Welcome everybody to the quarterly presentation for General Oceans for the first quarter of 2026. My name is Atle Lohrmann, and with me here today I have our CFO, Anton van Heerden.
Hello.
Who's going to be going through the financial portion of this thing. I'm going to cover first some of the operational portions of the company, then we'll afterwards have some questions and answers both here from the audience and from you who are online. I'll go ahead.
Yep.
We'll start talking about how the first quarter went for the company. We'll start with some operational highlights, and I think we will start just with going through the crude numbers as we see it at a glance, the performance of the different entities at the first quarter. Overall revenue was NOK 327 million. The backlog is NOK 546. The gross profit was NOK 220 million, and the gross margin was 67%. We'll get back to the comparison numbers later on. The adjusted EBITDA was NOK 59 million, and the margin on the EBITDA was 18%.
If you're looking at some of the more detailed underlying structures, we will see that in the segmentation, the Robotics S egment was about 25% of the overall revenue in the first quarter, whereas the sensor segment was about 75%. As you all know, this is the first quarterly presentation for General Oceans. We went or were listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange in March, March 26th this year, so we're only about a month and a half into the process of establishing ourselves after the IPO. The division in the terms of the different countries that are contributing to the revenue, it's still heavily dominated to be a European company, about 65%, and then we have about 20% in Asia, which constitute primarily China, Japan, Korea, and Australia.
We have about 20% in the U.S. and Canada, which are the dominant portions of Americas. There's very little revenue coming out of South America, for example. In terms of the events that happened right after the first quarter, we did do a successful acquisition in April of a company in the U.S. called MRV. I'm going to get back to some of the details there. It's basically a company that produces vertical profilers, and that are located on the West Coast and the central areas of United States, and that happened in April of 2026. We'll look a little bit at the quarterly numbers to give you a sense of the evolution of the revenue base and the profitability of the company.
In the first quarter, if we compare with the first quarter in 2025, the revenue was NOK 345 versus in 2025 versus NOK 327, so it's a slight decrease. The gross margins went up from 62% to 67%. The adjusted EBITDA margin went down 1%, but it's still within the frame of what we have said to the market before we entered into the IPO, which is about 18%-20%. As you see in the evolution here, I would say sort of overall, the picture is that the first quarter confirms the strengthening of the overall operational setting of the company that we saw in 2025.
In some ways you can really read this as an adjustment or not an adjustment, but as a continuation of a process where we saw this fairly large jump from 2024 to 2025, and we are continuing on the trend of 2025. There are really no big red flags or anything particular that happened in this first quarter. It really was part of what we think of as a natural evolution. We're gonna come back to some of the details there. Anton's going to talk about some of the effects and other sort of operational issues. On the revenue analysis, if we first look at the verticals that we operate in, basically the application areas, we will see there's a strengthening in defense.
Went up from 90, in the 90 area up into 125. That is a reflection of the deliveries on some of the orders that we got in 2025. It's also, generally speaking, clearly a large amount of activity in that area. We can get back to that, but if we want to know more about the defense sector. It's a pretty clear interest in that area, although it might be a little different than most people think. We can get back to that if there are questions surrounding defense. In the construction area, there was a reduced revenue. Some of that comes from a change in the amount of backlog that was being built down in 2025.
2025 was very strong in the sensor segment because the backlog from 2024 was built down. If you're looking at the backlog evolution in 2026, it's actually very steady. There's a little bit of reflection of things that are happening in the segment, but there's also sort of several financial, mathematical elements to it that makes it a little less radical than it may look like when you're looking at the screen here. In the science bit, there is generally a steady revenue stream, although it's not there's too much quarterly variations to really take too much information out of those numbers at this stage. I'd be careful to making a large interpretation.
Obviously, especially in the U.S., there is changes in how the administration looks at science and its importance in society, and some of that actually also is getting reflected into other countries. There is a little bit of uncertainty exactly where science is going. Overall, we're not particularly concerned yet, and we see more of a steady revenue stream, more so than any significant decline. If we go back and look at the segments, we would say that in the first quarter of 2026, we're seeing a reflection of a very similar trend that we saw from the last quarter last in 2025, which is that the Robotic s Segment is increasing in revenue.
Not at the expense of the sensors, but compared to the sensors which are more steady, we would say that the robotics is increasing and we're clearly seeing a lot of interest in robotic contribution into the defense sector, particularly. On the MRV acquisition, we're obviously very enthusiastic when something new is happening and MRV is a very nice contribution to the overall structure of General Oceans. MRV, the abbreviation is not being used much, but originally it was Marine Robotic Vehicles. This is a company that goes into the robotics segments of General Oceans. Its core function is to serve what is called vertical profilers or floats into the Argo Program.
The Argo Program is a program where these instruments are going up and down in the water column and collecting physical parameters like temperature and salinity, which is sort of the core descriptive physical parameters of the ocean. This data sets, especially close to the surface, is delivered to the national meteorological organizations so that our weather forecasting is actually using a lot of data. The ocean data that's being implemented into weather forecasting partially is coming from this Argo Program, which is an international program that's funded by at least 20 different countries around the world, and Norway is amongst them. This is an international collaboration that has a fairly steadily increasing budget, and there is competition in this segment.
There are three or four, actually different contributors of which MRV is about the same size as the other ones. It's fairly equal competition in that segment. Company has about 22 people. They're divided into areas. There is production in Chicago, and then there's development and sales coming out of Seattle. That also contributes to the overall structure of General Oceans in the U.S., which previously have offices in San Diego and Boston, or Newburyport, north of Boston. Now we also have Seattle and Chicago, which means that the only place that General Oceans is not present right now is in Houston, which is one of our ambitions for the rest of the year. The budget of revenue is about $13 million and the implementation process has started.
We are looking at the company in the context of the larger General Oceans ambitions. On the side of the sales, this is a company that is uniquely American, so it had is sourcing in the United States, and it has only sales in the United States. General Oceans ambition is to help them through specifically the Nortek sales organization, help them get a better penetration also in the international market. On the sales network, obviously Nortek is already then contributing in that area, looking at sort of the fundamental parameters like pricing, penetration abilities, something like that. It's a very active, ongoing effort. On the production side, we're also looking at international sourcing of the components that they buy.
It's a very interesting acquisition, fits really well into the science application area as well as the Robotics Segment. As you can see, there's not a one-to-one between the segmentation and the application areas. You can have robotics and science, you can have robotics and defense, you can have vice versa. There's a lot of different combinations going on. Back to the segment portion of it. Nortek, Tritech, Klein, RS Aqua, we're not reporting on these companies individually, we're reporting only as a segment. The hypothesis this year is that part of the reduction in revenue comes from the foreign exchange effects, the FX effects.
Some of it also comes from what we see as slightly reduction in the optimism in some of the marine construction areas, where people are not as bullish about especially wind as they were before. I think other companies within this space has also reported that they see a reduction in the commitment of the leasing companies to buy into a very strong accretive or to a strong evolution of this particular segment. It's more of a steady process we see. Obviously, leasing companies typically buy for the purpose of increased activity, so it has a very sort of quick and immediate effect. We're not seeing any long-term strong reduction in the activity at this point.
We're just not seeing the increase in activity that we have saw in 2025, where people were very, very bullish about the increase both in wind at the same time as there was a significant oil and gas activity. On the Robotics S egment, it's been a healthy order intake at the same time as some of the large orders have been delivered. There's a large backlog. MRV actually comes in with their own backlog. I think their backlog is about 10 months. They will also then continue to contribute to the evolution of the backlog as we start reporting for the second quarter, which we will see in a few months. On the outlook side, we are still where we were before the IPO. We anticipated revenues in 2026 of about NOK 1.5 billion.
That's a 15% up from 2025. We have not changed our forecast or our the way we work with respect to our intent of reaching those goals. On the central level, sort of speaking from the headquarters perspective, our focus is now after the IPO, gone back into M&A activities. There are several companies being courted or being spoken to and the discussions are ongoing. We are working on access to new markets, which means, in our case, opening offices in new geographies, trying to access areas that we haven't really been very strong before. We are also improving our connections to the defense contractors.
The reality of the defense world is that small companies like General Oceans still need larger companies to work with in order to penetrate that market because there's a lot of noise in the defense segment, generally speaking. A lot of VC money coming in, a lot of optimism. The reality is that the big contracts are still going to the large defense contractors. It is, in reality, the association with the large contractors that will make smaller companies like General Oceans successful in that particular segment. We're working hard on that, and there's a big conference actually coming up this week that we are going to be attending and working to talk to the relevant people.
On the software side, we did announce during the IPO process that we had opened up an office here in Oslo, where we were establishing a software group that was going to be serving the different operating companies. The group has now expanded. There are about six people right now, and they're turning out to become a little bit of an AI center for the group. They're both working AI for the purpose of informing the operating companies about how they can improve their way of working on a daily basis. There are also some very interesting experiments going on where we're looking at AI as a tool for product development, which is a new thing, meaning that we are writing software, firmware, even doing electronics and even mechanical design based upon AI models.
Obviously, we are looking at that with quite a bit of excitement because it means an enormous reduction in workload if we actually can successfully apply that. So, we're looking forward to seeing what those results are going to be. Hopefully, when we speak the next time in the second quarter, we'll be able to report back on what has happened there. Thank you. I'll leave it that there, and then we'll go back to talking about some of the numbers. Anton?
Thank you, Atle. Morning, everyone. I'll be presenting the financial side of the business. Operational highlights. We've seen this slide before. I just want to highlight I will be speaking more about seasonality in the group and a bit about the FX effect we've observed in Q1 2026. As you can see, we have an upward trend quarter by quarter. There is some lumpiness in the quarters, between the quarters. I'll come back to both of these subjects in later slides. Our cash flow evolution. We started the quarter at NOK 340 million, where we generated some cash in the quarter. We repaid our debt. We changed our USD and GBP loan to a NOK loan. Drew a bit down to help pay the IPO fees.
In April, we paid back all debt in the group from the proceeds from the IPO. We had a dividend in Q1 of NOK 20 million. With NOK 500 million proceeds from the IPO, we ended at NOK 840 million cash in the bank at the end of Q1 2026. This slide is to illustrate our working capital evolution. We gave guidance that our targets are between 15% and 20% net working capital of LTM revenue 12 months. As you can see, even though net working capital has gone up in monetary values as a percentage of LTM, we are stable at 16% roughly. Very pleased with those performance and fiscal discipline we've had with our net working capital. This slide is about our order backlog.
As you can see, our order backlog was NOK 573 in Q1 2025 and reduced to NOK 546 million in Q1 2026. Even though there's a reduction in total backlog, if you look at the light blue columns, our actual backlog has increased. The light blue column is the delivery in the current fiscal year. We've got started in Q1 2025 with a backlog for delivery in 2025 of NOK 472 million, and our current backlog for 2026 at the end of Q1 is NOK 509 million. We have a strong backlog going into the rest of the year. The evolution of the backlog between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, we can see the robotics segment backlog has increased significantly.
That is mainly driven by defense contracts we secured in 2025, carried over into 2026. Talking a bit more about our actual financials. Our revenue, our total revenue has decreased from NOK 345 million- NOK 327 million, and our gross margin has increased from 62% to 67%. The increase in gross margin is to do with our product mix being different in Q1 2026 compared to Q1 2025. Our adjusted EBITDA has decreased to 1% from 19%- 18%, that's within our guidance of 18%-20%, with our very long-term group target being 20%. Coming back to the FX effect.
Of course, as a group, international group, we have FX effects, and with the political upheavals we've seen, the dollar decreased by 12% on quarter-to-quarter, and pound decreased by 6% quarter-to-quarter. The monetary effects is in our case, actually, reporting where we converted from currency into NOK. From a management point of view, the USD and GBP effect was that our revenue for Q1 2026 was NOK 23 million lower on a like-for-like basis. Sorry, higher on a like-for-like basis. If you use the 2025 average FX rate and applied it to 2026, our 2026 revenue would have been NOK 23 million higher, basically on par with what we have reported for Q1 2025.
Having said that, the entities, which converted from local currency, for instance, in NOK from GBP and from USD, will have an effect on the bottom line with our current pressure with the FX movements. We are monitoring it, and we will take action as required going forward. Included in the results of Q1 2026 under other operating expenses is NOK 6 million transaction fees for the IPO. Just, if you're wondering why that is higher than the previous quarter. Overall, FTEs comparable. We were 334 FTEs in Q1 2025, and in Q1 2026, we are 380. Just so you can compare the movements between the quarters on the payroll as well. Other than that, a steady performance for us for Q1 on average. Profit and loss by segment.
In the Sensors segment, revenue has decreased from NOK 321 million- NOK 260 million. There's the, of course, the FX effect in that. The FX effect in the Sensors is NOK 15 million on the reporting side. Also, we mentioned that we had a backlog carryover in 2025. As you remember from the previous slide, you could see Q1 2025 being quite a strong quarter for us. Gross margin, stable-ish, at 61% versus 63%. Our gross EBITDA margin has decreased from 24%- 16%. That's the effect of our revenue reducing compared to our overheads. We are monitoring it. We don't think this is a long-term downward trend.
We report more on this in the next quarter to see if we can see a trend happening on that side. In the Robotics Segment, the revenues increased from NOK 25 million- NOK 73 million. The FX effect in the Robotics Segment was NOK 8 million on the reporting side. The increase is not just that. We delivered our backlog we secured in 2025 into 2026, and the Robotics is expected to continue on this trend for the rest of the year. Gross margin increased from 64%- 78%. That's the product mix as well. EBITDA from a negative 27% to a +40%. That's the segment side. Reporting on the balance sheet. Looking at our fixed asset side, the longer term.
Our CapEx for the quarter is NOK 19 million versus NOK 35 million in the previous comparative quarter. It's lumpy. It's nothing to read into that. That's normal for us going forward. Our guidance of 3%-4% of long-term revenue CapEx still stands. Of note is that we invested NOK 10 million in a company called Renca. It's a company in the States. It's an early investment. We will probably be committed to invest some more during the year, up to another NOK 3 million on a call-down basis. Regarding the evolution of the networking capital, we've already covered it in the previous slide. I'll skip that.
Looking at our long-term debt side, as mentioned before, we converted our USD and pound, and USD and pound loans into NOK, and we repaid the loan in April. The evolution in the equity is driven by our IPO. Looking at some of the appendixes for some additional information. This is about debt covenants. As mentioned before, debt's been paid back in April, and we adhere to all covenants. Can move on from this slide. Our shareholder overview. We do have a live listing, which updates on a daily basis on our website for up-to-date shareholder listing. Not much to say on this one either. Seasonal trends. This is of a lot of questions pre-IPO.
We didn't release any of our seasonal trend results at that stage since we were moving reporting tools, and we wanted to make sure what we report was accurate. In this slide, you can see we have 2023, 2024, and 2025 revenue numbers by quarter. If you look at the percentage, the percentage is the percentage of the quarter to the full-year results in the current year. As you can see, it's slightly lumpy from year to year, but if you look at the three-year average, it's very stable in that we have an average for Q1 of 23%-24%, and the same applies to Q2 and 3, while we have for Q4 an uptick as a normally a strong quarter at 29%. Hope that will help the analysts with our forecasting and their predictions. Just moving back a slide again.
If you take our Q1 2026 as a percentage of our forecasted revenue, NOK 1.5 billion, we'll hit 23%, which is in line of our previous quarters. We are aligned. On the IPO, we gave some indicative targets. This slide is the copy of what we presented before. There is no change. We are still predicting to achieve these results of NOK 1.5 billion for the year. Of course, we have challenges. We will not change our target at this stage. We are now entering the Q&A section. We will have some questions from the floor. We'll also have a look and see who's asked us online questions.
Øystein Elton Lodgaard, ABG. couple of question on the growth. growth was somewhat weaker now in the first quarters. Can you just say what do you kind of expect in terms of organic constant currency growth for the remainder of the year? Do you expect that to improve in the other quarters, given that you reiterated your full year guidance?
Well, I mean, since the overall goal is about the same, right? The underlying assumptions that we made before the IPO about the organic growth versus the M&A growth is about the same. The acquisition of MRV happened as we predicted, right after the IPO. Their contribution will probably be sort of the order of NOK 80 million-NOK 90 million, and then you can kind of do the calculations about what is the residual portion of it. As we said before, we're still maintaining our NOK 1.5 billion growth goal.
You know, what element of that is going to be organic, which one is going to end up be the FX effect and how you're going to look at that is going to be somewhat of a calculation that depends on what happens on the FX side in reality. I think the organic growth right now is compensating for FX effects in a way, right? If you said 6% FX effects over the course of the year, for example, took away the NOK 80 million, you get about NOK 120 million out of NOK 150 plus 6%, which would give you about 12%- 13%. That's sort of a very quick calculation. I don't think We're not seeing like huge changes in reality.
On Klein and SRS, which is now delivering on pretty large, contract backlogs, do you expect that to revenues in those two to be at the same level in Q2 or higher, lower? Can you give some indication on that?
My anticipation is that in that segment, we will see about the same deliveries in Q2 as we were doing in Q1.
Lastly, on the gross margin was pretty strong this quarter. Do you expect that to persist for the remainder of the year? Can you give some color on what you expect for the gross margin?
Well, I'm not gonna talk about the whole year, but for the next quarter, which is where we have visibility right now, is going to be very similar.
Thank you.
Okay. I'll read one of the questions.
Sure.
Yeah. How would you describe the current market conditions?
Well, it's a complex picture because there are so many elements to the market conditions. It is, you know, defense is maybe what fascinates me the most because we know there's a lot of activity, but it's also sort of a case where in the end, a lot of the money goes to very traditional funding. Whereas we are sort of, you know, we're not directly in the defense sector in the sense that we make things that go boom. We make things that support the defense sector in different areas. We still see a lot of interest from VC companies that are funding new defense contractors with large amounts of money.
Of course, who is actually going to get the contracts in the end is always a question. There's a lot of threats of large orders in the defense sector, especially for navigation purposes. The picture there is still uncertain in the long term in terms of what affect the smaller companies or how much of the defense increases will end up with the smaller companies. I think that's really the parameter that we don't know yet. On the science side, things are evolving, going geographically expansion, no really big sort of trends to see. It, you know, it traditionally is a very fairly slow increase year on year. We're sort of seeing the same kind of thing going on forward.
There's nothing. The question of science is more about adapting to what the scientists want to do, more so than the overall market, which is still steadily sort of moving upwards. On the operational side and the marine construction, marine operations segment, since some of the money is coming in a lumpy structure from leasing companies, it is going to be a little bit difficult to know exactly what the annual trends are based on one quarter. I think we're gonna have to come back to you a little bit later on and talk more about if there are sort of underlying trends or if it's really just quarterly lumpiness that we're seeing.
Right.
Long answer to a short question.
In line with that, any newly won awards, upcoming tenders for SRS and Klein?
They are both working on large orders in both in the U.S. and internationally. That's all I can say about it at this stage.
Okay. To do the Robotics Segment again. The strong gross margin in the Robotics Segment suggests that SRS gross margin has increased substantially. Is this a general price increase or is it solely related to the contract won in 2025 with the product mix here?
Yeah. The traditional margins in the Robotics Segments have always been quite high. Yes, it is related to the contracts that were won. They had that kind of margins also in a long time ago before. SRS is a special case because it went through a process where it lost significant orders back in 2022, 2023, and the company had to be rebuilt. In terms of increase in margin, they went from negative margins to positive. Obviously it was a nice increase. It actually is an expression of what typical margins are in that particular segment. As long as they have large contracts to deliver on, this is not atypical for a robotics company.
Okay. Thank you. Two questions. They sort of overlap. I'm gonna read them both.
Yeah. Are leasing companies becoming more constructive on the offshore energy market following the development in the Middle East? I think it's probably supposed to be, conservative maybe. As following on from that, how much of your needs do leasing companies typically constitute of the marine infrastructure exposure?
They typically are very heavily tilted towards the first quarter because their CapEx decisions are made in November, December, and then the orders are happening in January. Leasing companies' impact on revenue, and I think that was referenced in another company's presentation some time ago, is primarily in the first quarter. We'll see in the rest of the quarters they will have less of an impact. It's a lumpiness problem more so than anything else. They will obviously review their CapEx continuously. Since it was not very strong now in the first quarter, it may end up in Q2, Q3, Q4. It's really hard to predict in advance.
Okay. The next question is directed at me, but I'll read it out.
Can you quantify the FX effect in the quarter? Okay. I'll reiterate. The FX effect numbers I'm going to quantify is the reporting FX, where we convert the GBP and USD into NOK. Quarter-over-quarter using the 2025 FX rates, our quarter's revenue would've been higher NOK 23 million on a revenue basis in 2026. On a segment basis, the sensors would've been higher NOK 15 million and robotics would've been higher NOK 8 million. That is on a reporting basis, not on the operational. We do have FX contracts for operational cash flows and so on. We haven't quantified that. We only looked at our reporting side during this quantification. Okay. Let's see. There's one more question. How do you expect organic revenue growth in constant currency to develop for the remainder of the year?
Do you expect gross margins to remain at the current levels going forward, or were they positively impacted by one-off product mix effects in the quarter?
The delivery of the contracts in the defense sector is ongoing, I don't expect any significant changes in the gross margins in Q2. We'll see a little bit in Q3 and Q4. For Q2 predictions, I would give it sort of the same level. In terms of What was the other question?
Constant currency.
Constant currency. I don't know exactly what that means. I think about this in terms of volume, sort of volume growth. Obviously for volume purposes, It's always complicated, right? Because when you're looking at the total revenue number and the increase and decrease, it's a function of FX for sure. It's also about price increases. There's sort of underlying volume trends and mix trends as well. It's a pretty complicated picture. I think the fact that we're maintaining an overall goal of NOK 1.5 billion with the headwind from FX suggests that the underlying organic growth is still doing okay. That's my kind of the big message, I think, from the report today.
Yeah. A new question came in. What are the main factors General Oceans contribute to the acquired companies in order to make them grow and succeed?
What we're trying to accomplish, I think it's sometimes that it's always, you know, when you're running an international set of companies, it's always difficult to know what you intend to do and actually what the effect is. Obviously we are focusing on operational success within each individual company. If they have problems, technical and things like that, we will put resources or add resources from our international organizations to help people fix those things. We're looking at best practices by transferring people back and forth and looking at sort of how work is happening. We are very knowledgeable as a group about how you put together a proper sales and marketing system, we're adding those type of effects to individual companies, both in terms of resources, but also again, about best practices.
There's also an effect across the group of the fact that people are getting more attention because they're part of a group, so there's like an automatic sort of spillover effect. We're looking at the procurement side of it, experiences in international procurement, specifically procuring from China. Who are the best vendors? Who are the people that you want to talk to? E t cetera, et cetera. There's crossover effects there. Then there is a certain amount of alignment from the central organization in terms of people and making sure that we have the right people in the right place. There are significant effects, I would say, even though they usually take a long time to show up in the P&L.
Thank you. That was the last question.
Very good. Well.
With that then t hank you very much for your attention, and, we'll see you again in three months.
Thank you.