Essity AB (publ) (ESSITYB) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Essity's third quarter results webcast. With us here today, we have our CFO, Fredrik; who will take us through the events and the financials of the quarter. After that, we will move into Q&A. [Operator Instructions] with that, let's get started. I'll hand over to our CEO, Ulrika, please.

Thank you, Sandra, and good morning and also from my side, welcome to this webcast. So the third quarter can be -- or it was characterized by resilience and a stable performance in a quite challenging market. We continued with the volume-led growth momentum in our higher-margin categories and segments, such as incontinence care, health care, incontinence care retail, feminine care, wound care and also our premium products in Professional Hygiene. On the other hand, we had declining sales and volumes in the areas where we see a contracting market, and that led to stable volumes overall for the group. As expected, we experienced higher costs in the quarter following the situation in Middle East. And to compensate for that, we implemented price increases and prices were higher sequentially Q3 versus Q2 across all our 4 business areas. During the quarter, we also continued with our efforts to shift our portfolio towards our higher margin and higher-yielding categories and segments. So we progressed our strategic review of consumer tissue according to plan, and we also announced yet another acquisition in Feminine Care. And I will come back to that acquisition in a few minutes. But before doing so, let's zoom in on Health & Medical. In Health & Medical, we continued to grow both the incontinence care part of our business and the medical part of our business, driven by higher prices and stable volumes. I would say the highlight from a category perspective was the continued good growth in Wound Care and the highlight from a geographical perspective was the continued good growth in North America. Then when we talk products, I would say the highlight is always the new innovation that we bring to market. And in this quarter, we enhanced our JOBST offering to lymphedema patients. We extended the JOBST Elvarex Soft Ready-to-wear assortment with new styles, new sizes and new body part options. And for those of you now who know our assortment very well and who know how to treat lymphedema, you might think isn't custom made the better option. And yes, many patients that have that have lymphedema. For them, custom-made compression garments is part of the treatment. However, it can take some time before you get an appointment with the lymph therapist then until you then get assessed and measured and get your customer-made compression garments. And that is where the ready-to-wear assortment plays an important role. So that provides the patients with compression therapy in an early stage of their treatment journey. And for us, that means that we attract consumers to the JOBST brand at an early stage. And we do this now by leveraging a strong technology platform that we already have, JOBST, Elvarex Soft. Also in Feminine Care, we make use of a strong technology platform that we already have by rolling out the Smart Protect technology to our night segment in Latin America. And I talked about the SmartProtect technology in another webcast. I will not repeat myself on that. But what I want to highlight is with this rollout, we strengthen our superiority further in the strategically very important and fast-growing night segment in Latin America. We're already a strong market leader here with over 60% market share. And talking market shares, the investments that we do to drive market shares across our Personal Care categories, are paying off. We saw increasing market shares across the 3 categories for our branded business in Personal Care. For incontinence care and for Feminine Care, that also translated into higher growth, volume and sales growth. For Baby Care, however, where we had the declining volumes and sales in our retailer brand part of the business that did not play out in higher volumes and sales, but lower on a total scale. Then if we look at the geographical perspective, what stood out in the quarter, what's the performance we have in Latin America and North America for Personal Care as a total. There is a lot of activity, a high activity level in those 2 geographies, which reflects their strategic importance. And if we start by turning our eyes to Latin America, this is where we announced Feminine Care acquisition, more precisely the acquisition of the brands OB, Sample live and Carefree in Brazil. and this is supporting our strategy to grow and expand our higher-margin categories in attractive geographies. As you know from before, Feminine Care is really a category that we want to expand geographically. It's a category where we have higher margins and also where we have a proven success recipe and a very strong track record. That is true, not the least in Latin America, where we already have a leading position for example, in Mexico and Colombia. Then Brazil is certainly an attractive market. It's actually the fourth largest Feminine Care market in the world and growing at 4% roughly. It's also a market that we know very well. We have good presence there already with Professional Hygiene, with Medical Solutions and also within continence Care. In fact, we are market leaders in incontinence care with our TENA brand. And we are market leaders, thanks to a very strong position in the pharmacy channel. Now when we get access to the retail channel, which this acquisition provides, we expect to be able to accelerate our growth in TENA even further. So this is a very exciting acquisition, and we expect the transaction to be closed by Q2 '27 and really look forward now to integrate this business and take it to the next level. Then if we move to North America. There, of course, since we closed that business in the beginning of this year, we are one step ahead when it comes to the integration. We continued the integration of the Feminine Care acquisition in North America during this quarter, and we are improving our margins step by step. As you might recall, one of the benefits with this acquisition that we talked about was that in the U.S., this means that we will double our sales in Personal Care. And that gives us the scale to look at a more effective go-to-market model. And in the third quarter now, we have implemented the new sales model, which is moving us towards a more direct sales model and also then we're taking more ownership of our commercial execution. We've done this transition without any business disruptions and it puts us in a better position, stronger position to build a deeper relationship with the retailers and to build our distribution and in-store visibility. And I would say that TENA certainly deserves more shelf space. And the evidence of that is the strong performance and higher market shares that we have online, which tells you something about the consumer pull that is out there in the market for TENA. And I cannot help myself, but take this opportunity to show you some advertising that we do for TENA in the U.S. And that is advertising that demonstrates our product benefits, but also helps to create that pool that I talked about. So the first ad that you see here promotes our TENA sensitive care pads that have a 5 in 1 skin comfort formula. We have seen in consumer research that we've done locally that skin irritation is a real issue for users of bladder protection. So for us, with TENA, we see that the combination of having the trusted protection that we have with TENA and caring for sensitive skin is a very good way of differentiating the Tena brand and a very relevant way of doing so. And that is exactly what you see in this advertising. Then looking at men that suffer from incontinence here, we offer superior products that are disposable, but we also offer attractive washable products. And whatever the user prefer, we make sure that there are no more dribble dramas. Now moving to Consumer Tissue. Here, we had declining volumes and sales in the quarter, and we see that in Europe, the market is contracting somewhat. And also on top of that, we had some deliberate volume reductions coming from a restructuring that we did in Latin America. We were exiting 2 smaller production sites and moving production into a more efficient footprint and also by that, also stepping out of some low-value volumes. Besides that, the strong focus in Consumer Tissue is, of course, this quarter as previous quarter and as following quarter price adjustments. We experienced higher costs in the quarter, and we implemented price increases. Looking at pricing in this quarter than compared to same quarter last year, there is still a lower price effect, but that is coming from price adjustments done in previous quarters. As I said initially, sequentially, we are increasing price in consumer tissue. And we'll continue to work on those price adjustments. And while we do so, it's, of course, important to continue to invest in innovation and our long-term competitiveness. We did this also this quarter. What you see on the picture there is that we took the redo assortment to the next level of softness. But we also extended our moist toilet paper assortment and actually brought this product that we put on the market in the quarter. And here, what we have learned from research is that consumers, when they use moist toilet paper, they use 2 or 3 sheets. And with this product, you need just 1 sheet. One is enough. It is the largest and thickest moist toilet paper ship that is available on the market and it dissolves faster. Now moist paper is -- our moist toilet paper is still a small part of the consumer tissue category, but it's important because it offers the potential to bring value-added growth and differentiation into the consumer tissue category. Turning to Professional Hygiene. Let's start to talk about a good growth opportunity in this business, and that is the Tork Vision Cleaning. If you remember, I talked about Tork Vision cleaning in the context of AI last quarter. Because in this product, we have -- we are using AI in order to help our customers to optimize their cleaning operations by up to 25% with Tork Vision cleaning. And we are continuously expanding this offer and the presence of this offer. We are now in 38 airports around the world and adding on more and more. We're also increasing the presence in other channels like health care, in stadiums and also in the industrial sector. Quite recently, we acquired a customer, a BMW factory, a big 1 in the U.S. And here, we have 3,500 devices -- connected devices in their manufacturing sites. So it's big. All of this very encouraging data. But I think the most important thing is that 50% of our Tork Vision cleaning customers are new to Tork. So it's an excellent vehicle to attract new customers to the brand. So the growth of the Tork Vision Cleaning was obviously then a highlight of the quarter. Another highlight in the quarter is that we continue to grow the strategic segments in Professional Hygiene. On the other hand, we had lower sales in the more commoditized base assortment that is more exposed to changes in the market environment. And overall then, that led to a volume drop for professional hygiene as a total. A volume drop that we anticipate to be temporary as we continue to adapt our assortment to changing market environment, continue to expand our channel presence and acquire new customers. And with that, I hand over to our CFO, Fredrik.

Thank you, Ulrika, and I will not actually demonstrate any products, at least not this time. I will demonstrate a few numbers that relates to what Ulrika was talking about. So if you -- if I start with net sales, you can see that our net sales increased with about SEK 1.5 billion or 4.1% in comparison to Q3 of 2025. And out of that currency was 2.5%. And the acquisition -- the Frminine acquisition we've made in North America is close to 2%. So as you can see, the organic sales growth is slightly negative at minus 0.3%. So turning to volume. Overall, volumes were stable for the group, but we had a bit more challenging environment in the third quarter, and that was especially the case for consumer tissue and to a degree, Baby and parts of Professional Hygiene. So if I start with Health & Medical, volumes were generally stable, but it was an unusually you could say quiet quarter for Health & Medical. We saw a good growth in incontinence and also Wound Care, and that continues out of -- for many quarters and a bit slower in compression and orthopedics. And as I think Ulrika alluded to a bit, this is something we see as hopefully more temporary. If I then turn to Personal Care, this was another quarter of good growth and especially so for incontinence and for Feminine products and in Feminine products, not least for leakproof apparel. So it continues to be quite strong. Whilst in Baby, it is a challenging environment, both from a competitive standpoint, but of course, that is driven by continued low birth rate. So we continue to work with our Nordic assortment, good market share growth there and overall, of course, from a volume perspective, quite challenging for Baby. Looking at consumer tissue then, we had -- and we have talked about that a tough quarter, but we were quite impacted by the factory footprint optimization that we did in Latin America. So out of the volume decline of about 1.9%, 1.2% related to that Latin American restructuring. So underlying, of course, it looks slightly better than what you would see in the numbers. Professional Hygiene, finally, from a volume perspective, negative by 0.6%, and this is all based products. So strategic products, as we talked about, that is actually continue to improve. And pretty similar to what we think or what we saw in Health & Medical. We believe this is also, as Ulrika alluded to, a bit of phasing. And in the case of Professional Hygiene also relating to destocking, particularly on the North American market on the back of consolidation in the distribution part of the market. So we anticipate better volumes as we go forward. Just some really short words on price/mix. You can see that the net impact there is minus 0.2%, and this is 0.5% negative on price and positive 0.3% in terms of mix. So that's good. Mix is positive. And price as before, that comes from price concessions that we did previously in Q4 of 2025 and in Q1 of 2026. Sequentially, we have an increase of prices for all business areas, and we will continue to see that also going forward. So turning to margins, we contracted our margins with about 150 basis points for the group as a whole. And this is all driven by higher COGS. I'll come back to that impact, but it's very, very significant. In the previous quarter, in Q2, you will probably remember that we talked about the acquisition of the feminine business and the impact of that, and we experienced some cost issues and in flexibility when it comes to the TSA agreement relating to that acquisition in Q2. So we had quite substantial impact on our margin. We have taken a lot of actions related to that -- so we are now back on track when it comes to the business case. So we're quite pleased with the development in that acquisition. It still has a negative impact but it's quite marginal in comparison to what we saw in Q2. Now looking at gross profit margin, you can see it's down by 170 basis points, it's 190 basis points, and this is pretty much in every area. We see raw material up and we also see basically energy having a quite negative impact despite the fact that we have very significant savings. So SEK 180 million, very much in line with our full year estimate. So we're happy about the performance in terms of productivity gains, but clearly, COGS not developing where it should be. Now if you look at the rest of gross profit, we have some impact -- positive impact actually from volume. And as I alluded to before, a negative impact from price. So all in all, of course, a big impact from COGS, as I mentioned. When it comes to A&P, basically pretty much on the same level as last year in percentage of sales. And when it comes to SG&A, you can see we have a fairly good contribution to our margin of 20 basis points. And this is, in fact, pretty much all of it coming from the cost saving program that we are very much in the execution phase of and actually nearly completing that execution phase. So this is quite a good performance generally from SG&A and that cost savings program. So this is pretty much the description of Q3, but let me give you a little bit of into Q4 and what we expect when it comes to various cost items. So I'll start with COGS and you have seen now that we've had some very significant cost increases we expect a significantly higher COGS also in Q4, and this is related to Q4 of 2025, but we also see significantly higher costs sequentially and of course, this comes from also, again, raw material and also energy. So this is the COGS part. When it comes to SG&A, we expect SG&A, excluding A&P to be roughly on the same level or actually even slightly lower than what you've seen in Q4 of 2025 and actually also sequentially. So this is, again, a result of the cost saving program. And you see that the savings is roughly about SEK 150 million or slightly more than SEK 150 million for this quarter. and we expect the savings in this quarter. And if you look at, of course, the program as a whole, we expect that to actually deliver in line or more than what we have promised. We'll come back to that at a later stage. So that is basically the forecast when it comes to SG&A, excluding A&P. And when it comes to A&P finally, we expect that to be higher than what you have seen this quarter. You might have seen from our report that the items affecting comparability is slightly higher than usual or a lot higher than usual in this quarter. So close to SEK 1.1 billion. And if you look at the full year, it's a bit above SEK 1.8 billion. So I thought I'd just have -- give you a couple of insights into that big number. And the restructuring cost or SG&A savings program is about SEK 450 million and if you look at the combined impact so far this year of that, it's slightly above SEK 1 billion. So you can conclude from that, that we have taken most of the cost now relating to that restructuring program or the cost saving program. Ulrika mentioned the factory footprint optimization, manufacturing footprint optimization in Latin America we have taken cost of approximately about SEK 500 million for that in the third quarter. Roughly about half or slightly below half of that relates to cash and the annual savings that will materialize or already actually started to materialize and coming in the coming year. is roughly about SEK 150 million, SEK 160 million or $70 million. The cash impact, $23 million and the annual saving roughly about USD 70 million. And the rest is basically other mainly relating to the acquisition of the Brazilian entity apart, some smaller amount to the Feminine acquisition and of course, also the consumer tissue strategic review. So turning then to our cash flow. You can see we had a really good cash flow quarter, so SEK 5.8 billion in total. And this is, of course, the result of continued strong cash surplus, but it's also working capital in price, then our derivatives becomes worth more, and this is what you see in the working capital line. So if you actually adjust for the working is roughly about the same. So turning then to our balance sheet. You can see here that our net debt is SEK 25 billion. So net debt to EBITDA is 1.0 so it's a very strong balance sheet. And this is, of course, despite the fact that we have acquired the Feminine business in North America. And it's also despite quite significant share buyback and an increased dividend. So of course, the main reason to say is our strong cash flow. But you -- something we talked about already in Q2 we have something we refer to as IFRS revaluation that has actually impacted net debt quite significantly this year. And the impact, if you just take the full year roughly about SEK 5.4 billion. And then the question might be what is it? Well, it's basically the surplus value in all our pension obligations. So over the past years, or year, I should say, interest rates have gone up, which takes down the debt and the asset management that we have had has performed quite well. So in average, the asset surplus has grown quite a lot and it's now approximately in total SEK 7.6 billion. We still have a very strong balance sheet. But if you were to adjust for this our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio would be roughly about 1.3%. So with that, I leave over to you.

Thank you. And I'll just -- you did the clicking. That was good -- now we do it twice. But I would just like to summarize the quarter with the fact that we delivered stable volumes resilient profitability and a strong cash flow. And looking at priorities moving forward then, to compensate the cost increases with price increases remains, of course, a top priority. And our ambition clearly is to do that while also protecting and growing market shares. Then, of course, with the cost pressure that we are experiencing, it's more important than ever to control and restrain costs and spending. And as you heard from Fredrik, our cost-saving program is delivering very well, and we will make sure to get that to the finishing line and also continue to deliver on our COGS savings. Then another top priority is, of course, the portfolio initiatives that we have is the integration of our Feminine Care acquisitions and the strategic review of Consumer Tissue. And beyond those priorities, we will take further actions to accelerate progress and returns. Thank you for listening.

Thank you, Ulrika. Thank you, Fredrik. We will now turn to Q&A. So a chance for you to interact directly with us [Operator Instructions]. And we already have a good list of people calling in.

And the first name I find here on my list is Aron Adamski, from Goldman Sachs.

I have the first 1 on EBITDA, it has been more resilient than consensus as anticipated. So I wondered if you view the 13% margin as sustainable given the expected sequential step-up in COGS that you commented about. And also, should we expect any material Latin America or any other adjustments going forward? And then my second question is on pricing. I was wondering if you could give us a sense on the magnitude of the price increases being implemented and your expectations for the volume elasticities? And specifically in Consumer Tissue, I was wondering if the production over capacity and low-cost imports that we're hearing about in Europe, if that affecting anyway your pricing discussions?

That was many questions. But let's start -- I mean, when it comes to the margin, I mean, we don't guide on a margin perspective as such. But I'm sure Fredrik can talk a bit about what we expect when it comes to COGS. Then when it comes to pricing, of course, what you see in the numbers is that we compensate parts of the cost increases, but what happens also is that once we compensate with pricing, then it's a moving target because then there are new cost increases, and we go back and adjust our prices again. So we have, as you know, in Consumer Tissue, it takes roughly 2 quarters to compensate. But then again, there are new cost increases that we have to compensate. So we will continue with those efforts, announcing and negotiating new price increases. . The Latin American part, I'm not sure I caught the question there, but I think it was about if we can expect more restructuring costs from that. Here, we have -- I mean now we have concluded on that initiative. So that is more or less finalized, right, Fredrik.

Yes.

Did you want to comment on the COGS? .

Not more than what I have said. I mean, and this is quite observable that we've seen a significant increase in not least oil-based material, but it's also packaging and distribution and pretty much all material. And the origin of this is, of course, the Middle East crisis and then we see additional impact from Feminine cost. So as I said earlier that we do expect significantly higher COGS, both year-on-year and sequentially. So I don't think I can add much more than that. We will compensate part of it through good cost savings. So we're doing well there, I think. We're quite happy about that. But overall, the impact will be very significant. .

So we will then move to the next question, which comes from Andrei Condrea from UBS.

Two from me, please. I mean, the first one, could you help us unpack as usual, the COGS increase into raw materials distribution and its other components? And secondly, just a point of clarification on Consumer Tissue. 120 basis points of the volume decline also was linked to the LatAm restructuring because you exited low-cost products? Should we expect this to persist over the coming quarters? Or do you expect an acceleration in other parts of your portfolio? .

Yes, I can start there. You wanted the -- I can -- I'm not sure if this is really helpful, but I'll be happy to give you. So if you take COGS, in general, it increased by about SEK 660 million, if that's your question. And energy was SEK 245 million of that give and take. And then you have a bit over, well, close to SEK 420 million in pure raw material and then distribution, I think your question was the SEK 75 million. So that's kind of the total. And then we got -- as I alluded to in my presentation about SEK 180 million or so in savings and the rest is others. So if that was your question, those are the different components. .

The manufacturing road map. The optimization of manufacturing, will that impact on volumes continue to have an impact throughout the year?

Well, yes, it will because we executed on that factory footprint optimization. So what we did was we actually shut down a couple of plants, as Ulrika alluded to. And at the same time, we actually then stop selling some volumes that was less profitable. And the volume impact in the quarter versus last the same quarter of 2025 was 1.2% volume. And that is actually going to be there. You'll see exactly the same impact pretty much in Q4, Q1 and Q2 of 2027. So we'll still have that impact. But again, from just to be clear that from a profitability standpoint, it's quite profitable. So we'll see an uptick from that. .

Thank you, Andrei. So let's then move to Niklas Ekman from Carnegie. But before that, can I just remind you to just have 1 question per call, please. In that way, we can give you better answers and then you can return with a new call, if you want to clarify anything. So let's move to Niklas at DNB Carnegie.

I want to come back to the COGS guidance here because after Q2, you warned a much higher COGS. And I think we were all surprised at the magnitude we saw here in Q3 that it was a lot smaller than anticipated. So is there any way that you can kind of elaborate a bit on the future cost increases? Is -- are you expecting a significant further increase? And were you were you surprised that there wasn't a bigger magnitude in this quarter to start with.

I don't know what you think, Niklas, but I think SEK 658 million in COGS is a very -- I mean, 190 basis points in COGS impact, and that's including our savings. To me, that's very significant. I don't think we've had a lot of quarters with that kind of increase. And the increase was basically also -- I mean if you look at -- this was year-on-year SEK 658 million, as I mentioned, right. But if you look at sequential COGS, it was SEK 510 million just in 1 quarter. So to me, that's very significant. I'm not sure exactly Niklas, as what you expected. But to me, that was very significant. Now you're asking what's the number for Q4. And I can't tell you that. But of course, if I say it's significant also from a sequential perspective, then you would expect a fairly high number and year-on-year then, of course, much higher than what you see this quarter.

Let's then move to Karel Zoete from Kepler.

I have a question on your momentum in the North America market and then in particular for the consumer business, but also your H&M business. What are you seeing in this market? .

When we look at that, if with the Personal Care business. I mean, first, we have the Feminine Care acquisition that is that is progressing according to plan when it comes to our sales development. We talked already now in the presentation about the improvement when it comes to margin, but I think it's good to emphasize also that sales is progressing as we as we expected. Then we also have the leakproof apparel in North America that is doing very well. It's a fast-growing segment, and that is why we want to have a strong presence there. So we see that happening as well. And then we have our TENA business or incontinence business, where we are a challenger in the market. So there is a big potential for us to win market shares and grow. And we have a very strong plan in place in order to do so, and that plan is yielding results. And not the least, as I mentioned, we are growing our presence in online. And now when we are changing our go-to-market model, we believe that will help us also to accelerate in brick-and-mortar going forward. Then when it comes to Health & Medical there, you might remember that we did an acquisition in Wound Care Hydrofara some years ago. That strategic rationale for that was to support our overall growth in Wound Care, and that is exactly what we see in North America. And also generally speaking there in Health & Medical, we have a good momentum on the back of having a strong portfolio and an efficient commercial execution.

Appreciate your question, Carol. Let's then take the next question, which comes from Oscar Lindstrom at Danske Bank.

Yes. health and medical organic growth slowed. What drove the slowdown? And when could we expect growth to recover here in this key segment. If you could expand a little bit on that, that would be very helpful. .