Navigator's Q1 2026 Net Profit Falls 64% to €17.2 Million on Storm Damage at Figueira da Foz and Vila Velha de Ródão Plus Higher Gas-and-CO₂ Costs — Sales Down 19% to €427 Million, EBITDA Halved to €65 Million

The Navigator Company closed the first quarter of 2026 with a net profit of €17.2 million, a 64% drop from the €48.3 million the paper-and-pulp group reported in the same quarter of 2025, the company told the Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários on Thursday afternoon. Sales fell 19% to €427 million from €529 million; EBITDA collapsed to €65 million from €115.6 million; the EBITDA margin compressed to 15.2%. The company put the blame squarely on the storm cluster that swept Portugal in January and February — with severe damage at the Figueira da Foz and Vila Velha de Ródão complexes — and on the higher consumption of fossil energy, particularly natural gas, that the storm-driven power-and-water interruptions forced on the operation, plus the additional CO₂ allowance purchases that came with it. The full-year outlook is held at "positive and prudent."

The Q1 print, line by line

• Net profit: €17.2 million, -64% YoY (from €48.3 million Q1 2025).
• Sales: €427 million, -19% YoY (from €529 million).
• EBITDA: €65 million, -44% YoY (from €115.6 million).
• EBITDA margin: 15.2%, compressed from a structurally-higher base.
• Pulp segment volume of business: -33% YoY (low pulp availability, lower pulp prices, energy-sale reduction as cogenerations shifted to autoconsumption).
• Tissue volume of business: -19% YoY; volume of finished product and reels at 53,000 tonnes, -13% YoY.
• Packaging volume: +36% YoY and +16% QoQ — the standout line.
• Capex: €42 million, of which roughly 53% directed to environmental and sustainability projects.
• PRR incentives received: ~€84 million cumulative.
• Net debt: €675.4 million, down €28 million from December 2025.
• Net debt / EBITDA: 2.08x.
• Available financing lines: €414 million.

What the storms did to the production map

The January-February storm cluster — the same series that hit the GNR fleet, the SIRESP coverage, the EDP Distribuição grid and the road and rail networks — produced what Navigator describes as danos severos at the central-region facilities, with the heaviest hits at Figueira da Foz on the coast and Vila Velha de Ródão on the inland Tejo. The cascade was operational, not headline-financial in the first instance: external interruptions to power and water supply, followed by forestry-supply disruption from the destruction of vast wood-resource areas under heavy rainfall, followed by aggravated logistics constraints on the wood-supply line, with strong pressure on both volumes and the cost of supplying wood to the mills. Combined with low starting stock at the beginning of the year, the disruption shaped Q1 throughput. In short: it was a wood-supply, energy-supply and water-supply quarter.

Why energy and CO₂ costs amplified the hit

The second storyable line is on the energy and emissions side. The grid-and-water instability forced the mills to lean harder on natural gas to fill the gap left by interrupted electricity supply and by the cogeneration units that operate on biomass-and-recovered-energy economics. That produced two simultaneous costs: a higher direct gas bill at the prevailing wholesale price, and a higher CO₂ allowance bill as the gas-fired backup generated emissions covered by the EU ETS that the company then had to buy permits to cover. Both lines added to the cost-of-goods-sold gap that compressed margins.

Pulp: a market-and-supply double bind

The pulp segment — Navigator's structural commodity exposure to global market prices, plus the energy-sale revenue line tied to the cogeneration footprint — was the single biggest drag. The volume of business in pulp fell 33% YoY on three superimposed pressures: low pulp availability for the merchant market in the first two months of the year (operational and logistic limitations from the storm cluster), the need to build inventory ahead of a programmed annual maintenance shutdown at one of the pulp mills scheduled for the first half of Q2 2026, and the parallel reduction in energy-sale revenue as the renewable cogenerations transitioned to autoconsumption (the company is now using more of its own renewable electricity internally rather than selling it onto the grid). The pulp-price softness in the broader EU market layered onto those operational pressures.

Tissue: smaller volume, geographically diversified

The tissue segment — the consumer-product line that Navigator built out aggressively with the Tissue Ejea and Tissue UK acquisitions — printed volume of finished product and reels at 53,000 tonnes, down 13% YoY; volume of business down 19%. The strategic read is more constructive than the headline volume change: international sales reached 81% of the total tissue volume in Q1, up from 54% in 2022 (before the integration of Tissue Ejea and Tissue UK), with Spain at 33% of total sales, the United Kingdom at 31%, and France at 15%. The geographic-mix diversification is exactly what the recent acquisition programme was designed to deliver, and the company explicitly framed the Spanish and UK exposure as the resilience layer for the segment.

Packaging: the upside surprise

The packaging line — the smallest of Navigator's three principal segments by absolute revenue — was the clean upside print of the quarter. Volume in tonnes was up 16% versus Q4 2025 and up 36% versus Q1 2025; total sales up 23% YoY, with 73% of sales in Europe and the remaining 27% in extra-European markets. The company called packaging "one of the principal growth drivers" of the business and singled out the segment as the standout positive on the quarter. For the equity story, the packaging line is the structural diversification away from the cyclical pulp commodity that Navigator has been telegraphing to the market for several quarters; Q1 2026 is the first quarter in which the line printed at a scale that materially moved the segment mix.

The €42M capex, the €84M PRR layer, the €675.4M net debt

Capex of €42 million in the quarter — of which roughly 53% directed to environmental and sustainability projects with a future-cost-reduction read — keeps the modernisation-and-decarbonisation programme on track. The Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência execution is on time and on cost, with the company having received approximately €84 million in cumulative incentives to date. Net debt at €675.4 million is down €28 million from the December 2025 print, holding the Net Debt/EBITDA ratio at 2.08x with €414 million of available financing lines — a balance-sheet position that does not strain under the Q1 EBITDA compression.

The 2026 outlook: "positive and prudent"

Navigator's forward read on 2026 is held at "positive and prudent." The company expects continued international-market volatility, exposure to geopolitical evolution and potential global supply-chain constraints — the standard macro qualifiers — but flags that the most recent indicators suggest a gradual improvement in market conditions, particularly in the pulp segment, where price recovery and a more balanced supply-demand picture are emerging. Combined with operational discipline, the company expects a gradual improvement in performance through the year. The strategic axis for the remainder of 2026 is the gradual recovery of the pulp tape, the discipline on operational and financial costs, and the consistent execution of the diversification-and-innovation programme — the exact axis the equity story has been calibrated to.

Why this matters for the foreign-resident reader

For the foreign-resident reader, Navigator is one of the structural read-points on the Portuguese central-region industrial economy. The Figueira da Foz, Setúbal and Vila Velha de Ródão complexes are the largest single-site industrial operations in their respective regions; the wood-supply chain feeds eucalyptus management contracts that touch land use across the central interior; the cogeneration footprint is part of the renewable-electricity mix that determines what the wholesale tape does; and the EU ETS exposure is a real-time read on what the European emissions-permit price does to Portuguese industrial operating costs. A storm-and-energy-cost quarter that compresses Q1 margins by this much is also a real-time read on how exposed the central-region industrial base is to the climate-driven-storm-frequency story that the IPMA, APA and ICNF substrate has been flagging for the past two years.

Sources: Navigator Q1 2026 results communication to the Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários, 7 May 2026 (Tier 1 corporate institutional disclosure); ECO 7 May 2026, "Tempestades e custos da energia afundam lucro da Navigator para 17,2 milhões no arranque do ano", Patrícia Abreu, 18:35 (Tier 2 PT primary); Navigator Q1 2025 results substrate (Tier 1 corporate institutional historical comparison); IPMA storm-cluster bulletin substrate January-February 2026 (Tier 1 PT institutional); APA storm-damage assessment substrate (Tier 1 PT institutional); EU ETS allowance-price reference data (Tier 1 EU institutional).