Hexagon AB (publ) (HEXAB) Earnings Call Transcript

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Hexagon Q3 Report 2026 Webcast and Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Anders Svensson, President and CEO of Hexagon. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone, on the line. And also thank you for joining us for this Hexagon Third Quarter 2026 results. My name is Anders Svensson. I'm the President and CEO of Hexagon. And I'm pleased to have with me here in the room, Enrique Patrickson, our CFO. And with that, we turn into the cautionary statements. And then after this, we go into the agenda for today. So I will begin with the Hexagon's performance in the third quarter. Enrique will then present the business review and financials in more details. And I will then conclude the presentation, and we will open for question and answers. So next slide. So let me begin with an overview of our performance in the third quarter, and we can now turn into the highlights slide. We delivered another excellent quarter. Organic growth accelerated to 13%, and it is our highest level in the last 5 years. And we achieved that against a tougher comparable while also generating even stronger order intake and adding to our order book in the quarter. Gross margin held stable at around 62%, and our EBITAC margin, excluding robotics, rose to 25.3%. And that is up 450 basis points on a like-to-like, and quarter-on-quarter, that's up 100 basis points. Cash conversion was 82% in the quarter, and that's reflecting the normal seasonality that we have in the second quarter -- in the third quarter versus the second quarter. Operationally, we continued building our business for long-term profitable growth. The acquisition of Waygate Technologies is expected to complete during this quarter, the fourth quarter. And we also announced the bolt-on acquisitions of Guidance Marine, ZG Technology and Rocscience during the quarter. And we continue to embed the Hexagon Way, and that was also done during the -- our leadership forum where we collected 200 leaders across the group, where we improved alignment, accountability and collaboration. We also launched new company-wide values, which are trust, curiosity and courage. AEON humanoid continues to make great progress. We gained 2 new customers during the quarter, and 2 of our existing customers have now started training AEON independently for different use cases. It is an industry first and possible thanks to our simulations and world models. And this is a great step forward to full production deployment at our customers. So as the Hexagon Way takes hold across our business, we are well positioned to capture the significant opportunities for profitable growth lying ahead of us. So let me now take you through the quarter in more details, and I will start with the organic growth slide, the next slide. So organic growth accelerated to 13% during the quarter, and every one of our business areas group. Autonomous Solution was again leading the way with 23% growth. Manufacturing Intelligence delivered a strong 16% growth, and Infrastructure & Geospatial grew 4% in quite tough environments. All categories grew, but sensor sales led the way with 20% growth. But strong hardware sales today is enabling future sales of software and service solutions, which are normally at the higher margin. Adoption of our newer products continue to progress very well and represents an increasing part of sales for us. It is an important support for our growth of both the top line and gross margin development going forward. On the next slide, I will now show how the organic growth was spread across our regions and industries. So looking at the regional industry picture, growth was the strongest in EMEA with 17% growth, followed by China at 15% and the rest of Asia at 14%. The Americas grew 6% with tough comparables. Construction, which is our largest industry at 27% of sales remained mixed. Growth was strong in China, but however, from a low base, as you are aware, and helped by large monitoring projects and monitoring projects of infrastructure, of course. Western Europe returned to growth on machine control and reality capture. In North America, construction services and software were strong, but machine control was weaker, and South America declined for us. In general manufacturing, we were strong basically across the board with the Americas particularly strong due to reshoring trends. Aerospace & Defense continued to see strong demand across both Manufacturing Intelligence and Autonomous Solutions. Mining also grew well in the Americas, including a record quarter in LatAm, and return to growth in EMEA and the rest of Asia, and that was driven also by mining radar. Sentiment remains cautious given the high fuel cost within mining, and also the iron ore inventories and iron ore growth rate that we see. Automotive was a more mixed picture. The Americas is improving in both shipments and in orders, while EMEA was flat and China was clearly weak, a trend that we have seen now for some time and also see with all our competitors. Electronics was a bright spot in Asia with strong orders and shipments of bridge machines and also vision systems, both within China and within Southeast Asia. Finally, Agriculture, which has only represented 2% of sales, remains weak with farm income continuing to be under hard pressure, both from, again, fuel cost, diesel and -- but also from fertilizer costs due to the Middle East conflict. I'm now turning to the next slide, which is the gross margin. And we kept the gross margin around 62%, so that's the same as last year. And this is despite the growth of sensor sales of 20%, like I mentioned previously, which is a reminder of the strong gross margin profile across our portfolio from sensors to software and services, but also that we managed to keep pricing in a good way year-on-year. And we should remember that increasing the installed base with a large sensor sales is enabling future high-margin recurring and solution sales. Then we move into the next slide. So we generated EUR 265 million of EBITAC, excluding robotics, and that's giving us an increase in our margins to 25.3% in the quarter, and that's up from 23.1% in the previous year. And last year's margin here was flattered by 230 basis points from a large, very profitable one-off order in -- within Autonomous Solutions for defense application. And this is an order that we spoke about 1 year ago as well. And we also have some smaller one-offs included in that flat margin increase. So if we remove those one-offs, the margin improved by 450 basis points year-on-year. And if we break this down, roughly 130 basis points was from favorable FX or currency and 170 basis points came from the full contribution of the cost saving program that now reached the EUR 18.5 million in the third quarter. And then the rest, the 150 basis points were the drop-through from our organic growth. We benefited in the quarter from some tariff refunds but these were more than offset by the increase in costs related to the Iran war and costs from semiconductor shortages and memory costs. We aim to mitigate this impact also going forward, of course, but some of these effects will wait until the Q1 2027 to get full effect. Sequentially, the margin increased 100 basis points compared to the second quarter, even though that the third quarter is seasonally weaker than the second quarter. So this was another proof of very strong third quarter. Including Robotics, EBITAC margin was 24% compared to 22.5% a year ago, and the difference reflects then the investment of EUR 13 million during the quarter versus EUR 6 million in 2025. I then move into the next slide. And now we turn to robotics. And this quarter has been a breakthrough quarter for AEON. We have hit several customer milestones towards production deployment, and our customers can now individually train our humanoid themselves, and that's a big step to scale up use cases with customers. Two of our existing pilots, that's BMW and Schaeffler, are already doing the self-training. In August, AEON became the first humanoid to be trained in Schaeffler's humanoid gym in Germany. The humanoid recreates real factory workstations and environments, so AEON can learn, validate and refine new task before it goes into the production line. This is the next step in Schaeffler's planned rollout of at least 1,000 AEON over the next 5 to 6 years. What makes self-training possible is a combination of several physical AI efforts. This is an industry first and only possible because of the AI models and simulation capabilities that we have built. And in the market, this was also recognized. ARC Advisory named AEON and Hexagon as a major player in its humanoid reports. And during the quarter, we also added 2 new customers to the robotics business. Now I'll turn to the next slide, which is acquisitions. And we continue to be active in M&As where the 3 acquisitions announced and 1 of those closed already in the quarter. First, Autonomous Solutions will acquire Guidance Marine, and Guidance Marine makes the sensors that position vessels next to other marine assets or quays. It generated revenues of around EUR 22 million in 2025. The second acquisition is within I&G, and that's to acquire Rocscience and Rocscience makes geotechnical engineering software for mining and infrastructure projects. Rocscience has revenues around $50 million, and we expect both Rocscience and Guidance Marine to be completed during the fourth quarter. In Manufacturing Intelligence, we acquired the remaining 49% of ZG Technology. We bought the first 51% in 2021, but now with full ownership, it strengthens our portable metrology portfolio and also enables us to run a globalization strategy of the offering from ZG. On the next slide, we will move into the Waygate acquisition. So before I hand over to Enrique, we have this update on Waygate, which we also expect to close during the fourth quarter. And as a reminder, Waygate is Manufacturing Intelligence's entry point into the nondestructive testing with high product and customer synergies with our existing business. Waygate adds around $631 million of revenue at around 10% EBIT. And that's our 2025 numbers. We will have 4 businesses being added, and we have allocated different strategic mandates to those 4 businesses. Remote visual inspection has a growth mandate in the beginning. Radiography has a profitability mandate, and this is the CT business. And then we have imaging solutions and ultrasonic testing, which are in stability mandates from the start. On margins, Waygate is, of course, dilutive at first. And if we apply the numbers from 2025 that I mentioned, it will dilute the group EBITAC margin by roughly 150 basis points and the MI margin by roughly 300 basis points. We have plans in place already to bring Waygate's EBITAC margin into the MI's target range of 21% to 24% EBITAC. So this is a real possibility for a value creation journey in the next coming years. Of course, we will update regular on our progress with this as Andreas Renulf and his team work to unlock this value. So I will now hand you over to Enrique to talk to the financials and the business review. So please, Enrique, go ahead.

Thank you, Anders. Before I begin, let me add my own perspective on this quarter. It is fantastic to see the business executing so well on the market opportunities we are seeing. I'm also very pleased to see the Hexagon Way embedding further into the organization and that is reflected in the underlying profitability performance that we show. So now turning to the revenue and profitability bridge. This slide shows -- bridges the performance year-on-year. So starting with the net sales at the top. We added some EUR 73 million to our top line to reach EUR 1.05 billion. Structure, mainly the divestment of the D&E business to account EUR 68 million and currency added EUR 20 million. So organically, we grew by about EUR 121 million, and that's a 13% organic growth that Anders mentioned. And what you will see when I comment on the business areas is that our growth is really broad-based and structural. More importantly then, EBITAC grew organically by about EUR 37 million or around 16% faster than sales. And as you heard from Anders, once we account for the large one-off defense order last year, the organic EBITAC growth would have been around 28%. Currency also helped adding EUR 18 million, this is broken down to EUR 8 million in the quarter translation and EUR 6 million of transaction and then the balance of EUR 4 million is the negative impact from prior period. So now let's turn to the business areas. And starting with Manufacturing Intelligence, which grew an outstanding 16% organically and delivered a strong improvement in margins. Growth was driven mainly by the stationary and portable metrology divisions with general manufacturing, aerospace and defense and electronics all growing well. Automotive improved in Americas, but remained weak in China. Overall, though, China grew very strongly, and our export strategy is increasingly contributing. Importantly, order intake was strong again for them. On profitability, if you exclude the divested China engineering business, EBITAC margin improved by 310 basis points to 25.2%, which is a very, very good progress. This was driven by the strong organic growth, the benefits of the restructuring program and some currency benefits. And as Anders mentioned, the Waygate acquisition remains on track to complete in this quarter. Moving to Infrastructure & Geospatial on the next page. That one grew by 4% organically, up from 1% a year ago despite the mixed markets that they see. By division, growth was strongest in Construction Software and Services, in Geomatics and Radar and Monitoring. China continued to grow after destocking, and there was good growth in North America and Western Europe. Our new TS20 total station continued to sell very well, and that supported the growth in Geomatics. EBITAC margin rose 120 basis points to 23.7% reflecting the higher volumes, a more favorable product mix and some help from currencies. And then moving on to the last one, last but not least, Autonomous Solutions, which once again delivered a fantastic growth and margin performance with 23% organic growth. This is the strongest quarter ever for Autonomous Solutions. Aerospace and defense continued to drive a very strong performance across our positioning divisions particularly in Septentrio. Mining also grew, while agriculture remained weak. EMEA drove growth, in particular, Ukraine-related spend. North America declined on a headline basis due to tough comparatives from the one-off order last year, but continued to grow excluding that. Product growth was led by our anti-jamming solutions, our high-precision GNSS and our correction services. Backlog also continued to grow. EBITAC margin expanded by 250 basis points to 31.5% margin on the back of these strong volumes. This is despite the large one-off defense deal from last year. Currency also helped during the quarter. Now moving on to the income statement, and I'll focus on a couple of items below the EBITAC line. EBIT1 grew by 5% against 11% for EBITAC. The difference is the capitalization and amortization gap, which narrowed by 80 basis points or 120 points if we exclude the D&E and Robotics business. Adjusted EPS was EUR 0.082, up 19% from EUR 0.069 a year ago. That is lower than the reported EPS because the reported earnings include a fair value gain on investment. And as you might have noted, this refers to Unitree. Effective tax rate for the quarter was 18.7%, slightly below the lower end of our range -- guiding range of 19% to 21%. Now turning to cash flow and net debt. Starting with the cash flow waterfall. EBITAC, including Robotics costs was EUR 252 million. Adding back depreciation and capitalized R&D takes us to adjusted EBITDA of EUR 370 million. After CapEx and noncash items and working capital outflow of EUR 63 million operating cash flow pretax was EUR 208 million, and that is the number that we compare against the EBITAC number here, and that takes our cash conversion to 82%. After taxes, interest and nonrecurring items, operating cash flow was EUR 119 million. And on the net debt bridge, you see the EUR 119 million here as a positive reducing our net debt. And that operating cash flow more than covered out the investments of EUR 35 million, mainly related to acquisitions and then the outflow for leases and share program. As a result, net debt fell from EUR 532 million to EUR 489 million during the quarter. And then on the next page, to give you a sense of the combined businesses, this slide shows roughly how last 12 months would have looked if Waygate, Rocscience and Guidance Marine had been part of Hexagon for the full period. Revenue would have been EUR 4.7 billion, up from EUR 4.0 billion and EBITAC of around EUR 1 billion, up from the EUR 0.9 billion that we have currently. And on that basis, net debt-to-EBITDA goes from 0.3x today to 1.4, and this is well below the 2.5x threshold that we have set for ourselves. So even after these 3 acquisitions, we keep a strong financial firepower for further acquisitions. It should be noted that when we look at net debt here, this is financial net debt, excluding leases. Finally, on next page, sustainability where, as a reminder, our 2030 target is to reduce our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 70% against our 2022 baseline. By 2025, we had already reduced them by 33%, and we are on a good trajectory for further reduction in 2026. 5 months after we launched our new sustainability targets at the Capital Markets Day, the Science-Based Targets Initiative has validated both our near term and our net zero targets. We're now building sustainability into every part of the business, from product design to how customers use our products and how we refurbish them. In the quarter, all our sustainability program commitments progress as planned and all our targets remain on track. Several programs gained traction. We are using more renewable energy. We are replacing combustion engine vehicles with hybrid and electric cars, and our production is more energy efficient. This progress in emissions reduction is helping us to win business also. Increasingly, customers include sustainability criteria in their tenders. So being a leader in this area places us at a distinct advantage versus competitors. In short, our targets are now externally validated. Our emissions keep falling, and we remain on track for 2030. I'll now hand you back to Anders for concluding remarks.

Thank you, Enrique. So let me now bring this together with a short summary of the quarter. And -- but before we do that, let's move into the save the dates slide. So on February 25 next year, we will host a site visit at Septentrio in Leuven, Belgium, where you will be able to see GNSS receivers being developed and also production. The second date that we ask you to hold is 26th of October. And also next year, we will open our doors at our Manufacturing Intelligence facility in Rhode Island where we will demonstrate our production, talk more about manufacturing intelligence and, of course, the North America marketplace and situation. Investor Relations, Tom and Anton, will be sending invitations with the full details in due course, and we hope to see many of you there. Now if we move into the conclusion slide. So to summarize, the third quarter has built towards value creation levers both in the near and in the longer term. So we delivered an excellent quarter with 13% organic growth and further improvement in margins. At the same time, we delivered an even stronger order intake while further embedding the Hexagon Way and the benefits that it's increasingly delivering for us. This allows us to enter Q4 with strong momentum, and we are also investing in longer-term value creation initiatives. We have at least 3 acquisitions that are expected to close during the fourth quarter, all representing great value creation opportunities. Waygate, as we know well, is the largest one and brings an opportunity to generate a material step up in profitability over time. As you've heard, AEON is continuing to take broad steps forward in commercialization giving us access to a sizable humanoid robotics market in the future. So a lot of execution at Hexagon currently and much to be positive about. And with that, we would be happy to take your questions. So operator, please.

[Operator Instructions] We are now going to take our first question. And this question comes from Simon Granath from ABG.

Yes. So quite encouraging demand trends here, especially in MI. I know you don't report orders, but you have some -- for some quarters now, given a comment about them. So I'm keen to understand if the book-to-bill in MI is directionally up, down or flat versus Q2? And then I'm curious to understand how you would describe your visibility into 2027. Is there anything that suggests the recent trends could reverse or cool off as we move into that year?

Thanks, Simon. If you look at MI, that is basically flattish in terms of developing sales versus order intake. So equally strong, I would say. Autonomous Solutions is considerably stronger on the order intake side than on the sales side. And we also have positive book-to-bill in geosystems or infrastructure geospatial. If you look at 2027, currently, we don't see any dramatic changes in demand. If we look at our strong areas like aerospace and space also, defense, electronics, general manufacturing, they all seem very stable for us and not sort of weakening in any way. If you look at the weaker sectors like agriculture, automotive and also the construction side, which are the weak markets, we don't see a specific uptake in those markets either going forward in the short term. And of course, these markets are quite large, so they are not changing in 1 quarter or 2 quarters from being weak to be strong.

That is crystal clear. And then I'd like to double click on the latest acquisition of Rocscience. It's a quite sizable deal with a multiple, at least, above yours. And directionally, you have moved a bit away from software more recently. So I'd like to get some more color on this -- on the rationale for this one, also with aspects to pricing as we know that at least public software multiples have been hammered over the past year or so.

Yes. Thanks. No, Rocscience is a very, very good acquisition for us. So if you put it simply, Rocscience is a leading software company specialization in geotechnical analysis. So Hexagon and Rocscience technologies complement each other perfectly. So as you know, we have the sensors that primarily is radars, monitoring sort of slopes and monitoring infrastructure, bridges and tunnels, et cetera where we continuously record data on how these structures are moving. Then Rocscience adds a simulation on top of that. So they actually simulate how these will move in the future. And then on the mining side, we actually have how the mines need to plan. We have the mining planning tool as well. So that's how you change your planning then to run the mine in the best way and to do the necessary fixes. So it's extremely complementary to what we are doing currently. So hence, we know that we are able to grow this company significantly going forward. And it feels like a perfect fit for us. And then the second part of the question was related to what? Can you please repeat, Simon?

Yes, it was regarding multiples and how you reason when acquiring these companies, partly in light of the fact that public software multiples have been coming down.

Yes, exactly. So if you look at Rocscience, if you look at the multiple, it's actually very similar to the multiple that Hexagon has. So it's basically not contributing in multiple and it's not eroding in multiples. So we think from that point of view, it's a good fit. Then if you look at the performance of the company, it has a much stronger growth trajectory than the Hexagon Group. And the recurring revenue is 80%, so very stable revenues. And the EBITAC margin is north of 40%. So I think the multiple that we paid for this company is high. But if you look comparing to what we get and what we can do with it, it's definitely a value creation opportunity going forward.

And just a final short follow-up. Can you share anything on how Waygate has developed in terms of growth or margin since the acquisition was announced also given recent market trends?

So as we don't have included Waygate yet, and we are in this period where it's a bit hands-off, so we are not giving basically any comments on Waygate's performance or similar. More that we are planning for receiving Waygate and the employees into our organization. We are looking already now on what we can do without having full insights in the company on how to start with running from day 1 basically, to make sure that we do the improvement journey that we have been discussing to bring them up into MI's average performance. So lots of planning ongoing, Simon, but we look forward to receiving the team.

Congrats on the strong numbers.

We are now going to take our next question. And this question comes from Phil Buller from JPMorgan.

I've got 2, please. I'll perhaps ask them one at a time because they're quite different. The first one is on the growth by geographic region. It's a very different picture than recent quarters with EMEA, Asia, China, the drivers of growth well above the U.S. now. Obviously, that's a good thing to have a broadening out. But obviously, how should we think about the evolution of the geographic exposures into Q4? Are you seeing any change in tone or customer behavior in any different regions of the world that you'd call out as we should think ahead to Q4, please?

Thanks, Phil. If we look at -- if I start with the other markets, so start with EMEA. We had a growth of 17% in the quarter. I think that's really encouraging to see that we are back to good growth in EMEA. China, also back to strong growth with 15%, a very important market for us, especially when it comes to MI. Rest of Asia, strong when it comes to electronics, et cetera, and we grew 14%, so in line with China, basically, very happy to see that development as well. Then, of course, when you look at the Americas, like you say, it dropped to 6% growth. However, if you then take in the one-off order that I discussed in my presentation that we had within Autonomous Solution in the comparison period last year, it shoots out as a standoff -- one standoff. And if you would remove that, the growth numbers are much stronger. We will, of course, not go in and discuss specifics of that order or customer, but the underlying growth is much more positive than the numbers you see there. And if you would remove that number, you would also see that the group would have a growth of 16% instead of 13%, if you would remove that one-off order, and that would bring up America significantly from the 6%. We don't see that Americas has slowed down for us or so. We see a continued strong demand in North America, and we expect that to continue in the next coming quarters as well.

I guess part of the question was there's no one-offs in EMEA or Asia or China, that's kind of like an underlying-ish. Is that correct?

That's correct, right.

Then secondly, on AEON, obviously, good to see 2 new customers come in during the quarter. I know you won't disclose who they are. Are they Europe-based companies? And when it comes to the investment profile into 2027, given you're now moving into production and you're gaining new customers, how should we think about the increase in investment 2027 over 2026 in approximate terms, please?

Yes. Thanks. Yes, focus for our early deployments are in Europe partly because of proximity, of course, from the home base and the R&D team. So these customers are also based out of Europe, even though they, of course, have global operations. So if we are successful, which we believe we are, that will be rolled out on a more global scale. On to your second question, how you should think about the investment profile. So AEON will -- or humanoid will continue to require investments going forward. Last year was EUR 25 million from our side. And this year, we end up somewhere in between EUR 45 million and EUR 50 million, as we guided for also previously. Next year will be an increase from that. I would say that we will be in the range of EUR 70 million to EUR 80 million maybe, but that's not confirmed yet, but in those kind of levels is likely. And we will start having revenues also next year within our humanoid or Robotics division. Some of the robots will be sold. Some will be Robot-as-a-Service most likely. So there will be different business models that we operate with customers within this area. So it will still require investments in the next coming years, I would say, after '31 or so, this project is probably breaking even. And then the humanoid sales is targeting to take off '32 or so, if you look what the people who understand this better than me are saying. And then the market is exponentially growing very quickly. And we are currently in a good position, and we can see that from the feedback we get from customers. We can see that from the feedback we get in media and recommendations, et cetera. So we are in a strong position, and we intend to hold that. So we will invest what's required to make sure that we keep our position.

We are now going to take our next question, and this will come from Daniel Djurberg from Handelsbanken.

I have a couple of questions as well. Congrats on a strong report, I would like to say as well. I was a bit surprised by the strong automotive segment, roughly 10% of revenues seeing good growth in Americas and positive in EMEA, Rest of Asia and only negative in China. So can you comment a bit if this is the beginning of a more positive trend or more of a temporary effect?