Welcome to the HMS Networks Q3 Presentation for 2026. 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 CEO Staffan Dahlström and CFO Joakim Nideborn. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to this quarter three report call. Myself, Staffan, and Joakim will take you through a brief overview of the report we released this morning. Let's see if I can. How does this work, Joakim? Here we go. Activate slide. So we'll start with the business update, and then Joakim will move into a financial summary, and we end up with a short Q&A at the end. In general, we feel this is a stable and strong quarter for us. We are very happy to break the SEK 1 billion barrier in our revenue, SEK 1,024 million in revenue, where we are growing double-digit organic +6%. We are happy with this. Order intake continued to be good, SEK 1.1 billion. A good growth, 29%. There is also an element of pre-order.
We have been informing you about long lead times, especially for memories and semiconductor. This also make customers do a little bit of early orders with us. We estimate this to be SEK 17 million in the quarter. It's a smaller part of this, but we are seeing this and this is probably something we'll see in the coming quarters as well. We also do good improvement of their profitability, SEK 218 million in EBITA, and this gives us an improved margin of 27.4%, quite much over our long-term target of 25%. Continue to see very good and stable cash flow, SEK 333 million this quarter. We are seeing a more or less flat adjusted EPS with some bookkeeping technicalities there that Joakim will talk a little bit more later. So the first nine months, we are seeing a continued stable growth up 14%, and the orders are up 23%.
The markets are improving, and Joakim will talk a little bit more about it, but we see that the German market have been fairly weak in the past. We see signs of improvement. It's getting better there. We are very happy to see a continued strong Chinese market for us. We also see that a lot of Japanese companies are coming back after a very long time of quite high inventories and a bit negative market, but we are seeing that as well. Our big market in U.S. is continuing to be quite good. So with the first nine months, looks good. We talked about the revenue. We see part of this drive in the market is, I think there are three elements. There's a general uptick with the strong PMIs and the markets are improving general most of the markets.
But specifically, we are seeing a continued growth in the enormous investments in data center automation. When we say data center automation, that is more like the equipment, the incoming power, the ventilation of these huge buildings they are building. So we are not part of the compute part of the data center. It is much more the automation part around the big buildings. We also see a continued very positive development in the semiconductor field, where our customers there are the manufacturers of machines and the different components that is used in the manufacturing of semiconductor, where investment remains very strong.
However, as we report before that we expected to see, we see a pressure on the gross margins, both from tariffs, but especially also increased cost of semiconductors and some materials that we use in our products. We will mitigate this with price adjustments from 1st of January next year. Of course, now it takes some time to make this fall through into our systems, but we are seeing a little bit mismatch in the cost side versus the income side here. So we think this will remain in Q4. It is not that we have bad margins, but the gross margin is slightly under pressure due to this.
We made a public tender for a small Spanish company in building automation. I will be back with more information on that in a second. We also very proud, I must say, to receive a global certification of the International Information Security Standard of ISO/IEC 27001. The reason we are proud is not that we have a diploma on the wall, is that we believe that this is very important subject for us, both for our products and our customers, but also for our internal operations.
The fact that we have this now also give us comfort in that we have good processes, we have good teams, and we are working proactively. This is something that we and all other companies are concerned about, but we think this is an important step to make sure that we are professional in this area of information security. A little bit about this small Spanish public tender we did this quarter. ROBOT S.A. is a Spanish small company in building automation, and we have a building automation part in our New Industries division. It is the smallest part we have, but they have been looking into finding new building automation special verticals. Today with our Intesis brand, we are very strong in a small niche in AC and HVAC for larger buildings.
This company, ROBOT S.A., is a niche player, very successful in facility management for hotels, both with how you control the room where the hotel guests are living, but also in the bigger operation when it comes to power and heating and these things for the building. They started many years ago in Palma, Mallorca. Nice place, but that is also the home of many of the Spanish hotel chains. So they have been doing this business and working with Meliá and these other Spanish chains and following them out in the world. So it is around the Mediterranean area, and also quite much business in the Caribbeans, where we have a few employees to do installations there. The main USP here is to make energy savings for the hotel owners, but also, of course, convenient and flexibility for the guests at the hotel.
Small company, 65 people, mainly in Palma where they have R&D, manufacturing, and sales. This is also in Catalonia, very close to our own business in Barcelona. I think the fact that our team in Barcelona and this team in Palma have been really working well together in this process, and it looks very positive and the sellers of the company feel very comfortable that we have this Catalonia base, and they trust us for the future. We see that this is a good step into growing the building automation business.
This was a small public company, so we made a public tender and we were there with the team last week to meet them, and they had their extra general meeting to talk about how to approve this. There is a process now to get in the remaining minority shares. The expectation is that this will close before end of the year. Everything looks very good and we are quite excited about this. It is a small business, but we are very happy to see that these kind of niche players can form something together with our New Industries division. All right. With that, I would like to hand over to Joakim to talk about the financial numbers.
Thank you for that, Staffan. We will start with order intake as we normally do. As you saw, SEK 1.1 billion in order intake, a good improvement from last year with an organic growth of 22%. Staffan also mentioned this small pre-buying behavior that we saw because customers are getting worried about lead times and price increases and these kind of things given the component market and are placing some orders in advance. We saw similar behavior in the first quarter, not so much in Q2, and I think we expect to see this going forward as well, that we see orders placed over a longer period of time. We saw this before also in 2021, 2022, and now we see it not at the same extreme as it was back then, but we see similar behavior.
The underlying growth, if you would take that SEK 70 million into consideration, would still be 14%. So it is still a good growth on the orders. Geographically, we are quite happy to see that APAC is continuing to develop strong, and China has been performing very well for us now for almost two years. Those of you who have been following us, we have been complaining about Japan has been having a lot of inventory. Our customers in Japan have been having a lot of inventory for the last few years, and now we really see that something are happening again here, that the inventories are coming down, and they are ordering again. So it is same old good customers that are placing orders. We would have been having quite a very limited amount of orders for the last, well, two years or so.
We also see EMEA, quite important market for us that is growing now 20%. I also want to mention the German market and the DACH region that is performing well, growing also in line with EMEA. We are happy to see that that is starting to move a little bit also. It has been improving throughout the year, but now we are doing better than we have been doing for many quarters. That is also good to see. North America has been the main driver of our order intake for, I would say almost the last two years, and that is still growing, but not as much as before. We are down to almost reaching a 10% growth in North America. I think overall, we feel it is good that we can have different markets that are driving at different times to make sure that the overall picture is solid.
Staffan also touched upon the main drivers. We still see data centers, semiconductor industry is doing very well. We always get the question, how much business do you have out of the total into these sectors? We expect that to be maybe some 10%, maybe slightly more. That is a direct exposure. Then we are sure that we have a decent indirect exposure as well. It is very difficult to quantify. Also, going over to sales, also stable development. Now we are starting to meet tougher comparables. We had a strong ending of 2025. We are seeing now, just as Staffan said, meeting the billion mark. Good to see, first time over SEK 1 billion. Organic growth is 6%, so not as high as on the order side, but also in relation to those comparables.
We see that, I forgot to mention on the orders, but we have the INT division is performing extremely strong, both in orders and on sales, and we will take a deeper look into that when we go into the divisions. We can see that we are building a bit of order book-to-bill 1.09 in the quarter. It is good that we see this order book build up for the future that we will have solid sales for coming quarters as well. Then going into the divisions with IDS first, Industrial Data Solutions, that had a bit of a soft quarter, you could say. On the order side, we were actually down 3% organic to SEK 404 million. The main reason for that is that you know that we have some of these bigger product orders from time to time. In Q3, those were rather weak.
The underlying business is developing fine. The bread-and-butter business is developing pretty much as expected. We hope to see some of those larger orders coming in as well to support the growth in IDS. On the sales side, we are growing organically 2%, SEK 448 million, which in itself is a quite good number for us. Just as you see here, if you look at the end of 2025, you see that IDS had a very strong ending to the last year, which will also make it difficult with the comps in Q4, obviously, on sales. I also want to mention some changes on the tariff side that is impacting IDS a bit. We have been seeing now a pretty big fight between Canada and the U.S., which is impacting us actually in two ways.
Both that we have some suppliers of, we have an EMS in Canada delivering into IDS. We have import from Canada to the U.S. on raw material and semi-finished goods that is impacting. When we sell to Canada, obviously we see major tariffs on that. We hope that will be resolved fairly soon, and we are monitoring the situation closely to potentially take some measures for next year. We will hope that that will be resolved to a more decent environment to do business. Going in maybe to the highlight of the presentation, the INT division development. Here we see a 94% growth on orders, out of which 70% is organic. We have almost all of the pre-buying orders we see in INT. If we were to also adjust for that, then we would be at organic growth of some 45%.
I also want to mention what you see on the bars as the green area with the acquisition the last 12 months. We made an acquisition from Molex, and I think 2nd of January, we closed the deal. We communicated in Q1 that we thought we had basically received the orders for the year after Q1, and we are riding a lot on the semiconductor and data center trend here with continued nice order intake from that business. Some of that is part of the SEK 70 million. Around SEK 10 million out of the SEK 70 million boost is related to this business. So it is also a fair amount of the rest of INT that is seeing these longer orders.
Just to repeat what we said before, here, we also really see strong demand from semiconductors and data center segments, both on gateways and from the semiconductor side with more embedded business. So it is a good wide demand from that side. Sales also continue to improve solid, not as volatile as the orders obviously. We do SEK 341 million, which is an organic growth of 16%, which we think is fairly good for this business. Then we have New Industries, solid development. We have been seeing on the margin side a bit bumpy as you see on the red line on the bottom left. Now we have a better quarter with the margins very close to our long-term target of 24.7%. Organically good business both on orders and sales, 11% growth organically on orders and 14% on sales, where both businesses are developing quite well.
For building automation, we see Europe as the driver, and for vehicle communications, we actually see Asia and Americas driving since we have a part of the exposure towards the European automotive industry, which is obviously not developing fantastic. So it is good again to see that the markets are complementing each other for different parts of the business and overall picture is fairly good. Over to profitability, we have record EBIT of SEK 280 million. So a 27.4% margin, which is very much in line with what we see year- to -date, also 27.1%. So we get the question from time to time, if we are going to increase the target from the 25% that is our long-term target to something else. We believe it is good to be a little bit ahead on this stage.
We know that acquisitions are most of the time dilutive, and we would like to have 50% of the growth to come from acquisitions, and that gives us some space to acquire. We also want to have the opportunity to invest more in organic growth initiatives, which we will be looking into going forward. Gross margin has been a hot topic also for us to understand what will happen, and we do see quite a bit of pressure from component prices and now also tariffs in the third quarter. That is affecting most of our product portfolio. I think we are quite happy to be able to show 62.7%. We probably believed it could be a bit worse. We actually do have, it is almost a bit strange to talk about this, but we have a positive effect of SEK 3 million due to tariff refunds from 2025 tariffs.
On the other side, we have significantly higher tariffs than SEK 3 million in the quarter from the current tariffs that is in place. But if you want to exclude from that one of SEK 3 million, you would be looking at 62.4% in underlying gross margin. I think going forward, we believe that we will have a slightly challenging Q4 and maybe also Q1. Maybe it is even so that Q1 will be more challenging than Q4 since there will be higher cost increases and our price increases that we will make from January 1st will not have full impact from Q2 or so given the backlog.
So we might see a slight pressure on gross margins. We have been seeing now that volume is mitigating and also a positive currency situation with a weaker Swedish krona is good for us. So that is kind of offsetting this impact a little bit. We expect that to be in the short term also supporting in Q4 and hopefully Q1 as well. Going to OpEx, not a lot of drama there. We have an organic increase of 6% to SEK 391 million. The main things that are driving, of course, salary increases compared to last year, then half of that roughly, and then we have some increased investments in R&D and also in building up an internal AI organization to improve our processes that is now in place and costing a little bit.
So all positive things, we believe. We are increasing capitalized R&D slightly from SEK 19 million to SEK 21 million in the quarter, and we are running a pretty high pace in developing new products at the moment with big initiatives both in INT and IDS, which I think we talked about before as well. Now let us take a look at the earnings per share, and here you might be surprised to see pretty much a flat development versus Q3 2025. I think the main thing that might not be obvious that is happening here is that we have a currency effect revaluation of internal loans or group internal loans that has been revalued by SEK 22 million.
So a negative impact of SEK 22 million. This is not cash flow impacting. It is just the way IFRS wants this to be presented. If you were to take away that effect, you would be looking at an adjusted earnings per share that is SEK 4.20 +. So then you would see the increased performance also spilling over to earnings per share. One of my favorite parts in the report, the cash flow, SEK 333 million, not quite as good as in Q2, but another very strong quarter on cash flow.
I think it is fair to point out that we do have some help from an increased accounts payable, roughly SEK 50 million that is supporting us in a temporary increase in accounts payable. This will obviously be reversed rather soon. I think we will probably have a difficult time to show a similar amount of the cash flow in Q4, given that that accounts payable will be paid down. You know how it is with working capital, it goes up and down. Now it just happened to play out well for us in the quarter. In terms of inventory, we are developing fairly flat.
We have been having a lot of support from inventory decline over the year, and I think now we are in a position where we would actually prefer to be able to build some inventory to secure deliveries for 2027. Unfortunately, a lot of those components that we are looking for is in allocation. It is a difficult situation to build the inventory, but we will try to do what we can to secure deliveries for the coming year as well. Then we have our net debt that is continuing to decline in line with good performance and no recent acquisitions. We are now down to a net debt through EBITA of 1.52x if you exclude for the IFRS 16 methodology, which I think we are quite happy to see and reducing that from 2.77x a year ago.
So 1.27 x reduction in 12 months with a dividend and acquisition along the way. I think we need to be happy with that development. This also puts us in a good spot to continue the M&A agenda. We have good activities in our divisions in doing that as well. To summarize, before we open up for questions, what we would like you to take away is that we see now strong development in APAC and Europe. Before it has been more the North American markets that have been driving. Now we see that we are offsetting that slightly lower growth with a good growth in APAC and Europe instead.
Also that we see a sequential growth over the quarters in 2026 if you adjust for these pre-buying behavior. Gross margin still under some pressure from tariffs and component price increases. We think we are getting away okay. We will have to wait until 2027 to see improvements there given the price increases that we are going to make from year end will take effect. Finally, the profitability and cash flow, quite solid, a bit over 27% now for the third quarter straight, and cash flow about SEK 330 million for the second quarter straight. So solid performance there as well. Now, operator, I think let us open up for some questions from the audience.
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. The next question comes from Simon Granath from ABG. Please go ahead.
Hi, Staffan and Joakim, and congrats on the strong numbers. I would like to start on the pre-buying. I think Staffan said that this could continue over the coming quarters, but what is your line of sight on this? Do you believe that the pre-buyings are happening as a result of you seeking to raise the prices in January, or do you assess it to be more industry-related? Thanks.
I can start here with a high-level thing. I think we are really trying to actively manage that this kind of pre-orders is not placed to not get the increased price from the 1st of January. For all shipments that is made after 1st of January, we will deploy the new prices, even if we had orders in before. I think in general that as long as this uncertainty with lead times on especially memory, but other semiconductor continues, some of our customers are changing their planning horizons in their systems. I actually said I thought that it should be even higher than SEK 70 million. I think on this level is what you said, Joakim, is it likely that it will continue on this level for the next quarter?
I think it is quite likely. Yes, the start of October, I think we see a similar behavior for some customers. I think we can expect this to go on for at least one or two quarters more, a lot depending on how the component market develops.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for helping clarify that. I think you also said that you do not see any contribution from larger orders. Does that surprise you? It has been some time since those types of orders were present, so wondering how long the customers can wait until they start to trickle in.
I think that is important. We have two types of large orders. We have, of course, this design wins and machine wins, where we see a good flow of continuous order from this. Some large, some small, but I think what you are referring to is what we call project orders. This is what we received some years ago in American Data Center, where we did one project with a lot of equipment, and this is very volatile and difficult to plan. Some you win, some you lose. This project business that we more or less got more when we acquired Red Lion is fairly new to us, and we see that this is very difficult to predict, and it is, as I said, quite volatile.
That makes sense. I also recall that during CMD last year, you spoke about more than half of the organic growth in the new business plan would come from new products. Where are you tracking on that ambition? Have those new products come to the market, or should we expect more of them to come in 2027?
I think here, of course, first we develop the product, then we introduce the product to win customers, and then we get revenue. I think we are just in the phase now to. We just released for IDS two very important product lines, both for N-Tron and for Ewon. We are now in November presenting a new Anybus line in Germany. I think this will allow our salespeople to start winning. This means that winning to be specced into different machines or devices, then revenue will come later. I think we need to be a little bit patient to see the revenue effect. From a planning and introduction point of view, we are following our plans. We are releasing new, exciting products, and our salespeople are happy about it. But it will take some time before they generate real good new revenue for us.
Thank you. Appreciate it. A final question. Is there anything on the product mix that we should be aware of over the coming quarters when it comes to margin?
Not that I can think of, no.
Perfect. Thank you for having my questions.
All right. Thanks Simon.
The next question comes from Joachim Gunell from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and good morning. If I can just follow on Simon's question with regards to the pre-ordering here in the quarter. Is there any way that you can quantify how you think about how this will develop, whether you think that that impact could be then higher into Q4 since it's a January price hike, but we didn't really expect any into Q3? Also whether you think that pose some risk for an air pocket in INT orders for the first half of 2027.
Maybe we can just distinguish between two type of behaviors, Joachim. I think what we're talking about is a customer that's placing an order today for something to be delivered in Q3 next year. They could have placed that order in Q2 next year, just as well. That's what they normally would have done. For the year-end stuff, I think what we expect to see is that some customers will place orders and say, "Hey, we want delivery tomorrow to make sure we don't get the price increases."
I think that's what Staffan said. We're trying to identify that behavior and making sure that we don't have customers building inventory and taking deliveries in Q4 to avoid the price increase. It's two different things in our opinion, and we want to try to mitigate that as much as possible. But of course, the customers will do what they want, and then we just need to make sure that we get the right price for the goods.
Great. On just the gross margin, how you think about the trough here that perhaps Q1 2027 should be the trough, the way that you think about it playing out right now. Has there been any sort of changes to the levels you think it will trough, whether the price hike proportion of offsetting this increased cost will be lower or higher than you envisioned a quarter ago?
I thought that maybe they would have a little bit more pressure in the quarter. I think the currency developed favorably and that offset part of it. Going forward, what we see is that, of course, we have some inventory of some of the components as well that we purchased at a lower price, and now it is not possible to purchase at a lower price. I think the effect will become higher and higher as we go along. But then, of course, at some point, we will also have a mix that is within our price increases, and that is why we think that we might have a little bit tougher situation in Q4 and Q1, and then we should be basically back to normal when we have put the price increase in place.
Just to reiterate, the way we have been thinking about this is we could, of course, make a price increase like in first of July or something like that, half year through 2026. But we think that there is a good market momentum and would prefer to have our salespeople on the ground winning new business. So it was a decision we took to be able to focus on growth and, with that, be aware that we might take a bit of margin hit in the second half of the year. So that is the reasoning behind the situation.
Great. Perhaps just on the IDS development here that, okay, it has been the growth engine with U.S. exposure over the past two years, can you say anything about the organic order development excluding project orders and also just some high-level reflection on what you think about which divisions will have the growth opportunities into 2027?
I can continue, Staffan, you jump in if you want. I think the underlying development of bread-and-butter business has been quite okay, so pretty much as expected in IDS. From time to time, we have these weak orders especially in IDS. We saw it in Q4 last year, that was fairly weak as well, and then Q1 came back being strong. I think we are not too worried about one quarter without any of these projects. They come and they go. I think that is the nature of the business.
I think we want to hang around and then see how that plays out. In terms of growth opportunities going forward, I think in the short term, INT has a very good momentum and probably expect that to continue for some time. Over longer time, we think that all divisions have good possibilities. I do not think we want to rank one better than the other one in the longer perspective. We have similar targets in growth for all three divisions, and we expect all of them to grow nicely.
Great. Yeah, and sorry for the background noise here. Our office is under renovations. Hopefully we will have the automation products from HMS this year at some point. Perfect, thank you.
We love that sound. Yeah, that is good. Thanks, Joachim.
The next question comes from Jesper Stugemo from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Given a component shortage, could you give some flavor on how you are working with securing your volume from partners, and how prioritized are you, and are there any special components that are at risk or very crucial for you to secure in order to deliver? How worried should we be on the supply?
Mm-hmm. If I start just on a high level, I think we are working with, since we have also own manufacturing, two factories, one in Europe and one in U.S., we do quite much of component purchasing ourselves. Then, of course, we also work with EMS suppliers that do a lot of things for us, but they do their own purchasing. This means that we have a direct link to the large component suppliers, and I think we feel that we are fairly important for them. The reason why we are important is that for them, we are an enabler for them to get into certain machines and devices. If you look on our line card, what customers we have, our suppliers are quite happy to work with us because we are opening doors also into these companies for them. I think we have good relationships.
We work a lot with the larger Texas Instruments of the world, NXP, with direct contacts with them. That is good. But we also work closely with our EMS manufacturers to understand what they see and how we can mitigate that. I think in general, we have good processes, but it is also very difficult today because a lot of people have more demands than there is a supply. You need to be early on and have good relationships to get priorities. For us, it is of course memories, where we have big problems and extreme cost increases. But we are also seeing that this goes to traditional components like passive components, like PCB boards and things like that used to be very stable in pricing.
We are seeing that it is continued to spreading, and that is why Joakim was also saying that we may see that we need to build up more inventories and have more security in this. This could affect our cash flow a bit the coming quarters. I think we managed this okay, but it is a difficult situation. I am not sure, Joakim, would you like to give more details on this?
No, I think you covered it perfectly, Staffan.
Thank you.
Yeah. Given the gross margin boost here of SEK 3 million in Q3, but you were mentioning some headwinds as well, do you expect to see any more of this refund on gross profit in the coming quarters, or was this everything?
I was hoping you shouldn't ask, Jesper, but I think we expect, I don't want to get ahead of things, but I think we will expect to see a little bit more. Difficult to say exactly how much, but we expect to get a little bit more. We're working on it.
Okay. I see.
Just in general, I think the tariff situation, we were expecting Canada to be it for a couple of weeks. It seemed to continue, and it can't continue forever. It's 50% tariffs. It's extreme. Let's see how this develop, but we hope there'll be a change during Q4, but it seems like the fight is deeper than we expected.
Yeah. I see. Looking at INT, how much of the growth was from semiconductor data center related applications versus a more broader recovery from industrial OEM demand? Could you give some flavor around that?
Maybe I can start. We need to understand that we supply to some large players in the semiconductor field. We are supplying also some products to data center, but the indirect exposure that we supply products to the ABB of the world, the Schneider Electric of the world, and there we don't have transparency where they end up. It's really difficult to get a good feeling for where we are. But I think, Joakim, we are saying that maybe 10% of our total revenue will be related to data centers and semiconductor, but the majority of that part is probably coming in INT. So in INT, I guess the percentage would be higher, but it's really difficult to get a, how should you say, a scientific estimation there.
Then you probably have an indirect exposure that is very difficult for us to assess.
Yeah.
I don't think we can give a figure to the question, unfortunately.
Yeah. Okay, I see. That's fine. Thank you, guys, and good luck in Q4.
Thanks, Jesper.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Viktor Högberg from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.
All right. Good morning. Just a continuation on the other side of that question from Jesper. Demand seemed rather broad based, of course, driven mainly by the semi and exposure currently, but what about the other, maybe 80% then of your exposure? Could you talk a bit about the drivers there and what you are seeing in terms of demand, where it is strong, where it is not as strong? You mentioned Germany, China, and Japan. Could you just expand a bit on that? Thank you.
Maybe I can start. I think if we start in Japan, we are seeing that as both Joakim and I mentioned, that we are seeing a rebound of business, that the customer used to have a lot of inventory. They are coming back and would like to purchase again, but also the market in Japan is better. In China, I think we have two types of markets. We have companies in China that use our product to sell in America and Europe. That is going quite well. Then we have Western companies that are using our technology inside their operations in China.
That is the two major things, and both of them are going really well. We do not have so much exposure to Chinese customers who fight on the domestic Chinese market, very price sensitive. We have some customers there, but it is also a price fight that is very difficult for us. In Europe, we have seen a quite weak market, especially within and in the boundaries of German automotives for passenger cars. That is still quite negative for passenger cars. But in general, we see that the market in Germany and Central Europe is less negative, and this thing is continuing that we have seen, so that is good. In U.S., it is continued to be strong.
I think in general, that is the general picture we are having, and this is supported by PMIs. So we think that this industrial automation, industrial manufacturing things are progressing in a good and stable way forward. That is the major growth we are seeing. The semiconductor and data center, that is a little bit of the good stuff on top of this, but it is a broad base recovery and stable situation we are seeing.
Perfect. Okay, thank you. Just finally, I do not think anyone asked, could you disclose the magnitude of the price increases? We know that it is going to take some time to fully roll through in the P&L, but just what kind of magnitude this time around?
It's very different on both different markets, but also we try to think about their life cycle management thing that we probably increase prices more on older products and much less on newer products. We don't publish any numbers around the total, but we try to do this in a way that makes sense, to make sure that we don't lose customers. But at the same time, we need to compensate for the cost increase that we're having, but we try to do this in a strategic way.
Okay. Finally, just weighing all of these comments together to put some takes on the gross margin. We have the mitigation factors in FX and, potentially some refunds, but that's not going to be huge, I believe. But would you say that it nets out as a slightly lower level in Q4 and Q1 than the underlying level here in Q3, or considerably below? Just what kind of magnitude are you talking on a net level, all things considered?
I think we're talking slightly lower than what we have not a big move down given those factors compensating. Maybe I'll regret saying this, but I hope that we can still protect the 62%+ mark.
Reassuring. Thank you very much.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five 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.
Thank you, operator. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for attending this quarter three call and thanks for good questions. We will keep on developing the business, but it feels like we have a good and stable market situation, so we are very confident in the coming quarters and we feel that we are in a market where we see that there are growth opportunities. It takes time to execute on M&A, but that is also part of our strategy. So for 2027, we hope to have some new things to talk about, but we are continuing to executing according to our 2030 strategy with our ambition to become SEK 7.5 billion revenue company.
So making SEK 1 billion per quarter, that is a good start here, but we have a lot more things to do before 2030. But let us be back on that on the coming quarter, and thanks a lot for attending today. Good bye.