Stay and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Hexagon Q3 Report 2025 webcast and conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to our first speaker today, Anders Svensson, President and CEO of Hexagon. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to our third quarter 2025 earnings presentation. Today, we have an extended session with a bit of a different format. I will take a moment now in the beginning just to walk you through how it will work. In a moment, I will start by taking you through the third quarter performance, first from a group perspective, and then focus on Hexagon Core business performance in the third quarter. I will then hand over to Mattias Stenberg, the CEO of our potential spin-off company, Octave, and he will talk about the Octave performance during the quarter. Mattias will then hand over to Norbert Hanke, our Interi`m CFO, who will cover the financials for Hexagon Group in a bit more detail.
Following this, I will take an additional roughly 20 minutes or so to discuss my initial thoughts for my first full quarter at Hexagon, including also immediate priorities, with a focus then also here on Hexagon Core. We will then, of course, open up for questions and answers. Starting then with our third quarter performance, I start directly on the highlights. In the third quarter, we made solid progress in our financial metrics and delivered a great deal of operational progress. Organic growth was 4%, with growth driven strongly by demand in autonomous solutions and also across some of the other customer segments, such as aerospace and defense, electronics, machine control, mining, and general manufacturing. Operating margins strengthened quarter on quarter despite that Q3 is normally our seasonally weakest quarter, but it remained below our targeted levels.
Across Hexagon Group, we have identified a cost efficiency program, which is being in action now and will begin to benefit margins gradually from the coming quarter, the fourth quarter, and will then have full effect by the end of 2026. Cash conversion in the quarter was good at 77%, considering that Q3 is normally the weakest quarter in the year. We remained on course to achieve our annualized targets of 80% - 90%. We also made some strategic operational moves during the quarter. We have previously announced the sale of our D&E business in Manufacturing Intelligence to Cadence for EUR 2.7 billion, and we made some changes to the executive leadership team ahead of the potential separation of Octave. This separation is still on track for the first half year of 2026.
I will talk more about these changes in a moment, but first I will walk you through the announcement where we are addressing our cost issue. At my first call during the second quarter reports, I committed to review the cost base of Hexagon to address the recent challenges in our operating margins. Across Hexagon Group, we have identified EUR 110 million of potential savings, with around EUR 74 million being related to Hexagon Core and EUR 36 million being related to Octave. As I said, we expect to see these benefits gradually, starting from the fourth quarter this year and then with full effect at the end of next year. The cost to achieve these efficiencies will be around EUR 113 million.
In Hexagon Core, we also conducted a review of our balance sheet, where we identified a charge of EUR 186 million related to primarily innovation in history and also some other items like inventory and discontinued products. These charges were also taken during the third quarter. I am very confident that these situations will be less likely in the future, as I expect our businesses to manage their profit and loss and balance sheet within normal operations. Key steps we are taking here are to give divisions full accountability for financial performance. It will also enable operational and product decisions to be taken closer to customers to ensure a market fit and that customer needs are met. We are also strengthening our governance for approvals and review systems, and we are implementing a new performance management system to enable swift response. I now turn to recent changes to our executive team.
We have announced that David Mills is stepping down as CFO from Hexagon for personal reasons, and he will be replaced on an interim basis by Norbert Hanke until we find a permanent replacement. We did not want to see David go, but I understand the reasons and he has my full support. I am very happy that David has agreed to remain available for us for the next six months as a financial advisor and that we also have a very competent and knowledgeable interim replacement here with Norbert. We have also announced that on the separation of Octave, Ben Maslen and Tony Zana will transition to the Octave leadership team, where Ben will be the CFO and Tony will be Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary. Ben and Tony have been key members of the Hexagon executive team for many years and still are.
While I'm sorry to see them go, I'm also delighted to see them progress into these new roles with Octave. I have no doubt that they will be instrumental in driving value for Octave and embrace the future that this company is going into as an independent listed company. I'm pleased to announce that replacing Ben is Andreas Wenzel. Andreas joins us from ABB, where he has held a number of senior roles, including Head of Strategy and M&A. Replacing Tony will be Thomas de Muynck who joins us from Jones Day, where he was the head of the Brussels practice. Thomas joined us early in this month, and I'm very happy to welcome him on board to the team. Turning now to the next slide, I will talk briefly on the decision to sell our D&E business.
In early September, we announced the sale of our D&E business to Cadence for EUR 2.7 billion. The engineering and simulation market has been consolidating rapidly, and electronic design and automation suppliers, EDA suppliers, have been increasingly taking a leading role in this consolidation. We are then consolidating with physical simulation suppliers like our own D&E business, and we have seen this with other companies like Siemens, Altair, and Synopsys, Ansys. This is a trend which is very difficult for Hexagon to follow. It is therefore better that we dedicate our time and attention to our core, which is precision measurement, positioning, and autonomy technologies, where we can use our market leadership position to drive best in peer group growth and margin levels. Just to make it very clear for everyone, this is not an exit from software at Hexagon.
Post the potential separation of Octave and the sale of D&E, Hexagon software and services revenue will still account for above 40% of revenues and 25% recurring revenues, and we expect these amounts to continue to grow also in the future. The funds released by the transaction, expected to be in the amounts of EUR 1.4 billion, will help support us to build and develop our businesses while also maintaining a very robust balance sheet. We expect the transaction to close during the first quarter of 2026. I'm now turning to the next section, and that's the financial performance of Hexagon Core in the third quarter. I move directly into that. Hexagon Core, that means excluding Octave business, grew by 5% organic in the third quarter with an adjusted operating margin of 27%. This is a solid financial performance in challenged end-market environments.
I will now turn into a focus on Manufacturing Intelligence. MI reported revenues of EUR 445 million, representing 3% organic growth versus 2024. There was a strength in general manufacturing and electronics, and it was somewhat offset by continued soft demand within automotive. There was growth across all geographies with good demand in the Americas and growth also in EMEA, where automotive weakness was offset by a strong demand in aerospace. China also grew with 3% in the quarter, strength within electronics and general manufacturing, but signs of weaknesses also here within automotive. The division reported EUR 112 million EBIT and an operating margin then of 25.1%, and it was impacted by some negative currency effects. In fixed currency, if you compare the margin year on year, it was actually better in 2025 than in 2024.
Turning now to Geosystems, where we reported revenues of EUR 353 million during the quarter, I'm happy to say that represented a 1% organic growth compared to last year. It was really good to see a return to growth after six quarters of negative growth. Last time we had a positive growth was the fourth quarter of 2023. Good to see that we are back on positive numbers. We saw continued growth in the software portfolio and associated recurring revenues and a good contribution from our new product, Icon Trades, which continues to grow very well. This was however offset by continued weakness in hardware related to construction and heavy infrastructure, where the market remains very weak, especially in China. The Americas continued to grow, and there was a return to modest growth in EMEA.
Asia remained challenged, of course, given the exposure to China, heavy manufacturing or heavy infrastructure, particularly in high-speed railway, offsetting the continued good growth that we actually have in India. Here maybe adding some interesting facts that in average 2022 to 2024, China was building 3,600 km of rail every year. If you compare to the first half year of 2025, they only were building 301 km. It's almost a drop of 85%. That is, of course, impacting Geosystems' deliveries in China. EBIT declined to EUR 95 million with an operating margin of 26.9%, reflecting the combined effects of low volume in some product segments, the weaker product mix because the product mix going into this heavy infrastructure is a really positive contributor, and also then we had negative currency impacts.
Finally, I turn into autonomous solutions, and I'm happy to say here we have the standout performer in the quarter, delivered revenues of EUR 178 million, representing 19% organic growth compared to the prior year. There was a very strong performance in aerospace and defense. Mining was also growing well, and end-markets in agriculture actually remained challenging. Here's the problem child within this division currently. It's market related, and the agriculture is currently in a serious downturn, and we are seeing signs of improvement, but still it's very low compared to where it should be. By geography, growth was strong in the Americas, which represented the majority of the aerospace and defense demand in the quarter. APAC also grew well, supported by demand in the autonomous road tram project within Australia, and EMEA declined, but that was on tough comparables.
EBIT came in at EUR 65 million, represented an increased EBIT margin to 36.6%, driven by strong volume, positive product mix, but slightly offset by currency. In summary, a very solid performance within Hexagon Core in general, and I will now hand over to Mattias, who will cover the Octave performance.
Yes, thank you, Anders, and good morning everyone. We'll start with, I thought, since this is the first time we report like this publicly for Octave, I thought we'd start with a short description on what the business is and what we do. We are a market-leading provider of enterprise software that ultimately helps customers design, build, operate, and protect mission-critical industrial and infrastructure assets. In terms of numbers, we had about EUR 1.5 billion revenue last year. As you can see also from the slide, we have high recurring revenue and high profitability. We have roughly 7,400 employees around the world, and we have a very strong, I would say, A+ list of customers. As you can see, roughly 60% of the global Fortune 500 companies are customers of Octave today. You can see some of the logos there on the slide, but there are, of course, many, many more.
If we move to the next slide and talk about our core pillars, I think first of all, it's important to say what makes us unique is that we connect all of these pillars together into one platform, one natively integrated data platform, right all the way from design, build, operate, and protect. You will see product names out to the right here on the slide, some of the flagship products, obviously SmartPlant 3D, Ecosys, EAM, ETQ, et cetera. The way we go to market is really by selling a platform. We're selling solutions, we're delivering value, not selling individual products. An example of that is that you can also see that products like SDx2 , which is our data platform, shows up in several of the different pillars here. Design is our biggest area, as you can see from the revenue contribution pie there.
Build would be our smallest one, operate our second largest, and that's also been the fastest growing over the last couple of years. Moving into the quarter, how did we do on the next slide? I guess the headline number is that we grew organic growth 1%. One has to remember first that we come from several years of good growth, right? I think that's one important thing to say. The other thing to say is that our recurring revenue grew 6%. I feel confident that we're building momentum for the future. We're adding customers, adding seats, et cetera. The base is growing. You can see that by our SaaS revenue that grew strong double digits. However, our lease revenue was flattish, which obviously had a, what do you say, dampening effect on the recurring revenue compared to the SaaS.
To offset this growth, we did have a decline in perpetual licenses. This is a revenue that varies quite a lot by quarter. It depends if you get a big deal in one quarter or the other. The other thing one has to say also is that it is an intentional strategy and has been for quite a while to transition this revenue into subscription revenue. If you look at the slide there as well, we describe that the license revenue is now 13% in this quarter of total revenue, and this is the revenue that we will gradually, over time, transition to SaaS. If you look at the profitability, we did 26% operating margin, which was lower than last year, and I think it's a combination of things. I mean, one, that the perpetual licenses were down, that has a high drop-through.
Also, that we've had some additional investments, partly due to making the company ready for being a standalone public company and also to integrate the other business units, SIG, ETQ, and Bricsys that we have taken on recently. Important to say, however, that this is a temporary downturn in the margin. We are taking cost effects like Anders talked about, and my expectation is that this will put us back on a growing margin trajectory. If we move to the next slide, I wanted to highlight one very important strategic win we had in the quarter. We won a multi-year eight-figure deal, and I guess you could say also that it was very high eight figures. I see this as proof that our strategy of selling a platform and our relatively new product, SDx2 , is delivering value in the market and to customers.
It really also sets a precedent, I think, for other owner-operators that want to digitalize their assets, and it will clearly also influence and incentivize other players in the ecosystem, such as EPCs, suppliers, contractors, to adopt our platform as they see big owner-operators adopting it. On the next slide, I wanted to say a few words about some key initiatives that are going on right now. Like I mentioned, we are transitioning our business to a SaaS model, so you will see more of that going forward. I also mentioned that we are investing in making the company ready to be a standalone public company. I also wanted to highlight the strategic disposal that we did earlier this summer of some non-core assets in the HexFed business, which historically sat in the SIG division.
It was around EUR 90 million of revenue, and this will strengthen our margin profile and, yeah, sharpen focus for us going forward. Like I also mentioned, we are in the midst of integrating these businesses into one. We are making very good progress on that and will, yeah, soon complete that. We're also, like Anders mentioned, completing the cost efficiency program, which will, like I mentioned, put us back on a growing margin path. Finally, we are also making improvements to our organizational structure. If you go to the next slide, I wanted to highlight the management team that we have put together here over the last couple of quarters. I'm not going to read every resume here, but if you, there's a press release in September where you can read more about this if you're interested.
I'd say it's a world-class management team that we put together that we think really will help us scale this business. It's a combination of Hexagon executives like Ben and Tony that Anders mentioned, and then we have some executives from the former ALI division, as well as two new recruits that I wanted to say a few more words about. We've hired a Chief Product Officer in Jay Allardyce. He's a recognized leader in the industry across AI and enterprise software. He has had prior leadership roles at HPE, GE, UpTake, and Google, so I think he will be a great addition to our strategy and product teams. We also have hired Tamara Adams, or Tammy as she goes by, who is a strong CRO with lots of experience in the industry.
She has had recent roles at Honeywell, Oracle, and most recently as Chief Revenue Officer of a company called Dotmatics, which recently was acquired by Siemens. In summary, I'm very happy with the team we put together, and I'm sure they will help us scale this going forward. On the next slide, I wanted to say a few words about the timeline and what you can expect there. We are obviously well aware of the U.S. government shutdown, which is impacting the FCC and the review process, but we still feel that we are on track to complete the spin-off in the first half of next year. Also, like we mentioned before, Octave will be listed on a US National Securities Exchange with a Swedish depository receipt expected to run for approximately two years.
Like we mentioned in the report, we are planning to hold an Octave Investor Day sometime in the first quarter next year, and we will come back with an exact date when we have it. Thank you very much. I'm handing over to Norbert.
Yeah. Thanks, Mattias. In the following financial update, I will take you through the Q3 performance for the Hexagon Group. Turning now to the next slide. Let us begin with the Q3 2025 income statement. Taking the sales pitch first, revenue were EUR 1.3 billion, generating a reported growth of 0%. Currency was a negative -4% on sales, and there was a positive +1% from structure, resulting in organic growth of 4%. Gross margin was stable at 67%, considering the impacts of FX. We continue to be confident in driving gross margin expansion as we will have positive impacts from new product releases. Operating earnings decreased by 7% to EUR 349 million, corresponding to a margin of 26.8%. I will break this out further in the profit pitch. Interest expenses and financial costs decreased from EUR 44 million to EUR 32 million, given a delta on earnings before tax of -5%.
Taxes being at 18% in line with prior years, bringing us down to an EPS of EUR 0.096, also declining by -5%. Just for reference, the EBIT 1, including PPA, includes EUR 27 million of amortization and so dilutes the EBIT 1 percentage to 24.7%. Next slide, please. Moving on to the gross margin development. As I mentioned on the previous slide, we saw stability in the gross margin once adjusting for currency. On a rolling 12-month basis, gross margin of 67% is broadly in line with the prior year. Turning now to the profit pitch, please. During Q3, currency continued to be dilutive, reducing EBIT margin by 30 basis points. The structural element was equitative, with solid contribution from acquired companies such as Septentrio and Geomagic, as well as by the sales of the dilutive assets in Octave. The organic impact was negative, diluting the margin by 240 basis points.
This mainly reflects a cost base that is not yet fully aligned with the current level of demand. To address this, we have started a cost program to right-size the organization and mitigate this impact going forward. We expect the benefits to contribute or to start to contribute gradually from the fourth quarter of 2025 and beyond. Turning to the next slide, please. Moving on to the Q3 cash flow, which is a strong performance when taking seasonality into account. The adjusted EBITDA variance at -2% demonstrates the continued stronger cash leverage versus the EBIT 1 variance at -7% due to the increase in D&A. The working capital represented a build of EUR 32.4 million in the quarter.
An improvement to working capital management last year that results in a 1% increase in the operating cash flow before tax and interest, which leads to a solid cash conversion of 77% versus 70% last year. Interest payments marginally decreased as expected, and cash taxes remained at a similar level to Q3 last year. The non-recurring items cash outflow of EUR 38.8 million versus the prior year of EUR 22.7 million, being an operating cash flow of EUR 139 million, decreasing by -3%. Next slide, please. Moving on to the working capital trend. The Q3 net working capital being a build of EUR 32.4 million versus the prior year build of EUR 56.2 million decreased the proportion to rolling 12 month sales to 5.3%, lower than the prior year level of 8.3%, which is below the 10% threshold we aim to achieve.
To conclude, the divisions have continued to mitigate an uncertain environment to deliver growth, solid cash conversion, and stable gross margin. Negative currency has been a headwind to EBIT 1 margin development, and we are working to address the cost base through the announced cost program. I will now hand back to Anders.
Thank you, Norbert. I will then start by summarizing the third quarter. To conclude, in Q3, we have seen solid development in our financial metrics. Organic growth of 4% and improvement in margins quarter on quarter and a good cash flow considering the usual seasonalities for the third quarter. While improved, our operating margins remain below our expectations and below our targets. As a result, we then launched an efficiency program aiming to achieve cost savings of EUR 110 million. We expect to have gradual benefits from the fourth quarter this year to full effect at the end of 2026. We do not see the immediate market environment that currently is characterized by delays in customer decisions, as Mattias mentioned, and also within the Hexagon Core businesses. We don't expect that to change in the near term. We see a similar environment in the beginning here of the fourth quarter.
We have also released a lot of products in recent quarters, and we see that as we are set up in a good way when the positive environment returns. Operationally, we had a successful quarter. The sale of D&E, as I mentioned, as one of the key highlights, and the release of those funds will further fund growth for both Octave and Hexagon Core. Finally, the potential separation of Octave remains on track for completion in the first half of 2026. I now turn to my first quarter review slides. In this section, unless I otherwise mention or it's otherwise stated in the slides, it would be relating to Hexagon Core businesses. That means the type of businesses that are left after the potential spin-off of Octave, of course. This includes our business areas, manufacturing intelligence, your system, autonomous solutions, and also the robotics division.
I will take you through my initial thoughts and observations after now almost exactly three months being at Hexagon. I will then talk about actions we are taking to drive performance further and some more details about our upcoming CMD. I turn into the first slide here. Hexagon has created superior value for many decades now, or at least two + decades. We have the potential setup to continue to generate superior value creation for decades to come. Today, we are at a very exciting inflection point in our company's history because our industrial customer base values precision and quality more than ever as they try to meet the increased quality demands of everything getting more tight, more small, and with less tolerances, and also the increased sustainability challenges. They are also driving towards full autonomy as a response to the shortage of skilled labor in the world.
Our industry-leading technologies regarding sensors, software, and AI are allowing us to deliver ever more value-adding products and services to our customers. We are well placed to seize the opportunity for autonomous operations in many industry verticals going forward. Our new operating model would enable us to take full advantage of our profitable growth opportunities. First, a little more on the opportunity ahead. I turn to the next slide. Hexagon is ideally positioned to enable autonomy in many industry verticals. We will do this by combining our capabilities and offerings within various fields. We possess market-leading measurement and positioning technologies, combining multiple types of sensors. We utilize these to deliver sophisticated real-time digital twins, including reality-like full 3D environments of buildings and cities. We leverage advanced analytics and AI to unlock the value of petabytes of data that we generate.
The combination of these capabilities positions Hexagon to be a clear leader in the emerging field of autonomous solutions. Many of our industrial customers have embarked on a journey towards these autonomous operations as they increasingly struggle to find skilled and qualified labor. Hence, they need to move towards so-called lights-out production. Here, of course, our new humanoid robot, AEON , is a prime example of enabling industry autonomy. Measurement and positioning technologies and industrial autonomy are only going to become more important as industrial customers face these significant challenges. Let's see how our products are helping. Turning to the next slide. Since late 2024, we have launched a number of important product innovations, which combine our most advanced sensor with latest technology on AI and digitalization. All of them also bring significant advances on autonomy.
Taking some examples from this page, now we have talked previously quite a lot about AEON and Icon Trades, and also last quarter we talked about Maestro, our new coordinate measurement machine. I will focus on the other one here. In Manufacturing Intelligence, we have the ATS 800, which is the first laser tracker ever to merge scanning and reflector tracking into one system. This portable metrology device is automation-ready and uses AI to pinpoint the true center of each measurement. Detect features like holes and edges, et cetera, and this is due to speeding up the process and removing the need for human intervention. Also, now in the beginning of October in Geosystems, we just launched the TS20. That's the first new total station platform in, I would say, 20 years +.
It's a full hardware and software overhaul, and it's the first total station with on-device AI, which enables it to recognize and log into any prism without user input. This drastically reduces errors, setup time, and operator dependency. This is a direct response from Hexagon to the shortage of skilled surveyors. Combining our skills in measurement and positioning technologies, digital twins, and advances in AI to deliver solutions for industrial autonomy is key for Hexagon, and we are in the middle of this journey. The products you can see here on the page represent profitable growth opportunities ahead. This potential is, of course, largely not reflected in Q3 financial performance and will also not be very much reflected in Q4. Going forward, these products will play a major role in Hexagon's delivery. Turning to the next slide.
We know that Hexagon historically demonstrated that we can generate strong organic growth with excellent operating margins. On this slide, I tried to demonstrate a bit the relationship between organic growth and profitability during the last two years. We can see here in this recent history that we have two trends. One is that the organic growth has been impacted by the macro backdrop, and we can see it's been negative or at best flattish, while the operating margins have been subject to increasing cost levels internally. Hence, a dislocation from our top line alignment and the top line development, which has been flat. You can see we have dropped even more when it comes to profit. The recent quarter shows some signs of reversal of this trend.
With our increased cost focus going ahead here, combining this with our new operating model, we intend to generate a delivery model within Hexagon Core that supports profitable growth generation. Let's have a look at the steps we have taken, moving to the next slide. During the third quarter, we have taken two really important steps to enable us going forward to perform at our full potential. The first one is our new operating model, which embraces best practices of decentralization, but then applies them to the specific situation of Hexagon. We have established 17 divisional P&Ls with our externally reported businesses with dedicated management team, and this would improve accountability within these organizations considerably. This would also improve our ability to quickly respond to end-market changes and also to customer changes and make us generally faster to take decisions.
It also means that product and operational decisions will move closer to customers, ensuring that we take the right decisions related to the different market dynamics and ensuring we don't take decisions centrally where we don't have the input from markets and customers. The second step that we have taken is to realign our operational performance, and that was to do this restructure program that we communicated of EUR 110 million. This should be understood that this is in addition and completely unrelated to the operating model. If we would have kept the same model that we already had, we would have launched the same program. It's not related. We already communicated that we are addressing the cost-based challenge to respond to the pressures on these margins. Alongside this, we have taken the decision to review the balance sheet as well, in particular related to historic R&D spend.
This would help us to baseline performance so we can measure our divisional leaders properly on performance going forward. This baselining will only happen once, and we expect our divisional leaders to manage their P&Ls and balance sheet going forward as a part of normal operations. With adjustments only being taken for exceptional circumstances going forward, it could be such acquisitions with partly overlapping offerings. It could be a new COVID situation when we need to, as a group, react quickly. It could be a large restructure within the group, like the spin-off of Octave, for example. All other items need to be handled within the business of day-to-day operations. Turning now to some more details on R&D, where we have taken the decision to make these impairments. Innovation power is one of Hexagon's greatest skills and assets and is something that we will nurture also going forward.
However, in recent years, investments in R&D have spiked, as you can see in the graph there. That is mainly due to somewhat delayed core product developments and cost overruns in some major innovation projects. We have seen this not only in one division, it has actually been in several divisions where some of our key renewal projects have been fairly late to market. The positive thing is they are coming to market now, which is really positive to see with the TS20, etc. This has meant that we have seen significantly increased R&D spend, while at the same time, the benefits of our organic growth and margins have not yet materialized to be seen. Maybe to be added here as well, there are some elements in this spike that are related to software acquisitions that in relation have a generally higher R&D spend than our normal businesses.
With these new product launches across 2025 and 2026, we expect R&D to stabilize on an absolute basis and then to decrease on a ratio versus sales. However, as we reviewed our innovation and product portfolio, it also became clear that in some cases we have invested into innovation that turned not fully to meet customer requirements or the target end-market situation has changed, or we have decided to exit a specific offering. This means that there are some product lines that are not performing and will not be able to generate a return. We have therefore taken the decision to impair EUR 186 million in Hexagon Core. Most of this is related to these R&D spends, but there is also some related to inventories. This will give our businesses the opportunity to reset and move forward from a more comparable basis.
We are also then able to performance manage on actual performance and not on historical effects. As I mentioned earlier, our new operating model will help us to avoid that we face the need to do such impairments again in the future. I move to the next slide. This is explaining a bit the new management structure. We will have 17 profit and loss accountable businesses, which are a part of these are sort of the main part of our operating model. I will explain a bit how it will work. Hexagon has always operated with a decentralized structure, which has then entailed a lot of freedom for the divisional presidents to run their businesses, and it has kept the corporate cost levels quite low. However, within the former divisions, the organizational structures became quite overly complex sometimes, with slow decision-making and not always focused on end customers.
Our new operating model establishes a clear and common management blueprint on a more granular level. Also, what we have historically called divisions will now be called business areas instead, and they will have divisions reporting into them. The previous divisions, Manufacturing Intelligence, Geosystems, Autonomous Solutions, will now be called business areas. They will then have the dark boxes, the 17, or you can say 16, smaller dark boxes reporting into them. Externally, we will still report on the business area level. Then you have the 17's dark blue box, which is Robotics, and that will continue to report into the CEO. Division leaders and their teams will then have a mandate to deliver superior value creation within their businesses. I move to the next slide to show how those mandates will be set up.
A division can have a mandate of stability, profitability, or growth, depending on where they are in their current situation. We refer to these three stages as strategic mandates. That sets the overall direction for the business and how the management, the leadership of those divisions should basically think every morning when they wake up. If you are in stability, it does, of course, not mean that you need to restructure or sell parts of your business. You can also transform it organically. If you are in growth, it doesn't mean that you need to buy everything. You can also grow organically. We will allocate capital accordingly. More capital allocated towards when you are in growth and less when you are in profitability and almost nothing when you are in stability. Moving to the next slide.
A decentralized management structure with fully accountable divisions can only create value sustainably if it's combined with strong governance and a clear performance management system. Here we are taking a major step forward at Hexagon with the introduction of scorecards. At the core of the scorecard system is a set of standardized financials and non-financial KPIs, which are closely tracked for all divisions in a fully consistent way. The scorecard system will significantly improve transparency, accountability, and also speed of action taking to steer the division in the right direction and to pull the right levers to change direction or create more value. I then turn into the next slide. That's the summary. Hexagon is a strong company with a bright future ahead. Our fundamentals are very good. We are the market leader in position measurement technologies.
We have strong exposure to high-growth end-markets and emerging field markets like industrial autonomy. This places us very well to capture the opportunities presented from several macro trends, including the main one, labor shortages and skill shortages, increasing quality demands, and also, of course, sustainability and safety demands. Our innovation and expertise is second to none. That's reflected in several of the exciting new products that I showcased in an earlier slide. As we have a clear plan to achieve superior value creation going forward, we are taking immediate actions to address our cost base. In addition, we're implementing best practice decentralized operating model, establishing these 17 divisions with full accountability. Operation decisions will then be taken faster, and innovation will be anchored in markets and close to customer needs.
Last, we will manage our division portfolio very closely for performance and value creation, applying proven tools like strategic mandates and the scorecard system. Turning then to the next slide, where we are inviting you all to Hexagon's Capital Markets Day in 2026. That's on the 30th of April. It will be showcased in London. At this event, we will discuss in much more detail business area strategies, including the divisional mandates that we have identified. We will also discuss then new financial targets for Hexagon Core '26 and forward. We are really looking forward to seeing you all there. With that, I think that summarizes the presentation, and we will now move into the Q&A section.
Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Thank you. We will now go to our first question. One moment, please. Your first question today comes from the line of Johan Eliason from SB1 Markets. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, Anders and Mattias. Thank you for taking my question. I was wondering a little bit, I mean, your new setup of the Hexagon Core looks excellent to me. One issue that's been high on the agenda over a couple of years has been the way you capitalize R&D, and now obviously you impair a lot of that. Will you change the strategy regarding R&D capitalization going forward?
Thank you, Johan, for the question. We will not basically change the way we run capitalization. It's IAS 38. We will make sure, of course, that we are not capitalizing too early of any of the projects. We will manage our portfolio more like an insurance company if we believe that we take a larger risk in one project. We can't afford to take larger risks in all projects. We can manage all that within the normal operational structure of the company. What we're doing is more strengthening around how we do governance when we approve projects to be started, how we review projects during the way to make sure we don't continue to invest in something that we are aware of will be difficult in the go-to-market situation.
The answer to your question is we will not change the methodology of capitalization and by then restating all our history or something like that. We will keep the current way of operating, but we will operate more carefully and more controlled and with a tighter governance.
Excellent. Secondly, you will have a very strong balance sheet after the D&E divestment next year. How are you thinking about the balance sheets of the spin-off Octave? Is that a business that should be run on a net cash position, or how should we think about how to split the balance sheet going forward? Thank you.
This is a decision that the board will take at the right stage in the process on how we divide the assets, net debts, and the firepower within the company generated from the D&E sale. That's a question we will need to come back to, Johan.
Okay. I guess that's topics on the capital markets. Then just finally, a short question also for Mattias here. In Octave, you talk about lease revenue stable. I'm not sure I understand what lease revenues are. You have subscription license and services in your pie charts. How does this corroborate to each other?
Yeah. Good question. First of all, I should say we will break all of this down for you in more detail at the investor day, right? Since we are in a public filing process and we're still a division of Hexagon, we're not going to give all of the details today. Basically, leases are also subscription revenue, but it's month-to-month leases, right, of seats. Think of it, it fluctuates more than the SaaS revenue, right? That's why it's more, I guess, short-term volatile than the SaaS, if that helps you.
Okay, I understand it. Thank you very much.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Thank you. We will now go to the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Eric Goran from SEB. Please go ahead.
Thank you. I have a couple of questions. If we start with Geosystems and China, which was weaker, you talked about the development of the high-speed rail side in China. Given you have some peers in China growing much faster, is that basically an end-market split dynamic that means Geosystems is growing so much slower?
Sorry, we had a little bit of a problem here with the sound in the beginning of the question. Would you mind to repeat it?
Sure. On Geosystems development in China and your commentary there, a lot of the weakness is related to your exposure towards high-speed rail and that development. Your take is basically that it's an end-market split. That means that you are growing slower than particularly some of the local peers in China.
I would say the end-market exposure that we have in China is related to where very high precision is required and not in the general sort of market for our competitors. We are in the top-tier segment within China, and the top-tier segment is not required everywhere, of course. It's required when you have sort of high-speed railway manufacturing and other very large infrastructure projects. Our exposure to that sector within construction is much higher than our competition. When something happens to that specific part of the market, we get hit very hard. That's exactly what happened if you compare that to local competitors.
Okay. As a follow-up on that, there was never a plan to do with Geosystems similar to as you do with MI now, making China a separate unit within to make it operate a bit more autonomously given developments in China.
The question is good, but that option is actually not available because the reason why we can do that in MI is that we have been very good in history on localizing our products, and our innovation also is localized. Within MI, we have a good, better, and best offering. Best is basically the offering that we use globally, and the good and better offering is the offering we use within China for China. It's fully manufactured, developed, et cetera, within China. If you look at Geosystems, very little is localized in terms of supply chains, innovation, et cetera, to China. It's mainly a global offering that we have. A lot of the products are imported to China. This is the reason also, of course, why we are only present in Geosystems in the top-tier segment and not in the general segment in the market.
Completely different situations within those two businesses. It wouldn't make any sense to do that within Geosystems.
Okay. Thank you. From Mattias on Octave, just if you can give some more perspective on the low growth rate. I get that you say that growth has been high for a few years, but I guess that depends a bit on the starting point you use, and you certainly have some peers that are growing quite a bit faster. What, I mean, what kind of growth rate would you like to get out of Octave in the midterm?
Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to give a forecast today, as you can imagine, since we are doing the investor day in Q1. It is fair to say that it needs to be higher, the growth, and it needs to be higher, the margin. I feel confident when I see recurring revenue growing a lot faster than the headline number, the reported revenue. I think I'll stop there, and then we'll discuss more in Q1.
Okay. Thanks. Just one quick at the end. You mentioned for Hexagon Core, on peer-leading profit margins. What peers will you compare with?
We have different peers in the different businesses, of course. If you look at first, maybe you start with AS. You have peers like Sandvik, Epiroc, Metso, et cetera, right? If you look at MI, you have Sise, Siemens, to some extent Sandvik as well. If you look at Geosystems, you have Trimble, [Caro], [Navis], Topcon. Do you want to add any more?
I think that's pretty strong. You've mentioned already.
Very good, yeah.
It's all good.
Very good. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will now go to the next question. The question comes from Sven Merkt from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Great. Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Maybe first, following the R&D impairment, how should we think about R&D capitalization going forward? It looks like you are on track to capitalize around EUR 500 million this year and amortize EUR 300 million. This gives you a net benefit of EUR 200 million. Where is that heading going forward?
Yeah. It's nowhere here. From our point of view, as we are managing now the R&D costs, and you have heard as well going forward on this, that we are very selective, right, in the sense, and we will be very focused. It will go down in the sense that overall, I think, from our point of view, it will slowly decrease the gap from our point of view.
Maybe adding here, let there be no mistake, we are not doing the writing of the balance sheet to improve the result. Actually, if you would compare going forward with the new products being released and the impairments we are doing on the balance sheet, it's basically a wash from the performance and the gap within the third quarter this year. There will be no sort of big benefit in our reported results from this impairment.
What this impairment does is to set up the new management of divisions and business areas on a right level so we can actually performance manage them on their operational performance and not performance manage them on historical mistakes that we have on the balance sheet that are not generating a return. This is the reason why we do this. That enables us, then, us and the board, to make sure that we take portfolio decisions that are based on facts and not skewed by historical balance sheet issues. That's the reason.
Got it. Of the capitalized R&D that you have on the balance sheet at the moment, how much is sitting within Hexagon Core versus Octave?
We will not give any further information on that, honestly speaking. We'll do it when we have the spin. You will see it then.
You will see it clearly when you have this potential spin executed.
Okay. Fair enough. Final question just on the cost savings. How much of that should we expect really flow to profit and how much you might reinvest elsewhere?
What you see on the EUR 110 million of savings that we have communicated, that is what we expect flowing to the bottom line at the end of 2026. That is net. That is not gross.
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Thank you. I want to add one thing. You should not calculate the big effect in Q4. It is important to understand because this is a process that will take time before you will see the effect. You will see gradual effects starting in Q4 this year, but it will ramp up during 2026 and give the full benefit at the end of the year.
Thank you. We will now take our next question. Your next question comes from the line of Johannes Schaller from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions, three if I could. Firstly, on the impairments, you said there are certain kind of areas, products, initiatives that are now discontinued where maybe we didn't have the success you wanted to see. Could you give us a little bit more detail on what that is and which kind of areas are not part of the strategy and the growth profile of Hexagon anymore? Should we expect that this is it now in terms of impairments for the next one or two years, or is that more an ongoing process where maybe in six months' time you also find other areas? That would be my first question. The second one is just coming back to China. I know you don't guide, but could you give us a bit of a sense when you would expect that region to be back to growth?
Lastly, just on the Cadence stake that you got as part of that sale, what's the strategy here and the plan with that stake? Thank you.
Okay. I counted at least four questions.
Apologies, you're right.
No worries. No worries. Starting with the impairment, I will give you a couple of examples of what I mean there. It could be related to market changes.
We have, for example, one project that we have developed for autonomous driving mass production. This, as you know, has been quite delayed coming to market all over the world, basically, maybe except China, where it has come to market a bit at least. When the main producer of cars then decides to cancel the platform, we have nowhere to allocate this, to get any revenues for this. This is something we need to write off, right? That's market change. Then you have misalignment to customer needs. This is also related to ourselves, but customer needs can also change over time, right? It could be, for example, we have developed a product and the expectation of operations from customers is four hours, and we can operate for 20 minutes.
We don't fulfill the sort of sound levels that are required by the customer, etc., which means that we basically can't offload this product even if we would discount it 90% because nobody would buy it. This is something we need to write off. It's useless, won't generate any revenue for us. Then you have the third area, and that is when we decide, as we now restructure our company, given the potential spin-off of Octave, and we are refocusing Hexagon Core, we then have areas that we believe are not suitable for us to continue to invest in and continue to take part of. They're not contributing positively either in growth or in profitability. We have then decided to exit those areas and those products, and then we need to write those off.
I will, for competitive reasons, of course, not mention exactly which products these are in this call. If we go into, will this be an ongoing thing? I think I answered that question during my presentation, I hope, at least twice. I'm happy to do it again. My expectation is that our divisions and business areas need, going forward, to manage this in their operational normal day-to-day business and the operational profit and loss and balance sheet performance. They will be monitored closely to make sure that we achieve this. The decisions in those divisions will then be taken closer to customers so we are sure that we align to market needs, customer needs, market changes all the time.
We will have a stronger governance also before we start projects and also during projects to ensure that we stop projects early on when we notice that they are no longer aligned with market or customer expectations. We will have a new performance management system to enable swift response when we see that some of the KPIs that we follow are getting off track. This is not something that will come back on a regular basis. I hope we won't do this at all going forward unless we have one of those big things that I mentioned. It could be a potential spin-off like Octave that will, of course, make us do some things in terms of realignment structure, et cetera. It could be that we, as a company, need to react very quickly together, like a new sort of COVID situation or something like that.
Those are the kind of situations where we might have to do this again on a higher level, on a group level. Otherwise, it could also be that we buy a bigger company and there is product overlap and we need to make some impairments of some of that asset, of course. Those are the only examples. It should not be from normal operations and normal R&D development. That should be managed in the day-to-day business, in the day-to-day results. Regarding China guidance, we are not guiding forward on China, but there are areas in China that are performing very well. If you look at the manufacturing intelligence, we are growing quite well in manufacturing intelligence on a constant basis in China. I think in Q2, we grew 10%. In Q3, we grow 3% organically. We continue to grow. The different markets are strong there.
Electronics, general manufacturing, we're doing very well. We have this construction and larger infrastructure projects, which is very weak currently. When that changes into being more positive again, your guess is as good as mine, right? We are all hoping that will change quickly. Unless that changes, we will not see a speed up or an improvement in Geosystems' performance. Geosystems is now, I would say, what is it, 20%- growth year on year or so.
That's correct.
That is affecting, of course, the full number for China for us. When that business turns, of course, we will start seeing better numbers from China on the group level. Underlying, ALI is performing quite well in China. Manufacturing Intelligence is performing well in China. Autonomous Solutions, which is more bumpy given mining orders, et cetera, are performing well from time to time in China as well. Our China issue is related to large infrastructure and construction within China currently. Norbert, do you want to take the Cadence?
Sure. The question was on the Cadence, if I understood this correctly, because it was a while ago that you asked the question here, was related regarding net gain, I assume, from my point of view.
I think it's the EUR 810 million that we have as Cadence shares, right?
Maybe you can correct me.
You know.
I think, obviously, the focus at the moment is to close the deal, Johannes, and that's still on track for the first quarter of next year. It's obviously a very nice stake to have. Cadence is a super strong company with a great outlook. It's a nice stake to have. I think we'll have to come back to you on what the plans for it are because it's tied to the capital allocation discussion between Octave and Hexagon. That's obviously a decision for the board. I think we'll come back to you on that.
Understood. Thank you very much for all the color.
Thank you. We will now go to the next question. The question comes from the line of Mikael Laséen from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.
All right. Thanks for taking my question. You stated here, sorry, that the division priorities will follow the sequence: stability, profitability, and growth on page 37. Could you give a sense of how Hexagon Core is distributed across these three categories? Maybe give some examples from the 17 P&L-accountable divisions on page 36.
Yeah. Thanks, Mikael. We will give more clarity on how we rank the different businesses in the Capital Markets Day. We have just now launched a new organizational structure. It will be implemented basically from January 1 across the group, finally. It is too early to give any input on that externally. I would also like to say that if you are in stability, it doesn't mean that it's a bad business. Even a good business could be in stability. I would even say that our D&E business was in stability phase.
It's a very good business, but we didn't really know what to do with it. It wasn't growing for us. We were not the right owner for it. That is why the decision was basically to offload it and reallocate those proceeds into where we are stronger and have a stronger market position. It doesn't mean that if you are in stability, that you're a bad business. In general, of course, we would like to move all our businesses into the growth scenario or strategic mandate. We have a range of different businesses also within the different divisions. There is a lot to go through here and to set up with the business areas and the divisions themselves. We have to come back with that on the Capital Markets Day.
Okay. Fair enough. Just curious here about the book-to-bill ratios for the MI segment, if you can maybe comment on that or other areas where you have bookings leading phase.
At the moment, we don't have the information with me now, but we'll come back to you directly afterwards.
Anthem will come back to you afterwards and give you the facts.
Thanks.
Thank you. We will now take the next question. Your question comes from the line of Ben Castillo-Bernaus from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess a couple for Mathias to start with on the Octave business. Obviously, some headwinds there from the transition from licenses to SaaS. I just wondered, what's your assumption on how long you expect that to take until you're sort of a mostly SaaS business? Related to that, you know the margin headwinds that we're seeing there at the moment, obviously, there's some one-off costs going through there. If you look out to 2026 and the sort of like margin trajectory, what's your working assumption at this point in time? Thank you.
Good questions. What is it? I have to be boring and answer. You will get to know in the investor day in Q1, right? I'm not prepared to give outlooks at this point. We will lay that all out in detail at the Investor Day.
Okay. I'll try one maybe that can be answered. Just on autonomous solutions, obviously, super strong performance there this quarter. How much of that was kind of anticipated and predicted, if you like? Was there any kind of one-off in there that we should think about just in that performance? Thank you.
Thanks. If you look at autonomous solutions, we of course know our order intake, right? This result was quite expected internally. Very strong order intake in aerospace and defense area. Also, mining has been very strong. You can see that also, I think, in related companies reporting mining numbers also on very, very good levels. In general, the underlying markets in here are doing very well. We have a good order intake in those markets that will also generate good performance going forward. We expect Q4 to also perform well. Q4 has a bit tougher comparables, so it will not be on the similar level. We expect a continued strong market demand within autonomous solutions. As I mentioned, the weakness we see in autonomous solutions is agriculture, which is in a quite serious downturn globally. That weakness is also expected to continue during Q4.
We see a relative similar business climate in the fourth quarter.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will now go to our final question for today. Your final question comes from the line of Magnus Kruber from Nordea. Please go ahead.
Hi, Magnus here. I just wanted to get back to the delta between impairments and the amortization capitalizations in R&D. Is the message that it will be relatively similar in the coming quarters, but gradually, over time, it will narrow? If that's the case, do you expect your new strategy will be able to offset this headwind on the margin side in the coming, say, two, three years?
Yeah. Thanks, Magnus. Yeah. That's correct. Given that we are releasing lots of new products to the market, like the TS20 now here in October, for example, we see that amortization of those products released will then completely net the gain that we would get from this impairment. This impairment by itself will not move, basically, the amortization capitalization gap. It will be on the same level in Q4 and in Q1 as it was in Q3. That's correct. Going forward, we expect, of course, this new product to generate higher sales numbers. That is how we will compensate the shrinking gap between amortization and capitalization. I want to make clear that to capitalize R&D is not dangerous. If you capitalize good R&D, then that's the way it should be done, right? You take the cost over the life cycle of the product.
That's completely right in how it should be done. The dangerous thing is to capitalize and then not release a product and try to fix it and further capitalize a product which is not good. When you release it, you don't get the sales, and you only get the amortization. That is the danger. That is what the new management structure will make sure that we avoid going forward.
Fantastic. That's very clear. With respect to the EUR 110 million savings, could you characterize a little bit on how we should expect this to be filtering through 2026? Is it more linear or back-end loaded? What's the character of the implementation?
I would say it's very linear. You can model in linear with probably less in Q4 than going forward.
Perfect. Just the final one, Geosystems China, I think you said down 20% or something, if I read that right. How do you characterize that slowdown? How long it's been going on? Is there any element of that that's structural compared to cyclical, would you say?
I would say it's generally cyclical, connected to this launch infrastructure project, like the rail. It's impacting very much for Geosystems. In China, we don't have good sales of our whole offering portfolio. We have good sales of the top tier of our offerings, the most sort of precise measuring equipment. That is what we sell in China. On the mid-tier offering, we have very strong local competition. We have a very little footprint given that we don't have local manufacturing, local R&D, et cetera, within Geosystems. That's why we get so heavily impacted when there is an effect on those types of industries. It's been going on now for, what is it? Could it be something like 12 months?
12 months, roundabout.
Yeah, we see this effect coming into Geosystems. Of course, since this is our top offering, that also gives a weaker mix for Geosystems because we have best margins on these top-tier products because we don't have any competition, basically. That impacts Geosystems' mix negatively. You can also see that in the year-on-year drop in Geosystems in financial performance when it comes to operating margin. You can see the effect there as well of the lack of sales of those top-tier products.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. I will now hand the call back to Anders Svensson for closing remarks.
Thank you, operator. Thank you, everyone, for attending, listening, and putting good questions for us. Our next report will be on January 13th. Oh, 30th, sorry. Thanks. Good correction. January 30th next year. Hoping to see you all then. Until then, be safe.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.