Acconeer AB (publ)

Good morning and welcome to ACONIR Q3 2026 Earnings Results. I'm Ted Hansson, CEO of ACONIR, and with me today is Anna Wallid, Head of Communications. As usual, I will start with a presentation and then we will follow up with a Q&A session. So please feel free to submit your questions in the investor caller tool. 2026 Q3 marked our fifth consecutive quarter with growth and record revenue. The revenue came in at 23.5 million Swedish crown, which is a 42% year-over-year growth. Very happy to see that the gross margin for product sales improved significantly. It came in at 60%, up from 53% in the previous quarter. Looking at our revenue, we have two types of sales. We have our product sales, which is the bread and butter of the company, and then we have NRE and services sales. Looking at the product sales, it increased 66% year over year. During the quarter, we also shipped record volume. We sold and shipped half a million sensors and modules during the quarter. and we expect continued growth and a cash flow positive quarter in the last quarter of 2026. Before talking about Q3 details, I would like to take the opportunity to introduce Akonir briefly. We are a Swedish fabless semiconductor company. Our headquarter is in Malmö. We develop and sell low power millimeter wave radar solutions. Our products are based on a unique technology originating from research at Lund University that combines ultra-low power consumption with high accuracy. We are the only company in the world using this technology that we call PCR, pulse coherent radar. Millimeter weaver radars can be used in many applications, and we are addressing some of the fast-growing markets that I will introduce briefly on the next slide. We are very proud to be a supplier in the automotive industry. It's an industry famous for high requirements when it comes to performance, when it comes to quality and supply, and being able to supply to companies like Toyota and Volvo is a testimony to the quality of our technology. The key asset of Aconeer is the people and we are very happy and proud to work in a company where we develop solutions that to a very large extent help to drive positive environmental and social change. So you can see that our sensors are used to conserve energy optimize logistics chains, reduce waste in water and so on, as well as helping to save lives in in-cabin detection for detecting left behind children, pets, used in vital sign monitoring of patients and so on. As a company, we have sold 5 million sensors. That is something that we celebrated during the third quarter. There are more than 250 end devices in the market. We have sold our sensors to more than 50 countries, and we are since 2017 listed on Nasdaq First North. As I said, millimeter wave radars can be used in many applications. We are focusing on some applications where we feel there is a strong advantage of our technology, as well as there is a growing and significant market opportunity. These markets are a level measurement. This was our largest vertical in 2025 and it continues to grow in 2026. Our technology is perfect for level sensing. We have the lowest power consumption, we can read very accurately and we also have the best close-in range, meaning the ability to measure close to the sensor accurately. Automotive, here we work with two use cases. We have the access control, we also call it kick sensor, as well as in-cabin sensing. We are teaming up with Alps Alpine, which is a Japanese global tier one supplier to the automotive industry. And as I said, we are supplying our technology to customers such as Toyota and Volvo. The third area is presence. This is the largest opportunity for Aconeer when it comes to market size. We are focusing on applications requiring advanced presence, such as detecting micro-movements, tracking, classification, counting, vital sign and so on. and we see a lot of opportunities to grow in this market with our new A212 sensor which offers many channels and more data and the ability to track objects in 3D. The next product area is cargo tracking and also here we see strong advantages of our technology with a low power consumption many of these devices are designed to have a lifetime with more than 10 years using a battery and that is something they can achieve with our technology this is a market where we have shipped significant volume and it's also a market where we see great opportunity we're working with many of the largest cargo companies but also many of the larger companies that are working to optimize logistics and tracking. And we expect a continued growth here going forward. The last segment, industry and automation. Here we see there is a huge opportunity for radar to enter these markets. We're talking about proximity sensing, measuring distance in cylinders, measuring vibration without contact. We are working with some of the giants in this industry in Japan, Korea, in Europe, in North America, and it's not a very fast moving market. This is the only area where we don't have any significant business today, but we have a high expectation that our technology will be able to address this and there will be a big opportunity for our technology here. These companies are also typically doing level sensors and we start to see that these companies now commercialize level sensors and they are continuing their development work on proximity and cylinder distance measurements and so on. A212 is a very important part of our growth strategy. And during the quarter, we have sold hundreds of evaluation kits or EVKs to customers outside the automotive segments. This confirms the strong interest from customers. They're using our EVKs to develop and validate use cases such as tracking and counting people, obstacle detection and vital sign monitoring. During the quarter, we released and improved demo application that is now helping customers to progress with advanced presence applications. During the quarter, we also saw that several customers bought sensors for prototyping, meaning they're building their own PCB with our sensor to build a prototype of the end product. and also just this week we were pleased to announce the first limited volume order for a commercial launch outside automotive in-cabin detection which is for an obstacle detection so it's really nice to see that the sales funnel is expanding and also that we are now starting to move things from early discovery all the way through the funnel to actually getting the orders for volume so a very significant commercial milestone was reached during the quarter In automotive, here we saw a significant increase in A212 shipment. They quadrupled, meaning times four, compared to the second quarter of this year. Also very happy to see that a famous Japanese company launched the first model with A121 for access control during the quarter, so we have a new customer in mass production. Also nice to see that our partner AlpsAlpine showcased their world leading in-cabin solution with A212 at the in-cabin Barcelona event during the quarter, confirming their world leading performance and a strong customer interest in their product. We have now a total of 21 automotive launches, and we have announced the signed win value of 76 million US dollars between 2024 and 2032. Outside automotive, we also see increasing customer traction. We received record order related to level sensing during the third quarter of 14 million Swedish crown. also very happy to see that we managed to deepen the collaboration with a us-based global leader in level sensing and they are now paying Acuneer NRE to enhance our solution which will allow them to address new segments so this is something i have spoken many times about we have a strategy of getting close to the large customers increasing their trust in us, increasing the collaboration, aligning our roadmap, winning a larger part of their business. And this is a really good example of this happening. And now we are able to develop a new solution, which will allow them to compete in new segments, and it will enable new sales for Aconeer. Also in the quarter, a very famous Japanese company launched their second product with us for presence detection in bathrooms. Great to see that we continue to win business there. Now I would like to talk a little bit about Q3 in more details. So as I said, we have the fifth consecutive quarter with record revenue. You can see in the graph to the left. At the same time, we managed to improve the gross margin to 60% for product sales during the quarter. For those of you who have followed us for a while, you might remember that I, during the Q4 2025 earnings presentation, said that we are now going to put a lot of emphasis on gross margin to ensure that we don't lose margin. And it's very nice now to see the result of those activities with climbing gross margin over three quarters. And by the way, achieving an improved gross margin whilst you are driving volume with large customer, it's not granted. It's a clear testimony, it's a clear evidence of the value that our products and technology bring to the market that we're able to do this. So very, very happy about that. To the right, you see the EBTA, operating cash profit. So with record revenue and improved margin, it's reasonable to expect an improved EBITDA. You can see that we were at minus 4.1 in the third quarter of this year, significantly improved compared to the previous quarter. If you look, you can see that the same period last year, the third quarter 2025, we showed a positive EBITDA. And the reason that we show a worse EBITDA now compared to a year ago is due to the fact that we have transferred cost from COPEX to OPEX. And OPEX, of course, affects the results. And in the next slide, I will give a little bit more detail about that so you understand it. So looking at our cost, first to the left, we have our operating expenses or OPEX. There are two types of OPEX here. You have the lighter color, which is depreciation and amortization. And you can see that they started to increase in Q1, 2026. That is when we started to amortize our A2 investment. This is a non-cash item, but it hurts the result of course. If you look at the cash part, which is the darker part, you can see that it's down quarter of a quarter, but it's significantly higher than the same period last year. If you look at the COPX, which is capitalized expenses, You can see that they are trending down. And this is a result of the A2 investments being finalized and going down. They are now at a much lower level compared to before. 2.9 million in the third quarter is the lowest you can see on this graph. If you look at the same period last year, you can see that they were at more than 10 million. And now they're at 2.9. So a lot of the cost in the company was previously capitalized expense and is now becoming OPEX. And that, of course, will impact the earnings, the result. And that is the explanation for EBITDA in the previous slide. To the right, you see our inventory. We have been suffering from having a huge inventory for quite some time, and we've been working hard to drive it down quarter over quarter. The third quarter this year, there is a significant increase. and that relates to the global semiconductor supply situation which is very constrained right now and due to the boom in AI suppliers are struggling with capacity but they're also prioritizing AI components that are not cost sensitive where they can make more profit basically so in order for us to secure supply we were forced to increase the size of the production batches that we run and that will help our suppliers to run their production more efficiently and improve their profitability. So that is a way for us to get access to production capacity. The drawback here is, of course, that we tie up more cash in working capital, but the alternative would be to have no supply, which would be significantly worse than building some inventory. So the inventory build up in the third quarter is material under production for A121 and A212 that we are going to ship going forward. We don't see that we need to increase the inventory further going forward, we believe we can start to decrease already in the fourth quarter the inventory. Looking at cash, so to the left you see the cash flow from operating activities. Once again, with an improved revenue, improved margin and a lower cost compared to previous quarter, we expected to achieve a better cash flow from operating activities, which you can see we did. It significantly improved compared to the previous quarter. If you compare to the same period last year, it is worse. And the explanation here is the same explanation as for the result. A larger part of the expenses are OPEX compared to a year ago, and that also impacts the cash flow from operating activities in the same way as the result. If you look in the middle picture, cash flow adjusted for financing activities, This is where we have a financial objective to achieve a cash flow positive quarter this year and a cash flow adjusted from financing activities is basically the cash position at the end of the quarter minus the cash position in the beginning of the quarter adjusted for any capital raise that you did during the quarter and we didn't do any in the third quarter so it's simply the difference in the cash position in the company in the quarter and as you can see in the third quarter it's minus 22.1 And if you look at the trend, it's not obvious that we are on track to achieve a positive cash flow quarter for Q4. So I would like to take the opportunity to elaborate a little bit about how do we get to this minus 22.1. And there are five components that together adds up to this negative cash flow. The first one is the fact that we increased inventory as explained. This was to secure supply. That added minus 8.5 million SEK to the cash flow in the quarter. At the same time, our short-term receivables, meaning unpaid customer invoices, increased during the quarter. So now, at the end of the quarter, we have 3.3 million more invoiced sales that were not paid compared to the beginning of the quarter. and that has a negative impact of the cash flow with 3.3 million. This relates to us having an increased sales and also it relates to having a large part of the sale towards the last month of the quarter. It's not a situation where we are struggling to get paid from our customers. I want to point that out. Then we have short-term liabilities that decreased during the quarter. So short-term liabilities are basically money that we owe our suppliers. As I said, in order to secure supply, we were forced to build some inventory and we were forced to pay a large part of that during the quarter. So we actually have less debt to suppliers now compared to when we entered the third quarter. And that added another 3.5 million SEK to the negative cash flow. Then after that you have the investments as I said they were they are trending down there were 2.9 million during the quarter and finally the operating activities that was significantly improved quarter a quarter and is at minus three point So altogether, this brings us to the minus 22.1. So in the fourth quarter, we are targeting positive cash flow, and we will achieve that by, of course, not building more inventory. We expect there will be a plus sign here. We expect to collect cash. We're pushing sales now the first few months of the quarter. And we are not going to increase... Sorry, we're not going to continue to decrease liabilities to customers. And we are seeing a larger revenue where the gross profit will help to cover the cost of the investments and operating activities. So that is how we see a path towards a positive cash flow quarter in Q4. uh so with the negative cash flow we ended the quarter at 31.3 million sec this is my last slide it's a summary i'm really happy to see that we have managed to grow continuously for five quarters it's not trivial to achieve that it requires good product it requires good customers, it requires that you keep track of supply. And we have now done that for five quarters in a row. And we are on track to grow in the fourth quarter as well. And as I said, we expect a positive cash flow quarter. Very happy to see the improved margin. 60% is a good margin in our industry. And we are going to keep working to maintain a good margin. During the quarter, we shipped record volume. And getting the volume up is key for us to get the priority with suppliers to be able to maintain competitive cost of our products. So very nice to see that the volumes are increasing. And finally, we have announced four financial objectives. EBIT positive quarter during 2025, which we achieved in Q3 last year. A cash flow positive quarter, which we expect will be the fourth quarter this year. We have a long-term EBIT margin of at least 25% target. And then during the quarter, we updated our 2027 revenue target. It used to be a revenue of 300 million SEK in 2027. It has now been revised to at least 100% year-over-year revenue growth in 2027. And the reason for revising the revenue target is a reflection of the decreased forecast of some of the car models that are launched with our A1 sensor, as well as the delay in completing the A212 product offering that I spoke extensively about in the last quarterly learning report. So with that, I would like to open up for the Q&A session.

Thank you, Ted. And thank you everyone who has submitted questions. We have got a lot of them, so I'm afraid we won't have time to answer all of them, but we'll do our best. So first, there's a question about how we sell A2. Why are we only selling evaluation kits for DigiKey and not the actual sensors?

That's a good and valid question. There's a few reasons for that. The first one is that we would like our customers to have a good experience when they evaluate 8212. and as the maturity increases we will make it more widely available and when we originally put it on Digikey it was not open for everyone to buy and it was limited how many you could buy and now we're opening it up so so more people can buy or more organizations can buy and you can buy in more quantity it's also about having supply we had to prioritize supply to our customers, but now we start to get more EVKs in and there is a significant demand for EVKs and we will expand and it will be available through other channels as well. Some of our distributors are also selling the EVK, so it's not only Digikey today, we have given it to distributors or sold it to distributors both in Europe and in Asia.