Redeye concludes that Q2 was stronger than Redeye had expected and, in fact, the strongest quarter in Acconeer's history. Product sales were 13% above estimates, stemming from both high module and sensor sales. Also, the number of customer launches reached an outstanding 18, which is by a wide margin also an new high.

The sequential increase from SEK11m to SEK15m of net sales was mainly driven by customers in Industry & Agriculture for the level-measurement application. Four new car models were also launched during Q2, two of which had two use cases - Volvo EX90 and Polestar 3 with both presence detection and kick sensor. As such, we expect Automotive to be an important growth driver during H2.

While revenues were ahead of our estimates, so was the cost base. As such, we will make a slight upward adjustment to our cost estimates.

Less than one month into his new job, we had quite a long chat with new CEO Ted Hansson — watch the Live Q here. From it, our impression of him is that he is a very straightforward, no-bullshit person who says it like it is.

His experience from Fingerprint Cards is very impressive, and while he did not want to brag about it, it was in fact him that brought in Huawei as a customer to Fingerprint Cards.

His experience from working in Asia for more than 20 years has made him strongly emphasize the importance of building relationships with potential customers. And by this, he emphasizes personal connections with ALL stakeholders involved in an upcoming decision - because if one stakeholder says 'no', you will not get the deal.

Top priority for the next coming months is to launch a new go-to-market strategy. While it remains to be published, we assume the cornerstone of it will be to go after the really big players in some selected niches. Hansson states that Acconeer has built a very good foundation with an amazing and really innovative product, which has also been 'tested' on a variety of customers through Acconeer's distribution network.

In the new strategy, Hansson is likely to keep the existing distribution networks. However, to reach Acconeer's full revenue potential, the company needs fewer but much larger customers. As such, we believe Acconeer will aim for a handful of really significant customers rather than a hundred small but insignificant customers.

On the question regarding if this will imply growing the organization and put more people into sales, we were not given a clear answer. However, Hansson said that he does not aim to grow the cost base but that the new strategy will determine how resources will be divided. In between the lines, we think Hansson meant that resources would be moved from engineering into sales/customer relations.

Hansson emphasizes the importance of being very close to the customer - so that everyone know what needs to be done rather than assuming or guessing what the customer wants.

During his 20 years in Asia, Hansson has worked with most electronics manufacturing companies, all distributors, all the foundries, all OSATs (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (manufacturing) vendors), all logistics companies, etc. This is definitely something that Acconeer can leverage.

Having seen the problems that will inevitably arise as Acconeer establishes itself properly on the Asian market, Hansson believes it will be easier to handle these.

Hansson says that he will use his relationships to ensure Acconeer gets the right pricing and support from suppliers. However, he also aims to open doors to enter the right brand names with Acconeer's products.

Following the Q2 report, we make limited changes to our estimates.

With a new CEO in place, we have re-evaluated our Redeye Rating of People, Business and Financials. Following this exercise, we have lowered our People and Business ratings from 4 to 3, whereas Financials is intact at 2. Following this, we raise our weighted average cost of capital (WACC) from 12% to 14%. This makes a big impression on our fair value range, which is lowered from SEK8-28 to SEK6-25, with Base Case of SEK15 (17).