Aker Solutions: The Peak Is In, and the New CEO Is Already Sizing the Company Down
2027 revenue guidance lands roughly a third below the 2025 peak, a fresh chief executive swaps the growth vocabulary for cost and cadence, and a 20% stake in SLB OneSubsea quietly carries the cash flow.
AKSO.OL · Earnings Call · 2026-10-28
From peak to cliff in twenty-four months
Aker Solutions' third quarter was, on its face, perfectly respectable: revenue of NOK 13.5 billion, underlying EBITDA of NOK 1.3 billion at a 9.6% margin — 7.7% once you strip out the profit contribution from the SLB OneSubsea stake — EBIT of NOK 891 million and earnings per share of NOK 1.45. Net cash stood at NOK 5.8 billion including liquid funds. Nothing in the income statement screams trouble.
What screams trouble is the shape of the next two years. Full-year 2026 is guided to NOK 53–55 billion at a 7.5–8% margin. For 2027, management put a number on it for the first time: NOK 35–40 billion, margin 7–8%. Against the 2025 peak activity year of "more -- north of NOK 60 billion in turnover," as CFO Idar Eikrem put it, that is a revenue base cut nearly in half in two steps.
As the NCS activity package projects come to an end in 2027, we will reshape our business and adjust our capacity and cost base to reflect the market ahead. This is not something new to Aker Solutions. We have a scalable business model and a proven ability to adapt to a changing market condition.
The defence is a good one, and Eikrem made it explicitly: on large EPC work, “more than 50% of the contract value is actually a procurement that is flowing through our top line” — Idar Eikrem, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-28. Combine pass-through procurement with a heavy layer of hire-ins and subcontractors, and the drop in revenue flatters the drop in actual engineering effort. Fine — but the market will price the top line anyway, and the margin guidance accompanying a NOK 35–40 billion base is barely different from the margin on a NOK 55 billion base. Scale is not producing incremental margin here. It is producing revenue.
A new voice, and the word that keeps repeating
The most consequential change in this report is not financial. Kjetel Digre, who fronted every prior call in this archive, is gone; Paal Eikeseth took the chief executive role in September and opened by apologising for a stutter, then delivered a tightly scripted two-priority frame: deliver and transform. The vocabulary has visibly shifted — "lean agile setup," "standardization and simplification," "redesigning our processes to work with agile ways of working enabled by AI," and "data rather than documents."
None of this is new in substance — Digre's July call described CCS and renewables as "a change journey, transformation journey for the whole industry" — but the object of transformation has moved. Previously, transformation meant building a leaner version of Aker to serve carbon capture, hydropower and small modular reactors. Now it means shrinking to fit fewer, smaller subsea tiebacks. “What we're doing now is to make sure that we are ready then to be executing those projects in an excellent way.” — Paal Eikeseth, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-10-28
Read the Q&A carefully and you can see where the real answer sits. On headcount, Eikeseth gives strategy; Eikrem gives arithmetic. “In the fourth quarter of last year, we did some adjustment to our staffing level in the Verdal yard... and we took out between 200 and 300 people from that one. And you should expect similar going forward.” — Idar Eikrem, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-28 Those costs land in special items — which is exactly why the guided 7–8% cost base reduction maths should be treated with care. The Verdal yard is again the visible lever, and the next disclosure on numbers is promised "before year-end."
The lump sum ghost that will not leave
For at least six quarters, the same sentence has appeared near the top of this company's narrative: the legacy lump sum project. It was a top-ranked theme in early 2025 and again in the third quarter of 2025; it is again this quarter. What is new is that the cost is going up rather than tapering. “The legacy projects, as we have stated, they're still impacting our margin negatively due to the fact that there is no margins coming from those projects” — Idar Eikrem, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-28 — and this quarter the offshore phase has been extended, with additional costs booked.
The same projects produced an offsetting narrative in July. Then, the story was that all of the legacy first-generation offshore wind work was in the offshore commissioning phase and would be "completed all of it in 2026." Six quarters of provisions later, they are still dragging, still under commercial discussion, and now extended. That is the honest read of the segment performance: Renewable and Field Development delivered a 8.4% EBITDA margin on NOK 9.2 billion of revenue, held back by these contracts, and a NOK 27.1 billion secured backlog that does not cover a year of current activity.
What the market is actually paying for
With roughly a $1.9 billion market capitalisation, the arithmetic gets interesting. Net cash of NOK 5.8 billion is a substantial slice of the equity, and then there is the 20% stake in SLB OneSubsea — a business that generated $1.1 billion of revenue in the quarter at an 18.5% EBITDA margin, grew backlog to $5.3 billion, and holds $482 million of net cash. It paid Aker roughly NOK 841 million (about $80 million) in dividends in 2025, with a fourth-quarter top-up expected to keep 2026 broadly in line. That is a meaningful yield on the group's market value from a stake management has explicitly said it does not plan to exit.
Against that, the operating business is being guided down hard. The tender pipeline sits at around NOK 72 billion, and management volunteered that this is after removing the Wisting FPSO. In February, Digre said “Wisting is really high on our agenda, and we are working closely with Equinor... to look at the optimal concept” — Kjetel Digre, CEO · 2026-02-06. It was lost. The pipeline has also shifted toward Asia Pacific and FPSO work executed with partners rather than owned outright — a structurally lower-margin mix than Norwegian topsides.
The other side of the capex trade
Here is the contrast worth holding onto. The global tape over the last ninety days shows the AI infrastructure complex cooling — the AI data center basket is down mid-single digits over both 90 and 30 days, with breadth overwhelmingly negative. Yet the industrials reporting alongside Aker this week are still talking about the opposite of Aker's problem: GE Vernova flags "rising demand for grid equipment," Vertiv talks 800-volt DC and deployment time, KLA talks sustained AI data center investment. Aker Solutions is the mirror image, tied to a Norwegian continental shelf package cycle that is now entering its wind-down, with customers moving from mega-projects to marginal tiebacks.
The uncomfortable precedent is Aker's own forecasting. In July, Eikrem conceded that when 2026 guidance was first issued “we might be on a bit conservative, careful side on our estimates” — Idar Eikrem, CFO · 2026-07-14 — the number was subsequently raised several times, from an original NOK 45–50 billion to NOK 53–55 billion. Analysts asked directly whether 2027 would repeat the pattern; Eikrem's answer was “that's our best estimate for the time being.” — Idar Eikrem, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-28 A company that under-forecast 2026 by roughly NOK 7.5 billion at the midpoint is now asking the market to believe a NOK 35–40 billion 2027.
That is the whole story in one line: a new chief executive inheriting a peak, a shrinking top line he did not create, a legacy book that keeps costing more, and a quiet partnership stake doing more for the equity value than the guided operating business. The bull case is cash and OneSubsea dividends; the bear case is that "deliver and transform" is what management says when the order book is the thing that needs transforming.