Mercer International Inc. (MERC) Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Mercer International Inc. (NASDAQ:MERC) Q1 2025 Earnings Conference Call May 2, 2025 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Richard Short – CFO & Secretary
Juan Carlos Bueno – President & CEO

Conference Call Participants

Sanford Burns – Stifel Nicolaus
Sean Steuart – TD Cowen
Matthew McKellar – RBC Capital Markets
Cole Hathorn – Jefferies
Roger Spitz – Bank of America
Jim Cox – PPM America

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to Mercer International’s First Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. On the call today is Juan Carlos Bueno, Mercer’s President and Chief Executive Officer; and Richard Short, Mercer’s Chief Financial Officer and Secretary.

I will now hand the call over to Richard. You may go ahead.

Richard Short

Thanks, Lacy. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining the call today. I will begin by touching on the financial and operating highlights of the first quarter before turning the call to Juan Carlos to provide further color into the markets, our operations and our strategic initiatives. Also, for those of you that have joined today’s call by telephone, there is a presentation material that we’ve attached to the Investors section of our website.

But before turning to our results, I would like to remind you that we will be making forward-looking statements in this morning’s conference call. According to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, I’d like to call your attention to the risks related to these statements, which are more fully described in our press release and in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This quarter, our EBITDA was $47 million compared to Q4 EBITDA of $99 million. The lower results are primarily attributed to 22 days of planned major maintenance downtime at our Celgar mill compared to no planned downtime in Q4. We estimate this downtime adversely