Operator
Welcome to Studsvik Q3 2026 conference call. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode.
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 speakers, President and CEO Karl Thedéen and CFO Peter Teske.
Please go ahead.
Karl Thedéen
Thank you, and warm welcome to the Studsvik Group interim report of Q3 of 2026. Starting with some pictures of who we are and what markets we serve, we have shown these slides many times before.
We are operating mainly in Western Europe and North America, but also big market for us is Japan and Korea in Asia, and we obviously work in a lot of international corporations and projects incorporating all the states that are having nuclear power except for Russia. We have global sales in 15 countries, we are more than 500 people, and we have local offices in six countries.
The markets we serve is: new build, long-term operation, decommissioning, and life science. Traditionally this company has been very active in decommissioning and long-term operation.
Decommissioning is about in a very safe way dismantle and take care of nuclear power plants that not in service anymore, that typically takes 20 years per plant, and our main business there is in Germany and Switzerland, but we also work in other parts like the Nordics. Long-term operations is to support our customers to operate the plants safely, and also prepare them for lifetime extensions to support them with analysis how they're going to keep the plants going for many years to come, up to 80 and sometimes 100 years after the initial construction.
Life science is a reasonably new marketplace that we entered 8-9 years back, and we see increased demand and questions around life science, where we can handle the isotopes for cancer treatments and other illnesses that those kind of materials can solve. The latest that we are entering as a market is new build.
That was a market that this company started to support 80 80 years back, and is now back in play. We have announced in the quarter a project to build new reactors here in Sweden.
I will do more of that later. The markets are basically fourfolded, and we have entered into new market during this year.
Next slide, please. If I then go into Q3, we are very proud of the growth that we show in the quarter, growing more than 10% compared to same quarter last year, at 227 million Swedish kronor.
Very strong performance, and this is mainly contributed from the Scandpower business area, but also from the others. The operating margin is in the lower range, that is not unusual for this quarter, Q3 is seasonally a weak quarter from a profitability point of view, and we do see that this is in line with what our expectations.
If we go a little bit more into the detail of the different business area, I'm specifically proud of what we have achieved in decommissioning radiation protection services. We started a journey of change in that business area some 12 months back, and in Q2 and even more so in Q3, we now see the results with significantly improved profitability, actually over the sort of target that I have set internally of 8%, they're almost hitting 10% profitability.
Very strong, that's driven both of utilization, more efficiency, but also a better market in general for the markets we serve. In the fuel materials and waste management technology, FMWT, we had a solid quarter, and this business area is affected by the holiday seasons in Europe, and this is, I would say, a strong quarter for being Q3, but it's seasonally affected by the season.
We have taken, we come to that later, significant new orders in this area, we have a very good outlook for this business area. Studsvik Scandpower did a record quarter in terms of growth, we grew more than 40% in the quarter, and very interesting is that it's driven not only by the software sales and advisory and support services, but also by the Black Star Tech products that are almost 20% of the sales in the quarter, and we continue to report solid margins in that business area.
This is what we call the cash generating core, the main part of the business that we operate with our business areas today. We also have, and this slide tried to show, the cash generating core, that's the base business that we drive today and try to improve step by step, and I will say, I'm proud to say that we have three business areas that are now in a much better state than they were a year back, and that they are now coming up to the level of growth and profitability where they should be.
The asymmetric upside, which we have discussed from Q2, is to describe what investments and measures we take to really drive the company to substantially better growth and profitability, riding on the wave on new investments in the nuclear sector. Here you can see doing more of existing fleet, the back end, which is basically what we do for Norway, how we engage in new build projects, how we come into new areas like the advanced modular reactors and fusion, and continue to drive life science.
If we go back a little bit to Q3 and the key milestones of Q3, as I said, growth in all the three business areas, very important, and a solid 10% growth for the group. DRPS, strong demand and profitability.
Very interesting, we had an opportunity at our site north of Nyköping in Sweden to take over a hot cell, which is actually more modern and much bigger than the hot cells we have today, that we have rented for some while, but we took it over from SVAFO, and that is now in our own capacity. This means that we can continue to grow the FMWT business area, as we see more demand, we need more capacity to deliver that, very important for us.
As I said, Scandpower continue to grow strong, and both on the software side and on Black Star Tech. We launched a new build project, come to more of that later, 1.2 gigawatt to be built either at our site in Nyköping or at another site on the east coast of Sweden called Valdemarsvik.
We have appointed a new board member in Mats Ladeborn, and he also took over as acting chairman from October 12. After the quarter, we signed two very interesting deals: Norway, which is a back end where we take care of Norway's legacy fuel, I will describe that more in detail, and a much smaller but a very interesting strategic order for Japan, where we will develop our in-drum waste management technology to take care of waste coming out of the Fukushima plant.
Let's go into the asymmetric upside and some proof points of that. Here you see a consortium that we are very, very proud of.
This was launched on September 30 in Stockholm. We are obviously aiming to form a consortium where us partners can develop new nuclear in Sweden.
We will contribute with things like the site and competence, but we also look for partners that can contribute on a broad range to develop this together. In that selection, we found GE Vernova Hitachi that has a proven 300 megawatt SMR that is the only SMR in the Western world now under construction in Darlington, Canada.
We also found Samsung that have actually recently built nuclear power plants in Korea and in UAE and have a strong partnership with GE. We also initially launched financing support from DS Investment Partners.
That consortium is really a dream team to drive this forward. As I said, 1.2 gigawatt, that's equivalent to four of these BWRX-300 reactors, two candidate sites, and we expect the first unit to be somewhere in the latter half of 2035.
We will now continue, the next part of this project will be to continue the state aid application, to form a joint venture for a company, and then continue with the financing and the permitting activities over the next couple of years. A little bit more on the partners, and it's a true partnership here.
We can maybe start from the top right-hand corner: DS Investment, a South Korean investment firm. They have already worked in similar projects in Romania, they are really keen to not only enter as an investment part, but also, maybe more important, to be part of any initial early-phase investment into this, which could be, in many cases, the most difficult area to finance, and very good for us to have them with us from day one.
GE Vernova also not only bring reactor technology, but also their financing arm is very strong and a part of the consortium. We lead permitting, environmental impact assessment, site rights, and so on, and very important, of course, to drive this in the Swedish context.
As I mentioned, Samsung is a very, very important part of this. They will also engage with local and Swedish suppliers to drive this, but they have the know-how to really lead and drive the construction of these power plants.
Then GE Vernova Hitachi had already a very strong inroad into Sweden, as they worked with the other project, Vattenfall, for many years, and they have then already also a lot of partnerships and knowledge about the Swedish market, but also obviously bring their strong technology from the US market and international market. The second big one, and this was actually signed after we ended the third quarter.
This is a picture from the small village or city of Halden, just north of the Swedish border on the west coast. Actually in the mountain behind us there is actually where they host one of their research reactors that they have had, and actually very, very important for research in nuclear that was in operation in the '60s, '70s, '80s, and it was closed down in 2010 or 2005, I think it was.
What they are now been looking for, they created something called Norsk nukleær dekommisjonering, and they wanted a way to in a safe way decommission this. The first thing you need to do that is to take the spent fuel out of the site so you can start decommission the rest.
They have been looking, evaluating this, we have been engaged with them in a smaller project already from 2018. Now they have decided that we are the best partners to actually help them to get rid of the spent fuel.
Very, very important for us and actually for them to get going. It's the legacy fuel that we take care of.
It's around 17 tons, it sounds a lot, but obviously this is very small compared to if you run operational reactors. It's a long-term contract, but with committed volumes from day one.
It's not a frame agreement, it's committed volume and purchase orders coming to our desk day one. It's not material for our revenue or profits in 2026 or 2027, but we will build volume in this contract over time as we go and get all the permits to actually import the fuel and store it intermediately at our site in Sweden.
We will utilize facilities that we already have at site, this is not that we need to invest a lot of money to take us to do this job. There will be some new intermediate storage paid as part of the contract, but other than we use a lot of, and specifically also, as I mentioned, the hot cell that we now taken over will also be a good asset in this.
This is also a very good reference for us, because there are other similar research reactors spent fuel that we also have discussions with, and this will also prove that we are a site in Europe to help other countries to take care of their spent fuel. The second important, but significantly smaller day one, is the agreement we signed with Raynor Industries of Japan.
This is actually very recent, it happened on 21st of October. Raynor have applied for funding to start a development project to put our in-drum on the site in Fukushima to take care of contaminated liquids that have been used to clean water that was a big part of the waste and that came out of the Fukushima disaster.
We see this very important sign that we have something very important or good technology sign to work with in that sense. In-drum, this is a picture from our demo facility at our site.
What it basically does is take waste that can't be disposed in its current format to being disposable. It treats everything that is inside a contained environment, typically a drum, you don't need manual handling, and most importantly, it reduces volume by up to 90%, you actually have to store less of contaminated waste.
Raynor Industries, they want to bring this to Fukushima, they will work with us to develop it, and we will advise them, sell the technology licenses, and get recurring revenue from that once this site is up and running, but they will run the facility in Fukushima and other parts of Japan and Asia. A very important first step to go enter into a new market, and also work with this business cycle of in-drum.
Continue a little bit on asymmetric upside. We have momentum in many areas: existing fleet, we talked about a Norwegian agreement, which is very much building for the future, giving a strong foundation in high revenue and margin for the company for many years to come.
We also have the sign of that our in-drum, which is a new technology, that will also build recurring revenue not only when we build it at our site in Nyköping, but also when we go into these kind of licensing agreements in the world. New build, a big area for asymmetric upside, we took a very important step in the quarter on that one.
Advanced nuclear, here I highlight fusion. Fusion is enjoying a lot of investments in countries like the US, Germany, France, also Sweden.
Here we highlighting that we have a very strong competence in this, and we actually are hosting or we are chairing one of the standardizations around from one of our German colleagues, and we also attended and was a strategic partner and had spokespeople at the Nordic Fusion Forum in Copenhagen last week. Fusion will continue to be an area we will invest in in business development, as many of the services they ask for are the services that we have provided to the fission or nuclear power market.
In life science, we continue with a lot of interesting business development. The momentum in asymmetric upside is strong, and as I said, the cash generating core is in very good health.
Next slide, please. With that, I hand over to Peter for financial report.
Peter Teske
Thanks to you, Karl. I will start with the group numbers.
The sales in the quarter amounted to 227.4 million, that's up 10 point 10.7% in local currency. As Karl mentioned, we are so proud that all our three business area grew within the quarter, with Studsvik Scandpower showing the strongest increase.
For the first nine months, the sales amounted to 700.8 million, up 7.9% in local currency. That's above our target financial target of 6%.
Operating profit was 7.9 7.2 million in the quarter, compared to 13.2 million last year, giving an operating margin of 3.2%. When we talk about the results, we need to take into account that Q3 last year, we had an one-off effect of 6 million.
Exclude that effect, the profits in the quarter are in line with the Q3 results last year. During the quarter, we have continued to invest in our refurn program within Black Star Tech, SMR, and AMR developments, as well as in in-drum waste technology.
These initiatives carry costs today and are intended to support future growth of the company. When we talk about operating profit, even on the group level, we want to highlight the increased profitability profitability we had within DRPS.
The margin increased to 9.9%. If you look on the free cash flow, as we expected, it was negative in the quarter, it was negative with 35.3 million.
The main reason behind this is the changes in working capital, where the customer advances reduced as the prepaid the prepaid project progressed within our company. Year to date, our free cash flow, if when you look on those numbers, you should take into account that they are including the 34.1 million costs of the acquisition of KNXT.
If we go into and look a little bit more in the detail of our business areas, we start with the Decommissioning and Radiation Protection Services. The sales in the quarter amounted to 92.8 million, and that's up 2.6% in local currency.
For the first nine months, the growth was 4.5%. The main point we want to highlight here is the improvement of the profitability.
The operating profit more than doubled to 9.2 million from 4.4 million last year, and also increased operating margin. We have seen now that the changes we did during the past year now translates into results.
We have a clear focus on higher-margin services, we have better capacity utilization, and we continue our work with the cost discipline. This combine of a stronger market contributes to the strong result.
Then we go to FM Fuel Materials and Waste Technology, FMWT. The sales increased to 83.1 million from 79.5 million, and that's up 4.4% in local currency.
The profit, operating profit, was 4.4 million. We see there's a slightly lower profit compared to last year.
There's mainly two main reasons behind the lower profit. One is the seasonality that we have within the business, and also during the quarter, we had a little bit less favorable product mix.
We are still focusing on improving our productivity and a higher utilization, and that will of course continue even into Q4 and ongoing ongoing in the next years. With that said, we have a strong order backlog within the business area now when we enter Q4.
During quarter, we also took over the operation of the hot cell facility from SVAFO at the Studsvik site. This expands the capacity and improves the logistic for the future projects.
From from a financial point of view, this also increased our financial assets and our provisions. That reflects the decommissioning funds of the future obligation of the decommissioning of this facility.
Also, we've signed the NND agreement with with Norway. This is a long-term agreement and runs until 2055.
The agreement includes a fixed annual fee, and that's covering the project management, regulatory work, security, and also reservation of storage capacity of Studsvik. The pre-study begins immediately and will define in detail how the fuel is collected, transported, handled into Sweden, and also returned to to Norway.
In these on on that basis, the parties will we and Norway will then finalize the project plan and the budgets. NND will place orders for each stage.
All these are subject for required regulatory approvals and permits for both countries. This will not affect us financial material during 2026 or 2027.
Then we move to Studsvik Scandpower. The sales reached 54.8 million compared to 38.7 million last year.
That's a growth of 42.3% in local currency. That's supported by the software deliveries we've done during the quarter, and also signing new customer agreements.
It's also encouraging to see that our our Black Star Tech business contributes by nearly 20% of the business sales in the quarter. The operating profit increased to 9.2 million from 7.8 million Q3 2025.
Also, we need to take into account that last year, we had a one-off in the quarter, therefore it's a little bit tricky to do the comparison when you compare between this quarter and also for the full year. For the first nine months, sales grew with 21.5% in local currencies, while operating profit was 12.4 million compared to 21.4 million last year.
As I said, last year, we had one-off of 6 million, as well as we had some FX gains. Then, I will my final slide, we talk a little bit about our cash flow.
The cash flow was, as I said in the beginning, negative with 35.3 million, and that's compared with the last quarter the same quarter last year where we have a positive cash flow. If you look on the bridge I have done to the and start to go from left to right, you see that the operating cash flow before working capital was positive with 16.4 million.
Then, as expected, our working capital was negative with 41.5 million, and that's due to that we continue to deliver on our prepaid project, and that means that our customer advances has reduced. I also want to highlight that our trade receivables now are almost 19 million higher compared to end of Q3 last year, and this will of course have a positive effect in our cash collection in the coming month.
We have also done some investments on-site in Nyköping, and they amounted to 10.1 million. In in this cost, there's also some minor acquisition investments.
For the first nine months, free cash flow for for the first nine months, free cash flow was negative with 107.3 million, and also that includes 34.1 million from the KNXT acquisition. We're still and focusing a lot on how and monitoring the cash flow and we and we work with the change and we've we've monitored the cash flow and the change in working capital very closely.
To sum up the financial, I will say that it's positive that we have growth in sales on all three business area, and especially the clear improvements in DRPS. We have a underlying group profitability that was in line with Q3 last year.
We continue to build for for future growth while keeping focus on the earnings and cash flow. With that, I will hand over to you, Karl.
Karl Thedéen
Thank you, Peter. Let me summarize the business once again.
The net sales, strong growth of more than 10%, significantly higher than our financial target of 6%. DRPS, as we said, both growth, significantly improved efficiency, and hence also strong profitability, which is a effect of the changes and new initiatives that we put in place in the beginning of this year.
FMWT, hot cell capacity expanded, which is important because we need to take more and more growth out of the facilities that we have in Nyköping. Obviously, we are extremely proud, and the foundation that the NND landmark agreement puts to us can't be underestimated.
It's very, very important for the long-term play of our business. Scandpower, strong growth both in the traditional software and advisory and support business, but also very nice to see that Black Star Tech is contributing with almost 20% of the sales.
The new area, which is sort of new market that we are starting to serve much more aggressively, is new build, and specifically new build here in Sweden, which is one of the most favorable markets in the world to start new build projects. There, the partnership with GE Vernova Hitachi and Samsung is clearly the strongest partnership that we can have found, based on technology, financing, and experience.
In-drum, which is our waste technology, which is something that we are planning to build at site, but we also have a business plan to sign technology licenses for recurring revenue in the world, and we're very proud to sign that with Raynor, the Japanese partner, to develop that for Fukushima waste to start with, and for other waste in Japan and Asia. Global business, 80% of our sales is outside Sweden, this is truly a global investment case.
One platform, two return profiles: the existing cash generating core and the big upsides that we are tried to pack for the future, and we have clear proof points of that in the quarter. This is a slide that I have shown for quite a few investments calls now, and you will recognize that we added, I think last quarter, the SMR developments that we see.
We have hot cells, actually the new hot cell is by the sea, and that we have not put in here, but that's one we added. We are obviously looking to become bigger in the fusion, and here we are in discussions to put the test facility here.
In-drum, we talked about in-drum partnerships internationally, but important here is that we also build in-drum facilities at site for Nordic and European customers. The life science business with Nordic isotope, and then we added one, which is the intermediate storage for the Norwegian spent fuel, which we will build on the contract from the NND customer in Norway, to store the spent fuel before and after treatment, before returning it latest 2055 to Norway for final disposal.
You can see that this site is more and more becoming a very important asset for the company, and we will continue to drive business opportunities out of that asset. Thank you very much for listening, and by that, we hand over to questions.
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 Kaleb Solomon from SEB. Please go ahead.
Kaleb Solomon
Hi, guys, and thank you for taking my questions. Maybe I'll start off with a question on Scandpower.
Operating profit was up quite a bit compared to last year despite absence of positive one-offs, which were quite substantial last year. At the same time, you're sort of saying earnings were held back by investments into product development this quarter.
Can you maybe just start by telling us how big those investments were this quarter to get a better sense of how the underlying performance was?
Karl Thedéen
If I start, I think first when we view this business, we have very strong profits, and obviously we don't scale cost that fast even for investments, it's very very much leveraged by the strong growth in the quarter. That growth comes both from very profitable license sales into advisory and support services, but also then Black Star Tech, which typically is a slightly lower margins than the software business.
All in all, I think the volume drives a lot of the positive signs in this quarter. Investments here continues to be in Black Star Tech, where we invest for product development, also go-to-market models and partnerships that we need to sign to really drive volumes in that business, so that's one big investment area.
Then we are investing into new software modules based on the team we have, but also with new hires, and that's first to serve the light water market that we're in, but also to build more advanced products for the advanced modular reactor business that we do. I think it's a continuation of investments, but obviously, for example, the Black Star Tech business has been an investment case for the last 18 months that we have invested, and that has put us in a position where we can start getting significant or reasonable good sales in the quarter.
That would be, I don't know, Peter, if you have any other additions.
Peter Teske
No.
Kaleb Solomon
I'll get to Black Star Tech, but can you give us a sense of how big those investments were this quarter, and if we should sort of expect the same run rate heading into Q4?
Peter Teske
I think that I'll just continue to say what Karl said, that we will continue to invest in the business, both within Scandpower and especially within Black Star Tech, they will continue.
Kaleb Solomon
I interpret that as you don't want to put a figure on how big the investments was this quarter.
Peter Teske
That's correct.
Kaleb Solomon
Okay. Sort of as a follow-up to that, earlier, Karl, you expected Black Star Tech to constitute roughly 10% of our earnings this year, and you're already up to 20 as you sort of mentioned earlier in Q3.
Should we extrapolate that sort of run rate heading into Q4 and '27 as well, or was there any particular reason that the contribution was so big this quarter?
Karl Thedéen
As you see, the business in Scandpower is very seasonal from the base business, the software and business. Typically, and also this year, we expect Q4 to be a strong quarter for that business.
In terms of Black Star Tech, that's much more of a hardware business, it's much more lumpy, I think to forecast that and just extrapolate what we did this quarter is not the right way to do it. It's going to bounce up and down during the quarters because of the nature of that business.
I think it's a sign that we have started to get a sales machine going, and that we have products that is sort of attractive for the market. I think it's also fair to say that we are still in early days for the full potential of Black Star Tech, and we need to continue to invest and drive that business.
Now it's only a North American business, over time, we also need to drive it into the European business.
Kaleb Solomon
That's helpful. Just lastly on Black Star Tech and then I'll move on, but the sort of long-term potential there, as you've described it, is to be sort of 10% of group earnings, just if it keeps developing at this pace, do you think we can reach that level maybe end of next year or '28, or how should we think about the timeline for that?
Karl Thedéen
I think I haven't said group earnings, I think I have said Scandpower earnings, but maybe we can come back to that. I think we should, as I said, view this as a positive sign.
Don't extrapolate too much at this time. It will take time to drive the full potential of all the products into the market, I will not put a figure for next year, honestly.
Kaleb Solomon
That's clear. On FMWT, I appreciate there are some seasonal and mix effects here, but earnings year to date are down 12% if we just compare to last year, which kind of implies that we have to see a significant step up in Q4 in order to sort of stay flat compared to '25.
Is that a fair way to look at it, or should we expect '26 to perform slightly below last year's level as a total?
Karl Thedéen
I'm not going to forecast '26, but it is seasonal. Q3 is weak.
As Peter said, we have a strong backlog in this business, then it's all about execution, and the execution of this is not like building cars, it's actually every project is different from the other project, but we do hope and believe that we're going to have a strong quarter in FMWT.
Kaleb Solomon
That's helpful. Thank you.
Sort of as a follow-up to that, can you give us a sense of the earnings impact from expanding your hot cell capacity this quarter, and just what will that start to sort of impact earnings?
Karl Thedéen
This hot cell have been utilized by us to some extent through a rental agreement with SVAFO. I think the most important is that I think out of the business areas today where we see the strongest new demand based on the new renaissance of nuclear, is actually in the FMWT business area.
For us, it's been important not only to get this, but also to review the way we operate, we can take on the growth also in revenue, not only in building backlog. This agreement is important, but we take other measures.
We have appointed a head of operations for the site in Nyköping to really drive efficiency, to make sure that we can sustain a higher growth than in the past in this business area, based on the assets we now have at hand.
Kaleb Solomon
That's clear. On decommissioning, this was the best quarter profitability-wise since early '22, and you sort of attribute part of that to better utilization and a larger share of higher-margin services.
Can you maybe split up how much each part contributed? I'm asking because utilization, sick leave, etc.
is a bit harder to predict, but maybe it's fair to extrapolate the second component of that earnings improvement.
Karl Thedéen
DRPS is also seasonal, this was a strong quarter. We have maintenance in work in Switzerland, it was a strong quarter also from a project mix and demand point of view.
I think on illness rate, we have basically reduced illness rate with some 40% from the peak with new measures on how we work with our employees, making sure they are obviously healthy at work, and that we also have measures that makes sure that we comply with all the regulations. That is very, very important that we get people to be at work.
In Germany, it's very costly for the employer when people are off work. I think that is maybe from a utilization point of view, together with a project mix, those are the two most important for the profitability.
I do think that the sickness rate and that is sort of sustainable, although some quarters over winter, the sickness rate will probably go up because of natural reasons, but I think the measures we put in place are sort of there for the future.
Kaleb Solomon
That's clear. Thank you.
Leaving the quarter a bit, on the agreement you signed with NND, I appreciate that there's no sort of meaningful impacts next year, but what are the key milestones and regulatory approvals needed to convert that estimated 3-4 billion of total value into work orders, and how should we think about the revenue ramp-up over that contract period?
Karl Thedéen
I think it's important, which we phrased, this is not a frame agreement, it's committed revenue from day one, not material, but it's committed, which means that this is a contract that both ourselves and the customer need to work on from day one. The first thing that will happen now is that, as Peter said, there is a base fee for basically working with this and making sure that we prepare and also support the Norwegian customer with all the regulatory discussion from day one.
Other than that is the pre-study that will define the project in detail and the different steps. That is one key part that we do during 2027.
There are key regulatory things that needs to happen. We already have an existing contract for Norway for another site in Kjeller, and there is actually something going up in Stortinget in Norway in December, I think it is, where they will decide on a return guarantee with an end date of 2055.
That's very important, because then Norway can work with the Swedish regulators to make sure that we can get permits to start importing fuel to Sweden. That can actually, for that contract, happen already in the coming years.
Following that, the bigger contract for Halden will happen. I would guess that when the volume really starts becoming material for us, we're probably in the early 2030, 2029, 2030, 2031.
There's also other things like the construction of this intermediate storage that can drive revenue as well before that, but this is a build-up of the volume that will take some time.
Kaleb Solomon
After that sort of 2030 point, is it fair to assume it's sort of fairly distributed run rate throughout the contract period?
Karl Thedéen
Yes, but I think it's going to be higher, the continuous high level would be from 2030 to maybe 2045, and then the last 10 years would be more of intermediate storage and committed.
Kaleb Solomon
That's clear. Thank you.
Just another question on the in-drum partnership you announced today. What sort of commercial terms do you expect from that proposed licensing model, and what milestones do you have to meet before the pilot could translate into meaningful revenue?
Karl Thedéen
I think the meaningful revenue is when we start building the operating plant in Fukushima, and that can probably take another 3-4 years. First go through a pilot that would not treat radioactive material and prove the concept, and then you go to more radioactive basically liquid in this case, and that will start then after 3-4 years when we build the operating plant for this.
Exactly the volumes of this I don't have at hand, but the model is that we will get paid both for our initial licensing advisory services, but then also when it's in full operation, based on volume we will get paid, it's going to be recurring revenue, that's our
Kaleb Solomon
aim. That's very clear.
Thanks, guys. Thanks for taking my questions.
Karl Thedéen
Thanks.
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 written questions and closing comments.
Karl Thedéen
Thank you very much for listening. Just to remind you, strong growth in the quarter, DRPS, as for one example, back to very strong profits, and asymmetric upside driven by the Norwegian large deal and our consortium to build new nuclear reactors in Sweden.
Thank you very much. We also would like to highlight that the next earnings call for Q4 is January 22nd.
We pushed it a bit earlier, January 22nd is the next date for our earnings call. Thank you very much, and have a good day.
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