Tubacex Posts €5.5 Million Loss as Earnings Fall and Abu Dhabi Pressures Mount
Key Facts
Tubacex posted a net loss attributable to shareholders of €5.5 million in the first nine months of 2026, compared with net profit of €16.7 million in the corresponding period of 2025, according to a company disclosure published by Spain’s securities market regulator. The results show a decline in activity and profitability during the period, alongside operational and logistical disruptions that the company said affected its value chain. By contrast, the company ended September with an order backlog slightly above its level in June. It said stable orders and the normalization of operations could provide a basis for recovering activity in 2027.
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) were €54.0 million, compared with €84.6 million in the first nine months of 2025, a decline of 36.2%, Tubacex said. The EBITDA margin fell to 11.4% from 16.1% a year earlier, indicating that the contraction affected profitability as well as sales. The company attributed pressure on earnings to lower activity, which weakened fixed-cost absorption, and to higher logistics and energy costs linked to supplies to Abu Dhabi. It added that operational and logistical disruptions at its Abu Dhabi facilities since March had affected planning, supply flows and billing across the group’s value chain. The disruptions also affected working capital, with business flows and billing interrupted, the company said.
Tubacex’s order backlog reached €1,162.4 million at the end of September, slightly above the level recorded in June, according to the company’s disclosure. It described this as the first sign of stability after several quarters of decline. But the financial figures showed pressure on liquidity and the balance sheet: working capital stood at €384.1 million on September 30, and net financial debt was €405.0 million. Both figures increased by €60.2 million compared with the end of 2025, while net financial debt to EBITDA reached 5.4 times. These levels put the trajectory of working capital and debt among the company’s main areas of focus as it works to normalize operations and supplies.
Tubacex said the fourth quarter would remain affected by a difficult environment, while its contracted order backlog and progress in normalizing operations and logistics could provide a foundation for recovering activity in 2027. It added that converting projects under negotiation and expected awards could support that path, without specifying their value in the disclosure cited here. In the nuclear energy sector, the company said it had advanced opportunities with EDF and Westinghouse, and expected additional contracts to be awarded before year-end. The company thus linked its future trajectory to stabilizing operations and converting commercial opportunities into orders, while expecting difficult conditions to persist in the near term.
On the other side of the comparison, GRAMMER said strong demand in the Asia-Pacific region for off-road, rail and road products was the main driver of growth in its commercial vehicles division. It said the division’s improvement came mainly from those two areas in the region, according to the company’s disclosure on its nine-month results. At the same time, GRAMMER lowered its full-year earnings-before-interest-and-taxes forecast, citing higher-than-expected start-up costs for new projects in the Americas, as well as the impact of the U.S.-Iran conflict and special U.S. and Mexican tariffs. It said production on the new projects began in July, and start-up costs weighed on third-quarter earnings. The company expects these factors to continue affecting fourth-quarter results.