With all those disclaimers under our belts, it is high time to welcome CFO Frida Frykstrand. Hello.
Hello.
And CEO Johannes Lind-Widestam. Nice to see you.
You too. Thank you.
Please walk us through the presentation, and more importantly, the busy quarter you just ended.
Okay. Thank you very much, Carlos. Welcome, everyone. Our third quarter, as I always say, third quarter is always the most tricky one to predict. We have the summer holiday, and how that will play out is always something that we will see when we disclose the numbers. This year, we did SEK 1,057 million , which is the highest we have ever reached. We also see that we are catching some momentum. We were a little bit below our target when it comes to sales. We had the factory moves. They are corresponding to some lack of sales. I will come back to that. We also see that we still see some pushouts from the suppliers quite late in the process, and that is affecting our ability to get the top line out to the level we were expecting.
Without those things, I would say that we are rather pleased with the quarter. We remain with a good profitability. We have very good dialogues. We keep on having good momentum in the customer dialogues and so on. I think the quarter is overall a fairly good quarter. We are a little shy on top line, and that also means that we are dropping a few percentage points on the margin, but that is how it is. We are building up a very strong order book. We will come back to that later, and that is something that we see very positively about. I will move over to Frida, and that will take us through the numbers.
Yes. Turning to the financial performance. The key message for the third quarter is to say that the positive momentum is continuing. Sales come in at 27% growth, and reached SEK 1.05 billion. Importantly, we reached 2% organic growth, and this confirming the gradual improvement we have seen throughout the year. Growth could have been stronger, and it was restricted by reduced availability of some materials, as well as production disruptions from our relocation of plants in Lund and Hyvinkää. These relocations are important investments for the future growth, but they restricted us in the quarter. Despite these effects, we came in at an underlying operating profit of SEK 98 million, corresponding to underlying operating margin of 9.3%. We see this as a solid performance, especially taking into consideration that we have a lower local profitability in our Chinese operation and also in our previously established U.K. plants.
Earnings per share reached SEK 1.98, and also we have a positive operating cash flow, although considerably lower than previous year. The main reason for this is the increase in working capital, and especially in inventories, connected to the challenges in the material market. Finally, we have an increase in our order backlog, which is up by 12% in like-for-like terms, and this is supporting the positive outlook going forward. To summarize, growth is accelerating. We see organic growth has returned, and we have a good, solid underlying profitability despite operational disruptions.
Okay. Moving on, some operational highlights. We talked about the top line. We are also seeing that we are increasing with some new customers, and we have also announced that we are looking at several deals that are in the final phase of negotiation. We are expecting to be able to release some of those in the near future. What we also see is that the quarter, we see that our order book for the current sites, and that means that this is excluding Kasdon and STI, so this is corresponding to the sites that we owned before those. We are also seeing that the outlook for the next year, where we have tried to restate these sites to give the more accurate picture, and that the order book is now up for deliveries in the first half-year with around 20%.
This shows that we are continuing to attract more business. This shows that we also continue to increase our share of wallet towards some of our more important customers. What we also see is that we are continuing to invest in our footprint. We know that we need to have capacity to fulfill the obligations that we have in our customer deals. So we have now relocated both Hyvinkää and Lund. Both of these factories are now state-of-the-art factories. We moved out of two sites where we had no more space to grow. Now we have ensured that we can continue to grow with our customers in those two sites. We also see that when we move into new premises, we normally get a higher efficiency because the new buildings will be more suited for purpose.
That means that we are expecting good numbers to come out of these two sites where we have moved into. As you know, we also moved Torsby in the first quarter. That site has turned out to be a very nice site. We have had several customer meetings there. We have had customer days and so on. We had a grand opening in May and so on, and we see that everyone that visits it are very pleased with what they see. We also see that the efficiencies in the processes we have there has increased after the move when we have more space to work on. Cash flow. We have talked a lot about cash flow. Every time we have these constraints in the market when it comes to availability of components, we see that our inventory starts to build up.
We talked about it in the last quarter. We see that this trend has continued. I think the increase of inventory is not as steep as it was in the second quarter, but it has continued to grow or increase. This is something that we watch very closely on. It is natural, and I think that if you look at our peers, we will see a very similar situation. We also see that we are positioning ourselves for growth. That is what we are trying to do. If you look at our footprint, we see that we have growth capacity in more or less all our sites. That means that when we look into the next year, when we see that the growth numbers are coming back, we are very confident that we will be able to meet those growth numbers. Moving on to our segments.
We have talked a lot about Security & Defence. If you look at this, we can see that the growth in the Security & Defence area is 220% in the third quarter, but it is also 19% organic growth. It is the strongest organic growth we have seen in several years. This growth has also picked up during the year. We are up 9% year -to -date, and we also see that the trend into the fourth quarter looks very positive. We are also pleased to see that the Industrial segment, our largest segment, has turned back into growth. We are 11% up in this quarter. We are 8% up year -to -date. Communication, I have talked about it quite a lot. We have some new wins in this segment, and we have secured quite good orders for other customers here. We are expecting this segment to turn into growth.
We grew 3%, which is below what we expected, but we also know that this is the segment that have the highest dependency of the components that are limited. These are very memory intense boards, and the availability of memories is the most critical ones. Moving on to Greentech. This, as you know, have been one of our largest segment in the past. We know that the sales into especially the EV segment has been very weak over the last couple of years, and it continues to be what I refer to as sluggish. We were disappointed in this quarter, but we also see that the trend is fairly flat if you look at the quarters before this. We know that Q3 is a lower quarter than Q4 to Q2, due to the holidays in the Nordics.
Medtech, we have talked quite a lot about the decline in this segment. The decline in this quarter is 5%. I said that from Q3 onwards, we would not see as dramatic declining levels because then the strong sales we had one year ago is disappearing. We started to have weak numbers already from Q3 last year. This was fairly much in line with what we expected. Medtech is a segment where we have too few customers in, so when one or two customers are declining, that has a big effect on the full segment. That is an area where we are putting quite a lot of resources in to turn this negative trend around. Okay, moving on to Frida.
Turning back to the financial performance, I talked about an overall strong momentum for NOTE as a whole, but looking into the operating segments, we can see a clear difference between Western Europe and R est of World. Western Europe delivered strong progress. Sales increased by 41%. This is supported by acquisition, and we reached SEK 825 million. Excluding acquisition growth increased by 6%. Sales grew in Sweden by 8%, and in U.K., the increase was 3%, adjusted for acquisitions. In Finland, we saw a decrease in sales by 6%, and this is due to relocation of their site in the quarter. Also profitability-wise, the performance was strong in Western Europe, and we reached 10.5% with an operating profit of SEK 87 million. The acquired U.K. businesses are performing strong and are contributing to the positive development in the segment. Turning to Rest of World, the picture is more challenging.
We see a decrease in sales by 6%, and we reach SEK 232 million, and an operating margin which reaches 5.9%. Estonia continued to perform well with a sales increase of 10%. However, this was more than offset by Chinese operations reducing by 25%. This is primarily connected to the performance in Communication in China. Bulgaria is a smaller operation and performed somewhat below our expectations. The key takeaway here is that Western Europe is performing very strong, both in terms of growth and profitability. However, we have more to do in Rest of World, and we see a clear improvement potential both for the segment and for NOTE as a whole.
Okay. In summary, we can say that, if I just pick on some of the things that CFO Frida Frykstrand just mentioned, we can see that the Estonia operation is going very well, and we see the order backlog is increasing very nicely. So Estonia, we think, is a bit, what do you call it, out of the problems, if you look at it like that. Bulgaria, we see we have a good profitability. We had expected to be able to move more business into that factory. So we are a bit behind on schedule, if you look at it in that way. China is where we have had the biggest struggle, and that is the complete of Chinese market, especially China. For China, it's where we have had issues with top line.
We have taken a lot of actions in the Chinese factory, and we are expecting to gradually turn that back to stabilization, and over time, back into positive numbers. So that's very pleasing to see that we are taking those steps. Moving back to what I think about the ending of this year. We see that the market activities are very good. We have high customer, what do you call it, customer engagements. We are in long-term dialogues with several new customers and also new programs for existing customers. We are expecting a few of those to materialize in the fourth quarter. When I say materialize, meaning that we sign contracts for it, and then that will drive growth in the second half of next year.
The first half of next year looks very positive, as we have shown here, with an order backlog that is up about 20% corresponding to last year, also including the lately acquired sites. If I would look at, say, some companies are presenting some kind of book-to-bill, how much are we booking compared to how much we are billing? That number is way above one. If I look at the full value of our order book, that value is up significantly higher than this. But we also need to know that when the component market is getting tighter, we see that the order horizon is a bit longer. So that is a number that we don't think is that relevant. We rather time it in the way that we do here.
When I look at Q4, we know that some of our lately acquired site has their strongest quarter in the fourth quarter. We are expecting the ending of this year to be strong, and we are expecting the fourth quarter to be the best quarter in the NOTE history, both in terms of profitability and in terms of sales. That is what we are expecting. With that said, I will open the floor for questions.
Well, Frida and Johannes, thank you so much. I can see that the viewers are already preparing questions. But as we said, we will prioritize the analysts here. While we ask the analysts to raise their hand, and we have someone who was very quick here. Prepare yourself for the headphones and please switch on the camera. I will just ask you one question, and you were talking about China there. You have taken steps to sort that out. Would you be able to give us some sort of timeline there, timeframe?
I think that it's a bit early to say. We have been quoting and we're in negotiation with a few new contracts, and when those are materialized, then we will get back to that. But the activity is significantly higher now than it has been in the last, say, two years. We have seen a steady decline in China for the last, say, two and a half years. Even if we have had some quarters that have been positive, the trend has been reducing over that time. Now we see that the level of sales that we see quarter for quarter, if you look Q1 into Q2 and Q2 into Q3, that has stabilized. Now the decline we see is compared to last year, so we are not declining from the level we are operating at at the moment. We have stabilized.
We have adjusted our organization towards the capacity we have now, and as I said, we are in good dialogues with several new accounts, and we will get back to China in the next quarterly report.
Thank you for that. Then it is time to welcome Anton Ingves from Nordea. Anton, please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks a lot. I know you touched upon this in the presentation, but if you sort of break down the organic growth in the quarter here, the Greentech segment was obviously the main drag. What is your visibility into Q4 and 2027 in this segment from here?
I think that the drag in Q3 was more dependent on availability of components. We also know that one of our largest customers are changing their models, so there has been a slight gap in deliveries. The new model is coming out in the fourth quarter, and the last is starting to be sold off. Those kind of activities will affect. I was not really into the details when we looked at this after the second quarter, but that is one of the reasons. We also know that this segment is a little bit what I refer to as sluggish or a bit less stable. So we have seen up and down in this segment for the last, say, two years, but on a fairly slowly declining or fairly flat level. But quarter for quarter, we will see some sluggishness or whatever the right word is.
That is set to continue into Q4 then?
Yeah. We don't expect Q4 to be as low as Q3 was. We expect Q4 to be rather more in line with the earlier quarters that we have presented in Greentech.
Yeah. Okay. That's very clear. Looking at the organic growth in Kasdon and STI, which is not reported in your organic growth numbers, what are we looking at roughly in Q3 here?
I don't have the numbers, but I will say that we will be around 10% growth for both of them organically. Maybe slightly higher, but in that range.
On that outlook into 2027 for maybe especially STI, in terms of organic growth, because this comes into your organic numbers here as well, going forward. What are you seeing in terms of momentum?
We see that the order book for STI is significantly higher than that level in the first half compared to what I just said.
Okay. That is very clear. One final here for me. How confident are you on the? You mentioned you had a 12% organic backlog here for the rest of-
Yeah
... 2026. Seems to me there is some risk to this, that they will be able to deliver this, but how confident are you?
When we look at the order backlog and what we confirm and how we plan the order backlog is that we look at what the customer want, of course, that is the starting point. Then we look at what is the material availability that we see, and then we take in some precautions and say, "Okay, yes, here we have long lead time on memories." Then we might be a bit cautious, so we reduce the order backlog slightly with that, or we postpone the delivery dates a little bit. In the fourth quarter, I would say that there are risks. There are also upsides. We know that the customer wants quite much more than what we have confirmed, and that is what we show in the first half of next year.
Quite a lot of those orders or the growth that are there, or at least a few percent of that growth, is something that the customers really would rather have in the fourth quarter. We are pushing and working towards, what do you call it, pull them into the fourth quarter. We try to give you the best view that we can see based on the information that we have available.
Yeah. Perfect.
That is what we see.
Yeah. That is very clear. I think that was all for me. Thanks.
Thank you.
Well, thank you for that. Now it is over to Thomas Blikstad, Pareto. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Sorry, I need to follow up on the backlog development here because Q4 backlog, very nice to see that, again, 12% organic growth. We have had three consecutive quarters now with above 10% organic growth, but year- to -date, organic growth is barely in positive territory. I was wondering, given that it is your best view on the visibility, how much can you deliver in Q4? Because it is quite difficult to use this as any sort of indicator when it is that much spread between the organic backlog growth and the organic sales growth.
I think that is a very relevant question, Thomas, and this is something that we are struggling a bit with. We can say that the missed deliveries, if you put it like that, for the factory moves, I would say that they are in the range of maybe 4%-5% of sales. But still, the way I was envisioning the third quarter, we are lacking maybe 5% top line, and that would have had a good fall-through to the bottom line. You are right, we are a bit below on that. In the third quarter, we saw some late push outs on material, and that has an effect for us. If that will happen in the fourth quarter, very hard to say. We are of course, doing whatever we can to prevent that.
We feel comfortable in that the order backlog that we have is solid and that we have current confirmations of deliveries that will match what we are intending to deliver. The market is a bit constrained and some of these commodities we see late push outs and so on. If you ask me if I am 100% comfortable, no, I am not. If I think that we will reach it, yes, I think so. That is how I would see it.
Thank you. That is a very good answer. I understand that the relocations had about 4-5 percentage points impact on the organic growth this quarter, roughly?
Roughly. We have basically lost two weeks of production in these two factories and late in the quarter, so we had no time to catch up, and that corresponds to roughly SEK 35 million, SEK 40 million, maybe SEK 45 million, in that range.
Okay. On the cost side, were you able to mitigate the cost side from these factories, or is that an impact on the EBIT margins in this quarter as well?
You can say any missed top line that we see today will impact our EBIT. We have, of course, the organic growth will add good profitability numbers on our P&L. If we lack organic growth, that will limit our ability to earn money. With the low organic growth that we see and we still remain with a fairly flat EBIT margin, I think is very, very good. It is a constant challenge, but the more we grow, the more we will learn. That is how we see upon it.
Yes. Thank you. The final question from me is on the margin targets between 9.5% and 10.5%. I also noted that you expect Q4 to be a record quarter on both top line and margins. I guess the last record on margins was in Q4 2025.
Yeah.
11.4%, very strong. Is that a rough guidance, or do you expect to reach in the range of your margin guidance there in the full year?
Yes. We have said 9.5%-10.5%, and we expect to be in that range.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Well, we thank you for that. I think that we have already answered a viewer question regarding the order backlog. As we were talking about margins here, I am looking into one question here that is asking about the price increases, which obviously have an effect on the margins. How much did the price increase contribute to organic growth in Q3? Would you be able to give us an expectations about the pricing environment 2027?
That is a very wide question, I would say.
Yeah.
If you start with the price increase, or how I think the pricing on the component will develop in 2027, as long as the AI infrastructure is as strong as it is now, I expect the pricing to continue to increase.
I don't expect it to increase significantly much. I think it will be overall in single digits. It will not be above 10%. That's my own expectation. I think that we will start to see some of the commodities might actually start to come down, but overall it will be an increase. We talk a lot about PCB, the bare boards. Those are still quite restricted in the availability, and the lead times are roughly up to maybe 20, 25 weeks, up from, say, 6 - 12 weeks. That has been one of our biggest constraints when we look at our ability to deliver. If you look at memories, they have been on, say, roughly 50 weeks lead time for the last, I would say, 12 months. That is no news. It's still very long lead times.
We can see that the availability of the older versions of memories are getting a little bit more tricky. We are heavy on industrial application, and that means that we have rather old designs on those components from our customer side. That means that the availability on the component that we are buying is, if anything, is slightly more complex than for the more modern type of components. We have good dialogues, we have good visibility, and we have been ordering quite much in advance. So we are expecting that we will cope with the growth that we foresee with the orders that we have. With that said, how will that affect our top line? We are not factoring in an expected price increase in our top-line growth. That is something that we're not calculating on that. In Q3, we have seen some of it.
I would say it's marginal. The impact will continue to increase during Q4 and also into next year, where we are always pricing what we refer as FIFO. That means that we sell out the goods that we received first before we increase pricing to our customers, so they always pay the price that we have paid. So we don't work on moving average. We work always on when we have consumed, so to say, cheaper goods, then we start to invoice on the more expensive part, should say. That means that our sales price in the system is always matching where the latest sold price, so that's why we don't really see the impact of price increases in our order backlog and how we value that at the moment.
So new orders is more important in your expectations than a price increase?
Of course. I always say that price increase, yes, that might look a bit attractive on our top line, but it's also going to put a negative effect on our customer's ability to sell.
Okay
It's a mix of two things. If the price increases becomes too high, we will start to see declines in demand. But so far, I don't expect that to have had a significant impact in any of our customer cases. But this will, of course, be a factor to keep in mind.
You mentioned the PCB here, and I just want to clarify then, do you currently see European PCB capacity as a limitation on the defensive sales?
Oh, yes. We can say that if you look into the PCB market, as some people know it better than I do, you can say that today, less than 2% of the PCBs are manufactured in Europe, and that is barely enough for critical infrastructure and defense. So you can say that, yes, this is a problem for the industry. I would say that we, together with our customers, try to find other routes to increase that volume. We see that the PCB manufacturers in Europe are investing in more capacity. Many of them are quite small, so even if they increase capacity with high percentage numbers, it is not that much in volume. So PCB, that is a constraint that we are fighting quite hard with.
Not only to get deliveries, but also to secure, say that we win these defense contracts for deliveries in one or two years. They need to have a secure PCB manufacturing, and what we see now is that that can be a limited resource. So this is a challenge for the industry, and we think that we are relatively strong on this. We expect that we will be able to supply our customer with their needs, but it will be a challenge, and it will be a time lag potentially. We think that this is something that we will sort out. But over time, we need to have more PCB manufacturing capacity and capabilities in Europe if we want to see European-made PCBs in the defense and critical infrastructure. That is for sure.
The key here is it is an industry problem. What is your plan for the Rest of W orld, and how will you restore profitability there? You mentioned China, where you apparently are working. So there you would answer the one question, are the measures already in place for China? My interpretation would be yes.
Yep.
Could you elaborate on other parts?
Yeah. We should also say that the third quarter is seasonality.
Our weakest quarter in Estonia, Sweden, Finland especially, where we have holidays. Estonia is by far the largest factory we have in the Rest of World, and we have one month that are just above break even since we have lower sales in July. That has an effect. So the seasonality is one thing. We are expecting the Rest of World to increase their margin just because of that. We have also done some further cost mitigations in China, and we also see some small signs that we are growing with, what they call low single-digit numbers in China.
The growth we see will have a good profitability effect of China. I would expect that also the Rest of World will, as always, come back strong in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter.
We will have time to finish off the two last viewer questions here.
Yep.
The first one you have touched upon with one of the analysts, but it's the factory relocation, and the question is the impact of the factory relocation. Why wasn't it reflected in your guidance? And you are apparently now sorting that out, or...
I would say that we were pretty clear in the second quarter that this would happen, and that we also said that we would expect the fourth quarter to be relatively stronger than the third quarter.
Yes, I think we did not go out with a number. It was a little bit hard to predict. We know that any factory move will have some complications. I would say that we lost roughly two production weeks late in the quarter, and that is where the shortfall or half of the shortfall from the 11% is coming from. That is just how it is.
Yes, we could probably have been more clear on that, to be honest. We were more verbally saying than putting a number to it. If we are through with this, yes, I would say we are in one way. That means that we still have some inventory and stuff to move in Lund. That is a move that is taking time. But the processes, the manufacturing process, are moved, and we do not expect them to have a, what do you say, a limiting effect of the sales. We expect to keep the production pace as planned in both Finland and Lund in fourth quarter and onwards.
Mm-hmm. Given the constraints in the industry in general, how much of the 20% increase for the first six months at 2027 order book reflects customers ordering further ahead because of lead times?
That is always a question that we will probably see the answer of that in- say, six to eight quarters away. But what we see is that especially for the customers that grow and for the new customers that we are introducing, those are waiting for the products. They have customers that are waiting for a product. That is not an inventory buildup and so on.
For the defense customers, they are also waiting on products. Waiting on, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're late, but the products that we supply will be produced and shipped to customers. Nothing of what we see in the order book for those quarters are what we would say an inventory buildup at the customer side. They wanted a product earlier, and that means that they are going to ship it out to customers fairly quick when they get it.
Mm-hmm. Excellent, thank you for that. My last question would then be, looking ahead here before the next quarterly report, what do you think that the market should be looking out for from yourselves? Is it China back on stream or...
I think that any turnaround that we do, or whatever you call it, is taking quite significant time, so we will not see any drastic change of performance Q3 to Q4 in those. What we will see is that we have a good, strong seasonality effect. Normally, our fourth quarter is the strongest quarter. We know that STI normally have the strongest quarter in the fourth quarter. So we expect a seasonality effect that we normally see that will be very positive. We also expect to see slightly better numbers from China. We expect to see slightly better number from the old U.K. sites that we have been struggling with. Those two things is part of what we expect. We expect, of course, Lund to be back on track. We expect Lund to actually do the best quarter ever. We have a very strong order book there.
We are seeing quite good momentum in a lot of sites. I'm really excited to come back here in a quarter to present what we have done. But if I would say that China is back on track with strong growth and good underlying profitability, I would not expect that.
I would expect a slight improvement, but not more than that.
We also have a new question here from Thomas Blikstad, Pareto. Please, go ahead.
Sorry, I might have missed it, but I was wondering if you could give some commentary on the working capital expectations, if we could see any sort of buildup unwind here in Q4, or how do you view that situation?
Should you take that, Frida? You have been standing.
Yeah, well, the inventory buildup has been significant throughout the year, or since at least in the second quarter and also in the third quarter. We see that inventory is a challenge for us, and we are working hard with our customers and with the suppliers to mitigate the challenging situation at hand. We see that we expect the inventory levels to not continue to increase. I don't dare to say that they will decrease, but we will not expect them to the increase to continue. That's, I think, as far as we can say as of now, given the challenging market that is at hand for the whole industry.
But we can say that, Thomas, if we answer the question in this way, that if we manage to not increase the inventory, we will see good cash flow either in the fourth quarter or in the first quarter, because sometimes the cash flow has some lagging effect, as I call it, depending on payment terms to customer and suppliers. So sometimes the stronger cash flow comes often a quarter later than when the activity takes place. But the trick for us is to not increase the inventory. That is a high focus on that.
Great. Thank you.
Well, if there isn't any more for anymore, then I would say thank you, Frida, thank you, Johannes, and obviously we will thank the analysts and the viewers putting in questions. So looking forward to see you here the next quarter, and we thank everyone who's watching. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.