Karl Hersvik
Chief Executive Officer

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Aker BP’s second quarter presentation. It was a quarter of strong operational execution and robust financial results. Production averaged 384,000 barrels of oil equivalents per day and operating cash flow was $3.1 billion. And we have raised the lower end and narrowed our production guidance for the year.

Our major projects remain on track with important milestones across Yggdrasil, Valhall PWP–Fenris, Skarv Satellites and Johan Sverdrup Phase 3. At the same time, we continue to strengthen the portfolio for future growth, including through a new strategic collaboration with Equinor. We also maintain a robust financial position with $6 billion in available liquidity and an unchanged quarterly dividend.

Operationally, this was a quarter shaped by seasonally high level of activity with continued high efficiency across the portfolio. Production was lower than in the previous quarter, mainly due to planned maintenance at Edvard Grieg and Ivar Aasen combined with normal quarter-to-quarter variations. Despite these planned impacts, production efficiency was 94%, a very strong performance by industry standards. Production costs increased to $8.8 per barrel, mainly reflecting planned seasonal activity across the portfolio, including maintenance at Edvard Grieg and Ivar Aasen, diving operations at Alvheim and well intervention activity

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Operator

Welcome to the Scandic Hotels Group Q2 2026 Report Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers, CEO, Jens Mathiesen; and CFO, Par Christiansen. Please go ahead.

Jens Mathiesen
President & CEO

Thank you very much, and good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us for this Q2 presentation. My name is Jens Mathiesen. I’m the CEO of Scandic. And together with me, I have our CFO, Par Christiansen, as always. Let’s dive into the highlights. So please turn to Page 2.

We delivered a good quarter with solid growth. We improved our earnings and also higher profitability. The business is performing well across most of our markets, with Finland remaining the exception. Market conditions were favorable, supported by a busy event calendar, strong leisure travel and stable demand for business travel and meetings. Demand was particularly strong in the capital cities of Sweden, Denmark and Ireland. Finland remained challenging throughout the quarter, while the Norwegian hotel market was affected by a hotel strike lasting more than 6 weeks. The recovery in Finland is taking longer than we had expected, but we remain focused on turning the performance around. We now expect a gradual improvement with a stable second half of the year with a financial performance on same levels as last year.

During the quarter, we expanded the hotel portfolio, continued to grow

Ace investor Ashish Kacholia, widely known for spotting emerging small-cap winners, has pared his holdings in two chemical stocks during the first quarter of FY27, locking in gains after the stocks delivered returns of up to 114% so far this year.

The latest shareholding data available on the BSE shows that Kacholia reduced his stake in Yasho Industries to 2.08% from 2.37% at the end of the March 2026 quarter. He also trimmed his holding in Finotex Chemicals to 2.06% from 2.60%, indicating a reduction of 0.54 percentage points during the quarter.

Yasho Industries’ stock price has delivered a staggering 114% return in 2026 while Fineotex Chemicals has risen 58% in the last six months.

Kacholia is among India’s most closely watched small-cap investors, with his portfolio moves often drawing significant attention from the market. Kacholia’s investment decisions are widely tracked by retail and institutional investors alike, as they are often seen as indicators of emerging opportunities and evolving market sentiment.

Also read: Ashish Kacholia’s picks: 12 stocks rally up to 130% in CY26, 3 turned multibaggers; 2 new Q4 bets

Kacholia, fondly called the ‘Big Whale’ by media, Kacholia started out with Prime Securities and later joined Edelweiss before incorporating his own broking firm, Lucky Securities in 1995. He co-founded Hungama Digital with Rakesh Jhunjhunwala in 1999 and started building his own portfolio from 2003.
As per the Trendlyne data, Ashish Kacholia publicly holds 50 stocks with a net worth of nearly Rs 3,000 crore crore.

Why is Kacholia selling chemical stocks?

Iran war supply constraints – In the fourth quarter last financial year, companies continued to face raw material shortages due to disruptions caused by the West Asia conflict.
India’s chemicals industry, primarily through higher crude oil prices and supply chain disruptions. As many chemical manufacturers rely on crude-derived feedstocks such as naphtha, benzene and methanol, elevated oil prices increase raw material costs and put pressure on profit margins. Disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz also raised freight and insurance costs while delaying shipments of key inputs. Although a weaker rupee may support export realisations, persistent geopolitical tensions and higher input costs are likely to outweigh the benefits, particularly for commodity and petrochemical-linked chemical companies.

Although raw material prices have eased since end-May and availability is gradually improving, JM Financial expects supply chain constraints to persist in the near term, with normalisation likely over the next one to two quarters.

Softening demand – JM also observed that discretionary demand has weakened due to higher prices, although non-discretionary demand remains stable. While pent-up demand could emerge once supply chains normalise, the brokerage believes chemical prices are unlikely to return to pre-conflict levels, supporting a healthier spreads environment for the industry.

Also read:Ashish Kacholia exits, Madhusudan Kela trims stake in smallcap NBFC stock that’s up over 50% in 2026

China’s muscle power – InCred Equities said China’s persistent capacity expansion continues to exert significant pressure on the global chemicals industry. It noted that Chinese producers, particularly in petrochemicals, intermediates and commodity chemicals, have added capacity well ahead of demand and are exporting surplus output at lower prices, forcing global competitors to either cut prices or lose market share.

The brokerage believes Indian chemical companies should leverage China’s cost advantage rather than compete directly in commoditised products. It noted that Indian specialty chemical manufacturers have traditionally imported key intermediates and raw materials from China, where production costs remain substantially lower. InCred said the opportunity lies in moving downstream into higher-value products such as specialty chemicals, formulations, pharma intermediates, agrochemical formulations, food additives, electronic chemicals and customised CDMO products. It added that companies focused on differentiated, value-added offerings can benefit from lower Chinese input costs, while those remaining in commodity chemicals are likely to continue facing pricing and margin pressure.

Chemical stocks Q1 outlook – Axis Direct expects a mixed earnings performance for the chemicals and agrochemicals sector in Q1FY27. The brokerage said the delayed onset of the southwest monsoon pushed Kharif-related agrochemical demand into the second quarter, resulting in a relatively subdued quarter for domestic formulation companies.

At the same time, it expects companies with exposure to CDMO, fluorochemicals and refrigerants to outperform on the back of healthy order execution and a favourable product mix.

The brokerage believes pricing pressure from Chinese competition will continue to weigh on commoditised chemical manufacturers, limiting margin expansion. However, within the mid-cap universe, Axis expects companies supported by strong domestic infrastructure-linked order books to deliver healthy growth through robust execution, even as uncertainty persists in export markets.

Ashish Kacholia trims stake in NBFC

Shareholding data available on the BSE shows that Ashish Kacholia’s stake in NBFC SG Finserve fell below the 1% disclosure threshold from 2.37% at the end of the March 2026 quarter, indicating a likely exit.

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times)

A fleet of more than 150 robots is already laying bricks on real construction sites across the UK and Europe, and the company behind them has just raised $32 million to put more of them to work, in a deal that says as much about Britain’s vanishing trades as it does about the rise of physical AI.

Monumental, the Amsterdam-based construction robotics company, announced the Series B led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Plural and existing investors including Hummingbird. The money will grow its engineering team, scale the fleet across Europe, deepen its UK presence and fund a US launch this year.

For UK housebuilders and the small firms that supply them, the timing is pointed. The Home Builders Federation estimates the country needs at least 20,000 more bricklayers to hit the government’s target of 1.5 million new homes, yet only around 1,990 completed apprenticeships in 2024. It is a gap Business Matters has tracked closely, with a skills crisis already threatening the 1.5 million homes target and 76 per cent of construction firms struggling to hire.

Monumental’s answer is not to sell machines but to work as an autonomous subcontractor. General contractors hire the company and pay for finished wall, an outcome-priced model that spares builders, many of them SMEs, the financial and technical risk of owning and operating the equipment themselves.

The robots are electric and autonomous, using advanced sensors, computer vision and cranes to lay brick and mortar with millimetre precision, all orchestrated by the company’s AI platform, Atrium. The fleet has built the walls of more than 100 homes across the Netherlands and the UK, along with a school, a community centre, a hotel and canal walls. The pace is accelerating: nearly half of those homes went up in the past three months alone, up from just eight the quarter before.

“The world simply does not have enough people to build what it needs, and that shortage will not be solved by another app or another robot doing backflips on stage,” said Salar al Khafaji, co-founder and CEO of Monumental. “It takes machines that turn up on site and lay real brick all day, to spec, which is what our fleet already does today. Every robot we deploy expands the industry’s capacity to build, bringing a future of beautiful, affordable, bespoke buildings and infrastructure closer to reality. Khosla’s investment lets us put many more of them to work in more countries while expanding beyond bricklaying.”

The backdrop is an industry that technology has barely touched. Since 1945, manufacturing productivity has risen more than eightfold while construction productivity has gained roughly 10 per cent, and has fallen since the 1960s. The result is a housing shortage the Centre for Policy Studies puts at 6.5 million homes, with just 446 homes per 1,000 people, the second-worst rate in Europe. In the capital, where London built just 7 per cent of the homes it needed last year, the delivery gap is starker still.

“Construction costs have exploded while the industry itself has barely changed in decades,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “That combination has produced the housing crisis: we know how to build, we’ve just made it too expensive and too slow. Monumental is solving this by bringing robotics into the physical world, and the proof is already standing: canal walls, houses, a school, 100 structures already built by robots. Beautiful buildings, built at scale, don’t have to cost what they cost today.”

Founded in 2021 by al Khafaji and CTO Sebastiaan Visser, whose previous company Silk was acquired by Palantir in 2016, Monumental was the first to bring Palantir’s forward-deployed engineering model to robotics. It has recently appointed a dedicated UK country manager and is growing its on-the-ground team here.

Nor is it an isolated bet. From bricklaying to fruit picking, where Dogtooth raised £14 million this month to help growers beat labour shortages, investors are backing robots to do the physical work Britain cannot find the people for. Monumental says its crews move up into safer, higher-skilled roles operating the machines. The bricks, it seems, will get laid either way.