Studsvik AB (publ) ($SVIK)

Welcome to Studsvik Q1 2026 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers. Please go ahead.

Welcome to the interim report for Q1 2026 for Studsvik. I'm Karl Thedeen; and next to me, I have Peter Teske, my CFO. So let's start to go through the quarter. First, a summary of the Studsvik Group. We are a worldwide service and product provider to the nuclear industry. And net sales last year amounted to SEK 883 million. We have offices in Asia, in Europe and in the U.S. We are a little bit more than 500 employees in 6 offices around the world. Before we go to the results, just to remind everybody where we are in terms of what we do because that is always important and start with the top left-hand corner, new build, which is actually an area that we took significant step to enter more broader in this quarter with the acquisition of Karnfull Next. I will talk more about that later. But already before that, we are supplying our services and products into that market with fuel and materials testing for new reactor developments, supporting with waste planning for licensing, working with different fuel manufacturer for fuel that goes into these reactors and obviously supporting the SMR project development. The other 3 business areas or operations that we are engaged is Decommissioning, which is predominantly a business that we do out of Germany, but also we are also engaged in Switzerland, Benelux and in the Nordics. In a secure and safe way, we are tearing down and decommissioning nuclear process. Typically, a process takes more than 20 years. Long-term operations is the majority of our business. That's to serve a little bit more than 400 reactors in the world, and we are active with at least half of that amount with our testing services supporting the planned outages, our software for fuel management, safety systems and so forth. And that will remain a very important part of our business as these nuclear power stations are now set to be extended in their lives from 40 years to -- from 60 years to 80 to 100 years. And we have also an additional business that also requires our competence to handle radioactive material within life science, and we see increasing demand for that, specifically for the unique facility we have in Sweden to handle that kind of materials. We run this business from 3 different business areas: Decommissioning, Radiation Protection, Fuel, Materials and Waste Technology and Studsvik Scandpower, our software business. And Fuel, Materials is the largest of these ones in terms of net sales. Let me then come into the result of the quarter. We reported a stable quarter from a top line point of view, came in basically at the same levels as last year. The growth in local currencies is around 4% and an operating profit of SEK 12 million versus SEK 19 million. We should then be reminded of that we have some specific FX effects in last year in 2025, which has affected the results positively. And we ended up with a 5.4% operating margin. Free cash flow was low in the quarter. It was minus SEK 12.5 million versus a positive SEK 39.6 million. That is due to the large amount of prepayments that we received in Q4 from some of our customers and also that we had some late invoicing in the quarter. So key milestones for us in Q1 2026. And maybe the one that stands out is the acquisition of a company called Karnfull Next, which is a Swedish project developer for new small modular reactors in so-called SMRs. They have expertise and worked very closely with the Swedish government and other key players in the Swedish market to understand how to, in a new way, develop sites and projects for nuclear power in a new way that is already seen, for example, in the wind power industry. As a sign of that, just following the acquisition, they also handed in a pre-application for building an SMR park in the municipality of Valdemarsvik on the Southeast Coast line of Sweden. This is the first application of its kind for a total new site or location in Sweden for over 50 years. They also plan to send in more of those over the coming years. Also in the SMR market, we expand our relationship with Rolls-Royce SMR. We already do business with them, but now signed an MOU to explore a broader set of products and services from us to support them in their endeavors to build a fleet of Rolls-Royce SMRs in Europe. We also signed a very interesting MOU with Novotron Fusion Group. Fusion energy is very interesting at this time. There has been some good progress in the technology development, and there is a vast amount of investments put into various initiatives in Europe and in the U.S. And here, we are supporting Novotron, a company based in Stockholm with their endeavors to do this. And we are now exploring various testing and so on that we can do there, which is very similar to what we have done in the nuclear fission industry. And we continue to be active to show our competence and our brand. And in this quarter, we went to the global Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix, U.S. So let me take a little bit through more on the Karnfull Next. So it is -- for us, it's a strategic Studsvik's competence around new build, moving Studsvik into the forefront of the SMR market segment in Sweden and overseas, basically benefiting from being in a market which has very good foundations and conditions financially and competence-wise to build new nuclear in Sweden. And by engaging early in these projects, by being part of the project, we will gain a lot of competence around how these are done that we can also scale worldwide. They bring obviously a vast experience on understanding this market and how you set up these projects. They have an extensive range of vendor relationships, and not only with the reactor vendors, but also with all other vendors and suppliers required to build a nuclear power plant. To build this, you will need to invest in the projects. Investments come from the state, but we're also looking here to obviously look for private investments, and they have built relationships and understand which of these investors that actually have the right knowledge to invest in nuclear power. There is a lot of regulatory and policy expertise in this group as they have worked closely with the Swedish government to understand how to facilitate and change the regulatory environment to enable new players to build new nuclear. And they have access to land rights to develop new nuclear, the application for Valdemarsvik being one example. And here you see a picture when we actually handed in that application, we see the Minister for Environment, Mr. Johan Britz, getting the application from Karnfull Next. And this is a way for the government to -- in an early stage, make sure that we, as a product developer can understand if this will be approved and we don't end into a situation where we invest a lot of money and then subsequently, they will say no. So it's part of the regulatory changes and that we're now benefiting from. We will handle more of these in Sweden. I foresee maybe 1 to 3 more over the next 18 to 24 months. So let me then take you through the business areas, Decommissioning, Fuel, Materials and Studsvik Scandpower. Decommissioning & Radiation Protection Services, you know that we have struggled with our profitability in this market. We have done some changes in management and the way we operate this. We have set a new agenda for finding the right profitability. And I'm happy to say that, that's now starting to pay off. We saw a doubling of the operating margin, and we see a good momentum in this business, specifically an area that we'll be struggling with around engineering services and dismantling. And there, we now see a better order backlog, making sure that our utilization rate of this very people-oriented business is high. If we then go to Fuel, Materials and Waste Technology, which is the biggest, both in terms of top line and in terms of margins, which is predominantly run out of our facility just south of Stockholm. We continue to have a high order backlog and a high demand for our services. And this business is very much subject to how you manage these labs that you see [ Pictron ] and making sure that you have the right flow of some complicated testing scenarios. And I think we did that very well in this quarter. We also signed 2 important MOUs in the quarter to further strengthen our outlook for this business, Rolls-Royce SMR, which we mentioned and also Novotron Fusion Group, taking steps into becoming a broader and bigger and more strategic vendors into these 2 important companies. And waste is a part of this business, and we have our inDRUM reduction of waste unique technology that we are building or planning to build on our site and also licenses to players outside Sweden. And to present that and further drive that business, we attended the Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix, where we had some important speeches and obviously met a lot of important customers. Studsvik Scandpower, that is the world leader in development of software for reactor fuel analysis, independent of fuel suppliers, enabling our customers to work with the 4 different and put them under different fuel suppliers and put them under competitive offerings. Business developed positively, thanks to high demand in our project and engineering services. This is a mix of licensing and also implementation and engineering services. And we have added last year a new business, which is BlackStarTech, which are supporting hardware and software for safety system in nuclear power plants and also to other heavy industries. And we saw an increase in orders, an increase in revenue and specifically interesting to see that those orders are not only coming from the nuclear industry, we actually have demand also for other industrial sectors, which is important to build scale over time with this important business. We are also continuing to strengthen our organization in the U.S. One key strategic initiative we have is to make sure that we get a better growth and higher volume out of the very important U.S. market. And we are doing that by strengthening the organization for the group to drive business with key customers in the U.S. With that, I hand over to Peter Teske, our Chief Financial Officer. Please, Peter.

Thanks, Karl. And I will present the financial performance of our 3 business areas for the quarter and then followed up by the financial results for the group, including the cash flow. And we start with our first business area, Decommissioning and Radiation Protection Services. And we see in the quarter, the sales amounted to SEK 84.1 million, and that's an increase of 1.9% in local currency compared to the same quarter last year. We see that we have, as Karl mentioned, focused on the higher-margin business now and also reduced our headcount in our lower-margin services. This has improved our profitability, and we now see a clear increase in our KPI sales per employee. The operating profit improved to SEK 3.7 million corresponds to an operating margin of 4.4%. The margin improved is primarily driven then by the high utilization, cost efficiency and the shift towards a higher-margin service area, as we mentioned. If we then move to the Fuel, Materials and Waste Technology, we see that the sales in the quarter amounted to SEK 96.7 million, and that's a decrease of SEK 0.8 million in local currency. So basically, we are flat compared to last year, and that reflects a continued solid progress in our projects and the overall activity remained stable compared to last year. We see a slight decrease in the operating profit. It decreased from SEK 14.3 million to SEK 12.3 million and operating margin is 12.8%. The decrease is explained by a slight change in our product mix during the quarter as well that we had a positive one-off effect in the first quarter 2025. So with that said, we see that we have a profitability remains in a solid level, and we are continued to focus on the utilization and focus on the cost control and our financial discipline within the business area. If we then move to Studsvik Scandpower, and the sales in the quarter amounted to SEK 49.5 million compared to SEK 46.2 million last year. Here, we have an impact of our FX, and we see in the local currency, it's an increase of 16.6%, and that reflects a strong demand in the core business. We see also that the sales within BlackStarTech products increased to SEK 7.7 million, and that's up from SEK 3 million the same quarter last year. The operating profit amounted to SEK 8.5 million compared to SEK 11.3 million last year, and the margin is 17.3%. The decrease is primarily explained by the positive FX contribution we had during Q1 2025. So overall, the underlying business remains stable, and we also have a continued focus on the profitability and execution. If we then move to -- for the group, look on the group numbers, we see for the total, the sales in the group amounted to SEK 226.4 million, and that's in local currency, an increase of 4.1% compared to last year. And as I said, the increase is basically from the Decommissioning and Radiation Protection Services and from Studsvik Scandpower. And the Fuel, Materials and Waste Technology is basically flat compared to last year. So overall, our sales remain solid, and we have an underlying growth in the local currencies. The operating profit for the group is then SEK 12.3 million in the quarter, and that's an operating margin of 5.4%. We have a decrease in the operating margin compared to -- operating profit compared to last year, and that is that we have some one-off effect during Q1 2025. And also, we have done some investments in some strategic investments and also we have some one-off acquisition costs during this quarter 2026. We see then also -- it's positive that this quarter that all our 3 business areas are performing well. So that's really positive. And also, I think it's worth mentioning because we've talked a lot about the FX effects. And in the operating profit, we have limited impact on the foreign exchange effects. And that's because our revenues and expenses are largely matched in local currency. So therefore, we don't have any bigger effects on the operating profit. Finally, we're going to look a little bit on the free cash flow -- on the cash flow for the quarter. And we have a negative free cash flow of SEK 12.5 million compared to the positive SEK 39.6 million last year. And the decrease is primarily reflecting the timing effects in our working capital that we had big advanced payments received in the fourth quarter 2026 -- 2025 and that we had invoices a lot during late in the quarter. During the quarter, the group amortized SEK 7.1 million of our bank debt and our net decreased to SEK 78.1 million. So overall, the group maintains a solid financial position with continued focus on our cash flow discipline and our working capital management. With that said, I will hand over to Karl Thedeen.

Thank you, Peter. Just some outlook on the external markets in this emerging industry of nuclear. If we look on the world, nuclear is still positioned very much as a critical for stable fossil-free baseload in high-demand future grids. The SMR part of this, the new way of building more scalable modular product that can be to largely manufactured in normal factories and then shipped to the sites are gaining traction in the world. And there's a global resurgence for nuclear led by state-backed investment models and reiterate that the IAEA, 40 countries signed up to triple the nuclear power over the next 30 years. We see the same in Europe with a major push in the U.K., France is obviously the biggest country for this, Finland, Poland and Eastern Europe. Poland is a new country for new nuclear, and that's happening also in those kind of countries. Sweden, we are moving into execution phase. We have the Videberg Kraft application in from the Vattenfall Group. And the state is also taking a key role here, not only to finance the CfD schemes, the offtake of the electricity, but also going in with equity in the different countries that will apply for building new nuclear. For the industry, nuclear power is becoming a strategic industrial solution. It drives the electrification and notably, initially, it's very much driven by the AI industry, but we also see large-scale other industrial sites that will require stable base load that can be delivered from new nuclear. In terms of the SMR that we have seen a very interesting launch of a strategy, including financial support to develop the European Union's SMRs fleet and also technology. This is very important as we -- this needs to be something that we in Europe also can develop and maintain ourselves. In the U.K., there has been major funding of specifically inherent -- their incumbent developer of Rolls-Royce, and it was announced in April that they will now have financing to build 3 new SMRs in the U.K. Maybe most important to point out and why I think this -- the nuclear wave is here to stay is obviously that there is a key role in energy security and also combining that with also providing a net zero contribution because we're obviously not sending out any CO2 emissions from the nuclear power plant. This is becoming increasingly important in the geopolitical situation that we unfortunately are seeing as we speak now in Iran and Ukraine and other places. So I think that's also why we have a very strong political backing, not only in Sweden, but also in the EU and worldwide. We are ready to support this. We are one of the few companies that have a base, inherent competence and customer relationships and products and services, and we will use that to invest and grow with the SMR growth in the world. And here is a continuation of some of the news that have come out recently over the last couple of quarters. And you see to the top right-hand corner, where Karnfull Next team hands in the application for the site of Valdemarsvik. And so a lot of things happening and that will continue to happen a lot of things in our industry. Final remarks, a stable quarter with continued investments for the future. I think it's very interesting and very good to see that all 3 business areas are now delivering a solid quarter. And if you remember, we didn't see that in '24 when we had difficulties in the FMT business and in '25 when DRPS had a difficult year. Now I see a stable situation for all 3, which is very important for our year. We have taken a big step to expand into new nuclear product development and being part of new build with the acquisition of Karnfull Next. At the Nuclear Energy Summit in Paris, it was reiterated by politicians and European leaders that nuclear is very important for EU to strengthen energy security and regional energy supply. We've seen the legislation initiative from the Swedish government continues. And in this quarter, we saw the lift of the ban for Swedish nuclear along coast lines, not only being able to build on the existing site, but actually opening up for other sites to be explored. That is obviously very important for our new business together with Karnfull Next. We also see that the company now expanding. And notably, we have already business in the fusion industry. But with this MOU, we are looking to expand it and once again, taking advantage of having a strong local driver of our initiatives in the Novotron Fusion Group. And we also continue to expand our business in the SMR business by expanding our business opportunity with Rolls-Royce SMR. We have a strategy, which is basically having the foundation of our very competent people, our 3 business areas and then expansion in the areas of markets, products and M&A. And we will continue to do, and it's a good sign this quarter that we have an M&A case. We have market expansion with new hires and new expansions in the U.S. market, and we are continuing to drive innovation in our product areas. Last but not least, I have used this picture to, in a good way, exemplify what we are doing and what is happening at the end. And you do that physically at the beautiful site of Studsvik, you can see different initiatives happening on our site and in the world. The small modular reactors, there is interest, and we are exploring the possibility to build SMRs at our site. We have discussion with SMR vendors around that. And obviously, that is strengthening by the Karnfull Next acquisition. There is an initiative in Sweden to see if we can find funding and general consensus in industry and state to once again have a research reactor at the Studsvik site to support both the nuclear and life science industry. Our [indiscernible] is key to what we do. We are working with Novotron to see if we can explore having a test facility for Fusion, and we are continuing to build and invest in our inDRUM facility on site. So I think it's a good picture to showcase what is happening at Studsvik in the world with this image. And with that, I will say thank you and hand over for questions.

[Operator Instructions]. The next question comes from Lara Mohtadi from ABG Sundal Collier.

First one here. The operating profits from group functions and elimination, they dragged down group EBIT quite a lot this quarter. And you mentioned both in your presentation and in the report that you've taken some cost related to acquisitions. I'm guessing that they are related to the pending Karnfull Next acquisition. So firstly, with these group functions and eliminations -- were these under the group functions and eliminations? And maybe could you quantify the magnitude of these costs?

I think you are correct in your analyze because if we look on the group functions, we see an increase in our cost. And we see that some of the cost is related to one-off effects compared to the acquisitions. And for the year, yes, we have a strategic development, and we will -- so it will perhaps be a little bit slightly higher compared -- yes, during the year, the cost.

But maybe I can add that, it's not -- it was specifically high in the quarter. But Peter, it is absolutely correct that we are continuing to invest in long-term business opportunities that will require us to take cost in terms of the devices on to drive, but they were abnormally large in quarter 1.

Okay. And Fuel, Materials and Waste Management had slightly lower margins year-on-year and sequentially. How should we think about the margins in this segment? Should we sort of expect some lumpiness generally between the quarters because you mentioned that this was due to product mix. So how should we think when we model the -- maybe the annual margins here?

I think my view is that this is a low-margin quarter for FMWT. We should be higher, and I mentioned before that we should be north of 15%. The reason for this is a project mix. So we are executing on our different testing projects. And some of those will require more utilization than may be planned and then the margins go down a bit in those projects and some we are performing better and then hence, we get better margins. This is combined that we are constantly trying also to increase our prices on outgoing offers. But obviously, a lot of this, what we do now is to work on our backlog as well. So it is a weaker quarter in terms of operating profit for that business unit, but I have no sort of big concerns around that as it's sort of a normal variation of projects.

Okay. Very clear. And then it's positive to see that Scandpower is contributing to sales. Can you say anything about maybe the margin profile of this business compared to the legacy Scandpower business?

You meant the BlackStarTech or...

Sorry, BlackStarTech.

Yes. So BlackStarTech should -- it's a combination of the hardware and software business. So I think in general, it should be coming slightly lower. I should also say that we are learning this business as we speak. It's new to us, and we have been sort of positively surprised so far with the deals that we have done. But I think it's -- I'm a little bit early to say exactly where we end up on the sort of average margin over time in this business. My guess, it will be a bit lower than the normal Scandpower business.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Kaleb Solomon from SEB.

How much, if any, of the sort of profitability improvement in Decommissioning is purely seasonal versus sort of due to the cost measures you described? And as a follow-up to that, you mentioned there was a few -- or there was a reduction in the number of employees. So was or will there be any negative one-offs related to that?

So the first question, if this is -- the business is typically have a lower margin profile in Q1 based on the holiday season around New Year and so on. So it's seasonal, but all the improvements here are from increased utilization and higher sales per employee, as Peter alluded to. And I'm not foreseeing any more -- any restructuring costs coming out of that business.

Okay. That's clear. And then Fuel, Materials, can you remind us how much of the sort of decrease year-over-year that was due to the one-off related to invoicing effects in 2025? And sort of building on Lara's question earlier, do you expect mix to stay the same in Q2 or sort of be back to normal?

Can you take the first question once again, please?

In Fuel, Materials, if you can remind us how much of the decrease year-over-year that was due to the sort of one-offs related to the invoicing effects in '25?

Yes. And the decrease was around SEK 2 million. So the one-off effect was around SEK 2 million.

So it's obviously not material, I would say. And then yes, the project mix, it is actually a tricky question to answer. We are striving to do a super good forecast on this because we run our projects and then sometimes we get a slight problem and then we start another project and so on. So this is sort of work in progress throughout the quarter. But my answer to Lara's question, which is the same to you is that I see Q1 profitability on this [ FMT ] to be on the low level. It's not bad, but it's not on the high level. And we should, in average, strive to be north of 15%.

Okay. That's helpful. And just on the Karnfull Next acquisition, can you maybe give us some color on the sort of strategic rationale behind that? How much was wanting to sort of monetize on the actual projects versus sort of using it as a platform to develop products for new builds? And on which side of that can we expect to see a contribution first? And when can that be? So that was a lot of questions in one, but.

It was a very good question. So I think to being in these projects is very important. Otherwise, you stand outside, you don't really understand. And if you don't understand, you don't know what services you can develop and what sort of offerings you should have for other similar projects. So to really be in these projects, and I can take an example to the other ongoing projects in Sweden, where we are working closely with these different vendors, but we're not in the project as of now. And then you miss out on things, I think. So by being in the project to an extent together with others, we will be very close and nothing strategic that is very important to us. In terms of how much this business actually will yield in itself to be a project developer, we obviously have good hopes for that as well. It is a bit, and we need to come back to that to the market and tell a little bit when we -- what we invest when we exit from these projects and so on. And that is yet something we need to come back to when we start forming these SPVs and start seeing the full scale of the investments and time plans. But that is also important. But I think actually the strategic importance of us now being able to say that we are very active and investing in new build as that over time will be the biggest business that we will enter into 10, 15, 20 years from now. That's what's going to happen when you triple nuclear power in the world.

Okay. That's helpful. And last quarter, you said that you expect BlackStarTech to sort of reach 10% to 15% of Scandpower sales during '26, and it was almost 16% of sales this quarter. So is it fair to say you already achieved that sort of run rate in Q1? And is this the sort of contribution we should continue to expect for the next couple of quarters?

So it was a good quarter. This is as all equipment business, a bit volatile type business. So I remain with my hope and belief and strategy to drive this into a significant part of Scandpower. If there's going to be that exactly every quarter, that is something that we need to get back to. But I think it's -- we're off to a good start. I think we are now having a sales organization that is driving this business. We have better control of what the market is wanting, how to pitch it to different industries. That's important. But if it will be exactly this every quarter, that's maybe too early to say.

Okay. And just one sort of last housekeeping question. You mentioned that the slightly weaker cash flow is due to prepayments during last quarter. Can you quantify exactly how much that is, that effect?

How much effect of the prepayment?

Yes. How much is explained by the prepayment exactly in absolute figures?

Yes, absolute -- it's -- I would say it's around SEK 20 million, SEK 25 million of those prepayments that we received in Q4 last year then. That was a prepayment for this quarter, yes.

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

So thanks for listening. We are still in a very, very interesting market. A lot of things ongoing in the company, and we look forward to report back on our Q2 results, July 17, in roughly 3 months.