Careium: Not much should rock the Q3 boat - ABG
* Q3e: 13.5% organic sales growth, 8% EBITA margin
* H2 faces fewer GM headwinds
* Trading at 9x '27e EV/EBITA
Strong GM, but growth investments might sting a bit
We expect 13.5% organic growth in Q3e despite facing a much tougher comp than the previous two quarters. Given the H1'26 development, we expect Q3e service sales roughly in line with Q2'26 (SEK 179m), driving the mid-teen growth despite a relatively strong comp here as well. We expect adj. EBIT growth of 7% y-o-y on a relatively flat opex base q-o-q. This implies a margin contraction of 0.6pp y-o-y, mainly on investments in growth. We expect Q3 sales and EBIT of SEK 245m and SEK 20m, respectively, corresponding to y-o-y sales growth of 15% and a margin of 8.2%.
We expect H2 to drive the full-year margin
We expect the Nordics to deliver an improved gross margin, as the onboarding costs for the Norwegian contract should be behind us. The UK and Ireland margin was weighed down in H1'26 due to a large amount of low-margin A2D-related installation projects, which we see no reason to extrapolate into H2e. We expect the segment's GM to come in at 39.5% (10bps y-o-y lift), compared to the 240bps decrease y-o-y in Q2 to 36.9%. Moreover, Q4'25 EBIT was heavily weighed down by timing of accruals between quarters in the UK & Ireland, and we expect a normalisation in 2026.
EBITA estimates slightly raised
We make limited organic revisions to our sales estimates, but updated FX movements lead us to raise '26e-'27e sales by 1% and 1.5%, respectively. Moreover, we do not make any major changes to our opex estimates in absolute terms, which causes our '26e-'27e EBIT estimates to increase by 2-1%. On our updated estimates, Careium is trading at '26e-'27e multiples of 12x-9x EV/EBITA adj. and 13x-10x P/E, and we highlight '25-'28e sales and adj. EBITA CAGRs of 9% and 25%, respectively. Careium has historically traded at an average of 8x EBITA and 11x P/E, NTM.
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