Castellum launches two share buyback programmes with combined 8.0 billion Swedish crown cap
Key Facts
Swedish property company Castellum's board announced in October 2026 the launch of two share buyback programmes with a combined cap of 8.0 billion Swedish crowns, according to a company statement. Chief Executive Pål Ahlsén said the amount allocated to buybacks represented 60% of the proceeds from the divestment to Wihlborgs, linking the move to the allocation of asset sale proceeds. The divestment generated 13.3 billion Swedish crowns, according to the figure Ahlsén cited in the statement announcing the programmes. Castellum completed the transaction on 1 October 2026, before announcing the allocation of this share of the proceeds to buybacks. The company is listed in Nasdaq Stockholm's large-cap segment, where its shares trade under the ticker CAST.
The plan for using proceeds from the sale of the Skåne portfolio to Wihlborgs included allocating about 40% to debt reduction, according to Castellum's statement on the divestment. The company linked this allocation to its goal of maintaining its loan-to-value ratio, alongside earmarking the remaining share for buybacks. Explaining the portfolio sale, Ahlsén said, "The portfolio will not generate a sufficiently high return for us in the future," according to his remarks in the transaction statement. On capital, an extraordinary general meeting approved the cancellation of 46,541,184 treasury shares held by the company. The cancellation was accompanied by approval of a bonus issue to restore share capital without issuing new shares, according to the statement on the meeting's resolutions.
Castellum has previously run two programmes in parallel, announcing two share buyback programmes in July 2026 linked to proceeds from its divestment to Alecta. The company set a combined cap of 3.0 billion Swedish crowns for those programmes, compared with the higher cap announced in October. Chief Financial Officer Christoffer Strömbäck said when the earlier arrangement was announced that "using two parallel share buyback programmes gives us greater flexibility." The company concluded the programmes in September 2026 after buying a total of 22,596,587 shares, according to its statement on the completion of the purchases. The shares purchased had a total value of 3.0 billion Swedish crowns, exhausting the combined cap set when the programmes were launched.
On operating performance, Castellum's interim report showed income from property management fell to 3,427 million Swedish crowns in January to September 2026. The company had reported income from property management of 3,474 million Swedish crowns in the corresponding period of 2025. Income from property management per share, however, rose to 7.39 crowns in the first nine months, compared with 7.06 crowns in the comparison period. The loan-to-value ratio stood at 37.4% at the end of September 2026, compared with 36.5% at the end of September 2025, according to the same report. Castellum is also targeting a 15% reduction in administration costs under a plan to simplify its organisation, equivalent to savings of just under 100 million Swedish crowns.
The buybacks are being carried out under an authorisation approved by the extraordinary general meeting on 14 October 2026, allowing the board to purchase and transfer the company's shares until the next annual general meeting. Total issued shares stood at 430,985,171 when the new programme was announced, according to figures in Castellum's statement. The company held 499,403 of its own shares in treasury at that time. The authorisation stipulates that the company's holdings of its own shares must not exceed 10% of all issued shares after each purchase, setting the limit governing execution. The execution window for the two announced buyback programmes runs until the 2027 annual general meeting.