Gränges Capital Markets Day 2026: Transcription

Below you will find a transciption of the topics presented and discussed at Gränges Capital Markets Day 2026.

Speakers

• Jörgen Rosengren, CEO
• Oskar Hellström, CFO
• Christina Friborg, SVP Sustainability
• Patrick Lawlor, President Gränges Americas
• Fredrik Spens, President Gränges Europe
• Colin Xu, President Gränges Asia
• Moderator: Marybeth Sandell

An emerging global leader
Speaker: Jörgen Rosengren, CEO

A few weeks ago, one of the regional Presidents in Gränges, we have three such delightful creatures in our company. In this case, it was Patrick Lawlor, our President of Gränges Americas. He reached out and told me that we just signed another multi-year contract with one of our key customers, a big one. Locking in the market share for several years to come, more favorable pricing, and also, of course, a stronger, tighter relationship with this very important customer. I guess all good news, and I was delighted, but still, it was kind of a matter of fact because it was not the first time that I got this kind of news recently.
I thought to myself, "How am I going to be able to explain this to investors that it can be so?" Look around you, look at the world today. All we have are basically crises, risks, or in some cases, full-blown disasters like this war that's now playing in the Middle East with all its consequences, both human and economical. The question then is: How can a company like Gränges then keep growing, keep gaining market share, keep growing our profits, and how can we have such stable quality of earnings in such a volatile, risky, and an uncertain world?

Those are the questions we're going to try to answer today, we're going to try to answer them by explaining our Navigate plan. The Navigate plan is something we worked according to for the last four years, and that has driven the good results we've had to date. It's also something that's going to guide us for the next four years.

The theme for today, as you see here, is Accelerating towards leadership, and you might ask then, "Aren't you already a leader?" We're very proud of what we are and the position we have reached, and we're also extremely proud of the improvement in it in the past couple of years. Jörgen RosengrenCEO | Gränges We're also very ambitious for the future and have many things that we can do even better for the future. Let's decide that we're an emerging global leader. Here, global is a very important and operative word because we're actually one of the very few companies in the world who can say with honesty that we're a global player in our business. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment.

First, to make sure that everybody is at the same point and has the same information, I'll go over some of the basic facts about Gränges, what we do, our market, our competitors, our business model, and so on. What do we do? Well, we do something that we call aluminum recycling and flat rolling. Very simply, that means buying aluminum, buying energy, and then we melt the aluminum, we cast it, we roll it, we finish it, and we ship it to our customers according to a multitude of very specialized specifications. Crucially, we also work in closed loops, that means that we take back spare aluminum from our customers, and from their customers, and from our own operations, and then put it back in a closed loop, remelt it again, and so on. That's crucial because it's, of course, absolutely necessary to have a good sustainability, a good circularity, but it's also actually good for our profitability and not the least to build strong customer relationships, such as the one I just spoke about. Aluminum makes up almost 60% of our revenue. For investors, it's crucial to know that we invoice it through at market price. The price of the aluminum itself does not at all influence our profitability or earnings. It does, however, of course, influence our working capital, but our long position in aluminum is fully hedged, which insulates us then from the vagaries of the aluminum price. This has turned out to be a fantastic choice in the past couple of years because we've had some unprecedented volatility in aluminum, but Gränges' earnings have grown very steadily and calmly throughout that period. The other 40%, that's our added value. It's the cost for the fabrication, for recycling, for our services, and also, of course, our profit.

Now, about the market. This is a large market. The global market for aluminum components is something like 100 million tons or so. Something like SEK 300 billion. Huge. We're only active in one segment of that market, flat rolled products. We call it FRP sometimes. You'll hear that from time to time today. It too has segments. It's also a very fragmented market, with the largest player only being about 10% market share or so. We sold last year about 600,000 tons. That puts our volume market share, I guess, at 2%. We have 98% left to grow with, I guess, and our value share is a bit higher than that, thankfully, because we focus on some good niches.

This is a good market to be in because it grows. It actually grows faster than the economy by a pretty good margin, and over time that builds up to big opportunities for us. It's also a market with large differences between our different regions. In Gränges Americas, we have a dynamic where the market is undersupplied and where it is protected, or at least resides behind a very stout tariff wall. That leads in that region to medium competition, I guess you could say, and relatively high pricing for the conversion pricing. In Europe, we have a different situation. There we have a stronger competition. It's sometimes very stiff from imports. Therefore, the prices on average in that market are more medium. Finally, in Asia, we have the highest overcapacity. Of course, not really any imports. Very stiff competition, very tough, which leads, of course, to lower prices. This we can see, of course, in Gränges' numbers. We can also see it in market statistics. This chart here shows some commodity segments and the prices they command in our different regions. Of course, the details maybe don't matter so much, but you can see that there is a very striking difference between the price that we enjoy in the Americas compared to the price that we would get in a market such as China. This is not a temporary thing. It's lasted for a long while, and we think it'll last for some while yet. That's also strengthened by the forecast that we see for utilization in our different markets, where it's forecast that the utilization will increase rather significantly in Europe and in Americas, whereas it'll stay flat or quite low then in China. This, of course, gives some credence to the belief that the difference in prices can persist and maybe even widen over the next couple of years.

Growth then. What drives growth in this market? Well, there are three very important trends that shape the market, have shaped it for a long time, and will shape it also for a long time going forward. Important one there is electrification. Electrification, contrary to many rumors, is not at all slowing down. Rather, it's speeding up and it drives a lot of aluminum demand, of course, for electric vehicles, but also for things like data centers, for things like energy storage, for things like energy transmission. All those markets require a lot of aluminum. Also wind industry. Sustainability is also a very important trend for us, but I'll leave that for another speaker in a minute who will go into that in depth. Then we have the regionalization. Regionalization creates threats, of course, but also it creates opportunities. In Gränges' case, it is fortunate, but also a little bit by design, that we are very well imbalanced between demand and supply in each of our regions. That means that everything that gets sold in a particular region also, on average, gets made there. We believe on the opportunity side of this regionalization trend and have seen that already and think we are going to see even more of it going forward.

Finally, about Gränges then. We have about 800,000 tons of capacity. That leaves ample headroom from last year's sales of 600,000 tons to grow. The capacity is split very beautifully in an even way across the three regions. You can see here about a third each in Americas, Asia, and Europe. We're also split across segments in a nice way. When segments, by the way, there are some new names for the segments here. We have segments like climate control. We have packaging. We have industrial applications, each of which helps us even out the difference in demand that can happen in the different segments over time and have, again, steady growth, steady earnings.

We have 3,500 people approximately worldwide, and we call them people who make the difference. Why we call them that is going to be evident also in just a bit. I promised you some answers on how it is that we can win in this market, and it really comes down to five simple choices that we made early on in the Navigate plan and that we have stuck to since persistently.
First, it's that we place sustainability, people, and very importantly, safety at the core of everything we do at pragmatic way, and also let the regions run the operations so that we can serve our customers in an excellent way. This is a strong competitive advantage, while at the same time, also making sure that we leverage our global reach for the best effect. We have a multi-niche strategy. I'll get back to that in just a moment. There are two choices that are very important to succeed in this industry. The first is that you have to have a very consistent focus on operational efficiency and on taking market share, because this is after all, a competitive market. It's also important to be very disciplined in your capital allocation and in your risk management, all of which we'll go into later today. These five choices are the reason that we've been able to outgrow the market and have good profit growth and have good quality of earnings over the past five years, and we believe they will serve us well going forward also.

Niches done. We have a multi-niche strategy, and it has meant that we have chosen about 20 niches worldwide to play in. They are chosen for three criteria to be attractive in terms of growth and profit potential and so on, to be a good fit for us in various ways, but also to fit well together to make a whole that's bigger than the part of the whole, and we call that complementarity. This is a rather complex story to tell, and it actually is complex in reality too. We have a very large complexity in our business. We have hundreds of customers, but also thousands of individual product specifications, which are often very precise. Running this well is difficult and it's taken us a long time to learn how to do it. Something that is difficult and that takes time to learn is also going to be difficult to copy. For us, that translates into our competitive advantage in these niches where we play. The niches are chosen also to not be at the very core of what our competitors do. Our large competitors, they tend to focus on niches that are very large and valuable. They tend to focus on niches that are technologically quite advanced and also money- wise, very capital intensive. Of course then we don't go head-on with them in those niches. For instance, Gränges does not make aerospace plate. We do make other things, and in those niches, we have a competitive advantage. This is of course business 101, but you fortunately don't have to take my word for it because the proof of the pudding is that over the last couple of years, since we started an initiative to really go after market share, we have outgrown the market with a wide margin, both in 2024 and also in 2025, and in fact, in the first quarter of this year too.

I talked about the Navigate plan, and the purpose of the Navigate plan is exactly what Marybeth (Moderator) said, to accelerate toward leadership. We have divided it up in three very simple steps. We're not a complicated company, a simple one. The first step was to Finalize a very long investment program that we had been engaged in for a very long time. We did that in 2025. The second step is to utilize the capacity we built up. Remember the 800,000 tons I spoke about, to utilize it as fully as we can. We're about in the middle of that. I'm going to have to use also 2026 and 2027 to get there. We've now launched a four-year program that we call Optimize. Optimize aims to, well, guess what? It aims to optimize our price and our mix. It also aims to optimize our productivity, our asset productivity, our cost productivity, our capital productivity in order to have a good development also going forward. Below all this is something very important, namely our foundation for sustainable growth. While some other colleagues in the GMT, so our three Regional Presidents, Patrick, Colin, and Fredrik, and also our CFO, Oskar, are all here to talk about the different phases of the Optimize plan, somebody who's maybe even more competent, namely our Senior Vice President for sustainability and communication, is here to talk about our foundation for sustainable growth. Welcome up on stage, Christina.

A foundation for sustainable growth
Speaker: Christina Friborg, SVP Sustainability

One important reason for me to come work for Gränges was the fact that the company takes sustainability very seriously. It is truly a part of everyday work in our operations, and it has solid commercial results, which you will see when our CFO, Oskar Hellström, will present in just a little while. Sustainability is integrated into our Navigate plan. We have had fantastic results since 2021. We are now considered a industrial leader in sustainability. We have actually improved or decreased our carbon intensity by 46% just since 2021. This is a fantastic achievement. Here's another proof that we are doing very well in sustainability. The share of source recycled aluminum has increased by 45% since 2017. That equivalents 6.4 times the level in 2017. We have a target of 500,000 tons of sourced recycled aluminum in 2030, which is equivalent to 10 times the levels in 2017. We are already at 300,000 tons. A fantastic achievement.

As many of you know, the view on sustainability has changed the last years. This is a reality we have to adapt to. For us, this means that we have to create a more flexible sustainability plan. It has to be adjusted to the market in which we operate and as well as the position that we have on these specific markets. In the U.S.A., for example, we have seen a slowdown in sustainability in general. Nevertheless, Gränges Americas is a recognized leader in sustainability and can leverage sustainability as a strategic differentiator towards their customers. In Europe, we can see continued high political ambitions with the European competitiveness partially relying on sustainability, although with a complex regulatory framework. For Gränges Europe, we believe that the importance of sustainability will grow gradually with a potential pricing upside. In Asia, we can see an acceleration in terms of the climate and energy situation, with clean energy becoming one of China's most competitive advantages. For Gränges Asia, sustainability is becoming a part of the competitive baseline.

Going forward, we will accelerate the sustainability program by taking the lead in circular low-carbon solutions, accelerating decarbonization and circularity of our own operations, as well as operating responsibly across the value chain. We want to be able to offer leading sustainable solutions to our customers, adjusted to each niche and to the regions, so that our products are very different, and as you could see from the previous slide, the regions also differ a lot. Flexibility is needed. As for our own operations, we will continue to decarbonize by sourcing low-carbon and recycled aluminum in partnership with our suppliers. At the same time, we will continue to ensure energy and resource efficiency while also monitoring emerging and existing decarbonization technologies. Fossil-free energy is an important component of decarbonization. We will continue to operate responsibly across the value chain, for example, on health and safety, business ethics, and responsible sourcing, among others.

Take a little look here. This is the niches as they were at the end of 2025 at the group level. On the Y-axis, you can see the carbon footprint intensity, ton per ton, and on the X-axis, you can see the share of recycled materials. Now, have a look. This is 2030. This is how we plan for the customer solutions to develop until 2030. As you can see, it is a pretty important step just in the coming years with two niches approaching close to zero in carbon footprint. Now, let's go until 2040. Here it is, 2040. As you can see, two out of four niches will have reached net zero. The other two are well on their way. 2040 is still far away, and the slide is therefore estimated based on the current technology. As I said before, we keep a close eye on the decarbonization technologies in order to close the gap to the net zero in 14 years, also for the two remaining niches. We believe that we will be successful in achieving this target, just like we have achieved our previous targets. One of the key components in reaching what I have just presented is partnerships. We will continue working on partnerships on metal and energy. We need to secure low-carbon primary aluminum, as well as recycled input materials. We also need to ensure fossil-free energy. This is only possible if we also work together with our customers. We can, together with them, develop low carbon and circular aluminum solutions and improve recycling loops and material efficiency for them. The best thing of it all is when we manage to create closed loops partnerships, like a three-way partnership or even more across the value chain, together with customers and suppliers equally. That way, we could ensure both post-industrial and post-consumer scrap into new product through innovative processes. This is very complex to set up, but it is a sticky win-win solution once it is in place.

This is when I have the privilege of presenting one important piece of news. We will raise the bar. We will sharpen the decarbonization target to three tons per ton instead of four. It is actually a 25% reduction in the target or in our carbon emissions. It is a fantastic target to set. It's a difficult one to reach. We are pretty sure that if we work according to the plans that we have in the Navigate, we will reach these levels too. This is a lot in our industry. Therefore, we are extremely proud to be able to share this with you today.

As much as we believe that the climate issue is an important topic, there is one area that is the absolutely most important one, and that is safety, the safety of our employees. We have about 3,500 employees that we need to keep safe. They work around the clock, 365 days a year in heavy industrial operations in three different continents. Our biggest responsibility is to keep them safe. Therefore, safety is an integral part of Navigate. We have invested heavily in making safety visible everywhere. There are stop signs, barriers, signals, both from sound and lights, and so on. We have reduced the key risks together and also at each site. We are working together in teams, reducing these key sites from a common standard and also with regional and locational implementation. We are building a robust safety system. To reach our ambition, which is to be leading in our industry when it comes to safety, the most important thing is to have a strong safety and leadership culture. We have come a long way with that too, but we are not done yet. People make the difference in Gränges. Those are the ones creating the culture, and those are the ones making our operations work, and those are the ones selling our products, and those are the ones buying our input materials. This is because anybody can find equipment, customers, suppliers quite easily. The team, the knowhow, and the way of working that have been built up during decades, that is hard to copy. We have aligned our organization to the Navigate strategy and also to take into account all of our employees. We have a very lean corporate center to set the direction, manage risk, and allocate capital. We have three fully empowered regions that make 99% of the decisions close to the customers, and operations, and suppliers. We have a 60 people strong global leadership team formed into different core teams according to their expertise, and they drive synergies, initiatives, and coherence across the operations and the company. To support this, we have long and short-term incentives that drive value creation and sustainability. The result is that the whole team has a clear direction that enables fast and pragmatic execution. To reach this, we consistently invest in our people. In all regions, Gränges should be a safe and inclusive workplace to be proud of. We want to be the preferred employer in each region. Therefore, we invested heavily in leadership development for many years, from the frontline to senior executives. Our operating model, which you will hear more about, our engagement and the commitment from our people, and the pride in the organization is what is at core for us. As a result, we are seeing good trends for retention and engagement. A very important part of the foundation is the strengthened governance that we have done throughout the years lately. In particular, we have significantly strengthened the risk management. Risks are now governed by a simpler and sharper code of conduct framework and managed by our global finance and risk team. We have intensified global trainings for all employees on this topic, and we have invested significantly to improve processes and reduce risks related to metal effects, safety, and IT security. We have also tightened our investment policy and capital allocation. Oskar, our CFO, he will speak more about this and the positive effects it will have. Taken together, these actions make Gränges a better, safer, and more inclusive place to work for our employees. As Oskar will point out, this will have had significantly improved the quality of our earnings. In summary, we have built a strong foundation for sustainable growth. At its core, we have safety, people, and sustainability. Equally important, a global governance framework that ensures that we follow a single global code of conduct, and that we are disciplined in managing risks and allocating capital. Some key takeaways. We continue building an industry leader when it comes to safety, people, sustainability, and risk management, and we have significantly sharpened our sustainability ambition.

Marybeth Sandell: I have a few questions already in- Sure. ...I'd like to ask you, but before, could we watch a video that just has come in from a customer who believes in sustainability? Oh, I would love to.

Q&A with Christina Friborg
Question: The questions really are about the targets, the first one, and it is this. Just how much additional effort is going to be required to make them happen?
Answer: Well, we work hard already, and we will continue to work hard. It will require additional partnerships. It will require us being more efficient, looking more into recycling opportunities and so on. We will continue the path that we are on already, and if we deliver according to plans, we will reach our targets.
Question: The tougher follow-up question is the customers. Put bluntly, are they willing to pay for this? What is the value add you give them?
Answer: Well, you just heard from Trane. Some of them are willing to pay. I do think that sustainability should perhaps not be regarded as a standalone fact, but as an integrated part of a solution that we have to offer our customers. If you take sustainability out of that would probably not give us the business. It is an integral part of what we offer our customers, and therefore, they are willing to engage with us in that way.

Expansion finalized: Record results throughout
Speaker: Oskar Hellström, CFO

Since the launch of our Navigate plan back in 2022, I think we have achieved a lot. Let me now tell you why I think so. In 2025, we finalized an expansion phase that was started already back in 2018. During this time, we have made several expansion investments and also investments in new capabilities. For instance, in recycling, which has enabled a lot of the sustainability growth that Christina just talked about. All these expansion investments are now fully completed. During the same time period, we have made several acquisitions. Two of them are major ones. All these acquisitions are now fully integrated into Gränges.

The result of the finalized investment phase is that we now have a much stronger footprint and 800,000 tons of production capacity. In 2025, we delivered 617,000 tons of rolled aluminum products, representing then a capacity utilization of 77%. Now, that's not what we target. We target a capacity utilization well above 90%, and this means that we now have capacity to grow some 25% or so on top of the 2025 level without having to make further investments in rolling capacity. In addition to this, as my colleagues will talk about later today, we can release further production capacity by productivity improvements and optimization of existing assets.

Aluminum rolling is a capital-intensive industry, and as a consequence of this, expansion investments are typically made in cycles. That means that investment-heavy periods are followed by what we often refer to as harvest periods, where we spend only limited CapEx and focus on utilizing and optimizing the new assets for returns. During 2018-2025, we spent in total SEK 4.8 billion in expansion CapEx for our facilities. That CapEx-intensive period is now over. In the coming years, we expect to spend only maintenance CapEx, and that is significantly less. That is typically some 60%-70% of depreciation.

The underlying cash generation in Gränges is strong, and the actual variability in our operating cash flow is primarily explained by two factors. First, where we are in the investment cycle, and if we are spending capital on expansion, which is completely discretionary, or if we are only investing in maintenance. The second one is the volatility of the aluminum price, which creates timing effects on net working capital, but not structural cash leakage. If we look at the utilization optimization period that we had from 2014-2017, and that also happened to have quite stable metal prices during this time period. In this period, we had an EBITDA to operating cash conversion of 72%, and that is quite representative for this part of the investment cycle. If we look at the latter part of the most recent expansion period, so 2021-2025, the corresponding cash conversion was 28%. Now, of course, we need to acknowledge that we spent expansion CapEx in this time period, but we also should note that cash representing some 14% of EBITDA was deployed to finance increasing aluminum price.

To be able to handle expansion investments as well as the volatility in the aluminum price, Gränges should not be a highly leveraged company, nor should we be debt-free. We have a leverage target stating that the financial net debt should be between 1x and 2x of EBITDA. We are committed to this target, and we manage leverage with discipline. As you can see on this chart, in this time period, we have stayed within the target range for the most part, despite having spent quite some capital on expansion. Expansion investments take a lot of energy, a lot of focus from the organization, and so also during the last couple of years.

At the same time, we have experienced a, I think it's fair to say, very volatile environment, including the pandemic, supply disruptions, the start of the Ukraine war, the following energy crisis, the trade tensions, inflation, weak consumer demand, and most recently then, the war in Iran. All of these things have had an impact on Gränges. We have focused and followed our Navigate plan and focused on the things we can control. Our market share, our own productivity, and maybe above all, our flexibility. The result of that has been a good and stable earnings growth, as you can see on this chart here. From 2021-2025, we reached an all-time high operating profit every year. During this time period we had an average operating profit growth of 13% per year, so well above our 10% per year target. With all the things that have happened around us, I think this is quite an achievement.

Another way to look at this is the following. Here you can see that we, since the launch of the Navigate plan, have increased our earnings growth, but we have also significantly improved our earnings stability, or quality of earnings, if you will, which in turn has been translated into a higher valuation multiple. This, I think, is very good evidence that our strategy is working.
In terms of profitability measured as return on capital employed, that has improved from 10% back in 2021 to 11% at the end of first quarter this year. It's moving in the right direction, but it's still below our 15% target level. The reason for this, it's twofold. First, we continued to invest in expansion up until the end of 2025, and that means that we still have new assets on our balance sheet that are not yet at target return levels. Second, the increased metal prices that we have seen in this time period have resulted in a net working capital increase.

Even if we have not yet reached our return on capital employed target, the solid earnings growth and improved quality of earnings have been translated into good shareholder returns. Since the IPO back in 2014, Gränges has delivered a total shareholder return of close to 500%, or 17% per year. Since the launch of the Navigate plan in 2022, this has accelerated further to 21% per year, far outperforming the market.

What are the key takeaways? Well, first, I think probably the most important one is that we have now finalized the CapEx-heavy investment phase. second, at the same time as we have done that, we have also achieved very good results and a high quality of earnings in a very volatile environment.

Utilize: Growing through commercial excellence
Speakers: Patrick Lawlor, President Gränges Americas & Fredrik Spens, President Gränges Europe

Patrick Lawlor: My good friend here, Fredrik, and myself obviously have our own regional responsibilities. We of course, see the value of the optimization of the sum of the parts in many, many areas of the business. The meaning of the word utilize is to put something into effective service. As you just heard from Oskar, all our assets are now in service, including the expansion assets we have made in each region over the past years. Now we're working on the effective piece.

Let's home in a bit or home out a bit on the global rolled products marketplace. The global rolled product marketplace is a huge market with hundreds of different players, hundreds of different choices, and many different choices for us as a company. There are many different applications within the rolled market segment. It's in the homes that we live in. It is in the vehicles that we drive in. It is in the containers that we cook with. It is in the HVAC units, of course, that are used to heat and cool our houses. There are hundreds of applications to choose from, but we in Gränges have carefully selected the niches we want to play in. These are very clear strategic choices we have made.

Let's also focus a bit on some macro trends in the industry. Number one is regionalization. Without a doubt, regionalization gained momentum during the COVID years. Trade legislation has pushed this acceleration forward, maybe especially in the U.S. I've lived and worked in the U.S. for many, many years, and I've never seen the rate of change or the speed of change in this trade environment as we do today. It is a quite complex picture, and we can split trade legislation into two constituent pieces. On the one hand, we have industry-led trade legislation, and on the other hand, federal-led trade legislation. Industry-led trade legislation tends to be quite long in length of time and has reviews every five years. The objective of industry-led trade legislation is to level the playing field from a pricing perspective. Very good examples of this are in the foil industry, in our segments, which cases have gone through in both 2018 and 2021 with very good success. Federal-led trade legislation is a bit more complex and uncertain regarding the outcome. Examples are Section 201 and Sections 232 for national security. What does all this mean from a Gränges perspective? We compete mainly with imports in Gränges Americas, and of course, imports are subject to all the relevant trade legislation, whether that be on the industry side or whether that be on the federal side. Section 232 has also imposed 50% tariffs on all aluminum imports coming into the U.S. today. This has also pushed metal premiums up to record high levels in the U.S. Obviously, as you heard from Oskar, this has a negative working capital effect, not just on Gränges as a company, but also all the players within that marketplace. Fredrik, this picture in Europe doesn't quite look as complex as the U.S. Maybe you can give some views on that as well.

Fredrik Spens: The trade barriers in Europe are in general both weaker and slower implemented. Though, back in 2022, when the tariffs towards the Chinese peers were implemented, it supported to level the playing field quite a lot. There are imports still going on in Europe from many different regions. In 2025, the sanctions towards Russia prime was coming into force. Gränges took a conscious decision already back in 2022 to phase out all Russia-sourced aluminum. Now lately, the carbon border adjustment mechanism that has been worked on for quite some years is now coming into play gradually. It has, up until now, quite minor implication, and it's more work to be done here in order to make it work effectively. For all regions in Gränges, we of course monitor those kind of developments carefully in order to know how to compete successfully.

Let us now move in to see how are we as Gränges approaching the market. As you heard from Jörgen earlier here, the market dynamics in each and every region differs quite significantly. That together with different customer structures, makes it for us obvious and clear that the best way is to approach the market as regions. That makes us being quick in front of the customers. Of course, on top of that, we have a global reach. We as a company are able to serve the customers in different geographies. A great example is, of course, within our large automotive segments, where the Chinese OEMs, the tier ones in China, in steps are localizing in Europe and North America. Me and my team in Europe would not be able to create that customer relationship without Colin's team. Of course, our commercial teams are used to work very tight together. They know exactly when to act together, put attention together, and strive for the best return for Gränges. As you heard Patrick mention about our carefully selected niches, let's have a look at that.

Here, you could see the different niches that we play in today, and this is something that has evolved quite dramatically over the last years. Thinking about all acquisitions that we have made, the investments that we have made, and not the least, how we have been able to develop the products in each and every niche for our customers. Today, we are into automotive, we are into industrial, we are into packaging, we are into climate control. This whole portfolio, of course, create a strength in terms of commercial resilience over a business cycle. Not only that, we are moving stepwise into more and more attractive niches driven by, for instance, the electrification, the batteries, the recently also the data centers. That makes the ability for us to grow faster than the market be very, very good.

How do we then select those different niches? Yeah, at the first glance, it's a kind of generic. It's about attractiveness, it's about the fit, it is about is it complementary or not? Let's look into it.

Attractiveness. Is there a growth potential? Do we believe that we have the potential to make money? That leads us into fit. Is there a technical fit? Here comes, of course, the capabilities in our plants as a super important one. Do we have the competence in terms about the market, about the applications, the processes? Simply, do we have a commercial fit to enter this niche? Is it inside or outside the core of our competitors? Of course, we analyze the competitor landscape carefully. Then we are moving into complementary, and here I think we start to touch, actually, on the secret sauce. Thinking about a new niche, is it supporting or not supporting our metal management? Is it supporting our processes? Meaning, referring to what Oskar said about how to utilize all our assets. The demand profile, I mentioned about the diversified portfolio that we have created, it's actually even more layers here. We have niches that are complementary, also on a seasonal pattern point of view. When moving into a new niche, it's of course very important to analyze the technology. Do we have a technology to build on? For instance, when we are moving from the traditional heat exchanger into the electrified vehicles, there is a technology to build on. Same goes for instance, HVAC to data centers, and so forth. That is how we select the different niches. How are we then approaching the customers in each and every niche?

First, in each and every region, sales, product innovation, the different plants, plus sourcing, work very close to each other. We call that a tight closed loop collaboration. We strive for trusted partnership. First, each niche we treat as strategic. We are long-term, and we stay. On top of that, over time, we develop the competence, the know-how around the processes, the technologies, the markets. All this summed together makes it possible for us to tailor the solutions. We have, of course, proof points here. We have customer relationships that spans decades back. Also, when we enter into new niches, combined with a careful selection process and this way of working, we create trust early on. As you heard from Christina, we are very determined when it comes to the sustainability, and here the approach for us is very much based on what I just said. Maybe with a possible add-on that when we think about how to create leading sustainable solution in each and every niche, it's of course important how that we look through the whole value chain, sometimes also including the customer's customers at the end. The big question is, of course, all this work, Patrick, has it led to some results?

Patrick Lawlor: It's a leading question, I think that, Fredrik, but of course, it's led to fantastic results in all three regions over the last 12 months, or more even. These graphs look very simplistic in nature, but you see great market share gains in not just one, not just two, but in all three regions at the same time. Again, there's a huge amount of work behind this from all parts of the organization, whether that be our sales and commercial teams that have to go out and hunt for the business, or on our operational teams, of course, who have to ramp up the business. This is a task that cannot be underestimated. All this has led to an increase of nine quarters of consecutive volume increases in journey never ends. We had 77% capacity utilization in 2025 in Gränges. We have now raised the bar and set ourselves a target of 90%+ capacity utilization in the years to come. Oskar also talked about a nameplate capacity of 800,000 tons, I'm sure the competence we have within our operational organization will push this bar ever north over the coming years.

A quick summary from this first session, myself and Fredrik at least, it is very clear, and we've mentioned it on numerous occasions already, our ambition level is to drive utilization to 90% or more in Gränges over the coming years. By doing this, of course, we'll push our return on capital up to 15% more.

Optimize
Productivity and performance
Speakers: Patrick Lawlor, Regional President Gränges Americas & Colin Xu, Regional President Gränges Asia

Patrick Lawlor: This session is called Optimize, and as we've stated on the last session, we do have an ambition to reach 90%+ capacity utilization in the years to come. Of course, market share increase and volume increase is a key enabler of this. We have to sell it, but we also have to make it, and we have to make it more effectively and efficiently every day, every month, and every year. Of course, this word optimize conveys a certain picture of internal focus. In Gränges, it has a much wider perspective to include mix optimization, volume optimization, and of course, price optimization. It is my experience for many years that as we ramp up capacity and utilization increases, that it becomes tougher. It becomes tougher from an equipment standpoint. It becomes tougher from an operational and organization viewpoint, especially it becomes tougher from a people viewpoint. We need a plan. We need a plan for enhanced employee engagement. We need a plan for enhanced leadership, and we need a plan for enhanced engagement at all levels. This is what we call our Optimize plan. When we use these words Finalize, Optimize, and Utilize, of course, it seems that there is a very much a process behind this. In reality, of course, all our plans work with these concepts on a daily basis as they continuously improve the business. We have developed a new operating model over the last 12 months, and this is very much in evidence in our plans today. I'll speak a little bit more about this later in the session. We also speak a lot about enhanced employee engagement, and of course, most companies speak in this way. But really in have very good momentum for enhanced employee engagement at all levels in the organization. Colin, what's your view on this?

Colin Xu: Yes, Patrick, we do have great process in the pipeline. I think here I would like to first touch upon a bit on our framework, Optimize. There are several different dimensions in these metrics. The first we talk about the asset productivity. Just now, it's covered by the Utilize part a lot. We do work a lot with critical drivers like the OEE of the key assets. We improved the changeover time, increased the speed, increased available time so that we can squeeze all the tonnage out of the critical assets. Very important. Also, we talk about the price productivity. It's basically about optimize our mix. When we multiply these two together, we get the revenue growth. Indeed, we want revenue growth is beyond the market rate. On the cost side, we talk a lot about the drivers just now we covered in the asset productivity, but also we want to cover the metal management, the procurement excellence, and also very important, the fixed cost management. When we add the cost productivity onto the revenue growth, then we drive fundamentally our operating profit improvement. Last about the capital productivity. It is about the tighter working capital management and also better capital employed returns. When we multiply all those through, then we arrive at our return on capital improvement track.

Where do we see the opportunities? There are a lot. Talk about new customers. We have a strong pipeline of the qualification projects, and then also we see the great traction in the EV, in the batteries and data centers we all covered just now. We talk about new customers. Our R&D investments are translating into a broader portfolio and the solutions that we address the emerging applications. We talk about the new equipment. Also out from the Finalize phase, all the big investments come online, bring us the new capacity and the capability. We place them in the place where the growth is happening. More importantly, we need a stronger team so that we can materialize all these opportunities. In Americas, in the past years, we successfully addressed the retention challenge. Now we have formed a very stable and committed team there. In Europe and Asia, we have completed integration phase after the big acquisition, and now also we all operate like a unified organization, and we substantially invest in the leadership training. All the regions we have very detailed plan to execute and launch with very promising first results.

It's not just enough by having a right strategy. It's very important that we engage everyone from our 3,500 team member worldwide. We invest heavily in the leadership training and skill training, especially focus our frontline leaders. They translate our strategy into daily actions. We also focused a lot on communication engagement. That is our priority, too. We do a regular information sharing at all levels in many means that help us to align everybody and to motivate our teams. The core part is to build the ownership on the shop floor level. There, we expect improvement could happen, and we cascade our targets down to shop floor level and help everyone understand what they are responsible for and how they contribute to the bigger picture when the understanding is achieved, and the improvement will happen there. We also have recognition and reward to help us create the positive reinforcement and sometimes very healthy competition between the shifts. Finally, of course, we close the loop by adding the follow-up, including the surveys and audits. All this help us to find out whether we are on track and whether we sustain the right momentum. Okay, Patrick, just you talk about operating model. Maybe you can talk a bit more in detail about this.

Patrick Lawlor: Thanks, Colin. As mentioned already, we have developed an operating model in Gränges over the last 12 months or so. Of course, this is in the shape or form of a house. Some very simplistic words when you read this. You'll say, "Many other companies have something similar." Many other companies in a manufacturing environment have also developed a house looking like this. The key word from us in Gränges is our. It is not anybody else's operating model. It is clearly our operating model. We haven't used an external consultant to develop this. We don't have a Chief Operating Officer at a central level to put this down into the plants and regions. It has been developed through the hard work of hundreds of our different, fantastic employees throughout all regions. I could really talk about this operating model for a long time, but at the foundation level, we have three constituent pieces. We have safety, what we call "All of Us Safe" in Gränges. We have people, who we call "People Make the Difference," and we have a workplace to be proud of. Think about excellence in housekeeping and success.
We have a baseline performance, which is historical performance, and we have a leadership ambition going forward, how to get to our desired target places. If you look at the baseline, think about our 77% capacity utilization in Gränges in 2025. When we talk about leadership ambitions, think about our 90%+ capacity utilization target over the years to come. Everything else in between are the tools we use and how we get there. I'm not sure how many of you have walked through a Gränges facility. Our plants are heavy industrial facilities and quite complex in nature, especially our larger facilities. Our operating model is a very good communication tool on a high level for all our employees, both new employees as well existing employees, into how we work and who we are. When rolling out the operating model, we felt it was necessary to break down these complex plants we have into constituent pieces or departments. For example, a rolling mill is what we describe as a work center. We've identified 140+ work centers throughout our regions. We've also set in motion a set of minimum requirements with standards such as safety, housekeeping, process parameters, and a wide range of other process standards. We started with pilot programs in all the three regions six or seven months ago. I'm glad to say these pilot programs have been very successful, and we've achieved some excellent results. Our plan now is to roll out this work center concept across all our other pilot centers and work centers that we have in the regions and reach a leadership ambition target of having all our work centers under our operating banner in place by the end of 2028. I think it's also important to stand back when we look at our operating model and really describe and visualize what the intention is. For example, if we walk through a Gränges plant 12 months from now, whether that be in Shanghai or Shandong or Finspång or a plant in the Americas, what should we physically see on that location? Of course, we should see excellence in housekeeping and success. We should see everybody working safely in a safe working environment with very good safety standards in place. We should see a baseline performance that has been identified and continuous improvement activities in place at all our plants and regions. Most of all, of course, we should see our people. We should see our people working safely and effectively every day. We should see our people smiling like this great picture from Hirbo in one of our plants in the U.S. Envision our employees coming into our plants and asking their families or children or loved ones into the plant where mom or dad works. Reflect on the pride in their faces when they have their families there. This is the vision that we want to create in Gränges. Colin, another element of our operating model is something called Always Smarter, and I know you're an expert in this field. Do you want to talk a little bit about that today?

Colin Xu: Always Smarter. Yes, this is a digital and data-driven kind of transformation program we have. We see this as a very critical enabler, and basically it helps and accelerates everything we just talked about. In all the regions first of all, we have developed a roadmap towards an integrated IT architecture, aiming for a simplified system, low running cost, and more importantly, an accessible data foundation. These are all visualized in this slide with dotted lines circled. But more than that, all the regions we have launched different initiatives for Always Smarter, trying to embed the data-driven decision making and the problem solving into the daily operation. We come to understand the data, the technical documents, and also the cumulative know-how in any form that are becoming most important and most critical assets we have in hand. The Always Smarter actually fundamentally is about how efficiently we can utilize our assets of intelligence. AI is developing very rapidly, and we see the chance to leverage this. One example is that we could use that to help summarize and structure our decades of metallurgical expertise to make it accessible and actionable at very low cost. Always Smarter could also help us to enhance the ownership by providing the visualization tools. For example, if the operator can see his real-time performance on site, the behavior will change. We believe that Always Smarter will help us to accelerate the continuous improvement journey towards our leadership targets.

Now, let me get back to this framework of Optimize, which we bring everything into concrete. I don't have to repeat everything we just mentioned in this structure. You can see that we have quantified targets everywhere. They are all backed by detailed plan behind. All summed together that we land up on our headline target, return capital employed over 15%. Now we are in this four years Optimize phase, and we are working towards a very aggressive, very ambitious growth target, 15%. It is not unachievable, I would say. It's backed by very detailed bottom-up plan in the all regions, and is supported by the implementation of our operating model. We have a great confidence because we have a strong track record of execution. Altogether, we think, we believe we will deliver. Thank you.

Marybeth Sandell: Now that we have group strategy front of mind, it's time to take a tour around the regions and look at each of their unique environments. We're going to start with Asia, and then go to Europe, and then to the Americas. Afterwards, we'll wrap up with a panel discussion with all three presidents. Let's get started with Asia and Colin.

Gränges Asia
Speaker: Colin Xu.

I was not in person attending the last Capital Market Day, the previous one, because of the COVID and big lockdown time. Could not travel abroad. It's a pity. I'm very happy to show up here. By this year, Gränges has operated in China for 30 years. I've been working for Gränges for 25 years, and I've led organization there very long time. Many of our colleagues in the management team also work almost the same length as me. That's amazing. We have a loyal, competent, experienced team. This is so great. You may see or heard about strong relationship we've built in our region. I can talk a lot about our growth and about the changes, but nothing can compare to the transformational change we've achieved in the past few years since we start our Navigate strategy.

Today, I'm here. I would like to share with you what we have achieved, where we are going, and why I'm so excited about it. First, it's very brief about where we stand.

Now we have in total 280,000 ton capacity, majority at a new capacity from Shandong operation. In total, three sites. Shanghai is the original one. The Yunnan JV for the green metal, and then also newly acquired the Shandong operation. In total, sum up to 1,200 full-time employees.

We have rapidly expanded into the new capacity last year and achieved the sales volume of 205,000 ton. As a result, also strongly grown our operating profit to the level mainly above SEK 340 million. Just a few years back, we were just a single operation in China, in Shanghai, with 80,000 ton sales volume. We were a single focused players in the automotive heat exchanger material. We were not growing then. We're slowly losing our market share to our local competition. Altogether, we are very different business. The three sites almost tripled volume and input production capacity and also much broadened product portfolio. We have gained the market share at a very high pace in the past year, too. All this cannot just happen by chance. It's because that we've made the right strategy choices early on, and then we execute that very well.

Today, I would like to show you what it look like. First, on the commercial side, we used to depend a lot on the automotive heat exchanger material. It is still the largest niche we have, 44% of our total sales. It is still a very stable and very strong foundation for our business. The customer there are very strategic. Also, if we look at the other growth area around it, the battery cooling plate, the battery casing, battery cathode foil, electrification adds up and stand for more than 20% of our total sales. That's also not just happen by chance, by accident. You know China is the strongest EV market and also has grown the most in the past. We work very closely with the key customers, OEMs, Tier 1s, and try to build up the right technology, the right relationships, and also the right setup to succeed. As you can see today, it works. We also have distribution and other industry niches that bring us the breadth and also bring us the utilization of the new capacity. That helps to create a great foundation to grow further into other niches in future. The whole portfolio for us is the right one in Asia. We do have a lot of attractive growing segment that we can work with. We are right positioned exactly where the growth is happening.

Talk to about our footprint. We have our Shanghai operation as original base with 120,000 ton capacity focused on very advanced heat transfer material. We have deep customer relationship developed over decades there. We have the Yunnan joint venture. That operation brings us 320,000 ton casting capacity. It secures our access to the green primary metal through a nearby smelter. It is our strategic assets for our sustainability position. We have our Shandong operation, newly acquired in late 2024. It brings us 160,000 ton capacity. It significantly broaden what we can do and who we can serve. I know many of you may have questions around the fire last week. Most important, that no one's hurt, thankfully. We are now dealing with the situation, and now for sure there will be negative impact on us in the second half of this year. I will talk about that in full detail in a moment, a few minutes later. Back to our footprint. All these three sides together form a very strong platform from which we are ready to grow. The figures confirms that we are on the right track. Volume almost doubled, and then also the operating profit strongly grown. All the sustainability metrics are moving on the right direction. As you can see, though, the return on capital still have not improved yet. It is because that we've had fixed assets and working capital with our Shandong facility, but they so far not yet generate the higher enough returns compare with the rest of our assets, but we are on the way. I'm extremely proud of the strong volume that we've achieved, and also I'm very proud of the profit growth that we've achieved. It also creates a pride and energy into our team. It also actually expect that our customer can see this, that we are the right partner to work with.

Let me spend just a few minutes on the batteries. It is one of our most important growth opportunities in Asia, and it's very exciting to all of us. You know, battery technology is reshaping the commercial landscape in Asia for our customer, for our customer's customer, and for us. We have focused on this for many years, and now we are starting to harvest the benefit. It is worth for us to understand a bit more in detail. Some may talk about slowdown of electrification in Europe and in U.S., but that is not what we've observed. We've seen the battery demand is growing by 23% per year from 1,500 GW-4,100 GW by 2030. Of course, electrical vehicle is one main driver behind, but also we've seen the energy storage system for the grid, for the industries, for buildings, and increasingly for data centers are growing very fast as well. The declining cost is accelerating adoption. We see the economics of electrical vehicle and energy storage systems are improving year-over-year. In China, as you all see, the EV penetration is already above 50%, even 60% among the new car sales, and still growing. China remains the largest battery market in the world, and we are right in the middle of that. Increasingly, we believe we can also leverage our global footprint to work with the customer who has the global ambition to grow, we have chance to grow with them as partner. Our flat rolled product go to three different battery applications, they are very different from each other. The first, the cathode foil. This is a very thin material. From 12 micron-20 micron. Its technical requirement extremely demanding. This is used for the current collector inside the battery case, battery cell. In this world, just very few suppliers can make it to the quality level the battery manufacturing needs. We talk about prismatic case material. It is relatively thicker, 0.3 mm-1.2 mm. It is used to form the outer shell of the battery casing. It is through a precision forming at very tight tolerance. Another one we talk about the pouch foil. This is actually a laminate between aluminum and the polyfoam polymers. This is used in the soft pack batteries, typically used in some electrical vehicles and portable electronics. In all these three applications, we see the LFP chemistry, which is dominant in China, will require more aluminum material than NMC chemistries. Gränges now is supplying the battery casing and battery cathode foil, and these are high value and technically demanding products, and they play to our strength.

Now let me close with where we are going. Our strategy rests on four pillars. The number one, focus the commercial position on the structure growing niches, including the HEX battery, thermal management. All these give us a strong tailwind and also a strong fit with our capability. The second is to expand our scale and strengthen our industrial capability. The Shandong and Yunnan fundamentally change what we can do, now we have a great platform to serve the customer and market we were not be able to do so in the past. The third is a clear path to the cost leadership and the capacity utilization. This is where the most work we need to do. You know, we in China, we must be cost competitive and should be the best of the world. We've been working on that systematically, and we know what it takes. The fourth, the sustainability is now integrated as competitive advantage with secured green primary metal, with our recycling partners, with our innovative low-carbon products. Our customers increasing value that, and so do their customers in the world. Now the fire is the setback to us, but it's not a change to our direction. Our business has the momentum and it has the right platform, it has the right niches, and it has a strong team. Thank you.

Moderator: Thank you, Colin. Let me join you. I just have one follow-up question before we head to Europe. You were talking about the strong relationship with the OEMs and Tier 1s in Asia, and in electrification particularly. I wonder, what business opportunities do you see with them even going overseas?

Colin Xu: We see some leading customer in China. They see the local market is very tough, but going broad, it's a big opportunity for them. They all want to be localized, but the most concern they have is to have a secure supply chain. That means that they really want to work with a global supplier, and we have global footprint, which is really a good match on them. Also backwards, since they want to create a strategy relation with us also domestically, we're able to strengthen our position and get a lot of opportunities as well. Globally, it's beneficial for us.

Gränges Europe
Speaker: Fredrik Spens, Regional President Gränges Europe

In Europe, over the last couple of years, we have strengthened the business quite significantly. We have strengthened our asset base. We have moved into structurally even more attractive niches. We have strengthened our sustainability footprint, and we have constantly, in each and every niche we play in, gained market share in a very weak market. That has made Gränges Europe even stronger and well-equipped for rapid, profitable growth going forward.

Let us start by looking into the platform from where we operate. We have our two large production sites in Finspång, Sweden, Konin, Poland, and our small powder metallurgy unit in France. The total production capacity today is 260,000 tons. That is 60,000 tons more than back in 2021 after the main investments. That has created scale, of course, but even more importantly is how we have been able to utilize the fact that the sites in Konin and Finspång are very complementary to each other. We have been able, together with our customers and our team, to create even more comprehensive solutions for our customers. We have worked on mix optimizations. We have been able to work with flexibility. All this together has created strength and competitiveness for us with this setup. With that as a base, let's look into our portfolio.

Today, we have a leading position in automotive heat exchanger and complementary niches. The portfolio today is both broader and structurally more attractive. In automotive heat exchanger, as you all know, we have been leading in this niche for many, many years, but over the last couple of years, we have further strengthened that position. We have rapidly moved into battery cooling plate. We have strengthened in structural sheets. Within the stable packaging segment, we have kept a leading position in the closure niche. On top of that, we have seen and are exploring a couple of additional promising pockets within the stable segment of packaging, Industrial. Batteries. We have, through extensive product and process development, created a leading position into the growing battery casing market, driven by large investments into cathode foil. Combined with product and process development, we have taken a foothold into battery cathode foil. We have two quite sizable niches within Europe we call general engineering and distribution. Here we have two items I would like to share. Number one is that we have increased our geographical reach. Number two is that this is at the same time a great proof point that we have been able to take market shares also when the market price has been going down quite rapidly here, some 7% CAGR the last years. That is, of course, a strong proof point that we have improved our competitiveness to gain market share, support the utilization, and the profit also from those two segments. We are returning back to profitable growth after a challenging 2025.
Starting with the volumes, the market itself has declined by some 5 percentage points if we compare to 2021. Even though that, we have been able to grow for 10 consecutive quarters, reaching nearly 200,000 tons Q1 2026 rolling 12 months. Profit has increased in 2021-2026 by 16%, and as you can see here on the graph, in 2025, for three quarters, we had a big setback in the profit, largely related to large metal imbalances in the market. We, during those three quarters and the years before, continued to grow, continued to improve productivity, and continued to improve cost position, and thereby it's, of course, encouraging to see in Q1 2026 that we are returning back to our profitable growth journey. The profitability during this period, 2021-2026, as you can see, has been rather flattish. Important to note here is the fact that we have invested quite sizable into the battery cathode foil, not yet contributing to earnings. Thanks to the dedicated cathode foil team that has been worked constantly with product and process development right now are ramping up the production, we see a meaningful operational leverage also here going forward. Sustainability. We have, as you can see, increased the source of recycled aluminum from 28%-42%, taking down the carbon intensity to four tons per ton. The start of the journey in this time horizon back in 2022, of course, created a little bit more demanding journey, given that we phased out up to 80,000 tons of aluminum sourced from Russia. That was really low carbon intensity. Reaching four tons per ton with our quite advanced and complex portfolio is not that easy to replicate. It is about creating alignment with the customers on changed customer specifications. It is for production to cope with much higher scrap content. It is about create the right collaborations with the suppliers to make the whole chain to work. It's of course, great that we have improved the sustainability position, but it's also so that this is starting gradually to become more and more a commercial differentiator. Looking at our large segment, automotive, for instance, where the large OEMs are placing more and more emphasis on the carbon intensity, on the recycled content, and that is, of course, now starting to actually support our market share gain journey.

In the same way as Colin described about batteries, which is important to us as well, I share here about electrification, which is also important across Gränges. Electrification really reshapes automotive thermal management system. If you compare an electric vehicle with an internal combustion engine vehicle, the thermal management system in the electric vehicle is much more advanced. That is, of course, connected to manage the power electronics, the batteries, the requirement on faster charging speeds, etc, is accelerating this. All this, when it's happening, is good for us at Gränges because the electrification is a strong growth driver for us. If you first look at the projection of the share of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, you can see they will increase in share. If you combine that with the fact that the aluminum content, the rolled aluminum content in an electric vehicle is bigger, a higher intensity, that creates growth. Plus, that the rapid innovation demanding more and more advanced material solutions fit us as a company very well. The impact on Gränges is a big plus. The two growth drivers here is the battery cooling plates and the structural sheets.

Let's look a little bit more specific into this and think about an electric vehicle and compare that with an internal combustion engine vehicle. It is more than twice as much heat exchange material in an electric vehicle. The biggest driver here is actually the battery cooling plate, the battery heat exchanger. The traditional heat exchanger, as you can see, is a bit less. Again here, since the demands on advanced material, etc, is forced here with more advanced cooling solutions that fit us very well also in this pocket. It is the fact that the battery heat exchangers are expected to continue to increase in use, driven by that the electric vehicles are moving towards more and more liquid cooling solutions. Because of the driving mileage, etc, they are increasing in size and therefore, it's a plus for us. I think now I have speaking about battery cooling plates, I guess five times. That doesn't stop me to have one slide for battery cooling plates only. This is case from Europe. We have gone from effectively close to 0% market share just three years ago, to now have 25% market share in this market. If you think about the Q1, we, as you know, increased our revenues, the tonnage, by 16%. The largest chunk of that growth was automotive. 50% of the automotive growth was electrification. Guess what? The biggest driver here was the battery cooling plate. What are the key success factors in making this happen? First of all, it was a careful selection early on. It is a growth market. It fit us very well. Most important, of course, our people. The strong commercial team staying extremely close to the customers, supported by our engineers with their thermal knowhow. It is as well a great example on how we are harvesting the complementary to production sites in Sweden and Poland. The outcome. Now we have contracts for the platforms to come with the majority of the large OEMs. That creates resilience. Let me summarize. Gränges Europe, we are outperforming a challenging market through focus and discipline. We have developed a resilient position in high-value selected niches. We have made major investments that, yes, we have started to harvest, but more to come. We have created a strong market share gain momentum, that by itself prove our improved competitiveness. On top of that, we have increased and improved our sustainability position, and that by itself will create a commercial differentiation also going forward. Gränges Europe is today a stronger business with a great foundation for continued rapid, profitable growth. Thank you for listening.

Marybeth Sandell: A human question, a people question about this taking market share. I understand from talking to you earlier that it's really impacted the mindset of your team. Can you explain a little bit more how? Yes, I would happy to. First of all, I think that we like to win.
Fredrik Spens: Of course, when me, myself, or people in my team are meeting, for instance, with The Aluminum Association, we meet on a quite regular basis. They're all our peers in the region, it's a fact that you hear very frequently that Gränges is outperforming everyone. They also on top of that know that we, profit-wise, are in a stronger position than our peers. I could also mention, I don't know how many customer meetings I have been sitting and listening to when my team is taking the credit from the customer saying that, "Gränges, you are really a role model when it comes to driving sustainability.
Marybeth Sandell: I suspect that continuing to gain market share will get harder and harder going forward. How will you sustain this?
Fredrik Spens: This is about our careful selection of the niches. Since we have now moved into even more attractive growth niches, we have the ability and the foundation laid for growing faster than the market. That is our plan.

Gränges Americas
Speaker: Patrick Lawlor

The story of Gränges Americas is a great one since the acquisition of the assets back in 2016. Since then, we've achieved record year-over-year results in terms of revenue, in terms of earnings, and of course, in terms of return on capital employed. It's also a story of great resilience. We've achieved these results despite a very volatile external environment, with issues such as a very high inflation rate in the U.S. over the past years, the highest metal price we have seen in history. Our largest market segment, the HVAC market, being down 40%+ in the second half of 2025. A real tough labor environment, and of course, as you heard a bit already today, a volatile and uncertain trade landscape. Contrasting with this, our internal strategy has been clear, consistent, and precise. Very good earnings in terms of our investments we have made. A clear strategy on the commercial side. The use of our operating model, both to drive operational stability as well as operational improvements. Of course, great execution have all helped us to achieve these results over the past year. First and foremost, I'm extremely proud of the organization for these achievements. Given our excellent track record, we are very confident in our own ability to continue this story going forward and drive our performance going forward, ever-improving.

Let's go into a bit more detail. Our three facilities in the Americas were all built in the 1960s, through good investment, great people, and great maintenance, they are all very efficient facilities today. Our Huntingdon location in Tennessee is our largest location with approximately 70% of all our volume. Our capacity utilization in 2025 was 85%, and we now have an ambition to reach 260,000 tons over the years to come. We have a multi-niche market strategy and have a relatively high market share in the segments that we operate in. We operate in the foil space of the North American rolled product industry. This foil space accounts for approximately 11% of the entire North American rolled product market. The foil segment has been relatively stable over the years, but in recent years, we've experienced some more volatility, especially in light of the HVAC market demand. This has been offset partially by the growth in the data center market, which I'll speak a bit about in a few minutes. Despite the relatively weak marketplaces, we have achieved eight consecutive quarters of volume growth. In addition, our price increases every year tend to offset the ever-rising cost of inflation in the U.S. We have also invested very heavily in the business between 2019 and 2024, especially in our Huntingdon and our Newport locations. These investments have been very good, as evidenced from our ever-increasing return on capital employed percentage. A super case to note is our Newport location in Arkansas. When we acquired the business back in 2016, this location had 14 employees, three rolling mills that had been idled by the previous owners five years before we acquired the assets. Today, our Newport location is a thriving location with more than 160 employees, three modernized rolling mills, and one of the few players operating in the light gauge market segment of the rolled product marketplace. A great story for the Newport team, a great story for Gränges Americas, and a great story for Gränges overall as a company.

We also have a great story on sustainability. We have reduced our carbon emissions by more than 40% since 2021, and by more than 60% since 2017. This is mainly as the result of very high scrap consumption ever improving on an annual basis. We are now close to 70% scrap consumption in the first quarter of 2026. We are also using much more post-consumer scrap. The HVAC market is a very good example of this. Most end-of-life units within the HVAC market are recycled, probably 85%-90%. speak for themselves.

Having said that, we have achieved 13 consecutive quarters of increased earnings. Our first quarter 2026 result was the highest result we had in the history of the company. As mentioned already, we have an ambition to reach 260,000 tons in the years to come, or 280,000 tons if you include our imports from our sister locations in Sweden and in China. Let's zoom in somewhat on our largest market segment, which is the HVAC market. The HVAC market represents approximately 40% of all the volume we have in the Americas. It can be split into two distinct segments. On the one hand, we have the residential market, which accounts for 75% or so of the volume. On the other hand, the commercial side of the business, which represents remaining 25%. Furthermore, we can break down the residential market into replacement, which is 80%, and new housing starts, which is the remaining 20%. It's been a real tough 18 months for the residential market for HVAC. Market volumes are estimated to be down 20% in 2025 and a further 10% in the first quarter of 2026. Despite this, our market volumes within HVAC have been flat in 2025, and again flattish in the first quarter of 2026. We have obviously gained significant market share within this marketplace over the last 18 months. The commercial market is much more stable over the years and consists of many different sub-segments. Examples of the sub-segments within the commercial side are retail, restaurants, hospitality, and the ever-growing market for data centers.

We talked a bit about this morning about the global rolled product marketplace and the estimate of 4% growth over the coming years. The data center market obviously strictly outpaces this market growth and is a very good market for us to be in in Gränges Americas and Gränges as a group. The growth in the data center market is obviously fueled by the explosive growth in the use of AI. One extraordinary fact is that 90% of the world's data was actually created in the last two years. Earlier on today, we heard Colin speak about our Always Smarter strategy. Of course, I think Gränges are at the very early stages of this strategy, like most other companies. A very exciting strategy, and the need for data going forward is quite intense. Good news for Gränges is that the data center market is very aluminum-intensive. 70% or so of this marketplace is within the cooling side of the business. Good news from a Gränges Americas perspective is this is a market we know very well. We have existing relationships with our HVAC OEMs and also now have relationships with system integrators. 50% or so of the data centers in the world are now located physically in the U.S. As you hear, a very good strategic segment for approximately 4% in the data center market in 2025. We estimate that 7%-8% of all our volume in the Americas will be data centers for 2026, and that percentage will increase on a go-forward basis.

Finally, a quick summary for Gränges Americas. We have an excellent track record of performance since we acquired the assets back in 2016. Our foundation is ever strengthening, whether that be in terms of safety, sustainability, operations, or many other facets of the business. We are very confident in our own ability to continue this story going forward. Also have the pleasure, in a way, being the last out, to make a summary for all three regions. As you hear it a bit, every region is quite distinct in nature. We all do something a bit the same. We all do something a bit our own way. I think much more every day, we see a commonality between the regions and how we work together as a team. Some examples of this. We have invested very heavily in growth assets in the last few years. We have gained significant market share in all three regions over the past years. Our sustainability story is an excellent one across all three regions. Now we're using our operating model as the glue that binds us together on the operational side of the business. We've established very good momentum in all three regions, and we're confident enough to raise our leadership ambitions for the years to come.

Marybeth Sandell: If you don't mind. It's about the video we saw during Christina's session on sustainability. It was with the company called Trane, I know that they're a very important customer to you. I was hoping we could take a moment. You can explain a little bit more about how and why.

Patrick Lawlor: Sure. Thanks for the question, Marybeth. Yeah, first and foremost, their head office is in Ireland, so that's a perfect starting point for us in Gränges Americas, at least for me personally. Now, Trane, as you heard in the video, fantastic customer. Like many customers in Gränges Americas have longstanding deep relationships. Trane is one of the customers we have. Number two, I think Trane, at the core, they have a core of sustainability. When you hear Trane conferences and seminars, they talk about sustainability as a core value, and this is very much in evidence in terms of our core value for sustainability as well. In that effect, as we heard in the video, in fact, we did receive the Sustainability award for Supplier of the Year back in 2025. He also mentioned the fact that we stood in last year when Trane had some supply problems from a second vendor, and at short notice, we stood in to make sure their lines were kept running. I think all in all, longstanding relationship, great customer, like many of the customers we have in Gränges Americas.

Regional President’s Panel
Speakers: Patrick Lawlor, Fredrik Spens, Colin Xu
Moderator: Marybeth Sandell

Marybeth Sandell: We have a few questions in there, of course, about the fire last week. Tell us what happened?
Colin Xu: Sure. Yeah. In late night on Sunday, a week ago, there was a fire broke out close to our hot rolling mill in the Shandong facility. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. That matters most to me. Of course, the electrical system was damaged and need to replace. Also luckily, the hot mill itself, the rest of the assets and downstream operations, they are still in a good shape. That's good. We are, of course, dealing with the situation with three priorities. The first is try to understand the root causes. The second is really to protect our customer. Then the third is try to get it back to work. It may takes up to six months, but we are really pushing hard to make it faster.

Marybeth Sandell: A follow question to that is, but really, what does this mean for business going forward?
Colin Xu: We do see some negative effect during the second half of this year, for sure. How big the impact is, it really depends on the repair time, how short that we can repair it, and also depends on how much hot rolled coil use that we are able to source externally, which we have done before. Roughly, Shandong operation contributes on about SEK 50 million per quarter. This gives you a sense of the exposure we have. Also, we have the insurance for the property damages and also business interruption. Maybe over time, the total impact on our net profit could be limited.

Marybeth Sandell: Thinking a little bit bigger about Asia as a whole and not just this event last week, as you said, you've been there for 25 years. That's quite some time, and you've really transformed it dramatically in your tenure. The question is: we all want more, so what's next, or what's left in your ambition for Asia?
Colin Xu: We still have very high ambition. China is really a fast-growing, Asia is fast-growing region for flat roll product. Also, technologically or commercially, China stay the powerhouse for many interesting niches. The EV batteries, renewable energy, many things like that. We are really competing in these attractive niches with strong tailwind, that's a very strong reason. Also, we have a very good strong record, a track record since 2021. We have more than double our volume, we have grown and built a very strong team, more than 1,200 employees. Very proud of what we've achieved. When the Shandong hot mill is back, I'm sure it will pick up exactly where we left off and resume what we planned for.

Marybeth Sandell: Thank you. A question for beyond Asia, for all of the regions. Patrick, you mentioned briefly earlier that you have no COO. That made me think you don't. My goodness. Most of these global companies have that role. They also have things that you don't have, like a CTO. You don't have a CTO or a CCO. No CCO. How do you work together with this operating model? Not just the three of you, because it's clear that you all get along and talk a lot, but how do you make that cooperation go deep into the organization?
Patrick Lawlor: Sure. I can take a stab at that one, Marybeth. I think maybe on your last point, it's because the three of us are not actively engaged at that level. That's the opposite. That's why it works, in fact. Actually, seriously, as I said a bit on the description, we really have engaged people at all levels of the organization for this operating model and the way we work. It's not just one region, it's all three regions at the same time. I think one good example is the fact that we have a monthly call with probably 60 of our employees worldwide. That comes from Asia, it comes from Europe, it comes from the U.S., and many different areas of the business, HR, operations, safety, and many other different areas. The purpose of this is really to share best practice between the plants. Of course, sharing best practice is one thing, but implementing is completely different. I think that's part of the culture we have in Gränges, partly in our hearts as well, that it's not just sharing stuff, but there is a great culture to take best practice. No one's telling them. No CTO or COO is telling them to do this, but it's done naturally as part of the culture. Every month, the next month then, we start with both sharing best practice, but also the other plants giving examples of how they've taken that best practice and implement it already in their own locations. I think that's just a great culture for a company to work with. if I continue there- I think it's about reaching ownership. With this model, I'm thinking about in the design phase of creating the operating model, instead of having a staff or a COO who is leading this, it's all our plant managers deeply involved in setting the design for how is this going to work. I think it's also very encouraging for people to have this, "Okay, I have my functional role, but aside that, on top of that, I'm part of something bigger where I need to contribute in order to get this to work." That, I think at the end, then, is creating good prerequisites then to reach the ownership all the way to where it's the most important, at the work centers.

Marybeth Sandell: Do you have an example of something you've implemented recently from another place?
Patrick Lawlor: Lots. I think we have some very good boards. Well, a very good story about this. We in the Gränges management team, we had a visit to an external company. Every time we meet together, we all visit an external company to learn. Right. We visited a company in Sweden. It was probably last year, I think, in fact. It was. We walked around the plant as we do.
We walked around the location, and they had some visual tools that were fantastic. Boards on Fire, they called it. We were looking in Gränges Americas to implement something similar, and we're trying to find something to implement as a good visual tool. We took this tool, we stole with pride, as we say in Gränges, and we implemented this very good visual tool in Gränges Americas. Now you see all our work centers.

Marybeth Sandell: These are the data vis boards that we've seen on the slides.
Patrick Lawlor: Correct, Marybeth. Following there, of course, my good friend here, Fredrik, immediately saw this, and Finspång saw this, and they said, "This is fantastic." Within a month, I think it was, a very short space of time, we saw very similar boards, visual boards, in the Finspång plant. Now they're everywhere. I think it's just a real good example of how we work together in Gränges as a team.
Colin Xu: In Asia, too? We have a homemade, but very similar type. It's actually less expensive, I know.

Marybeth Sandell: Thank you. That's a really great story. I appreciate you sharing. I'm wondering if we could take a step back and talk about an industry specifically where you are working together concretely, and I was thinking about the automotive industry. How does that work, customers with you individually and then collectively? Tell us a little more.
Colin Xu, President Gränges Americas: I could take an example. I shared here earlier today about the Chinese OEMs and the Tier 1s in China that are in steps localizing in Europe, in North America. As I said, me and my team wouldn't be able to create that close customer collaboration without Colin's team. Yeah, you're too humble because you remember a couple of months ago that we jointly visit these customers, the top guy show up really show a strong willingness to cooperate with us global wide. It's just because we face them jointly, then also we have global reach, global footprint. Everything is strategic for them. That's really a strong example. I think we have many cases like that.
Fredrik Spens: That's a great example, and also connected to Americas because at the very same meeting, they wanted to have, "Okay, how do we set up a supply chain when you're exporting with the certain capabilities that we have in Asia and Europe into Mexico?" We wouldn't be able to create the trust or be able to do that without the strong local support from Patrick's team.
Patrick Lawlor: I think that's a great point, Fredrik. We have a local organization, of course, in the Americas to handle imports, both from our plant in Shanghai, of course, and our plant in Finspång. In this trade landscape environment, which is very tough to navigate around and very tough to understand, it's great having local teams with that type of competence to be able to understand what the implications are, for example, in the tariff environment, for example. With these changes we saw last year with the Section 232 moving from 25%-50%, the implications from a cost perspective are absolutely enormous, of course. I think it's a very good examples of the global teams working together from a commercial angle to make sure that, one, tariffs are clearly understood very quickly in terms of the competence we have within the organization, but also make sure that the cost implications of these tariffs are passed through in the marketplace. I think that's another really good example. I agree.

Marybeth Sandell: The automotive industry is just one example. Is it the easiest industry to collaborate in, or can you pick out some other industries and then compare and contrast?
Fredrik Spens: Yeah, now what was popping up in my head, it is not only in the commercial side, actually, it could also be on the sourcing side. Explain. For instance, of course, predominantly all sourcing flows are regional, I would say. We have examples where we, through combined efforts, could create, let's say, contracts. In this case, I'm thinking of this was between Americas and Europe. It's actually examples throughout the whole operation, I would say.
Marybeth Sandell: Thank you, all of you, for answering my questions. I appreciate it. It means that it's now time to start pulling everything together. We've listened to a series of sessions on strategy and ambition and on execution. Back to join us is Oskar Hellström, the CFO, and he's going to explain how this is going to lead to better returns for investors. When he's done, Jörgen will come back and close the session.

Maximizing returns
Speaker: Oskar Hellström, CFO

Oskar Hellström: First I would like to take the opportunity to thank you all in the audience for all the good questions we have received. We have tried to answer as many as we could of those through the regional presentations, and hopefully I will be able to answer quite a few of the remaining ones through this upcoming session.

If we think about what we've heard so far today, I think it's fair to assume that the financial profile of Gränges will be changing, and that we will see significantly stronger cash generation going forward. The finalization of the investment phase means that we will have much lower CapEx in the years to come, and increased utilization to above 90%, which is our target. That will mean a significantly higher EBITDA generated by the existing assets. Optimization of our net working capital will allow for a higher sales than working capital growth. If we revisit what we talked about earlier today, we noted that we, in 2021-2025, had an EBITDA to operating cash conversion of 28%, burdened by the expansion CapEx, from increasing metal prices. For 2026-2029, we believe that a reasonable ambition for EBITDA to operating cash conversion is 70%. That, I think, answers many of the questions that we have received from the audience here. We don't provide forecasts this far out in time, but if we use the latest analyst consensus, a 70% EBIT to cash conversion would mean an operating cash flow in Gränges of over SEK 8 billion over the coming four years. The 70% cash conversion assumes stable aluminum prices. Is it likely to believe that the aluminum price will remain stable? Well, the honest answer to that question is we don't know. If we look at what the market thinks right now and the broker estimates, they are indicating falling aluminum prices over the coming years as the current supply-demand imbalances is currently being corrected. If this becomes true, this will mean a further tailwind to Gränges' cash generation on top of the targeted 70%.

With significantly stronger cash generation expected, I think the fair question to ask is: how will that cash be deployed? Let me now take you through how we think about capital allocation. Our first priority is always to run our existing business well. This means allocating capital to fund working capital as we grow. It means maintaining our existing assets, funding maintenance CapEx some 60%-70% of depreciation every year. It means maintaining our leverage within our target range of 1x-2x EBITDA. Of course, it means paying our ordinary dividend to our shareholders in line with our dividend policy of 30%-50% of net profit every year. Once those needs are covered, our second priority is share buybacks. We think this is the right use of capital at this point in our investment cycle. It's a disciplined way to return capital to our shareholders when we cannot deploy it elsewhere at attractive enough returns. Our Board of Directors have a mandate from the AGM to repurchase 10% of the shares in Gränges, and we will use that once the criteria are fulfilled. Third, we will always consider acquisitions and further expansion, but only when the returns are genuinely attractive. We will not make acquisitions just for the sake of growth. Taken together, we believe this framework will support continued and growing returns for our shareholders.

Another question that many of you have asked is the following one. We actually anticipated this, so we made a slide already up front, and that is, of course, when will you start with the buybacks? The simple answer to that question is that it will depend on the development of leverage going forward. To start buybacks, we need to see a net debt to EBITDA at or below 1.5x on a sustainable basis. The reason that the bar is set at 1.5x rather than at a two, which is the top of our target range, as you know, is that we need to have some meaningful headroom to absorb swings in working capital created by the volatility of the aluminum price. This gives us the confidence to execute buybacks without risking to breach our leverage target, even if the metal prices will move against us. That being said, we are strongly committed to start buybacks as soon as the leverage permits.

The key takeaways, what are those? I would say they are the following ones. It's fair to expect significantly stronger cash generation going forward, and that we are aiming at a 70% EBITDA to operating cash conversion over the next four years. That we are highly disciplined when it comes to capital allocation, and that share buybacks are prioritized as soon as leverage is sustainably at or below 1.5x EBITDA. With that, I'll hand over to our CEO, Jörgen Rosengren, who will summarize today's session.

Accelerate toward Leadership
Speaker: Jörgen Rosengren, CEO

Jörgen Rosengren: Now you've heard from all of us here in the group management team. You've heard from Christina, from Oskar, from our three regional presidents, Patrick, Colin, and Fredrik. You're now hearing from me again. I hope, and we hope that the presentations that you've gone through today, that we've gone through, give you a good picture of what our foundation is, what our plan is for the future, what our performance has been, and also a picture of the similarities and also differences between our different regions. Personally, as I've been sitting and watching this, I've had a different impression, and it's been an impression of a very strong management team. Not only a strong team as strong individuals, but also really good teamwork in this team. If you have the same impression, then you've learned something very important about Gränges. Our Group Management Team, the individuals, but again, the team, and also our Global Leadership Team with 60 highly talented people in our three regions globally, which again, consists of really good, strong individuals picked for that purpose, but also is in itself a strong team that does most of the day-to-day global management work of Gränges. If you've understood that, you also understood a little bit how it is that we can achieve the results that we can achieve, and also how we can be confident about the future for Gränges.

Let me say a few words about the future for Gränges, where we're headed, and about our confidence also. The first takeaway is that we are today reconfirming our financial targets. That's not a difficult decision to make. We make it with full confidence based also on really good performance we find. We have profit growth where we're promising to grow faster than 10% per year on average over time. That's something that we have done not only in the last five years or four years with a good margin, but also over almost any other time period if you look back in time. It's definitely something we're committed to doing forward also.

Oskar spoke to you a little earlier today about our discipline in maintaining a good leverage, which gives us room both up and down to move with various market swings. We've been very disciplined in maintaining that between one and twice, 1x and 2x EBITDA. Of course, we're committed to doing that also. With, I think the exception of one year, which had to do with COVID, of course, we've paid a dividend every year, like clockwork, between 30%-50% of net profits. The one target we haven't yet reached, but you got to have something to do in life, is the 15% ROCE targets. The reason we haven't reached it yet, we've also talked about today, it has to do with the development of the aluminum price. It has to do a little bit with some of our most recent investments that aren't yet fully paying their way, so to speak. We are going to reach it, and that's a very ambitious target in our industry to have. It's also far above our cost of capital, but we do intend to reach it, and we intend to reach it as follows. You've heard today about our starting point, which is 11%. You've heard about our three steps, where we are still engaged in step number two, Utilize. We think that Utilize has the potential to add around about 5 percentage points that is, to our return on capital employed metric. That's really a simple math. It has to do with the utilization level we're after and our operational leverage and the fact that we have ample capacity to accommodate that growth. We have Optimize. There we're being slightly less precise for some reasons. We're saying there it's 4%-6%. It's not 5%, it's 4%-6% for Optimize, of potential to further raise our return on capital employed. Unfortunately, in our business, in many businesses, also in our business, you have to count with some headwinds. There are many actual and potential headwinds, of course, in our industry. We're factoring in a 4%-6% headwind also. I guess then making us come out very comfortably here on this 15% level. This is not something that we're just saying here. This is backed up by very strong and detailed plans for each region, each business, and also for the group as a whole, to succeed with the Utilize and Optimize plans in this way. Throughout the day today, we've signaled that some special takeaways are more important than others.

I would like to take a moment just to walk you through them now, because I think that taken together, they give a very clear picture of where we stand and what we're planning to do going forward.

First takeaway is, of course, as we've said now many times, that our investment phase is finalized and that that gives a lot of room for increased cash flow going forward. Already in the beginning of the session, Christina revealed that we've raised our sustainability ambition. We've tightened it. Instead of 4 tons per ton, which was our previous target for 2030, we're now aiming for 3 tons per ton in that year. That doesn't sound like such a big change, but it's a huge change, and it's also a testament to our ambition to be leading in sustainability now and to be so in the future also.

We've talked a lot about getting our utilization up to 90%, and we have talked a lot about our four-year Optimize program. Finally, with the presentations from each of the regions and the panel discussion, I hope that you got a strong feeling also that each of the regions has a very strong ambition level for its own business, and that the Regional Presidents also share the ambition level for Gränges' business as a whole. These three points here, three, four, and five together is what is going to take us to the 15% mark.

Oskar spoke about a stronger cash flow ahead and a new guidance for cash conversion, and also promised that we're going to be extremely disciplined about the allocation of that cash, of that capital. We will, of course, look always for good investment opportunities. Every business should do that. We'll only look into investment opportunities that return significantly higher when adjusting for risk than share buybacks do. Share buybacks are prioritized now, and we will execute share buybacks as soon as leverage permits, as you just heard the CFO say, so it's got to be true. We confirmed our financial targets. I already spoke about that.

We have, very importantly, our ambition to build an industry leader. We also talked about how we are going to do that, and here's some repetition for you. What we are building on is a foundation for profitable growth, which is based on safety, people, sustainability, and also in the discipline I spoke about in our governance when it comes to cash, capital allocation, and risk management.

We have the three steps: Finalize, Utilize, and Optimize. As I think it was Patrick remarked, these of course overlap, so it's not three distinct steps. We stop one, finish, go to another. Rather, as you can see, there's a significant overlap between these three steps. In practice, we're of course working every day in parallel with these. We do have the ambition to reach our Utilize target by the end of 2027. We do have the ambition to run this Optimize program for four years, improving our results every year. That is going to lead us to our ambition, our overall ambition, which is to build an industry leader. Specifically, we promised today to get our ROCE up over 15%, to keep an operating profit growth of 10% a year, to show a stronger cash flow going forward based on the situation we're in, and to be disciplined about our capital allocation and also risk management.

Finally, we raised our carbon target for 2030 and are still aiming for carbon neutrality by 2040. This is the plan. My own hope is that you will take away from this our confidence in this plan. We really feel that we have the starting point, we have the foundation, we have the team, and we have the commitment and the momentum also to make this happen. We're actually quite confident that we're going to reach these targets. We're also very confident that we're going to be able to build an industry leader in aluminum recycling and flat rolling. We're not going to build the biggest company in this industry, but we are going to build the best one. Thank you for attending today, and we're very much looking forward to your questions in the next session.

Thanks.