Konecranes Raises the 2030 Bar in the Same Quarter Its Orders Fell

A 15.6% margin, a modest EUR 8m tariff refund, and a quieter admission that some Industrial Equipment slippage was self-inflicted

KCR.HE · Earnings Call · 2026-10-23

The orders went down; the ambition went up

Konecranes delivered a strange combination on 23 October: a quarter where order intake fell year-on-year, and a Capital Markets Day two hours later where the company lifted its long-term targets. Marko Tulokas framed the quarter as "a great quarter" on delivery and profitability — sales rose 10% in comparable currencies, the order book strengthened, and the EBITDA margin printed 15.6% — but the top line of the demand story was softer than that headline suggests. “even though we have a lot of activity in the funnel, our order intake in the Port Solutions was somewhat muted, and that meant that we also fell short of last year's quarter 3 in terms of order intake” — Marko Tulokas, CEO or President · 2026-10-23. This is the recurring frustration with Port Solutions: a lumpy, multi-year-decision business where the funnel is healthy and the timing is not. What is genuinely new is the ambition. Group growth target of 7%, 7% for Industrial Service and Port Solutions, 6% for Industrial Equipment, and a 15-17% group EBITDA margin range by 2030. The framing matters more than the numbers:

apart from a global unforeseen shock or crisis, we believe that we can perform in a normal downturn, so that by 2030, we are in that range of 15% to 17% on a group level
Marko Tulokas, CEO or President · 2026-10-23

That is a company telling the market its through-cycle margin floor has structurally moved up. It is a confident statement to make in a quarter where orders declined and where the CFO had to explain a 1.1pp margin decline. Strip out one-offs on both sides and the picture is less dramatic but still negative: “excluding the one-offs, the difference is not as big, but it is still a negative in Q3 this year versus the year before” — Teo Ottola, CFO or Finance Executive · 2026-10-23 — roughly half a point, driven by mix and what Teo Ottola called operational issues.

Service: the cautious tone finally cracks

Services has been the soft spot for several quarters. In July the message was that customers were holding back on non-critical maintenance; in February the company quantified it — connected-crane utilisation fell 6-7% across the prior year. The Q3 update is the first real inflection: order intake up 1.2% in comparable currencies, or better than 5% in field service and spare parts once last year's unusually heavy modernisation comp is excluded, and sales growth around 4% after adjusting for an internal unit transfer. Marko's language shifted from cautious to “There are some cautious signs of improvement there.” — Marko Tulokas, CEO or President · 2026-10-23 Note the hedge — this is the third consecutive quarter in which management has described the same service work environment as ambiguous. Teo's counterweight is blunt: “the usage of those connected equipment is not up year-on-year. So if there is a deviation, it's rather a little bit to the worse.” — Teo Ottola, CFO or Finance Executive · 2026-10-23 Not all the signals point the same way, and management said so. The other tell is churn on the agreement base. The target is roughly 90%; the company is running at 86-88%, the same place it was in the prior two quarters. Daniela Costa of Goldman asked the question for at least the second time, and the answer was unchanged. Meanwhile Net of inflation pricing contributed almost nothing — pricing ran about 2.5%, volume did the heavy lifting at 7-7.5%, and the net effect was "on the positive, but very little." That is consistent with the February guidance that investors should not expect continuous net-of-inflation price benefit; it is also a reminder that the margin story is a volume-and-mix story, not a pricing one.

The admission that matters

Industrial Equipment is where the quarter genuinely disappointed: sales down about 1% in comparable currencies and margin at 10.9% versus above 14% a year ago. For several quarters, delays in delivery acceptance have been explained as customer-driven — in July 2025 Marko described customers whose sites weren't ready, “partly because customers have other equipment that they need to complete their site” — Marko Tulokas, President and CEO · 2025-07-24. This time he split the cause:

we have some internally borne issues in Industrial Equipment that are more related to handling of the orders, that is a mid- or short-term challenge that we are well on our way of realizing
Marko Tulokas, CEO or President · 2026-10-23

The keyword set reflects this split cleanly: alongside the new customer borne slowness, the quarter introduces "factories performed" and "delivery delays" as distinct themes. The internal half, by Marko's account, should fix quickly; the customer half is not in the company's hands. Investors should treat the first as credible and the second as the same open question that has hung over Industrial Equipment for four quarters.

Tariffs, power and the wider tape

The tariff refund is the quarter's quiet swing factor: about EUR 8m positive, split roughly EUR 4m Industrial Equipment, EUR 2m Ports, and just over EUR 1m each in Service and elsewhere, against EUR 10-15m of positive one-offs in the prior-year quarter. This is not a Konecranes idiosyncrasy — refunds from IEEPA-era duties have been one of the loudest global themes for several quarters, echoed by Deckers, Fiskars, Lindex and Hasbro in this reporting window. Konecranes' exposure is small and shrinking; the February call already flagged that the tariff *tailwind* on Industrial Equipment, roughly EUR 2m a quarter, would fade rather than reverse. More interesting is where the next leg of demand is coming from. Marko leaned hard on Power Generation: “all other users or ways of generating power except solar power actually consume different sizes of cranes” — Marko Tulokas, CEO or President · 2026-10-23. He also flagged General manufacturing and mining broadening out beyond the Power, Defense and Aviation pockets that carried earlier quarters. That is a genuine Customer segment rotation argument — the portfolio's breadth as a natural hedge. But it lands against a tape that has spent the last 90 days selling the adjacent AI data centers complex hard, and against European automotive and pulp & paper, which Marko conceded remain muted and which are heavy service consumers. That is precisely why Service, not Equipment, is the lagging link. One more reversal worth noting. In February the CFO boasted that net working capital sat comfortably below the 10%-of-rolling-sales target — “Now we are clearly below that.” — Teo Ottola, CFO · 2026-02-05 Nine months later: “it is, of course, true that we are slightly on the wrong side of the target of 10%, of rolling 12 month sales” — Teo Ottola, CFO or Finance Executive · 2026-10-23. Work in progress is elevated, with no contractual deviation behind it. Cash is still net positive at roughly EUR 100m, so this is a timing irritant, not a solvency story — but it is the kind of detail that pairs badly with a raised 2030 ambition. The verdict: a company upgrading its structural story while its most cyclical order line rolls snake-eyes and its services engine only just restarts. The targets are the headline; the internal-handling admission and the working capital drift are the footnotes that deserve the attention.