Nel ASA Stock

Good morning from Oslo, Norway. We are ready to present our second quarter 2026 results. My name is Hakon Volldal. I am the CEO of Nel, and I'm joined today by our CFO, Kjell Christian Bjornsen; and our Head of Communication, Marketing and Investor Relations, Wilhelm Flinder.

We have the following agenda. Nel in brief, we will skip and we will go to the second quarter highlights followed by a commercial update, a technology update and as usual, end with the Q&A session.

In the second quarter, we generated NOK 153 million from contracts with customers. We ended the quarter with a negative EBITDA of NOK 155 million. The order intake ended at NOK 230 million, order backlog at NOK 1.2 billion and the cash balance at NOK 1.3 billion.

Some of the highlights in the quarter were the following. We launched our new pressurized alkaline platform, what we call the PA-Series on May 8. We'll come back to that later. We also progressed the new manufacturing line for this technology at Heroya according to plan, and we received 2 purchase orders for containerized PEM solutions, each worth approximately $7 million.

Looking at the group financials. Revenue from contracts with customers, NOK 153 million, down 12% year-on-year. Alkaline revenues declined by 14%, whereas PEM revenues were down by 10%. Total revenue and income, NOK 182 million versus NOK 215 million last year. EBITDA ended at NOK 155 million versus NOK 86 million last year. This is driven by the settlement with Iwatani. If we adjust for the NOK 70 million, EBITDA was flat versus second quarter last year.

Of course, this also impacts EBIT and pretax income, et cetera. Adjusting for the one-off settlement with Iwatani, all figures were actually in line or better than last year.

Looking at Alkaline financials. There has been a decline in revenues on the alkaline side. It's not surprising because we have had a few orders for our atmospheric alkaline technology. That's why we have launched a new platform, and it will take a few quarters for orders to materialize and to turn orders into revenue. This is a development which is expected, not appreciated. But again, the reason we are launching new technology is to bring these numbers back to the 2024 level where the business was EBITDA positive.

In the quarter, we had NOK 56 million from customer contracts in revenues and NOK 28 million negative EBITDA. This quarter included NOK 27 million in R&D expenses compared to NOK 18 million in the second quarter of '25, explaining some of the difference.

In PEM, we have more stable revenues and higher revenues. There is solid demand for our containerized PEM solutions, which means we had better revenues in the second quarter of '26 than in the first quarter, still slightly down 10% versus last year, largely driven by kilowatt-type electrolyzers. The small, what we call the SH and C Series electrolyzers for industrial applications and the megawatt type installations had lower project revenues in the quarter.

We had also lower other income in the quarter due to delayed or canceled research grants in the U.S. Some of the programs have been reinstated and will be a positive effect in the second half of '26.

Also, this quarter included NOK 33 million in R&D expenses compared to NOK 33 million in the second quarter of '25. We keep a steady progress on the R&D side. More orders are needed also on the PEM side to breakeven, especially megawatt scale projects.

Order intake and backlog. Order intake in the quarter ended at NOK 230 million, and that's up significantly from a weak quarter in '25 and also significantly up versus the first quarter in '26. With NOK 230 million in order intake and NOK 150-ish million in revenue, we have then increased our order backlog to NOK 1.2 billion. As you can see from the bar chart, most of the order backlog is comprised of PEM orders. You can also see on the left-hand side that the dark bars indicate that in recent quarters, we have mostly received orders for our PEM solutions.

If orders are not high enough. We need to compensate by controlling expenses. That's why we have reduced our headcount from 430 down to 313, mostly in production and project delivery. We have kept most of our R&D people. This means that personnel expenses are down in the quarter versus last year and of course, versus the peak back in Q3 of 2024.

On to the commercial update. Our market perspective is somewhat unchanged from the previous quarters. We continue to see several promising smaller projects and some larger projects in the 50- to 150-megawatt range. These projects are expected to take final investment decision over the next quarters.

We see strong momentum for containerized PEM solutions, anywhere from 1.25 to 10, 15, 20-megawatts. The reason we see a strong demand for these type of solutions is that most projects have become smaller or start with the first build-out phase in the 10- to 50-megawatt range, which fits nicely with our containerized PEM offering.

Multiple containerized PEM solutions offer a proven, efficient and standardized alternative to customized solutions. Because we have managed to bring down CapEx considerably, combined with a growing list of references, this also increases Nel's competitiveness in the market segment.

Pressurized alkaline has received concrete interest, and there are several active and ongoing customer dialogues. However, it's still early phase, and we need some more months before the first orders materialize. Europe is currently the most active and promising region for Nel and I guess, most other electrolyzer OEMs, but there are also some projects progressing in North America, the Middle East and Asia.

In the quarter, we received a $7 million purchase order for containerized PEM equipment. This is from Mesure Process in France, valued at $7 million. It's the second purchase order from this customer. We will supply -- or Mesure Process will supply hydrogen refueling stations and industrial applications in Europe with hydrogen.

Another nice win in the quarter was with Douglas County in the U.S. This is the first system sold that will be owned and operated by a public utility or as you said, the first Nel system sold. The electrolyzers will operate near a hydropower plant and the equipment will be used to utilize excess power to balance the grid and to be used for other high-value applications.

This reduces the need for mechanical adjustments to lower wear and maintenance on the turbine units and associated equipment. A nice and interesting application for this equipment in the U.S.

We have also expanded our technology partner network. We have signed a frame agreement with the leading power electronics partner, SMA Altenso for PEM, atmospheric alkaline and pressurized alkaline platforms. That means we have one supplier covering all our different platforms with power electronics.

We have signed agreements with container integrators across the U.S. and Europe, delivering plug-and-play PEM containers, similar to the ones we showed on the previous 2 pages. We've also entered into contracts with PEM stack component manufacturers and new agreements with best-in-class partners delivering novel components for our PEM stacks. A lot happening in the quarter on the partnering side.

We continue to progress our solutions together with our strategic EPC companies, Samsung E&A and Saipem. Samsung E&A has recently completed its 100-megawatt wrap for our new pressurized alkaline solution, what they call the CompassH2-A+. That means Samsung E&A can now offer 100-megawatt or larger bankable solutions across all of Nel's megawatt platforms, atmospheric alkaline, pressurized alkaline and PEM with long service agreements and full system guarantees.

Saipem, we continue our close collaboration where Saipem is offering its IV 100, a replicable and scalable full-scope electrolyzer solution with sizes from 20 megawatts up to several hundred megawatts and more based on Nel's atmospheric alkaline technology. And we're also working to expand the partnership with Saipem to cover other platforms.

We have a strategic partner in India called Reliance. They have an ambition to produce electrolyzers for captive use in India. The project to establish a gigafactory in India remains under development with key suppliers for its production facility contracted. The plant construction is expected to commence in this year.

Nel and Reliance continue to work closely with dedicated teams on both sides, driving the project forward. So again, a very interesting development with Reliance in India that we hope will materialize and bring significant profitable revenue growth for Nel in the years to come.

On the technology side, we had a big happening in Norway in early May. That's when we launched our new pressurized alkaline platform, which we call the PA-Series. Just to remind the audience why we have launched this product besides having something new to show to our customers. We need to bring the order intake up. We need to get back to the levels we saw in '22, '23 on the revenue side. In order to do that, you need a compelling product offering.

The new pressurized solution, we said had to improve energy efficiency over the old platform. We needed to bring the system footprint down. We needed to remove the building for the electrolyzers because that building can be quite expensive. We wanted to dramatically reduce project engineering hours and site work because hours can constitute up to 50% of the total CapEx for the customer.

We need to enable a wide operating range where in, for instance, Europe, with today's energy system, you need to be able to turn the system down to, let's say, 10%, 20% load, and you also need to operate it at full load. We need to design it for dynamic operations where you quickly shift the load factor up and down.

Our answer to this is the new PA-Series. It's smaller, it's cheaper, and we think it's better. Starting with smaller, the new solution reduces the footprint of up to 80% of Nel's scope. That means thousands of square meters, if you talk about a large hydrogen plant.

System CapEx, what you see on the picture is reduced by 40% to 60%, and that covers power electronics, electrolyzers and gas liquid separation. System energy consumption is estimated to be in the 51- to 53-kilowatt hours per kilogram range. This is best-in-class today if you look at real performance, not what you find in data sheets, but real performance.

If you want more than the 25-megawatt building block, you can combine them into larger plants. This rendering shows a 100-megawatt plant in just 1,750 square meters for the core system. In addition to this, you need switchgear and high voltage to medium-low voltage. You need water treatment and some other things, storage.

But for the core system, you're down to less than 2,000 square meters for a 40-tonne per day or 100-megawatt solution. That's quite good, as I said, 80% down versus Nel's previous offering.

More importantly, the new system redefines the cost of clean hydrogen for a full turnkey CapEx comparison, you can look on the left-hand side, what we see in our reference projects, 20- to 30-megawatt projects using the old technology, you ended up around $3,000 per kilowatt.

A similar scope with the new pressurized alkaline system reduces that down to $1,400. That means you bring the levelized cost of hydrogen at 30 bar pressure down from $7.8 per kilo to $4.5, a significant reduction that enables new projects to move ahead. Please bear in mind that these figures are for small, let's call them, small-scale projects of 20- to 30-megawatts. We're not talking hundreds of megawatts or gigawatt-scale projects, then the CapEx, of course, would come down further.

Looking at Nel's buildup of the CapEx. We have -- for this 25-megawatt module, roughly $1,000 linked to the hardware that you see at the bottom and then $123 for services provided by Nel. Other hardware and services not included on this picture is $346, and that includes water purification, dryer purification, compression from 15 to 30 bar, additional cooling equipment, nitrogen for purging, et cetera.

This is an almost all-in cost estimate of $1,400 per kilowatt for a 25-megawatt system. Again, if you bring the size of the project up to, let's say, 100 megawatts, a lot of the labor cost will come down, and there are also some scale benefits on the hardware side, which means for larger-scale projects, it's possible to get the $1,400 figure down further.

The good thing about this is that it's not only a PowerPoint concept. It is a real concept. To prove that the system actually works, we have built it at Heroya, outside our manufacturing facility. What you see on the picture is a plant with the gas liquid separation to the left, you have an electrolyzer and you have the power electronics, the transformer and the rectifier to the right.

This system is 1/4 of a full system. That means it can deliver 6 megawatts if you have all the electrolyzers in the skids, but it can be built out to do 25-megawatt. This is what we showed the world on -- in May, early May, where we took the curtains to the side and allowed people to inspect it and have a look at how it's constructed and why we have designed it the way we have.

To deliver this, not only build a prototype, but deliver at scale, we need a production line for some components. We will not build a huge manufacturing site where we make all the different components. We will have a capital-light approach to this. But we do need a production line for some components. This production line is taking shape. There are ongoing tests that we have conducted that confirm good product quality, and we actually exceed prototype production results.

We see clear quality improvements with higher yields and fewer critical defects. Cycle times are coming down and support higher capacity and improved efficiency. We have a strong process understanding. The baseline production run plan to look -- plan to lock in learnings with further improvement expected during the autumn.

In terms of capacity, 500 megawatts will be installed by the end of '26. This can be expanded to 1 gigawatt by 2027 through increasing the cycle time. I want to remind everybody, especially the analysts that CapEx per megawatt is significantly lower than for atmospheric alkaline and PEM. Again, back to the point that we will not make all the components ourselves. We will just make a few critical components and do the final assembly and testing in-house.

The project is also funded by the European Union. We have received EUR 135 million in funding. It has to be matched by Nel, and we have received already the first milestone payment in the second quarter, which is good. That shows progress, and it shows faith in what we have done so far.

Final point, I will step down as President and CEO of Nel to pursue another professional opportunity. I have been with Nel since July 1, 2022. It's been a fantastic journey, great company, and I will still be around. I have a 6-month notice period, and I will continue in my role until further notice. The Board of Directors has already initiated the process to recruit my successor.

I think it's important to say that we have gone through quite a bit of strategic shifts and organizational developments over the past 4 years. It's been a hectic period, but the strategy remains intact, and it remains unchanged going forward. It's supported. It's not just me pursuing this strategy, it's anchored with the rest of the management team and the Board of Directors.

The current strategy, including technology and product road maps, project scope, target geographies and the pursuit of partnerships with leading industrial players will remain unchanged.

Going forward, the continued rollout and commercialization of the recently launched pressurized alkaline system and the future next-generation PEM technology will remain Nel's top priorities.

With that, we conclude the presentation, and I will be joined on stage by our CFO. Before we start answering questions, you will read the script that you normally follow. Wilhelm?

Thank you, Hakon. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, we will not comment on outlook-specific targets, detailed terms and conditions for individual contracts or questions about specific markets. Also modeling questions are also best handled offline. With that, let's get started. First question comes from the line of Arthur Sitbon.

Thank you very much for taking my question. I would just be keen to have your thoughts on the funding of Nel at the moment. So you report a NOK 1.3 billion cash position. You are still burning cash on a quarterly basis at the moment and the order backlog seems to take a bit of time to pick up while you're investing in the manufacturing platform.

I was wondering, basically, are you -- do you consider yourself as being in a strong enough funding position at the moment to turn the group into a growing entity and a profitable entity? Or should we think about potential avenues and potential action plan on the funding for the coming 12 months?

We do have, Arthur, a solid cash position as of now, and we have no urgency to do anything about it. However, we have done many steps in the past to strengthen ourselves, including the spinout of Cavendish, frequent capital raises, but also working with customer and customer contracts to ensure that we get paid early so that we don't build up too much working capital. A long way of saying that we have a good position now, but we will, of course, make sure that we remain in a good and solid position in the future and take actions if required.

Thank you, Arthur. The next question comes from the line of Helene Brondbo.

I was wondering a bit about the overdue receivables. Could you provide an update on the ones with -- that are more than 91 days past overdue? And do you expect to see anything happening here in the immediate future?

Yes. So let me just handle that overdue receivable. We have one very large overdue receivable that's been out for a long time. That's related to a bankruptcy in Germany for a project developer last year, and it remains on the balance sheet until that is closed.

As we communicated at that point in time, the net effect if we get nothing out of the bankruptcy estate will be 0. We do have a hope to reclaim some inventory and which we have a strong position to reclaim. This is a net zero cash effect on that one, and it will remain there until the bankruptcy proceedings finalize in Germany.

Okay. And you do not have any sort of more clarity on the timing of that?

Unfortunately, it takes longer than what it would do in Norway. But again, the total balance, there are also -- and we can follow up this on modeling questions with Wilhelm afterwards where the counter position to that overdue receivable is.

Thank you, Helene. I see no further questions here, but we have received some written questions that we can go through from [ David Lopez ]. Following cost-cutting measures and the evolution of demand in recent quarters, what level of plant utilization do you consider necessary to achieve positive EBITDA? What's the most realistic time frame for achieving this?

I think that varies depending on which platform we look at. For PEM, the plant utilization has to be around 20%, 24% maybe of the installed capacity, whereas for alkaline, it has to be a bit higher. Of course, it depends on margin where initially you have a lower margin on the equipment than you will have over time.

I think we need to come back to precisely what the load factor has to be, but it's fair to say that we need to move into the hundreds of megawatts per year on alkaline and tens of megawatts for PEM in order for this to be a profitable business.

Thank you. And another one also from David. Given the increasing international competition and pressure on electrolyzer prices, in which segment do you believe Nel can maintain a sustainable competitive advantage? Is it production cost, technology -- technology efficiency, aftersales service or the execution of projects with Saipem and Samsung E&A?

I think we have to remain competitive. The good thing about modern electrolyzers is that a lot of the manufacturing is actually automated. That means we're not penalized for having high labor cost in Norway or the U.S. because most of the manufacturing is automated. I do, however, believe that supply chains in China will be cheaper than supply chains in the Western world. I think the Chinese will have an upper hand on CapEx. I think we will have an upper hand on efficiency.

The reason I say that is not because we're so clever and have insights that the Chinese cannot also get, but it takes a while. It's a moving train. I think we do piggyback on almost a century of experience. We also have certain design secrets. So I think our competitive advantage will be related to stack efficiency and reliability.

We -- one thing is to build something to last a year or 2, but to make it last 7, 8, 9, 10 years is a completely different ballgame. I do think we will see results and stories coming out in the coming years where electrolyzer performance is not what people expected. Then the demand for high-quality solutions will come up. Can we remain competitive on CapEx and be leaders on efficiency? I believe so.

Thank you, Hakon. We have a question coming in here from Kulwinder Rajpal.

Basically, just wanted to inquire about the order momentum. Essentially, just wanted to get your take on where we are in discussions with customers because it's been quite a while for the alkaline division to actually have something on the books. I think that's now starting to get to a point where it's concerning investors quite a lot. We have controlled the cash burn rate, so kudos on that. But I really wanted to understand where the policy support in Europe stands versus what it is in the U.S.

Then on China as well. What sort of competition could we expect if China breaks into the European market in terms of supplying electrolyzers? What is your view on that? Is it something similar that is going to be like the wind industry where wind turbine manufacturers have not been able to acquire a lot of market share, especially in key European countries, they have only been there in price-sensitive economies. Just wanted to get your take on that also.

That was a long question. But if we start from the top, before you get a purchase order, you typically have worked with the client for at least a year, maybe 2 years. Part of that work is to do a FEED study or to qualify the technical solution. That doesn't mean all FEED studies are exclusive. You might be in a competitive FEED situation with other OEMs. But it's usually when you talk about FEED down to 2, maybe 3 OEMs.

What I can say is that we are conducting FEED work on behalf of potential clients. We are in projects with -- where Nel is the sole OEM. Then FID, if it's taken, will involve a purchase order to Nel. We are in situations where we have competitive FEEDs where we're 1 out of 2 or 3 OEMs bidding on the contract and the likelihood is then, of course, fairly high that we could win it.

We have these situations. But you're right, we have not seen a lot of large alkaline orders for Nel. We have seen fewer projects overall, projects that have not moved forward, and we've also been on the losing side of some of these bids. That's true. I think we need to give it a bit more time also for our atmospheric alkaline contracts to come through.

Having said that, in order to qualify Nel and put Nel in a more advantageous and favorable position, we have launched the pressurized alkaline concept. The whole reason we have launched this now and started to work with customers is to get the large-scale orders on the alkaline platform. But I have to say that I think we need to pivot from atmospheric to pressurized to see more order intake on the alkaline side. That will take a few quarters.

It was launched in May, and then we need time to work with customers and customers to get comfortable with what we have built for them to then place the order with Nel. We are positive the orders will come. But as I said, we have to be a bit patient because it's new technology.

What was the second part of the question related to legislation. Legislation in Europe is okay-ish. There is a market in Europe. There are support programs. There are grants being handed out, but there were also some very detailed and I would say, not so productive legislative pieces that are being -- the European Union is taking a second look at some of these legislative pieces.

The idea was to come out in July with a revised version of the delegated act and some of the provisions in there to qualify hydrogen as RFNBO, that has been delayed until fall. That creates, of course, a bit uncertainty in the market. But I would say Europe is in a decent place. The U.S. is a much more difficult market. It's hard to see that the government will come up with the subsidies and grants. It has to -- every project has to stand on its own, and there are not many offtakers currently in the U.S.

We do see activity in the Middle East and Asia, promising projects in those regions, but not as many as we probably see in Europe. Out of the regions, I would say Europe is still important, and it would help a lot if member states could transpose the renewable energy directive into national law. Very few countries have done that.

Germany has done it partly on the transportation side. That helps. That creates an end market for hydrogen. And over the coming months, we hope that more countries will transpose it because that definitely helps, probably helps more than a new hydrogen bank auction. That was a long answer to a long question.

Thank you so much, Hakon, and all the best for whatever is next for you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Kulwinder. We have another question from the Q&A function here. And the first part is something that we naturally cannot really comment on, but let's have a go on the second part.

Regarding Everfuel's recent EUR 245 million funding from the European Hydrogen Bank for the Frigg Project, do you see active interest from Everfuel to partner with Nel on this? And more broadly, in terms of uncommitted or potential large-scale projects like this, what kind of pipeline volume ranges can investors realistically expect to see coming down the road?

I guess we cannot comment on individual customer projects for customers that have not yet started. But on a more generic basis, we are, of course, targeting everybody that gets funding. Ideally, we start working with them well before they get the funding.

Our ideal position would be to identify the good projects and make sure that we are well positioned before they get the funding from the hydrogen bank or similar subsidy rounds, including the ones in the U.K. If not, we are playing a catch-up game, and we're quite good at that as well. I don't know if you want to add some more, Hakon?

Yes. But I think it's fair to say that if you look at the orders we have received over the past year, at least, you will see a lot of repeat purchases. That means we deliver solutions that customers like and they come back to us for more. I do hope that we can have repeat purchases also on projects with Everfuel. As you know, they have built a 20-megawatt plant in Denmark using Nel's electrolyzers.

Very good. It seems we are out of questions. So we'll end the Q&A session here. If anything comes up after the call, you're always welcome to reach us at [email protected]. And I'll hand it back to the management for any final remarks.

Well, I think we have covered it all. What remains is to wish you all a good summer. Then maybe we'll see each other in October, at least Kjell Christian will be here. Maybe I will be here as well. But have a great summer, and thanks for watching the webcast.

Good morning from Oslo. Welcome to Nel's First Quarter 2026 Results Presentation. My name is Hakon Volldal, I am the CEO. With me today, I have our CFO, Kjell Christian Bjornsen; and our Head of IR, Marketing, Communications and Miscellaneous functions, Wilhelm Flinder.

We have the following agenda. I'll skip the Nel in brief and jump straight to the highlights for Q1. We have a short commercial update covering the most important commercial events in the first quarter and one subsequent event, a short technology update and then we will, as usual, end with questions and answers.

Quarterly highlights. Revenues came in at NOK 148 million. We had a negative EBITDA of NOK 100 million. Order intake at NOK 85 million. Order backlog ended at NOK 1.1 billion, and our cash balance ended at NOK 1.4 billion. A pretty quiet start to the year.

First quarter is always a bit slow. What we are focusing on is the launch of the new pressurized alkaline platform that will happen at Heroya on May 6 this year. In connection with that, we have been busy in the first quarter testing out new pressurized alkaline production line technology that is progressing according to plan. We also opened Korea's first off-grid green hydrogen production facility. That was commissioned in late March. And in April, we received a $7 million purchase order for containerized PEM equipment.

Looking at more detailed numbers. Revenue from contracts with customers down 5% year-on-year. Revenues from alkaline division increased by 6%, but we had a decline in the PEM division of 14%. The NOK 100 million negative EBITDA was a NOK 15 million improvement year-on-year, and it's, of course, driven by the fact that we continue to invest in next-generation technologies, and we need higher revenues in order to become profitable. Solid cash balance at the end of the quarter, and that does not include EUR 11 million in the EU grant linked to our pressurized alkaline industrialization, which we expect to receive in the next quarter or in this quarter, second quarter '26.

Alkaline financials limited revenue recognition in the quarter. Despite that, revenue was up 6% year-on-year. EBITDA improved by NOK 35 million versus corresponding quarter last year due to positive impact of project deliveries. We have adjusted our cost base and capacity utilization to reflect lower market demand, but lower fixed costs will continue to negatively influence results until volumes pick up. As you can see from the chart, we do generate profits when we have good revenues.

Turning to PEM. Revenue were down 14% year-on-year due to limited megawatt project deliveries in the quarter. We had mostly sales of industrial products. EBITDA was down NOK 16 million year-on-year, largely driven by delayed or canceled research grants in the U.S. We have historically received money from the Department of Energy to fund several research programs, and that has been under review and parts of the grants have not been paid out since late last year, and that reflects performance so far this year.

We have a good hope that the grants will be reinstated and that money will continue to be paid out or resume -- we will resume paying money to Nel, but can't say exactly when that will happen again. We are also in the PEM division spending money on product development for next-generation PEM electrolyser with significantly lower levelized cost of hydrogen, and that development is progressing well.

Order intake was NOK 85 million, was down year-on-year versus a strong quarter in '25. We expect the order intake to improve and have already booked the first order in the second quarter of roughly NOK 70 million. So the first quarter you see here did not reflect any big project wins, just, I would say, normal course of business related to aftersales and some industrial products. The order backlog at the end of the quarter ended at NOK 1.1 billion.

Due to a declining order backlog and limited demand over the past few quarters, we have reduced our employee base. We will try to adjust our cost to change market expectations. We are down in terms of number of employees by 26% versus the peak and 19% versus the end of first quarter 2025. And we can see that this also then translates into a 21% reduction in personnel expenses in the first quarter of '26.

We have done these adjustments to make sure that we spend our money responsibly, but it has largely affected our ability to manufacture at scale and deliver projects at scale. So that variable or that muscle has been reduced. We have kept more or less our R&D organization to make sure that we can progress and deliver the new technology needed to bring additional volumes back. And once we get new orders and we see that the market is coming back, we can add back the manufacturing and project execution capacity. But for now, we have reduced our staffing down to roughly 300 employees.

On the commercial side, we do want to highlight this. Korea's first off-grid green hydrogen production facility has been commissioned, happened in late March. It's a 10-megawatt alkaline system from Nel supplied by a solar power plant, as you can see on the picture. There is no reliance on the power grid. And this project more or less validates large-scale off-grid hydrogen production as a model for future domestic and international projects. It's been a very interesting project together with Samsung C&T, where, of course, Samsung C&T acted as the EPC and Nel provided electrolysers and gas separation modules.

In April, we received another order from -- for containerized PEM equipment from Measure Process. It's a second purchase order from this client. And we're quite proud to see that whenever we get an order now, very often, we can say that it's a repeat purchase. That means the quality we deliver is solid. Customers have good experience with the first products they have purchased and they come back for more when they need it. This equipment will supply hydrogen for refueling stations and industrial applications. And I think it's sort of confirms the story that the MC platform, the containerized PEM solutions, has strong momentum across a wide range of applications. It's a fully modular design and that enables rapid project execution. It's also a good way to build out capacity over time. You could add more modules if you need more capacity.

That also fits nicely with the market perspective. We continue to see several of these promising smaller projects, 2.5 megawatt, 5 megawatt, 10 megawatt projects that are ideal for containerized PEM, but we also see some larger projects in the 50 megawatt to 150 megawatt range, and these are expected to take final investment decisions over the next quarters.

Containerized PEM has strong momentum, as I said, and to elaborate a little bit on that. The reason is that projects have become smaller than we saw a couple of years ago than customers spoke about 100 megawatt, 200 megawatt, 300 megawatt, 400 megawatt. They now plan for something smaller, at least initially. They want a gradual approach to this where they build out capacity over time when an offtake materializes. If they start with the first step, that's usually in the 10 megawatt to 50-megawatt range, and that fits nicely with Nel's containerized PEM systems. Multiple containerized PEM systems offer a proven, efficient and standardized alternative to customized and tailored solutions.

We have achieved significant CapEx reductions over the past few years, both on the stack itself and on the system design. And combined with the growing list of references that we have around the world, this has increased Nel's competitiveness in this market segment. Europe is currently the most active and promising region, but we also have projects and deliveries in North America and interesting prospects in the Middle East and Asia.

Then I want to end the quarter with a comment on the energy resilience. We continue to see fossil energy shocks and we continue to see that we repeatedly subsidize fossil energy to manage these shocks, while investments into renewables face higher scepticism. Renewable energy can reduce exposure to certain price spikes and definitely help mitigate geopolitical dependency and vulnerabilities.

The intermittency that we see from wind and solar, the wind doesn't blow all the time. The radiation from the sun is not constant, and that is a known challenge with the renewable energy systems. But electrolytic hydrogen enables long-term energy storage and system flexibility beyond what batteries can provide. As one example, a 200-megawatt plant in the United States has larger capacity than all the batteries currently linked to the electric grids in the United States, including the batteries from Tesla. So hydrogen is at another level when it comes to what kind of -- how the amounts of energy that we can store.

Investing in renewable energy and green hydrogen is cheaper than repeat short-term subsidy programs for fossil energy. And it also, by the way, reduces emissions. So when we have debate about energy resilience and security of supply, I think hydrogen should increasingly be part of that. And we see an increasing interest among defense contractors and politicians to look at the role that hydrogen can play in distributed energy supply.

To give you one example of how hydrogen can help basically flatten out the demand curve for electricity, we have a 20-megawatt Nel plant in Denmark. It's run and owned by Everfuel. They run this plant when there is excess energy in the system. So instead of then bringing prices down to a very low level, Everfuel will help prices stay more or less stable because they can also shut down the equipment when demand for electrodes is high. So this facility, the 20-megawatt facility helps balance out these peaks and low points that we see in electricity demand. Implementing this on a larger scale will, of course, help avoid periods where operators and generators get absolutely nothing for the electricity they produce, but also help consumers avoid periods when demand is high and electricity prices go through the roof. It basically helps flatten out the price curve for electricity.

Shortly on the technology update. We have shown this slide before. And I just want to remind you that when we talk about pressurized alkaline in Nel, it's not that we haven't looked at that before. We used to have pressurized alkaline technology 20 years ago, but it did nothing that the atmospheric solution didn't do. We do, however, see benefits of having pressurized gas. And that's why we started back in 2018 to sort of reinvent our pressurized alkaline technology.

In 2026, after years of testing this new technology, we are ready to commercialize it. It has taken 8 years. But now we're getting ready for the commercial launch. It will happen on May 6. We have invited customers, potential customers, partners, employees and a lot of people that might find this interesting to Heroya to take a look at a real physical installation, proving that this concept is more than a PowerPoint concept. It actually works. It's a physical thing and talk about the benefits that this solution brings to the world of hydrogen.

We are truly excited to show the world what this technology can do. We will offer market perspectives by external speakers and of course, also dissect the solution and talk about the value proposition that we believe this solution has. Therefore, we will not go into a lot of details today on the technology. We will share our presentations with the public on May 6. Just want to give you a sneak peek of what is happening in parallel because we are truly proud of the solution that we have. And of course, we have to be able to deliver it at scale. And that's why we, in December, decided to invest in a production line for pressurized alkaline manufacturing capacity at Heroya. This is funded by the European Union. As I mentioned, the first milestone payment will happen shortly.

CapEx per megawatt is significantly lower for this concept compared to the atmospheric alkaline or PEM. Ongoing tests confirm product quality and exceed prototype production results. We have clear improvements in yield and fewer critical defects and cycle times are coming down to support increased annual capacity and improved efficiency. We have a strong process understanding already, piggybacking on a century of experience producing alkaline systems, but there are new processes and new techniques that have to be mastered, and we're well into that. The goal is to have the first 500 megawatts of production capacity installed by the end of 2026. And that's why we commercially launched it now to have time to build the order backlog and for customers to understand the benefits of the concept and together with Nel start to work out the exact concrete and specific projects where we can apply this beautiful technology.

And that brings me to the final page. This has been our value proposition for quite some time. I think Nel has an unrivaled track record. We have a century of experience. We have sold more than 7,000 electrolyzers globally, and we have a tonne of prestigious references. But to stay a leader in this industry, you have to demonstrate technology leadership. We do that by having multiple technology platforms. We have both PEM and alkaline. We have proven solutions for today, but we need new solutions for tomorrow. We need solutions that can bring the total cost of hydrogen down, and we don't develop that only here in Nel. We do it through a big network of world-class partners.

What we will show in May is an example of cost and scale leadership. This concept will be an enabler for customers to realize projects that they could not previously realize because costs were too high. But Nel is a frontrunner in cost reductions. We take -- we make big leaps in terms of innovation and how we look at cost down opportunities and we combine that with market-leading production capabilities. So we will revert in May with more information about the new technology. And bear in mind, couple of years later, we will have the next-generation PEM platform also available.

That concludes the presentation, and I will be joined by our CFO, Kjell Christian Bjornsen, to answer questions that you might have.

Very good. Thank you, Hakon. Before we start the Q&A session, just a few practical points here. [Operator Instructions ].

If we don't get your questions, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] And as a reminder, we will not comment on outlook-specific targets, detailed terms and conditions for individual contracts, or questions about specific markets. Modeling questions are also best handled offline.

And with that, I think we can get started.

First question comes from [ Martin Klebert ].

I'd just like you to give us some explanation of how long you can store the hydrogen for and what method you're using to store this? And then when it is released, do you turn it back into electricity through the use of fuel cells?

Yes. that's correct. There are different ways of storing hydrogen. You can store it in a buffer tank for large quantities of energy to be stored. You can even use a pipeline or you can use salt caverns. So there are different examples of how to do that. There are salt caverns used in Sweden for storage, there are pipelines being used with compressed hydrogen. You can liquefy it and store it in a tank. So there are different ways of storing the energy. And you're right, if you want to turn it back into electricity, you have to run the hydrogen through a fuel cell again to generate that electricity, which you can use on site or you can send it back to the grid.

And just before I let you go, how long can you store that hydrogen for? You have the normal storage at the moment of electricity, you can't store it for that long. Are you able to store it for a longer period? And what is the advantage of that?

Yes. So that's the big thing about hydrogen. You turn it into a molecule that you can store for a very long period of time, we're talking years, if necessary. There is always a little bit of a loss, what we call a boiloff, but that's a mickey mouse figure compared to the total amount of energy that you store. So whereas batteries can help you smoothen out short-term swings, it's very difficult with batteries to store large amounts of energy and use that to sort of, let's say, you need more energy during the winter, then it's difficult to store that in the summer and release it in the winter. Hydrogen, you can do that and you can even use it for long-term storage for multiple years. So that's where batteries and hydrogen serve different purposes, but I think both are needed to have an energy system that we can depend on.

And quickly, can you use existing infrastructure, existing tanks or do you have to get special new tanks?

So it depends on where you are. In some places, you have the infrastructure in place that you can leverage. In other places, you have to build that storage capacity.

Next question comes from Elliott Geoffrey Peter Jones, [indiscernible].

Just -- I think just more on the macro side, just thinking about the -- obviously, the escalations in the Middle East and what's happened to like you mentioned, energy prices, we're seeing metals prices go through the roof as well. Are you seeing or hearing kind of any change in customer activity with regards to the potential for another bout of cost inflation when it comes to projects? Or have you not really seen any change in attitude from customers? Any color on that would be very helpful.

So what we do see is that some of the projects that are in the Middle East are delayed or that further execution of those are somewhat hindered by the current circumstances. We do see some material price movements, but it's too early to see if that is a sustained movement or not. I would say with the beauty of what we are launching with the next-generation technology and also the next-generation PEM platform that we're working on is that we take down the labor cost on site, we take out down the engineering hours. So we take down a lot of these cost adders that would typically be influenced heavily by inflation.

And we reduce our dependence on platinum group metals significantly.

That's a good point. That's helpful. And then just kind of follow up on that quickly. Just kind of putting it all together, looking at last year versus this year, obviously, we've talked about this year a lot of the pipeline being more kind of sensible and real. If you kind of add on the Middle East escalation, would you say the current market is more tricky than where you were last year? Or would you say given the maturity of the customers you're working with, actually, it's still -- you're still expecting more activity this year than last year?

I think we expect to see more FIDs this year than we saw in 2025. And then in a healthy market, there will be projects that are canceled and projects that are added. And I think that's what we see now. We don't see a big jump in our pipeline capacity. It's fairly constant, which I think is a good thing because then all the dreamers are gone and projects that don't make sense are stopped before we get too deep into the execution phase. So I would say we are slightly more optimistic about '26 than '25. And then we believe momentum will continue to build into '27 and '28. But we talk internally about a turning point that we've been down in the valley and slowly starting to climb back up the ladder.

Next question comes from Arthur Sitbon.

So I have two questions. The first one is we've seen some of your competitors announce large framework agreements with the defense sector. I was wondering -- I mean, you refer a bit more to energy security, the need of energy resilience in your presentation today. I was wondering if you're working on such type of framework agreements with that sector. And if we could see anything announced, anything meaningful announced on that in 2026?

The second question, is just on the sequence of events for coming quarters and coming years. Your backlog is -- has been coming down. I was wondering how fast do you need order -- do you need to see orders come through in order to kind of bridge the gap between where your backlog is and maybe where consensus expectations are for revenues in 2027 and always with the idea that, well, I know you have that cash balance at the moment at a given level. I imagine that covers you for 2026. But for 2027, I suspect you need orders at a certain level for the cash to be enough. So any color on that would be helpful?

If I can take the first and maybe you will take the second question, Christian? We have a number of collaborations also with companies in the defense sector, but we don't announce these partnerships publicly because what we have been told is that the capital markets only appreciate hard purchase orders. And anything else, whether it's a FEED study or a frame agreement or this and that just creates noise. So I do see there's a lot of noise out in the market. A lot of agreements are presented as firm commitments, but they're not. So we are in the same type of discussions and with the same companies as you have seen announced recently, if that answers your question.

Yes. And then just to add to that, we've been for years having grants from Department of Defense in the U.S. to work on hydrogen as part of an energy resilient infrastructure, and we're a defense subcontractor in the U.S. So yes, defense and resilience is definitely on the agenda.

On the outlook, when Hakon talks about us seeing momentum in the market, it's obvious that with that, we see order intake coming near in time. And currently, we do not have enough to really fill meaningful utilization in 2027. But we have good reasons to believe that we will see order intake this year that will help us have meaningful activity levels in 2027.

When it comes to cash balance, and we touched upon this in the presentation, we have taken quite some actions in addition to the personnel expenses that we talked about. We have worked a lot on other external spending. And I do believe that we can stretch that cash balance fairly long if it takes even longer to get orders. So we're not stressed with the size of our cash balance.

And I think we also said that the momentum for containerized PEM solutions is picking up. And the good thing about that solution is that we have a fairly short delivery time on that. We can deliver systems in less than 12 months. The order we booked in April will be delivered in '27. If we get orders now until year-end, I think we have an opportunity to deliver all of those or close to all of those in '27. So we are hopeful that we can book more containerized PEM solutions, and that will keep us float until we get the larger alkaline orders.

I see we have a follow-up question from [ Martin ]. After that, I see no more questions in the queue. [Operator Instructions].

My question is just when do you expect to launch the next-generation PEM? When is that likely? And what advantages will it bring?

If I could give you an exact date, I would. But if there's one thing we have learned is that technology development is uncertain. It takes time. I mean look at pressurized alkaline, we have worked on that for 8 years. The one -- you have a pretty good idea of what you want to do, and then there are always tricky things that you need to overcome. It could be pertaining to the concept design itself, could be pertaining to availability of materials or you end up with a cost that you don't like. So you have to reengineer it.

With PEM, we have the ambition to build a full prototype stack this year. Then that has to be tested, and then we need to spend some time to get partners to help us industrialize it. So it will take, as I said, a couple of years. Whether that means we can launch it end of or mid-'28 or if we will launch it late '28 or in '29, I'm not able to say at the moment.

When it comes to the benefits, the benefits of the new PEM platform is that our goal is to take the cost down by 70% on a stack level. And in the PEM system, the stack is the most expensive component. So that means we can significantly reduce CapEx. It will be a low CapEx, low OpEx solution. So that's the sort of the holy grail. You get the cake and you can eat it. It's compared to pressurized alkaline, it might have even better energy efficiency, and it has -- could have a smaller footprint at a lower cost. So it's -- and the response is, as always, with PEM, fantastic. So it's more dynamic than pressurized alkaline.

Even though I have to say for larger pressurized alkaline systems, we also have a fantastic dynamic capabilities. But we believe that this is something that will be even more competitive than what we will launch now in May. And that's why we continue to work on it. If it's not, we will not launch it.

I'm from South Africa, I always promote platinum, platinum, platinum of platinum, but will it also contain platinum to read PEM equals PGM?

Yes, but it's the iridium loading and the platinum loading is very limited. So to all those who want to sell all of that platinum and iridium, I have to disappoint you because the reason we can get the prices or the cost down is because we will utilize much less iridium and platinum. It's on a very different level compared to what we see today.

I'm very happy with that, just go for volume. We don't worry about value, give us volume.

Thank you, [ Martin]. It seems we're out of questions. So we'll end the Q&A session here. If anything comes up after the call, you're always welcome to reach us at [email protected] and I'll hand the word back to management for any final remarks.

And no further comments. I think we look forward to the launch event on May 6. And as I said, we will release some material on May 6 that I think explains the new solution and the benefits that we see with that solution in more detail than what we have presented to the market so far. So I hope you take a good look at that material in just a couple of weeks.

Thank you for voting.

The time is now 2:00 p.m. Norwegian time, and it's time to welcome participants to the Annual General Meeting in Nel ASA. Currently speaking is Thomas Aanmoen, I'm proposed Chairperson of the meeting. This general meeting is held as a virtual meeting where shareholders or the company may participate online, and I'd like to thank everyone who are logged on today for participating in the company's affairs and on behalf of the Board of Directors, I hereby declare the AGM open.

The General Meeting is now closed for shareholders to log on and we'll move to the list of represented shares. And I would like at this time to request the kind registrars at DNB Verdipapirservice, who are keeping track of the numbers today to present the number of participating shareholders to the meeting, and these figures will also be presented in detail in the minutes, which will be published after the Annual General Meeting.

Thank you. The share capital is represented as follows: 204,984,849 shares are represented by advanced votes. 133,563 shares are represented by proxy, 50 shares are represented by instructions to the Chair of the Board. And this sums up to a total of 205, 118,462 shares, representing 11.6% of the voting share capital.

Thank you very much. And again, these details will be included in the minutes or attached to them, which will be published on the company's ticker on Newsweb after conclusion of the meeting. We may then proceed to the first item, voting item on the agenda, which is Item 2, the election of a Chairperson of the meeting and a person to co-sign the minutes for the Chair. And the Board has in line with its long-standing practice and Norwegian recommendations for good corporate governance proposed as an independent person to chair the meeting. And the proposal is that Attorney Thomas Aanmoen, currently speaking, is selected to chair the meeting. To co-sign the minutes, it is practical that person present at the company's head offices in Oslo where this meeting is transmitted from, is elected and the proposal is that the company's Head of IR, Mr. Wilhelm Fliner is elected to co-sign the minutes. So that is the proposal from agenda item 2. There have been no alternative proposals and the vote is now closed, and the item has been approved with the requisite majority. Exact voting figures on this item as well as on other items on today's agenda will appear in the minutes of the meeting, which will be, as said, made available as a stock exchange announcement and on the company's website following the meeting.

We can move to Item 3, wherefor consideration, which deals with the approval of the notice and agenda. The statutory notice period pursuant to the Norwegian Public Limited Companies Act is 3 weeks, and the notice document was distributed to shareholders and also announced that a stock exchange notice on March 17, 2026. At the outset, therefore, it appears that the notice of the meeting to me has been given in a lawful and appropriate manner. As regards the agenda, the meeting will follow the sequence simply set out in the notice. On Item 3, we can now conclude the vote and the count shows that the item has been approved with requisite majority. And again, exact voting figures will be specified in the minutes of the meeting. Item 4 of the agenda is the approval of the annual accounts and Board report for 2025. We can move to voting, and we can close the vote. Count shows that the item was approved with requisite majority.

Item 5 of the agenda deals with the Board's report on corporate governance. The report is included in the 2025 annual accounts of the company. This agenda item is not a voting matter, but the report shall be presented to the Annual General Meeting, pursuant to Section 5-6 of the Public Limited Companies Act. No questions or comments have been made to the Board's report on corporate governance, and we can then conclude Item 5 and move to the next agenda item, which is Item 6, concerning remuneration to Board members. The proposal for the remuneration have been made by the Nomination Committee in line with the Articles of Association and a detailed proposal follows from the notice, as well as the Nomination Committee proposal itself, and I will not read it out here. We have not received any questions or comments, so we can conclude voting on the matters. And the account shows that the item was approved with requisite majority.

Item 7 of the agenda concerns remuneration to Nomination Committee, Audit Committee and Remuneration Committee. Again, same proposals were made by the Nomination Committee in line with the company's articles and the details proposals follow from the notice and the Nomination Committee proposal. No questions or comments have been made, and we can move to voting and we can close the vote showing that the item was approved with requisite majority. Moving to Item 8 on the agenda, which concerns the auditor fees. The proposal is simply that the fees, which are specified in the 2025 financial statements are approved. No questions or comments have been received to the item. We can move to voting. We can close the voting and conclude that the item was approved with requisite majority. Item 9 on the agenda concerns the updated guidelines regarding salary and other compensation to executive personnel. These updated guidelines have been available on the company's website in the notice period in accordance with the Articles of Association. And the proposal to the general meeting was that the guidelines for salary and other remuneration to members of executive personnel are approved. Again, no questions or comments have been received. We can move to voting and conclude the votes by concluding that the item was approved with requisite majority.

Moving to Item 10 on the agenda, which concerns a onetime LTI investing deviation related to a new LTI plan. And the proposal, as I noted in the notice, is simply that the onetime LTI investing deviation related to the new LTI plan for executive management is approved. We have no further -- we have not received any questions or comments. We can again move to voting on the matter, and we come close to vote showing that the item was approved with requisite majority. Item 11 on the agenda concerns the report regarding salary and other compensation to executive personnel. The report has been made available on the company's web in the notice period in accordance with the Norwegian law, and the proposal is that the report on salary and other remuneration to executive personnel is approved. No questions or comments have been received to the matter. We can move to voting, concluding that the item was approved with requisite majority.

Moving to Item 12 on the agenda, which concerns proposed authorization to issue shares. The background for the proposal is set out in the notice and is in effect that the current authorization lapses today and the Board, therefore, asks for its renewal. In line with corporate governance recommendations, the voting arrangements have been such that the shareholders have been asked to all separately on each specified purpose for which the authorization may be used, being Items 12.1 and 12.2 on the agenda. I can see that we have not received questions or comments. We can move to voting on both item 12.1 and 12.2 on the agenda. And concluding that the count shows that both items were approved with requisite majority. Moving on to Item 13 on the agenda, which concerns authorization to acquire treasury shares. The background for this proposal is also set out in the notice and is in effect the same as for the previous item. The current authorization lapses today and the Board, therefore, asks for its renewal. We have again received no questions or comments. We can move to voting on the matter. With respect to both Item 13.1 and 13.2 of the agenda, being the subitems under the overall Item 13. Moving to voting, and I can conclude the count shows that both Item 13.1 and 13.2 were approved with requisite majority.

Item 14 on the agenda deals with the election of Board members. There are proposals for 7 members, each to be elected for a period of 1 year. This proposal was made by the Nomination Committee and the committee's reasoning for their proposals is set out in the recommendation itself, which was attached to the notice. With respect to voting on election of Board members, in line with Norwegian Corporate Governance recommendations, arrangements have been made for individual voting on each candidate. We have not received any questions or comments, so we can move to voting on the matter with respect to each individual candidate now. We can conclude the vote and the count shows that all proposed Board members were elected with requisite majority. Moving to Item 5 on the agenda. This deals with the election of Nomination Committee members. And this proposal is also made by the Nomination Committee itself with the rationale as set out in the committee's recommendation. There are 3 proposed candidates. Again, with respect to voting on the election of Nomination Committee members, arrangements have been made for individual voting on each candidate. We have not received questions or comments to this agenda item either. So we can move to voting on each individual candidate separately.

We can conclude the voting and the count shows that all proposed nomination committee members were elected with requisite majority. And as mentioned in the introduction, the exact figures on all voting items in the -- today's Annual General Meeting will be specified in the minutes of the meeting, which will be made available as a stock exchange announcement on the company's web pages following the meeting.

And this brings us to the end of the 2026 Annual General Meeting. I can declare the AGM for closed. And on behalf of Nel, I would like to express the company's gratitude to all participants for participating in the company's affairs. Until next time, thank you very much.

Good morning, and welcome to Nel's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results Presentation. My name is Hakon Volldal, I am the CEO. With me today, I have our CFO, Kjell Christian Bjornsen; and our Head of Investor Relations, Marketing and Communications, Wilhelm Flinder.

Today, we have the following agenda. We will skip the Nel in brief section and go straight to the fourth quarter and fiscal financial year 2025 highlights. We will have a commercial update. We will talk about our new technology that we are about to launch, and we will, as usual, end with a Q&A session.

Quarterly highlights. Revenue from contracts with customers came in at NOK 330 million in the quarter. We had an EBITDA of minus NOK 36 million. Solid order intake. I think it's the second best order intake in Nel's history of NOK 686 million. Order backlog increased to NOK 1.3 billion, and we ended the year with a cash balance of NOK 1.6 billion.

In the quarter, we had several highlights. Among them, the PEM purchase orders from HyFuel and Kaupanes from hydrogen solutions in Norway, together with a combined value of more than $50 million. We were chosen as a technology provider for GreenH projects in Kristiansund and Slagentangen in Norway. And we received a third order for containerized PEM solutions from H2Energy in Switzerland. We also took a final investment decision on industrializing the Next Generation Pressurized Alkaline platform. Coming back to that a bit later in the presentation.

Looking at the fourth quarter results. Revenue, as I said, came in at NOK 330 million. That's a 9% increase quarter-on-quarter and a 20% decline year-on-year from the fourth quarter last year. EBITDA flat versus last year and also flat quarter-on-quarter. The big difference versus last year is actually on the EBIT line with a negative EBIT in the fourth quarter of NOK 920 million compared to NOK 106 million minus in the fourth quarter last year. That is due to roughly NOK 800 million in impairment losses due to our next-generation technology influencing the value of the current platforms or the legacy platforms. I'll come back to the specifics a bit later. No cash effect, of course, on the impairment. That means we end the year and also the quarter with a solid cash balance of NOK 1.6 billion, slightly down from NOK 1.9 billion at the end of '24.

In a historical context, 2025 came in below '23 and '24, but still higher than '22, '21 and '20. EBITDA losses came in at minus NOK 275 million, again, as a consequence of the reduced revenue. So not a year that we wanted. But still, in a historical context, around NOK 1 billion is decent.

Alkaline was the main reason for the decline on the revenue side and also on the EBITDA side. We went from NOK 1 billion in '24 and a positive EBITDA of NOK 127 million down to NOK 562 million in '25 and a negative EBITDA of NOK 16 million. Again, this was partly due to canceled contracts or also the bankruptcy of one of our customers that was supposed to drive top line and EBITDA performance in '25. On the PEM side, we increased revenue slightly from 2024, and we also improved EBITDA slightly. More revenue is needed in order to bring the PEM business into black numbers on the bottom line.

Order intake and backlog. That was a very positive development in the fourth quarter. As I mentioned, the fourth quarter was the second -- or is represented the second best order intake for Nel ever. I think we had one quarter in '22 that was better, but compared to what you can see here in '24, '25, it was a big, big step forward, of course, driven by the big contracts in Norway with HYDS. It also means that the backlog has increased from below NOK 1 billion to NOK 1.3 billion, and 2/3 or roughly 70% of the backlog is now related to our PEM technology. Order intake accumulated ended in line with previous years, below 2022, which was a very good year, but again, a big step forward from NOK 977 million in 2024. And as you can see here on this slide, most of the order intake in '25 came on the PEM side.

Important for Nel is to protect our cash balance. And the cash burn rate historically has been high as the company has invested into R&D and also production assets. We have been cautious in '24 and '25 to bring down the cash burn rate. We continue to invest into technology, but there is not the same need to invest into assets as there was historically. Compared to '23, we reduced the cash burn by 35% in '24, and we have reduced it further by 41% in 2025. Again, there will be some investments into production assets, production equipment for manufacturing lines and also some investments on the technology side. But if you look at the operational losses and CapEx together, we will not go back to what we witnessed in '21, '22, '23 and '24. We will have a controlled burn rate going forward. This is driven by a reduction in, among other things, full-time employees. We have gone from 430 people in total in Nel to 346 at the end of '25. And as a consequence, we have also reduced personnel expenses from NOK 646 million in '24 to NOK 569 million in '25. That's a 12% decline.

The impairments that we took in the fourth quarter actually reflect our optimism around next-generation technology platforms. We have developed a new technology that we believe in. We believe the new technology will be superior to the technology we have sold traditionally. And that means, as a consequence of this new technology, we expect demand to shift to the new platforms and there will be less demand for the old or existing products. And that means the value of those platforms will be reduced, and we have reduced also the book value of these assets. We took an impairment loss of NOK 361 million related to our atmospheric alkaline production assets, more specifically Line 1 at Heroya, and we've also taken NOK 439 million in impairment related to goodwill and intangible technology assets stemming from the acquisition of the PEM division back in 2016.

Moving on to the commercial update. 2025 was not a lost year. We also had some good progress. Among the highlights, I would like to mention the partnership agreement with Samsung E&A. We became their preferred global partner for hydrogen. We received the third purchase order from a major U.S. steel producer, a nice big purchase order from Collins Aerospace for U.S. Navy stacks, where we equip submarine vessels with our PEM stacks. We sold a solution to the Aberdeen Hydrogen Hub in Scotland. As I mentioned, big orders from HYDS in Norway and a nice third order from H2Energy in Switzerland, and also the recognition of Nel as the technology provider for GreenH projects in Kristiansund and Slagentangen.

Going a bit more into detail on the contracts that we signed in the quarter. This is a picture of an installation we have done in Switzerland together with H2Energy. It's in Kobel. It's close to hydrogen power station. This is not what we will develop based on the order that we received, but it shows what we have done with them. And now they have placed an order for a similar facility, and it represents the third such order to Nel from H2Energy and we take pride in that because it means that when somebody comes back to you and orders more equipment, they're happy with the performance. In the hydrogen industry, there have been lots of stories about equipment that doesn't work and suppliers that can't make plants run. This is a customer that has had the opportunity to check our equipment, test it, run it and they come back to us to buy more. I think that's a nice testimony of the quality of what we now deliver on the PEM side.

The purchase order for 40 megawatts from HYDS was the highlight in the quarter. The 2 projects they will develop are the HyFuel project and Kaupanes, 20 megawatt each, and we plan to deliver the MC500 containerized PEM systems to these 2 projects. Both projects are funded partly by Enova and total contract value exceeds $50 million, and that represents the largest order for PEM equipment that Nel has received so far. And also the second largest contract we have signed in history. We will produce the solutions at our PEM manufacturing facility in Wallingford, Connecticut.

We will deliver more than 20 megawatts to 2 projects in Norway that will be developed by GreenH. The minimum scope agreed for each of these projects is 10 megawatt of electrolyzer equipment plus engineering and technical support. The 2 sites are designed to supply clean hydrogen to industrial and maritime users, and they will form part of GreenH's network of distributed regional hydrogen production facilities. Again, these projects are partly supported by Enova with funding. And also size and delivery of the schedules for these 2 projects will be confirmed at a later date, exactly when they will produce it and what technology that has been chosen.

If we sum up what is happening in Norway, on the maritime side is actually starting to look quite interesting. There are the 2 projects with HYDS, Floro and Egersund; there are the 2 projects with the GreenH, Slagentangen and Kristiansund; and then there's also the Rjukan project with the Norwegian Hydrogen, where they announced a maritime offtaker of the hydrogen they will produce at Rjukan. And altogether, this forms a quite interesting picture of what is happening in Norway and also the fact that you can supply now hydrogen from different sites, means that it becomes more attractive to invest in hydrogen vessels for ship owners, because you're not dependent on one site only, you have multiple sites available, and that redundancy of fueling options and bunkering options is important.

In the fourth quarter -- actually, that's not correct, earlier this year, we launched the Electrolyzers for Europe initiative. It's an initiative consisting of 6 leading electrolyzer OEM manufacturers, all European, to promote electrolyzers made in Europe. Europe has more than 10 gigawatt of annual electrolyzer production capacity, but less than 1 gigawatt has actually been deployed, and that means we're lagging behind EU's target of having 40 gigawatt installed by 2030. This slow uptake is, among other things, due to unclear and/or to rigid regulations, insufficient offtake and cancellations across many early-stage hydrogen project developments.

What we aim to do with this initiative is to unite the leading electrolyzer OEMs and help push for clearer frameworks, predictable demand signals, and faster policy execution. And by speaking with one voice, a unified industry voice, this initiative aims to protect Europe's technological leadership, strengthen competitiveness versus subsidized imports and accelerate large-scale hydrogen deployment. So that's a good initiative. Nel is one of the founding members of this body, and we hope more industry players in Europe will join this initiative going forward, so that we can help politicians shape the regulations that we need to drive the industry forward.

Talking about or coming to the outlook section and offering somewhat a market perspective going forward, it's slightly challenging. But what we have seen is that order intake in 2025 increased by 15% versus 2024. And again, it was not evenly distributed throughout the year. We had low order intake in the first -- actually, first quarter was good, second and third quarter not so good, and then the fourth quarter was very strong. It accounted for almost 60% of the total order intake for the year. It's difficult to predict order variations between the quarters. But if we look at the long term or mid- to long-term trends, we are positive. What about the short-term trends? We continue to see several promising projects in the 20 megawatt to 150 megawatt range. And these projects are expected to take final investment decision over the next quarters.

Especially on the PEM side, we see a lot of opportunities. And the reason why containerized PEM has strong momentum is that projects have indeed become smaller. They have been scaled down from maybe several hundred megawatts to something which is slightly smaller as the first phase. Developers had to start with 20, 40, 50 megawatt instead of going directly to hundreds of megawatts in order to phase in demand. And that means, with the first step of 10 to 50 megawatt, we are in the sweet spot for Nel's containerized PEM solutions.

With a containerized PEM solution, you also get a proven, efficient and standardized alternative to customized solutions. And I think a lot of the customers have seen that designing a hydrogen production plant from scratch is expensive. The amount of engineering and planning that you need to put into it is quite substantial. And then having something ready to go arriving in containers simplifies overall project execution and also enables you to shorten the schedule to go to market with hydrogen. It also improves the redundancy, because you have access to multiple systems, and it's easy to build it out stepwise to scale it over time.

Significant CapEx reductions on this particular solution, of course, also help. We have worked hard over the past couple of years to get the cost down. The market is price sensitive. So as a result of our cost reductions, we also see that we can enable more projects to move forward with a profitable business case. With respect to geographies, Europe is currently the most active and promising region for Nel, but we also have leads and opportunities in North America, the Middle East and Asia.

Then we move on to the technology update. As I have said before, we have spent a long time developing a new generation of alkaline electrolyzers. We have spent more than 7 years developing a brand-new platform. It has taken a long time, but we really wanted to build it from scratch and build a product that is in fact better than what we have on many, many different dimensions. We wanted to be the best electrolyzer the world has ever seen. And now we are here. This is not a PowerPoint rendering, this is a picture of the prototype at Heroya. It's close to our production plant located inside the Heroya Industrial Park, where we for some time now have tested a real version of our pressurized electrolyzer.

And what do we aim to accomplish with this solution? We hope that this new solution will set new industry benchmarks. We see that this solution is extremely compact. We can reduce system footprint by up to 80% if we compare it to our existing atmospheric alkaline solution. Why is that important? Well, especially in Europe where there is -- which is the most promising region at the moment, you don't have all the land that you would like to have. Land is expensive. And sometimes you need to locate your hydrogen production plant inside an industrial park or you need to develop a brownfield site. That means having a compact solution that can fit on the site that you have access to, the plot that you have available, it's important.

Even more important, I would say, is to get the system CapEx down, the cost of building the entire plant, not just the electrolyzer itself, but everything that goes with it. It's the complete system cost that has to come down for our customers. With this solution, we believe we can bring the total system cost down by 40% to 60%. And that means we start to get close to a level where hydrogen becomes very attractive.

Long term, of course, it's not only about the CapEx, it's more about the OpEx side. And OpEx is driven by electricity consumption. This solution will significantly improve the energy consumption for generating hydrogen. We believe that on a system level, we can get down below 50-kilowatt hours per kilogram of hydrogen. And that is a 10% to 20% improvement over most systems today.

To add some color to why we are confident that we can deliver on this CapEx and OpEx improvements, I'll just touch briefly on some important points. OpEx, again, the electricity consumption, it's the design of the electrolyzer itself. We have improved the energy efficiency, so 0 gap electrode design, improved diaphragms. We have also spent a lot of time designing a smart system that limits the shunt currents that typically plague pressurized electrolyzer systems. We have a unique and patented solution for avoiding shunt currents. So all of that design work leads to improved energy efficiency in the stack itself.

Also important is the fact that you can operate the electrolyzer at different loads. We have a wide operating range, meaning you can run the electrolyzer at the 100% or you can run it at 10%, 20%. So that wide operating range is important when you want to optimize the electricity cost and how much hydrogen you produce, at what hours during the day.

We also had a quick ramp up and down. And that is important because it means you can respond to price changes in the market rapidly. If you spend hours bringing your electrolyzer load down, you will not benefit from the fluctuations in electricity prices. Our system has been designed to use as little electricity as possible and still give customers the opportunity to optimize the electricity consumption based on pricing in the markets and how you want to run your system.

CapEx reductions are driven by the fact that our system now consists of fewer and cheaper modules. Because there is pressure generated inside the electrolyzer, gas is coming out at 15 bar pressure instead of coming out at atmospheric pressure, we can avoid modules such as scrubber and the gas holder. And we also, because of that pressure, can reduce the size of the modules.

Our system has been designed for outdoor installation, which is rather unique. I'm not aware of any other pressurized alkaline electrolyzer technology that can be installed outdoor. Most are installed inside buildings. Having a separate building for your electrolyzer adds a lot of costs, because there are safety regulations linked to ATEX zones, et cetera, that drive up the cost of the building. So we avoid all of that cost. It can operate outside, even in Norwegian or Nordic climate, through the winter conditions.

The footprint is small, as I commented on, and this helps reduce cabling, piping and site works linked to concrete, et cetera. It brings all of the construction costs down, because you don't need to prepare thousands of square meters. You get the small compact footprint with less work. And that means all in all, also because our system is standardized, modularized, everything comes inside 20-foot skids, we significantly reduce the engineering, construction and commissioning cost. Why is that important? Because the labor part sometimes account for more than 50% of the total CapEx for the customer. So it's not only about getting the hardware cost down, it's also about getting the labor cost down, and our system delivers on both of these things.

We announced, I think right before Christmas, that we delivered first gas with solid results, confirming our anticipated business case. And that led to the Board of Directors giving us the green light for building 1 gigawatt of stack production capacity at Heroya. So very pleased with the results so far. And now it's full speed ahead to commercialize this technology.

We have produced gas on the prototype plant, as we said, in 2025. We took final investment decision on the gigawatt production line in the fourth quarter. We will launch the product commercially in the first half of 2026. May 6 is the magical date when we will invite customers and partners to come observe this technology, and also share more technical data and commercial data with them for what this system can do. We aim to validate the full customer pilot in the second half of 2026 and be in position to deliver at scale. What does that mean? Well, it means hundreds of megawatts in 2027.

This project is funded by the European Union. We have received EUR 135 million in grants for industrializing the concept. Doesn't mean that we will spend all of that, but we are lucky and very happy that we have a solid financial backing for building the production line and running the pilot tests from the European Union.

Then we are done with the official presentation and move on to the Q&A part of the quarterly presentation. And then you have a script you need to go through first, Wilhelm.

Thank you, Hakon. Before we start the Q&A session, just a few practical points. [Operator Instructions]. To manage the time, we ask you limit yourself to, I think we can take 2 questions at a time. If there's room at the end, you are welcome to rejoin the queue. We will also take written questions submitted through the Q&A function if time allows.

If we don't get your questions, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. And as a reminder, we will not comment on outlook specific targets, detailed terms and conditions for individual contracts, or questions about specific markets. Modeling questions are also best handled offline.

And with that, I think we can get started.

As of now, I see no one has actually raised their hand, but we have received some questions -- here, we have one. Anders Rosenlund, I'll bring you on the screen. Please go ahead.

You talked about this new pressurized alkaline system with the energy reduction of some 10% to 20% compared with most systems today. And the indication of below 50 per kilo is a bit vague. But could you just give us an indication of what you think energy consumption is for alkaline today, or what the systems that you deliver are consuming?

I think the big -- if you look at PEM and atmospheric alkaline, it's usually in the 55 kilowatt hour to 60 kilowatt hour per kilogram range, depending on who the OEM is. And then there are lots of OEMs claiming to be at very low figures for pressurized alkaline. And the problem is, yes, you might be that on the stack itself, but you lose a lot of that electricity due to so-called shunt currents, so electricity spent on producing hydrogen where you don't want it, in the manifold system. So if you look at the real energy consumption, it might be 15% to 20% higher than what we stated in data sheets because of that effect. And that means you, in some cases, are well above 60 kilowatt hour per kilogram of hydrogen, which comes as a big surprise to customers when they turn on the plant and they compare the electricity consumed versus the hydrogen coming out of the plant.

And the above 60, that applies for PEM or alkaline...

That above 60 is for pressurized alkaline technology with high shunt currents. PEM is typically around 55, I would say, on the system level. And then, of course, a lot of these systems degrade over time. So there's a degradation effect of 1% to 2% per year. And our system has been designed to minimize that degradation effect, so that you end -- after, say, 6, 7, 8 years, your energy efficiency is still okay and not just during the first couple of years.

And just a follow-up there because you said -- you referred to the others out there with those electricity consumption levels. But I presume that also applies for your equipment, that your equipment is not materially different since this is an improvement compared to what you already are producing?

No, I would say, if you look at PEM, there were not those big variations. It's either 53, 54, 55, 56. I mean most OEMs are in that range. And then plus the annual degradation. The big unknown is on the alkaline side. We produce atmospheric stacks where you have very low shunt currents, but higher energy consumption than we will have with the new technology.

The problem is related to the existing pressurized alkaline stacks on the market today. And without throwing specific companies under the bus, we can say that most of these technologies are plagued by high shunt currents, which means you might operate in the 55 to well above 60 kilowatt hours per kilogram range. So we don't have the problem with shunt currents because we don't deliver pressurized alkaline technology today. When we do, the whole product has been decided to avoid that problem, and that is the differentiating factor.

Thank you, Anders. I see no hands. So let's jump to some written questions. From Morten, will you sell your old alkaline stacks in the future when your new tech is available, or just deliver on placed orders and then switch to pressurized alkaline?

I think we will still sell some atmospheric electrolyzers. There are some use cases for atmospheric stacks that are quite good. But as we have said, we think the majority of the market will prefer our new technology, because it is cheaper. The levelized cost of hydrogen will be lower for many customers, and that is the reason we have done the impairment, but we will be in a position to supply customers with the old or existing products if they want them. So I think we will sell both, but over time, the majority of the demand will be related to the pressurized alkaline technology.

So another one from Morten, do you think there will be consolidation in the electrolyzer world? And do you think Nel will survive these initiatives?

I think we have -- I can start and then you follow up, Christian. I think that consolidation has already started. There are a couple of companies that have gone bankrupt or given up. And I think that is likely to continue. There will be fewer players out there. Nel aims to be one of the companies that remain when the dust settles. And then, of course, we are a publicly listed company. Anybody can buy us. If somebody wants to buy us and pay a very high price, I think it's up to the shareholders to consider that, but we plan to remain a leading company. We remain to be one of the key players in the industry. And with the launch of the new product, first, the pressurized alkaline product and, in a couple of years, the new PEM technology, we believe we are in a position to capture a significant share of what we believe will be a sizable hydrogen market.

Anything to add here, Christian?

No, nothing.

So will you need PEM in the future when you have pressurized alkaline solution? And if yes, why?

So we will -- PEM and alkaline technology have slightly different use cases. Some customers prefer PEM, some customers prefer alkaline. We are in a position to pick the one solution that fits the business case or the project the best. And then we are of the opinion that it's much better for Nel to disrupt itself than for somebody else to do it. That's why we continue to invest into the R&D side. The pressurized alkaline technology will cannibalize and over time, outcompete the atmospheric alkaline version. It might even cannibalize the PEM product. And then if we launch a new PEM product, it is because we believe that product either has some unique benefits that will drive demand from certain segments, or because it will even outcompete the pressurized alkaline technology. So Nel aims to bring the best technology to market that we can possibly come up with. And if that means cannibalizing the old technologies, so be it.

Good. Also a question from Thomas on here. And I don't think we can be very specific, of course, but maybe some general comments around it. Are there large EPC tenders where Samsung and Nel are currently jointly bidding on?

Yes.

Yes. Good. We've also got some questions from David Lopez on e-mail. Some of these are already taken, but will the new pressurized alkaline technology be able to compete on price for projects worldwide with electrolyzers made in China?

Yes. And especially outside China. If you go back to my comment earlier that when you look at the total cost of starting a project, if you look at the CapEx side, more than 50% could be related to labor costs. And that is engineering hours, construction, commissioning, testing, et cetera, happening on site. Whether you start with equipment coming from China or equipment coming from Europe, you need to perform that with local labor on site. So even if the hardware cost is cheap for Chinese equipment, that labor portion is still very, very high. And what we aim to do with our solution is to bring that labor cost down to a minimum. That means we can be a bit higher on the hardware side if we can be much better on the labor cost side.

I believe that with our pressurized alkaline technology, we are competitive on the hardware cost side, and we are much better on the labor cost side. And that means we have a winning solution for CapEx. Over time, the Chinese will probably -- they learn fast, they move fast. We have to expect that they will have a lasting competitive advantage related to their supply chains that will enable them to beat us on CapEx. We will do as best as we can, but it's fair to say that they -- or assume that the electrolyzers coming out of China will have a lower production cost.

What can we do then? Well, we can beat them on the OpEx side. The OpEx is still more important than CapEx. CapEx is the first hurdle, but for the levelized cost of hydrogen, energy consumption is key. And that's where we, with this technology, have taken a giant leap forward in terms of efficiency and where we still see opportunities to improve. And compared to what is there today coming out of China, we are many, many steps ahead on the actual performance on the electrical consumption. So I believe we have, with the pressurized alkaline system, a world-leading technology that will put Nel in a position to win projects globally.

Thank you. I'll do another one from David Lopez. Given the Trump administration's policies, have there been any advances in the Michigan plant project? And if the project has been halted, will we have to wait until the new U.S. election to see if the new administration is more supportive of green energy?

So we've said before on this topic that we will not build an empty factory. And unfortunately, in a market situation as it is, there is no market for building that facility. So we are not actively doing anything on that side. We would have loved to, but we would need to wait until there is a market.

Thank you. I see we have another question from Anders Rosenlund. Please go ahead.

Could you comment on working capital and possible efforts to bring down the very large inventories?

Yes. So the key thing on the large inventory is inventory that we have because some of our customers basically stopped their projects. Some of them even went bankrupt. We are working very hard to get that over to a cash conversion, working with several concrete projects, but we are dependent on new project wins to sell that. We're not adding to the problem by producing more. Also for the PEM side, with the newly advanced orders, we are making sure that we hold back our commitments until we have money on the book. So you could say the larger than normal inventory we have is a result of some of the historical project cancellations.

And the reason why it stays high for a couple of quarters in a row is because of lack of alkaline sales?

Yes. So there's limited new large alkaline orders that are possible to both sign and then deliver on. That's one of the things we are working very hard with and it's a key priority to get that sold.

Thank you, Anders. It seems we are now out of questions, so I think we'll end the Q&A session here. If anything comes after the call, you're always welcome to reach out to us at [email protected]. And I'll hand the word back to the management for any final remarks.

Yes. I think if we look isolated on the 2025 financials, we are, of course, not happy with the figures. We wish the performance would have been higher, but it became clear quite early that we would have a difficult 2025 in terms of top line and EBITDA. What I'm happy about is that 2025 has definitely not been a lost year. We have used 2025 to strengthen key partnerships with strategic EPC partners, Reliance, technology development partners. We have massively invested in our new technology platforms and successfully developed those platforms towards commercial launch.

Because of the difficult markets and lack of demand for legacy products, we had to accelerate the R&D effort and bring the launch plans closer to us, and I am proud of the organization for its ability to deliver on that ambition. We go to market now with a new product in May. And I really, really believe in that product, because it has been designed from scratch based on the right set of, let's call it, guiding stars, so what is required to make hydrogen projects work.

We have looked not only at our piece, the stack, but we have taken a system view and really tried to look at this from the customers' perspective, what can we do to bring total system costs down? What can we do to bring the cost of producing hydrogen down? And that makes me quite optimistic about 2026. Despite a difficult 2025, we had a good ending to the year with important contract wins in Norway. We still see demand for our PEM products. I think we are likely to sign more PEM contracts going forward. And then hopefully, we can get more momentum on the alkaline side through our efforts to get rid of the inventory of electrodes, but also start to build the order backlog for the pressurized technology going into '27 and '28.

So with that, I think we will come back in April with even more news on the launch of the new product platform, and we look forward to maturing that.

Good morning from Oslo. We are ready to announce Nel's Third Quarter 2025 Results Presentation. My name is Hakon Volldal. Sorry, the microphone is on Wilhelm. My name is Hakon Volldal. I am the CEO of Nel. With me today, I have our CFO, Kjell Christian Bjornsen; and also Wilhelm Flinder, our Head of IR, Communication and Marketing.

We have the following agenda. Nel in brief, highlights from the third quarter, a short commercial update, a short political update and a short technology update. And we will, as always, end the session with questions and hopefully answers.

Nel is a fully dedicated electrolyzer technology company. We have been listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange since 2014. We have sold more than 7,000 electrolyzer stacks across the world. I think if we do the count, it's now moved to more than 80 countries and we have been in business since 1927. We have 1.5 gigawatts of manufacturing capacity, 1 gigawatt here in Norway and 0.5 gigawatt in the U.S. for PEM.

We are about 350 employees. At the moment, we are investing heavily in R&D to develop next-generation platforms. We have a global sales and office network. We have become a preferred partner with industry leaders such as Samsung, Reliance and General Motors, and we have NOK 1.8 billion in cash reserves.

Our value proposition is based on our long track record, what we call an unrivaled track record. As I just mentioned, we can trace our history back to 1927 that gives us decades of experience, more than any other electrolyzer OEM today. We also have a large installed base that we can learn from in terms of performance and energy consumption and degradation and all the important things that customers want to know.

We claim technology leadership. We have multiple technology platforms, both what we call the alkaline platform and the PEM platform. We have guaranteed and proven performance and we have game-changing next-generation solutions.

That brings me to the third leg of our value proposition, cost and scale leadership. We have been frontrunners in cost reductions, starting with automated manufacturing and also full-scale plants together with partners to bring down the total cost of ownership. And we have market-leading production capabilities, including one of the most advanced and fully automated assembly plants for electrolyzers here in Norway and now also in the U.S.

The finance department has aggregated the numbers and here are the results. On top line, revenue from contracts with customers, NOK 303 million. EBITDA, minus NOK 37 million. Order intake in the quarter, NOK 57 million. Order backlog, NOK 984 million. And we ended the quarter with a cash balance of NOK 1.757 billion.

Not a lot of press releases or news in the quarter among the highlights and subsequent events. We can mention a follow-on equipment order from a customer in Switzerland called H2 Energy for a containerized 2.5 megawatt electrolyzer. We signed a FEED study for a 100-plus megawatt project in Northern Europe and we also signed a pre-FEED contract for a 100-megawatt-plus project in Southern Europe.

Let's study the group financials a bit more carefully. The revenue from contracts with customers, NOK 303 million. That's a decrease of 17% compared to last year, while it's up 74% quarter-on-quarter. Compared to the second quarter, a strong rebound. Total revenue and income, NOK 349 million versus NOK 391 million last year. That brings the year-to-date to NOK 633 million versus NOK 974 million in '24. So obviously, a bit tougher market in '25 than in '24.

We have done what we can to improve performance by managing our cost base and also improving execution capabilities and margin on deliveries. You can see some of the results here. EBITDA in the quarter, minus NOK 37 million compared to minus NOK 90 million last year. Also improvement when it comes to EBIT, pretax income and net income.

Just one remark regarding the cash flow from operating activities, which is weaker than in the third quarter of 2024 despite the higher EBITDA and that has to do with the payment milestones. We had recognized or we had not recognized, we had collected cash from customers on some of the work that we recognize as revenues in the third quarter prior to doing the work.

So cash, we try to stay cash positive on projects. And that meant that in the third quarter of '25, although the results are good, we have been prepaid for the work that we did, hence, cash flow from operating activities a bit weaker than the EBITDA should signal. still a healthy cash balance at the end of the quarter.

Turning our attention to the alkaline financials. We can see that the third quarter represented a strong rebound from a slow first quarter and second quarter. And you can also see that in quarters where we have solid revenue, the alkaline business is EBITDA positive. We have proven that on multiple occasions, but we need the revenue to be around NOK 200 million plus in order to balance the books. With high utilization of our factories and with high revenues, we also had a profitable business, i.e., the business model for the alkaline segment works. The challenge is to fill the factory.

For PEM, it's slightly different. We still lack the top line to turn a profitable or to have a positive EBITDA. We reported a 15% decrease in revenue compared to last year. And a lot of the revenue in the quarter was driven by containerized electrolyzers, delivery of containerized electrolyzers.

EBITDA fairly flat in the first quarter, second quarter and third quarter. In general, we would say that product and project margins are up due to better project execution, but we also have some heavy investments going into the next development or next-generation development of stacks.

Order intake in the quarter, NOK 57 million. And that meant that a lot of the revenues we recognized in the quarter came from our order backlog, which now stands at NOK 984 million. The breakdown of the NOK 984 million, roughly NOK 600 million on the alkaline side and NOK 400 million for PEM. And again, the order backlog is subject to risks such as delays and/or cancellations, and we have given further information on that in the notes to the quarterly report.

Cash burn rate is important. What this slide tells you is that we have a cash burn rate, which is coming down. We spend less money on operations and on investments than we did in the past. It's -- we're still talking negative numbers. But compared to '22, '23 and '24, the cash burn is significantly down. And that's important in a market which has been slightly slower than we anticipated and expected to control the expenses.

We are down from a peak staffing of 430 1 year ago to down to 354 at the end of the third quarter this year. And it will continue to go gradually down. Personnel expenses down year-to-date, almost NOK 60 million. The slight uptick in the third quarter is due to periodization and payment of vacation money in Norway. So the trend is that the number of employees is coming down, and we do that in order to, of course, reduce the burn rate and extend our runway.

We still set up to conduct significant R&D work. We are working on very exciting developments, both in alkaline and PEM. I'll get back to some of that later. This is predominantly adjusting our manufacturing capacity and also project execution capacity in the wake of a slower market.

On the commercial side, the pipeline is indeed large and increasing. We try to keep our pipeline up to date by canceling or removing all the projects that will not move forward. But actually, the pipeline is growing. However, final investment decisions continue to be pushed out in time. Several target projects in the 20 to 150 megawatt range are expected to take final investment decision during the next quarters.

And we are currently involved in more than 500 megawatts of paid FEED studies for large-scale systems and our EPC partners are involved in additional studies. Two examples. In the quarter, we signed a FEED study with a reputable European company for a 100-plus megawatt Northern European project. We also signed a pre-FEED contract for a 100-plus megawatt project in Southern Europe with a reputable company.

So the quality of the FEED studies or our FEED study partners is very high. I would be surprised if none of these projects would materialize. And for a lot of the FEED studies, Nel is conducting exclusive work. That means if the project takes FID, Nel will be the partner that will receive the purchase order.

One highlight after the close of the third quarter was an additional purchase order for a containerized PEM system, what we call it MC500. And this actually represents the third purchase from H2 Energy in Switzerland.

What you see on the picture is the second installation we delivered to them. It's under a beautiful bridge and the electrolyzer is in the middle of the picture. It's hard to see it, and that's good because it proves that the footprint isn't that big to produce hydrogen. It's a rather neat compact installation.

The third unit that H2 Energy will buy will be installed in Switzerland and supply hydrogen for mobility and industrial applications. And we're proud of this order because it's a repeat order and it proves that Nel's customer satisfaction is high and it also I think documents our track record when it comes to delivering working electrolyzers around the world.

Short political update. We have sent a letter together with other leading European OEMs to the European Commission. And we asked or urged the European Commission to adjust the hydrogen regulations. Less than 1 gigawatt of capacity has been deployed in Europe compared to the 6 gigawatt target that was initially set for 2025. The industry promised to establish annual manufacturing capacity close to 10 gigawatts. We have done that, but demand is still not strong enough.

And we believe part of the reason is that the current rules and regulations are delaying project realizations and also undermining demand. We need a more pragmatic way of regulating the market. We need to extend exemptions for the frontrunners and also more flexibility in how hydrogen plants are regulated. We believe it's possible to do this within the context of the legal framework that has been established.

And we remain hopeful that by changing some of the rules and regulations in the current framework, it's possible to speed up hydrogen adoption across Europe. It's a broad push for this. And I think the EU has also, in the past, shown that through the Omnibus process, they can indeed work with existing frameworks and speed up and simplify, remove some of the red tape in those quite fast.

Moving on to the technology update. One of the more important things we are working on is the next generation pressurized alkaline system. I have presented this many times in the past, but just to highlight sort of the key selling points of this, why are we spending a lot of time perfecting this and why are we bringing this to market shortly?

It is because we reduced the footprint by up to 80% compared to our existing system. And that's important, because in Europe, which is indeed a very important market for clean hydrogen these days, you don't always have the space to do whatever you want. You don't -- you're constrained by existing land plots, properties. You have brownfield sites where you don't have the opportunity to just expand your hydrogen plants in all sorts of directions, you need to limit the footprint of the system. This is a very compact footprint. It's less than 230 square meters for 25 megawatts of capacity.

Along with that comes a significant reduction in investment cost and not just for the Nel part, but for the entire system. We're talking about a total system CapEx reduction up to 60%. And it will be more energy efficient than anything available in the market today, we believe. The system energy consumption will be less than 50 kilowatt hours per kilogram of hydrogen, which is a significant improvement versus what is available today. That's why this is important.

What you see on the right-hand side is a real picture. It's not a PowerPoint. It's a picture from Heroya, where we are building half of what you saw on the previous page. It's pilot or prototype. The mechanical installation is done. The cold commissioning is done. We're entering hot commissioning, meaning we will produce molecules very shortly.

We hope to do that in November. We hope to take FID on a new production line before year-end 2025. We hope to validate this as a running installation, producing gas hour after hour, day after day in 2026 and we hope to also commercially launch it in 2026 and deliver at scale, meaning hundreds of megawatts in 2027.

So this is not a PowerPoint concept anymore, it's real. And we remain very positive that this will be a way for our customers to actually move their respective projects along at a faster pace and with much more attractive financials behind them. Unless we can enable our customers to have positive business cases, we cannot sell our equipment

And I think with this, we have looked at all the different aspects of building a hydrogen plant and how you can do that in the most cost competitive way, taking the customers' point of view and not only focusing on the hardware cost, but focusing on the total project cost where things are modularized, standardized, brought to site, it's quick to assemble it and it involves limited engineering and limited construction time. So more on that in the coming quarter. We will also, in the coming quarter, give a more detailed update on our next-generation PEM stack. But that's what we have for today.

And I will be joined now by Kjell Christian Bjornsen, our CFO, to answer any questions you might have. Wilhelm, you have the usual text you need to read before we start.

Thank you, Hakon. Some general information before we kick off the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] If we have time, we will also take written questions submitted through the Q&A function. And if there are questions we don't have time to answer, please reach out to us on [email protected]. And a reminder, we will not comment on outlook specific targets, detailed terms and conditions on specific contracts as well as questions on specific markets. Modeling questions, we will also appreciate is taken offline.

So let's kick off. First question comes from Elliott Geoffrey Peter Jones [indiscernible].

Congrats on the numbers. Just a quick question on the backlog. Obviously, you had a nice customer milestone payment this quarter. Could you give us any kind of insight as to how the backlog looks going forward? And if maybe you're expecting similar payments in the coming quarters or is the backlog now looking a bit more kind of longer term in terms of milestone payments? Any kind of color on that would be very helpful.

So thank you for the question. We would then point to the notes to the report where we split out what is currently planned for delivery in the rest of '25 and what's planned for '26 and later. And finally, what is at significant risk of delay or cancellation. And they will have some of those details.

I would really want to point out that what is planned for the rest of the year should not be seen as guidance. There are huge shifts from sometimes month-to-month, week-to-week where something might just not come in one quarter and then skip into the next one. And we will not give an update during the quarter on what is in that table when it comes to the rest of the year, but I hope that answers your question.

Next question comes from Arthur Sitbon.

Just trying to think about revenues for the next quarters and next year. What I realized is that in that table that you just talked about actually, the amount for potential cancellations has not changed for several quarters in a row I think. So I was wondering, if on that, you think the worst is now behind you?

And also related to that, you talked about potential FID in next quarters for projects. I was wondering, at the earliest, when do you think you can get order intake linked to those potential FIDs just to try to better understand the sequence of revenues for coming quarters and years.

So if I could start with the past and then Hakon can take the future. So you are correct, we have had a backlog of large projects signed a couple of years ago that have been delayed and/or canceled and some of them are still in the process of negotiating basically a workout with the customer. And that's why the risk figure there has been unchanged for some time.

And I would highlight that there is significant risk with those. But based on the current contractual situation, there is an obligation for the customer to take that. We believe the worst there is past us also because we have delivered so much of what was not on that list. There's always some minor risk on the PEM side, but that's typically smaller orders on the, what we call, the industrial areas. And then Hakon?

Yes. And it's notoriously difficult to predict when FIDs will be taken and what the time gap will be between an FID and a purchase order. I would say our current pipeline is spread out from, I would say, today until the end of '26, we have opportunities that could materialize and result in equipment orders for Nel in the fourth quarter, in the first quarter, in the second quarter, in the third quarter and the fourth quarter. But I would say, all of the 500 megawatts that we signaled that we're doing FEED work on will not happen in the same quarter, they will be spread out. Some of them might not lead to any equipment orders.

But I would also like to say that the FEED phase is prior to reaching FID. And that means the FEED what we have said, 500 megawatts in FEED work, will potentially lead to FIDs and equipment orders in '26. Some of that might drag into '27. The FEED work we have already done in '25 and also in '24 might lead to equipment orders from today and throughout '26.

So I think it's super hard to say something generic about this. But based on our current pipeline and what we can say or see about the maturity of these different projects, we can have equipment orders -- significant equipment orders in every single quarter going forward.

Next question comes from Skye Landon.

I was just wondering, on the FEED projects that you're working on in this 500 megawatts, are you able to comment whether this is basically based on the new alkaline technology or is this more around the old alkaline technology? And if it's on the old stuff, when do you think the new stuff will kind of start flowing into your pipeline?

The FEED work we're currently conducting is for what you referred to as the old or the current alkaline technology, and that's important because we have an inventory of equipment that we need to sell and this is what is available.

When I refer to possible equipment orders every single quarter from now on until the end of '26, it will most likely be for what we already have. The new equipment will not -- we will launch that commercially next year, but we haven't started to take orders for that equipment. We have a soft launch towards certain customers that would like to know what we can offer in '27, '28, '29, but we will not launch it commercially until next year and start building the order backlog for that new equipment in '26.

And then maybe you could maybe give a comment or an update on partnerships with General Motors and updates on kind of like the push forward you're making with the PEM product and then also collaborations with Samsung and Saipem and so on and so forth. It would be good to get an update on that.

We should almost have included an additional slide, Wilhelm. But I would say we have a handful of strategic partners. Reliance Industries, India's largest private company, I think announced during their annual meeting that they will build a huge electrolyzer factory in India, 1 gigawatt initially and then moving that to 3 gigawatts and that will be based on Nel's technology.

So that's according to the previously announced technology licensing agreement, which will be very beneficial for Nel. It will give us a revenue stream from the Indian market when Reliance starts to produce electrolyzers in India. And I think the time line indicated for that is that towards the end of '26 they want to have that 1 gigawatt line in India up and running. We are working closely with Reliance to make that happen. It's a team from Nel working with a big team from Reliance.

Samsung, very important strategic partner. They handle some of the large projects in part of the world where it's difficult for Nel to have local representation. They're especially strong in the Middle East, in Asia, but they also have projects in Europe and in the U.S. It's a global partner that gives us credibility and can provide turnkey plant solutions. They deliver a full working hydrogen plant with performance guarantees on system level.

The same goes for Saipem. They've also developed a turnkey solution package they can deliver with Nel inside, as we call it, and are involved -- both of them are involved in multiple potential projects around the world and working closely with Nel to win those potential contracts. They're not included in the 500 megawatt of FEED studies that we refer to. What they are doing with their clients will come on top, just to say that.

And with General Motors, we have had a joint development agreement in place for several years where we have benefited from General Motors' decades of experience with fuel cell technology. We've taken their learnings and know-how and applied that on the electrolyzer side to make a PEM electrolyzer that will revolutionize how PEM electrolysis is done.

And we -- just to sort of give that away, we are now building a short stack in full size of that electrolyzer. It's very exciting. CapEx targets and OpEx targets are extremely attractive. And we will finalize that work and continue to work on that in '26, but it's slightly behind what we call the pressurized alkaline platform. It will take more time to mature that. But there's still a relationship with GM. Although as we move forward, we will gradually have to take over and do the industrialization ourselves or with other partners.

We have received one written question as well. [Operator Instructions] So there's a question from [ Nicolas Legrand ]. What do you consider to be the main regulatory barriers in Europe that are currently hindering the development of hydrogen production solutions? How is the company addressing these challenges?

Yes. I think that was what I referred to as the letter that Nel together with major other electrolyzer OEMs, including thyssenkrupp Nucera and Siemens Energy, John Cockerill and others sent to the European Commission that the legislative framework that we have in Europe is actually not bad. It's quite good, but it's very strict.

It makes it hard to start up projects because the grace period until you need to comply with quite strict rules on how you source your energy, where you source your energy and how that energy is made up to give you the full benefit of producing clean hydrogen is very difficult to deal with. And the first movers need a bit more flexibility. Maybe they need a grid connection. They can't get 100% wind or solar.

And what the current regulation says is that every single hour that you use energy, it has to be renewable. So I think to give them a bit more flexibility on what kind of energy they can source, where they can source it, does it have to be local or can it be come from somewhere else, can they sell surplus energy back to the grid. All of that needs to be relaxed in order to make the business cases fly for the early movers.

As we approach 2030 and halfway into the next decade, it's possible and I think reasonable to comply with the EU regulations. It's just that it's very strict for the first movers. It's a framework that is almost taking for granted that we will be successful. But we need to create success before we introduce all the rules and regulations that they have.

So for the ones that are familiar with the regulations, it's what we call, the 3 pillars of -- what's it called again? Help me out.

Additionality...

Additionality. The 3 additionality principles and temporal correlation and geographic correlation and whatnot. There are very sort of specific rules that we would like to be relaxed for the next 2, 3, 4 years. The delegated act is what I wanted to say, the 3 pillars of the delegated act, they should be relaxed.

Very good. It seems we are -- there's no further questions. So I think we'll end the Q&A session there. I'll give the word back to management for any final remarks.

Yes. Thank you for joining us. I think the numbers in the quarter were promising or at least satisfactory compared to first quarter and second quarter. It was a nice rebound on the revenue side and also good EBITDA performance. It's not positive EBITDA, which we ultimately want, but it was a step in the right direction.

We have said that we remain cautiously optimistic about equipment orders in the coming quarters. There are opportunities out there. The opportunities have a higher quality than in the past. They are with reputable companies. We have good partners that we're benefiting from.

And I think when we meet next in February, we will give a more detailed update, both on the markets and on the technology plans we have for the pressurized alkaline and the next-generation PEM. So hope to see you back then also with some interesting events to talk more about that.