Elanders Grows Everywhere and Earns Nowhere — Until the Print Fix Lands

A new CEO's first call pairs 6% organic growth with flat group EBITDA, a 60-point automotive split, and a memory-chip shortage the equity market has already stopped paying for

ELAN-B.ST · Earnings Call · 2026-10-23

Elanders: Broad-Based Growth, Flat Earnings, and One Very Expensive Segment

A first call that reads like an inheritance inventory

Florian Beck took over as Group CEO on September 1st and used his first quarterly call less to promise anything than to catalogue what he walked into. The headline is genuinely good: “The organic growth for the group came in at 6%. When we adjusted for air and sea rates, our organic growth was 4% for the group.” — Florian Beck, Group CEO · 2026-10-23 He stressed that “all regions and all customer segments contributed to the growth during the quarter” — Florian Beck, Group CEO · 2026-10-23 — the U.S. and U.K. returning to growth after several quarters of churn and gloom is the most important line in the release for anyone who has followed this name. But the earnings line tells a blunter story. Adjusted EBITDA of SEK 210 million was up SEK 29 million sequentially and flat year over year. Adjusted pre-tax profit rose to SEK 74 million from SEK 67 million. So the company grew 6% organically and converted almost none of it into incremental group profit. That is not a rounding error — it is the whole thesis of the call compressed into two numbers, and it explains the repeated "cautiously optimistic" hedging. The engine is Supply Chain Solutions: 7% organic (5% ex air and sea rates), adjusted EBITDA up 12% to SEK 204 million, margin from 7.9% to 8.2%, unadjusted EBITDA literally doubling from 102 to 204, and cash conversion of 109%. Group cash conversion of 126% versus 73% a year ago, with operating cash flow of SEK 565 million against SEK 316 million, is the cleanest proof that the biggest division is now a cash machine, not just a growth story. Working capital released SEK 95 million; currency effects added back SEK 82 million of net debt, which is why the SEK 65 million net debt reduction understates the underlying deleveraging.

Automotive: two businesses wearing one label

Within Supply Chain Solutions, which is also the larger part of our automotive business, we had organic growth of 25%, while Print & Packaging declined by 35%.
Florian Beck, Group CEO · 2026-10-23

That is a 60-point spread inside a single automotive customer segment, and it is the most interesting structural fact on the call. Consolidated automotive grew 7% — an average that conceals a services business compounding while a print business collapses. Beck's explanation for the 25% is not a comps fluke: new business started at the beginning of Q3, plus, crucially, “within the Supply Chain Solutions business area, we have a higher value add per car, so we are less affected if the volume of cars going down” — Florian Beck, Group CEO · 2026-10-23 — one manual per car versus a menu of logistics services per car. That is a genuine mix-shift argument, not a cyclical one, and it is the reason the struggling automotive sector in Germany is a Print problem rather than a group problem. The print side is where the money leaks. Sales were flat at SEK 592 million but adjusted EBITDA fell to SEK 17 million, a 2.9% margin. Structural measures are expected to save roughly SEK 57 million annually — against a segment generating about SEK 17 million a quarter, that is close to doubling segment profitability if delivered, and it is the single largest identifiable earnings lever in the whole company. Management has also renegotiated an important long-term contract with a Print customer and is exiting two U.K. leases announced in Q2, benefits Beck dated to roughly Q2 2027.

The memory boom is Elanders' bottleneck

The chip shortage has been on this company's keyword list before, but its character has changed. Electronics grew only about 1% organically because of global memory scarcity; August was weak, particularly in Asia, before September bounced back on replacement business. Beck expects it to run “well into 2027” — Florian Beck, Group CEO · 2026-10-23. Here is the contrast worth holding onto. Globally, memory has been a monster equity theme for a year: high bandwidth memory was among the market's strongest 360-day movers, and memory pricing entered the global keyword board as a top-30 market theme. Yet the tape has already turned — high bandwidth memory sits among the 90-day and 30-day decliners, and the whole AI data center complex is down over both windows. So Elanders is caught in the awkward middle: a fundamental shortage that persists into 2027, produced by a boom whose shares have already de-rated. The constraint is real; the sympathy trade is not available. That is precisely why management is diversifying into work that uses simple memory rather than advanced chips, and September's offsetting wins are the first evidence it can.

Where the growth actually came from

The genuinely new-emerging themes in the trajectory are consumer-adjacent rather than industrial. fashion — historically the U.S. churn problem — saw churn fall and funnel opportunities convert into signed clients already contributing revenue, with the U.K. helped by “life science and technical logistics, but we also saw good volumes on FMCG and on the fashion side” — Florian Beck, Group CEO · 2026-10-23. online print and publishing are the counter-cyclical heroes inside a weak segment, and Beck was explicit that this is operating gearing not margin mix: “if the volumes in automotive, for example, are going down, there is much higher fixed cost rate associated with those volumes than we see with online print and publishing” — Florian Beck, Group CEO · 2026-10-23. Healthcare grew around 19%, "other" around 17%, industrial 3%. One caution on the broad-based narrative: two of the larger customer segments — electronics and fashion — grew about 1% each. "All segments grew" is true but thin in exactly the places that need to carry weight when automotive print keeps shrinking.

The market-wide read

Supply Chain Solutions was a top-5 global keyword this quarter, and Ryder flagged the same franchise on its own call days earlier. That is a real sector signal: contract logistics is being repriced upward as a defensive, cash-generative service layer while goods volumes wobble. Elanders is riding that wave rather than creating it — but it is riding it with a 25% automotive growth rate and a 12% EBITDA increase in its largest division, which is better than merely riding. The bear case is not complicated. Group EBITDA was flat, print margins are at 2.9%, the memory shortage has another year to run, and the new CEO has promised savings he has not yet delivered. The bull case is simpler still: the cash is already arriving, the cost base is being cut against a reset volume base, and the returns are being harvested in the division that actually earns them. Beck's own summary — cost base measures plus a renegotiated contract plus SCS momentum, "cautiously optimistic" — is the language of a man who knows the second half of 2026 is a setup year, not a payoff year.