Earnings call transcript: Polygiene Q3 2025 sees revenue beat, stock surges

Polygiene Group reported its third-quarter earnings for 2025 on October 23, revealing a revenue of SEK 36.4 million, surpassing the forecast of 34 million USD. Despite a 10.8% year-over-year decline in sales, the company’s stock surged by 9.76% in pre-market trading, reflecting investor optimism fueled by new product launches and strong regional performance in the Americas. According to InvestingPro data, the company maintains a strong financial position with more cash than debt on its balance sheet and a healthy current ratio of 4.81x.

Key Takeaways

• Polygiene’s revenue exceeded forecasts despite a year-over-year decline.
• The company’s stock rose by nearly 10% following the earnings announcement.
• New product innovations, particularly Staycool technology, show promising initial results.
• The Americas region posted a 48% increase in sales, offsetting declines in other regions.
• Foreign exchange effects significantly impacted sales figures, contributing to a 7% decline.

Company Performance

Polygiene’s overall performance in Q3 2025 was mixed, with a notable revenue beat contrasting with a year-over-year sales decline. The company’s focus on innovation and new product launches, such as the Staycool technology and a mosquito-repellent textile treatment, has been well-received in the market. However, the company faced challenges from foreign exchange impacts and regional sales declines in EMEA and APAC.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: SEK 36.4 million, down 10.8% year-over-year.
• Gross Margin: 71.1%, slightly down from 71.6%.
• EBITDA: SEK 2.9 million, compared to SEK 5.7 million in the previous year.
• Cash Position: SEK 45.3 million at the end of the period.

Market Reaction

Polygiene’s stock price rose by 9.76% in pre-market trading, reaching 9 SEK. This increase reflects investor confidence in the company’s future prospects, driven by positive reception of new product innovations and a strong performance in the Americas. The stock remains below its 52-week high but shows a strong recovery from its lows. InvestingPro’s Fair Value analysis suggests the stock is currently undervalued, presenting a potential opportunity for investors. The company’s beta of 1.38 indicates higher volatility compared to the market average.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, Polygiene aims to end 2025 with sales levels comparable to 2024, with expectations for a strong fourth quarter. The company is focused on commercializing new technologies and anticipates market normalization in 2026. Guidance for future quarters suggests continued innovation and strategic brand collaborations.

Executive Commentary

"We are not going to change anything in our long-term plan," stated Ulrika Björk, CEO, highlighting the company’s commitment to its strategic direction. Björk expressed optimism about the potential of new technologies, noting, "The tests we’ve done... over 90% fewer landings on the treated fabric."

Risks and Challenges

• Foreign exchange fluctuations continue to pose a risk to sales figures.
• Regional sales declines in EMEA and APAC could impact overall performance.
• Macroeconomic factors, including tariffs and external disruptions, may affect business operations.
• The success of new product launches is critical to maintaining investor confidence.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about recovery expectations and the impact of new technologies like Staycool. The company confirmed no significant customer losses and highlighted the potential of its mosquito-repellent technology. Seasonal sales patterns were also discussed as a factor influencing performance.

Full transcript - Polygiene AB (POLYG) Q3 2025:

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: Good morning and welcome to the presentation of the third quarter for Polygiene Group. I am Ulrika Björk and I’m the CEO of the company.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: I’m Niklas Blomstedt and I am the CFO.

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: I’m going to start to show you some highlights of the quarter. It’s been an interesting journey the last six months. I’m going to show you here some of the headlines. What we could see coming out of a quite poor Q2, we have seen improved performance and especially driven by a faster recovery in Polygiene. AdMaster still has a little bit more time to come back after the drop in Q2, but we can see the business is overall returning slowly. AdMaster has received some quite significant big orders in the beginning of October here. We believe that the year-end will be very, very strong for us. We also held our first global agent and distributor conference in September. We had one in Malmö and one in Manchester. That is to strengthen the external sales force we have.

Very, very interesting is that we’ve seen the first commercial orders for Staycool. I will come back to that a little bit later when I go more in depth. Tomorrow’s news about the patent we filed for a new groundbreaking technology within mosquito applications. First, we’re going to have a summary of the financial updates.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: Yeah, I think we start with a short summary. We can see that sales was 36.4 versus 40.8. It’s down with 10.8%. The FX effect is 7%, so it’s around 4 or 5% that’s the volume driven. The rest is FX. We see a gross margin of 71.1 versus 71.6. If you compare quarter to quarter, we can see that there is a negative FX impact of 2% versus last year. Without the FX, the margin would actually be stronger this year versus last year. That’s mainly driven by the mix we have with stronger Polygiene sales versus AdMaster sales. The operating cost is more or less flat, 21.9 versus 21.8. If we look on the fixed costs, they are actually lower in the quarter versus last year.

This commission is a little bit higher this quarter versus last year, and that’s driven by sales and the customer mix that we have. We have an EBITDA of SEK 2.9 million versus 5.7. An EBITDA of 1.5 versus 4.2. Cash flow of minus 1.2 versus 3.8. At the end of the period, we had a cash of 45.3. As we said, the main drop of sales versus last year was FX. Polygiene has now 66% of the total sales versus AdMaster 34%, and that’s then an increase versus last year when it was 57 versus 43. Overall, AdMaster dropped with 28% versus last year, while Polygiene increased with 2%. EMEA, if you look on the regions, decreased with 24%, driven mainly then by AdMaster. We also saw a drop in APAC with 15%. Americas increased with 48%, and that was both in Polygiene and in AdMaster.

I will say a little bit more details, but we touched on all of them already. As we said, a little bit lower sales driven by FX. Still a strong margin, even stronger if we take out the FX. Cost more or less flat. Fixed cost is lower than last year. EBITDA 2.9 versus 5.7. EBITDA 1.5 versus 4.2. Cash flow minus 1.2 versus 3.8.

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: Thank you, Niklas. Now I will go into the different segments. I will start with the Polygiene, the textile side of our business. As Niklas says, we have 2% growth in the quarter. Year to date, we are still on a very good level on plus 19%. The FX impact, Niklas mentioned before. It is very interesting to see. It’s a very, very strong recovery in the brand sales. In Q2, we were down on the brand sales quite significantly. We managed to mitigate with higher distribution sales. In this quarter, here you can see that the brand sales are actually picking up very, very well. That is the core business. It is the brand sales. The distributor sales are more dependent on the stock levels. This is a really, really good sign that the worst part of this tariff disruption is a bit over now.

We can see the brands return and start to produce again. We onboarded a handful of new brands. We have this golf brand here from Japan and Percé. It’s part of the Goldwin Group, where we have a very, very strong collaboration. They treat almost 90% of their collection, which is a really, really good sign and powerful sign of the value we add. We have another brand in Germany called Camel Active, who has substantially big sales to be a new brand. That’s also really, really satisfying to see. We hosted the Global Agent Conference here in Malmö in September. That is to strengthen the sales force. We had 22 of our sales agents here in Malmö. We believe that this is a way to grow the business moving forward.

To invest one hour in the agent network will give us a return of 22 hours if we can get them on board as strong as our own sales force. This was worth the investment. The feedback has been extraordinary, very positive. High activity, as always. We have trade show seasons. We had trade shows in Portland, in Germany, and also in China. We’ve been to an investor road trip in August to try to attract investors abroad. We’ve been over to New York. We met around 50 professional investors. The feedback has been very, very positive so far. We just wanted to try and see the attractiveness of Polygiene Group in other markets. We believe there is a big interest because everybody can relate to what we are doing. Everybody knows the customer we work with. It’s very appealing for them. We had a collaboration with Bikesite.

It’s a German online retailer. This is very exciting for us to get out there and spread the messaging. You can see Bikesite as an online retailer who gathers brands from many different places. You can search for Polygiene specifically, and then you get all the treated garments in one search. That is very, very powerful. That’s great, great news. I’m also going to talk a little bit about the project developments we had lately. We launched Staycool in March, and that has been an overall expectation, I must say, because this is not normally how fast it goes from launch to commercial orders. We introduced the technology to around 100 of our existing customers, and about 50% of those confirmed to trials, which is very, very strong.

We only had a couple, like two, three, who rejected because it didn’t fit in their planning right now, but 50 had already committed to say, yeah, let’s go commercial with this. We received the first orders in Q3, and we also have they’re going to be delivered here in Q4 as well. It’s not massive, but it’s a really, really good start. I think we could say the volume is around a couple of tons, I would say, in these first orders. The main sales will be for 2027, the summer and spring season 2027, and that is in production next autumn. For the second half of 2026, that’s where we will see the main volumes.

We are working really hard on the marketing side to create all the materials, all the co-branding assets, all the hang tags, labels, everything to be able to support when these products will be in store. Just a small short update on ShedGuard. This is the innovation project that we launched two years ago, and it’s been more slow than we thought because it’s a very complicated technology. We have tested positive results for specific fabrics, and that’s the way we want to go. We’re going to go with specific fabrics. We have approached a couple of partners, and some of them actually decided to move on to bulk trials. We did lab trials before, but now we’re going to do these applications in a real-world environment, and that’s very exciting. I think it’s ongoing now, and we have to wait another one, two months to see the results.

We have offered commercial agreements to partners, but we haven’t signed anything yet. There are ongoing discussions. It’s still absolutely very exciting. It’s still alive, but it takes a more long time than we expected. Of course, I want to just mention the new technology that we have filed a patent for. This is a new mosquito-repellent textile treatment. It is an advanced textile treatment. What we do is we remove the scent compounds that attract mosquitoes. This is a new innovation that we have the IPR now. We waited around one year before we talked about this publicly because we wanted to file the patent, because we believe we have really, really strong findings here. This is something we’ve been developing in-house with our expertise, with the PhDs, the chemists we have in-house who could really found this new application.

We know that we have a lot of customers in these sports and outdoors where this is a highly demanded product. We believe this also could be a next successful launch for us. The timing is right because the regulatory challenges for traditional anti-mosquito products, it’s really hard now in Europe. They already had banned some kind of products that have active substances like the pyridamide and others. That is why the timing is perfect for this non-biocidal technology. The patent was filed successfully yesterday. It is really, really interesting to see how this is going to turn out in the coming year. The tests we’ve done, we’ve done many tests. In control tests, according to the standards, we can show that over 90% fewer landings on the treated fabric versus non-treated. That is really, really strong results. The discussions with customers will start now.

We can talk about it openly. We are going to talk about this next week. We have a big trade show in Munich. We also have ISPO coming up. This is super interesting. I’m really, really happy to announce this. Moving on to AdMaster, who had, as I said, quite challenging last six months here. The quarter was down 28%. We also have an FX impact on the pound SEK, as with the dollars. What we can see now is that the industry has confirmed the same developments as AdMaster. We visited a big healthcare trade show this week. We interviewed around 10, 12 of our customers there. Everybody’s witness of the same pattern. Strong Q1, strong beginning of the year, really, really struggling Q2, Q3. They can also feel that the business is returning now. As I said, we got some significant orders coming in here in October.

That is why we believe the Q4 will be a strong quarter for us. In Q3, we also saw the distributors starting to stock up. This is a good sign because they are the ones first in line to order from us. They have orders on their end as well. I think this is a good sign. We also had the distributor meeting in Manchester, again to strengthen the sales force we have. The distributor network and the distributor sales in AdMaster is very important. About 30% of the business goes through these distributors. There was also a high activity level. Of course, it’s a big focus now to get back on track to have the customers starting development projects again. That is the main focus in AdMaster now.

The last slide, the outlook for the rest of the year, is that this temporary setback has been caused by external factors. We are not going to change anything in our long-term plan. We’re going to continue to grow as we started in 2024 when we had six or seven quarters in a row where we were growing. Even Q1 this year was strong with 20% growth. Then we had this disruption. It’s not only in our industry; it’s all over the markets and industries. I really hope that we can get it back on track again. I see signs, so I’m quite positive. We’re going to focus now on commercializing the new technologies, especially the Staycool and the mosquito-repellent textile treatment. We have to work hard to get everything in line: the supply chain, marketing material, test data, everything. We are now finalizing the budget process for 2026.

That’s ongoing. We have a very strong ambition to end the sales in 2025 in line with what we had in 2024, and also to maintain a cost level that is flat. That is the ambition for the last quarter. I’m positive. I’ve seen signs of recovery here. I think that was all. Now we will have some questions, I believe.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: Yeah, we have. I don’t know if there have been some questions during the presentations, but we have some that have been done before. We can start with the ones that we had before. I think most of them we actually had covered during the presentation. There was a little bit of discussion about what product area we see will be the next one that will bring increase of the revenue. I think we touched upon like the ShedGuard, mainly Staycool and mosquito-repellent textile treatment. That’s the official ones, of course. We’re also always working with development that’s not official yet.

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: For the technologies we launched, we still have other things in the pipeline. What we launched now, I would say that Staycool has started off very strong. The interest is really, really high. I would say Staycool will be.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: Yeah. A little bit, when do you think we will be back? As we said, AdMaster looks like Q4 and Polygiene. I would say we already see that in the report in Q3. We had some questions about ShedGuard. I think we said that we’re doing field testing right now with the customers. There was something about Staycool. There we said we had the first order. I think we covered that one. There was a little bit of discussion about this big contract that we should see some signs of in Q4.

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: I mentioned that in the report. Due to the tariff war and all the disruption, this has been delayed because they are producing in China. It’s an American brand. It’s been delayed. We have started with smaller collections already, but we are working on a new starting date for the big bulk volumes.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: There was a discussion about the drop. I think we touched upon that. It was mostly external factors. If we lost any customers, no, we haven’t really lost any.

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: Lost completely. Volumes are, of course, down on some of them.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: Yeah. New customers, I think we touched upon that with Percé and Camel Active. Also, a little bit about the quarterly, how the pattern is for the quarter when it comes to sales and cost. It’s a little bit different if you look on Polygiene and AdMaster. Polygiene, I would say Q3 is normally the strongest quarter, while Q1 is probably the lowest one. AdMaster is more or less flat. More of anything, I would say the Q1 is probably a little bit lower. The Chinese years always try to mess up the production pace for our customers in Q1. Otherwise, I would say AdMaster is more flat, while Polygiene Q3 is strong and Q1 is lower. From a cost point of view, I would say the fixed costs are more or less flat. It’s not really a big difference between the quarters.

It’s mainly the commissions, which is driven by sales and the customer mix.

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: Yeah.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: We have some questions here during the presentation. Given the recovery in Q4, what are our thoughts about the more normalized market conditions in 2026?

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: You never know, right, what’s going to happen. Nothing is like we can expect. From now, we can see that the recovery started. We really hope that there are no other things that will disrupt our business for 2026. We really, really hope we can get back on track. I think, like I said, we’re going to end the year around the same place where we were when we ended last year. We will not lose a lot. Of course, from now on, we want to create the growth.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: I think if you look on the history, I would say this year, Q1 was strong. Especially, I would say March was really strong. I would say a week into April, it just stopped due to the tariffs. It’s really difficult to have that to see in the future. The gross margins, what about the new products? Staycool, do we expect the margins to be in line with existing products?

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: It’s a cheaper technology in terms of that. It’s a cheaper technology, but you need to add a little bit more. I would say they will be in line, slightly lower than the other business. Slightly lower.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: The key factors for commercial launch of Staycool and mosquito-repellent textile treatment, I guess it’s a little bit different because Staycool is probably easier and can be faster versus mosquito-repellent textile treatment. I guess that will take a little bit longer.

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: On the other hand, we have so many customers in the fields where you’re hunting, fishing, outdoors, which have a huge demand for these technologies. We already have discussions with the companies who are highly interested in this because it’s a sustainable technology, no biocidal. It’s a new innovation, how we present this and how it works. I think it could be really interesting.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: Yeah.

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: I think that was all.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: OK.

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: Yeah, I’d like to say thank you for listening and see you again in February when we’re going to present the Q4. Thank you.

Niklas Blomstedt, CFO, Polygiene Group: Thank you.

Ulrika Björk, CEO, Polygiene Group: Thanks.

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