PowerCell Sweden AB (publ) (PCELL) Earnings Call Transcript

Welcome to PowerCell Q3 2026 Report Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome. Today, Anders and I will take you through the third quarter, the effects of the measures that we have initiated earlier this year and the commercial development in our priority markets. Our approach remains consistent. It is to manage PowerCell in this rather challenging market condition, protect our position and then retain the capacity to capture larger opportunities. But let me start with the quarter and our response to it. We initiated measures earlier this year, and it's now generating measurable effects for us. Combined selling, administration and R&D expenses has decreased with 25% in quarter 3. Our measures are expected to lower our annual cost base even more by approximately SEK 50 million in 2027. So the reaction started earlier this year. Then the quarter, the numbers are not the ones that we want to report to you, but they are the numbers that we are prepared for. Revenue declined 61%. That reflects a weak market, lower automotive royalties and also deliveries that shifted from quarter 3 into quarter 4 with the PS190 ramp-up. We have adapted our cost and commitments to this lower level of business during the year. In parallel, we have continued to sign orders since June. Customer activity has increased in both Marine and Power Generation. And we have signed now recently an MOU with Bosch to address the larger installation we see emerging in the Power Generation segment. These developments are encouraging, but they are also too early to conclude that the broader market is improving because we are operating in harsh market conditions and have been doing so for the whole year. For us, the balance between resilience and readiness has guided our decisions throughout the year and has served us well in this rather difficult market. In our year-end report that we communicated in January, we explicitly prepared for a broad range of outcomes in 2026. We have managed PowerCell on that basis throughout the year. We have been very, very cautious in protecting our financial position through cost, cash flow and capital discipline. But we also need to protect our strategic positioning by concentrating resources on Marine and Power Generation, really focusing on the capabilities that can differentiate our offering and capture the volume that we actually see is out there. We also protect our structural position by sizing the organization for current business while retaining the industrialized platforms and access to manufacturing capacity. This gives us resilience at the lower volumes that we have been talking about, but still have the ability to respond when larger projects materialize. Now I will hand over to Anders to walk us through the financial performance and position in more detail.

Thank you, Richard. Starting with the Q3, I think it's obvious that as reported that we have had a decline in business. But it's also important to remember what Richard just mentioned about spillover effect into Q4. Looking into the sales level as an example on that one as that provided the same level of royalty that we would expect and the business is rolling into Q4, we would have been close to twice the size of the sales in Q3. And of course, that puts some expectations into Q4. But I mean, this is important to have as a, let's say, understanding for the business because delivering on larger projects, we have not that many large projects. But when they slip over a quarter, obviously, that have immediate effect on the individual quarter. But rolling 12, you will see that, that will level out. And I also think that one thing that is important for us, at least to stress to the market, is the cash flow situation. Looking into the cash flow or operating cash flow for the third quarter, we feel comfortable that this not only reflects the fact that we have stabilized the cash flow, but behind that is that we stabilized the cost structure and the cost that we have in the organization and also been able to even out part of the deliveries that we are doing. And if we go into the accumulated numbers for the full year on next page, you'll see that the operating cash flow is minus SEK 92 million. We dive directly into that number now. And you can also notice that if you go back 12 months and look into our operating cash flow, you notice that in the Q4 report '25, we had above SEK 100 million. And after that, we have had a negative Q1 that is close to the same level. But if you even out these things, we hover around 0 in operating cash flow in a very tough situation, and that is a lot to do with the way that we have managed the company from that perspective over the last 12 months. Other measures on this page, I mean, it's important, like Richard already stated, that the cost effects visible in the P&L are already visible to everyone. And we, as Richard said, would look forward to see even further cost reduction moving in, particularly into 2027. I think I will summarize with that and leave it back to you, Richard.

I think you have your schedule for...

Yes. That's an important thing not to miss out on. I mean, the upcoming reporting dates. And I think they follow basically the same, let's say, pattern that we had previous years with Q4 report coming up in week 6 and then the interim report for the first quarter, approximately the same time as we had last year, followed closely by the AGM right after.

Good. Thank you, Anders. As Anders stated, there are 2 timing effects to take into account here and to understand them separately. During the ramp-up of our Power Generation production, we have seen delays in supply chain. So secured deliveries that was supposed to generate revenue in quarter 3 is now rolling over to quarter 4. That is frustrating, but it's also an effect and a good description of the challenging market we are operating in. Our focus is now to receive those deliveries in quarter 4 and do that early. But then automotive royalties follow a slightly different pattern. Deployment in China has been substantially below expectation with delayed incentives holding back activity. The whole industry was expecting growth in 2026 compared to 2025. But instead, it became a declining market with up to 55%, 60%. Part of the royalty income that we're expecting is now going to roll over into 2027, and we're monitoring this quite closely, even though we are not addressing this market directly, but through our manufacturing and industrial partner, Bosch. But then what we can control is how we have reacted, and we have adapted our plan to the lower contribution. We manage costs against this business that we have and remain very cautious about timing of recovery. So cost control and organization measures become particularly important. And it's not just cost reduction, but also productivity improvements from new processes, new tools. We see a benefit from AI in our both engineering and aftermarket and production. So the organization remains in action readiness for the potential growth that we see out there. The cost reductions visible in Q3 are effects of the action initiated actually from the beginning of this year. We will continue to have a strong cost control and rightsize the organization, both from a financial perspective, but also for the new potential growth that we see out there that we need to have a slightly different competence mix going forward. Further benefits will continue throughout 2026. And then in 2027, we are already with a SEK 50 million cost reduction compared to 2025. We have made deliberate choices about where to reduce spending, which capabilities to protect. Customer deliveries, our industrial platforms and system integration remain priorities. These support the business today, but it's also our ability to handle larger projects going forward. So the same priorities determine where we put our people and development resources. We need to have a strong focus right now on where we put activity and focus in the company. But then we also see an emerging business out there. Marine remains the foundation of our business. We are prioritizing customer delivery, repeat business, which was very encouraging to see this year and the application experience that we have built for the customers, especially now when we go into commissioning and start-up. In Power Generation, it's slightly different. We're building on the PS190 platform and our commercial progress is going to show some improvement going forward, the ability to address larger installations. And that is why the MOU together with Bosch is so important. Our own resources concentrate on application expertise, integration software and what we call energy orchestration because when you build these large installations with 20, 40, 50, 100 megawatts, it is not just about selling a fuel cell, but it is to sell energy. It is to optimize the performance of the technology in the customer operation. And that is an area where we have expanded our expertise and see that we have a very, very good opportunity to build value for the customer. The orders that we have secured show that the approach translates into customer business. But once again, we are seeing small encouraging signs of growth and demand, but it's still too early to say how it will play out in '26 and '27. So we have a cautious outlook for '27 as well. The progress we have seen in our priority markets is encouraging for us. These examples show how we build the business around established platforms and adapt them to customer applications. The follow-on order from GMI and eCap demonstrates repeat business in Marine using the MS225 platform and the experience from the previous customer works. In Power Generation, the ECL order provided a very valuable first multi-megawatt reference case for AI data centers. And that one followed the extended customer evaluation and has generated a lot of application knowledge and practical experience to build on. The DLR order is also important, although it was rather small, but it demonstrates the fuel to power capabilities. And that is important also going into Power Generation because what we see now is a potential to scale if the fact that we can tap into natural gas as a resource. Natural gas reformed into hydrogen, blue hydrogen, has the potential to scale deployment of PEM fuel cells in a way that we haven't seen before in the market. So within Power Generation, access to reliable power is increasingly a condition for customers to expand their business. We see that from data centers. But it's not just about power anymore. Also other aspects like water, which is something that we produce with our fuel cell has become a competitive advantage that the customer actively is asking for. So if we then deep dive a little bit into the data center opportunity and what we see from the dialogues we have in the market. For the data center customer, the value starts with being able to bring computing capacity into operation. Available power can determine when that happens. And we hear that it takes 3, 5, 7 years to deploy a new data center. We hear that the bottleneck is power, but the bottleneck is also permitting and getting the environmental certification to put a data center into operation. The PEM fuel cell, local fuel generation, offers another route to where grid capacity is constrained. Our fuel cell operation also brings low noise, no local CO2, SOx or NOx emission, which is really important. Many of the hyperscalers in this industry has made very strong green commitments to the industry, which they have a difficulty to live up to, and they have to spend a lot of money buying CO2 credits instead. But then also water. And previously, up until now, we have talked about water as being the only emission from our fuel cell. We are actually producing water. And water recirculation can potentially be a very, very important driver for PEM fuel cells to enter into this industry that so far has been dominated by the SOFC fuel cell technology. So these characteristics can help the site requirement. It can also be supporting faster permits, but everything like permitting and things like that is, of course, subject to local requirements. But we see that this is becoming a very, very important value creator for us. Our modular platform and access to established manufacturing capacity supports an expansion into this segment that has the potential to be larger than what we have seen in Marine previously. PEM fuel cells from PowerCell also offer operational flexibility. So the same installation can support both prime power, backup power and peak shaving in the same prime collective, making it really efficient for the operator when installed. So deep diving into that one, the one installation and multiple power services. The PEM dynamic response is allowing an installation to provide both continuous power, but also have the capacity for backup and peak shaving. And that is really important because the data centers are operating really high demand for redundancy and backup service. In this illustration, we see that the PEM 50-megawatt installation will most likely be operating at 25 megawatts. That means that they have 25-megawatt additional capacity for the peak shaving, for the backup power, which gives both a very optimal load point for the PEM fuel cell, which means it can operate on really good conditions with good fuel efficiency and cost effective. But with the same drive collective, you get backup power and peak shaving. And that multiple power service or dynamic profile is something that the PEM fuel cell is bringing into the data center industry that they haven't seen before. So this is a very important part of the value that we create. But then also talking about the water, if we have a 50-megawatt fuel cell installation running in a data center and the average load is half, 25 megawatts, that means that we produce more than 250 tonnes of fresh water per day, 250 tonnes of water, which is really valuable because many of the data centers are located in areas where water is a scarce resource. This can then be looped back either to the cooling loop of the system of the data center to make that completely independent of external water, which is an issue for many of these when it comes to permitting. But also the excess water can be used for irrigation. It can be used for fire protection reservoirs. So the asset of water production has been massively underestimated by us before and is now equally important to the power that we can produce. So these are illustrative configurations, backup capacity, demand on the system, fuel supply, storage and redundancy, all of this is part of the offering and not just power because speed to power can be solved in many different ways. We can, with the PEM fuel cell and the offering we have, bring other additional values alongside just access to power. But to deploy this at scale, reliable hydrogen is essential and has been the bottleneck previously. So we have worked quite hard on focusing on getting hydrogen and seeing how we can tap into natural gas as a resource. The hydrogen supply determines which project can move forward and at what economics. In some locations, existing pipelines offer access to blue hydrogen infrastructure. In other, established reforming technologies from Linde, Topsoe and Air Liquide can provide a route from natural gas to blue hydrogen with carbon capture, enabling access to hydrogen at lower cost than we have expected when we looked at this before. In several U.S. projects, indicative blue hydrogen production cost is lower than $2 per kilogram, and that can support really competitive economics and also deployment of scale because hydrogen is available in these areas. What can then change is whether or not we need to transport, store and have a logistic chain. But what the customers are looking at right now is to establish power utilities and data centers around pipelines or build their own reforming station. PowerCell's contribution is to turn the industrial fuel cell platform into a solution that is suited for these customers, but we need to do that in partnerships with really strong players in the industry. We do that together with Bosch because they are our manufacturing partner, which is really important when we talk to these customers that have larger demands than what we have been addressing previously. Our commercial foundation is the PS190 platform and the application experience we have built through customers like ECL and others has shown really, really strong value creation. The offering that we have is really competitive. We contribute with application expertise, integration capacity optimization and energy orchestration. What you see there in the picture is the potential 3-megawatt container that we are launching to the market, where you will have between 16 and 20 PS190 systems installed inside. Anders criticizes me for showing too many product pictures on the core component. This is what the customer will use. This is what we create value at the customer site. And our 40-foot container can generate 3 megawatts of power, where our colleagues in the industry right now are operating between 1 and 1.2 megawatts. So we have a massive energy density advantage at the moment together with Bosch because we are based on industrial components that has been perfected and optimized for other segments like automotive, where cost and size is really, really critical. So for us, the collaboration with Bosch is also an opportunity to have a capital-efficient growth. We focus our investment and capabilities where we create value in the complete solution. And then we have the collaboration with Bosch, which we then yesterday strengthened in the MOU that we communicated to build on that value creation. So this is a nonbinding MOU signed, but with the intention to complete the agreement in quarter 4. We signed this yesterday to address the growing interest and demand that we see from data centers and power utilities. The intended collaboration covers joint development and execution or installation of 50 megawatts and above in the United States, Canada, Europe and Middle East. For the customer, this joint approach brings our application and integration expertise with the credibility of Bosch industrial capabilities. So both parties see this emerging potential in the market. The MOU is PowerCell is granting additional technology license and the right for joint activities to Bosch, and we expect a revenue of around EUR 5 million to be materialized in quarter 4. This supports the opportunity that we're pursuing, while our management priorities remain unchanged. So we are still running PowerCell with a cautious outlook on the future. But this joint initiative is our most important factor to be able to act on the emerging business we see out there and the volumes that could come from power generation and data center. But if we then look at where we are right now and what we need to focus on is to continue to be disciplined today and still remain ready to grow. So we need to manage PowerCell for the underlying market that we see out there today. As I said when we started, these are not the numbers that I want to show you, but these are the numbers that we have prepared the company for. We have reduced costs. We have focused resources and retained the capabilities needed to deliver. We have secured orders and deliveries. We are focusing on completing all deliveries in quarter 4 and then also continue to work on cost optimization as they take effect in quarter 4 and into 2026. But we also see encouraging customer activity and the opportunities with larger scale deployments in power generation, but the timing remains uncertain. Our task is to be ready, secure and execute them while maintaining the discipline and the business that we have today. I am proud of how our employees have handled this year because it's been a very tough year for us. They have been working closely with our customers to complete deliveries, solve problems and act on opportunities because we have both, but also develop new business and new values inside PowerCell; innovation, new features and new offerings. We will continue to protect PowerCell's position, and we will build where customer demand supports growth. For us, the 3 areas to protect is to protect the financial position, the strategic position and the structural position of PowerCell. So with that, we say thank you for now and open up for questions.

Let's go to the question. Anders?