's about a 2-year extension of life of mine. We will, of course, not mine it in 2 years, and we will not mine 100% from there.

We will do that in parallel with using other existing facilities. But that alone, it's about a 2-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. And then I think that we have -- there's a breakdown of the maturities in our quarterly report. There is some debt that has to be refinanced over the next few years. For example, the term loan after the acquisition is fairly short term. So we're keeping busy from that perspective, but nothing really out of the ordinary. It's pretty stable.

Got you. Amos Fletcher working for Barclays. He asked the following question, and that is that you have earlier said that you would produce 4.5 million tonnes milled volume in Garpenberg around 2030. Now given today's investment, can you be more specific?

No, it's still around 2030. And you can say today's investment doesn't really impact that because the investment we're doing is only going to be operational in '32. So the step-up from where we are today up until 2030 is all about increased development. 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 Hakan from Richard Hatch working from Berenberg Bank. Please help us again, how should we think about revenues and costs for the SME plant? How should we think about the modeling there?

Yes. We haven't provided for that, but I think we said that in a base case, with current cement prices, I think we gave the revenue per year, right, in the release. And then from the IRR, I think you can work your way back to what cost level we expect.

Excellent. Okay. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I remind you if you have questions, please go ahead to the web page and submit them there. I have a few left here. And the next one is in from Daniel Major at UBS again. These uplifts that you're talking about, both for the Odda expansion and the new tankhouse in [ Skelleftehamn]. 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 on? Should I've to?

Can you do.

No. But I think -- if we start with the tankhouse in Ronnskar, it's commissioning Q4. It's 3 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 tankhouse, typically, when you commission it, you get a very quick -- 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 stop selling the anodes somewhere towards the end of this year. And we should see that extra money with maybe some month or so delay as to 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.

So 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 3 questions left. We'll see if they come in any more questions. And this one is from a gentleman called [ Mats Jonhson ] he doesn't say his company. I assume it's a private investment, private investor. It's for Hakan. What are the short-term and long-term CapEx projects plans for the Neves-Corvo mine, that is our name Somincor.

Well, yes, it's -- we haven't sort of given the CapEx guidance year-by-year. But for the Somincor for the 2 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.

And you can see on that chart with the bubbles a rough estimate of the cost. It's a fairly low-cost project and compared to the other expansions that we have.

And then there's a follow-up again regarding Garpenberg from Liam Fitzpatrick working for Deutsche Bank. And 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 2 potential expansion?

Yes. 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 -- normally, we should not get a considerable materially worse outcome in the appeal process than we got in the first round. But you, of course, never know. What we said also, and I think you 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 will 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. So that was on the gap. What's the second part of the question? It was.

What's included in the Garpenberg beyond.

Beyond, yes. In that one, in the bubble that you see has to do with lots of -- 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 additional storage and so on, on surface that is part of that. And also things like paste and other infrastructure that needs to be strengthened if you were to produce that, and that has to do also with -- we need to get more power into the mine and everything else.

So but once again, this is a 2030 kind of time line and very rough numbers, but we want to give you that kind of order of magnitude.

What I think it's worth repeating, though, is that dam is not included. And the logic to that is that we will have to extend the dam capacity anyway even without an expansion. So that decision could come anywhere the next few years. But we will need -- regardless of expansion, we will need new tailings capacity sometime during the first half of the 2030s.

Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, we actually have a final question then, and it's a follow-up from Marina Calero working from Royal Bank of Canada. And it goes like this. You said that the 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. The Garpenberg today is an extremely efficient mine. As most of you will have seen, it's probably worst -- 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. And we will also be able to use 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.

So both the 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, Hakan, and thank you, 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.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to Boliden's Q4 2025 Results Presentation. My name is Olof Grenmark, and I'm Head of Investor Relations. Today, we will have a results presentation led by our President and CEO, Mikael Staffas; and our CFO, Hakan Gabrielsson. We will also have a Q&A session, which we will start here in Stockholm. Mikael, the stage is yours. Welcome.

Thank you, Olof, and good morning to everybody from me as well. We in Stockholm here have a crispy morning. When I woke up this morning, it said minus 15 degrees outside of my bedroom window. Today, we will give the presentation of the Q report, and we'll also touch on the R&R statement update that we've also issued this morning.

So generally speaking, for Q4, there's been a very strong metal price development. Everybody knows about this. And of course, precious metals have been really rallying during the quarter. At the same time, we've had a negative development on prices and terms, but that has in relationship to, of course, a much smaller movement.

We have a continued strong mine production in Aitik. We have been stripping very, very hard for quite some time, and we are now happy to say that we're, in some way, catching up on the stripping depth that we've had before. We're also happy to say that the grades are going up in Aitik and have now started on their journey on going upwards.

Apart from Aitik, we've had generally lower grades in mines. To some extent, this is maybe slightly more than we had expected, but part of this was already in our guidance that we've had before. We had a stable production in smelters. We're very pleased with that in general. We had a one-off positive of SEK 410 million linked to summing up of taking care of the metals in Ronnskar in the fire as we had the fire metals in the tankhouse, was going down and going down into the ground.

And we have now, during this quarter, done a summary of that and where we are actually standing, and we have been able to recognize this SEK 400 million positive effect. The dividend has also been recommended by the Board. This is fully in line with our dividend policy of 1/3 of net profit, and it amounts to SEK 11 per share.

We also have a very positive R&R development. I'll get back to that in a little while. So the financial performance in general, a little bit more than SEK 4 billion in profit. It's the third best profit in the history of Boliden for a quarter, which is good. We do have the positive SEK 410 million one-off, which is much lower than what we had last year in that comparison.

The free cash flow also quite healthy at SEK 2.7 billion despite record level investments. And we've had a favorable development of working capital in the quarter. And the CapEx, as I said, according to budget, but on a high level.

On the key projects, on the Odda project, there's not really much more to say compared to what we said when we issued the guidance for 2026. We are right now in the middle of commissioning, and it's going so far well. We have started to deliver some of the Odda Leach product actually as the first delivery. It's a very small-scale delivery so far.

The Ronnskar tankhouse is on track and ramping up during the second half of this year. The Boliden Area tailing management is also on track. And the early part of the Garpenberg expansion, which is the Paste project, is also moving on according to plan. We have been also getting, which we were hoping for to get the environmental permit for Garpenberg. It has been appealed. So the appeal process will be launched here going forward.

On ESG side, we're also [indiscernible] with the development. The greenhouse gas emissions are going in the right direction. And you always have to point out that when you look on the graph here to the right and also on the comparison number that we have not restated any previous numbers with the acquisition of Zinkgruvan and Somincor. If we were to take that into account, this is looking much better.

The lost time injury frequency at 3.6 is a very good number, even though it was even better last year. And this also means that we're ending up the full year on 3.6, which is, I think, the best year in the history of Boliden. Sick leave continues to move in the right direction. We're not quite back to pre-COVID levels, but we're approaching coming back to pre-COVID levels.

On the market side, and I think this slide shows it all and everybody wants to discuss that, yes, we've had negative currency development, and you see that on the little graph below, the bluish graph. We've had relatively weak TCs, zinc and for copper on the spot side. And we've had -- but we had copper or metal prices that have more than enough outweighed that, especially the precious metals, gold and silver, but also relatively strong copper and also slightly -- at least slightly improving also zinc prices.

If you look at this on the cash cost, and I think that this -- if there's any time maybe you should not look too much on to this graph is right now because it will be lots of discussion with the people who make this one and the source of this information, exactly how they will account for the precious metals in this because with the big increase of precious metals as is most of the zinc or copper mines in the world have that as a byproduct and as a credit means that cost will go down.

You see here in the assessment for '25, that costs are down, but I will not be really responsible exactly how this has been counted. But it's not that the zinc mines in the world are getting so much better at managing cost. It has to do with the silver price going up. And the same thing with the copper mines in the world not getting better in managing the cost, it's the gold price that is going up.

If you look at our mine production, once again, in Aitik, we've had a milled volume around what we've guided for. The grades have improved versus Q3, and we had a strong total mine production with very good stripping in the quarter, which is going to help us going forward, especially to work with how to get around the diorite issue when we will get more potential [indiscernible] to work from.

In Garpenberg, I think this is the second best quarter ever in terms of throughput [indiscernible] grades are lower, but that's also according to plan. Kevitsa, stable production at capacity, lower grades also remain [indiscernible] to plan. Somincor, quite a strong improved operational efficiency we've seen during the quarter. Tara continues with the ramp-up. And in Zinkgruvan, we had good production, slightly lower zinc grades this quarter also, nothing to really look into in long term. It's more or less according to plan.

On the smelter side, it's been generally good production, especially on the copper side, good production in Ronnskar with high free metals; good production, actually record production in Harjavalta in terms of copper cathodes; high silver production. At Kokkola, slightly lower. We've had some process disturbances during the quarter, maybe not much. Odda is continuing to doing well in one way, but of course, also struggling operating a zinc smelter right to a major construction activities. Bergsoe had some planned maintenance in the quarter. Otherwise, everything went well.

And with that, I will give over to you, Hakan, to talk about the numbers.

Thank you. Good morning. So as Mikael said, we are reporting an operating profit, excluding process inventory of SEK 4.1 billion, which is clearly above the comparison period. I think it's also worthwhile to look at the operating profit then including process inventories, which is at SEK 5.8 billion, a substantial increase to the comparison. And that's, of course, due to the stronger metal prices and the big part pressures that we have in the process inventories. This leads to an earnings per share of SEK 15.31, which is a 40% increase compared to last year.

On this slide, you also see a high investment number. We do have high CapEx, which is completely in line with the guidance. And all in all, a strong cash flow at SEK 2.7 billion. Looking at the profit by business area, you can see that mines has had a really good quarter, of course, helped by the rally in gold and silver and also strong copper. Smelters is also clearly up compared to Q3, and there are a few reasons. One is the one-off recovery adjustments that we talked about already in December, but also smelters are much helped by stronger precious metal prices, and we also have slightly less maintenance in Q4 compared to Q3.

If we then dive into the analysis of profit quarter-on-quarter here and start with the one comparing Q4 of this year -- or sorry, Q4 of 2025 to Q4 of '24. Looking 1 year back, much is about adding the acquired units. It will come back in many of the lines here. But we can start with prices and terms where we've seen a strong improvement. Metal prices, if we only look at the metal prices isolated, contributed by about SEK 2.5 billion compared to the same quarter 1 year back. And then it was then offset by a lower dollar and lower TCs, landing at a plus of almost SEK 1 billion. So all in all, a good development.

Volumes up 1.5. That's mainly the new mines and also Tara that has been ramping up. It's a little bit offset by weaker grades above all in the Boliden Area and Garpenberg. Costs, same things. It's an effect of the acquired mines and the restart of Tara. If you back out those top parts, we're roughly flat with the same quarter last year. So we do not see much of an inflation at this point in time.

And I think, yes, we can also comment on the items affecting comparability. We have insurance incomes and we have recoveries in Ronnskar, and that is further specified in the report. If we then move on and look at the sequential comparison, Q4 to Q3, you can again see the big impact of stronger prices. And that's primarily silver and copper in this comparison, but also gold. Volumes, though, is a bit down, and we talked much about Q3 being a very, very strong quarter with some records in it. We have slightly lower production in mines, both throughput and grades with the exception of Aitik, where grades is starting to move in the right direction.

Costs, they are seasonally higher. We see a pretty strong seasonality. As I mentioned, compared to last year, it's roughly flat, but we do have higher costs in Q4 than Q3. So it's seasonality, we spend a bit more on external services. And also due to the strong development of prices, we had to increase our provisions for profit sharing and similar in Q4.

Moving on then to cash flow. Well, we've talked about the strong earnings, EBITDA. We talked about investment being in line with guidance, but we also had a good quarter in working capital. Typically, what happens when prices go up is that we tie more capital. Each tonne of inventory has a higher value and so on. But regardless of that, we've been able to release working capital also in this quarter, which is the third consecutive quarter with a positive number in here.

So all in all, we are happy with the cash flow. And that's -- with that cash flow and with that price development, it sums up in a strong balance sheet. We have a net debt to equity now down to 20% as a result of this good development. So a strong balance sheet and robust financing to support that.

This is also a time when we look a bit at the full year numbers. And this year, we reached an operating profit, excluding process inventory of SEK 10.7 billion. It is down compared to last year, but then last year was very much boosted by big insurance income. So adjusting for that, it's a step in the right direction. Prices and terms has a positive impact. Volumes are up. And of course, the acquisitions and the restart of Tara is an important part of this. But all in all, it has been a good year.

And looking at mines, you can see the profit, the EBIT for each one of the mines and a couple of ones that I'd like to highlight is the Garpenberg mines, really strong performance with an EBIT of SEK 4.4 billion, of course, helped by good silver prices, but also by a good operational year.

Also the Boliden Area, which is showing an impressive result of just over SEK 2 billion. That is another good year. And again, good operational performance, but also good prices on gold, in particular, helps the Boliden Area. And SEK 2.5 billion profit is great. We don't disclose the return on capital employed, but of course, it's a fantastic number for a site like Boliden.

I'd also just like to highlight that in the Somincor and Zinkgruvan numbers, the depreciation of the overvalues following the acquisition are included. Looking at an EBITDA level and extrapolating to a full year, it's within the range of what we guided for, for these 2 mines.

Smelters, a year that has been, to some extent, characterized by low treatment charges. Still we arrived at SEK 3.7 billion, down compared to last year due to the one-off insurance income we had last year. But there has been some pressure on prices, but the gold and silver has compensated that, especially in the copper smelters.

Harjavalta delivering a result in excess of SEK 1.5 billion and Ronnskar with a SEK 1 billion profit, which is a really good number considering that we still don't have a tankhouse on that site. The zinc smelters are suffering a bit more with Kokkola coming down and Odda having a negative result due to the prices, but also due to the expansion project having a slight negative effect on the daily production. And I think this is also an effect of not being able to recover silver, which we cannot today in Odda and it underlines the importance of the project that is currently ongoing.

So with that, I'll hand over to Mikael.

Thank you, Hakan. Now we've had some technical issues with my microphone. Hopefully, now it will work on here. As I said in the beginning, we also released today the R&R statement and the R&R statement, in my mind, looked very, very strong and very good. Generally on exploration, we spent a little bit less than SEK 1 billion on this during the year. It is areas that are familiar to you. It's close to our existing operations. So it is apart from the fact that we're working on early exploration in Canada, which is new geography to us. We are mainly working within existing geographies.

And if you then look at the actual reserves update at the end of 2025, well, we have increased reserves in the Boliden Area. We have -- in Somincor, in Tara and in Zinkgruvan. This is mainly due to improved price assumptions. And here, now you have to be kind of careful because this is that we had -- these are price assumptions that were set in the beginning of 2025 for doing the calculations during 2025. They were slightly better than the ones that we had in the beginning of 2024.

They are nowhere close to where we are today on spot prices. So these are still, with today's prices, extremely conservative, but they're slightly more aggressive than we were a year before. When you do that, you get better volumes, but typically, you get lower grades because you will incentivize mining from lower grade areas.

Now what is great this year is that we have this increased volume, and we do not have lower grades. And that's mainly due to successful exploration that fills in this whole gap in a very good way. Then we also, of course, had lots of work during the year to transfer Zinkgruvan and Somincor into both the PERC standard and into the Boliden way of reporting within PERC. That's, of course, a process where lots of people have done lots of work, but it's nothing strange that has come out of that work.

So if you then look at that, you can see that Aitik, we do not have a new update for reserves. So reserves are still ending up in 2048, which is a year shorter than the last year. But as I said, we have not had an update of the optimization for the reserves. The Boliden Area, very strong update, now extending to 2036 from 2033, so a 3-year addition in the Boliden Area, and it looks good and it's all 3 mines that are contributing to this.

Garpenberg, on the reserve side, it has continued very good. We'll come to the resource in a while that looks really good. Kevitsa, nothing new happening. We are working on with the pushback #4, which means there is a 2034 end of life of mine.

Somincor, partially because of the different ways of counting and doing so on the official life of mine is now 2036, which is already a year or 2 better than what we said when we bought it and much better than what Boliden had reported before.

Tara is adding another 2 years of reserves up until 2032. And Zinkgruvan also increasing of 2.5 million tonnes, which is then also means that we come up to 2035. And then to the right in the exhibit, you can see the 10-year development. And you can see here after 10 years of really hard working in the Boliden Area, we managed to increase the life of mine from about 9 to now over 10 years. And it's the first time, I think, ever that we have Boliden over 10 years. And Garpenberg, very strong development, close to 25 years life of mine.

If we then look at the resources, we can see that in the Aitik area, we have both indicated resources and inferred resources going up in Aitik itself. And additionally, here, Nautanen now coming in, if you add these 2 together, at over 50 million tonnes of indicated and inferred together, which means that this becomes enough to really warrant a deeper look into actually making a project out of this given the high grades that we have there.

In the Boliden Area, despite the fact that we have had the resource conversions into reserves, you had a 3-year extra reserve side. We still have more resources coming in at the Boliden Area from very successful exploration during the year. In Garpenberg, we have altogether about 25 million or 30 million more tonnes of resources coming in. We are then adding up the amount of tonnes and the resource together. We're getting close to 150 million tonnes. This is getting large enough that, as I said to some journalists this morning, it's kind of absolutely wrong not looking into expanding the Garpenberg mine with the, once again, very successful R&R update that we had.

Somincor, here, you have to be careful about the comparison numbers because we are really comparing apples with oranges. So you need to be perfect there. But as I said, the Somincor looks relatively good, tara looks relatively good and Zinkgruvan looks relatively good. So all in all, what I feel is a very strong R&R update.

Outlook for the coming year, no news whatsoever. This is exactly the same as we said in December. So there are no news. The only little news there is that we are right now, as I'm speaking, experiencing very heavy rains in Portugal, and we've done that all through January. That has caused issues for us in water management. We're far from alone. I think everything in Portugal is affected by these rains. It's, of course, very unclear what will happen going forward in the rest of the quarter. We don't know the exact weather. Therefore, it's very difficult to say exactly how much this will impact in Q1.

But our estimate as of today is that it's not going to impact more in Q1 than that we're going to be able to keep the full year guidance for Somincor. It's mainly the mill that's affected by this, not so much the mine. And as you know, in Somincor, it is the mine that's the bottleneck and not the mill. So we should be able to catch up over the year what we lose potentially from having to stop because of water issues.

With that, I will invite you all with questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, that opens up our Q&A session for the Q4 2025. I've been informed that we have many questions on the web. [Operator Instructions] And we'll start here in Stockholm, and we have Kaleb Solomon, SEB.

Yes. You mentioned in the mineral resource report that the Finnish mining tax for Kevitsa wasn't factored into last year's reporting. Can you give some color on to what sort of extent you expect that cost increase to impact resource estimates?

In terms of the reserves, it will not impact at all because that's the pushback #4. In terms of the resources, I cannot tell.

Okay. And recoveries at Aitik were pretty much back to normal levels, close to 90% this quarter. Is it fair to say that the sort of recovery issues are completely behind you?

Yes.

Johannes Grunselius, SB1 Markets.

Yes, I have a question on Odda and what you see there for the coming quarters. I think you have guided for EBITDA uplift of EUR 150 million or something like that. Can you give some color if that's intact and what you see for the coming quarters in terms of sort of tailwind?

I don't have a good number. Maybe you do, Hakan, but the EUR 150 million for an annual number, I say, what as of right now is quite understated given the high silver prices. The uptick should be bigger than that. But I don't have another number to give you. But I would say that as of right now, the EUR 150 million is actually pretty conservative. And then that's for the full year status. And of course, we will not have full year production in 2026, but maybe 3 quarters of full production or something like that if now we continue with the ramp-up during Q1 as guided.

And you feel comfortable about the ramp-up, where you are at the moment?

Yes. The ramp-up is going more or less according to plan. And as of yesterday, we went up to full year to say, 24/7 manning on this one. So now we're basically running the process altogether. We haven't started feeding concentrate yet, but it's going forward the way we're anticipating.

Christian Kopfer, Handelsbanken.

It was a quite solid result. I just -- if I look at your production, especially in the mines for Q4, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you didn't live up to your own expectations in the mines on -- if you look in full for Q4, if I'm wrong, you can just tell me. But if I'm right on that, from your perspective, was it, call it, normal hiccups? Or how do you see Q4?

The mine production, the grades apart from Aitik are slightly lower than what we had expected. So it's -- you can say grades issue, and I would say this is all timing issues. There's nothing that will matter in the long time. And the throughput was around where it should be.

But it was something in Kankberg, I mean, the gold mine. So it seems like you came down quite a lot on gold in Kankberg. What was that? Normal hiccups or...

No, I think it's mainly a lower part of Kankberg in the total ore mix, and that goes normally up and down. So there's nothing wrong in the actual -- by the way, I didn't say that. But in the R&R statement, the reconciliation is also done this year and the reconciliation looking for all of '25 compared to what the R&R statement had for '25 and what we had in our plans is clearly within tolerances.

All right. Finally for me then for Hakan. If prices, everything flatten out, what would you say is the internal elimination, call it, reserve, what you will get back in internal elimination if everything flattens out?

Well, that's an interesting question because it depends where it flattens out. But from now, it all depends to prices where they stand compared to year-end. And I think that we have, let's say, a couple of hundred to release at constant prices. But then we'll see where the prices take us because that has a big impact.

Igor Tubic, Carnegie, please?

I just want to go back to the production for the full year because looking at your numbers, primarily for Aitik and Tara, you guided for 40 million tonnes and you reached slightly above 39 million. And for Tara, you reached slightly above 1.4 million and you guided for 1.6 million. And looking for 2026, you have guided for increased numbers. Can you please elaborate a little bit around that so we understand what you are doing in order to improve the ore milled?

In Aitik, you know that why we are not close to the 45 million is because of diorite issues that we've had in the ore. And diorite is not going away overnight, but we will have less diorite, and that's why we can go from up to the 41 million that we have guided. In Tara, it's a more complex situation. It's a new organization. It's a new setup after we restarted from having been in shutdown, and we have not been able to achieve the productivity during the year that we had anticipated. We were also late in getting some contractors in. As we look for 2026, that looks better, and therefore, we feel confident about what we have guided about it.

Okay. And the second question, have you seen any prebuying among your industrial customers?

I actually don't know. I'm looking at my CFO.

No, I'm not aware of that. I don't think we've seen any of that.

Any more questions here in Stockholm? Okay. Operator, then we hand over to the international questions, please.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Alain Gabriel from Morgan Stanley.

A couple of questions from my side. I'll do them one at a time. Firstly, Mikael, on the Odda project, you sound as if you are quite satisfied and happy with the progress of the project. Do you mind giving us a bit more color how you expect the earnings to be phased over the course of the year, the earnings uplift from the project? And what would be the approximate mark-to-market earnings uplift on spot commodity prices because clearly, things have moved quite a lot since you've given the estimated uplift. That's my first question.

And on the mark-to-market on spot, I may look at my CFO for that number. As I just said before, I actually don't know. The other question is around when I feel it's going to come. Well, I think that we should be in full production by the end of this quarter. And therefore, you can say that we should get roughly 75% of this during the year as a whole. So that will be a number on kind of how the timing will work out.

And regarding the spot level of the uplift, I think we'll leave it at the level where the EUR 150 million is understated. We did a simulated performance this Friday -- or last Friday. And just in a couple of calendar days, the whole price environment has changed quite a lot. So for that reason, I'd rather not give any exact forecast. But we leave it at the fact that it's understated, the EUR 150 million.

Okay. Understood. And my second question, it's a high-level question on both Somincor and Zinkgruvan. You seem to have extended the remaining life of mine with the latest R&R update as you've also just articulated now. How are you thinking about the medium-term capital allocation to these 2 mines? Are there any big ticket items that may be needed to ensure that the life of mine is actually extended to the mid-2030s as you are planning to do?

Somincor will need a ventilation shaft to put in relatively quickly. I don't know exact number. That is still relatively modest CapEx, but it's there. For Zinkgruvan, we don't see if we need to do any kind of major changes. It's more continuous as is and with just normal replacing CapEx.

The next question comes from Liam Fitzpatrick from Deutsche Bank.

I've three hopefully quick questions from me. The first one, just on the dividend -- in terms of the special dividend. It looks like if we look ahead a few quarters, you could be well below the 20% gearing threshold. So could you just remind us of the policy in terms of how you would look at potential top-ups in a year's time?

Second question, just on the CMD in March, you had a CMD a year ago. We had the update from you in December as well. Are you able to give us a little preview of kind of what to expect? Is this going to largely be a progress update? Or should we expect to hear about new projects and initiatives?

To start with the dividend policy, just to remind everybody, we have a clear dividend policy of 1/3 payout ratio from net profits. That's what you've seen suggested here today. Then we have -- the next one is that when we are having a too strong balance sheet and strong is defined as having less than 20% gearing. And then this time, we include the net reclamation debt as well into the gearing. And we also take care of the fact that we already -- it will be after the ordinary dividend.

And that number right now, I think, was 30% or 32%, so clearly north of 20%. I don't want to make any prediction of when this is going to happen or if it's going to happen, it will all be down to price and terms. On the CMD in March, you can expect update on projects. And of course, this will be, I think, right when Odda is maybe very hot off the press. We will have updates from also what's happening in Ronnskar and how we're doing in the Boliden Area sand recovery project.

Regarding new projects, we will see what we get, but hopefully, there could be something around that, and it will not be something that comes straight out of the sky, but we have discussed that there are potential further steps into Garpenberg, and we have discussed that there might be some discussions around cement during the early part of '26. And to the extent that we get this in place, you might hear more about that also in March.

And just as a quick follow-up, we can safely assume that any sort of new approvals or additional steps are kind of captured within the SEK 15 billion CapEx number for '26?

We'll see. I could add just to be very clear to you that those 2, for example, will have relatively little CapEx in '26. It's more '27, '28 that will be affected.

The next question comes from Amos Fletcher from Barclays.

Just a couple of questions on cash flow items. I just wanted to ask Hakan on the cash tax side, it looks like you paid very little in the quarter relative to the P&L accrual. Should we expect some catch-up in Q1? And then the second question was on working capital. Can you guide on sort of what your expectation for the quarterly dynamics through 2026 is? Obviously, it sort of feels like we're at a relatively low level of working capital at this point.

Thank you, Amos. Two good questions. I'm happy you asked that about the tax one. I should have perhaps highlighted that already in the presentation. But it's right. The way it works is that you decide a preliminary tax level based on where you stand in the beginning of the year and then we pay according to that. And given the development that we've seen in the later part of the year, it is a quite big tax amount that we will have to catch up with the final payments during this year. And we have some flexibility when during the year to take it. But there is a fair amount of catching up that we'll have to do this year.

Secondly, working capital, we typically tie working capital in Q1. Looking back over the years, it's about SEK 1.5 billion at constant prices. Then it's relatively stable in Q2 and Q3 and then Q4, we release roughly the same amount. So that's -- I mean, to give some indication for Q1, I would expect us to tie about SEK 1.5 billion working capital. What's happening this year as well is that we have a little bit extra in working capital for Odda.

That's fairly small amount since it's zinc. But then towards the end of the year, we'll also come back with an amount on how much we're going to tie for the Ronnskar ramp-up. I think we're talking about SEK 1 billion to SEK 1.5 billion, depending on where the prices stand.

Okay. And then one little follow-up, if possible. I just wanted to ask on the MAMA effect in this quarter. Could you talk us through what that was and where expectations should be for Q1 that, let's say, flat prices where we are today?

The MAMA effect, just to repeat what that is, that is the open positions we had when we started the Q4 and that got their final pricing. So in Q4, that had a positive impact of SEK 300 million. And assuming that prices are flat compared to where we -- to the end of the quarter, that should be pretty much 0. But then again, we'll have to see where the spot prices end up, but SEK 300 million for Q4.

The next question comes from Jason Fairclough from Bank of America.

Just a question for you on the reserves and resource statement. I wonder if you could just talk high level about the sensitivity of your reserves and resources to the prices that are used to calculate those reserves and resources. Also, you've given planning prices. Are those actually your reserve calculation prices? Or is that what you're using to run the business in the short term?

If I start in the end of that question, the answer is we use the same. Our planning prices are used both for investments in the kind of medium term, a couple of years out and also for calculating R&R. So it's the same number.

And therefore, you can now see what we have been using throughout the year as a planning price for investment. Regarding sensitivity to prices, well, the Aitik mine is very sensitive to prices and terms on gold and on copper. And it's not -- even though you're not supposed to talk about it, of course, Aitik at today's spot price and terms would be vastly larger than what you see here.

The underground mines are less sensitive, even though there's always some sensitivity, but the underground mines are less sensitive to these fluctuations. And as of right now, you can say that the whole resources in Kevitsa and their ability to be upgraded to reserves is very much dependent on pricing terms, but also tax levels in Finland.

Okay. Can I just do a follow-up one as well? And I think this is one we've talked about before. So CapEx, there's always a bit of discussion as to how much money you guys need to spend to keep the business running to keep output flat. And I think in the past, this figure has been as low as SEK 7 billion, but I think you've drifted that up a little bit now. These days, you have some new mines. So how do you think about sort of a through-the-cycle level of CapEx required to keep the mines running?

Do you want to take that, Hakan? Or should I go ahead?

Well, I mean, you're right. I mean we've added a couple of billion due to the -- I mean if you start at the SEK 7 billion and then you add a couple of billion for the new mines and some inflation, then I think you're ending up roughly right. But in addition to that, I'd like to defer that for a month or so until we have the capital markets update because that's the time where we usually dive into the CapEx question a little bit more. But I'm not sure if you want to highlight some more there.

No, it is -- of course, you can get a number to answer your question, but it's also -- and everybody is aware of that, that when we talk about sustaining CapEx that what we need to kind of get on from year-to-year. If we only do sustaining CapEx, we will eventually deplete the mines because we're not developing anything new and we're getting to lower grades.

So yes, sustaining CapEx is one level where if you go below that, you will very quickly reduce your production, but then there is something more if you really want it flat for a long time. But as I said, Hakan will have that as a little bit of a discussion on the capital markets update as well.

The next question comes from Daniel Major from UBS.

Just first one on Garpenberg, two parts to it. One, can you give any approximate indication of the time lines on the appeal process for the environmental permit? And then the second part, assuming the permit is not appealed successfully, when would you expect to achieve the 4.5 million tonne throughput run rate?

We have guided for the 4.5 million. We have guided to you that we are aiming to increase by about 200,000 per year for 5 years. So around 2030, we'll achieve the 4.5 million. Regarding the appeal timing, it's always very difficult to tell. But as a rule of thumb, a year from the verdict. So sometimes late this year, we should be able to get the verdict from the appeals court.

Okay. Two modeling questions. Maybe I missed it, but did you give any guidance for the distribution of maintenance through the year quarterly in the smelters?

I'm looking at Olof. No, we haven't done that. We have to complete that during the capital markets update. But typically, Q2 and Q3 are the heavy quarters. It's relatively small numbers in the other quarters.

Okay. And then the final one, how much have you got left in terms of cash insurance proceeds that comes through in receivables in 2026 from the insurance claim?

It's about SEK 330 million that is due to be -- well, in fact, we have received it already in January, but it will be a positive then in the Q1 cash flow. So where we stand here and now, there is nothing more to receive, but SEK 334 million, I think, that we received in January this year.

Okay. And so your net is expected to be at SEK 1.5 billion working capital build after that. Is that the right kind of ballpark?

Yes.

Yes. That is correct.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Richard Hatch from Berenberg.

Two questions. Just the first one, just on cost inflation. Hakan, you mentioned that you weren't really seeing any cost inflation, but I guess it's only a matter of time if prices remain this high. So can you just give us your thoughts on the outlook for cost inflation and where and when we might be seeing it? That's the first one, please.

Well, that's a difficult question. I wish I had a crystal ball to answer that. But looking at what we see right now, we do have the regular salary inflation, which is fairly limited in our part of the world. And then for the external purchases, we haven't seen much inflation at all, I should say, on OpEx. It looks like there is more inflation on the CapEx side, but that's more difficult to compare quarter-to-quarter. I guess you're right, if we see the same price levels, there is a risk that we see a pressure on the inflation, but it's a bit difficult to say then when and where that will come.

Okay. That's helpful. And I'll just -- so my follow-up is -- well, two follow-ups. One, you just talked about the CapEx inflation. Is that just because we're seeing more appetite from more companies wanting more hit. So therefore, there's a bit more tension there? Or is it something else? And then the follow-up is just on the tax. So I see your current tax liability is SEK 1.3 billion. You answered an earlier question with regards to the tax payments, but should we be perhaps unwinding that kind of SEK 1 billion-or-so build year-on-year on the tax liability over the course of 2026. Is that the right way to kind of think about it on a cash basis?

Start with the taxes. Yes, that's roughly the right way of thinking of it. I think it's not really SEK 1 billion, but it's close to that level. And then CapEx inflation, I think we also have to come back to that in the capital markets update. But there is -- just when looking at projects, there is a feeling that things are increasing, looking at what is announced by other parties and so on. But let's come back to that.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a few minutes to go. Are there any follow-up questions here from Stockholm? Yes, we have Jonas Grunselius, SB1 Markets.

Okay. I'll take the opportunity for an extra question here. How about -- yes, I was wondering about Nautanen. You have applied for some kind of permit there to the EU. And I suppose you want to have a fast track. And can you elaborate when you see this project to sort of starting and when can you maybe go ahead with first commercial production? And how will all this change basically the Aitik feedstock into the mill basically?

Just on timing, I mean, it's unclear right now. As you know, the only -- we have a mining concession that's been appealed. We need to make an environmental permit. If we get the strategic status, that should all help and speed that process up. But I think we're still talking about 3 years just to be talking about order of magnitude. And then we will be able to move ahead with the investment and get production a couple of years later.

So this is something that in best case has production 2030, 2031, something like that. How will it impact Aitik is a very good question because there has been this constant question about how do you best process the Nautanen feed? Do you mix it in with the general Aitik and just increase the average grade? Or do you, in some way, batch it? And that's still being worked around.

So -- and if you batch it, then you can say Aitik -- the rest of Aitik should be totally unaffected by this one, and this will get its own kind of situation. And the answer is, we are not quite sure. The best guess, if you were to ask me today, is that we will probably invest in a new mill line and we will mill Nautanen separately, and then we will mix the feed from the mills and have a joint flotation, but that's the best thinking right now.

Is the deposit fully sort of examined? Or do you see a potential for increasing the reserves?

Nautanen is open, I would say, in every direction, they're not quite true, but clearly opening towards the depth. So the 50 million tonnes that we have now should normally not be the end of it. So we are continuing exploration.

Any other follow-up questions here in Stockholm? Then I hear in my ear that we have some questions on the web, please, as follow-ups.

The next question comes from Amos Fletcher from Barclays.

Just one follow-up. I just wanted to come back to one of the questions asked earlier about surplus capital returns. In a fantasy scenario of higher commodity prices going forward, would you typically wait until the end of the year to launch any kind of surplus capital returns? Or is that something that you could think about doing intra-year if your net debt-to-equity ratio gets low enough?

In the Swedish context, it's only the AGM that can decide that. That means that if we were to do it during the year, we have to call an extra EGM specifically for that purpose. Maybe not impossible, but I think it's highly unlikely.

Next question, please, operator.

The next question comes from Marina Calero from RBC Capital Markets.

I just have a couple of follow-up questions. The first one is on your cement projects. I've seen that you have received some grants or financial support from the environmental authorities. Do you consider increasing the scope of that project?

And then a second question, of the one-off impact on recoveries in the smelting division, can you clarify what part of that has been converted into cash and if there's anything that still remains to be converted?

I'll leave the last one for you. On the cement project, you're absolutely right, and everybody who reads Swedish have read that, that we have received some grants towards the cement project. The cement project is about size. The one that we're looking into and the one we're working on is fitted pretty well for what is possible in Ronnskar. It's linked to the size of the fuming operations that we have.

So there, the kind of the scope creep is relatively limited. But the technology as such is one that works well with copper slags. It actually works well also with zinc slags, and it might even work on mine tailings. So there might be many feeds into this process, which means that we could theoretically, over time, if this thing works and if it works in the market and if it works in production also at other sites, but that's way too early to tell.

We are right now making sure that we get a first stage, this demonstration plant, as we call [indiscernible] up and running. And the size of that one, as I said, is determined by the size of the existing fuming operation.

And second question on the one-off adjustment of recoveries. All of that has been converted to cash as of the end of Q4. Some came already in the earlier quarters, but by the end of Q4, everything is cash.

Ladies and gentlemen, time is flying. We have time for one final question from the web. And after that, I leave it over to you, Mikael, to end this session. Please go ahead.

The next question comes from Liam Fitzpatrick from Deutsche Bank.

Apologies. Probably a question for Hakan, just on the provisional pricing. I think last quarter, you broke it down into the 2 buckets. There was the MAMA and then there was the effect of a chunk of sales being priced at the end of the quarter rather than the average price. So I think last quarter, it was around SEK 100 million and then another SEK 200 million to SEK 300 million. So you gave us the MAMA figure for this quarter, which was SEK 300 million. Do you have the other number as well?

I don't know. And I think it's just important to recall that we are not invoicing strictly according to average prices evenly through the quarter. It will depend on whether we invoice one week or the next week and so on. We have described the pricing methodology that we use in the capital markets material with MAMA peers. So I would rather refer to that than give any exact numbers.

What Hakan is really saying is that all these things are relatively easy if you have small deviations. When you have big deviations, this is more difficult to actually assess.

So with that, everybody else, thank you all for listening this morning. It's been very interesting for me to be able to present this, especially the R&R update, which we feel very good about. We feel very good about the general strategy that we have. And we will now continue our meetings during the day, and we will face the 15 degrees minus temperature in Stockholm. Have a nice day, everybody.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you to this Boliden 2026 guidance presentation audiocast. 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. Mikael, welcome.

Thank you, Håkan, and good morning, everybody out there. The whether here in Stockholm is actually really gloomy today, but it's not snowing like it was when we had the Q3 presentation, and we almost missed the presentation because we were stuck in traffic.

Anyway, we're going to talk about 2026 and the 2026 outlook. For the mines, well, first of all, it's the first full year with Somincor and Zinkgruvan included. So we now have them part of our -- all of our guidance initiatives. We have higher grades in the open pits, and we'll come back into more of the details around that. We also have increased milled volume in several of our mines. We have in Aitik expansion due to less diorite. In Garpenberg, we have gotten an extended permit. This permit can still be appealed, but we did also get the permit -- to use the new permit while a potential appeal process is ongoing and thus, we can guide for higher throughput in 2026.

The Boliden area, the Kristineberg expansion is also leading to more throughput. And in Tara, the ramp-up is coming on, and we have more volumes coming through there than we have in this year. We're also making clear in the minds that we have the changed tax levels in Finland. It still says here potentially increased annual cost, the reason why it's potential is that the budget is not yet through the Finnish Parliament. There are still discussions ongoing, but I think the prudent way to think is that these taxes will go through in some shape or form, at least in the next few days.

On the smelter side, we have a increase in order. The first feed is coming in Q1, and we have a roughly 2-month delay compared to what we have said before. We have encountered certain issues during the ramp-up period. The project in Rönnskär, is however, working very well and continuing according to plan with a ramp-up during the second half of '26. And the planned maintenance has an EBIT effect of the SEK 450 million, we'll come back to that as well.

On the CapEx side, the group CapEx for the next year is guided at SEK 15 billion. Out of that, mine sustaining is roughly SEK 6.5 billion. And this number, we do have -- well, at some later stage come back to more details because we're still fighting out with some suppliers, but there are some, I would say, minor overruns and all that they are included in these numbers in here.

So I'll leave it over to you, Håkan, to a little bit go through the details of the numbers.

Thank you, and good morning. So on this slide, and in the press release, we give milled volume for each mine and also the grades for the key metals for 2026. And as you can see this is a similar format to what has been used in Boliden earlier years. Some key points, for Aitik, we expect milled volume to be at 41 million tonnes. That is an improvement from this year. We see milled volume gradually coming out as the impact of the diorite intrusion is reduced.

Grades 0.18% for copper and 0.08 grams per tonne for gold and we expect an improvement mainly from the middle of 2026. Also in Kevitsa, the grades are improving, and the milled volume as usually stable at the permit level of 10 million tonnes per year. So we see a stronger production in the open pit mines in Boliden.

As Mikael said, Garpenberg has an expanded permit, and we expect a production of 3.7 million tonnes for next year at 2.9% zinc and 95 gram silver, which is slightly down to this year. We talked about the continued ramp-up towards 4.5 million tonnes at the last Capital Markets Day. So to put it into context, I refer back to that presentation.

And then you can see the grades and the throughput of the remaining mines further down on the slide. I'd also like to highlight already here that in the appendix, you'll find a comparison with rolling 4 quarters until Q3. This is great milled volume, but you also have cash costs rolling 4 quarters as well. And we expect to report cash costs every quarter going forward, given the rolling 4 quarter cash cost in each quarterly report. So Mikael?

So we're also just going to say a few words about what we're doing in the -- what are still we consider 2 new mines that we bought from Lundin and we took control over in April of this year. In Somincor, we have done -- and we did relatively quickly the first action that we did was changed the shift schedule. This had been a sore point for quite some time in Somincor and it's been a little bit stuck in different negotiations. We went ahead with this one and got what I would say very good acceptance for this, and we figured that this -- we think that this new shift schedule is the basis for the future improved productivity as we move forward.

We have substantially increased near mine exploration around this. We are doing surface exploration drilling on the Lombador North extension. And altogether, we have gone from 2 to 6 drill rigs on surface. We are working with geophysics in the Rosario area, and we are updating the feasibility study of the Semblana mineralization. So if I should say something what I feel about this compared to what we've done, I would say that, yes, we had a vision doing these things, but things looks relatively good also compared to what we had in our own plans as we took this over as we made the due diligence.

We have increased the mine development, horizontal developments to get over to Lombador North. We have put in a new ventilation races, and we are working on an ore pass to get more flexibility in how to work with the mining. We should, however, be clear that we're doing these things not to -- with the ambition to increase the production. The production volume at around 4.5 million tonnes per year is stable for the next coming years. We knew about this as well. We knew that we did not believe that even the 4.5 million tonnes was sustainable unless you took more actions, and that's what we're doing with the increased mine development around this.

Mill optimization. We are having a large study underway to see what we can do on mill optimizations -- and we're, of course, working with improved -- to try to get improved recoveries. However, we're not guiding for that for 2026. We're guiding for the recoveries to be expected to be unchanged.

The work on how to set up the mill in a more efficient way will take more time than that. We've also -- and this is, of course, mainly something that was done already under Lundin time. So we basically just took the last step around getting the new global industry standard on tailings management, compliance completed, and it is now completed, which is good for us and good as we move forward.

On Zinkgruvan, we have also here increased focus on mine extension and that is the primary focus. And it's mainly development of the [ Derby ] mineralization that we're working around to get this working. We have extended tailings facilities. That was according to plan. It was already initiated in the previous owners, but we have continued that one. We're going to get it in operation in 2026, which is a good way of securing additional life of mine. And also here had been started already under previous ownership, but we have been able to move this one forward to being a full compliance with the GISTM, which also feels good going forward.

We're working here also with optimizations in the mill, but just to be very clear that the recoveries are at least for 2026 expected to be unchanged. This is also a longer-term discussion than that. And the mill volume for next year is stable at 1.5 million tonnes and is likely to stay stable at 1.5 million tonnes for the next few years, even though we're not guiding specifically for anything else than the next year.

In Odda, as I said earlier, the hot commissioning has taken longer or will take longer than we -- than we had anticipated. The first feed will be in Q1 rather than right before Christmas, as we had hoped in the original plan. We have encountered both some mechanical issues that needs to be sorted out and also some electrical issues that need to be sorted out. That, together with the fact that you get entangled with the Christmas and New Year's plans as -- with the contractors means that we're losing roughly 2 months compared to what we have said before.

The annual capacity increase is still the same at 150 kilotonnes of zinc and 45 kilotonnes of the leach product. And here, we can also say that although we never thought it would be difficult to sell the leach product from a commercial point of view, we can now confirm that we have a very strong interest from buyers for the leach product, and it looks very easy to sell it, if we want to use that word. And we're also looking to get good price and terms in selling the leach product. The one that we're going to sell, some of them will actually be treated in our own Rönnskär facility.

The increased improved annual EBITDA is around EUR 150 million per year as we come into full production. This is fully in line with what we have said before. And that's not such a big so strange because that's with the Boliden long-term planning prices in place, which also changed very slowly. If you were to make this on spot, it probably will look a little bit better.

The increased depreciations of about SEK 700 million, '26 versus '25 as we start to put on the depreciation as we ramp up. In Rönnskär, everything is moving on according to plan. It looks quite good. We are 60% completed as of November this year, that's very much on track, the ramp up during the second half of next year.

One thing that you don't -- if you look at this picture and look on the ceiling and you look a little bit to the left, you see that there is something there on the roof going on. That's actually that we're dismantling the roof when this picture was taken to put in the last cranes.

We decided to make the building first before we had the cranes and then we had -- we have to open the ceiling to get the cranes in. That operation happened earlier this week and the cranes are now there. That's one of these things since then we can seal the ceiling again to make this work. And as you see the building is there in place, the building that's in the front that's working on, you can see the 2 yellow cranes around is the electrolyte cleaning facility. That one is the only one where the walls are not up as quite of yet. But in a few weeks, those wall will also be up, and we'll start working on the -- on the internal installations there.

The capacity is still at 230 kilotonne on copper cathodes capacity. And the annual increase of EBITDA as we get going around this one. Here, you've seen around -- a number before of around SEK 1 billion. It now says SEK 1.2 billion and that's reflecting the somewhat changes that we've also done in terms of the prices and terms in our long-term planning prices. So that also looks good.

Then I will leave it up to you, Håkan, to talk a little bit about the maintenance and the smelters.

Okay. So as you saw already on the first slide, we expect the profit impact of maintenance stop in smelters to be SEK 450 million in 2026, down compared to an expected level of SEK 500 million in 2025. And this is an EBIT impact. So you have part of it coming on cost and part on revenues. And below, you see the quarter down, and as usual, the heaviest part is in Q2.

And then finally, some comment about Rönnskär and this is actually quite positive news. We have made an updated assessment of the metal recoveries in Rönnskär, which has a positive impact on operating profit in Q4 2025 of about SEK 400 million. And this is done -- the background is that after the fire, we had some new material flows with anode sales and also materials from the Harjavalta smelters that were sent to Rönnskär. And at that time, there were a fair amount of uncertainty as to the recoveries of those flows. We also had some risks in the recovery of metal from the ground where the old tankers was destroyed by the fire.

Now as a result, we have operated with conservative assumptions on metal recoveries in our accounting. And we have now better visibility, including some recent stock takes. And we have, therefore, been able to adjust the accounts resulting then in a positive one-off item of SEK 400 million in Q4.

And with -- I think the presentation comes to an end, and we will now leave it over to the operator for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Adrian Gilani from ABG Sundal Collier.

Two questions from my end. First of all, on Aitik, do you expect to see any recovery issues persist into 2026 as well due to the diorite problem? Or are the recovery issues fixed at this point?

I can take that quickly. The recoveries have already gotten better, if you saw Q3 was clearly better than what we had in Q1 when this was a really persistent problem. We expect those recovery issues to basically go away quite a lot during the year. It's not due to diorite, that's due to oxidization, which is a separate challenge.

Okay. Understood. And then with the Garpenberg permit now in place, can you give any time line on when you might be able to announce any investment decision to actually take the throughput to 4.5 million tonnes?

Here, we say that we have already announced an investment decision that we had the Capital Markets Day, both with the new paste plant and other, and we gave a lump sum for others bunch of smaller investments. Altogether, I think it was SEK 1.5 billion or SEK 1,550 million to get to 4.5 million tonnes. But it's one thing to get to 4.5 million tonnes and another thing to stay at 4.5 million tonnes, because to get to 4.5 million tonnes, we can use some shallow positions. But as they get depleted, we need to go on the depth, and we need to have more investments. So I would say that we don't need any more investments than what already has been announced to get to 4.5 million tonnes, we will need more investments, and we'll come back to those to stay at 4.5 million tonnes.

Okay. And just as a follow-up, are those going to be taken mainly in 2026?

There might be some decisions in 2026, but in terms of capital, it's going to be later.

The next question comes from Krishan Agarwal from Citigroup.

First one is a bit of a mechanical on Rönnskär. So the guidance for SEK 1.2 billion EBITDA. Can you confirm that the metal recovery, particularly the gold and the silver is going back to the level of 400,000 ounces and 50 million ounces which you were producing before the accident?

That's always very difficult to answer because that will always, in any given year, depend on what feed we have. And we will always optimize feed that might not be optimized to keep a certain gold production level. It might be increased optimized leading that you produce less gold, but you still make more money. So we tend to be very vague in terms of guiding exactly how many byproducts we'll get as it's dependent on the feed mix that varies from year-to-year.

Understand. But is it safe to assume that, okay, feed mix will be consistent and there is no material change as compared to what you were doing before?

Well, from a kind of 10,000 feet point of view, you could say that we will be trying to have similar feed as before. But this is a liquid market that change and suddenly certain parameters in these things, be it penalties, be it gold price, be it something else changes. And that, of course, leads to new optimizations. So -- but I would say that we're going to get back to the same run as we had. So of course, we will be looking at similar feed as we had before.

Understand. Very clear. The second question is on Aitik. I mean, 41 million tonnes of milling volume guidance. I mean, if I go back and look at the 5-year history sort of has operated at that level. So where does the 45 million tonne actually comes into the play? And more importantly, is there any kind of CapEx requirement you foresee to reach that 45 million tonne?

Exactly when we reach 45 million tonne, we're not guiding for today. So that will be for a later guidance, we're only guiding for '26. However, we have said before that the main challenge is diorite and diorite appears in certain areas. We were surprised that it came a little bit sooner than we thought. But as we come through diorite, we should be able to increase throughput without any substantial investments that -- we have the equipment to do 45 million tonne when we have -- don't have diorite presence.

Understand. Very clear. So there's no as such pressing need for the CapEx to reach that 45 million tonne, it's more of the mine sequencing?

More of the mine sequencing.

Understood. And the final question, probably for Håkan. So you're guiding for SEK 6.5 billion mine sustaining. Can you also help us break down the CapEx between SEK 6.5 billion mine sustaining for the mining business, what is the sustaining CapEx level for the smelting business and then rest is safe to assume that it is a pure growth CapEx? And where that growth CapEx is likely to go in 2026?

Okay. I can say a few words around that. However, I think that we'll come back to a deeper guidance or a deeper breakdown in the Capital Markets Day in March rather. But -- this year, we have -- as you say, we have guided for EUR 6.5 (sic) million [ billion ] mine sustaining CapEx. And this is then stripping of waste rock. It's underground development and raising of dams. And if we adjust for the new units, it was SEK 6.5 billion also in 2025.

Then we talked in the last Capital Markets Day of a handful of strategic projects, big important projects that we've been running. In 2024, they amounted to SEK 8 billion. In 2025, they came down to SEK 5 billion. And it is further being reduced in 2026, although I will not give an exact number this time. We'll come back to that in the Capital Markets Day.

But to give some more detail, I mean, these bigger projects -- we had the Aitik dam that was finalized in 2024, late '24. The Kristineberg expansion finalized in the earlier parts of '25. Odda, the Rönnskär tankhouse and the sand recycling project in Boliden are still ongoing. And then you can add the Garpenberg spend that we talked about recently to get up to 4.5 million tonnes to that list.

Now Odda is in the final part that goes away during this year. Rönnskär is on a similar level this year as last year. The sand recycling that's a SEK 2.5 billion project in total, that's actually increasing the momentum a bit.

And then out of the SEK 1.5 billion investments in Garpenberg, we did have only a minor portion in '25, and I'd estimate about half of it will happen in '26. So all in all, there are still a number of strategic projects that are ongoing. They are lower -- as a total, they are lower compared to the SEK 5 billion that we had in '25, but we'll come back to a further breakdown.

The main growth projects that we have, that's the final parts of the Odda projects, the SEK 4.5 million spend in paste plant and others, the SEK 1.5 billion that we talked about in Garpenberg, and then I guess it depends on how you see it. You could see the Rönnskär tankhouse either as a replacement, but it's -- it's adding profitability at least.

So if you want to include it as a growth project as well, that could be there. The remainder then are replacements, some productivity, some EHS investments. I think it's worth mentioning that we have a phase of slightly higher replacement CapEx in Aitik as we are moving the old industrial area to access the ore that is beneath. So that's roughly where we stand, and then we'll have to come back to further details in the Capital Markets Day.

Understand. That's the comprehensive detail. And if I can ask a broader question. So 2026 probably will be the fourth year for you to stay at SEK 15 billion CapEx level. Is there any kind of a visibility in the next, say, 2 years for you to come down or SEK 15 billion probably is the new norm for the group CapEx?

Everything beyond 2026, we'll take it later times.

The next question comes from Liam Fitzpatrick from Deutsche Bank.

Two questions for me, one on Garpenberg and one on Rönnskär. On Garpenberg, I take your comment around future investment decisions, and that will be needed to maintain at 4.5 million tonnes. But in terms of thinking about getting to 4.5 million tonnes, is it kind of fairly linear from here on out in terms of stepping up to that level? That's the first one. And then the second -- sorry go ahead. Yes.

Yes. So on that one, it's fairly linear. I think we said in the Capital Markets Day that this may be a 2030, we should be able to get there.

Okay. And then on Rönnskär, I know the SEK 1.2 billion, I think it's based on the -- on your long-term assumptions. In terms of a rough feel for -- at spot levels, we've got very high pressures. We've got low TCs, is it going to be similar to the SEK 1.2 billion uplift or will it be materially different?

It would be a bit higher. I think we actually talked about a number on a question in the last quarterly call and said SEK 1.5 billion. And that's -- I haven't done the update the last week, so -- but that's roughly what I would estimate at the current gold prices.

Okay. And that's uplift versus sort of current EBIT levels?

EBITDA levels.

EBITDA levels. Okay.

Uplift versus current EBIT levels.

The next question comes from Marina Calero from RBC Capital Markets.

I have a couple of questions as well. The first one on working capital levels, given that you are ramping up Odda and Rönnskär, how should we think about that in the coming year? And then the second one is on Garpenberg as well. Now that you have the permit and you know all the conditions. Is there any additional CapEx that Garpenberg is going to require in terms of -- to meet with the environmental requirements of the permit?

I can take the second one, I'll leave Håkan with the first one. The second one, just to be very clear. We have gotten a permit. With -- if that permit were to stand exactly as it is, we would not require any more CapEx than what has already been guided for. That will be included in that on what we need to do.

However -- and we've gotten the permits to start producing more than 3.5 million tonnes while a potential appeal process is ongoing. If it's appealed and if there will be -- and the appeal court decides to hear the appeal, where they can still refuse to hear it also if they want to do that. But if they hear it, there could, of course, be some still 4.5 million tonnes, but some other conditions on something that we don't know. But as it is given now in the lower court, there is no extra CapEx required on top of what's already been guided for before.

And I'll give it to you, Håkan, to talk about working capital levels.

Exactly. Well, working capital, we've got about SEK 0.5 billion for Odda that will come in possibly some already in Q4, but otherwise, in Q1, and then it's roughly SEK 1 billion for Rönnskär, which we'll see during the second half of 2026.

The next question comes from Johannes Grunselius from SB1 Markets.

It's Johannes Grunselius here. I have 2 questions. The first one is on Aitik. You guide for 0.18% in copper grade. How should we think about that grade over the quarter? Is it kind of back-end loaded improvement? Or is it more evenly spread throughout the quarters? That's my first question.

Back-end loaded.

Back-end loaded? Yes?

Yes.

Okay. Could you give some color on it? How we should think about start? And the...

I think that when it comes to kind of how that was split over the quarters, we might come back to that when we report Q4 and so on, because it's still -- quarterly -- it's always a little bit sensitive, but it is back-end loaded. Yes.

I think we said in the press release -- sorry, I think we said in the press release that it's -- the increase is mainly happening in the second half of the year.

Second half of the year. Okay.

Individual quarters, we'll come back to...

Okay. Then on the Odda project, maybe you already touched upon it. But you -- it seems that you're delayed with additional 1 to 2 months. Is this sort of something you think is more about timing and other stuff? Or have you encountered any sort of new technical challenges over the last few weeks. Could you give an update on that, please?

Without going into detail, I would rather say that we've been kind of some old technical challenges. I mean, it's not that there is any kind of fancy new technology. It's just that when you start everything, everything should work. And if things have not really been properly done, you need to redo it. And there's always something of this happening in every project. It was unfortunately a little bit more that this takes a little bit more time to fix.

Yes. But your view on the Odda investment, the economics and so forth, that remains completely intact? Or how should we think about that?

Yes. There is nothing that has come up during the commissioning so far that indicates that we're not going to meet any of the parameters of the investment decision. In other case, the recoveries, there is no indication that they will not work.

The next question comes from Amos Fletcher from Barclays.

Yes. A couple of questions. First one was just on Kevitsa. Could you confirm whether the Pushback 5 project is on hold as a result of the Finnish mining tax or whether you abandoned it? And then also, is there any likelihood of you guys lifting the cutoff grade and shortening the mine life as a result of the new taxes?

The good thing for us is that we don't really have to decide whether we scrap it or put it on hold. It's basically the same thing. And while it remains on hold, it will eventually get scrapped if nothing happens in between. The existing Pushback 4 will not really be affected that much. It will be mined according to how it was done relatively close according to the mine plan.

Okay. And then I just wanted to ask on the 2026 CapEx guidance, does that include any allocation assumed for the cement projects, which you were saying that the last set of results has been a bit delayed in terms of the approval time line?

No, it does not include the cement project. We'll come back to any numbers around that.

Okay. And then I just wanted to ask on the tailings side with respect to the 2 new assets acquired. Should we expect -- is there any kind of meaningful uplift to the provision base that we should assume as a result of GISTM approvals or compliance for those 2 tailings dams?

No, have mainly been taken. So -- and I'm a little bit uncertain exactly what the annual uplift cost changes will be, but they will be relatively in line with historical numbers.

Okay. So you don't expect any kind of material impact on that net reclamation liability?

No, not on the net reclamation liability, for sure, not. I thought it was more a question that as you go into GISTM, you might have actually other technologies for raising dams that we have ourselves, and we have increased cost -- annual cost in Aitik as we said because of the GISTM compliance in Aitik. But I think in the case of Somincor, there has not been this kind of redesigns of dams. Therefore, there should be relatively similar uplift cost as historical.

The next question comes from Richard Hatch from Berenberg.

I've just got 3 questions. The first one is just on the SEK 400 million EBIT from the release of metal. Should we just drop that through into the cash flow statement as a working capital release? How should we just -- how should we think about the accounting of that, please? That's the first one.

The cash flow is independent. So it's mainly an EBIT effect. So you shouldn't feed it into the cash flow.

So is that -- so it's noncash. Is that correct?

Some of the cash has already come.

Some has come and some is in the future, but it's not a one-off cash impact.

Okay. Any quantification as to how much is cash and how much is not?

I mean at the end of the day, it's all cash. It's just the timing, and it ends up in the account in 1 quarter and the timing of the cash is spread out over a long time and some of it has already come to the accounts.

Right. Okay. The second one is on Kevitsa, mining materially below the reserve grade of, I think about 0.31% copper. So if your '26 guidance is 0.24%, how should we think about the direction of travel back up to the reserve grade?

It should continue up, but I would refer there to what we said at the Capital Markets Day, where you're absolutely right, there is clearly an upward path also after this.

Okay. And then the last one, I think we're all trying to understand this CapEx piece on Garpenberg. So it'd be good to get some more information on it in time. But if I look historically, you've run the CapEx number at this mine at about SEK 500 million, SEK 600 million, SEK 700 million. And then I guess if you take the throughput up to that sort of 4.5 million tonnes, should we think about the additional CapEx? Is it almost like a linear adjustment to that just because you've got to have more development to your point. Is that the right way to kind of think about it broadly?

I think that's the right way to think about it broadly, especially as we're kind of ramping up. However, as we've talked about before, in order to maintain that level, we will need a new shaft. And that's, of course, a pretty big CapEx item that will come in the future for us to remain at 4.5 million tonnes.

When do you need to push the button on the shaft decision?

Decision probably during '26. It might not be so much money during '26. Money is probably later, but most likely during '26, we'll have to make a decision.

The next question comes from Christian Kopfer from Handelsbanken.

Just a follow-up on Aitik and not trying to get too technical here. But I think previously you talked about that you have had some issues with oxidized zones in Aitik. And just to be clear, those are not -- those are not correlated with diorite?

Sorry, do you hear me? They are independent.

They are independent?