A few of my own highlights from the press conference:
- In the Americas, the rise in price levels was already fully reflected in Q1 due to the market dynamics. The Mexican market is improving, and new regulation has been introduced that steers towards the use of local production > this supports Mexican production and prices, now that exports from there to the USA have been restricted due to tariffs. Order books in the Americas are strong and lead times are quite long.
- In Europe, the rise in price levels is reflected with more of a delay. During Q2, lower-margin orders represent a clearly smaller share than in Q4/25 and Q1/26 and will phase out during Q2. I’m thinking that from Q3 onwards, we should start to see a clear increase in price as well, considering that CBAM came into effect at the start of the year and new safeguards from July; thus, the incoming order backlog is certainly already at a better price and improving all the time. Contracts will, however, partly cause a delay before this fully feeds through to sales prices.
- FeCr should already receive some support during the year from higher-margin sales. Total production of over 500kt possible? Demand is robust.
- Q2 results will improve significantly. Half of the improvement comes from volume and half from timing and hedging. Marc Simon further clarified that these improvements will come from “most of Europe”.
Summa summarum: Q1 could have been better (Europe!!), but the market direction as a whole is good now. Based on the above, I’ll throw out my own Q2 EBITDA forecast: Americas €55m, FeCr €35m, and Europe will also bounce clearly into the black at €20m, so my own Q2 EBITDA forecast/guess is €110m. The positive development should continue in Q3 and Q4, taking seasonality into account of course, but it looks good. Furthermore, if peace could be achieved in Ukraine and Iran in the near future, one could expect a quite significant jump in both European demand and earnings levels, as well as the share price.