Welcome to the Green Landscaping Group Q3 presentation 2026. For the first part of the presentation, 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. Please begin your meeting.
Okay, everybody. Welcome to Green Landscaping Group Q3 report 2026. Presenters today will be Marcus Holmström, our brilliant CFO, and myself, Clein Ullenvik, interim CEO. This is my first quarterly report as an interim CEO. I joined Friday, July 17th, the worst period to start if you really want to hit the floor running, since it was in the middle of the vacation period. But I managed to spend the week after in Lithuania getting to know that team. In just a few seconds, I know several of you in this call, but my background is ABB, 12 years. Ahlsell, seven years. Monier, five years. Swedol, Alligo, 13 years. My intention was to start working through boards, but here I am. More importantly, this is a little bit like coming home for me. I grew up in a family that ran a landscaping groundworks business.
My entire childhood, I spent weekday evenings and weekends filling up diesel tanks, helping my father weld something or fix something on the machines. So this is like coming home in a way. It is a report-heavy day, so we will bring up just a few topics, be reasonably quick, open up for questions, and then we can move on with the day as it is. What we will do going forward is to try to bring up one or two different themes to be more transparent and to educate all the listeners a little bit more about the Green Landscaping Group. So it could be different themes, one or two per quarterly report. This time it will be, of course, quite focused on what we have been doing these few weeks to start with. So just an orientation. Green Landscaping Group is a home for entrepreneurs.
We work in ground maintenance and space management, landscaping. Large attractive market, and we have a history of successful entrepreneurship. Looking at the map, it is roughly one third each Norway, Sweden, and other Europe. So we also have businesses in Lithuania and even one company in Switzerland. This was a timeline I did when I joined in the middle of the vacation period, as I said. I was a little stressed that we had a leaders' conference already since before planned for 24th to 26th September, but it turned out it was a good timing. So we tried to hit the floor running, did a lot of things. Had a board strategy day on September 14th, then we got a sign-off on the activities we wanted to do.
We had to communicate on September 22nd about some restructuring costs and a little update on what we have been doing. We will come back to that shortly. We had the leaders' conference 24th to 26th September in Mainz, which was, as it turned out, a brilliant timing because we had come that far in many different aspects, so we could launch it and discuss it in the Mainz conference and go home and be 100% aligned. As it turned out, the timing was brilliant. Today, October 23rd, the Q3 report. This has been the timeline we have been working along up to today. Tomorrow we start with batch number two, but let's come back to that in the future. What we did during the hectic days in the middle of the summer, we established a new vision.
We want to be Europe's leading group for sustainable outdoor environments through local entrepreneurship. What we do is quite obvious, where we operate the Nordic, Baltic, and the DACH region, and we compete through strong local entrepreneurship. Also very important on this slide is the core values. Our type of business is not only allocating capital, it is also trying to be aligned with us working in the group. Our core value says accountability, simplicity, and community. I will come back to the word community a little bit later because that is a bit of a change to how we run the company today. This is a slide, actually. If we look back to prior 2018, Green Landscaping Group was very much centralized and coordinated. The feeling back then, I guess, was that it didn't get the financial outcome that was expected and wanted.
Over time, the company has moved down to being decentralized, which is good, and uncoordinated, which presents some opportunities. For us going forward, we say we want to keep the decentralization, of course. It is our local heroes who is going to win in the local markets. There is potential and also need and also a want to be more coordinated how we work. That was quite obvious when we met in Mainz that is actually something the companies want and expect, which is good. Looking at the right-hand side of this slide, if we start from below start to communicating more. We didn't even have an intranet, but we do now, where we share projects we won, experiences, we put in policies.
We are gathering around this intranet, which has been launched a couple of weeks ago, share technology, and be more transparent when it comes to data, to get a better grip quicker on what's happening. We are fine-tuning a little bit the M&A process, how we do acquisitions, how we want to structure them. Cash flow, of course, the number one focus area at the moment for obvious reasons. Green Book. We have a playbook, of course. We want to have that as simple as possible, as meaningful as possible, bringing as much value as possible, and I think we are well on our way to fine-tune that to become just that. The governance structure. What are you allowed to do on different levels to get acceptance for projects and investments and so forth?
As we communicated, we have a new management team in place, having now welcomed our four country managers into the management team. Jan Lervik, Country Manager Norway, Tapio Sundholm, Country Manager Finland & Baltics, and Matthias Asdonk, Country Manager DACH, and Jakob Körner, Country Manager Sweden, in parallel with being COO. By doing that, we will have more business focus in the management team, but we will also have an easy way to implement things. Since we agree in the management team, our strong country managers ensures that it is being implemented in their respective countries. Since before, we had Marcus, of course, in the management team, Daniel Linderståhl, Head of Performance, and Jacob was already in the management team. Then a guy at the top trying to keep up with these youngsters' speed. This was the press release.
During those hectic weeks, we just tried to turn all stones and see what was under them. We had to communicate us doing this. The first point is quite obvious. Cost for changing CEO is a quite obvious one. Then we had a restructuring cost related to some group functions, but that is, in a way, a good investment since it saves us SEK 10 million. So SEK 6 million in cost gives us SEK 10 million lower cost run rate per year. Then we have some project write-downs in two different Swedish companies, two different projects dating back actually quite a few years. One of them back to 2021 even. But it is a typical effect when smaller companies taking larger projects and losing grip of them, and then time goes and the visibility has not really been there. The local management has hoped that it would fix itself, but it has not.
Then we also have a write-down in a company in Germany. It is actually not a project write-down, it is the acquisition write-down, which we have actually reported to the police. From our perspective, it is criminality, to be frank. We also communicated that all the changes we are doing, we are doing under the umbrella of Green Performance. So new organizational structure, cost reductions, focus on projects, getting data transparency, launching the Green Book. It is all under the umbrella Green Performance because it is aimed at improving our performance. This is not me showing vacation photos. It is just to show that this is not a one-man show, it is not a two-man show.
This is our local heads from our companies around the group when we met in Germany in September, and that was a super important meeting because we launched everything we want to do, and I think and feel and know we got a brilliant sign-off. So even if it is me and Marcus in this presentation, it is this team who will do a big part of the job and succeed in their local markets. Very good. Handing over to you, Marcus.
Perfect. Thank you, Clein, and I will cover the financial part of the presentation. The third quarter showed net sales growth of 11%, totaling at SEK 1.8 billion, bringing our rolling 12 months to SEK 6.8 billion. In the quarter, we had organic growth, at 3%. It was the third consecutive quarter where we reported organic growth, and we are very pleased to see that trend at group level, despite it being a mixed development on segments, which I will come to on the next few slides. Adjusted EBITA amounted to SEK 123 million, compared to SEK 135 million last year. We note that profitability improvement in Sweden. Meanwhile, continued price pressure in Norway put the weight on the profitability, and other Europe continued to deliver solid earnings, supported by positive developments in Germany and Finland. The adjusted EBITA margin quarter came in at 6.9%, and at rolling 12 months, we are now at 6.3%.
As Clein already have framed it under the launch of Green Performance, we are not satisfied with the overall financial performance, and we remain strongly focused to improving our operational execution to bring the profitability to the level we expect. I will go into cash flow more in details also on the upcoming slides, but the cash flow from operating activities totaled at SEK 28 million compared to SEK 47 million last year. The third quarter is a quarter where we traditionally do not release that much working capital, even if we are working intensively to adjust the working capital profile in the group. Adjusted financial leverage increased sequentially and compared to last year, and concluded at 3.5 x. Encouragingly, we saw the order backlog amounting to SEK 8.5 billion, which is an increase.
However, as we always iterate, the order backlog varies between quarters and should not be seen as a leading indicator in short-term. Turning to our segments more in detail, in Sweden, the market remained tough. Companies focused on green space management and maintenance were affected by weaker demand for alteration and variance orders in the quarter, which ultimately led to lower volumes. On the other side, from a market point of view, it is encouraging to see that we have early signs of fewer bidders on the contracts that we are bidding for. This may indicate that we have a gradual move towards a more balanced market condition going forward, even if the next few quarters will be important to see it in the numbers also.
Net sales in the quarter decreased by 7%, and that was then organically - 4%, but also the divestiture of Svensk Jordelit in the beginning of the year impacted 3%. Adjusted EBITA increased 57% compared to last year, and SEK 19 million compared to SEK 12 million. It is very positive to see that the initiatives we have now worked for a long while are yielding positively. However, the lower volumes in part of the organization impacted negatively. So it is positive signs, but still work to do ahead. When we turn to Norway. Norway has been a tough market for us during several quarters. From a market point of view, it has been very high competition. The landscaping and construction market remained weak in the quarter, but our companies managed to secure volume.
But it is too high price pressure, therefore we see strong growth of 16%, whereof 9% organic. But at the same time, our EBITA decreased to SEK 25 million compared to SEK 36 million last year. Some of the businesses had a clear positive development in the quarter. Meanwhile, some of the entities we have earlier mentioned, which are facing challenges, are continuing to weigh the profitability. But worth mentioning that a year ago, we had one company really standing out in the portfolio, and we have put strong actions into it, that company is now on the right track and continue to deliver good progress compared to where they were a year ago. Also worth mentioning under segment Norway is that we have now strengthened the leadership platform within the country led by Jan Lervik.
While profitability remains below our ambition, the overall trend is moving in the right direction in the local business. In Other Europe, a bit of a mixed market landscape within the countries we are present under the umbrella of Other Europe. Finland remained challenging, although we are also there seeing early signs of recovery as we see the broader construction market is gradually increasing. Lithuania has been and continue to be a market with solid demand. Meanwhile, the market in Germany remains to be weak, but the resilience of our German entities the past couple of years has been proven and continue to be proven solid. In the quarter, Other Europe increased net sales with 29%, mainly acquisition driven, but also in combination with stable organic growth of 5%. EBITA amounted to SEK 91 million, compared to SEK 96 million last year.
The profitability in Germany and Finland improved compared to last year. Meanwhile, Lithuania was behind last year, and it was driven through that we had somewhat lower volumes than expected under the contract that was renewed in the end of Q2 this year. But we are expecting activity in Lithuania to increase going forward. With that said, I will turn to where we, as Clein also mentioned, have our main focus, in combination with driving profitable improvement, cash flow and cash generation is the top priority for us at group level and at company level. Cash flow from operating activities amounted to SEK 28 million, bringing our 12-month rolling cash flow from operations to SEK 364 million compared to SEK 390 million last year. We continue our efforts to improve our working capital profile and through strengthening our financial governance, clear performance oversight, and discipline operational follow-up.
I want to really make the remark that we have come a long way, but we are not completing that exercise. But we see underlying positive trends within the portfolio and are expecting that we should deliver on a large portion of the remaining during the next two quarters here. As Clein also framed it, cash flow generation is a central part under the improvement program of Green Performance. In addition, we have a seasonal cash flow, and we are now in Q4, and following that, Q1, which is, from a seasonal point of view, our strongest cash flow quarters. We are expecting that we will deliver according to historical working capital releases in those quarters. Financial leverage. Adjusted financial leverage amounted to 3.5 x in the quarter compared to 3.0 last year, and it remains to be above our target.
In a steady state scenario, our ambition is to deliver through operational cash flow in combination with our underlying improvement activities from a result perspective. I can also confirm that we have headroom to our financial covenants in the loan agreement from where we are ending the quarter. The cash flow, as said, remains the priority for us to start deleveraging ahead. From a financial overview, we did a lot of refinancing activities during 2025. We refinanced our loan agreements with the bank, SEB, DNB, and SEK. We also issued our first senior unsecured bond of SEK 500 million last year. All of them are maturing at the end of 2028, but we have the option to extend the bank loans by additional two. That remains optional for us in the agreement.
Per quarter end, we have cash available at SEK 495 million, and we have unutilized credit facilities amounting to SEK 239 million. So available liquidity is there for the group. A concluding financial slide. Looking at our financial targets, we are very pleased to see the growth trajectory we have and the trend we have had during the past couple of quarters and can now say that we are delivering in accordance with the growth target of 10%, a combination of acquisition and organic growth. We are not satisfied with the 6.3% on Adjusted EBITA margin level, and therefore we have now framed the Green Performance program to accelerate the improvements in the business to return to our target. Also, adjusted financial leverage at 3.5 x is above our financial target and remains our key focus to bring back to the levels where we want us to be at over time.
We also have a fourth financial target, which is distribution of dividends, but AGM in May this year, in accordance with previous year, decided to not distribute any dividends to the shareholders. With that said, I will, together with Clein, open up for questions.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key six on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
Okay. Let's say that we are well on our way, but there is a lot to do ahead of us. We know what to do, and we will for sure do that. We have a good spirit in the team. I should have said that earlier. That is my super reflection, that the team is super psyched to take on this challenge going forward. I am confident that this journey has only started, and thank you for listening in. Take care.
Thank you all for joining today, and see you in Q4.