Underlying earnings at Stora Enso climbed 27 per cent in the June quarter, and the group still swung to a loss, with fair-value hits on its forests and restructuring charges dragging the bottom line into the red while the operating engine improved. That is according to the group’s half-year report published last Thursday, which puts adjusted EBIT at €160 million on stable sales of €2.4 billion. The net result fell to a loss of €11 million, with earnings per share at minus €0.03.
Two below-the-line hits drove the result, with €83 million in impairments and restructuring charges stacked on €61 million in fair-valuation losses that mostly reflect the changing value of the company’s standing trees. Stripped of those items, the adjusted margin widened to 6.6 per cent from 5.2 per cent a year earlier as the new consumer board line at Oulu built toward the full capacity expected in 2027.
“Wood supply continues to be tight and overall wood costs, including sawlogs, remain high,” Hans Sohlström, Stora Enso’s President and CEO, said in the report, conceding that wood costs have moderated from the exceptional levels of recent years while remaining the backdrop against which the group competes every day.
For the timber trade, the sharpest line is the review of seven Central European sawmills and three cross-laminated timber plants, still open more than eight months after it began and covering operations cutting 3 million cubic metres a year across Austria, Czechia, Poland, and Lithuania. The units under review generate half of the group’s Wood Products sales worldwide, and Thursday’s report confirms only that the assessment continues.
Pressure on the sawing side is not confined to Central Europe, with the group idling its Veitsiluoto sawmill in northern Finland from the start of August and standing down all 56 workers as unsold spruce stacks up across European yards.
It comes as the group spent the first half preparing Bergslagets Skogar, the 1.2 million hectare Swedish forest estate, which it will separate into Europe’s largest listed pure-play forest company in the first half of 2027, with Sohlström reporting the strategy defined, the organisation in place, and the work moving at a good pace. The group’s forest assets held a fair value of €8.5 billion at the half, or €10.80 per share, after last year’s sale of 12.4 per cent of the Swedish estate trimmed the holding, with Bergslagets Skogar set to front investors at a Stockholm Capital Markets Day on 3 November.
Brussels is rewriting one of the group’s quieter income lines, with revenue from selling emission rights projected to fall from €72 million last year to between €10 million and €20 million in 2026. Several mills now run at more than 95 per cent biogenic emissions, and the revised EU Emissions Trading System strips their free allocations as a result.
Portfolio surgery continued into July, with the German corrugated board units divested and a €19 million fluff pulp investment confirmed at Skutskär, where softwood pulp production on fiberline three shuts permanently this quarter. On the report’s own numbers, the half delivers €319 million of adjusted EBIT, net debt cut to 2.2 times adjusted EBITDA from 3.3, and a quarter where the underlying business improved even as the bottom line went backwards.
