Nel Asa (NLLSF) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning from Oslo. Welcome to Nell's first quarter of 2026 results presentation. My name is Håkon Voldahl. I am the CEO. With me today, I have our CFO, Kjell Christian Bjørsen, and our head of IR, marketing, communications, and miscellaneous functions, Wilhelm Flinders. We have the following agenda. I'll skip the NEL in brief and jump straight to the highlights for Q1. We have a short commercial update covering the most important commercial events in the first quarter and one subsequent event. A short technology update, and then we will, as usual, end with questions and answers. Quarterly highlights. Revenues came in at 148 million NOC. We had a negative EBITDA of 100 million NOC. Order intake at 85 million NOC. Order backlog ended at 1.1 billion NOC. And our cash balance ended at 1.4 billion NOC. A pretty quiet start to the year. First quarter is always a bit slow. What we are focusing on is the launch of the new pressurized alkaline platform. That will happen at Hyderabad on May 6th this year. In connection with that, we have been busy in the first quarter testing out new pressurized alkaline production line technology that is progressing according to plan. We also opened Korea's first off-grid green hydrogen production facility. That was commissioned in late March. And in April, we received a $7 million purchase order for containerized PEM equipment. Looking at more detailed numbers, revenue from contracts with customers down 5% year-on-year. Revenues from out-of-line division increased by 6%, but we had a decline in the PEM division of 14%. The 100 million negative EBITDA was a 50 million improvement year on year. And it's, of course, driven by the fact that we continue to invest in next generation technologies. And we need higher revenues in order to become...