Hi everyone, and welcome to Kalmar's pre-silent call. My name is Camilla Maikola from the Investor Relations team, and today's call will be hosted by our CFO, Sakari Ahdekivi. Yes, please, over to you, Sakari.
Right, thank you, Camilla, and welcome everybody to the pre-silent call. From my side, good afternoon and good day. Today we have a short presentation for you, and as usual, we start with a recap of the second quarter just to remind us where we left off. We will cover the published order releases during Q3, talk about the market indicators, and how we see the situation in the market at the moment with recent comments. We will have a Q&A and then a couple of notes at the end regarding our IR team and some changes there. With that short introduction, let's just cover the Q2 recap here. As you remember, we had a strong orders quarter in the second quarter, 20% growth year-on-year, overall favorable demand pretty much in all of our end-use customer segments as well as geographies, with the exception of perhaps North America.
We had a strong comparable operating profit margin, especially on the equipment side. You might remember that on the service side, we had the warehouse move. We both moved and outsourced our warehousing in the U.S., and we had some issues related to that, which short-term impacted the profitability on the service side. That was more than compensated by the strong equipment margin in the second quarter. We had a 13.1% comparable operating profit margin overall in the quarter. We also, for the first time in a while, showed an increase in sales on the back of the strengthened order backlog, basically since the end of Q4 last year, when we have had strong orders in three quarters in a row. We also said back then that there was an increased level of market uncertainties affected by the tariff announcements, geopolitical tensions, and other demand-impacting issues.
We expected potential risk of a slower growth in H2. We also said that the U.S. distribution and customer segment demand was hampered by that increased market uncertainty, whereas there was strong growth in Europe and solid in the AMEA area. This is more backward looking again, and that comment is valid for the second quarter. We kept our outlook unchanged, and just to repeat that, we expect our comparable operating profit margin to be above 12% in 2025. On the order releases booked, you may notice that this is a bit thinner than what we have had in recent quarters, but just in the last few days here, we have published a couple of orders. There's an order again on the straddle carrier side, five hybrid straddle carriers in the Rotterdam Short Sea Terminals.
You might remember that in the second quarter, we had quite a few large, especially straddle carrier orders, and these are, of course, lumpy by nature. Depending on when the customer makes the decisions, these may fall into one or the other quarter. This quarter, we have now published one of these. In addition to that, we published a press release on our three-year Kalmar Care maintenance contract for the Noatum Ports Malaga terminal. Those are the releases so far for the third quarter. Coming back to the macro view and the statistics, there's a slight improvement in the global container throughput development in the latest monthly stats. However, it doesn't change our view on the second half of this year, which is that we still see this as a more subdued second half compared to what we saw in the first half.
If you look at the 2026 global container throughput development, there is a dip to 1.3%, which is much lower than what we've seen recently and also lower than is expected going forward into 2027 and 2028. This is one of the reasons that we were saying that we expected a subdued second half. Likewise, the global manufacturing output is quite weak in 2026, so in anticipation of that, also the same comment is valid for the second half of this year. Perhaps on the GDP, it's more flat, and also on the global retail output, slightly weaker than what we have seen before and after 2025. I would say that more important are the global container throughput and the manufacturing output development curves. Our favorite topic here, the tariffs. Just to make a couple of points here on that. 21% of our sales came from the U.S.
in the first half of 2025. That's lower compared to 2024, where we had 26% in euro terms of our sales coming from the U.S. As you probably all remember, the largest product category is the terminal tractors, and they are locally produced in our Ottawa factory in Kansas. On top of that, the U.S. also contains service maintenance work, as well as equipment which is imported from our Stargard plant in Poland and to a smaller extent from our Bromma factory in Malaysia into the U.S., as well as the spare parts. Still, the bulk of the sales is the TTs, the terminal tractors, and then our service. When it comes to the imported equipment portfolio, it is the forklift and the empty container handlers which are included on the Section 232 list for steel and aluminum tires, which came in the month of August.
The straddle carriers and our reach stackers are currently not included on the list. There was a temporary delay in our forklift deliveries to the U.S. due to the new tariffs announced in August and also due to the documentation requirements that came about as a result. Since then, we have continued the deliveries, and therefore, of course, the situation has somewhat normalized. We will provide more details on all of this in our Q3 results call, but those would be the comments that I would make on the tariff situation at this point in time. The connected fleet activity, you remember this slide, we're not showing numbers. We'll come back to this also in our Q3 release.
What I can say is that this has remained on a similar trend, subdued in the U.S., quite strong in Europe, and as said, we'll then come back with the numbers in a few weeks' time. No change really in the way we see either the fleet activity or the macro backdrop for the second half of this year. That concludes our very short presentation of today, and we're ready for Q&A.
Yes, [Ankiti], please.
Yeah, hi, good afternoon everyone. Hope you hear me well. I want to start with the demand outlook that you already provided, that you're expecting a slightly weaker second half. Could you maybe help to understand a little bit how much is driven by the contribution of larger deals that helped you in the first half, and how much do you expect the underlying demand to weaken as well? Is that isolated only to the U.S. portion of the business, or are you expecting that in Europe as well? Maybe additional on third quarter, do I remember correctly that seasonality plays a role as well going into the third quarter?
Yeah, I would say that, of course, the comments are more based on how we see the macro and the demand development. There, as we've said, it's especially the U.S., and we don't really see a big change compared to the comments that we made in connection with our Q2 release. Of course, there is always the element of the larger orders, you know, either coming in a certain quarter or not coming in a certain quarter. For sure, you know, that plays a part also from one quarter to the other. As I said, the straddle carrier orders are quite large when they come, and they are quite lumpy also. Several of them may fall into one quarter, and then you might have one with less. I think it's a combination. When it comes to the seasonality, we're not really a very seasonal business.
It's not like process industries that might have a summer shutdown in their plant or something like that. We have much less seasonality. I wouldn't say that seasonality is a big element.
Okay. On the tariffs, I don't know how much more are you willing to comment at this point on the impacts that we should think about. Did you say that, or is the situation regarding forklifts and electric empty container handlers, has that been normalized totally since the stoppage of deliveries in April, or should we expect some negative impacts to the Q3 deliveries and EBIT as well from the situation from a volume perspective? How should we kind of model this regarding Q3, Q4?
Yeah, I would say that, of course, since there was a temporary hiccup there, we haven't completely caught up. Is it normalized in terms of deliveries? Yes. Let's remember that it's one part, a smaller part of our total U.S. business, a temporary issue. I wouldn't overblow the impact on volumes, for example.
Okay. There's maybe a small minor impact on your U.S. sale in Q3, and then depending on how the demand situation may be, you will be fully caught up in Q4.
I think let's then see what happens going forward. I would say that, of course, there's some kind of impact from the delay.
Okay. I'm sure that...
Yeah,
Ankiti, maybe to add on that, I would also say that the demand, the kind of end-user customer demand is what kind of the uncertainty. I think the tariff debate as such, the kind of overall impact is on the demand side in the long term than on the kind of maybe sales side.
I understand that. I guess that was my next question: what is your best understanding right now on your pricing level in the U.S.? If you look at it, most of the business is assembled in the U.S., but you are exposed to supply chains, then you have a little bit of an impact. Is there any level of price increases that are required for you to be neutral in terms of the cost impact? How much higher are prices the customer is facing right now compared to, let's say, the start of the year?
Of course, our target is to be able to pass on the impacts. How that commercially will play out going forward, we'll need to see. The ambition is, as we have said with the initial tariffs already in the early part of the year, that we aim to cover these with price increases. Of course, that can have an impact on our relative competitive situation. How that plays out in demand for us, let's see.
Okay. Is there a number on the level of price increases that you have, let's say, done so far or are planning to do so far?
Not anything that I would say that I would comment on in this call. No.
Okay, thank you. That's all from me.
Are there any further questions? Yes, Mikael.
Yeah.
Good afternoon. Just coming back to the demand situation, and just to be clear on the European side of things, I guess what you're saying here is that you continue to see a relatively good demand in Europe. You haven't seen any kind of weakening there. There wasn't anything extraordinarily strong in Europe in Q2, when we now look into Q3.
Yeah, I would say that Europe remains, you know, the situation is more or less unchanged from what we've seen recently in Europe.
Okay. How would you describe the service business overall? I would assume, you know, you talked about the connected fleet and that. I would assume that Europe is still looking quite good into Q3. How would you describe the situation in the U.S. when it comes to the service business?
Yeah, of course, service is less affected by the ups and downs. I think what we had in Q2 in the profitability in service was more an operational issue. In terms of demand, I would say it's, of course, smoothing out the ups and downs of the equipment demand or orders, so pretty stable. Of course, service growth remains one of our three strategic pillars. That's what we aim to be doing.
Okay. Good.
Maybe Mikael also, if you remember, we said that, as Sakari mentioned, the profitability on the service side was impacted both by the warehouse move and the tariffs because there was a grace period of 30 or more days on price increases on the service side. I think they're catching up both on the warehouse and the tariff situation with the price hikes. Of course, that picture remains.
That was in the second quarter.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's clear. Finally, on the market dynamics in the U.S., how would you describe them currently? How is the competition behaving now? Are the local players in forklifts and reach stackers, for example, hiking the prices? Are they going after volumes? How would you describe the overall competitive dynamics in the U.S. right now?
I think everyone is somehow impacted by the supply chain. It, of course, depends on where people are supplying their components from. I think to some kind of degree, everyone is facing similar issues. Of course, if we're importing the entire equipment from outside, that's a bit different than producing it locally.
Okay, all right. Thank you very much.
If there are no more questions, we still have a quick update on our Investor Relations team. I will be on maternity leave as of 14th November. Therefore, we have a new IR team member, Katarina, who's also on this call. She will take over my responsibilities here slowly. You will probably get to meet her soon as well. That was all we had for today. Thank you all for joining the call. We will see you on 31st October when we publish our Q3 results.
Thanks everyone for joining. Have a good day.
Thank you. Bye.
Bye-bye.