Acuvi has published a report for the third quarter of 2026, and joining me here in the studio is the CEO, Nils Sjöholm, joined by CFO Jens Lagergren. Welcome to you both.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
We will begin by overlooking the figures. Net sales came in at SEK 47 million, which is about SEK 10 million lower than last year. Our EBITDA is still negative, but to put it into perspective in last quarters, it is an improvement from a SEK 4.3 million loss to SEK 0.3 million loss. What has been the main drivers behind this improved profitability?
Well, compared to the quarters, as you ask, main driver is staff cost or personal cost. In Q2, we took the last major cost for the change of the CEO, for example. In Q3, we have the vacation period that reduces, naturally, the cost of staff. We also in Q2 had a SEK 2 million, sorry, adjustment of a previous project that we had to roll back, so to speak.
I would say those are the main comparisons when you look at last quarter.
We also have some positive effects from a better product mix. PiezoMotor doing well improves the gross margin overall for the group as well, so.
Considering the natures of these factors, can we count on them continuing to improving into Q4?
I would definitely say so.
Yeah.
What we're trying to establish here is a very nice baseline and an actual baseline for the company. Although we don't like to talk too much about one-time effects, they were there this time, but we truly believe that they are special character, special nature. We think that we're getting very close to representing the true baseline of the company.
We will talk about one-offs, however.
Yeah
Because there are a lot of them relating to previous periods, inventory adjustments, and also provision. If we exclude these items, adjusted EBITDA amounted to SEK 6.4 million. How accurately do you think that that represents the underlying profitability of Acuvi at this moment?
I think it represents us very well. The underlying business, as Nils was saying, is improving a lot. We have a better gross margin than we have had over the year. This is driven primarily by the growth of PiezoMotor, as we have mentioned several times during the year. I think SEK 6.4 million is a very accurate figure, actually, of what we could expect going forward.
These one-offs from prior periods, are they fully written- off now, or is there more to wait?
We have done a thorough analysis of our balance sheet, and my feeling is that no, that we have taken from previous period, especially from previous years now in Q3, the one-off effects there. That said, the obsolescence reserve booked in this quarter, it is only focused on PiezoMotor inventory, which is the largest part of the inventory. We have to do the same analysis of our two other legs, Sensapex and TPA Motion. That analysis is still to be done, but it is a smaller value.
We will look at PiezoMotor in just a moment, but before we do that, I would like to take a look at Acuvi more operationally as well. Nils, you mentioned that you are approaching a point where you can be more aggressive. What does that mean in practice, and where will you allocate resources?
We have been speaking about growing top- line since day one, and I think the visibility of the future has been a little bit cloudy. It was not very easy to know exactly where we are going, so we wanted to make sure that we have a stable cost level before we start spending money on being aggressive. I think what we are kind of seeing now in the report, the arrows are starting to point in the right direction, which allows us a few more degrees of freedom. I still do not want to go completely bananas and invest over our heads. I really see that we are at the point where we probably should not be waiting or holding off investments too long. The cost savings package that we have put in place needs to be balanced a little bit with some aggressive moves.
When I say aggressive moves, it is primarily on the sales side, and in this case, PiezoMotor and Sensapex firsthand because we have a new General Manager at TPA, and he is very new in the role, just two months pretty much. There is a little bit of time to get settled in there and understand the full picture and so on. For now and what we are seeing in the budget work that we have just begun getting into, we definitely see the opportunity to be a little bit more aggressive with the sales capacity on PiezoMotor and Sensapex.
Not quite yet, if I understood you correctly. You want to keep building a sustainable cost foundation. In coming from a period where you have been focused on that, to then go and say, Oh, now is the time to invest. How should we investors see to that?
First of all, I think we have been moving in the right direction, and this report gives us a little bit more confidence that we are actually getting to that point. I would say that we are prepared to maybe accelerate a little bit more, very cautiously, but a little bit more than I had anticipated half year ago. This means now that we have to trade off or balance the cost savings with the aggressiveness and growth potential that we see, trying to chase that. It probably will not be SEK 10 million net that we were speaking about in the past because we need to add a couple of resources on the sales side, and I think that is very well justified seeing how the sales numbers are growing.
When we do the budget work, we're looking into the business units, and we can really see that that potential that we've been talking about, it's beginning to appear in front of our eyes. I don't want to say that it's already in front of us, but we clearly know how to chase it and where to chase it.
The tricky question is then, when?
Oh, I would say that we're starting immediately. As soon as we get through the budget process, I think we want to have the consolidated view for the whole group before we give everyone a go ahead. But other than that, we're ready.
Mm-hmm. Jens, do you want to fill in there?
No, just agreeing.
All right. Looking at your cash flow then, it came in at SEK 10.2 million for the first nine months. We will put this into perspective and compare that to last year, that was SEK -27.5 million. So, there is a clear improvement there, and much of this comes from working capital. How much more can you improve cash flows that way?
As we talked about the inventory, we continue our work with improving inventory management and inventory control, and I think we can further reduce our inventory levels and free cash flow from that one. Q3 was exceptional when it comes to cash flow. The distributor business that ended in the U.S., with the last deliveries in Q3, where we sold out the remaining inventory without buying new stuff because, of course, the business has ended. That generated a large amount of positive cash flow. So, we will not see the same. Look at the full-year cash flow, almost everything is generated same value in generating Q3. So, we will not see the same, but that said, the underlying business here, as we have been mentioning many times, is improving continuously. The contribution from that, I expect to generate a positive cash flow going forward. Not at this level, of course.
There are some questions in regards to this in the chat, and we picked up some from your forums as well. How much of Q3's cash flow improvement is sustainable when the inventory has normalized? Which level of investments do you need in 2027?
Yeah. That is a tricky question, of course, to come with specific numbers. If you look at our investments today, we have been very restrictive in especially capitalized own development compared to last year. We are looking into some projects going forward for that. That would require some investments. Instead, I would say instead of doing a shotgun approach, we are doing more the sniper approach and picking the real projects that we really think can have a positive impact for going forward.
From the chat also, when do you expect sustainable positive cash flows without these effects of the inventory?
In the future.
Yes.
We had the same question last quarter, I think, and I do not want to put a specific quarter when we will be there. As I said then, I can say again, we continuously improve, and we want to see an improvement quarter by quarter going forward. That is our main goal right now.
Mm-hmm. Nils?
Can I just add on the investment topic?
Of course.
Because what we've seen at TPA, especially, is that it was a very well-run, optimized, effective business. It was also profitable to a degree where you could say that you're running the equipment to the end of their lifetime, basically. So, we definitely see some need for investment in machinery, more so at TPA than other places. But yes, there will be some investments needed.
There's a question also from the viewers. How big is the remaining net sales effect that TPA must compensate during 2027, and how much is covered by existing orders?
The distribution order or customer that you're referring to, I assume, was a $5 million business, and we're looking at an effect - $2 million for this year and minus another then $3 million next year. It's not actually just that business, but there was also another customer that placed a huge order with about $1.2 million at TPA last year. We didn't lose them, but it's just that they're still evaluating this huge installment that they did. We're not having that business this year either. Yet we're looking to bridge that gap for this year. But you're right, we have a headwind of another $3 million for next year. I think we're on the right track to bridging that as well, but it's a little bit early, and we know there's a lot of work needed to get that done.
You mentioned in the report that there are new customers and projects being added every month. Could you give us a more granular look? How does the pipeline look like right now?
Okay, I can't tell you exactly how the pipeline looks, but I'll tell you what we've already communicated. We add about 20 paying new customers each quarter. I was doing a calculation exercise this morning on that. If we can grow 10% of those new customers into becoming a top 20 customer for us, that means we'd add about 30% of the top- line. This is how important it is to keep adding new customers. All of them are pretty small today. There's a couple that would reach over $100,000, but most of them are smaller than that when they're new. Then we have to work with them to ramp- up. In two, three years' time, I think that's something that we could hope for, to put them in the top 20, for instance.
Monitoring this number is really important, and that's also why I want to share that number with you, because hopefully we can also see that that number increases quarter by quarter. I was talking about this all the time, that it's really important to add new customers. This is a business with very long sales cycles, so you got to fill that cabinet of good stuff, right?
Mm-hmm. Moving on then, the PiezoMotor, you mentioned that operations there, and as well in Asia in general, is developing nicely. What is a primary driver behind this?
There's two things, two answers to your question. One is that PiezoMotor is doing really well. I think it has several components into it. One is that we're bridging or we're putting together the team in one place. Jens and I both moved to the production unit not long ago, and this increases communication between people and builds teams, and bridges knowledge gaps. It makes knowledge transfer possible, and so on. That's been one thing. The second thing is that we have a new sales team at PiezoMotor, and they are far more proactive. We've been talking about the CRM system, which was an important part for us. Now we're really seeing how our pipeline adds up, how we're not missing customers that fall between chairs, and so on. These things all contribute to making that difference.
When it comes to Asia, I really think that having a local presence makes a big difference. We've seen that not only in terms of a couple new customers that put the trust in Acuvi, but also customers that were sort of declining over the last couple of years. They're now ramping up and increasing again, and I think it builds confidence and trust when you're available to take care and provide support and help when needed, not waiting for the next day or not even sometimes maybe responding in timely manner and so on. It's common sense to a large extent, but making sure that we are on top of these things and don't let things slip through.
From the chat, what were PiezoMotor actual Q3 revenue and order intake, and how much of the new business has converted into recurring volume orders?
It's a discussion that we're having with the board on whether we should be transparent on each of the business units or not going forward. If you remember in H1 or after Q2, I did share how PiezoMotor was doing, and I showed a graph. Then we showed 100% increase in H1, and I said that I think we can make 50% for the full- year. I will stick to that story as well. I'm pretty confident that we will either achieve or overachieve 50% growth for PiezoMotor. And probably then if you do your maths, you can sort of roughly estimate where we're at. But I'll leave it at that.
There's three areas that's highlighted. It's motorized precision stages, there's Sensapex, and there's U.S. Department of Defense for future orders. Is there any indication of the size, timeframe, and whether these potential orders could be recurring or not?
For the stages, that was the first thing you mentioned, that's a new collaboration. That's going to take a little bit of time before we see any major ramp- up. It's also the type of product where we don't expect huge framework orders that cover several years of business ahead of us. So most likely, first customers will start buying a couple of stages and then adding on a few quarter by quarter. But when it comes to Sensapex, it's a little bit different because their customers are smaller, but they have very many. I think Sensapex has about 1,000 customers all in all. But they're very small, each and every one of them. However, we are moving into the IVF field.
It's been talked about and mentioned in the past, but now it's really happening. I'm also happy to say that we have a new partner or customer who is implementing the Sensapex micromanipulators for the IVF products, for their products, which they are launching next year. It's not just talk, it's really something that's happening, and that could really be reoccurring revenue that we could probably discuss as such. Your last one was the defense. We have several ongoing, really big defense orders right now, so we're still delivering on them for a few more years.
What Gary, our new General Manager at TPA, is doing is that he's looking into how we can potentially lift all quality aspects of TPA, and by doing so, we would be eligible to get certifications at a higher level, which would then mean that we are susceptible for defense contracts that require a higher degree of quality management, basically. That would definitely be something that would be reoccurring then in such case.
Finally then, what should investors keep their eye out for when it comes to Acuvi in the next 6-12 months?
I really want to stress the fact that if you look at how we've been communicating since a year back, that's when I took over, we were pretty clear in the first reports or the annual report, saying that we're now putting the strategy together. We are convinced about the potential, but we need the strategy in place to achieve that or grasp the potential. Going forward, in Q1 and Q2, we were talking a lot about all the different processes that we're implementing, the structures that we're building, and all these things, and I think now is really a good time to see that the arrows are pointing in the right direction. Still at a very early stage, but I think this is proof that what we have done now for the last quarters are starting to pay off.
I think when you listen to what the management wants to achieve, looking at top line, looking at cash flow, this should build trust, in my opinion, because we said this from day one and we stick to it today, and you can really see that it's actually those arrows that are starting to turn, right? I'm totally honest about the headwinds that we have, like the one that you mentioned, but I'm also convinced that we can bridge those if we work really hard. I would still keep an eye on top- line and cash flow, to be honest.
Jens, do you want to add to that?
No, I agree with that. I mean, top- line and cash flow. Cash flow, at the end of the day, that's what drives shareholder value. That's our focus, to sustain ourselves, our own development, our own investments with our own cash flow. That's something one should look out for as an investor.
Jens Lagergren and Nils Sjöholm, thank you very much for being here and answering our questions.
Thank you.
Thank you for having us.