Kinnevik's New CEO Holds the Line on Valuation While the Discount Screams Buyback

Helena Saxon's first call defends the marks, writes Stegra to zero, and re-pledges to concentration — as an analyst asks why not just buy the 60% discount.

KINV-B.ST · Earnings Call · 2026-10-15

A New Voice, The Same Marks

Helena Saxon opened her first earnings call as Kinnevik's CEO, and the tone was deliberate: continuity, not reinvention. “Our net asset value landed at SEK 29.8 billion at the end of the quarter, equivalent to SEK 108 per share, up 1% since Q2.” — Helena Saxon, CEO · 2026-10-15 For an investment company whose entire product is its own judgment, that "up 1%" is doing a lot of work — it hides a quarter in which public peer valuations swung violently and Kinnevik chose not to follow all of them. The word the company kept reaching for was peer groups. Saxon and interim CFO Caspar Sjöstrand leaned on it repeatedly as the defense for why the marks did not track the market: “our Health & Bio and software companies grew revenues by over 30%, including acquisitions. That is 2x to 3x as fast as the broader listed peer groups. However, profitability is lower.” — Caspar Sjöstrand · 2026-10-15 That single sentence is the whole valuation philosophy in miniature — high growth, negative margins, and a deliberate discount to lower peer multiples until the profitability gap closes.

The Calibration Defense

Sjöstrand was pressed hard, three separate times, on what looked like a pattern of taking marks down while the underlying businesses grow. His answer was materially the same each time: nothing in the process changed, and the moves are calibration, not downgrades. The tell is that Kinnevik's own keyword history shows this tension is now the company's headline theme — peer declined and transactional software both spiked to the top of the roster this quarter, while in the prior quarter the top themes had been the new CEO and a portfolio review. The mechanics are cleaner than the defensiveness suggests. HealthTech and vertical software peers re-rated up ~10% and ~5%; Kinnevik didn't follow in full because it trimmed forward growth estimates at Mews and Oviva. Transactional software and value-based care peers fell ~12% and ~16%; Kinnevik followed down at Perk, Pleo and Cityblock. In other words, the portfolio caught the downside of peer compression but only part of the upside re-rating. Whether that is conservatism or simply painful honesty is the real question, and it is the one the analysts danced around without landing. What changed the story in the quarter came from the round marks rather than the public comps. Tandem Health and Enveda both raised at premiums that lifted their carrying values 30–35%. Cityblock acquired Homeward Health in an all-stock deal, took dilution, and — notably — was held flat: “we hold the current mark below the round.” — Caspar Sjöstrand · 2026-10-15 Management explicitly said it would rather let Cityblock "grow into" the synergies than re-rate it on day one. On the other side, the Climate Tech book, mainly Stegra, was written to zero. That is a real admission of a thesis that died quietly.

Concentration, Discipline — And a 60% Discount

Saxon's closing priorities were the clearest new content on the call.

We will build a more focused portfolio and concentrate on fewer, larger profitable holdings in later growth stages where Kinnevik can be the best owner.
Helena Saxon, CEO · 2026-10-15

She attached a hard number to financial discipline: management costs down to SEK 200 million per year by 2027. That is a small-team, concentrated-holdings posture — fewer names, later-stage, profitable — a quiet admission that the old long tail of early-stage bets was the source of the NAV's discount problem. The tension that defines the call came from DNB's Frederik Lunde, who asked the question the buy-side has been circling: with Enveda and Tandem marked at clear premiums to prior NAV, why invest externally when the market is

buying back your portfolio at probably 60% discount to NAV in the market today?
Frederik Lunde, Analyst · 2026-10-15

Saxon's answer was the tell: “for us, in this transition period, we need the financial flexibility to transform the portfolio and make new investments.” — Helena Saxon, CEO · 2026-10-15 She invoked financial flexibility and a strong balance sheet — SEK 7.4 billion net cash — rather than engage the discount arithmetic. For a new CEO two months into the job, deferring the buyback question is defensible. For a shareholder staring at a 60% gap between SEK 108 of NAV and the share price, it is the central unresolved issue.

Where The Market Overlaps

Kinnevik is not a lone voice. Asset managers and financial-services reporters were unusually thick on the tape this window — BlackRock, State Street, EQT, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan — and the shared keyword is public market flows and fee-bearing AUM. EQT flagged lower fee-paying AUM in a soft real estate book; the read-through for Kinnevik is that the private-to-public valuation gap is a sector phenomenon, not a Kinnevik-specific one. That cuts both ways: it validates the conservative marks, but it also means Kinnevik's peers are being punished for the same reasons, so the discount may be structural rather than an opportunity management can talk away. On the growth side of the book the news is genuinely good, and that is what makes the flat NAV almost frustrating. The revenue growth is real, margins are climbing — combined EBITDA margins up seven percentage points this year — and the weaker krona added roughly 3% to portfolio value. The market's punishing of AI-exposed and high-multiple names in the current tape (data-center and semiconductor themes dominate the 30- and 90-day decliners) is the same discounting pressure Kinnevik's software holdings face.

The Read

This is a continuity call wrapped in new leadership. The signals that matter: a first-time CEO refusing to tweak methodology, a zeroing of Stegra, round-driven uplifts at Tandem and Enveda, and a fresh promise of concentration and new investments that remain un-timetabled. The stock's ~60% discount to NAV is the elephant in the room, and the company answered it with flexibility, not a plan. Saxon has credit for two months in the chair — but she has now put a number (SEK 200 million of costs) and a posture (fewer, larger, later-stage) on the table. The next two quarters will test whether "calibration" was prudence or something less flattering.