HMS Networks AB

HMS Networks AB

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Q3 FY2026 · Earnings Call TranscriptOctober 21, 2026

Operator

Welcome to the HMS Networks Q3 presentation for 2026. 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 CEO Staffan Dahlström and CFO Joakim Nideborn. Please go ahead.

Staffan Dahlström

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everybody.

Welcome to this quarter three report call. Myself Staffan and Joakim will take you through a brief overview of the report we released this morning.

How does this work, Joakim? Here we go.

Activate slide, right? We'll start with business update, and then Joakim will move into financial summary, and we end up with a short Q&A at the end.

In general, we feel this is a stable and strong quarter for us. We're happy to break the billion SEK barrier in our revenue, 1 billion 24 million in revenue, where we are growing double-digit organic, plus 6%.

We're happy with this. Order intake continue to be good, 1.1 billion, a good growth, 29%.

There is also an element of pre-order. We have been informing you about long lead times, especially for memories and semiconductor.

This also make customers do a little bit of early orders with us. We estimate this to be 70 million in the quarter.

It's a smaller part of this, but we are seeing this and this is probably something we'll see the coming quarters as well. We also do good improvements of the profitability, 280 million in EBITA, and this gives us an improved margin of 27.4%, quite much over our long-term target of 25%.

Continue to see very good and stable cash flow, 333 million this quarter. We are seeing a more or less flat adjusted EPS with some bookkeeping technicalities there, Joakim will talk a little bit more later.

First nine months, we are seeing a continued stable growth up 14%, and orders are up 23%. The markets are improving, and Joakim will talk a little bit more about it.

We see that the German market have been fairly weak in the past, we see signs of improvement, it's getting better there. We're very happy to see a continued strong Chinese market for us, and we also see that a lot of Japanese companies are coming back after a very long time of quite high inventories and a bit negative market, but we are seeing that as well.

Our big market, US, is continuing to be quite good. The first nine months looks good.

We talked about the revenue. We see part of this drive in the market is, I think there are three elements: there's general uptick with strong PMIs, and the market are improving in general, most of the markets.

Specifically, we are seeing a continued growth in the enormous investments in data center automation. When we say data center automation, that's more like the equipment, the incoming power, the ventilation of this huge buildings they are building.

We're not part of the compute part of the data center, it's much more the automation part around the big buildings. We also see a continued, very positive development in the semiconductor field, where our customers there are the manufacturers of machines and different components that is used in the manufacturing of semiconductor, where investment remains very strong.

However, as we report before, that we expected to see, we see a pressure on the gross margins, both from tariffs, but especially also increased cost of semiconductors and some materials that we use in our products. We will mitigate this with price adjustments from 1st of January next year.

Of course, now it takes some time to make this fall through into our systems, but we are seeing a little bit mismatch in the cost side versus income side here. We think this will remain in quarter four.

It's not that we have bad margins, but the gross margin is slightly under pressure due to this. We made a public tender for a small Spanish company in building automation.

I'll be back with more information that in a second. We also very proud, I must say, to receive a global certification of the international information security standard of [6th?]

ISO 27001. The reason we are proud is not that we have a diploma on the wall, it's that we believe that this is very important subject for us, both for our products and our customers, but also for our internal operations.

The fact that we have this now also give us comfort in that we have good processes, we have good teams, and we are working proactively. This is something that we and all other companies are concerned about, but we think this is an important step to make sure that we are professional in this area of information security.

A little bit about this small Spanish public tender we did this quarter. Robot is a Spanish small company in building automation.

We have a building automation part in our new industry division. It's the smallest part we have.

They've been looking into finding new building automation special verticals. Today, with our Intesis brand, we are very strong in a small niche in AC and HVAC for larger buildings.

This company, Robot, is a niche player, very successful in facility management for hotels, both with how you control the room where the hotel guests are living, but also in the bigger operation when it comes to power and heating and these things for the building. They started in many years ago in Palma, Mallorca, nice place, but that's also the home of many of the Spanish hotel chains.

They've been doing this business and working with Meliá and these other Spanish chains and following them out in the world. It's around the Mediterranean area and also quite much business in the Caribbean, where we have a few employees to do installations there.

The main USP here is to make energy savings for the hotel owners, but also, of course, convenient and flexibility for the guests at the hotel. Small company, 65 people, mainly in Palma, where they have R&D, manufacturing, and sales.

This is also in Catalonia, very close to our own business in Barcelona. I think the fact that our team in Barcelona and this team in Palma have been really working well together in this process, and it looks very positive.

The sellers of the company feel very comfortable that we have this Catalonian base, and they trust us for the future. We see that this is a good step into growing the building automation business.

This was a small public company, we made a public tender. We were there with the team last week to meet them, and they had their extra general meeting to talk about how to approve this, and there's a process now to get in the remaining minority shares.

The expectation is that this will close before end of the year. Everything looks very good, and we are quite excited about this.

It's a small business, but we are very happy to see that this kind of niche players can form something together with our new industries division. All right.

With that, I would like to hand over to Joakim to talk about the financial numbers.

Joakim Nideborn

Thank you for that, Staffan, and we will start with order intake, as we normally do. As you saw, 1.1 billion in order intake, a good improvement from last year with an organic growth of 22%.

Staffan also mentioned this small pre-buying behavior that we saw because customers are getting worried about lead times and price increases and these kind of things given the component market and are placing some orders in advance. We saw similar behavior in the first quarter, not so much in Q2, and I think we expect to see this going forward as well, that we see orders placed for a longer period of time.

We saw this before also in '21, '22, and now we see it not at the same extreme as it was back then, but we see a similar behavior. The underlying growth, if you would take that 70 million into consideration, would still be 14%, it's still a good growth on the orders.

Geographically, we are quite happy to see that APAC is continuing to develop strong, and China has been performing very well for us now for almost two years. Those of you been following us, we've been complaining about our customers in Japan have been having a lot of inventory for the last few years.

Now we really see that something is happening again here, that inventories are coming down and they are ordering again. It's same old good customers that are placing orders.

We have been having quite a very limited amount of orders for the last, well, two years or so. Then we also see EMEA, quite important market for us, that is growing now 20%.

I also want to mention the German market and the DACH region that is performing well, growing also in line with EMEA. We're happy to see that that is starting to move a little bit also.

It's been improving throughout the year, but now we're doing better than we've been doing for many quarters, so that's also good to see. North America has been the main driver of our order intake for, I'd say, almost the last two years, and that is still growing, but not as much as before.

We're down to almost reaching a 10% growth in North America. I think overall we feel it's good that we can have different markets that are driving at different times to make sure that the overall picture is solid.

Staffan also touched upon the main drivers. We still see data center, semiconductor industry is doing very well.

We always get the question how much business do you have out of the total into these sectors, and we expect that to be maybe some 10%, maybe slightly more, and that's a direct exposure. Then we're sure that we have a decent indirect exposure as well, that is very difficult to quantify.

Also going over to sales, also stable development. Now we're starting to meet tougher comparables, we had a strong ending of 2025.

We're seeing now, just as Staffan said, meeting the billion mark, good to see, first time over 1 billion. Organic growth is 6%, not as high as on the order side, but also in relation to those comparables.

I forgot to mention on the orders, but we have the INT division is performing extremely strong both on orders and on sales, and we'll take a deeper look into that when we go into the divisions. We can see that we're building a bit of order book, book-to-bill 1.09 in the quarter, and it's good that we see this order book build up for the future, that we will have solid sales for coming quarters as well.

Then going into the divisions, with IDS first, Industrial Data Solutions, that had a bit of a softer quarter, you could say. On the order side, we were actually down 3% organic to 404 million.

The main reason for that is that we have some of these bigger project orders from time to time. In Q3, those were rather weak.

The underlying business is developing fine, the bread and butter business is developing pretty much as expected. We hope to see some of those larger orders coming in as well to support the growth in IDS.

On the sales side, we're growing organically 2%, 448, which in itself is quite good number for us. Just as you see here, if you look at the end of 2025, you see that IDS had a very strong ending to the last year, which will also make it difficult with the comps in Q4 obviously on sales.

I also want to mention some changes on the tariff side that is impacting IDS a bit. We've been seeing now a pretty big fight between Canada and the US, which is impacting us actually in two ways: both that we have an EMS in Canada delivering into IDS, we have imports from Canada to the US on raw material and semi-finished goods that is impacting.

Then also when we sell to Canada, obviously, we see major tariffs on that. We hope that that will be resolved fairly soon, and we're monitoring the situation closely to potentially take some measures for next year.

We'll hope that that will be resolved to a more decent environment to do business. Then going in maybe to the highlight of the presentation, the INT division development.

Here we see an 94% growth on orders, out of which 70% is organic. We have almost all of the pre-buying orders we see in INT.

If we were to also adjust for that, then we would be at organic growth of some 45%. I also want to mention what you see on the bars as the green area with acquisition the last 12 months.

We made an acquisition from Molex, and I think 2nd of January we closed the deal. We communicated in Q1 that we thought we had basically received the orders for the year after Q1, and we're riding a lot on the semiconductor and data center trend here with continued nice order intake from that business.

Some of that is part of the 70 million, around 10 out of the 70 million boost is related to this business. It's also a fair amount of the rest of INT that is seeing these longer orders.

As just to repeat what we said before, here we also really see strong demand from semiconductors and data center segments both on gateways and from the semiconductor side with more embedded business. It's a good wide demand from that side.

Sales also continue to improve solid, not as volatile as the orders obviously. We do 341 million, which is an organic growth of 16%, which we think is fairly good for this business.

Then we have New Industries, a solid development. We've been seeing on the margin side a bit bumpy, as you see on the red line on the bottom left.

Now we have a better quarter with margins very close to our long-term target of 24.7%. Organically good business both on orders and sales, 11% growth organically on orders and 14% on sales, where both businesses are developing quite well.

For building automation, we see Europe as the driver, and for vehicle communications, we actually see Asia and Americas driving, since we have part of the exposure towards the European automotive industry, which is obviously not developing fantastic. It's good again to see that the markets are complementing each other for different parts of the business, and overall picture is fairly good.

Over to profitability, we have record EBIT of 280 million, a 20 27.4% margin, which is very much in line with what we see year to date also, 27.1%. We get the question from time to time if we're going to increase the target from the 25% that is our long-term target to something else.

We believe it's kind of good to be a little bit ahead on this stage. We know that acquisitions are most of the time dilutive, and we would like to have a 50% of the growth to come from acquisitions, and that gives us some space to acquire.

Then we also want to have the opportunity to invest more in organic growth initiatives, which we will be looking into going forward. Gross margin has been a hot topic, also for us to understand what will happen, and we do see quite a bit of pressure from component prices and now also tariffs in the third quarter.

That is affecting most of our product portfolio. I think we're quite happy to be able to show 22 62.7%.

We probably believed it could be a bit worse. It's almost a bit strange to talk about this, but we have a positive effect of 3 million due to tariff refunds from 2025 tariffs.

On the other side, we have significantly higher tariffs than 3 million in the quarter from the current tariffs that is in place. If you want to exclude from that one-off 3 million, you would be looking at 62.4% in underlying gross margin.

I think going forward, we believe that we will have a slightly challenging Q4 and maybe also Q1. Maybe it's even so that Q1 will be more challenging than Q4, since there will be higher cost increases, and our price increases that we will make from January 1st will not have full impact from Q2 or so given the backlog.

We might see a slight pressure on gross margins. We've been seeing now that volume is mitigating, and also a positive currency situation with the weaker Swedish crown is good for us, so that is kind of offsetting this impact a little bit.

We expect that to be in the short term also supporting in Q4 and hopefully Q1 as well. Then going to OPEX, not a lot of drama there.

We have an organic increase of 6% to 391 million, and the main things that are driving, of course, salary increases compared to last year then, half of that roughly. Then we have some increased investments in R&D and also in building up an internal AI organization to improve our processes that is now in place and costing a little bit.

All positive things, we believe. We're increasing capitalized R&D slightly from 19 to 21 million in the quarter, and we're running a pretty high pace in developing new products at the moment with big initiatives both in INT and IDS, which I think we talked about before as well.

Now let's take a look at the earnings per share. Here you might be surprised to see pretty much a flat development versus Q3 2025.

I think the main thing that might not be obvious that's happening here is that we have a currency effect, revaluation of group internal loans has been revalued by 22 million, a negative impact of 22 million. This is not cash flow impacting, it's just the way IFRS wants this to be presented.

If you were to take away that effect, you would be looking at an adjusted earnings per share that is 4 4.20 SEK plus. Then you would see that the increased performance also spilling over to earnings per share.

Then one of my favorite parts in the report, the cash flow, 333 million, not quite as good as in Q2, but another very strong quarter on cash flow. I think it's fair to point out that we do have some help from an increased accounts payable, roughly 20 sorry, 50 million that is supporting us in a temporary increase in accounts payable.

This will obviously be reversed in rather soon, I think we will probably have difficult time to show a similar amount of the cash flow in Q4, given that that accounts payable will be paid down. How it is with working capital, it goes up and down, now it just happened to play out well for us in the quarter.

In terms of inventory, we're developing fairly flat. We've been having a lot of support from inventory decline over the year.

I think now we're in a position where we would actually prefer to be able to build some inventory to secure deliveries for 2027. Unfortunately, a lot of those components that we're looking for is in allocation, it's a difficult situation to build the inventory, but we will try to do what we can to secure deliveries for the coming year as well.

Then we have our net debt that is continuing to decline, in line with good performance and no recent acquisitions. We are now down to a net debt through EBITDA of 1.52, if you exclude for the IFRS 16 methodology, which I think we're quite happy to see, and reducing that from 2.77 a year ago.

So 1.7 1.27 times reduction in 12 months with the dividend and acquisition along the way, I think we need to be happy with that development. This also puts us in a good spot to continue the M&A agenda, and we have good activities in our divisions in doing that as well.

Then to summarize before we open up for questions, what we would like you to take away is that we see now strong development in APAC and Europe. Before, it's been more the North American markets that's been driving.

Now we see that we offsetting that slightly lower growth with a good growth in APAC and Europe instead. Also that we see a sequential growth over the quarters in 2026, if you adjust for this pre-buying behavior.

Gross margin still under some pressure from tariffs and component price increases. We think we're getting away okay, and we will have to wait until 2027 to see improvements there given the price increases that we're going to make from year-end will take effect.

Then, finally, the profitability and cash flow, quite solid, EBIT over 27% now for the third quarter straight, and cash flow above 330 million for the second quarter straight, solid performance there as well. Now, operator, I think let's open up for some questions from the audience.

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.

The next question comes from Simon Granath from ABG. Please go ahead.

Simon Granath

Hi, Staffan and Joakim, and congrats on the strong numbers. I'd like to start on the pre-buying.

I think Staffan said that this could continue over the coming quarters. What is your line of sight on this?

Then do you believe that the pre-buyings are happening as a result of you seeking to raise the prices in January, or do you assess it to be more industry-related? Thanks.

Maybe

Staffan Dahlström

I can start here with the high-level thing. I think we are really trying to actively manage that this kind of pre-orders is not placed to not get the increased price from the 1st of January.

For all shipments that is made after 1st January, we will have deployed the new prices even if we had orders in before. I think, in general, that as long as this uncertainty with lead times on especially memory, but other semiconductor continues, some of our customers are changing their planning horizons in their systems.

I actually said I thought that it should be even higher than 70 million, I think on this level is, what said Joakim, it's likely that it will continue on this level for the next quarter.

Joakim Nideborn

I think it's quite likely, and just the start of October, I think we see similar behavior from some customers. I think we can expect this to go on for at least one or two quarters more, a lot depending on how the component market develops.

Simon Granath

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for helping clarify that.

I think you also said that you do not see any contribution from larger orders. Does that surprise you?

It's been some time since those types of orders were present, wondering how long the customers can wait until they start to trickle in.

Staffan Dahlström

I think that important we have two types of large orders. We have, of course, this design wins and machine wins, where we see a good flow of continuous order from this, some large, some small.

I think what you're referring to is what we call project orders, and this is what we received some years ago in American data center, where we did one project with a lot of equipment. This is very volatile and difficult to plan.

Some you win, some you lose. This project business that we more or less got more when we acquired Red Lion is fairly new to us, and we see that this is very difficult to predict, and it's, as I said, quite volatile.

Simon Granath

That makes sense. I also recall that during CMD last year, you spoke about more than half of the organic growth in the new business plan would come from new products.

Where are you tracking on that ambition? Have those new products come to the market, or should we expect more of them to come 2027?

Staffan Dahlström

I think here we, of course, first we develop the product, then we introduce the products to win customers, and then we get revenue. We just released for IDS two very important product lines, both for Anybus and for Ewon.

We are now in November presenting a new Anybus line in Germany. I think this will allow our sales people to start winning.

This means that winning to be spec'd into different machines or devices, then revenue will come later. I think we need to be a little bit patient to see the revenue effect.

From a planning and introduction point of view, we are following our plans, and we are releasing new, exciting products, and our sales people are happy about it. It will take some time before they generate real, good, new revenue for us.

Simon Granath

Thank you. Appreciate it.

A final question: is there anything on the product mix that we should be aware of over the coming quarters when it comes to margin?

Joakim Nideborn

Not that I can think of, no.

Simon Granath

Perfect. Thank you for having my questions.

Staffan Dahlström

All right. Thanks, Simon.

Operator

The next question comes from Joachim Gunell from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.

Joachim Gunell

Thank you, and good morning. If I can just follow on Simon's question with regards to the pre-ordering here in the quarter.

Is there any way that you can quantify how you think about this, how this will develop, whether you think that that impact could be then higher into Q4 since it's a January price hike, and that we didn't really expect any into Q3? Also whether you think that pose a risk for an air pocket in INT orders for the first half of '27?

Joakim Nideborn

Maybe we can just distinguish between two type of behaviors, Joachim. I think what we're talking about is a customer they're placing an order today for something to be delivered in Q3 next year.

They could have placed that order in Q2 next year just as well, that's what they normally would have done. For the year-end stuff, I think what we expect to see is that some customers will place orders and say, "Hey, we want delivery tomorrow," to make sure we don't get the price increases.

I think that was Staffan said, we'll try to identify that behavior and making sure that we don't have customers building inventory and taking deliveries in Q4 to avoid the price increase. It's two different things, in our opinion.

We want to try to mitigate that as much as possible, but, of course, the customers will do what they want. Then we just need to make sure that we get the right price for the goods.

Joachim Gunell

Great. On just the gross margin, how do you think about the trough here?

That, okay, perhaps then Q1 '27 should be the trough, the way that you think about it playing out right now. Has there been any sort of changes to, call it, the levels you think it will trough, whether the price hike proportion of setting this increased cost will be, call it, lower or higher than you envisioned a quarter ago?

Joakim Nideborn

I thought maybe that we would have a little bit more pressure in the quarter, and then I think the currency developed favorably and that offset part of it. Going forward, what we see is that, of course, we have some inventory of some of the components as well that we purchased at a lower price, and now it's not possible to purchase at a lower price.

I think the effect will become higher and higher as we go along. Then, of course, at some point, we will also have a mix that is within our price increases, and that's why we think that we might have a little bit tougher situation in Q4 and Q1, and then we should be basically back to normal when we have put the price increase in place.

Just to reiterate the way we've been thinking about this, is we could, of course, make a price increase in 1st of July or something like that, half year through 2026. We think that there is a good market momentum, and would prefer to have our sales people on the ground winning new business.

It was a decision we took to be able to focus on growth, and with that be aware that we might take a bit of margin hit in the second half of the year. That's the reasoning behind the situation.

Joachim Gunell

Great. Perhaps just on the IDS development here, that, okay, it has been the growth engine with US exposure over the past two years.

Can you say anything about the organic order development excluding project orders, and also just some high-level reflection on what you think about which divisions will have the best growth opportunities into '27?

Joakim Nideborn

I can continue. Staffan, you jump in if you want.

I think the underlying development of bread and butter business has been quite okay, pretty much as expected in IDS. From time to time, we have these weaker orders in, especially in IDS.

We saw it in Q4 last year, that was fairly weak as well, and then Q1 came back being strong. I think we're not too worried about one quarter without any of these projects.

They come and they go, and I think that's the nature of the business. I think we want to hang around and see how that plays out.

In terms of growth opportunities going forward, I think in the short term, INT has a very good momentum and probably expect that to continue for some time. Over longer time, we think that all divisions have good possibilities, and I don't think we want to rank one better than the other one in the longer perspective.

We have similar targets in growth for all three divisions, and we expect all of them to grow nicely.

Joachim Gunell

Great. Sorry for the background noise here.

Our office is under our renovations, hopefully [building?] automation products from [Intesis?]

is here at some point. Perfect.

Thank you.

Joakim Nideborn

We love that sound. That's good.

Thanks, Joachim.

Operator

The next question comes from Jesper Stugemo from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.

Jesper Stugemo

Yes, good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. Given a component shortages, could you give some flavor on how you are working with securing your volumes from partners, and how prioritized are you?

Are there any special components that are at risk or very crucial for you to secure in order to deliver? How worried should we be on the supply?

Staffan Dahlström

If I start just on a high level, since we have also own manufacturing, two factories, one in Europe and one in US, we do quite much of component purchasing ourselves. Then, of course, we also work with EMS suppliers that do a lot of things for us, but they do their own purchasing.

This means that we have a direct link to the large component suppliers, and I think we feel that we are fairly important for them. The reason why we are important is that, for them, we are an enabler for them to get into certain machines and devices.

If you look at our line card, what customers we have, our suppliers are quite happy to work with us, because we are opening doors also into these companies for them. I think we have good relationships, we work a lot with larger Texas Instruments of the world, NXPs, with direct contacts with them.

That's good. We also work closely with our EMS manufacturers to understand what they see and how we can mitigate that.

I think, in general, we have good processes, but it's also very difficult today because a lot of people have more demands than there's supply. You need to be early on and have good relationships to get priorities.

For us, it is, of course, memories, where we have big problems and extreme cost increases. We are also seeing that this goes to traditional components like passive components, like PCB boards and things like that, that used to be very stable in pricing.

We are seeing that it's continue to spreading, and that's why Joakim was also saying that we may see that we need to build up more inventories and have more security in this. This could affect our cash flow a bit in coming quarters.

I think we manage this okay, but it's a difficult situation. I'm not sure, Joakim, would you like to give more details on this?

Joakim Nideborn

No, I think you covered it perfectly, Staffan.

Staffan Dahlström

Thank you.

Jesper Stugemo

Given the gross margin boost here of 3 million in Q3, but you mentioned some headwinds as well, but do you expect to see any more of this refund on gross profit in the coming quarters, or was this everything, or?

Joakim Nideborn

I was hoping you shouldn't ask, Jesper, but I don't want to get ahead of things, but I think we will expect to see a little bit more. Difficult to say exactly how much, but we expect to get a little bit more.

We're working on it.

Jesper Stugemo

Okay. I see.

Staffan Dahlström

In general, I think the tariff situation, we were expecting Canada to be for a couple of weeks, it seemed to continue, and it can't continue forever that it's 50% tariffs. It's extreme, and let's see how this develop.

We hope there'll be a change during Q4, but it seems like the fight is deeper than we expected.

Jesper Stugemo

I see. Looking at INT, how much of the growth was from the semiconductor, data center-related applications versus a more broader recovery from industrial OEM demand?

Could you give some flavor around that?

Staffan Dahlström

We need to understand that we supply to some large players in the semiconductor field. We are supplying also some products to data center, but the indirect exposure that we supply products to the ABBs of the world, the Schneider Electrics of the world, and there we don't have transparency where they end up.

It's really, really difficult to get a good feeling for where we are. I think, Joakim, we are saying that maybe 10 10% of our total revenue will be related to data centers and semiconductor, but the majority of that part is probably coming in INT.

In INT, I guess the percentage would be higher, but it's really difficult to get a, how should I say, a scientific estimation there.

Joakim Nideborn

Then you probably have an indirect exposure that is very difficult for us to assess. I don't think we can give a figure to the question, unfortunately.

Jesper Stugemo

Okay. I see.

That's fine. Thank you, guys, and good luck in Q4 here.

Staffan Dahlström

Thanks, Jesper.

Joakim Nideborn

Thank you.

Operator

The next question comes from Viktor Högberg from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.

Viktor Högberg

Hi, good morning. Just a continuation on the other side of that question from Jesper.

Demand seemed rather broad-based, of course, driven mainly by the semi and data center exposure currently, but what about the other maybe 80% then of your exposure? Could you talk a bit about the drivers there and what you're seeing in terms of demand, where it is strong, where it is not as strong, and you mentioned Germany, China, and Japan, could you just expand a bit on that?

Thank you.

Staffan Dahlström

Maybe I can start. I think if we start in Japan, we're seeing that, as both Joakim and me mentioned, that we are seeing a rebound of business, that customers used to have a lot of inventory, they're coming back and would like to purchase again.

Also the market in Japan is better. In China, I think we have two types of markets: we have companies in China that use our products to sell in America and Europe, that is going quite well.

Then we have Western companies that is using our technology inside their operations in China, that's the two main thing, and both of them are going really well. We don't have so much exposure to Chinese customers who fight on the domestic Chinese market, very price-sensitive, and we have some customers there, but it's also a price fight that is very difficult for us.

In Europe, we have seen a quite weak market, especially within and in the boundaries of German automotives for passenger cars. That is still quite negative for passenger cars, but, in general, we see that the market is in Germany and Central Europe is less negative, and this thing is continuing that we have seen, so that's good.

In US, it's continued to be strong. I think, in general, that's the general picture we're having, and this is supported by PMIs.

We think that this industrial automation, industrial manufacturing things are progressing in a good and stable way forward. That's the major growth we are seeing.

The semiconductor and data center, that's a little bit of the good stuff on top of this, but it's a broad-based recovery and stable situation we are seeing.

Viktor Högberg

Perfect. Thank you.

Just finally, I don't think anyone asked, could you disclose the magnitude of the price increases, and we know that it's going to take some time to fully roll through in the P&L, but just what kind of magnitude? Is it similar?

Staffan Dahlström

It's very different on both different markets, but also we try to think about their life cycle management thing, that we probably increase prices more on older products, much less on newer products. We don't publish any numbers around the total, but we try to do this in a way that makes sense to make sure that we don't lose customers, but, at the same time, we need to compensate for the cost increases we're having.

We try to do this in a strategic way.

Viktor Högberg

Okay. Finally, just weighing all of these comments together, the puts and takes on the gross margin, we have the mitigation factors in FX and potentially some tariff refund, but that's not going to be huge, I believe.

Would you say that it nets out as a slightly lower level in Q4 and Q1 than the underlying level here in Q3, or considerably below, just what kind of magnitude are you talking on a net level, all things considered?

Joakim Nideborn

I think we're talking slightly lower than what we have, not a big move down given those factors compensating. Maybe I'll regret saying this, but I hope that we can still protect the 62 mark, 62% plus mark.

Viktor Högberg

Reassuring. Thank you very much.

Operator

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time.

I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

Staffan Dahlström

Thank you, operator. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for attending this quarter three call and thanks for good questions.

We'll keep on developing the business, but it feels like we have a good and stable market situation, we are very confident in the coming quarters, and we feel that we are in a market where we see that there are growth opportunities. It takes time to execute on M&A, but that's also part of our strategy.

For 2027, we hope to have some new things to talk about, but we are continuing to executing according to our 2030 strategy with our ambition to become a 7.5 billion revenue company. Making it a billion per quarter, that's a good start here, but we have a lot more things to do before 2030.

Let us be back on that on the coming quarter, and thanks a lot for attending today. Goodbye.