Green Landscaping Hands the Keys to a New CEO — and He Immediately Finds the Skeletons

An 11% top line, a shrinking EBITA, 3.5x leverage, a police report in Germany, and not a single analyst question

GREEN.ST · Earnings Call · 2026-10-23

The vacation hire

Clein Ullenvik did not ease into the job. “I joined Friday, July 17th, the worst period to start if you really want to hit the floor running, since it was in the middle of the vacation period.” — Clein Ullenvik, Interim CEO · 2026-10-23 By September 22 the company had pushed out a press release flagging restructuring costs and write-downs; by the 24th–26th it had flown its local chiefs to Mainz to sign off on the whole plan. Seven weeks from cold start to launch is fast — fast enough to read as a deliberate reset quarter rather than an operating quarter. The umbrella is Green Performance — the top-ranked keyword in this call by a wide margin and, judging by how much airtime it got versus any financial line item, the actual product being sold on this call. Underneath it: a new vision ("Europe's leading group for sustainable outdoor environments through local entrepreneurship"), three core values (accountability, simplicity, community), a first-ever intranet, and a "Green Book" playbook. The most concrete piece is governance: four country managers — Jan Lervik (Norway), Tapio Sundholm (Finland & Baltics), Matthias Asdonk (DACH), Jakob Körner (Sweden, doubling as COO) — were pulled into the group management team, which explains why Country Manager was the second-most-prominent keyword of the quarter. The diagnosis is blunt and consistent with the history: after 2018 the company decentralised, which was right, and became uncoordinated, which was not. The fix is coordination without recentralisation.

Growth on the top line, erosion underneath

Headline: net sales +11% to SEK 1.8bn, rolling twelve months SEK 6.8bn. Organic growth of 3% makes a third consecutive quarter in positive territory. Order backlog SEK 8.5bn, up. Underneath: adjusted EBITA fell to SEK 123m from SEK 135m. The quarter's margin was 6.9%; the rolling-twelve figure was 6.3% against a stated ambition materially higher. Cash flow from operating activities dropped to SEK 28m from SEK 47m. Financial leverage rose to 3.5x from 3.0x — above target, and the metric the CFO spent the most words defending. “We are not satisfied with the overall financial performance, and we remain strongly focused to improving our operational execution to bring the profitability to the level we expect.” — Marcus Holmström, CFO · 2026-10-23 The segment picture is what makes this a genuine inflection story rather than a bad quarter. Sweden shrank 7% (organic −4%, with the Svensk Jordelit divestiture worth another −3%) yet adjusted EBITA rose 57% to SEK 19m — so the Swedish fix is cost and mix, not volume, and management flagged “early signs of fewer bidders on the contracts that we are bidding for” — Marcus Holmström, CFO · 2026-10-23, a real if early sign of a construction market that has stopped deteriorating. Norway is the opposite: sales +16%, organic +9%, EBITA down to SEK 25m from SEK 36m on Norway price pressure. Other Europe grew 29% (organic 5%) with EBITA of SEK 91m versus SEK 96m, Germany and Finland improving, Lithuania behind. In other words, the lower volumes problem has migrated from Sweden to Norway, and the swing factor is price rather than activity.

The write-downs nobody asked about

The September release bundled four things: CEO change costs; a restructuring cost that is straightforwardly good economics — “it saves us SEK 10 million. So SEK 6 million in cost gives us SEK 10 million lower cost run rate per year.” — Clein Ullenvik, Interim CEO · 2026-10-23; project write-downs in two Swedish companies, one dating back years (“one of them back to 2021 even. But it is a typical effect when smaller companies taking larger projects and losing grip of them” — Clein Ullenvik, Interim CEO · 2026-10-23); and, most striking, a write-down on a German acquisition:

We have actually reported to the police. From our perspective, it is criminality, to be frank.
Clein Ullenvik, Interim CEO · 2026-10-23

That is not boilerplate. Small-cap industrials restructure constantly; they rarely allege fraud in a subsidiary on an earnings call and then take zero questions on it. The read-through is that the write-down policy of the prior regime may have been loose, which in turn means the 6.3% rolling margin is potentially a cleaner number than the 6.9% quarterly one — and that the new management team is deliberately resetting the earnings base so that future quarters compare against a scrubbed starting point. The other half of the reset is cash flow generation, explicitly named the top priority at both group and company level. The CFO conceded “we have come a long way, but we are not completing that exercise” — Marcus Holmström, CFO · 2026-10-23 and leaned on seasonality — Q4 and Q1 are historically the working-capital release quarters — to carry the deleveraging. That is a credible but load-bearing promise given that the rolling twelve-month operating cash flow already fell to SEK 364m from SEK 390m.

What the silence and the keyword shifts tell you

The single most telling moment of the call is structural. “I can also confirm that we have headroom to our financial covenants in the loan agreement from where we are ending the quarter.” — Marcus Holmström, CFO · 2026-10-23 Fine — liquidity of SEK 495m in cash, SEK 239m undrawn, all bank facilities and the SEK 500m senior unsecured bond maturing end-2028 with a two-year extension option. And yet:

There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
Operator · 2026-10-23

A new interim CEO, a leverage figure above target, a police report and a fresh restructuring programme, and no analyst dials in. Either coverage is thin or the buy-side has already decided the story is a 2027 one. Either way, the information asymmetry is unusually favourable to anyone doing the work now — or unusually damning of the franchise's relevance. Notably, the biggest keyword movers this quarter were places and people — Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Lithuania, Clein, Marcus — not financial themes. That is the fingerprint of a leadership-and-geography call: management is teaching the market what the group actually owns before it asks to be judged on returns. There is also broad European confluence here. Across this week's reporters, restructuring costs and cost-base resets show up repeatedly in Nordic and continental industrials, and lenders everywhere are narrating a high-rate, high-competition deposit and funding environment. Green's refinancing being locked to 2028 is genuine insulation; its 3.5x is not.

The tell to watch

The CEO closed with “we are well on our way, but there is a lot to do ahead of us” — Clein Ullenvik, Interim CEO · 2026-10-23 — and, more intriguingly, “Tomorrow we start with batch number two, but let's come back to that in the future.” — Clein Ullenvik, Interim CEO · 2026-10-23 A second tranche of something, left deliberately undefined, one day after the report. Combined with the stated intent to fine-tune the M&A process and the governance ladder, the most likely content is further portfolio and organisational action rather than a demand surprise. So the thesis is narrow and testable: if Q4 and Q1 deliver the normal seasonal working-capital release, leverage drifts back toward target without a rights issue; if Norway's price pressure persists and the Swedish bid discipline is a head fake, 3.5x becomes a 4x and the equity story changes shape entirely. Growth is no longer the question at Green Landscaping. Cash, price and credibility are — and a CEO eight weeks into the job has bought himself roughly two quarters to prove all three.