Welcome to Surgical Science Q1 Report 2026 presentation. During the Q&A session, participants can ask questions by pressing pound key five on their telephone keypad. During the Q&A, we kindly ask participants to limit yourselves to two questions at first. If you have additional questions, please queue up again by pressing pound key five. I will hand over to the speakers, CEO Tom Englund and CFO Anna Ahlberg. Please go ahead.
Hi everyone and welcome to this earnings call for Surgical Science for the first quarter of 2026. My name is Tom Englund, I'm the CEO, and with me today I have Anna Ahlberg, our CFO. We'll start with a walkthrough of quarter one and the numbers, and then we'll open up for questions. Quarter one is a quarter with two stories running in parallel. On the surface, reported sales are down 6% to SEK 236 million .
Once you strip out the currency headwind that we had and the dollar moved significantly against us, the underlying business grew by 4%. If you look at cash flow, we generated SEK 65 million from operations, which is a very strong number and significantly better than the same quarter last year. The business itself is in good shape. Adjusted EBIT came in at SEK 28 million, or 12%. That's in line with last year, and when you adjust for currencies, it's actually around 16%, right at our target level. The headwind here is, as with the revenue, almost entirely a currency story and not an operational one. Throughout the quarter, we're executing on the strategy we laid out at the Capital Markets Day in December, and I feel good about where we're headed.
Now I want to take you through the different parts of the business. Educational Products grew by 6%, or 14% growth in local currencies, and there are some exciting things happening here that I want to highlight. EMEA had an exceptional quarter. Revenue was up 80%, or over 80%, driven by a number of strong deals across Eastern Europe. The U.K., which as you know is where our Surgical Science U.K. team operates, posted one of its best quarters ever. Sales in pound sterling for the quarter actually exceeded the total for all of 2025, which is a big statement. It also tells me that the investment that we have made in building that business is starting to pay off in a meaningful way. The Americas is a different story right now.
We were down about 10% in local currency. We see a trend in Americas with our active customers that despite pipelines being full, the purchasing decisions by our customers take slightly longer time. There is a certain hesitation in the market, particularly in the U.S. We think it's tied to the broader macro environment. The silver lining though is that the activity is still very high with big pipelines, as I said, especially within ultrasound and robotics, which gives us confidence that the demand is there. China deserves a specific mention. The government in China is actively pushing to support locally operated and manufactured companies, which creates a headwind for our simulator business in particular. This has as an effect that the Chinese sales declined during Q1 versus the same quarter last year.
However, we are not standing still and we are taking concrete steps to address this, but it's a structural shift that we need to navigate carefully. The quarter saw several important product launches within our endovascular simulation portfolio for pulmonary embolism and ICE 3D, or three-dimensional intracardiac ultrasound. The product and R&D teams are working with an exciting product pipeline with the aim of broadening and improving our strong portfolio even further, and also to increase the penetration in this very underpenetrated market. I want to speak a bit about ultrasound. Ultrasound had a strong quarter, and I'm particularly pleased with the momentum that we're seeing in ultrasound. The adoption of ultrasound across clinical settings is accelerating, and we're well positioned to capture that. Women's health continues to be a big and key focus for us, and I think it's worth pausing on why.
Ultrasound is one of the primary tools for diagnosing conditions that disproportionately affect women, and it has historically been under-resourced in terms of training. Our solutions are genuinely making a difference, helping clinicians diagnose earlier with more confidence. That's directly in line with the purpose of Surgical Science. The ultrasound simulation market is also genuinely exciting from a financial perspective due to the high number of potential users and the big size of the potential market. Ultrasound simulation has the opportunity to represent an even larger share of the revenues of Surgical Science in the future. A milestone this quarter was that we launched the first products built on the shared technology platform between Surgical Science and Surgical Science UK, or formerly Intelligent Ultrasound. This is the first tangible output from R&D from the integration of Intelligent Ultrasound, and it's a meaningful step.
There's still plenty of integration work ahead, but the direction is clear and we're moving really fast. To Robotics, where the headline number requires some context. Industry revenues were down 17%, and license revenue came in at SEK 68 million versus SEK 84 million in quarter one last year. If you look at revenue in local currency, though, the license revenue was only $600,000, or 8% lower than quarter one of 2025. License revenues in quarter one in USD were actually higher than two out of four quarters of 2025. As we have previously communicated, the memorandum of understanding with Intuitive did not result in a signed agreement, and we reverted back to our existing contract at the start of the year. We previously estimated a SEK 60 million-SEK 90 million negative impact on license revenues for 2026 versus 2025. That estimate remains unchanged.
I want to be clear about what this is and what it is not. It is not a deterioration of relationship with Intuitive, quite the opposite. The collaboration is as strong as it has ever been. What's changed is the commercial structure reverting back to an old agreement, and we're working within that. Our conviction remains that simulation will be a central component of the digital offerings in the robotic platforms of the future, and Surgical Science will be at the heart of that. On a market level, the picture is really exciting. The robotics market is very dynamic and fast growing. Intuitive received FDA approval for cardiac procedures. Johnson & Johnson got the De Novo classification for OTTAVA. Medtronic received U.S. approval for Hugo in urology.
The commercial competition in the U.S. market for robotic surgery is now real, and that's actually a good thing for Surgical Science because it means more robots, more training needs, and more licenses. We also had license revenues from several of our other robotic customers during the quarter, which is a clear sign that players beyond Intuitive are now deploying robots at scale. We are developing simulation solutions for most of the top 20 robotics companies. Our pipeline is bigger than it's ever been, and the long-term opportunity here is very big. Medical Device had a quieter quarter financially. Development revenue at SEK 14 million and simulated sales of SEK 20 million. This is a business that moves in lumps. Projects have long lead times, and the comparison last year was particularly tough because several customers undertook large-scale fleet upgrades at the same time.
We have a clear high ambition within this segment and definitely a growth strategy, and we expect to show solid growth in the future. We should not judge success on one quarter alone and look too much at lag indicators. Rather, the underlying lead indicators remain strong. More than 70% of customers in active development projects are repeat clients. That's a loyalty and retention number that tells you about the quality of what we deliver. We're working with many of the biggest medtech customers globally and are a critical supplier in their deliveries, and we continue to see new clients entering as well. The foundation is solid. As outlined in the strategy, we have a strong focus on improving our gross margins, and we are seeing the effects of our work on pricing. The work that we have done here continues to deliver.
However, the effects of our price increases are countered by the currency headwind that we've had since so much of our sales is in U.S. dollars. We pushed through another price increase in April. The full effect will show up gradually as sales cycles close throughout the year. The trend is positive and gives us confidence in margin improvement ahead. Let me step back and talk about where we're going. The strategy we laid out in December is about becoming a company that truly addresses the full potential of medical simulation across five segments, all of which have very low penetration today. We are in the early innings of a long game. We have no debt. We have SEK 668 million in cash. We have the market-leading position, we have the products, we have the relationships. We have the clinical expertise.
This combination is genuinely rare, and it gives us real options to invest in growth to pursue acquisitions, and also to return capital when the timing is right. In Q2, aside from the work with growing these five segments, we will put significant focus on our operational and production structure, particularly on how we scale manufacturing in a way that reduces cost per unit and makes us more resilient to supply chain disruptions. Our new production facility in Tel Aviv is expected to go live during the quarter which is going to be an important milestone for us. The tailwinds are real and they're growing. An aging population, increasingly complex procedures, a shortage of trained healthcare professionals, higher standards for patient safety, all of these are driving demand for simulation every single year.
We're building for that world, and I'm confident that we have the right strategy, the right team, and the right assets to get there. With that, I will hand over to Anna to walk through the financials.
Thank you, Tom. Yes, we're very pleased to report a solid start to the year. For the quarter, we had sales of SEK 235 million, down 6% in SEK but up 4% in local currencies. We have, after Q1 2025, seen a significant negative effect from currencies on our overall sales and also on our result. I will come back to that later. With our just below 80% of revenues in U.S. dollars for 2025, the full year, the average USD rate was down 7%. For this first quarter against Q1 last year, it is down with a full 14%. Of course that affects us. As I have mentioned before, we are doing some things to try and mitigate this. We are raising prices, and as Tom mentioned, we did one more price increase in April.
We also try and quote more countries in euros instead of in U.S. dollars where this is possible. This will not mean a very large change in the ratio between different currencies since a lot of our revenues originate from the U.S. We see for Q1 there we had approximately 70% of our revenues in U.S. dollars. It's down approximately seven percentage points if we compare to the full year 2025. Looking at our two business areas for the quarter, the split was 55% for EDU and 45% then Indu. EDU up, strong quarter, up 6% or 14% in local currencies. For this year, we have updated our revenue segments somewhat.
The geographic regions have been adjusted slightly. Sales by product segment have replaced sales by product group. This is done in line with the segments that we have presented in our new strategy, apart from the Emergency Medicine segment that is still too small to be reported separately. We therefore now have it included in the Medical Device segments. Back to regions, Tom already talked about it. EMEA was very strong, up over 80%. Eastern European countries accounted for the majority of this increase. The U.K. had a quarter that was stronger than any other quarter in 2025. Revenue in the Americas down by 24% compared to Q1 last year, primarily related to the U.S. Excluding currency effects, sales for this region decreased by 10%.
APAC saw a 25% decline, primarily then attributable to China. We also had a large order for Pakistan in the prior year quarter. India was also strong for this quarter. Indu, down 17% or 7% then excluding FX effects. License revenues, as Tom Englund talked about, SEK 68 million, a decrease in SEK of 19%, but 8% then FX adjusted. If we look at our revenue streams, that means that we had 29% of our revenues were license revenues in the quarter, which we see as a good number. Again, it was as expected that Intuitive was down due to the previously announced MOU cancellation, reverting back to the old agreement between the companies starting January 1st.
The previous estimate that we had that this will have a negative impact on our license revenues of SEK 60 million-SEK 90 million, that is still our best estimate. However, we did have revenues also from several other countries and customers in this quarter. Simulator sales as a whole was down 2% compared to Q1 last year, this is due to our Industrial business area. As Tom Englund said, it's more lumpy for sales than within EDU since it's usually tied to larger projects where development is also involved. Our development revenues, they were up a bit compared to last year but weaker than the previous three quarters. This is primarily due to the project we have in a Southeast Asian country.
This project saw revenues of only SEK 2 million in this quarter due to a minor restructuring of one of the project's milestones. The total for the project is still the same, even with a smaller addition, for this quarter, we saw some weaker revenues. Moving on then to our costs and EBIT margin, as mentioned, our gross margin then for the quarter was 66%, 69% if we look at the comparable quarter. License revenues, as we've seen, a lower share of total sales. Then the currency effects, that effect was approximately 2.2 percentage points in the quarter. Here it's important to note that the lower dollar exchange rate has for us less impact on the goods of cost of goods sold than on other cost items.
Our input goods are primarily purchased in currencies other than USD. Production and associated wage costs are also not in U.S. dollars. Also for the quarter, the proportion of direct sales within Educational Products, and then primarily in the U.S. was lower, and this also then has a dampening effect on the gross margin. These three are the main three reasons. On the positive side, we have the price increases that we implemented in 2025, and as mentioned, we did another one in April. Regarding OpEx, Sales costs were 21% of sales. In the comparative quarter, we had some restructuring costs attributable to the acquisition of Intelligent Ultrasound, now Surgical Science UK. Then we also did some further restructuring in Q3.
Starting in Q4 last year, the reductions that we implemented in the sales force following the acquisition started to have full effects on the cost side. Tariffs from the U.S. implemented in Q2 last year, meaning that we had no costs for this in the comparable quarter, Q1 last year. For this quarter, tariffs amounted to approximately SEK 2.4 million. Admin costs, 8% of sales, same as Q1 last year if we exclude acquisition costs for IU in the comparable quarter. In absolute numbers, admin costs were down if we compare to previous quarters. We have started to work on the relisting process, and, but these costs we will of course inform of how much costs we have for each quarter due to this process, and we expect the relisting to take place next year. R&D costs, 24% of sales.
We activated slightly less, SEK 9 million instead of SEK 10 million, second quarter. The costs on this line also vary depending on how much development revenue there is for the quarter, since salaries for the portion of the development team that have worked on projects that generate development are transferred to cost of goods sold. In absolute numbers, for R&D costs, we were down a bit compared to last quarter, Q4. However, then we also had some restructuring costs on this line, SEK 3 million, related to the termination of development personnel in Seattle. On the other hand, we had more development revenues then, meaning more costs were moved to cost of goods line. All in all, if we look at all these different items, our R&D costs were down a bit compared to Q4, even though we continue to invest in this area.
The other operating income and operating cost line, that mainly consists of cost for the company's option programs as well as the revaluation of operating assets and liabilities in foreign currencies. For this quarter, we had a negative impact on results of just about above SEK 5 million attributable to this revaluation, compared to a positive of just under SEK 2 million last year. Following this, our operating profit, our EBIT for the quarter, was SEK 23 million, corresponding to an operating margin of 10%. If we adjust our P&L for FX effects, EBIT amounted to SEK 36 million, or 14%. The way we did this is done that we use the average exchange rate for Q1 last year, recalculated the P&L.
However, balance sheet items and their impact on this line, the other operating income and expenses line, that has not been restated. Organization-wise, the number of employees at the end of the period was 317. That's 19 less than going out of Q1 last year, and the majority of this change is attributable to the restructuring of the sales force following the acquisition of IU and also the closing of the Seattle office in Q4 last year. For adjusted EBIT, which is then EBIT exclusive of amortizations on surplus values related to acquisitions. The result here for the quarter was SEK 28 million, and if we then adjust for FX effects the same way as we did for EBIT, our adjusted EBIT was SEK 42 million , or 16%. Finance net and taxes, not much to say here for the quarter.
We have no loan financing, meaning that the net financial items mainly consist of interest income on bank deposits. Also, we have revaluation of internal loan liabilities to subsidiaries and an IFRS 16 effect. Net profit for the quarter, SEK 19 million. The tax expense was SEK 3 million. For this year, there are tax loss carryforwards in the U.S. Attributable to Mimic. Also, in the U.K. attributable to Surgical Science UK. Cash flow, we saw a very strong quarter on the cash flow side, SEK 65 million from operating activities compared with -SEK 5 last year. We had a big positive from working capital SEK 36 million, where inventory remained largely unchanged while accounts receivable decreased. Current receivables, including accrued income, and that mainly relates to accrued license revenues that we invoice and that are paid in the following quarter, that has also decreased.
Meaning a positive effect on the cash flow. Investing activities. Tom talked about our new production facility in Tel Aviv. For this quarter we invested approximately SEK 6 million. As also mentioned, they are expected to be commissioned now in the second quarter. Financing activities, not much to mention here for the quarter. That meant that cash flow was a positive SEK 51 million for the quarter. We ended the quarter with SEK 668 million in our cash in bank. With that, we open up for.
I would like to conclude by first thanking Anna and then a short wrap-up. Quarter one was a solid quarter for Surgical Science. The underlying business is growing, margins are in line with last year, and cash flow was the best quarter one we've had in some time. The currency environment has been a real headwind, and the Intuitive impact on the license revenue is playing out as expected. If you look through those two factors, what you see is a company executing well. We have momentum in EMEA. We have a very strong quarter in the U.K. We have exciting new product launches generally and specifically in ultrasound. We have a growing robotics ecosystem beyond Intuitive and a pricing strategy that is working. We are not yet at our financial targets. We have been clear that 2027 is the year we expect to hit them.
We're moving in the right direction and building the foundation that gets us there. The opportunity in front of Surgical Science is significant. Simulation will become a central part of how healthcare trains its professionals, and we intend to lead that shift. With that, we open the floor for questions.
Thanks, Tom.
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 Christian Lee from Pareto Securities. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, Tom and Anna. Thank you for taking my two questions. The first is regarding the license revenue. If you could give us some color on the composition of the license revenue in the quarter. If there were any larger packages delivered in Q1. Given that your robotics customers, aside from Intuitive, are contributing to sales to a great extent, do you view the SEK 67 million you had in Q1 as a floor for the license revenue, or should we expect continued volatility going forward?
I mean, hi, Christian. Good question. Regarding the license revenues, it is clearly a positive trend where, as I said, simulation will play a central part of the digital offerings of the robotics platforms in the future. Since there is many players now entering the competition, more robotics systems are out there. The market is growing and the market potential is growing for simulation. That's clear. I think it's very positive that we see that revenue streams from several different customers were seen during the quarter.
Regarding Intuitive and the kind of the expectations going forward, we don't speak about specific customers, but what we can say is that simulation continues to be an important piece of the digital offering of Intuitive and in a sense there you could say that 2025 with 100% attach rate on the da Vinci 5 was a slight jump start of the future. When we speak with all our robotics customers, the team and I, we see that the discussions are only about how they can expand simulation content for their platforms and how they can tie simulation even more closely into their training pathways for the surgeons. There is a real gap here between installed capacity of robotic systems and the number of trained surgeons.
That's why I say that not only will we be an important piece for the robotics platform, but also we think that this will be a growing business for us. Exactly how this will play out quarter by quarter is difficult to say, but I think you have to find appeal in the long-term opportunity here.
Excellent, thank you. My second question is regarding the structural changes in the Chinese market and your steps to address these challenges. Are you considering moving any manufacturing or perhaps assembly operations to China?
It's a very good question, and it's definitely a structural shift. What we are doing is that we are trying to be a term coined by Atlas Copco, "glocal," meaning that we want to be global and local at the same time. What this means is that we want to have more local presence, generally speaking, in China, not just related to production or operations. We want to be perceived as one global important player with a very strong local foundation so that we can be seen as an attractive player from a Chinese perspective and not as a foreign company. We're taking actions then to increase our presence generally in China, and that has had as an effect several important decisions here through last quarter and also this quarter.
Great, thank you very much.
The next question comes from Simon Larsson from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, Tom and Anna. I would like to start on the Education segment. I think it was a rather solid quarter for that part of the business. It seems, looking back a couple of quarters now, that you've established some kind of revenue level around SEK 130 million per quarter. How should we think about the EDU segment in particular going forward? Is this some kind of floor level, you believe, or any meaningful maybe one-offs here in Q1 that shouldn't be extrapolated? Thinking maybe about the ultrasound business, which was very strong, obviously. Yeah, any help on the dynamics on the EDU segment here going forward would be helpful.
Yeah. We haven't, as you know, particularly explained or set specific target for the EDU segment in the new financial target. Broader, we had financial targets on the full company, on the group level, right? The EDU segment is definitely an underpenetrated segment, and there is lots of opportunity for growth there. Within the different sub-segments of the EDU segments, you have different growth potential, both in percentage and absolute terms. The way we're going to grow this segment is primarily by two important levers. One is the sales and marketing lever driving awareness in this segment of medical simulation and the value of our products. That's mainly sales and marketing efforts.
There we have tremendous amount of activities going into driving different type of marketing initiatives to drive awareness as well as thinking hard and executing on how to cover the market in a much better way. We have a very broad product portfolio today. There's big opportunity here to cover the market in a more efficient way. The second growth lever is in new product introductions. As I mentioned in my comment here, we have a strong product pipeline working, you know, within R&D and product development. We also have made some important product announcements here last quarter and the quarters before that as well. Usually what happens then is that becomes kind of an add-on effect, meaning that it doesn't take away from the existing business, it rather adds on to the business.
When you introduce a new product, then you get the jump in the sales. It's definitely a growth strategy, and we're working on these two to three levers, sales, marketing, and product development to increase the penetration and grow the sales.
Yeah, cool. Gotcha, gotcha. I suppose maybe a tough question to answer, but on the industry OEM side, as Christian also mentioned, the strong print here in Q1, and you're sticking to your SEK 60 million-SEK 90 million impact versus last year for the full year of 2026. Could you give us any sort of direction as to how the impact will be sort of distributed over the quarters? I would expect us to maybe see increased pressure from Intuitive in the coming quarters, or am I mistaken? Any help in that regard appreciated.
I think there is a lot of moving parts here. I mean, it's our license revenues are not just constituted of Intuitive as I've said, we have several different revenue streams within license revenues. We want to stick kind of to the overarching argument that simulation will become a very central piece for the robotics manufacturing. As I said, we see increase in the number of requests for proposals and the number of development projects that we have with these customers. Usually they become customers and they stay customers with us for a long time. There's another piece of this as well is that the robotic manufacturers, they themselves work on the business modeling and the packaging of the digital offerings here.
The way that you offer robotic platforms tomorrow will not be necessarily the same as today, and that will also have an impact on the packaging of the digital offerings, and it will also have an impact on the volume of licenses that we sell. There are so many moving parts here, so we want to refrain from making any sort of more specific predictions, but rather stick to the SEK 60 million-SEK 90 million that we have said that is the impact on the full year, and then feel very confident about the long-term opportunity here in the license business.
Understood. Thanks so much.
As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key five on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from Ulrik Trattner from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Kind of building on the previous questions and regarding the SEK 60 million-SEK 90 million in guidance you provided, is there any way where you can give us some more information on the effects in Q1? I know you won't sort of to the guidance, but it should really help the market to navigate sort of seeing growth, underlying growth in this segment, if you can help us provide some more granularity on that potential headwind or the expectation of headwinds throughout the course of 2026.
Once again, I think it's very dangerous and somewhat unprofessional to try and give guidance on a quarter-by-quarter basis when there's so many moving parts. I think that the macro trends are very positive and strong. I spoke about the increase of competition with different robotic manufacturers now coming in. We see strong competition by that within the U.S. market now with Medtronic and Johnson & Johnson entering the fray. That of course drives the need for training and drives need for simulation, right. As I also mentioned here just in the previous question, there is also moving parts in how you package and how you price these licenses and what prices you have for these licenses.
All this together and still relatively few number of customers, not that we have like hundreds or thousands of license streams makes it that it can be a little bit lumpy, but the longer-term opportunity is very strong. We also feel very confident in our ability to deliver value and extract good solid prices from these customers. Sorry, regarding more specifically, for example, the attach rate and, you know, how many licenses per system for specific customers. We need to also see how this plays out in a little bit of a longer term. It's too early to judge for just one quarter.
Sure, if we were to look isolated here for Q1, what was sort of the quantified negative effect year-over-year?
Do you mean for Intuitive? We have never and cannot comment on the amount that we have for our different customers. Again, we do stick to the SEK 60 million-SEK 90 million. It's still our best estimate for the year, looking down at 2026 in comparison to 2025.
In essence, we will never be able to essentially track whether it's SEK 60 million, SEK 90 million, SEK 150 million in 2026.
Sorry, we will never-
Be able to, as we're on the sell side trying to put down estimates, we will never then be able to pull this or then estimate or get any sense of whether it's SEK 60 million, SEK 90 million or SEK 150 million or SEK 250 million in negative effects year-over-year, or SEK 20 million.
Yeah, we had SEK 300 million in license revenues for last year. Of course, I mean, you know what the dominant player in Intuitive is on the market. We cannot comment on the exact numbers, but of course, this is something that we will follow if we have the possibility to give more information down the line, you know, when we've seen more quarters. We will, of course, continue to comment on this range.
Sort of follow-up question. Robotic surgery sales are down 17%, 18% in local current in reported numbers year-over-year. Like 80% plus being towards America. I guess some significant FX headwind, it could potentially call it a 10% sort of headwind here. If you add back sort of the negative effects, are we talking about underlying growth here in constant exchange rates or is it still in sort of the negative territory?
For the license revenues, if we look at them-
Of robotics, robotic surgery, since like you're providing the revenue by product segment and robotic surgery is then sort of isolated. Just in general for the entire robotic surgery segment.
Yeah, yeah, we do have a sale of products there of course as well. For example, the robotics, which is within the EDU, but just for licenses is still the majority. As Tom mentioned, that's down like 8%, and we saw that actually being higher than several of the other quarters last year. Q1 was, I mean, 14% down for the U.S. dollar. Q1 really had a very large currency effect. Moving into Q2, slowly it will be less if the dollar stays at this level. Yeah.
Okay, great. My second and final question, I'm not sure if you want to answer this one. U.K., you talk about success in the first quarter and some strong underlying demand and momentum out of that market. Intelligent Ultrasound, I guess, it's part of this transformation and success in the U.K. Given that we saw negative EBIT contribution from Intelligent Ultrasound throughout 2025 and there is a significant uptick here in sort of EBIT for Q1 at least versus my expectations, are we to assume that Intelligent Ultrasound as sort of a separate entity is in black numbers now on EBIT?
Yeah, definitely. They are contributing to our EBIT for this quarter, and due to of course increased sales, but also through the cost reduction program that we have done as a part of the integration process. Apart from that, I also want to mention that we see an improved funding climate from the NHS that have made it possible to close many deals that have been sort of frozen in the NHS purchasing department.
Also the fact that we now have a direct sales team in the U.K., which is selling the entirety, not just Intelligent Ultrasound or ultrasound simulation product, but the entirety of the Surgical Science portfolio, has had a very important positive impact on the sales and will of course have an even more important impact on the sales going forward. Both for educational and also for our industry customers in the U.K., which represent a big opportunity for us.
Great. That was all questions on my end, and I'll get back into the queue.
Thank you.
There are no more questions at this time. I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions or closing comments.
Yes, great. I was just about to say we have some written questions. I think there was one about China, we answered that one, I hope. There's one around the Uplist and the timetable for that, taking place in 2027, which is around year for this process is sort of a normal timetable, depending of course on how many, how much consultants, etc., you use as well. But as for the share buyback, which is connected to this question, we cannot today do a share buyback on Nasdaq First North Growth Market.
However, it will be allowed starting in December this year, and that is why we tomorrow when we have the AGM, there is a proposal to the AGM to give us that mandate so that we have it when the uplisting takes place, or if we're allowed on the First North Growth Market. There is one more question also around the relationship with Intuitive when you say, Tom, it's stronger than ever? Can you please elaborate on that a bit?
The way that these relationships work, not just with Intuitive, but with both robotics companies as well as medtech companies, that we engaged in deep collaborative projects around a specific value, a specific feature, a specific product from them. Then our development teams engage in a development project that leads to either a software simulation piece or some type of hardware for a medtech company. These type of discussions with Intuitive are ongoing, and development work is still continuing in an unchanged manner. That's what I mean by this comment. Of course, that's a lead indicator for future business, of course, both with this customer and with all the other customers that we have.
I don't think we have any more written questions.
No more questions. Thank you for your attention and see you all in a quarter.
Thank you. Thank you for today.
Bye-bye.