Mips: Koroyd Stops Being a Deal and Starts Being a Business
A 24% organic quarter landed in line with consensus but below the 30% slogan — while a closed lawsuit, a 45% EBIT margin and a safety unit closing on SEK 100 million quietly rewrote the narrative.
MIPS.ST · Earnings Call · 2026-10-21
The deceleration that wasn't
On the headline, Mips grew net sales 59% in Q3 2026. Strip out Koroyd (30 points) and FX (6 points) and organic growth was 24%. That is the number the sell side fixed on. “24%, it was somewhat below expectations.” — Adela Dashian, Analyst · 2026-10-21 Max Strandwitz did not flinch: “the Mips performance was a little bit lower than expectations, but at the same time, the Koroyd performance was a little bit better than expectations. Actually, if you look against consensus, we were spot on.” — Max Strandwitz, CEO · 2026-10-21 He is broadly right on the arithmetic. Last quarter was 42% organic; this quarter 24%; year-to-date the group is at 31% organic on 65% reported growth — inside the >30% long-term ambition the company has repeated for years. The quarter's specific drag was a European comparator that nobody outside the company had modelled tightly enough: Europe grew 80% organic a year ago. Fluctuation around a 30% trend is the normal physics of a business this small and this fast. But look at how the company's own language has moved. The top of this quarter's keyword stack is not a growth slogan — it is a product. The SHK-2 helmet, launched with Studson in September, sits at the top on the strength of a genuine first: Studson's first helmet with a full Koroyd interior rather than a Koroyd-plus-EPS hybrid. Around it sits a cluster of language about increased momentum, broad-based demand and positive trend across every category and geography. This is a company talking about what it shipped, not what it acquired — and that is the actual change in this report.Koroyd has graduated from headline to ingredient
A year ago, Koroyd was the single fastest-rising keyword in the Mips corpus; by Q2 2026 the Koroyd acquisition was still ranking first in its quarter. In this quarter's top thirty it has thinned to a single product reference — "Koroyd solution." Deal mechanics have stopped being the story. Management is no longer selling the transaction; it is selling the combined product, with an integrated Mips-plus-Koroyd system still pencilled for 2027: “we want to have a much more integrated solution on Mips and Koroyd, and the plan is still to release that during 2027.” — Max Strandwitz, CEO · 2026-10-21 That shift comes with two visible frictions. First, Koroyd's growth rate is no longer disclosed quarter by quarter — the company argues it never had audited quarterly accounts — so the only read on the fastest-growing piece of the group is qualitative: “Q3 was at least stronger than the 15% that we expected.” — Max Strandwitz, CEO · 2026-10-21 Second, the group gross margin fell to 72.3% from 74.2%, roughly 190 basis points, which the CEO attributes to Koroyd mix plus a services mix effect and explicitly not to price adjustments: “we don't see any price adjustments. We haven't done any price adjustments as such.” — Max Strandwitz, CEO · 2026-10-21 Read the operating leverage through that: adjusted EBIT rose 70% and the adjusted margin jumped to 45.2% from 42.1%. A dilutive gross margin and a strongly expanding operating margin is the signature of a scalable ingredient brand absorbing a smaller, lower-margin, but still profitable acquisition. The structural question for 2027-28 is whether Koroyd reaches Mips-like cost ratios before the mix drag becomes a permanent haircut to the >70% gross margin promise.The lawsuit closes; the U.S. does not
The settlement of the U.S. legal dispute — reached July 2 and recognised this quarter — is the quietest big number in the release. Total legal costs of SEK 37 million in the quarter, of which SEK 32 million was the settlement itself, split across two line items. For five straight calls this had been a moving, unquantifiable tax on earnings: SEK 9 million in Q1 2025, a doubling guided in July 2025, "similar spending" into Q4 2025, then a SEK 10 million per quarter run-rate assumption in February 2026 and a ~SEK 35 million ballpark in July. Now it is a closed settlement cost and Q4 carries none of it. Adela Dashian asked directly whether anything lingers; the answer was no. That is a forward earnings tailwind entirely separate from the growth debate, and it is the sort of thing that shows up in consensus a quarter late. The other vanished theme is tariffs. Through 2025 the Mips corpus was thick with the implementation of tariffs, the tariff situation, "levels of tariff" and "right level of pricing." In this quarter's top thirty, tariffs are essentially gone — not because the world solved trade policy, but because the disruption was a timing event, not a lost-sales event. The global tape tells the same story in reverse: the big 2026 keyword wave in this area was tariff refunds, not tariff headwinds. Mips has moved on from the excuse. What has not moved is the U.S. Read the CEO's language across three consecutive calls and it is the same caution, restated. In July 2026: “Our assumption is that if the market is flat, we will still be able to grow. We are betting on a flat market for the rest of this year.” — Max Strandwitz, CEO · 2026-07-16 And now, with the U.S. still weak in bikes: “I think it's much better to be a little bit more cautious on the U.S. market and rather be surprised than plan for something which you don't have control of anyway.” — Max Strandwitz, CEO · 2026-10-21 That is not a new insight — it is the same position, and the growth is coming from the other two engines. Germany is doing the heavy lifting inside Europe, with 10% more bikes sold year-on-year, and the Asian market bounced back earlier than the company expected.Long term, we are expecting 30% organic growth, and you will see ups and downs. Last quarter, we had 42%; this quarter, 24%. So, of course, when you are a fast growing company like Mips, you will see fluctuations like that.