Elopak's Best Quarter Ever Lands the Same Week Its CEO Leaves
A record 16.8% EBITDA margin, a board-supply crisis that management now says bleeds into 2027, and a hedging answer that got notably less precise than last time.
ELO.OL · Earnings Call · 2026-10-27
The record is real — and the forward math is not
Elopak printed the best EBITDA in its history this quarter: EUR 51.9 million on EUR 308 million of revenue, a 16.8% margin, with EMEA carton and closure revenue up nearly 11% and no adjustments taken to get there. The CEO was uncharacteristically direct about it: “This is actually the best EBITDA so far in Elopak. And I think that is very encouraging given the challenges in the market.” — Bent K. Axelsen, CEO · 2026-10-27 Then the arithmetic gave it away. The full-year guide — revenue in line with the current run rate, EBITDA margin around 15%, with Q4 revenue "similar to Q3" — implies a Q4 EBITDA near EUR 45 million. Arctic's Jeppe Baardseth asked the obvious question: why guide down if sales are flat sequentially? The answer was seasonality, plus a rhetorical hedge: “We want to be cautious not to overpromise a full recovery in Q4. So the predictability in America is lower than normal because it's really out of our hands.” — Bent K. Axelsen, CEO · 2026-10-27 That is the whole quarter in one exchange. The record is a Q3 seasonal artifact dressed up by cost takeout (EUR 3.6 million of savings) and the full-quarter benefit of customer surcharges introduced mid-Q2 — not a run-rate reset.America: the tunnel got longer, and management said so out loud
The supply disruption out of the Nippon board mill cost EUR 2.6 million net of insurance in the quarter; excluding it, group margin would have been ~17.5% and Americas ~22%. But the interesting item is not the number, it is the duration. Asked about 2027 contract negotiations, Bent Axelsen volunteered what most CEOs would have left in the footnote:That is a meaningful escalation from May, when the message was “We commit to our midterm targets for Americas. That is the simple story.” — Thomas Kormendi, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-05-05 The 2028 target still stands; the path to it now has a hole in it. Note also that Americas delivered ~6% revenue growth while carton and closure revenue in the region was flat — the growth was equipment and aftermarket, not board. There is a partial fix: “Nippon is able to produce board based on imported pulp. And that is a big and a very important development.” — Bent K. Axelsen, CEO · 2026-10-27 Pulp production itself slips into 2027. And a nice piece of keyword forensics: Nippon incident was a top-five theme for Elopak in Q3 and fell out of the curated keyword set entirely this quarter — not because the problem vanished, but because it stopped being new. Meanwhile school milk jumped to the top of the company's keyword table and is now the explicit rationale for the third Little Rock line, ramping in H2 2027. Analysts read the H2 2027 date as a slip; Axelsen denied it flatly (“I don't think we have intentionally changed the start-up dates.” — Bent K. Axelsen, CEO · 2026-10-27) while conceding plant-based demand still shows "no clear signs of recovery."In America, there will be a halt, but it will be -- the growth will be muted also in '27 because of the combination of supply issues, but also how this will impact the dynamics going forward, it's difficult to tell at this stage.
The hedge book went quiet — and India got worse
The most telling contrast with prior quarters is not operational, it is verbal. In May, the CFO gave hard numbers: “When it comes to PE, we are hedged south of 80%. When it comes to ALU, which is a smaller part of the cost, we are hedged mid-50s.” — Bent K. Axelsen, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-05-05 In February the same executive cited “a hedging rate that is typically 70%, 80%.” — Bent K. Axelsen, CFO · 2026-02-10 Yesterday, asked the status of 2027 hedging:This matters because raw material price levels remain elevated and 2027 contracts are being negotiated right now. Management is steering the answer toward commercial pass-through rather than financial instruments — Axelsen said risk appetite for raw material exposure is being reduced, leaning on "good commercial solution and not only leaning on the financial instruments." That is a defensible strategy and also a way of saying the visibility is lower than it was six months ago. On geography, the call contained a quiet admission. The Capital Markets Day growth corridor was EUR 800–840 million to 2028; Axelsen corrected himself mid-answer to clarify that number was core Europe, ex-India and MENA — and then conceded “the overcapacity in India is a bigger challenge, far bigger challenge than what we assumed in the Capital Markets Day.” — Bent K. Axelsen, CEO · 2026-10-27 Core Europe is on track; the mix underneath it is worse than advertised. Roll Fed, which management once described as pricing "not sustainable," is now driven by Poland with intensifying competition in Southern Europe and MENA — and the keyword itself faded from the company's own mover list this quarter.The short answer is that we are currently working on it.