Tomra Systems ASA (TMRAY) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

The key signal is not the headline growth, but the divergence between demand visibility and margin quality. Collection’s record revenue suggests the deposit-return buildout is still in the “installation wave” phase, where top-line can outrun earnings as mix skews toward hardware-heavy deployments and lower-margin rollouts. That usually benefits upstream component suppliers and integrators more than the platform owner, and it implies earnings power may lag revenue for 2-4 quarters until the installed base shifts toward higher recurring service and operating leverage.

Recycling weakness looks more like a capex pause than a structural end-market reset. If commercial activity is still subdued while cost actions are “on plan,” the market is likely underestimating the latency between order recovery and P&L inflection; these businesses often see 1-2 quarters of apparent stabilization before order books re-accelerate. The second-order winner is any adjacent automation vendor exposed to waste sorting and material recovery, because customers will eventually re-open projects to avoid losing share to better-capitalized peers.

The contrarian issue is that consensus may be too focused on near-term margin compression and not enough on political/regulatory optionality. Deposit schemes in Europe are policy-led, not GDP-led; once a country crosses implementation thresholds, revenue can compound even in weak consumer environments. That makes the stock less sensitive to cyclical retail volume than it appears, but also vulnerable to a sharp de-rating if rollout timing slips by even one country, because the multiple is implicitly paying for a clean expansion path over the next 12-18 months.