Kauppalehti’s Jälkipörssi also took note of the “Inderes effect” (paywall):
“Nokian Panimo’s share (BEER among friends) was down about 6 percent on Wednesday. The reason for the share price drop was by no means related to changes in the company’s business operations, but rather to the initiation of analyst coverage by the analysis firm Inderes.”
I will return to the spring stock analyses of both Inderes and Evli.
Evli, which has stopped producing analyses, forecasted 7.1 MEUR in sales and 0.8 MEUR in operating profit for Nokian Panimo in H1. As for net sales, the forecast hit the bullseye, but operating profit fell short by a hundred thousand. However, looking at the H1 figures for last year and this year as a whole, one can state that Evli was, so to speak, on the right track with its estimates.
Evli’s forecasts for this year and the next two years regarding net sales and operating profit were:
2026: 14.5 MEUR / 1.8 MEUR
2027: 16.3 MEUR / 2.0 MEUR
2028: 18.1 MEUR / 2.4 MEUR
Over the same time period, Inderes forecasts:
2026: 14.4 MEUR / 1.6 MEUR
2027: 15.8 MEUR / 1.7 MEUR
2028: 17.9 MEUR / 1.8 MEUR
When comparing the figures, attention is drawn to Inderes’s clearly more pessimistic expectation regarding profit performance. Based on H1, this has its justifications, at least for this year.
Personally, however, I find Inderes’s net sales growth expectations for the years 2027–2028 even more striking. Although the difference for 2028 compared to Evli is seemingly small, it must be remembered that Evli’s forecast was created at a time when the company had not yet announced its investments in non-alcoholic beer production. The growth expectations were built primarily on the sales of current products and related capacity investments.
In Finland, the sales of non-alcoholic beer have been recorded since 2018 in a way that class I beer (“ykkösolut”) is not mixed into the figures, but rather refers to 0.0–0.5% products. Back then in 2018, sales were 3.65 million liters. Since then, sales have risen with one exception, reaching as high as 9.30 million liters last year.
In my opinion, quite a plausible scenario would be that sales rise to around 10 million liters this year, and in the following years the growth will be slightly under a million liters per year, with growth continuing strongly after that as well.
I personally think that if Nokian Panimo succeeds in launching non-alcoholic beers with successful quality and price points in good time next year, sales in the first year could reach around 0.2 million liters, for example, and rise from there annually by almost similar leaps. In 2028, the segment’s net sales could be over half a million and in 2029 already closer to a million euros. For 2029, Inderes expects the company to have net sales of 19.5 million euros.
As for this year, increases in the soft drink tax will continue to dampen the sales of the other beverages segment in H2 as well, but I believe the situation will start to correct itself after that. In my own mind, the net sales figures predicted by Inderes will be reached in the next couple of years even without the sales of non-alcoholic beer, and the forecasts are therefore very conservative.
Well, forecasts are forecasts. So are my forecasts, and time will tell how wrong I was with my thoughts.