4/21/2026

speaker
Conference Operator
Operator

Welcome to Jetting to Q1 Report 2026 presentation. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing pound key five on their telephone keypad. Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers, CEO Matthias Peerjus and CFO Agnetha Palmer. Please go ahead.

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

Thanks, and welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining the call today. As mentioned in the intro here, it's me and our CFO, Agnetha Palme, with you today. And in today's conference, we'll go through performance and some of the highlights in the first quarter of 2026 before opening up for a Q&A. So let's move directly to page number two, please. And I'd like to start by looking at the development of some of our strategic KPIs. And as you can see here, it's evident that we continue to clearly track in line with plan to increase the share of sales from recurring revenue and also accelerating the share of sales from higher margin products like, for example, our ECLS offering, our consumables in infection control and our beta bags within the transfer product category. This is all supported, of course, by solid and effective quality processes. And if we look at the specifics here, we can see that sales from recurring revenue continue to make up two-thirds and high-margin products closing in on about 70% right now. When it comes to quality, the number of field actions in relation to sales has decreased significantly, and we see this positive trend sequentially continue also into the beginning of 2026. And these improvements, we always act in line with thinking of responsible leverage and an attractive long-term return on invested capital. We can move to page number three, please. If we then look at some of the key takeaways from the first quarter, we managed to beat last year's record quarter and grow top line organically. Net sales grew by 0.8% organically with positive development specifically in life science and in surgical workflows. And on the order intake front, we saw an organic increase of 3.9%. When it comes to our adjusted gross and EBITDA margins, they were down in the quarter, mainly due to the strong headwind from currency and from tariffs. And adjusting for the 226 million SEC in currency and the tariff headwinds in the quarter, the EBITDA margin was about 50 basis points higher than last year's Q1. So the conclusion from that is that the underlying performance in our business continues to be strong, and it's developing according to the plans, the long-term plans that we have laid out. We also have a strong cash flow and they continue to have a solid financial position. So our financial leverage is at 1.5 and well below the 2.5 times EBITDA that we have kind of as an internal threshold. We can then move over to page number four and some of the key events during the quarter. And if we start with our product offering and our customers, I think one situation that is, of course, evolving on a daily basis is the situation in the Middle East. And we continue to monitor this closely. Our first priority is, of course, to tend to our employees in the region and continue to support our customers. And if you look at the region as such, it makes up about 2% of our sales, and where Saudi Arabia is half. And so far, the impact on top line and on cost has been very limited for us. To our life science customers, we launched a new steam sterilizer dedicated to larger items for use for labs and for research applications. And when it comes to the sustainability and quality perspective, I'm very happy to see that we got the CE approval for Cardiohead 2 in the quarter. And I'll talk more about that on the coming slide here. In addition to this, we have in our implants business received EU MDR certificate for the Integard Synergy, which is a vascular graft with an antimicrobial coating to minimize the risk of infections. Furthermore, in the quarter, we released our annual report for 2025, including our sustainability statement. And the annual report provides a lot of good information on getting it. So I encourage you to have a look at this if you haven't done so already. We're going to move to page number five, please. So just wanted to elaborate a moment on the positive news about the CE approval for CardioHelp 2. And just to remind everybody, this is a market segment where we are already the global market leader within ECLS therapy, thanks to our strong existing portfolio. With the launch of CardioHealth 2 now, we become even more relevant for our customers, and some of the system's key features are that it's even more lightweight and transportable, meaning that it can be used for both in-hospital and intrahospital use. It also has an attachable gas blender as an option, which is something that is highly appreciated by our customers. And from an interface standpoint, we have an interface now that is even easier for users to operate, and it includes also several smart monitoring functionalities for better decision support for our customers. We have initiated a limited market release now in the beginning of the second quarter to a handful of customers, and very happy to see how positive the reception from our customers have been for this important product. The plan now is to do a full C market release at the beginning of the third quarter. And when it comes to the important U.S. market, the plan is still to make the submission of the CardioHealth 2 system, including our HLS advanced consumer boost in the second half of this year. We can now move to page number six and talk about the top line for a moment. So overall, we had a solid top-line performance in life science and in surgical workflows. And when it comes to order intake for the group, we grew 3.9% organically. The order intake for acute care therapists decreased mainly due to the temporarily high comparative figures in ventilation, where one competitor last year drastically exited the market. So we were very successful in capturing some of that market share. At the same time, we saw really good growth when it comes to ECLS consumables across the board, and this is, as you know, one of our key categories. In life science, the organic order intake increased in the quarter, for example, because of an anticipated improvement from low levels that we've seen in bioprocessing for quite some time, and this is something that it's good to see some of the momentum. Those grew double-digit in the quarter, mainly on the back of the strong development across all our product areas, which is also encouraging to see. Net sales, there we had growth of 0.8% organically. For two care therapists, organic net sales decreased, mainly on the back of last year's consolidation in the ventilation market that I just mentioned. In life science, they had a really strong quarter in terms of deliveries, and they grew organic net sales in all product areas. Beta bags, as they are transferred, continues to show significant traction and momentum. In surgical workflows, the organic net sales increased primarily thanks to growth in infection control consumables within service and within our operating table category. With that, we can move over to page number seven, and I hand over to you, Agneta, for a moment.

speaker
Agnetha Palmer
CFO

Okay. Thank you, Mattias. So, overall, the headwind from tariffs and currency continued in the first quarter. Even so, we managed to hold up margins thanks to continued pricing and productivity. Starting with adjusted gross profit for the group, adjusted gross profit amounted to 3,828,000,000 SEK in the quarter, heavily impacted by currency and tariffs. Adjusted gross margin was down by 0.7 percentage points in total in spite of healthy contribution from price and need. If we then look at adjusted EBITDA, clear for currency, adjusted gross profits effect on the EBITDA margin was plus 0.3 percentage points, while OPEX adjusted for currency had a negative impact on the margin by about minus 1 percentage points in the quarter. And FX impacted by minus 0.3 percentage points. So all in all, this resulted in an adjusted EBITDA of 824 million SEK and a margin of 11.1%. Let's then move to page 8, please. And here we can clearly state that we remain in a solid financial position. Free cash flow amounted to 842 million SEK in the quarter. Compared with last year, free cash flow was impacted by improved operating profit and changes in working capital. Working capital days continue to be well below 100. We are now at roughly 90 days. On operating return on invested capital, we are at 11.4% on a rolling 12-month basis, which is well above the cost of capital. At the end of Q1, net debt decreased to 9.3 billion SEK. If we adjust to pension liabilities, we are now at 7 billion SEK. This brings us to a leverage of 1.5 times adjusted EBITDA, which is well below the 2.5 that we have set as an internal threshold. If we adjust for pension liabilities, leverage is at 1.1 times adjusted EBITDA. Cash amounted to approximately 4 billion SEK at the end of the quarter. So all in all, we can conclude that the financial position continues to be strong. Let's now move to page 9, please, and back to you, Mattias.

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

Okay, great. Thank you, Agnetha. Just a moment then to focus on the impact from tariffs and FX in the quarter. So this was in total a drag on adjusted EBITDA in Q1 of more than 200 million SEK, so 226 million altogether. Tariffs made up just over 100 million SEK of that, and if we exclude the impact of tariffs and currency, our adjusted EBITDA margin in Q1 would have been 12.6%. And there, as you can see, showing them an underlying improvement. As tariffs were first implemented in Q2 of 2025, we expect the year-on-year comparison to be a little bit cleaner from Q2 and onwards if tariff levels remain. And that's, of course, something we'll continue to update you on. We can then move over to page number 10, please. So I want to talk a little bit more about the long term as well. So zooming out and returning to what we said at the capital market update that we had in May of 2024. There we talked about an adjusted EBITDA margin of 16% to 19% by the end of 2028. And I think we're on a steady path of reaching that despite the headwind factors that we have seen that we were not aware of when we announced this target. The main drivers which will enable this are growth, mix, and productivity. From a growth perspective, from regulatory approvals and key strategic product launches, such as CardioHealth 2 in Ekman that we've talked about here, and also launching our low-temp sterilization in the U.S., having the SAVES restrictions removed for CardioSAVE in our inter-orthic balloon pump business, is just to mention a few factors here. Specifically, when it comes to Cordisave, I'm happy to say that we, at the end of last week, got the release for sales in CE countries in line with the plan for Q2. We also expect that the investment fatigue that we've seen in the pharma industry will improve, and some of the decision anxiety that we've seen last year will go away here as well. We will also, in addition to this, get our share of the announced U.S. investments and benefit from the recovery in bioprocessing. And, of course, we will also continue our diligent and successful work with realizing price increases annually. When it comes to mix, we have been successful in our strategic intent to steer our business towards a continued rotation to high-margin products and consumables. And if possible, we prefer to have products made up of a competent hardware with captive consumables attached to it, similar to what we have in our ECLS offering with CardioHealth and HLS, and in the stair transfer offering with Alphaport driving the consumption of Betamax. Our strong R&D and innovation pipeline is, of course, set to support this. When it comes to productivity, here we've already done a lot in different parts of the business, and we are still excited that there remain quite a few opportunities across the business as well. One thing to mention, I think, is the heightened extraordinary quality costs connected to the product uplift of CardioSave and CardioHelp that is expected now to go down in the second half of 2026, and that will be on a lower level in 2027 and 2028. Furthermore, we will, of course, continue with our production excellence effort, where we also have some very tangible measurable benefits and helping us further optimize our supply chain and remain with an overall tight cost control across the company. So this all supports our assessment that our target for 2028 is still within good reach. Then we can move over to page 11, please. So for the remainder of 2026, we just confirmed the financial outlook for 2026. As we all know, there are some geopolitical uncertainties that we need to navigate. But based on the underlying demand and the dialogue that we have with our customers on a daily basis, our expectation remains for an organic net sales growth in the range of 3% to 5%, adjusted for the phase-out of the surgical perfusion product categories. Circa Perfusion is still expected to have some net sales in 2026, but declining from about 250 million SEC last year to 50 million SEC this year. We can then move to page 13, please. So in terms of summarizing here the key takeaways from the first quarter, we did achieve organic growth in our top line despite the record quarter last year. Tariffs and FX continue to be a significant headwind, but our underlying performance is improving. Cash flow in the quarter was really strong in the quarter, and our financial position remains solid as well. For 2026, we reiterate our guidance for organic net sales growth of 3% to 5%, adjusted for the phase-out of the surrogate profusion. And when it comes to our priorities for 2026, you've heard them before, we are focused on addressing the remaining challenges when it comes to quality remediation in acute care therapies. We focus on sustainable productivity improvements and cost consciousness when it comes to navigating the geopolitical uncertainty and also addressing the impact from tariffs. And most importantly, we continue to focus on the work hand-in-hand with our customers, adding value for them and the patients that they serve. With that said, I open up for questions.

speaker
Conference Operator
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 Sten Gustafson from ABG Sundahl Collier. Please go ahead.

speaker
Sten Gustafson
Analyst, ABG Sundahl Collier

Yeah, good morning. A couple of questions. First of all, with regards to the ventilator headwinds you had in Q1, if I remember correctly, you had pretty good sales development for ventilators also in Q2 last year. So is it fair to assume that the headwinds will continue into Q2? That would be my first question.

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

Maybe to some extent, it's not something, it's not going to be a significant factor, I think, for Q2, but it certainly won't be a big help either.

speaker
Sten Gustafson
Analyst, ABG Sundahl Collier

Okay, excellent. Thank you. My second question is regarding CardioHelp 2, and what kind of gross margin should we assume for that product compared to the existing CardioHelp product? Is it going to be accretive or is it fairly similar gross margins on those two products?

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

We don't guide on and disclose gross margin levels on any of our products, and Cardio 2 is no exception. Generally, though, when we work with product development and new launches, we make sure that the products that form the next generation of any therapy or product category have a better gross margin than the category, the generation that they replace, and Cardio 2 should be no exception to this.

speaker
Sten Gustafson
Analyst, ABG Sundahl Collier

Okay, thank you. And one final, if I may, you talk about these lower extraordinary quality costs going forward. Could you please sort of quantify those? I mean, we've heard 800 million in the past and where we are today and how low those will be going forward.

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

Yeah, I think you're right. We said that they peaked at about 800 million SEC in 2024. We saw a small decrease in 2025. We expect another small decrease this year and then a slightly bigger decrease from 2027 onwards. And the end game here is to at least halve those costs.

speaker
Sten Gustafson
Analyst, ABG Sundahl Collier

Excellent. Thank you very much.

speaker
Conference Operator
Operator

The next question comes from Eric Castle from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

Hello, everyone. First, I want to get some more color on the decomposition of the ACT. I mean, obviously, you talked about ventilators, but you also talked about cardiac assist, et cetera. I think last quarter you said that demand for cardiac assist was quite positive on the heart rate side. So I wanted to ask if something has changed. Changed on that side, and if you could, if possible, give some more color on how much the ACT America's part declined by the different parts.

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

Yeah, no, thanks for the question. We don't dissect the business that much. What I can say on cardiac assist is that we had hoped to be able to resume deliveries in Q1 already of balloon pumps in CE markets, and that was not the case. We only got the final approval to start this last Friday, so it will be a Q2 event now. That's been a little bit of a drag on sales, and also, of course, it has an indirect impact on order intake as well, because customers don't order new pumps unless they have received what they're expecting to be delivered.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

Can you say anything on how much the lent later time did on that 8.5%?

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

No, we don't disclose subcategory financial parameters, unfortunately.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

But can you say anything if it would have been say, positive organic growth if it wasn't for ventilators? I can't answer that either, unfortunately. All right. Fair enough. I've got to try. Then on the guidance side, I view it as the wording is a bit softer. Perhaps the visibility is worse now, and maybe you're even seeing a bit more negative outlook. Can you just talk a bit about what you're seeing for The rest of 26 in terms of the customer behavior and dialogues that you're referring to, has it become slightly more negative or is this just wording change that I'm dwelling too much on?

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

Yeah, no, that was not the intent of the wording change at all. It was really just a way of recognizing that we do operate in a rather volatile environment, and we're mindful of that, but we feel confident reconfirming our guidance here. The word semantics has changed a bit.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

Okay, just a last question then. The surgical workforce is obviously quite strong in terms of ordering tape, especially for Americans in digital health. Is there some specific projects that this relates to that sort of makes it non-recurring, or are you seeing a more up-to-date environment in the U.S. specifically for surgical workouts?

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

It's a bit of both. If you look at DHS, it's always lumpy. I mean, they tend to be rather large projects, and we do have that. But there's also a little bit of an underlying better confidence, I think, generally in the market, and also, I think, in the way we operate in this business as well. We made some tweaks to how we organize ourselves, which hopefully also for the long term has a better, more positive impact. It's absolutely a bit of a, you cannot call them one-offs because they're not. It's just project business that is a little bit fluctuating by nature.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

Okay, thank you. Can I have one short one? Will you tell us anything on the potential impact of the change in field content tariffs, or is that something you're going to not discuss?

speaker
Agnetha Palmer
CFO

What we can say there is that it's still under analysis how it impacts us. It's fairly recent. But the preliminary evaluation is that it's mainly if it hits its components and spare parts, not complete products. And the absolute majority of our exposure is on the complete products.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

So the 500 million for full year still holds, you think?

speaker
Agnetha Palmer
CFO

I don't think that we have guided on this, but that sounds like a fair assumption given the current levels.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

Yes. Okay. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you.

speaker
Conference Operator
Operator

The next question comes from Philip Wetterquist from SB1 Markets. Please go ahead.

speaker
Philip Wetterquist
Analyst, SB1 Markets

Thank you for taking my questions. I have a couple. First one, given recent price hikes that we've seen on raw materials, such as plastic, steel, aluminium, it seems like you do not see any material effect of this in Q1, and I assume contracts are negotiated a few quarters in advance, but do you anticipate any higher input costs in the coming quarters, or do you not expect any effect at all from this?

speaker
Agnetha Palmer
CFO

Thank you for that question. If we dissect it a bit into parts, when it comes to freight, which is the more direct near-term impact, we have very limited impact in Q1. But if it's prolonged, yes, there will be some impact in Q2 onwards. When it comes to plastics, et cetera, it's too early to say that we have any effects there.

speaker
Philip Wetterquist
Analyst, SB1 Markets

At the Q4 call you indicated price increases of around 2% for 2026. Did that materialize here in Q1, meaning that 0.8 organic growth was hampered by lower volumes? And are you able to accelerate price increases further if you see increasing costs here in the coming quarters?

speaker
Agnetha Palmer
CFO

We still stand by that, roughly 2%. It is a gradual rolling during the year, so it's slightly less than that in Q1. But we are progressing well towards that level.

speaker
Philip Wetterquist
Analyst, SB1 Markets

Okay, but let's say we see, so if costs are increasing, you won't be able to translate that onwards to your customers. You still anticipate on the 2% price increase then?

speaker
Agnetha Palmer
CFO

This is always an ongoing discussion that we have with all the commercial dynamics and the cost levels that we have. So, of course, we will adapt our ways of working if we see that we get higher inflation. But it's not an automatic or sort of something that we can directly pass on. Mattias mentioned it for tariffs, and it's similar then for raw material. But we do have very active pricing issues.

speaker
Philip Wetterquist
Analyst, SB1 Markets

Okay, thank you. I'll jump back into the queue.

speaker
Conference Operator
Operator

The next question comes from Christopher Liljeberg from DNB Carnegie. Please go ahead.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

Thank you. I have a few short ones. Hope that's okay. First of all, is it possible to quantify at all the positive effect you expect here from the new ECMO approval in Europe or whether that potential positive effect is more a factor of when and, yeah, when you get the U.S. approval again. And then could you clarify a little bit about the CARDIUS aid status here in Europe and the U.S. filing? And then finally on tariffs, if it's fair to assume a really neutral effect here year over year from the second quarter. Thank you.

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think we can't quantify, but of course there is a positive effect from the launch of CardioHelp. I mean, this is an important part of our product range, so definitely a net positive, but I can't give you a magnitude of that. When it comes to the call you save status, we got approval to start shipping last Friday. So the first pumps are being delivered in CE markets this week. And the US filing, there is no change here. We still expect to do that before the half year mark.

speaker
Agnetha Palmer
CFO

And then when it comes to tariffs, it's dependent obviously on the tariff level, but also on the product mix of imports. But generally speaking, yes, it's not such a fair assumption to assume that.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

Great. Thank you so much. Thank you.

speaker
Conference Operator
Operator

As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please dial pound key 5 on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from David Adlington from J.T. Morgan. Please go ahead.

speaker
David Adlington
Analyst, J.T. Morgan

Thanks for the questions. Maybe could you quantify the impact of foreign exchange hedges in Q1, how they roll off through the next 12 months or so? And then secondly, obviously we're quartering now, still no margin guidance. Just wondering if you're willing to give us an idea around how you're seeing margins for the air weather up, down, or sideways. Thank you.

speaker
Agnetha Palmer
CFO

Yes. If we start with FX, we have not changed anything specifically regarding our hedging strategy. We will not disclose that. But just a reminder, I think we have talked about it on this call before, looking at the natural hedge, around 60% of what we sell in the U.S. we also produce in the U.S. And then the second thing maybe to mention regarding natural hedging and FX exposure is that we work very actively with our payment flows to compensate or set as much as possible. So those are the two things to highlight there, but no quantification of the hedging effects as such.

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

And the margin guidance, I mean, they still said in the presentation, we are confident about the long-term margin guidance of 16 to 19%.

speaker
David Adlington
Analyst, J.T. Morgan

Sorry, Michael, as you broke up again, I missed the first part of that. Would you mind just repeating the margins this year?

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

Yeah, as I said, there's a lot of uncertainty in the world, as you know, so we're not going to do any margin guidance for 2026. We remain with the top-line guidance only, and we remain with the long-term margin guidance of 16% to 19%. Thank you.

speaker
Conference Operator
Operator

The next question comes from Ludvig Lundgren from Nordia. Please go ahead.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

Yes, hi. I just have a follow-up on ACT. So on ECLS consumables continue to grow despite being up against rather tough comparison numbers, and I assume there was some flu-related headwinds here given the lower hospitalizations, Q126. So I just wonder if there were any, you know, one-offs or stockings of consumables that you saw here in the quarter of X, or if it's rather, you know, the underlying run rate.

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

You broke up for a second. Can you repeat the question on these as consumables, please?

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

Yes. So it seems pretty strong considering the quite tough comparison. So I just wonder if you, you know, saw any stockings or one-offs here in the quarter, or if it rather reflects the underlying run rate.

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

Yes. There were no abnormal events in Q1. I think your analysis of this seems correct. There's a good underlying demand.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

Okay. And can you just confirm that the flu-related sales was lower this quarter versus Q1 2025?

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

And that we see the same flu data as you when it comes to hospitalizations. How our customers use the product they buy, whether it's for treating flu or something else, we don't have perfect insight into.

speaker
Eric Castle
Analyst, Danske Bank

Okay, fair enough. Thanks. I'll jump back into the queue.

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

Thank you.

speaker
Conference Operator
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, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.

speaker
Matthias Peerjus
CEO

Okay, thank you very much. I think I already made the summary before the Q&A, so I just wanted to say thanks, everyone, for joining, and I wish you a good rest of the day. Thank you very much.

Disclaimer

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