Vegard Wollan
Analyst · Christoffer Bjornsen from DNB Carnegie
Thank you, Steel, and good morning, everyone. Q2 was another solid quarter for Nordic, both operationally and financially. Our product renewal program continues to progress very well, both strengthening our competitive position and expanding our addressable market. At the same time, we continue to develop our software offering and have launched cutting-edge AI tools that enable developers to speed up and improve the quality of their product development processes. And we continue to grow our cloud services business, which increased the lifetime value of our products. Financially, we achieved record revenue in the second quarter and increased by 33% to $219 million. This was once again at the high end of our guiding range, and this brings revenue for the last 12 months to $759 million, up 21% from the second quarter last year. As in the first quarter, we saw growth both in short range and long range and among both large customers and the broad market and across the consumer and industrial health care segments. Gross margin was 53.1% in the second quarter, up from 50.7% in the second quarter last year and from 52.1% in the first quarter this year. Overall, this generated an EBITDA of $36 million when adjusted for noncash cost effects related to the Memfault acquisition, up from $21 million in the second quarter last year and from $24 million in the first quarter. As I just mentioned, we continue to see growth both among our key customers and in the broad market. And this quarter, we see particularly strong performance in the broad market. Revenue from the top 10 customers are at an all-time high on a rolling 12-month basis, and we are continuing to grow the design activity with our key customers at a high level. However, we have said for a long time that it has been a clear priority for us to regain traction in the broad market, and we now see the strongest growth in this area. Broad market revenue is up by almost 60% from the 2024 lows on a rolling 12-month basis, although still almost 20% below the peak levels from 2022. We continue to see great upside potential, and we see both new customers and returning customers. Looking at the end customer Bluetooth Low Energy certifications, we account for 31% of the total number of certifications, although we dropped somewhat below 30% in the second quarter isolated. Designs based on the new ?nRF54 series accounted for more than 20% of the certifications in Q2, and this will continue to increase over time. It's important to note that this is only counting numbers of certifications and it does not distinguish between high and low-volume end products. And because of that, this cannot be translated into volume or revenue market shares. Last time, I spoke about 4 key growth drivers for Nordic. The first is the continuing wireless connectivity market growth, which creates an attractive business environment for us. The other 3 are up to us. And with an ever broader portfolio of next-generation hardware, cutting-edge software and developer tools and a growing cloud services offering, we are strengthening our competitive position, expanding our addressable market and increasing the life cycle value per customer and product. What sets us apart in this competitive environment is our complete chip-to-cloud solution. Nordic is continuing to build a position as a trusted partner to its customers from concept idea through product development and all the way to the end product life cycle. We have world-class ultra-low power hardware, offering wireless connectivity on multiple protocols, the highest performance processing and compute capabilities on the market and continuously growing power management portfolio. We have a strong stack of embedded software solutions, including the nRF Connect software development kit that works across the complete chip-to-cloud solution and the newly launched AI-assisted development tools that I will get back to in a minute. And we have our growing cloud services business that enables secure over-the-air monitoring, debugging, firmware updating of devices in the field and compliance with the EU Cyber Resilience Act and other regulations coming. Let's first take a closer look by clicking in on our hardware portfolio. This is a very busy slide, but it necessarily is so. If we have to show the increasing breadth of our portfolio that enables Nordic to capture the broad market and open entirely new opportunities. In 2 years now, we have executed an aggressive road map built on the highly competitive 22-nanometer processes from our key partners, GlobalFoundries and TSMC. In short range, you see the growing number of SoCs in the new nRF54 series, spanning from entry-level parts such as the different nRF54L05 variants through the mainstream 54L10, L15 to the high-end, large memory 54LM20 A and B, and the 54H20, aimed meet the complexity and functionality that intelligence at the edge [ new ] demands. These adds to the nRF54 and the nRF53 series, which have also served us so well over the past decade and still accounts for the bulk of revenue and even still have new design wins. In the middle of our -- in the middle, you see our long-range portfolio. We introduced the nRF9151 in late 2024. And at Mobile World Congress in March this year, we announced the upcoming nRF 92 and the 93 series, including the new Smart modem variants. This future-ready cellular IoT portfolio now spans TE-M, NB-IoT, satellite NTN, and Cat 1 bis,? with options for both integrated applications processors with the open MCU series and external application processors in the smart modem series of the 90 -- 9X series. Then we have the Wi-Fi portfolio where we expect to make a step change forward with the upcoming nRF71 series based on 22-nanometer technology and our most modern technology platform. Underpinning all 3 spanning short-range, long-range and Wi-Fi are the growing portfolio of power management solutions and range extenders. They complement the entire portfolio, improving usability and extending the addressable market. Summing up, this represents the broadest and most modern product portfolio for low-power wireless communication in the market. We are addressing an ever-increasing part of the commercial opportunity, and we have only just begun to see the financial impact of the overall product renewal program. On top of our hardware, software and services pillars, there is one thing that ties it all together, which increasingly sets us apart. Developer experience has always been Nordic's strengths built on trusted, established development tools, high-performance connectivity and software stacks, documentation and support. That foundation gives developers a proven starting point when building on Nordic solutions. AI has the potential to assist developers across the entire product life cycle from prototyping and board bring up to debugging, release validation, fleet management, and there are many trying this at the moment. However, generic AI assistants often lack the hardware SDK configuration and device-specific context required for reliable embedded development, which creates a real pain point for developers and end product development. Nordic's AI-assisted development capabilities address this by giving AI assistants access to verified Nordic context, including nRF Connect SDK, documentation, API references, device configurations and even field data from nRF cloud. This is unique, and the ground truth is high-quality data from Nordic and the high-quality Nordic foundation for developers. And this truly solves pain points experienced by developers. This means we are now helping developers to speed up their development cycles and achieve higher quality results. With that, I'll leave it to Pal to take you through the financials.
Pål Elstad: Thank you, Vegard, for a very interesting review of our products and systems and tools we have enabling our customers to develop their products. I'll now run through the financials for Q2. As Vegard mentioned, revenue amounted to $219 million in the second quarter of 2026, an increase of 33% from the same quarter last year and 14% increase from the previous quarter. This is the highest quarterly revenue we have ever reported. The previous highest was $202 million back in 2022. On a rolling 12-month basis, revenue increased by 21% to $759 million. The revenue growth mainly reflects Nordic's strengthened competitive position in the short-range wireless communications market with short-range revenue increasing 29% to around $200 million. Although short-range is driving our growth with more than 90% of total revenue, we see strong growth in the other business units. Long-range revenue almost doubled to $15 million with both higher product sales and higher cloud services revenue after last year's acquisition of Memfault. Although the scale is smaller, it's also worth noting close to a doubling of other revenue to $4 million, mainly driven by increased sales of PMICs and development kits. Turning to the end user markets. We see growth across all areas. Consumer revenue increased by 25% year-over-year to $125 million and now accounts for 57% of total revenue. Consumer growth continues to be relatively broad-based across most verticals. Industrial and Healthcare revenue increased by 45% to $86 million and accounts for 40% of the total. Growth in this segment continues to reflect strong health care numbers and increasing contribution from long range, which mainly goes to the industrial consumers. As we have communicated for a long time, revenue in Industrial Healthcare will still depend on a relatively small number of customers with high sales to individual key customers supporting revenue also in this quarter. This means that we will see significant variations from quarter-to-quarter. Interesting point this quarter is that our other revenue grew to $7 million, up from $4 million last year. Other revenue mainly reflects online catalog sales, supporting the positive development that Vegard mentioned in the broad market. Turning to gross profit. Gross profit was $116 million in Q2, up from $83 million in the same quarter last year. The gross margin hence increased to 53.1% from 50.7% last year. The increased margin reflects changes in product mix, higher sales to broad market customers and increasing positive contribution from high-margin cloud services revenue. We expect the gross margin to remain above 50% also in the third quarter and reiterate our long-term ambition to keep gross margins above the 50% level. The growth is improving margins and increasing our operational leverage. With 33% revenue growth and improving gross margins, gross profit increased by 40%. With higher volumes, we also see the effects of the operational leverage in our business model. The adjusted EBITDA margin increased by close to 4% to 16.6% and adjusted EBITDA increased by 75% year-over-year to $36 million. Splitting our cost base, you see that R&D increased in both absolute terms and in percentage of revenue. We continue to invest in the short-range portfolio, although this area accounts for less than 60% of R&D spending despite accounting for more than 90% of revenue. The R&D to revenue ratio in this area has now dropped to around 15%. However, we still invest a significant amount in R&D in long-range and/or early-stage businesses. And combined, these account for more than 40% of R&D despite accounting for just 10% of revenue. These are investments for the future. And as revenue grows over time, we expect gradually more balanced R&D to revenue ratios also in these areas. SG&A OpEx also increased somewhat in absolute terms, although the higher revenue means that R&D -- no, the SG&A to revenue declined by almost 2 percentage points to 13.7%. Turning to cash cost development. In absolute terms, you can see that cash costs have increased from around $63 million in the second quarter last year to $80 million this year. Salaries accounted for $14 million of the increase with around $4 million explained by acquisitions done last year, $2 million from salary adjustments and $5 million from variable pay accruals. In addition, we have approximately $3 million negative effect of the weaker U.S. dollar. At the end of the first half year, Nordic had 1,465 employees, including the 59 employees that joined 2 acquisitions last year. This corresponds to an organic increase of 6% and a total increase of 10% compared to the same period last year. Other cash expenses amounted to $26 million, up from $23 million last year, mainly driven by higher hardware and software spend, along with increased sales activity. I said last time that we overall expected a similar cash cost level in Q2 as in Q1. And although we saw a $2 million increase, we are pretty much on the same level as the last couple of quarters after we took on the acquisitions. Overall, we see no major changes to the cost picture in the third quarter. CapEx in the second quarter was $8 million, slightly below both the second quarter 2025 and the first quarter this year. Around 90% of this is back-end production testers as we're investing for added manufacturing capacity throughout the supply chain. CapEx intensity over the last 12 months is 3.8%, back within the 3% to 4% range we have typically seen over the last few years. Turning to cash flow. Overall, there was a slight reduction in cash during the quarter. However, it is important to understand the underlying developments. Operational cash flow from operations of $15 million was driven by profits. However, the reduction versus last year is explained by an increase in working capital during the quarter. The increase in working capital is driven by higher inventory that mainly reflects a deliberate front-end loaded build to secure supply and capacity. Nordic has raised wafer purchases to support the ramp of next-generation products, notably the nRF54 Series and to build inventory ahead of the additional test capacity being brought online in the supply chain, as I commented on the CapEx slide. As a result, net working capital was $200 million at the end of Q2, up from $143 million last year. Measured as a percentage of last 12 months revenue, net working capital increased to 26%. This is slightly above our target of 25%. Finally, cash and cash equivalents ended at $276 million, which is a strong balance sheet to support future growth. In addition, we have $200 million in an unused credit facility. Before handing the word back to Vegard, we can have a look at our near-term outlook. Based on current customer orders and forecasts, we are guiding for revenue of $220 million to $240 million in the third quarter of 2026. This corresponds to a year-on-year growth between 23% to 34% or a midpoint of 28% and sequential growth between 1% and 10%. We reported a gross margin of 53% in Q2 and expect the gross margin to remain above the 50% also in the third quarter. With that, I'll leave the floor over to Vegard for some closing remarks. Vegard?