GRGSF (GRGSF) Q2 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good morning, and welcome to Grieg Seafood's First half 2026 Presentation. My name is Nina Willumsen Grieg, and I'm the CEO of Grieg. I'm joined today by our CFO, Magnus Johannesen. This is the first time we're holding the presentation in Bergen, and I appreciate everyone who has joined us early this morning. Today's agenda includes updates on our operation and market activities. For the first time, we are presenting farming and sales as separate segments. And as usual, Magnus will take us through the financial results at the end of the presentation. This first half year have been challenging for Grieg Seafood. Weaker market conditions than we anticipated, combined with biological challenges and a company in transition resulted in weak financial performance. The results are certainly not to the standard that we like to set for ourselves. We harvested nearly 14,000 tonnes and delivered marginally positive results in both farming and sales. The freshwater production have been strong across all sites, while at sea, we have had a rough start to the year. However, I'm pleased that we have entered Q3 with close to maximum MAB and the fish is performing well. During the period, we ramped up Gardermoen VAP facility and implemented actions to mitigate rising feed prices. Refinancing of the hybrid marked the important last step in ensuring a long-term financing structure for our company. I will get back to details on these highlights. One slide on context on the new Grieg Seafood before we turn to the numbers. 18 months ago, we were a company managing a balance sheet problem. Today, we are a focused Rogaland operator with a clean capital structure. The transition is done and it proves that this organization can move decisively when we need to. The years 2020 to '24 brought biological issues in Canada and Finnmark, heavy CapEx and write-downs. We found the solution without diluting our shareholders. First, the hybrid bond, then a disciplined divestment process in which we map every option before we moved. The result is well known. We divested 3 of 4 regions and closed the sale to Cermaq at NOK 10.2 billion, which cleared the debt from our balance sheet. Over the past 12 months, we have paid NOK 4 billion in dividend, established a new bank syndicate and last in June issued NOK 750 million hybrid. We have also resized the organization and cost-cutting initiatives are tracking ahead of the original NOK 50 million target. From here, the agenda is simple, strengthen the core, keep taking costs out and optimize post-smolt as our main competitive advantage. A transformation of this scale is demanding for any company. But it has built the decisiveness and focus that I believe leave us stronger, even with a challenging start to this year. With post-smolt and our own sales organization in place, we believe we have the setup to act as a consolidator in Western Norway at the right time and on our terms. For now, the management team's top priority remains building a strong foundation, and we will keep looking for and acting on improvements across the balance sheet, the structure and our operating model. Then to the numbers. Starting the operational review on a positive note on land. We had strong freshwater performance during the period. We released 2.9 million smolt with an average weight of 1.3 kilo. A major milestone during the quarter was the harvest of 600 tonnes of fully land grown fish. Seawater production was affected by challenging biological conditions. The weak results in Rogaland is driven mainly from harvesting fish groups with winter wounds in Q1 and into Q2. Sea lice issues and repeated treatments in late 2025 resulted in weaker fish in a cold winter. The situation looks much better now, and we have done several operational changes to prevent this from repeating. Winter wounds led to a low superior share of 63% and harvesting fish with lower harvest weights due to fish welfare. Building biomass left us with a harvest profile heavy at the end of Q2, where superior share had improved, but at a time where the prices were at its lowest. However, by building biomass, we are increasing the guiding for the full year back to 31,000 tonnes. Challenging biology transferred directly into a farming cost of NOK 70.9 per kilo. Production is strong so far in Q3 and we maintain our cost guidance for the full year at NOK 67.5. Feed prices going into Q3 have increased due to challenging fisheries and tighter raw material supply. We have done targeted actions to contain costs, including revision of feed recipes and introduction of land-based proteins or poultry meal. With these measures, we have absorbed 50% of the raw material increase. While we believe the increase of price is not permanent, we see it as essential to include a wider range of alternative ingredients, both for sustainability, cost and nutrition. As mentioned, our land-based production across sites have been strong during this period. The capacity available to us gives us the opportunity to adapt smolt size to the needs of our production. The pilot for land-based fish at Ardal was the ultimate test of our land-based facilities. The biological results were strong with high survival on land and 95% superior share. The main learnings related to transferring large fish to the harvest plant, and purging them at sea to remove the land-based taste. Sea-based purging has never been done before. The result I'm most pleased with is that we saw no significant slowdown in growth among larger fish, unlike the challenges reported by other land-based projects. This production confirms that Ardal and Grieg Seafood have the setup to produce 5-kilo fish on land with low mortality and higher superior share. However, given the cost of production without the necessary scale, we will for now focus solely on post-smolt in all 4 halls at Ardal. With data from 75 post-smolt groups across various sizes, we are now conducting a thorough analysis on the best operational strategy going forward. We know the post-smolt strategy is delivering, and we now have enough completed cycles to fine tune it. Increasingly, that tuning is about improving smolt quality and the value each kilo realizes on different sites throughout the year. We also see our available land-based capacity as a competitive advantage in a potential consolidation or collaboration, giving us flexibility to adjust the number and size of post-smolt supplied to additional sea licenses. While sales and value-added processing have been part of Grieg Seafood for many years, we present it as a segment for the first time with figures included from 1st of April 2026. The segment delivered positive EBIT contribution of NOK 15 million. However, this should not be read as the potential of the segment. Sales performance on superior graded fish was strong during the period, but price achievement was highly affected by downgraded fish, the ramp-up of Gardermoen and currency fluctuations. We have had a contract share of 30% year-to-date, delivering a positive contribution to results. The contract share will be stable into the second half of the year. Grieg Seafood Sales purchased fish from external suppliers to support contract fulfillment and maintain production volumes at our processing facility. While this is mainly done from week to week, we recently entered into an annual agreement to sell 50% of Lingalaks volume through our sales organization. Our new value-added processing facility at Gardermoen started production in January and establishing a new production line takes time. One-off ramp-up costs and negative earnings driven from low capacity utilization has affected our results this period. Production at the facility is picking up speed and the important milestone of breakeven volumes was reached during July. Going into Q3, focus on stabilizing volumes and optimizing both the line and our product portfolio to ensure the best result in total. I believe we have a strong team on VAP and the facility, and we expect the positive trend to continue through second half of the year. And with that, I leave the stage to Magnus.

Thank you, Nina, and good morning, everyone. It's great to present in Bergen, but it would be even better if the results were representing the strong track record we have in Rogaland. Starting with the profit and loss. Our sales revenues are down 6% year-over-year. This is due to a high share of downgraded fish in an already soft price environment and is even magnified by the lower harvest volume that we have in '26 compared to '25 in the first half year. The biological challenges, of course, then impacts our revenues. Equally, our farming cost is not satisfactory for this half year. We see the farming cost being almost NOK 71 per kilo, which is an increase of above NOK 40 year-over-year. The biological challenges led to higher capitalized cost to the generation, which was harvested both in Q1 and Q2. And combined with the lower harvest adaptation of our harvest plan to accommodate the changes following the incident as well as general price increase -- cost increase. The farming cost was high for the first half year as a whole. However, there are also positive elements in the first half year. For instance, our headquarter cost reduction is tracking ahead of plan. We see additional cost initiatives being explored, defined and implemented as we go into 2027. And we do believe that we gradually will come down to NOK 3 per kilo and below. All in, we see that the operational EBIT for the group came in at minus NOK 30 million, which is equivalent to a negative NOK 2.1 per kilo which is not satisfactory or representative of the new platform Grieg Seafood is building on. Moving now to cash flow. Our net cash flow for operations ended at negative NOK 108 million. It was positively impacted by the EBITDA of NOK 48 million and negatively impacted by changes in working capital of negative NOK 257 million, partly offset by lower biomass at sea. Looking at the net cash flow from investment activities, we see this coming in at negative NOK 80 million. This includes NOK 35 million CapEx investments in our Rogaland segment as well as NOK 44.5 million participation in the share issue at Ardal Aqua early in this year. However, looking at investments, this is a positive element in today's presentation. We reduced our CapEx guidance for the full year of 2026 from NOK 150 million to NOK 105 million. And this increase is expected to come mainly from the farming segment. A statement to the strong and well invested value chain that we have built up in Rogaland over many, many years. Looking then at the larger items in the financing -- sorry, in the cash flow, which is net cash flow from financing. This is not surprisingly impacted by the dividend of NOK 4 billion paid in end of April as well as the refinancing of the group's capital structure of net NOK 339 million. And in this number, you will have both the repayment of the hybrid bond, the issue of the new hybrid bond, the drawdown on the new RCF credit facility as well as the repayment of the bridge loan. As such, this is a net figure representing the full restructure that we did on the finance capital structure. Moving then to our net interest-bearing debt. The net interest-bearing debt started off going into 2026 with a positive cash position of almost NOK 2.5 billion. The cash position was positively impacted from the operational EBITDA as well as the reduction of biomass at sea. And then we also have reduced the cash position through our investments, the dividend as well as changes in our -- as well as other changes in our debt structure. All in all, we exit the first half year with the net interest-bearing debt, excluding IFRS of NOK 1.25 billion. Despite having a more normalized capital structure, we still have available liquidity and cash of above NOK 1.1 billion, and we still have a robust liquidity position. However, I think it's important to spend some time on our capital allocation strategy that is revised in going out of the first half year. Even though Grieg Seafood maintains a robust balance sheet, the carrying value of our licenses are significantly below the fair value of those licenses. For instance, our licenses is only valued in our books at NOK 250 million despite being worth many billions. This makes our balance sheet more sensitive to changes in price and earnings expectations. At the same time, there are risks that we need to account for. We see political, regulatory and market risk. But most importantly, there are significant opportunities in this sector. Opportunities that Grieg Seafood wants to explore and move towards. As such, we will prioritize creating headroom in our balance sheet to be able to easier -- more easy and flexibility to act on those opportunities. And that is why we repeat our 3 pillars in the strategy. We still will strengthen our core, but most importantly, we will prioritize important and also exciting opportunities that we believe the industry will be facing. And Grieg Seafood plans to have a key role in that process. Also, we have done strong and decisive investments over 10 years in our post-smolt technology, but we are also open on exploring new technologies if the time and price is right. But for now, we are prioritizing strengthening the core and the expansion of Grieg Seafood. And due to that, we also want to invite our shareholders to our Capital Markets Day on the 27th of April next year. We believe that this Capital Markets Day is important to go through the new Grieg Seafood platform as well as looking and discussing the opportunities that we see ahead. Further information about this Capital Markets Day will be published in due time and invitation will be sent out. For those who are unable to attend in person, there will be a streaming of the presentation itself. And based on that I thank you very much for presentation, and me and Nina will take questions from the web and in the room. Thank you.

Let's start with the web unless there's any questions in the room. Yes.

Your equity ratio sit at 30%, while the covenants for '26 is the same at 30%. How comfortable are you with this position?

So we have -- in the new bank syndicate, we have gradually increasing or step-wise covenants. So it started out at 20% equity ratio. And out of the first half of 2026 it was 25% and it will not be 30% until exiting the first half year '27. So we are comfortable when it comes to our equity ratio. At the same time, there are importance -- the important changes due to the capital allocation strategy is to exactly create the necessary headroom to have that opportunity to act without being in breach of covenants. And we have a very good dialogue with the bank syndicate on these matters.

How will you create the financial flexibility to pursue M&As?

So there's several, of course, options to that. We are reducing costs. We are doing adaptations to how we operate as well as implementing the initiatives Nina talked about on post-smolt. But more importantly, it will be to repay debt. And given that our balance sheet is so small compared to the underlying values, there are not that much earnings that need to come in, in order to improve this equity ratio significantly. So it will be through the operations. But of course, just to add, the capital markets, of course, will still be an important source of capital for us.

Following the recent divestments, your farming footprint is now highly concentrated. How do you plan to mitigate the increased biological risk and achieve industry standard margins with a reduced geographic setup and limited growth capabilities in PO2?

I think our main -- the post-smolt is what really takes down the risk in the Western Coast of Norway. So that is our main focus. And we also believe that 30,000 tonnes and the 13 sites that we have available is giving an okay risk return to that. But that is also one of the reasons why we believe we need to grow into PO3 and PO4 to reduce that risk.

Can you please give a breakdown of the earnings in VAP and Sales and give indications of the earnings potential in each.

I don't think I will do the breakdown live on stage. But what we can say is that the VAP contribution is the most significant contribution when you look at the facility and the VAP income -- VAP income separately. As well as the salmon processing -- also salmon processing the VAP facility is also contributing positively going into H2. But it's a combination of those who are positive for H1. When it's for the sales performance, the sales performance on the superior graded fish is very strong. But it is the downgraded fish that is offsetting that performance in this quarter. So to break it down, I would say that the price achievement of Superior is the key driver. And then the negative key driver would be the operation of the result in the Gardermoen facility and then offset by the VAP performance. That is the overall breakdown, and then I can come back to the numbers next time.

One last question. How do you see cost developing into '27 based on the current inflationary environment in feed?

The inflation on feed prices from marine ingredients now is high. As we said, we have done what we can to contain that price increase. So -- but -- and I think it will not stay forever. Fisheries will start up again next year. But for us, it has been really important to create the flexibility in that price. So yes, some feed -- there will be some inflation from feed absolutely into 2027.

And just to add to that, given that the generations we have in the sea now is fed with feed on the old price. The implementation of the feed increase will not be seen until early mid-2027, so April, May. So there is an implementation effect from the feed increase as well.

But will the cost go up or down compared to '26?

It will go significantly down. And on that, we end this stream. And thank you very much for following. I appreciate it.