Nimbus Group AB

Nimbus Group AB

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Q4 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptFebruary 4, 2026

Operator

Welcome to the Nimbus Q4 2025 presentation. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key 5 on their telephone keypad.

Now I will hand the conference over to the CEO Johan Inden, CFO Rasmus Alvemyr, and Head of Investor Relations Gunilla Öhman. Please go ahead.

Johan Inden

Welcome to the Nimbus Group Q4 report. This is Johan Inden speaking, and with me to present today, I have Rasmus Alvemyr on my side, and we'll get going with the report.

I want to say that we continue operating in a soft market. We see that in our numbers.

If you compare quarter to quarter, we are lower on sales and we have increased losses. At the same time, and as we will present through the presentation, we are executing a number of decisive measures now to turn the trend.

Those are both on the commercial side, with new product launches, restructure of our organization, but also on the cost and the efficiency side. Through the presentation, we'll take you through the measures we are taking.

Let's start by summarizing the numbers and give you some additional information on where we stand. Fourth quarter then and full year, in summary: net sales in the fourth quarter amounted to 233 million SEK.

That's a delta of 40 million SEK less than last year. As we have pointed out through our presentation and also consistent with Q3, the North America market is the lion's share of the losses.

If we look at the full year 2025, net sales amounted to 1,366 million SEK, as compared to then 1,619 for last year. That's a delta of 253 million SEK.

If you look at the gross profit, we are delivering a gross profit of 6 million SEK. If you look at the delta towards last year of 28, the majority of the reduction in gross profit is related to running with overcapacity in our factory, but also related to the commercial side, where we are still selling out inventory and, therefore, have rebate structures out on those sales.

That is pressuring our gross margins right now. If you look at then the quarter EBITA results, it's -52 million SEK, as compared to -25 million SEK last year.

If you break that down—I will come to the full year in short— -18 of this Q4 result is related to our operations in Finland, which we have been closed by the shift of the year, and another -18 is related to EdgeWater, which is then the business we run out of Florida in the US. If we take that to the full-year numbers, the EBITA of -84 million SEK, whereof then EdgeWater represents -47, and Finland then, again, the business we are closing by the shift of the year, represents -43 million SEK.

If you look at the cash flow, operating cash flow for the quarter is -7 million SEK, and for the year, -87. Then we come to order book, and I will give you some more details on the order book on the next slide, but for commercial sales, amount to 357 million SEK, as compared to 484.

Available cash end of Q4 amounts to 233 million SEK, where 33 million SEK is cash in bank and 200 is a credit limit with the bank. This is a summary of our performance through the quarter.

Let's move to the order book and talk a bit about the market environment. Market volumes are at the lowest point in over a decade.

I mentioned this already in Q3. We see a careful market across the board, with the softer side in North America, consistent with quarter three, and a stable and careful market in Europe and Nordic.

What do we mean with a stable and careful market? If you look at the order book in Europe and also in our Nordic retail organization, we are coming in at the same numbers as we had last year, we see that as stability, but it is on a lower level than we have seen historically and, of course, we expect for the future, whilst North America then remains soft.

If you look at the sales and what the soft North America market and the stable Europe market does to our split of sales, the full year, we have an even split between North America and Europe, with 42% of revenue each, whilst then Nordic is at the remaining 16%. If you look at the quarter, the fourth quarter as such, the share of the European side of the business significantly increased then in relation to North America.

We see a bit of a shift from historical years where North America has been strong, and we see that now shifting towards Europe. Looking at the retail pace in our retail organization, remains on a low, but stable level.

We saw it through quarter three, and we see when we dig into the details of our retail organization that we continue to operate with stability. We see a good activity level out in the market, and I'll come back to that when I'll talk a bit about the market activities.

Dealer stock levels, when we monitor those, as you've understood before and as we have presented, coming out of COVID, dealers were sitting across the globe with a bit too high inventory. We see that that inventory has been decreasing step by step, and we see in Europe a fairly low inventory level.

Of course, that is related to sales. It's on a good level, but we see when the market starts activating, we expect that dealers need to refill their stock levels.

We see a market that is set to recover with those low dealer stock levels, but it's of course a question of time and timing to see when the market starts moving upwards. Looking at the commercial order book, and if we combine then the commercial order book and the retail order book into group order book, we're at 441 million SEK, as compared to 574 for last year.

What we see in the order book with the slower market is that it's typically shorter today than it was a year ago and a year before that. The entire delta in the order book, if we look at it year over year, is related to North America, again then underpinning the stability we see in Europe.

Coming then to what are we addressing and how are we navigating the company, we are executing right now an extensive change agenda. I have now five months in the company, as you might remember.

I joined 1st of September, and in the quarter three report, I pointed out a number of areas and observations where I said that we should change in order to improve our business. This is then a summary of some of the activities we are executing to turn the trend and improve our performance.

If you've read my CEO notes, you also see that I finish off on the culture. We have a strong culture of being close to customer, accessible, have a warmth and a Nimbus family feeling around the brand.

Those are really good strengths for the company, but we are now building into that the energy and the drive to results and the business focus. That is a shift in the culture that we are driving now at high pace.

If you look at some of the actual activities then connected to turn the trend in North America, it's both in the headline and one of our most important actions. We have new commercial leadership.

Dave Patnaude has joined us since November, and now with a new role since January. He's heading up our North American sales business.

Dave has hands-on dealer experience. He's been running a number of dealerships.

He's an expert in dealership turnaround, he has this experience from the floor. He understands the business, understands the business structure, understands the performance criterias.

As part of his first journey, he's now touring all our dealer partners across North America, first of all, to evaluate their performance, but even more so, sit down and discuss the business plans for the year. That is an extensive activity we are conducting as we speak.

We have also made a decision to operate EdgeWater as a separate unit within Nimbus Group. I mentioned that as I believe that when you run a group of businesses like we do, a number of brands, you need to be able to see the performance of each of the brands.

The more accountability you can build, and the more clarity in the operation around each brand you can build, the better effects you will have on your business plan. The decision to operate EdgeWater as a separate unit is entirely related to that governance structure.

As part of that, we are consolidating the Nimbus production to Europe. We have produced Nimbus boats in the EdgeWater factory, but both for the benefit of Nimbus, we are consolidating to one site, and to the benefit of EdgeWater, which can then solely concentrate on the EdgeWater production and build efficiency around that.

We're also taking measures to consolidate functions for finance, administration, and marketing. We expect that this final bullet will give us savings in the area of 5 to 6 million SEK per year when fully implemented.

We have built a new commercial structure. We've consolidated under one commercial officer, Christina Ivansson, who is also my deputy CEO.

We're bringing together commercial sales, retail sales, aftermarket, and marketing under this responsibility to take the full grasp of the customer journey and have clarity on commercial strategy and execution across the entire organization. We are continuing then to implement the governance model, we measure each brand on financial performance.

We have exited Stream Propulsion, as we noted in the Q3 that we were evaluating. No material effect on the result from that exit.

Which is an important milestone for us, we have concluded the sale of Bella and Flipper's assets, and we have now closed and handed over both factories in Finland to other owners. Finally, efficiency improvements and cash management: as a result of reorganization and changes, the executive management team is now reduced from eight to six.

We have a strong focus on stock reduction, and you saw how that had some impacts on our gross profit when I mentioned the numbers, and of course, cash collection. The full-year effects of the measures we have taken on the cost side so far, full year between 2024 and 2025, is 70 million SEK.

Then turning to the market, this is a consumer market. We need to be visible.

We need to present fantastic products. I believe and see that we have really pushed the pedal on this during the last period.

We had a couple of weeks ago the Düsseldorf Boat Show, the largest indoor boat show in the world, very important milestone. It kicks off the European sales season.

We had record high visitor levels. We are registering every visitor to the Nimbus booth.

We also accelerated our efforts on social media. It's a really good platform where we have our products, we have our people, we have our dealers, obviously, we have our customers as well, to use that to leverage both the product launches, which I'll come to in a second, but of course also the brand as such and the company.

In Düsseldorf, we launched the Nimbus W2C series, sequel to the very successful WTC 11 series, and we presented the Nimbus 495 Coupe. The 495 Coupe is not ready from production, but we have start of ordering in Düsseldorf, and start of production is early 2027, so that's when the first customers will receive their 495 Coupe.

The earlier known product then, the 495 Flybridge, which is already on the market, was presented for the first time at the Fort Lauderdale show in North America, very well received with high attention, and we have now also delivered the first order to Japan and the first order to Middle East. The success of the 495 is spreading across the world.

As part of engaging our dealers for the season, we have executed dealer meetings in Europe and dealer meetings in America. We have had our fantastic Aquador 400 HT, a fantastic family cruiser, being named finalist in both the 2026 Motorboat Awards in Düsseldorf and Best of Boats Awards in Berlin.

We did not take a gold medal in either, but we were on the podium for both competitions. Falcon is moving on with launches of a new 6 and 7 m version being introduced to dealers and now rolled out through the spring shows in the Nordic, and EdgeWater presented its 250 Center Console at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, and that was an important launch, the first product launch from EdgeWater in quite some years.

We are bringing fresh product to the market. This is a market which is driven by news and new product, and we see that as a very important step now preparing for a market which we expect to improve over the period for us.

I'm really proud of the team who can accomplish this during this period. Then we want to make a special mention on the opportunity side, and that is the workboats and governmental sector and sales opportunities.

We are already active in this sector. We have our boat, the MSMB 200, as it's called.

It's an Alukin 11.5 m, where we have our order with the Defence Materiel Administration of Sweden. It's a 400 million SEK order value over 15 years, whereof 23 million SEK is in our order book right now.

What we want to point out in this presentation is that this is not only a one-time opportunity for us, and we are treating it rather as a sector that we are addressing based on this first win. As another example, we have deliveries to Sjövärnskåren.

We have delivered 10 Alukin CV 850 up until today, and we have five more on order for delivery now early 2026. We are now building capabilities to explore this sector further.

We see that there are more and more tenders coming, and there is more and more activity in this sector, and we have some specific competitive advantages. We have an R&D function which is used to building boats, but even more so, we have serial delivery capability.

This sector is dominated by yards building one-offs or serial production, and we believe that we have something to contribute in the sector. This is under our intention, and we wanted to bring that as an opportunity going forward.

Now Rasmus, we will look at the numbers in more detail.

Rasmus Alvemyr

Thank you, Johan. Then we start with the key financial items from the fourth quarter.

As Johan mentioned, EBITA dropped to -52 million in the quarter, and the adjusted EBITA pre-closing costs amounted to -35 million. The closing cost in Finland was 18 million, whereof 13 million was allocated to gross profit and 5 million was allocated to operating costs.

The restructuring costs, in combination with different campaigns to reduce inventory, including costs from underabsorption of low sales and production, has pushed down the gross margin to 2.6% in the quarter. In relation to last year, the sales volume dropped by 40 million, which affected the gross profit by -4 million, as can be seen in the bridge, while the price and underabsorption effects amounted to -6 million.

The FX came out net positive with 1 million, driven by both a negative effect related to US dollars of 1 million in terms of sales, but this was also been able to be compensated for by lower supply costs from euro and P&L, all in all, +1. All together, this pushed down the consolidated contribution significantly then from 28 to 6 million.

On the cost side, both sales and admin decreased due to cost savings from 54 to 52 million, which is down 4% year over year. The finance net amounted to -11 million versus +6 last year.

The finance net was affected by FX effect from intercompany balances, with a net effect of -8 million, driven by US dollars. The corresponding FX effect last year was +25.

Then we move on with the commercial sales. The commercial sales dropped 21% in the quarter to 156 million.

The drop is fully driven by North America, which decreased 60 million to 53. As can be seen to the left in the upper right chart, the North America sales has dropped +100 million since 2023.

Also, the order intake seen down in the left chart in North America was supersoft and amounted to 35 million versus 123 last year. The European market improved by both higher order intake from 68 to 130 million, and increased sales from 53 to 84.

This means that the positive trend that we saw already in the second quarter and the third quarter has continued. The Nordic sales dropped from 31 to 17 million, but the levels are low because of the seasonality.

The order intake in the Nordics was rather flat, with 39 million versus 44. In the Nordics, order intake in the fourth quarter is primarily driven by deliveries in front of the next season, it will be this summer.

Order intake on other markets went up from 0 to 29, primarily driven by 495s reaching new markets, as Johan talked about earlier. The order book down in the right chart amounted to 357 million, which is up 60 million since the third quarter.

Then we have the retail sales, which increased 3% year over year to 78 million versus 76. Sale of own brands was up 10 million to 34 million, which is positive and a preferred balance from a consolidated perspective.

The order intake was down 10% and amounted to 101 million versus 112, driven by own brands. Order intake on traded and used boats, together with service and accessories, was in all rather flat together.

The order book amounted to 84, which is lower than last year's 90, but also higher than 2023, 56 at that point. Then we move to the cash flow and net working capital.

We saw that the net working capital continued down to 607 million, which is down 54 million since the third quarter and 63 million year over year. This confirms that the actions that we have taken has a positive effect, and intended effect, of course.

The improvement is driven by lower levels of inventory. Year over year, the inventory dropped 39 million.

Operating cash flow in the quarter improved to -11 versus -26 last year, and available cash, including unused checklimit, amounted to 233 versus +80 last year. From both seasonality and market perspectives, we are expecting to reach the peak in net working capital by end of Q1, and we see that we are tracking on our projected cash forecast in a good way in relation to this.

With that, I leave the word back to you, Johan.

Johan Inden

Thank you very much, Rasmus. Just to finish off with our financial targets, the targets over time are to have growth of above 10% and EBITA margin of 10%, with a capital structure with no financial debt, and then a dividend policy of 30%.

I have now spent five months into the company. I believe that these are valid objectives.

We are not there today, and it will take us some time to get there, but we are executing the right measures now in the company. That is our financial targets.

With that, we will in a second open up for our Q&A. I'll just remind you of the financial calendar.

Our Q1 report is on April 27th, 2026. Before we open for question, I have one additional note, and that is to thank Rasmus Alvemyr.

You are heading for other adventures in the future, and we are delivering, most likely, the last quarter quarterly report together. Thank you very much, Rasmus.

Rasmus Alvemyr

Thank you, Johan. Thank you.

Johan Inden

With that, let's open for questions. We will now move over to see any written questions and get a facilitation.

Operator

If you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial pound key 6 on your telephone keypad.

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. There are no more phone questions at this time, I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions or closing comments.

Gunilla Öhman

Thank you very much. We have several written questions.

I will start reading a question from George at Gratitude Capital. He asks that, "We can now see from your reported figures for losses in conjunction with the Finland shutdown and EdgeWater's losses that you actually produced a positive EBITA adjusted for this.

Are there still more initiatives to reduce costs outside Finland and EdgeWater and also the mentioned 5 to 6 savings in the US, or are you only reliant on a market upturn to take you to an okay profitability level?"

Johan Inden

Thank you for that question. It's a highly relevant one, and the answer is no, to say.

We are not only relying on the market. Of course, the market has an important contribution, but we are continuing our efficiency program and our opex savings program.

We mentioned the year-over-year savings between 2024 and 2025, but we also mentioned that we have not met the full pace of that reduction. We expect to hit that during Q1.

We are continuing to work both across administration, both across our structure, reporting procedures, where we have consolidated with the finance function. The answer in short is no.

We are continuing to look at cost opportunities, and that's a regular part of our business, which we have embedded in the executive, to say, procedures or the management team procedures.

Gunilla Öhman

Thank you, Johan. The second question from George at Gratitude: "We have recently seen additional public tenders for boats similar to the one you will produce for the Swedish Armed Forces.

In Norway, the Home Guard has announced a fairly large tender that seems like a perfect match for Alukin, while in Sweden another large tender is out for boats a bit bigger and specialized than the one you already are producing. Are you seeing or expecting more such tenders elsewhere, and are both of the mentioned tenders relevant for Alukin?"

Johan Inden

If I come back to what I presented on the government and workboat segment, it's highly relevant for us and we're following this market, including then opportunities, closely. We are building capabilities in the company to address opportunities in a structured way, but I will not comment on any of the specific potential tenders that are out there.

Gunilla Öhman

Okay. His third question is: "In Europe, you seem to have quite a positive momentum and in 2025 you're almost on the same revenue level as in '22 and '23.

Do I understand you correctly, with reference to your comments on inventory levels with dealers in Europe, that you have not had any tailwind from inventory build-up with your dealers, even in the second half of 2025?"

Johan Inden

As we commented, we see that dealer stock levels are at a low level across Europe, I wouldn't see that we've had any tailwind from that side. Rather, what we see now is that the market activation is increasing.

I mentioned Düsseldorf, where we saw higher visitor numbers and we see also that the activity level at the dealers are increasing. Now, we also call the market stable in Europe, as you mentioned the numbers, and we now want to see activation of the customer.

That's what we are now looking for to break the trend from stability to something more positive.

Rasmus Alvemyr

I can fill in there. This tailwind, we saw quite much of that just after the pandemic, of course, but since then, and now we're talking about some years, it has been quite stabilized.

Today we don't see that kind of effect.

Gunilla Öhman

Okay. The next question comes from Toni at TCH: "Please, can you tell me have you given share incentives to your new people, that is the new CEO Patnaude in the US and our new COO, and in general whether you are linking individual performance to improving share price?"

Johan Inden

If you look at the incentive structures, it's a simple three-level models, and of course, it distributed differently in the organization. We have the salary level, we have the short-term incentive, STI program, which is a yearly bonus program, and we have the long-term incentive program which is then connected to the share.

Gunilla Öhman

Great. Another question from Toni is, "Please, can you talk about the military workboat made the news recently?

How material is it?"

Johan Inden

You're referring to the boat which I had on the picture in the presentation and which I talked about as the MSMB 200 or the 11.5 m Alukin. From a value perspective, the total order value is 400 million SEK over 15 years.

Then we will see at what delivery pace the customer wants to receive this. We expect to start serial deliveries in late 2026.

That's the materiality from a financial perspective. Then as I also highlighted in the presentation, I believe it's a material step for us as a company to enter into this business segment.

There are two levels of materiality in that sense: the financial scope of the delivery, but also the fact that we are now entering this segment and have broader opportunities, I would say, than only this tender.

Rasmus Alvemyr

To fill in there also, this enable us, of course, then to reduce some of the seasonality aspects that we have in the business. That is a good and positive thing from stabilizing the business from a seasonal perspective and also from a cash flow perspective, of course.

It has many advantages.

Gunilla Öhman

Thank you. Toni's next question and last question was, "Has your debt level changed over the past year?

What's your current debt-to-equity or net debt position, please? Any major repayments of refinancing coming up?"

Rasmus Alvemyr

If I reply there, we have seen an increased use of cash the last years. We have increased the net working capital, which we talked about during the last years.

We also now see that we change this curve and decrease the usage of capital, which is good. We have a plan which we follow and feel comfortable with.

We know that the first quarter is the tightest quarter, that we know from history and from experience, of course. We follow our plan closely and feel that we are very comfortable in our situation.

Regarding the net debt as such, we have more or less just our credit facility and we have also floor plan financing for our own demo boats in the retail business. This is the debt that we actually have on our balance sheet.

In our official balance sheet, there is also, of course, an external floor plan, which is more related to accounting measures, but this is not our debt. This debt has decreased quite much since last year.

It went down from 357 to 263 this year, and that is related to the lower activities in US, but that is not our debt. Our debt has decreased since last year and in the planned way, to say.

Gunilla Öhman

Great. Thank you.

George at Gratitude has another question regarding also net working capital. He understands that we are expecting to reduce it further.

"What would you consider to be a more normal working capital level for the company, I guess in percentage of sales?"

Rasmus Alvemyr

We have been talking about the area in between 25% to 30%. I think that is still quite realistic, maybe a bit higher, depending on the market situation and how things develops, but slightly above 30%, I would say, is quite realistic.

Gunilla Öhman

Great. I think that was the final question.

Thank you very much, Johan and Rasmus, and thank you all for listening in.

Johan Inden

Thank you very much for calling in.

Rasmus Alvemyr

Thank you.