The Q2 report is behind us, and management admitted that the EBITDA target will no longer be met this year. The stock dipped over 10%, and rightly so.
A clear improvement is expected for H2, but the company has now walked back its guidance three times in a row (twice in 2025, once in 2026).
The company’s “fingertip feel” for its business is quite poor. The ongoing CRM project will (perhaps) bring some improvement here, but the following sentence from the report makes my hair stand on end:
…a new CRM system…becoming significantly better at understanding where in our customers’ businesses our offer creates the greatest value
If the company hasn’t understood well how its products create or could create value for the customer, it is equally lost regarding pricing and volumes. Apparently, the company has not been very customer-centric, but rather a research- and engineering-driven house, with a culture that, from a shareholder’s perspective, is poorly tuned.
It seems increasingly likely that the organization has been a conglomerate of three separate companies, with each of the three doing more or less its own thing. Now, management promises to build one unified Acuvi, but one has to ask why only now, when it’s been about five years since the acquisitions?
A bright spot is the revenue growth of PIezoMotor, and the optimistic believe that various non-recurring expenses simply hit the numbers all at once, ruining them. The new management has a hell of a lot of work left to turn Acuvi’s course around. Right now, in that regard, the company looks like a “Savonian project” (i.e., a project that is constantly delayed or perpetually unfinished).
For those looking for positive signs, a turnaround play is available at a cheap price, but my own experience with turnaround projects is that they take longer and are more painful than they appear at the initial stage.