Welcome to the Beijer Alma Q3 2026 report presentation. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions- and- answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key five on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers. CEO Johnny Alvarsson and CFO Peter Forslund, please go ahead.
Thank you. You are welcome to this webcast. I am still around, as you can hear, but yesterday we announced that there is a successor now decided. That is Per-Johan Dahlgren will come within six months. It might be earlier than six months, that we do not know yet. I have been deeply involved in the interview with different candidates, and I think we have a very good candidate now who will take over after me and run this business. He has experience from similar businesses. He has been in real industry, he has been out abroad, living in China and so forth. I will look forward when he is coming in and replacing me. Then if we go to the outcome of the quarter, I try always to deliver better than last quarter, and so we did this year as well.
If we look at the markets around the world, start in China, in our segments, it is a good market in China. We are supplying both to medical, but also to cooling system for these new chips. That is a growing market, and it is amazing how much money there is in a small spring to these connections. That means there is enormous investments doing in the AI centers around the world now. If we go to the other side of Atlantic Ocean to United States, it is also for us a good market, actually. The general market, we have four companies there, has been growing nicely. We saw that start already after Q1 this year, after a very slow Q4 last year. So that looks very good. If we go then over to Europe, and then we talk about Central Europe except the Nordic, is more stable business.
Not so much happening. It is about the same level as the other quarters this year where we are working, actually. So we are waiting for a wake-up in Europe when it will come. If we go to the Nordic, it is more bright situation also. It is not fast-growing, but it is slowly growing upwards. That we can see in our volumes and in our results. Then if you look at the other areas of us, we have the aftermarket, springs for cars.
That has been slow. It has been slow for the whole year, and that especially connected to U.K. That is a big market for us. As always, the reasons is a little bit unclear, but we know that two years ago it was a very good market. That means a lot of people changed springs on their old cars. Now, there has been a very soft winter last year.
That means there is not so much demand for replacing springs on the cars. The same goes actually for the Nordic, but it's still a sustainable business, but not as good as sometimes are. If you look at the other companies in Beijer Tech, the Niche companies are performing extremely well. They're located in the Nordics, but they are selling around the world in their Niche. There we have some companies who have very big orders coming in and also a very high performance for the business. So it's a mixed situation for the demand side, but also the strength of this type of companies, Beijer Alma, is that we are in so many different areas. If someone is down, there is always someone else who is up. We have been not doing any acquisitions this quarter.
We didn't do any acquisitions in first quarter, but we'll see what's happening in Q4. I expect some acquisitions coming up. We have a good backlog of acquisition targets, so there will be things coming up in Q4. Shall we go to capital efficiency or the margin? I've told some of you that I expect the margin for Beijer Components should be 20%, and we are almost there now. I expect that Beijer Tech will also grow their margin to sometime 50%, I expect. We're not there yet. We're almost on target is capital efficiency, where we have communicated that we should have 50%, and we are now on 49.8%. The EBITDA growth should be 50% over the year, and now we have outperformed that, actually.
I'm very satisfied with the situation and all the performance done in the companies, and it always shows that this model by letting people take responsibility around the world works very well. If you set the targets and they are trying to do their best, then we are performing. By this, I give the word to Peter.
Thank you, Johnny, for that. We move on a little bit to the financial performance, and we'll deep dive in a number of areas. Looking firstly at the sales bridge, we are up 11% year-over-year with a good Q3 growth coming mainly from acquisitions in Beijer Tech, but also we have a portion of organic, and we have finally some currency with us rather than against us. We also see that on the full year, currency is still on the negative side. It's a very strong order booking situation in the quarter. If you look a little bit closer to it, you will see that we, in Beijer Tech and especially in the Fluid, we have a one-time order. It's a recurring customer within the Fluid segment that has placed larger than normal orders.
We have singled that out because that drives a portion of the significant organic growth that we have in Beijer Tech. Generally, organic growth in order book is good. We have said also before that it is slightly volatile in the Beijer Tech side that we also see this quarter. The organic growth in Beijer Tech is slightly slower. We have had the 8% over a long period of time, the 12 months, so we are now facing tougher comparisons on the Beijer Tech side when it comes to the organic growth. Moving on a little bit into Beijer Components and singling out a couple of things in here. We talked about chassis springs, and Johnny mentioned that demand is slightly lower than last year, which we think is also true for the third quarter.
Although, we are going to relocate one of the distribution center, the one that we have in Hagen in Germany. We are moving to a new location. The current distribution center is too small to handle the volumes that we are now seeing, and that means that we have some pre-buy effect here in the third quarter where, both on the order side but also on the delivery side, that we have stronger numbers than we would have presented otherwise. We think the market hasn't moved much since Q2, but we get kind of a pre-buy effect. Then of course, we will be slightly lower sales in Q4 on the other side. The move will happen 1st of December, and we should be up and running again 1st of January. But it is difficult to predict exactly how those effect will fall.
I think we can also say that in Components, we have a broad profitability improvement. It comes from many areas. It is not one or two companies doing very well. It is a broad profitability improvement. We have also talked quite a lot about Alcomex the last two years. First of all, we are satisfied that we think we are in a phase with Alcomex that is more stable and profitability has now improved further, meaning that we are above the 10% EBIT mark for Alcomex, which is good. We also have two one-time effects in Beijer Components. First, we have an insurance compensation that we have received, and then we also have two actions, one related to Alcomex, but also one related to the European Standard Spring business that we have taken in this quarter. These are actions that we take to drive profitability.
We see that there is still work to do in Alcomex, and we hope that we are nearing the end in terms of these actions, but we feel it is best to take it now and look forward. When it comes to the Standard Springs, this was an operation set up a couple of years ago. We have a very strong Standard Spring business within the Nordics, but the market looks slightly different in Europe, and we are going back to a more not a centralized model. We are going to push it back out to the local companies within the European region. But that means we are going to close the distribution center for Standard Springs. Great. Let's move on to Beijer Tech. I think Johnny mentioned fairly well where we are in the Beijer Tech side.
Industrial, we see a stable development, but quite a varied demand between the companies. Fluid is in a good and stable level, and Niche is doing fine. Margins are generally higher in Q3 based on the seasonality. As I said, the organic growth of 1% comes also from a very strong last year, but also that some of the project companies especially in Niche had slightly higher invoicing last year than this year. Generally, we don't see a big shift in the market in any way in Beijer Tech, but it moves a little bit. As I said, the order intake is also moving a little bit up and downwards from time to time. We move to the cash flow and some other metrics. Strong cash flow in the quarter.
Here you will have the positive effect that we see from the insurance compensation that we've received also in the quarter. But it's also that during this year, we have already invested SEK 42 million in rebuilding the facilities, and we also invested in 2025. So seen over a little bit of time, yes, it's a positive effect in this quarter, but we have also had outflows connected to this. Capital efficiency, close to target. Hopefully, we can reach the target next year, but the important thing is that we continue to work. Okay, now we are there at group level. Now we need to make sure we are there in both subsidiaries and after that in as many companies as possible that we can drive up the capital efficiency.
Moving to financial positions, with no acquisition in this quarter and net activity comes down, then also helped by the strong cash flow means that we are at the net activity at 1.4x, meaning that we have a good financial position for continuing to do acquisitions. So we have the possibilities if the right target arises here in the coming quarters. Great. With that, Johnny, I'll leave back to you a little bit on acquisitions.
Okay. Well, as you have seen, we have put more resources on acquisition during last years and can also see the number of acquisitions has slightly been increasing, but the goal is to come up to much higher level. We recruited, as I probably told you earlier, two more persons in beginning of second quarter this year. It takes about six to eight months before you can see any outcome of that. So that means, with that calculation, there should be some outcome now in the fourth quarter, and I expect it that way. So we are now building up a backlog for the coming years and for this quarter four as well.
Great. As you remember, we did five acquisitions so far this year. With that, I think we can move to the Q&A slide.
Yeah
Take the Q&A.
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Well, then I'll say thank you for listening. I know there is enormous amount of reports today, so I guess our usual questionnaires are not available. They're probably sitting in some other conference calls.
Or we were unusually clear.
Yeah. Yeah. That could be also. Basically, going the way we have been doing for some quarters now. There is no big surprises. Going in the right direction. We would like to say thank you for listening to us.
Thank you. We come back in next year.
Thank you. Bye.