Impact Coatings: The Profit Was Made of Metal
Q3's first positive net income owes more to recycled-metal trading than to coatings — and the real question is whether SEK 14 million of cash outlasts a very picky partner search
IMPC.ST · Earnings Call · 2026-10-21
A profit, but check what it's made of
Impact Coatings reported its first positive net income on 2026-10-21: SEK 3.6 million against SEK -12.1 million a year earlier, with EBIT of SEK 3.8 million. Group net sales more than doubled to SEK 36.5 million from SEK 15.2 million. On the headline, a decade-old loss-maker in Swedish coating equipment just turned. On the detail, the quarter's marginal contributor was not coating at all — it was scrap. CFO Lena Åberg put it plainly: “Coating Services net sales includes recycled metal sales of SEK 9.0 million compared to SEK 1.4 million last year” — Lena Åberg · 2026-10-21. That is roughly a quarter of the entire quarter's revenue, and it arrives at a margin that is nothing like a coatings margin — “the margin for the metals, the aggregated in this quarter was a bit below 30%” — Lena Åberg · 2026-10-21. Do the arithmetic: about SEK 2.7 million of gross profit from trading iridium and platinum back into the supply chain. Against net income of SEK 3.6 million. CEO Jonas Nilsson insists the bottom line is positive both with and without the metals, and the numbers are consistent with that — barely. But the distinction matters enormously for how you capitalise this business. A metal sales line is a treasury event, not a franchise. Management knows it, which is why it flagged the item separately and why the first analyst question on the call was about it. The disclosure also explains the volatility, and it is not a demand signal:Strip the recovered metals line and the operating improvement is real but plainer: personnel costs fell to SEK 9.4 million from SEK 12.7 million, headcount to 43 from 54, and the nine-month operating loss nearly halved to SEK -20.3 million from SEK -41.9 million. Gross margin was 56%, exactly flat year on year. That is a cost story, well executed, not yet a scale story.It varies a bit because since we changed to a new supplier, that agreement allow us to decrease capital binding in the metal inventory, and it is used from time to time… sometimes we are not able to return material at the same time as we purchase
One shift, and a ceiling
The most forward-looking number on the call was not in the accounts at all. It was the observation that the Shanghai Coating Services centre — the automated line, the robot loading the IC2000 machine the team calls Wilma, 8,000 bipolar plates a day — is running flat out on a single shift: “Today we are right at the limit what we can handle with one shift… if we look at the forecast, overtime might not be enough to fulfill the customer demand in the forecast we have from the customers today for the rest of the year” — Jonas Nilsson, CEO · 2026-10-21 That is the closest thing to a demand inflection in the release. overtime is a leading indicator of shift production additions, and the China subsidiary — SEK 1.7 million of group sales this quarter — is the tell that Chinese Hydrogen activity is re-accelerating after a slow stretch. Nilsson's anecdote about the Port of Ningbo, where a truck fuel-cell maker has quietly been running his coating for years without knowing it, is marketing. But 613 vehicles operating around the clock is not nothing.The segment that is left
The structural story is the customer-by-customer march. Five new paying customers in Q3, eleven the quarter before, eighteen year-to-date, more than seventy since tracking began. Order intake was described as moderate at SEK 9.5 million. In Q4 a Romanian research institute ordered an IC2000 — a competitive win Nilsson was happy to name: “We were three companies who placed a bid. It was us, and it was Hauzer, and it was Singulus” — Jonas Nilsson, CEO · 2026-10-21. And a machine shipped to Denmark the day before the call. Two booked segments carried the quarter, and two did not. Luxury goods and electronics delivered machine sales; the HJWAVE antenna-coating machine is installed and its CEO is planning expansion — “According to his expansion plans, he need more than one machine” — Jonas Nilsson, CEO · 2026-10-21. Automotive did not: “The segment that is left is automotive” — Jonas Nilsson, CEO · 2026-10-21. That is the gap worth watching, because the radar-transparent decorative coating franchise is the one management has long pitched as the volume leg. The automotive industry in Europe is contracting, and management is candid that its customers simply do not lack capacity — they need to win China first, which would itself be a machine order. Solid oxide is the offsetting optionality. qualification cycles there are longer, and samples sit with four of the top five players, but the commercial shape is better than in PEM, as Nilsson explained:The iridium oxide work with LT Metal is a ready-to-go coated porous transport layer, currently under evaluation by electrolyser makers — commercial packaging rather than new science.On SOFC… you qualify the coating, then you go for your own machine because the volumes already from start are so big, so it makes sense to invest in your own machine already from start. This, of course, is good for us because it brings the revenues earlier