QleanAir AB (publ) (QAIR) Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So a warm welcome to the QleanAir Investor Presentation for Q4 2025. My name is Sebastian Lindstrom, I'm the CEO of QleanAir. And joining me in today's call is Fredrik Sandelin, CFO of QleanAir. Fredrik and I will go through the presentation and then open up for Q&As at the end. But let's dive straight into the numbers. So SEK 113 million in sales in the quarter, 9.1% growth over last year. We, of course, had a strong headwind on the currency side in constant currency. So in constant currency, we grew 20% in the quarter and growth in all product categories, a very strong achievement of our sales teams. Our new products focused on solutions for critical problem areas of the industry are continuing to drive growth and mitigate the difficult market conditions. Our recurring revenues remained stable at SEK 67 million, a slight increase from previous quarter and stable versus last year if you take currency effects into account. Our gross margin continues to strengthen, thanks to a higher rate of renewals on the air cleaning side, products targeting more critical problem areas of our customers and the cost improvements we made over the past 2 years in the supply chain in Europe and overall in the U.S. Our EBIT margin of 13.1% was a big improvement over last year, minus 5.3%. Our EBIT was -- for Q4 was SEK 14.8 million versus SEK 5.4 million last year. Last year, we suffered from the absence of the Curexa contract. Cash flow was strong. Our very focused work on balance sheet items like inventory and accounts receivables have really paid off. And together with our strong operating profit, our net debt is at a record low level of SEK 118 million. Our EPS makes a strong jump to SEK 0.87 per share, SEK 1.88 per share for the full year, real money as Warren Buffett would have put it. The Board is proposing no dividend for 2025. And summing up the quarter, we still have work to do and we'll keep our focus on the 3 objectives towards the long-term profitable growth, cost control, sales efficiency and customer focus. Now over to the product categories. From our Q3 report, we started to report on product segments down to gross margin. So we will now add this slide on our product categories in our investor presentations. Overall, in Q4, we show both growth in revenue and stable or improved gross margins across all product categories. On the Cabin side, we maintain a stable revenue, slight increase over last year. We had a strong base of renewals to finance companies in Japan throughout 2025, which helped compensate for the weak currency of the Japanese yen. Growth in Cabin business in Japan was 27% in local currency for the quarter. New cabin sales in Japan grew as well. Our charge into smaller and medium businesses and the HORECA channel is progressing well. For cabins in Europe, German holds our performance down, but in Q4, 7 out of 12 markets grew in the quarter on Cabin Solutions. Cabin Solutions gross margins remained stable across both geographies. Moving over to Air Cleaners. Our targeting of more critical industry segment is paying off. Air Cleaners in Europe grew 24% in the quarter through very strong performance in Europe and particularly in France. In Japan, we had a decrease in revenue, mainly due to that we still have sales in Japan for Q4 2024 on the HEPA side. The industrial air cleaner volume in Japan continues to increase. On the margin for air cleaners, we continue to see positive effects on gross margin from an increased proportion of renewed contracts, new products targeting more critical application areas and a much more efficient supply chain in Europe. We expect this journey to continue as we focus on solutions built to solve real specific problems at our industrial customers. Over to the cleanrooms. These products are only sold in the U.S. market and with a particular focus on compounding of medicine at hospital pharmacies. In 2024, we had a situation with one large client, Curexa, where they did not fulfill the agreement, and we had a substantial impact on 2024 for the full year, but in particular, for Q4. Revenues are now back on track and the work we performed back in 2023 and 2024 in respect to cost of goods sold and efficiency in installations show full benefits in 2025. The high margin in Q4 is largely related to a renewal of 6 rooms with a long-term client via finance company. If we back that out, we see that the underlying business is at a healthy and improved margin of 55% to 60%. We have both a strong backlog and pipeline on the cleanroom side, but due to a project planned for Q1 that has been delayed until Q1 2027, we will see the strength in the U.S. in the second half of '26. Now let's look at the regional perspective and starting off with Europe. It's an important region for us, accounting for almost half of our sales in Q4 and where we have our biggest installed base of over 6,400 units. We've had a great finish of the year in Sweden, France, Finland, Poland and Belgium with double-digit growth for the quarter. The economic environment with long sales cycles continues in Germany and the DACH region overall. Our figure shows that our strategy to focus on more critical areas of our clients helps. Moving on to Japan with 40% of our sales. Here, we have an important installed base on the cabin side, but are growing the industrial air cleaner base. Japan is our third largest market on air cleaners today, almost tying Sweden for second place. Given the strong renewal base in Cabin Solutions in 2025, Japan grew 1% in Swedish kroner, but as much as 19% in constant currency for the quarter. Overall, the business is very stable. And to finish off the regional review, we have the U.S. The team in the U.S. has made a strong recovery from the past years. We have, over the last 2 years, worked through our COGS, our installation cost, our organization, and it is now clearly visible through our P&L. In 2025, we make the best profits ever in the cleanroom business in the U.S. Overall, we see a stable demand. And as we have alluded to before, we only see marginal effects on our profitability from tariffs as less than 5% of the cost of our clean rooms is sourced outside of the U.S. The market environment -- so let's look at some of the stuff and the activities that we're doing across our markets. So the market environment is in part tough out there, but we maintain a high activity level, as seen here on this slide shows a sample of where we've been pushing our solutions to help and support new clients and to grow our business in the past quarter. Notably, the higher degree of digital marketing. We have, during 2025, made investments to optimize our websites towards SEO and tailoring to the needs of AI. The high level cuts across all regions from Japan in the East to U.S. in the West. When it comes to our focus, we stick to our 3 prioritized objectives: cost control; sales efficiency; and customer focus. Summing up for 2025, the key steps taken were, starting off on the cost control side, we have clearly materialized improvements in COGS, especially in the U.S. Our consolidation of the supply chain for service material that we concluded for Europe by the second half of 2024 is clearly supporting our gross margin improvements. Our value engineering projects within air cleaners and cabins are on track, and we should start seeing benefits of this in the second half of 2026. Moving over to sales efficiency. The whole process of the QleanAir wheel that has given us new bespoke solutions for oil mist and now welding has really improved our time to market. On the operational side, the more decentralized structure in Europe with full responsibility for sales, service and marketing in the 3 regions within Europe, Nordics and Poland, France, Benelux and DACH has really sharpened our approach. When it comes to customer focus, we continue our explorations for further bespoke solutions for the industry. Oil mist in the food sector and further segments in welding are in the works. We are now in the midst of the regional workshops with all sales and service teams to iterate our strategic plan for '27 through 2030. We continue our work on SEO and AI and have launched a restructured website much more targeted at our focus areas. And before handing over to Fredrik and the financial section, let me summarize the key takeaways from my perspective of the quarter. We have had great success with our product launches. Our structured approach with annual workshops with our sales and service teams, selected clients really delivers. Product launches that we have brought to the market in the past 12 months accounted for 20% of unit sales in Q4 in air cleaners. Our cleanroom business is back on track with the best bottom line result ever for 2025. We have worked through our working capital and have a solid financial position with a net debt of SEK 118 million today compared with SEK 164 million a year ago. With that said, I hand over to Fredrik.

Thank you, Sebastian. Let's now have a look at the numbers. To the left, we have the quarterly sales quarter after quarter. Last quarter, revenue was SEK 113 million. Adjusted for the negative currency effect we had in that quarter, revenue was SEK 125 million, an increase of 20%. The negative currency effect was almost SEK 12 million, and that was a result from a stronger Swedish krona in relation to all our other currencies, but the main effect comes from the Japanese yen, the U.S. dollar and the euro. And as you can see, revenue-wise, we are ahead of the corresponding quarter last year. Recurring revenue is in line with previous 3 quarters. Compared to the corresponding quarter in 2024, it is a decrease, but adjusted for the currency effect, it is slightly ahead of last year. To the upper right, we have gross profit and gross margin. For both gross profit and gross margin, we see an improvement compared to the corresponding quarter last year. Gross margin is back to the level we had in early 2023. To the bottom right, we have operating profit and operating margin. After a negative trend for 2 years, we now for the last year presented a positive trend, and we are now back on a level we had more than 2 years ago. The reasons for the improvement in profitability is a combination of supply chain improvements leading to lower COGS, lower personnel costs in Q4, higher rates of renewal for air cleaners and a strong quarter, particularly in the U.S. On the left-hand side, we see the split between recurring revenue, revenue from sales of agreements to finance companies and revenue from product sales. And to the right, the corresponding split for the installed base of units that we hold on our balance sheet, sold to finance companies and units sold directly to customers. The installed base is stable over time and revenue split is primarily affected by the decline for recurring revenues because of the cancellations from the German schools that started in 2024. Now there are very few of these contracts left on our books. Looking at the installed base to the right, we see at the bottom the units we have on our own books. Book value of these units is only SEK 36 million, and they generate revenues of around SEK 270 million this year. So we have an asset-light business model with low CapEx. I would like to highlight that our base for renewals have come back to more normal levels in Japan. These renewals typically follow a 3-year cyclical pattern. So to understand how this affects the present, we must go back 3 years and look at the sales to finance companies at that time. Still, we don't get the full benefit as the Japanese yen has lost value towards the Swedish krona during this 3-year period. For the last 3 years, the Japanese yen has lost 26% in value against the Swedish krona. Our recurring revenue, i.e., long-term customer contracts are stable at a high level. Adjusted for the currency effect, revenues in 2025 is almost in line with 2024 with a reduction of less than 1%. In this economic environment, customers tend to go for more short-term contracts rather than to choose a 3- to 5-year contract. We believe that they, over time, will convert these short-term contracts into longer maturities. Churn to the right is back after a higher level in 2024 to a more normal level. Retention rate when our customer agreements expire is high. To the left, you can see that our recurring revenue is relatively stable over time, even if our total revenues fluctuate. Total revenues in 2025 compared to 2024 shows a slight increase and currency adjusted increase is 6%. To the right, you can see that our profitability is heading upwards again after a trend with negative development for the last 2 years. We have had a strong cash flow, both in this quarter and year-to-date. Operating cash flow is SEK 25 million in a single quarter, and that is very good for us. Of this SEK 25 million in the quarter, a large part come from our operating result. For the full year, the operating cash flow is SEK 80 million. Here, we see a combination of good results and from our focus on reducing working capital. Both inventory and accounts receivable have been reduced. We have a stable financial situation. Net interest-bearing debt continued to come down and is now at a record low level. One reason for that is that we amortize around SEK 40 million per year on our term loan from our cash flow. Equity to total assets ratio continued to improve and is now at 38%. And with that, I hand it back over to you, Sebastian.

Thank you, Fredrik. And to close off the session in front of the Q&A, what we do at QleanAir is important. We dedicate our work to improve the health of people, the quality of products and the performance of processes, and we do so throughout our 3 product categories: Cabin Solutions, Air Cleaners and Cleanrooms. And looking at the amount of clean air that is delivered through our solutions, we estimate that we cleaned over 7.79 billion cubic meters of indoor air per month by end of Q4, and it matters. As air pollution is a key challenge for human health. People die prematurely from exposure to polluted air. We spend an important part of our lives in indoor environments, and indoor air can often be more polluted than outdoor air. So with that, I hand back over to the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Anders Roslund from Pareto Securities.

I just had a couple of questions, and I start off with Cabin Solutions. You just mentioned here that had 19% organic growth in Japan last year. And it doesn't look as strong this year versus last year. So should we expect flattish or even less organic growth in -- sorry, should you expect flat growth -- organic growth in Japan for '26 or even -- and I'm talking about Cabin Solutions, of course.

So clearly, 2025 was a strong year when it comes to the base of renewals to finance companies. I think we were at JPY 225 million per quarter. And for 2026, that will go down a bit. But also the new sales on cabins have been very strong in Japan. So it's not only the effect of the base. But I think overall, looking at cabins, we should expect a stable development.

And we're talking now overall for the whole Cabin Solution?

You asked specifically on Japan. So I think a stable development, and it all depends. So you know that we have a charge into the smaller, medium business that is going quite well and into the HORECA channel. So we'll see how well that can compensate for the lower base of renewals.

That is an interesting -- I mean, historically, you've been very strong or almost all sales in Tokyo, while you have been very hard to penetrate the market outside Tokyo. So is this the first sign that you sort of find your way out of Tokyo from the Cabin Solutions -- HORECA business.

So we both have an office in -- of course, the largest office of ours is in Tokyo, but we are also expanding our office in Osaka. Now Osaka is more an industrial region. So that's more focused on the air cleaner side. And I think the move into smaller and medium-sized businesses is not only for the areas outside of Tokyo, but for Tokyo as well.

Okay. So those, what you call it, small or medium-sized, is that sort of versions of the Cabin Solutions that are cost-wise more favorable for clients? Or how should we put it?

Yes. So we have developed a series, the 1000 series and soon also the HORECA series that fit better into the HORECA channel, both from a size perspective as well from color and so forth. And for sure, we are -- when you go to the small and medium business, we have to have a more competitive offer and that we do have.

Excellent. So if we then go to the expanding and growth business here, I'm very impressed about the Air Cleaners business. Could you give an example of how much of the sales here that are recently launched products? Maybe you mentioned that, and I didn't pick it up...

So what we communicate is on the unit sales, right? Because it all depends on whether it's a 36-month contract or it's a product that we sell as what we call a PPG, so a normal sale to a customer. Therefore, we communicate how much of the units. And when we look at the units for 2025, we are -- with the new products launched in the last 12 to 18 months, that's 20% of the units sold in 2025.

Is that share higher in the fourth quarter? That was my questions.

Okay. No, it's been pretty stable from Q2 and onwards. I mean the products -- some of these -- we launched 6 new products, I think, on the 11th of December in 2024. So it took a little time, of course, to get them into the market, but it's been very stable since. And then we complemented that initial offering with some further solutions in the September time frame. So the new products, the way we're running the wheel where the salespeople and the service people are part of finding the areas where we want -- really when the product then arrives, they are already up and running. So if you take the FS 60 and the second welding solution in September, we took orders already in the first month from launch. So we have a very good spin on it.

Yes, I'm very impressed by this figure because I assume that the old type -- I wouldn't say old, but COVID-related with HEPA filter type of equipment is more or less phased out now in those figures. So they are more sort of related to the basic industrial products and new products, the SEK 26 million? Or do you still have COVID-related HEPA filter sales in your figures?

No. So in 2024, we did. But specifically for Japan, it's a long time ago now. But when COVID hit, right, Japan really closed down. So they had a delayed effect on the COVID side, right? So therefore, they [indiscernible] a little bit behind Europe on that. So therefore, in Q4 2024, we still had some of the sales on the HEPA side in Japan. But you're correct. In 2025, we've had very limited HEPA sales -- other purposes than COVID, right? It helps towards allergies and all these things, right? And in medical or hospital environments, but it's back to a normal level for sure.

So when I look at those SEK 26 million, I don't see that you have any strong seasonality in this business. It means that we could look quite favorably if we believe in growth upon those SEK 26 million. It's not that you got several large orders in the fourth quarter? Or is this a new baseline?

No. I think it's steady growth in the industrial air cleaning side. And the only thing holding us back is really Germany and the DACH region, right? Which struggle a little bit more on the overall economic situation in the market.

You mentioned here picked up, you had growth over what is 12 markets or? Is it the rest of Europe that is -- and you specifically mentioned France here, which is quite new market.

Yes. So France was -- we took a decision in 2023 not to expand in all kinds of geographies, but really put our focus. And France was really our prime choice for this investment, so to say. And they have steadily grown and show a very good growth for 2025, and we will continue to invest in further resources into that market.

So that -- and you also see now growth in the industrial space in Japan as well. You mentioned was the third largest market. Is it the #1 is Germany, which is the second largest? Is it Sweden or, in air cleaners.

So. So #1 is Germany for sure. And second place is Sweden and right on the -- almost on the tie is Japan. And then we are putting our focus to grow the France, Benelux region to be that third pillar in Europe, if you will.

Excellent. I mean you have a lot of new products here, and it seems that you've got a good response on those product launches. Do you plan for further advances in this Air Cleaners business?

Yes, absolutely. We will deliver more and more bespoke solutions for critical areas of the industry. And we are right now in January in the midst of the regional workshops for 2026. And then we talk to all our sales teams and service team and try to find other problem areas adjacent to where we are with those customers. And then we have expanded our exploration team to two people, that all they do is look at those areas and go out and work in depth with customers for a length of time trying different solutions to crack the code on how to solve those issues for the clients. And it's been very successful from the start in 2023 when we started it, and we are increasing our investment into that. It really has served us well.

Yes. And you also have a reasonably stable gross margins in this business.

So stable and increasing, I would say. So of course, we made some improvements that we reported on in end of 2024 on the supply chain side on the whole filter and service material for Europe. So we did a consolidation of that supply chain, and that has helped our margins to increase. But also the fact that we are making more bespoke products for particular critical issues for the client also allows us to have better pricing on our products.

Excellent. I just end up with the cleanrooms business. And this is a more lumpy business, and you had a relatively strong sales development that you have also -- could you mention a little bit about the order book because you closed a lot of deals in the fourth quarter. And it depends a little bit how those orders will be delivered and you mentioned that we should not expect that much. Is it a flattish business in the first half and then a strong peak in the second half? Or how should we look upon the order book delivery there?

So first of all, we have a stronger contracted backlog for 2026 than we had going into 2025. That's one thing. Then we had -- unfortunately, we had one project that was supposed to be delivered in first quarter that was delayed now or currently is on a delay until Q1 2027. It has nothing to do with the cleanroom or us. It's around the facility and the work they're doing overall at the facility that has been delayed. So that is a little bit out of the Q1 in particular.

Yes, until Q1 '27, so it will sort of...

It falls out of the year. From what we know now, right now, it falls out of the year. That's our conservative approach on it.

But that means that could you maintain the present level around SEK 12 million, SEK 13 million for the first half and then -- or should we -- because you still had a quite -- as you mentioned here, you had a stronger backlog. Coming into '26? Or how should we look upon it? Or will the growth come in the second half?

Well, Q1 will, for sure, be a bit weaker on the cleanroom side given this move because when we have a move this late in time, then we have no way of replacing it with any other business, right? So therefore, it becomes sort of a hole in the first quarter. But we have very strong demand. We see a very strong demand in the market. So it's quite possible that we will be able to add things on to -- and that's why I'm saying second half because that's where we could really add something on. It's tougher on the Q2, which is quite filled up already. So it's more towards the Q3, Q4. But we are, for sure, expecting a double-digit growth in the U.S. also for the coming year.

Yes, that was exactly what I was going to ask that part of the orders you have taken now are, I would call it, not pre-studies, but that you get paid for consultancy preparing for hopefully orders to come. Could you explain a little bit how you see that type of preordering or consultancy work?

Yes. So what we're doing, it's not just a pre-study. It's actually a full engineering that leads up to the final scope of the room. And it's roughly about -- if you look at an engineering contract that we do, you can expect that, that is about 12% of the full room value. And those engineering contracts, we announced a couple of them in December. That was one for USD 52,000 and one for USD 151,000. And you can typically expect that the full room will be about -- including that will be about 7 to 8x that value. And we -- the process around investments into cleanrooms for these large IDNs is a very structured process, right? And we're seeing more and more of them splitting it up into the engineering portion, so that they get going in the process. And then the final room decision and order comes a little later. But I don't think it's going to be more than 2, 3 months between the engineering and the final room order.

So it means that you could get a very back-end loaded '26 with higher sales, but also more orders coming in for the full -- but will those orders already be part of '26? Or is it maybe '27 that will get stronger or?

Well, it all fills up down the line, so to say. And the engineering contracts that we have signed, those are not in our contracted backlog, but they are for sure -- the engineering contracts that we delivered now, we reported on them in December, and we deliver them typically in, I think, December and January. They are not in our contracted backlog for a full room, but they are for sure in our pipeline for 2026.

Yes, absolutely. And there you have...

I try not to make too much forward-looking statements, but you're getting me there step by step.

Yes, yes. I mean this is since you already published all the orders. So just to share a little bit how it works.

But you can -- I think we can see more engineering contracts. But -- and I must say, when we've done all that full engineering, it's not like the customer then goes out for a full RFQ on that room because it's -- when you build a room, it's very specific to our design, right? Already in the engineering phase.

But you had a very strong gross margin here, and you mentioned that you had one renewal of an old contract that you sold to finance companies and then you normally get a very high earnings recognition here. And that's why you say that your more normalized gross margin, you mentioned here, 55% to 60%, which is also above. I mean that is 55% to 60% is definitely above historic levels. So are we entering now a cleanrooms business that is catching up to the other divisions?

Yes. So -- and I've alluded to it many times, right? We made a real hard work on COGS and installation costs already back in the fall of 2023, right? And we couldn't really see it in 2024 because we didn't have the volume, right? Because we -- the Curexa contract didn't fulfill during the end of the year. So for sure, we have improved our whole baseline as far as gross margin on the cleanroom side. And we -- it's not something that is short term or this is the level that we are targeting.

Yes, that's very good. Normally, you are -- a large part of the cleanrooms business is sold to clients with service contracts, but this one was sold to finance companies. Normally, how will the mix look like in the future? Is it the usual more sales with service contracts? Or is it this unusual deal with the rental business sold to clients -- sold to finance companies?

So we are open to both, but it is more common that the customer actually buys the cleanroom because it's an installation. It's not -- cleanroom is not easy to move once it's been installed at the customer site. But we have a couple of customers that do use these finance companies for all their capital equipment purchases. So it was not our choice that this was handled through a finance company, but just the setup of that particular IDN. And we have a very few of those. So they will come now and again.

Okay. So how about the legislation? You have talked of this QleanAir business is really sort of boosted by regulations coming in force. How should we look upon this legislation process?

So of course, the USP 797 and 800, which is the regulation that touches on the compounding of medicine of hospital pharmacies is important. And we believe that there are a lot of hospitals out there that need to update their rooms. But it also depends on the State Board of Pharmacy and how they are enforcing it in different states. But for sure, over the past 6 months, we have seen an increase in requests. So our team is working quite hard just to deal with all the requests. So it's likely that we will expand the team in the U.S. to be able to handle that more efficiently going forward.

Yes. That was my question because 1.5 years ago, you had your own sales force and then you said now we work with distributors. And how will you address the clients with partners or direct sales?

So it will be a combination. So we -- on the partnership side, we still work in partnership with some of the companies that supply robotics for pharmacies and so forth that are dependent on being able to expand existing cleanrooms to cater for those solutions. But I believe that we also need to strengthen our own sales team given the demand that we see. So it will be a combination.

Putting back some of the sales team now then?

There could be.

Okay. So that looks very promising. So just some part of the financial here. You changed the funding of your loan, changed banks and you have a restriction on the net debt-to-EBITDA. Is that something that you had to provide to get a lower interest rate? Or what was the deal behind this?

Yes. I can answer that. It was before my time. But I mean the -- it's pretty similar to the setup with the old bank. There was a covenant debt agreement, but the change of bank led to improved condition, especially on the interest margin.

So with this stronger balance sheet that you are almost debt-free now, is it starting to provide a basis for dividends? Or are you looking for acquisitions? You've never done that before. So how should we look upon this improved balance sheet?

If I start with the dividend, the financing side, and then we can -- Sebastian can follow up on the acquisition side. We have a good cash flow. We have a strong balance sheet, but there are two items that stick out. One is that we amortize quite a lot. And the second is the dependence on the cash coming from Japan. I mean Japan is our single largest market with good profitability. Of course, a lot of the cash generation in the group come from Japan. The Japanese Yen has lost 26% in value for the last 3 years compared to the krona. So of course, there is an uncertainty. We know about the amortization, but there is a level of uncertainty how much the Japanese yen will convert into Swedish krona. And they -- as 40% of the revenues come from Japan, that is an important part of the total cash generation for the company. So that is -- to have a prudent approach to this question, the proposal is to have no dividend for this year.

Go ahead.

I just had to change my -- so now I'm back again. Sorry, do you hear me?

Yes.

Yes.

Good. No, I was just asking about acquisitions. That is nothing you have really talked about. So I was just throwing in that question as...

We are absolutely open to that. If that further drives our focus that we established and really launched in 2024 into industrial air cleaning. But -- and I think the more we get in depth in this specific industry problems, that's where we should find something like that. But we are not -- our focus has been on getting our act together in a good way for the past couple of years. And I think that has to be the primary focus. But I think now we have a very good product development process. We know where we focus our energy from the sales and product management team from a segment perspective. So now it's more a better time to look at such things.

I mean the industrial air cleaners, as I see it, is an extraordinary competitive market with a huge number of companies covering other areas, I mean, heavy industries and et cetera. Where is your space? Because you are coming from sort of less polluted areas and like air cleaners for inventory places and not into the heavy industry where there are a lot of other solutions.

So I think if you take apart sort of the HVAC industry where you have a lot of big players, you have some really important Swedish players also. And then you look at the primary and secondary solutions. So primary solutions are those solutions are normally around the machine, and that's where you find Absolent products, right? They are mounted directly on the welding on the drilling machine or laser machine and so forth. And we have really looked at the secondary filtration in the industries because the primary solutions cannot solve all of that. And it is true that in the past, we were more in the light polluted areas. But with our solution and building an oil mist, we are definitely becoming a force also in the more critical areas for these industries. And there, I think there is a lot of opportunity in. We complement the primary solutions well, and...

Yes. Because it's a very developed market. The primary solutions normally take care of all the dirty air. And then the secondary solutions is something sort of nice to have, but how could you be a part of the critical area here?

But if you look at welding -- if you take welding, for example, and I had a specific slide on that, I think, in the last quarterly presentation, there are some primary solution. It's a very fragmented market with a lot of small players. And those primary solutions, when you look at welding over larger items are not really easy to use for the welder themselves, right? So therefore, I would say our -- it's not a nice to have our welding filtration solution. It is a must-have. And the same goes for oil mist. Oil mist, yes, there are solutions around the machine, but that machine has to open to pick out the components that have been fabricated in it. And through that, you get a lot of oil mist that sits on products, ends up in lungs and so forth. And I argue that, that is also an area where it's not a nice to have. It's a must to have. And we see both in welding and oil mist that a big demand from the customer is the ability to hire new people into their workshops because it is quite a tough environment, despite having primary solutions in place. And for sure going -- from nice to have to more must-have. That's our whole target.

That's very good to hear. So I see that we almost moved to an hour now. So I just have a final question here, and that's about the cleanrooms business. What sort of future you've had historically going into other areas like electronics and have cleanrooms for other applications? It seems that you are back to your roots now and you focus and you were selling ad hoc business in Sweden that were not very successful. Is it core business now that -- or do you have other ideas?

So we -- our whole organization in the U.S. is really geared towards the health sector. That's where their strength, their network and everything. So that's where we will maintain our focus. We will not into electronics or assembly of electronics or -- we will stay within the health sector. There are possibilities to expand also within the health sector more into the GMP, so into private compounding, Curexa would have been the first beachhead for us into that, for instance. So I think there's still expansion out of hospital pharmacy that we can do. And very interestingly, and we reported on during the fall is that we closed the first cleanroom with the veterinarian hospital, right?

Okay.

So I think there is expansion opportunities.

Okay. I think I stop here. But yes, nice to see such a good result.

There are no more phone questions at this time. So I hand the conference back to the speakers for any written questions or closing comments.

So we're looking at the questions coming in. So there is one question on how does the future pipeline of new projects on the cleanroom side in the U.S. look? And how does that -- the demand potential look now compared to a couple of years ago? And we, for sure, see a pickup in demand. And our pipeline is stronger than ever also for -- as we go into 2026. The second question is that personnel costs were the lowest of all quarters this year, significantly lower than Q3. What's the reason for this? And what should we expect going forward? Well, if you look at our -- the number of employees, it's actually risen a little bit. And what we -- we have had some benefits of going to decentralize the organization in Europe. So we do have some benefits in personnel costs there. But we are -- when we are investing in additional people, it will be in the -- towards the client-facing part of the organization.

And in the last quarter, we saw a reduction.

Yes. So if there are no further questions, I would like to reiterate our approach to operational and strategic development is very systematic. We have our 3 operational priorities: sales efficiency; customer focus; and cost control. We have a focused product development that has given us 10 successful products in the last 18 months. We have a very targeted go-to-market approach. And for quarter 4 2025, we delivered an overall growth of 9% and an EBIT margin of 13.1% despite hard currency headwind. So thank you all for your participation and interest in QleanAir, and we wish you a great continuation of the day. Thank you.

Thank you.