Fiskars Grows for a Fifth Quarter and Won't Say What the Tariff Refund Is Worth

A turnaround that is finally working, a gross margin flattered by an undisclosed refund, and a CFO who says the level simply holds

FSKRS.HE · Earnings Call · 2026-10-22

The refund in the room

Fiskars Oyj Abp reported on 22 October a genuinely good quarter. Comparable net sales rose 3%, comparable EBIT jumped to EUR 20.2 million from just under EUR 14 million, and free cash flow swung from negative EUR 20 million to better than EUR 40 million positive. “for the fifth consecutive quarter, we are reporting growth, comparable net sales up 3%. And this quarter, we can observe growth from both business areas.” — Jyri Luomakoski, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) · 2026-10-22 Business Area Vita grew 4.5% like-for-like and more than doubled EBIT to EUR 11 million on 190 basis points of gross margin expansion; BA Fiskars grew 1% reported and 2% in constant currency. Cash EPS went from effectively zero to EUR 0.44. And yet the loudest thing on the call was what management would not say. tariff refund is the single highest-ranked keyword in Fiskars' own transcript this quarter, and it was raised in the prepared remarks by both the CEO and the head of the Fiskars business area as a driver of gross margin. Then, when the first analyst asked for the magnitude, the answer was a flat no:

as Niko said and as I said in the intro, we are not commenting on the quantum or the magnitude in our quarterly reporting. We did not do that last year when those tariffs, multiple of them actually hit us.
Jyri Luomakoski, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) · 2026-10-22

This is not a company-unique quirk, it is a wave. Globally, tariff refund was the number one market keyword in the second quarter of 2026, and IEEPA refund ranked highly in the third. Among reporters in the last five days alone, Deckers cited the net benefit of IEEPA tariff refunds, Hasbro booked a onetime tariff refund recognized in Q3, and RTX talked about roughly 25 cents of IEEPA recovery. Fiskars is riding the same wave — but it is the only one of that group refusing to attach a number to it, while simultaneously using it to explain a step-up in margin. Reconstruct the sequence. On the July call the refund was a technical work-in-progress: “Our imports are focusing on what the phasing system of this tariff refund is referring as wave two.” — Jyri Luomakoski, President and CEO · 2026-07-16 And the CFO was explicit that “our guidance does not include any refunds from those potential tariffs.” — Jussi Siitonen, CFO · 2026-07-16 Now the refunds have landed in the P&L, and the guidance has been repeated verbatim from February. Either the refund is immaterial — in which case why flag it twice from the podium and refuse to size it — or it is material and is sitting undisclosed inside a repeated range. That is the crux of this report.

The sustainability question, answered sideways

The most consequential exchange came from the chat. Asked whether the improved group gross margin is sustainable or was clearly supported by tariff refunds, the CFO offered: “Once again, on the tariffs, we feel that that's the level that we are going forward as well.” — Niko Haavisto, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) · 2026-10-22 That is not an answer about underlying margin; it is an answer that refuses to separate the two. With positive mix genuinely helping Vita and the transformation savings helping cost of goods, there is real operating improvement here — but the size of the inorganic slice is being deliberately withheld.

Vita: savings ahead of plan, costs ahead of budget

The Business Area Vita story is cleaner on the top line than on the cost line. The EUR 28 million run rate savings programme is “running very much on track, slightly ahead, I may even say” — Daniel Lalonde, Business Area Vita CEO · 2026-10-22 on the one-third due this year. But the bill for getting there has grown: “the one-off costs have become clear and have turned out to be slightly -- to be higher than estimated.” — Daniel Lalonde, Business Area Vita CEO · 2026-10-22 Restructuring charges have already reached EUR 11.9 million against the roughly EUR 9 million flagged in February — “This program will result one-off of roughly EUR 9 million.” — Jussi Siitonen, CFO · 2026-07-16 Savings ahead, costs also ahead; the net is a wash that only looks good if the savings stick. The turnaround brands — Wedgwood, Waterford — are described as moving to plan without numbers, and the CEO confirmed Wedgwood had a relatively positive Q3. The more interesting shift is in language. Previous calls were about inventory levels; this one is about quality of inventory: “the quality of inventory, not just the quantum and the number of days. It's a clear priority for us.” — Daniel Lalonde, Business Area Vita CEO · 2026-10-22 Production curtailment continues, Q4 is the volume quarter, and the company is simultaneously funding a deliberate build of top SKUs — a subtle admission that the inventory problem was partly an availability problem. Note too the concessions business: department-store concessions drove sales growth in Vita and, being variable-cost, inflated SG&A. Growth of the lower-quality kind.

Q4 is the highest volume quarter. That's, of course, the time when we also expect to see reductions taking place. But it's a marathon, as Daniel said, but it's a marathon with kind of good shoes.
Jyri Luomakoski, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) · 2026-10-22

What went quiet, and what replaced it

The disappearance list is as telling as the additions. Steel tariffs, a top-ten company keyword through 2025 and early 2026, is absent from this quarter's top thirty; the tariff conversation has flipped from cost to credit. CapEx management and Net working capital — the latter the company's single biggest keyword in early 2026 — have both fallen away, even though working capital is precisely what delivered the cash flow swing. And the leverage target of 2.5x net debt to EBITDA is now a fixture rather than a novelty: at 3.36x, “we are aiming towards that 2.5x level in the coming years.” — Niko Haavisto, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) · 2026-10-22 Investors first pressed on that gearing gap back in February; nine months later it is a roadmap, not a date. The constructive new thread is product. For the first time the business area CEOs joined the call — Steffen Hahn appears as a top gainer in the transcript keywords — and he used the slot to make a strategic point rather than a quarterly one: “What we are seeing is that the world is motorizing. And of course, that has an effect to some of our manual tools.” — Steffen Hahn, Business Area Fiskars CEO · 2026-10-22 The answer is a battery platform shared across voltages, now extending into an eSnowShovel this autumn and electric hedge shears in spring. That is the power tools push against a slowly eroding manual-tools base — small today, but the only part of the story with genuine category-creation optionality. Q4's wildcard remains the weather: the absence of snow in the Nordics would remove a seasonal kicker.

The verdict

Operationally this is the best Fiskars quarter in years, and the boring-guidance joke is earned. But the report's centre of gravity is an accounting one: a margin that improved partly because of a government cheque nobody will size, inside guidance nobody changed, from a company whose own prior call said that cheque was excluded from the plan. Until Fiskars discloses the refund quantum — or demonstrates an ex-refund gross margin — the quality of this beat is unverified. The next test is Q4: Vita's high season, the inventory drawdown, and whether the improved gross margin survives without Washington's help.