Sandvik Q3 orders just miss forecasts, taking shine off earnings beat

Swedish metal-cutting tools and mining gear maker Sandvik reported quarterly order intake just short of market forecasts on Friday as weakness in the energy and aerospace sectors weighed, overshadowing an earnings beat and sending shares 4% lower.

The company, one of the first major Nordic industrial firms to report July-September earnings, said order intake fell 11% organically to 19.91 billion crowns ($2.25 billion), just short of the 20.02 billion seen by analysts according to Refinitiv estimates.

“We expect the gradual recovery to continue, but the market conditions will be uncertain until we have put the pandemic firmly behind us,” Chief Executive Stefan Widing said in a statement.

“We are continuing to shift our short-term savings toward permanent initiatives to adjust to the suppressed demand also in the mid-term in aerospace and oil & gas.”

The group is considered a good gauge of industrial demand due to high shipping volumes of its cutting tools, which have short lead times from order booking to delivery and a wide customer base.

Third-quarter operating earnings at the firm, which competes with the likes of U.S. Kennametal rose to 3.46 billion crowns from 3.00 billion a year earlier, beating the 3.31 billion crown mean analyst forecast in a Refinitiv poll.

The company said in a separate statement it had decided to proceed with plans to list its specialty steel unit Materials Technology, intending to propose the listing at a shareholders’ meeting in 2022

($1 = 8.8539 Swedish crowns)

(Reporting by Johannes Hellstrom; Editing by Simon Johnson)