CombinedX AB (publ) - Deep Dive Research Report

Ticker: CX (Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market, Stockholm) | ISIN: SE0012065589 | Sector: Technology / IT Services Report date: 29 August 2026 Latest reporting period: Q2 2026 (1 April - 30 June 2026), published 17 July 2026

A note on reporting cadence and recency. CombinedX reports on a calendar fiscal year with quarterly interim reports. Q2 2026 covered April-June and was published on 17 July 2026, which is the most recent period and is confirmed on the company's own quarterly reports page. Since then, three market-moving announcements landed on 26 August 2026 (a binding agreement to sell Netgain, a proposed related-party investment in an AI software company, and the initiation of a formal strategic review of the entire group), plus an extraordinary general meeting notice. Those are covered in full below because they change the investment case materially more than the Q2 numbers do.

A note on "concalls." CombinedX does not run a traditional sell-side earnings call. It publishes an interim report containing a signed CEO commentary (VD-ord), then holds a recorded investor presentation, archived on Vimeo or YouTube from the investor presentations page. I have used all six of the last six reporting periods (Q1 2025 through Q2 2026), working from the interim report press releases and CEO commentary, which is where management's forward-looking language actually sits. I could not transcribe the video recordings themselves, so where I quote management I am quoting the written CEO commentary or the press release, and I say so. That is a real limitation and I would rather state it than imply I have call transcripts I do not have.

1. What the Company Does

CombinedX is a Swedish holding company that owns a small family of specialist IT consultancies. It does not sell a product. It sells the time and expertise of roughly 600 consultants, organised into separate operating companies that each go deep on one enterprise software platform and one set of industries, and each keep their own brand, their own CEO, and their own profit and loss.

The organising idea is narrow and worth stating precisely, because it is the whole thesis. Most IT consultancies compete as generalists: they staff broad teams, they bill by the hour, and they win work by being available and reasonably priced. That business has been getting worse for years. CombinedX's bet is the opposite. It wants each subsidiary to be the person you call when you are implementing one specific platform in one specific industry, so that the buyer is not comparing hourly rates across ten agencies but is choosing between the two or three firms in the Nordics who have actually done this before. CEO Jörgen Qwist put the strategic direction bluntly in the Q2 2025 interim report:

"We must move our offering from markets with pressed hourly rates and consultant oversupply to markets with specialist talent shortage and high willingness to pay."

That sentence explains almost everything the company has done since: the acquisitions it made, the businesses it merged, the businesses it shut, and the two subsidiaries it has now sold.

Founding and how it got here

The oldest piece of the group is Ninetech, founded in 1993 in Karlstad, a mid-sized city in western Sweden, per Wikipedia's company history. The name is a contraction of "nine technicians." Over the following two decades a holding structure formed around it, taking the name Combined Excellence in 2016 and CombinedX in 2021. The group listed on Nasdaq First North on 28 March 2022 in an offering the same source describes as heavily oversubscribed, with participation from Axis Communications founder Martin Gren, Investment AB Spiltan, and the trade union Unionen.

Jörgen Qwist has been CEO since 2020. Per the company's group management page, he was born in 1972, previously served as CEO of the listed DGC One AB and of the EQT-owned businesses IP-Only Enterprise and Candidator DGC (which the same page notes is now Iver AB), and graduated from the Stockholm School of Economics. The chairman is Niklas Hellberg, elected in 2013 and described on the company's board of directors page as a co-founder and chairman since inception, with roughly 40 years as an entrepreneur including CEO roles at Hellberg Consulting AB and at Netgain AB. He holds 550,596 shares per that page. Hellberg's relationship with a newly formed AI company matters a great deal to the current situation and is dealt with in Sections 7, 8 and 11.

The group's shape has changed more in the last eighteen months than in the previous eight years. It ran ten subsidiaries as recently as 2023 (Nethouse, Elvenite, Aspire, Netgain, Two, Ninetech, Absfront, Redway, Anytrust and M3CS). Today the family page lists five, and one of those is being sold. The compression was deliberate, and it happened in two ways at once: merging sub-scale specialists into each other, and selling the ones that fit better under a different owner.

The value proposition, concretely

Take Elvenite, the largest remaining piece. A Nordic food producer such as Kavli or Lantmännen (both named as Elvenite customers on the company's family page) runs its entire operation on Infor CloudSuite M3, an ERP system built for process manufacturing. When that customer decides to move from an on-premise M3 installation to Infor's cloud version, the work is not generic software consulting. Someone has to understand how M3 models a batch recipe, how it handles catch weight (the fact that a side of salmon is priced by actual kilograms, not by unit), how allergen traceability flows through the bill of materials, and how the customer's twenty years of local modifications map onto a standard cloud instance that cannot be modified the same way.

There are perhaps a handful of firms in the Nordics that have done that specific migration for that specific industry more than a few times. Elvenite is one of them, and it describes itself on the family page as "Nordens ledande Infor CloudSuite M3-partner." The customer is not shopping on hourly rate. They are shopping on whether the failure mode - a botched ERP cutover halting production at a food plant - is likely. That is the "specialist talent shortage and high willingness to pay" market Qwist was describing.

The same logic runs through the group. Ninetech does digital commerce and customer experience on Optimizely CMS and Inriver PIM. Enqore does Microsoft business applications and analytics. Align does IFS Cloud. Netgain, until the pending sale closes, does ServiceNow. Each one is a platform-plus-industry pairing, not a body shop.

2. Business Segments

CombinedX does not publish a formal segment note that splits revenue by subsidiary. It reports as one group. But it is genuinely a multi-business company, each subsidiary is a separately branded and separately managed entity with its own CEO, and management talks about them individually, so treating them as segments is the right way to understand the business. Where I use revenue figures they come from the specific disclosures in the divestment press releases, which are the only per-company numbers the company has published.

For scale context: group net sales were 947.7 MSEK in FY2025 per the Q4 2025 year-end report, of which Nethouse was 253 MSEK (roughly 27%) and Netgain 97 MSEK (roughly 10%), leaving roughly 598 MSEK across Elvenite, Ninetech, Enqore and Align.

2.1 Elvenite - Infor CloudSuite M3 and data intelligence

What it does. Elvenite implements, upgrades and manages Infor CloudSuite M3, and builds the analytics layer on top of it using Qlik and Microsoft tooling. Its stated customer list on the family page is dominated by food, agriculture and consumer goods: Plantagen (garden retail), MOWI (salmon farming), Kavli (dairy and spreads), Intersnack (snacks), Lantmännen (agricultural cooperative). Its CEO is Mathias Dyberg. It operates in Sweden and, since October 2025, Norway.

The core capability. Infor M3 is not a general-purpose ERP. It is chosen by process manufacturers, food producers, fashion, distribution and equipment service businesses because it handles things SAP and Dynamics handle awkwardly: variable-weight products, complex batch and lot traceability, and rental or service-heavy equipment models. The consulting knowledge is therefore double-layered. You need M3 configuration depth, and you need to know how a dairy actually runs. That combination takes years of repeat projects to accumulate, and it does not transfer from a generalist consultancy.

Why it exists separately. Elvenite is the vehicle CombinedX has been actively buying to build up. It acquired M3CS in February 2024, which added M3 capacity, and Elvenite itself acquired ERPkonsult in Norway effective 1 October 2025 per the Q3 2025 report, which extended the same M3 practice into a second country. Management has been explicit that add-on acquisitions into existing brands is now the preferred M&A route rather than buying new standalone companies.

Competitive position. The named competitor here is Columbus Global, which describes itself as one of the largest independent Infor M3 partners in the world and is Danish-listed. Infor's own professional services arm also competes for the same work. Elvenite's counter is Nordic industry specificity and local presence; Columbus's is global scale and a broader platform portfolio spanning Microsoft Dynamics 365 as well as M3. Beyond those two, the field thins quickly, which is exactly the point of the niche.

How it fits. This is the growth bet and the acquisition platform. Two of the group's three most recent visible customer wins were Elvenite's: Swedish Match Industries selecting Elvenite in May 2025, and Alleima selecting it for an M3 CloudSuite preliminary study in March 2026 (both per the MFN press release archive). It is also where the "Leading Brand" ambition of 250 MSEK annual revenue per company, raised at the Q4 2025 report, is most plausibly reachable.

2.2 Ninetech - digital customer experience and commerce

What it does. Ninetech takes a brand's digital storefront and customer journey end to end, from service design through front-end web build to backend development. Platforms are Optimizely CMS and Inriver PIM, plus Microsoft. Named customers on the family page include Klarsynt (optical retail), SkiStar (ski resorts), OBOS (Nordic housing), Viking Line (ferries) and Würth (industrial distribution). Its CEO is Jonas Aronsson. Wikipedia's entry notes Ninetech acts as a digital partner for Volvo and Volvo Cars, including work on World of Volvo.

The core capability. This is the oldest business in the group, the original 1993 Karlstad company, and its edge is relationship duration rather than exotic technology. The Würth relationship is described in the Q1 2025 report as a decade-long collaboration that culminated in the launch of wurth.se. A ten-year digital partnership with an industrial distributor is a genuinely defensible position: the agency knows the product data model, the pricing logic and the ERP integration points better than any challenger could learn in a pitch.

Why it exists separately. Different buyer entirely. Elvenite sells to a CIO and a supply chain director. Ninetech sells to a CMO, an e-commerce director or a digital business owner. Different sales cycle, different budget line, different competitive set.

Competitive position. This is the most contested part of the group and management has said so with its actions. Ninetech absorbed the Aspire business during 2025, then in May 2026 transferred its Linköping operations out, explicitly described in the Q2 2026 report as reducing exposure to traditional software development. That is a tacit admission that generic build-and-maintain web development is a commodity. Named competitors include Avensia (Swedish, listed, and also an Optimizely-centric commerce specialist), Knowit Experience, and the digital arms of the larger Nordic consultancies.

How it fits. Legacy core, being narrowed. Management is pruning the commoditised end and keeping the platform-anchored, long-relationship end.

2.3 Enqore - Microsoft business applications and analytics

What it does. Enqore was created by merging two subsidiaries, Two and Absfront, a plan announced at the Q3 2025 report and completed by the end of 2025. Absfront had itself absorbed Redway in April 2025. The combined company sells Microsoft business applications (Dynamics 365, Power Platform) plus analytics on Microsoft and Qlik. Named customers span security services (Avarn Security), utilities (Karlstads El & Stadsnät), coffee (Löfbergs), timber (Moelven), consumer goods distribution (Pictura), building products (Skånska Byggvaror) and specialty steel (Suzuki Garphyttan).

The core capability. Enqore's differentiator inside the enormous Microsoft partner ecosystem is the pairing of business applications with an analytics practice, so that the same firm that configures the CRM also builds the forecasting model on top of it. The Q1 2025 report cites an AI forecasting model built for Sefina Pantbank, a pawnbroking chain, as an example.

Why it exists separately, and why it was assembled. Two and Absfront were each sub-scale Microsoft specialists. Separately they could not credibly bid for larger Dynamics programmes; combined they can. Qwist attributed the group's Q3 2025 profitability improvement directly to this kind of consolidation, citing in that report "sammanslagningar vi gjort av våra specialistbolag" (the mergers we have made of our specialist companies). Enqore then narrowed further: the Q1 2026 report discloses that it discontinued its Jeeves ERP offering, affecting seven consultants, at a transition cost of 1.7 MSEK, in order to concentrate purely on Microsoft business applications.

Competitive position. The hardest competitive position in the group, because the Microsoft partner channel is crowded by construction. Named regional competitors include Columbus, Fellowmind, Innofactor, Sigma and Avanade, plus dozens of smaller local partners. Enqore's defence is verticalisation and the analytics attach.

How it fits. The efficiency project. It is the segment where merging and pruning has been most aggressive, and where the margin logic depends on scale rather than scarcity.

2.4 Align Consulting - IFS Cloud

What it does. Align delivers strategic, functional and technical services around IFS Cloud, with operations in Norway and Sweden. Its Norwegian managing director is Erik Nøkleby Holth and its Swedish managing director is Per Aronsson, per the family page. CombinedX acquired it in May 2025, with completion announced 19 May 2025.

The core capability. IFS is a Swedish-origin enterprise software company whose product is strongest in asset-intensive and service-management industries: aerospace and defence, energy and utilities, construction, and field service. IFS implementation work skews toward large, complex, regulated customers, which is structurally the highest-rate end of the ERP consulting market. Align is a pure play on that.

Why it exists separately. It was bought, not built, and it was bought specifically because it sits on a different leading platform. Qwist framed the deal in the Q2 2025 report as consistent with the strategy "to build leading brands around leading platforms." It also gave CombinedX a Norwegian operating base beyond Elvenite's.

Competitive position. The IFS partner ecosystem includes specialist firms such as Novacura and Addovation as well as the IFS partner practices inside the global system integrators. Align is small, and its advantage is Nordic proximity to IFS itself plus the industry mix.

How it fits. The newest brand and the clearest expression of the platform strategy. Its full-year contribution was one of the reasons the pro forma FY2025 revenue reached roughly 1,008 MSEK with a 10.3% adjusted EBITA margin versus 947.7 MSEK and 9.5% as reported.

2.5 Netgain - ServiceNow (being divested)

What it does. Netgain digitises and automates secure, business-critical workflows on ServiceNow. Its customer base is unusually public-sector and defence weighted: Saab, Sandvik, Region Skåne, Region Stockholm, Göteborgs stad and Inera (the Swedish regions' shared digital infrastructure company). Its CEO is Eva Sandberg. It has held a multi-year contract with Svenska Kraftnät, the Swedish national grid operator.

Disclosed economics. The 26 August 2026 divestment release gives the only clean per-company financials the group has published: approximately 60 employees, 2025 revenue of 97 MSEK, and adjusted EBITDA of 9 MSEK excluding a management fee of roughly 3.4% of revenue. Founded 2008, part of CombinedX since 2013.

Why it is being sold. ServiceNow partner economics in the Nordics have been consolidating fast. NTT DATA acquired The Cloud People in December 2025 and is now buying Netgain to form what its announcement calls Sweden's largest pure-play ServiceNow company. At 60 people, Netgain could not win the largest ServiceNow programmes on its own. Qwist's stated rationale in the CombinedX release was that the sale is consistent with the Leading Brands vision and that the combination with The Cloud People and NTT DATA strengthens Netgain's competitiveness. Netgain's quality was not the issue: it won a ServiceNow Partner Award in April 2025 and was recognised as Sweden's ServiceNow partner with the highest customer satisfaction, at a CSAT of 4.95.

Terms. 107 MSEK on a cash and debt-free basis, fixed and conditional on clearance from the Swedish Inspectorate for Strategic Products, expected within five weeks of the 26 August announcement, plus a conditional earnout on Netgain's 2026 results which the board excluded from its distributable-liquidity arithmetic.

2.6 Nethouse - divested May 2026

Worth a paragraph because it was the largest single business in the group until three months ago. Nethouse was founded in 1998, joined CombinedX in 2020, and in 2025 generated 253 MSEK of revenue and 34.8 MSEK of EBITA (excluding a management fee of roughly 3.4% of revenue) with approximately 120 employees, contributing about a quarter of group revenue and EBITA. CombinedX agreed on 1 April 2026 to sell it to Nordlo for 345 MSEK on a cash and debt-free basis, roughly ten times EBITA, and completed on 29 May 2026. The stated rationale was that Nordlo's infrastructure and cybersecurity depth was a better fit for Nethouse's potential than CombinedX's application-layer group. One board member, Joakim Alkman, is described on the board page as a co-founder of IT companies including Nethouse and the listed Precio Fishbone.

Segment comparison

3. Products and Business Detail

There is no factory. The delivery model is the product.

CombinedX manufactures nothing. Its inputs are consultants and its output is billable hours plus fixed-price project deliverables. That makes the "manufacturing process" question really a question about three things: how it recruits, how it structures delivery, and what certifications gate the work.

The certification gate. This is the closest thing the business has to a technical barrier. Every one of the group's practices is a formal partner of a software vendor: Infor for Elvenite, Optimizely and Inriver for Ninetech, Microsoft for Enqore, IFS for Align, ServiceNow for Netgain. Partner status is not decorative. Vendors tier their partners, and tier depends on certified-consultant headcount, delivered-project references, and customer satisfaction scores. Tier in turn determines whether the vendor's own sales force will introduce you to a prospect, which is where a large share of implementation work actually originates. Netgain's ServiceNow CSAT of 4.95 and its 2025 ServiceNow Partner Award were not marketing trophies; they were the mechanism by which ServiceNow's Nordic sales team decided who to bring into deals.

The practical consequence is that a competitor cannot enter Elvenite's market by hiring five people. They need certified M3 consultants, who are scarce, plus reference projects, which require having already won work. This is a real but not insurmountable barrier: it is a two-to-four-year problem, not a twenty-year one.

The delivery process. A typical engagement runs: preliminary study, design, configuration and build, data migration, test, cutover, then application management. The Alleima engagement announced on 9 March 2026 is a clean illustration of the front of that funnel: Alleima selected Elvenite for an M3 CloudSuite preliminary study, which is the small, low-risk, high-influence piece of work that typically determines who gets the multi-year implementation that follows. Winning studies is how these firms convert into large programmes.

The recruitment engine. For a consultancy, hiring is manufacturing capacity. CombinedX recruited 19 trainees from Swedish universities in September 2025, disclosed in the Q3 2025 report, which also reported an employee net promoter score (eNPS) of 53 and a customer NPS of 63. The employee count is the honest capacity metric: the Q1 2025 report disclosed 528 employees entering Q2 2025, down from 606 a year earlier, explicitly attributed to a lower recruitment pace and restructuring. The 2025 annual report describes approximately 600 specialists across Sweden, Norway, Finland and Romania. Romania is the nearshore delivery centre, which is how a Swedish consultancy competes on blended rate for development-heavy work.

Geographies

Sweden is the home market and the large majority of revenue. Head office is in Karlstad, with offices in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö, Umeå and elsewhere. Norway is the second market, built through two moves: the Align acquisition in May 2025 (Norwegian-headquartered, with Swedish operations) and Elvenite's acquisition of ERPkonsult in Norway effective 1 October 2025. Finland and Romania appear in the 2025 annual report's description of the footprint, with Romania functioning as delivery capacity rather than a sales market.

Milestones that changed the business

• 1993 - Ninetech founded in Karlstad.
• 2016 and 2021 - Renamed Combined Excellence, then CombinedX.
• 28 March 2022 - IPO on Nasdaq First North.
• February 2024 - M3CS acquired, deepening the Infor M3 practice.
• January to April 2025 - Aspire's Borlänge operations divested; Aspire merged into Ninetech; Redway merged into Absfront. The consolidation phase begins.
• May 2025 - Align Consulting acquired, adding IFS Cloud and a Norwegian base, part-funded by a directed share issue.
• October 2025 - Elvenite acquires ERPkonsult (Norway).
• By end-2025 - Two and Absfront merge to form Enqore.
• 11 February 2026 - "Vision Leading Brands" announced at the Q4 2025 report, replacing "Vision 2028." The bar for a Leading Brand is raised to 250 MSEK of annual revenue, and management explicitly opens the door to spin-offs of group divisions.
• 1 April to 29 May 2026 - Nethouse agreed and sold to Nordlo for 345 MSEK.
• 19 May 2026 - Ninetech transfers out its Linköping operations.
• 17 July 2026 - Q2 2026 report; board states intention to return approximately 220 MSEK to shareholders during 2026.
• 26 August 2026 - Three announcements in one day: Netgain agreed for sale to NTT DATA for 107 MSEK; board proposes a 21.5 MSEK investment in Xalerate AB, an AI software company in which the chairman has decisive influence; and the board initiates a strategic review of the entire group with HDR Partners AB as financial adviser and TM & Partners as legal counsel.

4. Customers

Who buys

The customer base is Nordic mid-market and large corporates plus Swedish public sector. Named accounts across the family page and the interim reports include Lantmännen, MOWI, Kavli, Intersnack and Plantagen (Elvenite); SkiStar, OBOS, Viking Line, Würth and Klarsynt (Ninetech); Löfbergs, Moelven, Avarn Security, Pictura, Skånska Byggvaror, Suzuki Garphyttan and Karlstads El & Stadsnät (Enqore); and Saab, Sandvik, Region Skåne, Region Stockholm, Göteborgs stad, Inera and Svenska Kraftnät (Netgain). Ninetech's Volvo and Volvo Cars relationship, including work on World of Volvo, is documented in the Wikipedia entry.

Two things stand out about that list. First, it is heavily industrial and heavily Swedish, which is a fair description of the Nordic mid-cap economy: food, forestry, mining and metals, ferries, distribution. Second, the public-sector concentration is entirely inside Netgain, the company being sold. After that sale closes, CombinedX becomes a substantially more private-sector, more cyclical business.

Who makes the buying decision, and on what

The buying centre differs sharply by subsidiary, which is the underlying reason the group runs separate brands rather than one.

For Elvenite and Align, the decision sits with a CIO or ERP programme sponsor, usually with a CFO signing and an operations or supply-chain director holding an effective veto. The selection criteria are, in rough order: has this firm implemented this platform in my industry, can they name reference customers who will take my call, do they have certified consultants available on my timeline, and what is the risk of a failed cutover. Price matters, but it is a qualifier rather than a decider, because a botched ERP implementation costs multiples of the consulting fee. Sales cycles are long, typically six to eighteen months from first contact to signature, and are frequently mediated by the software vendor itself. The preliminary study is the standard entry wedge.

For Enqore, the buyer is more often a business function head, a sales director buying CRM or an operations head buying an analytics capability, with IT approving rather than choosing. Cycles are shorter, three to nine months, deal sizes smaller, and the competitive field far wider because the Microsoft partner channel is deep.

For Ninetech, the buyer is a CMO, e-commerce director or digital business owner. Selection is on portfolio, creative and UX credibility, and platform expertise, and the work is more likely to be pitched competitively. This is the part of the group where switching is easiest and rate pressure is highest, which is exactly why management has been pruning it.

For Netgain, roughly half the buying is public procurement. That means formal tenders with published evaluation criteria, which favours firms with documented references, security clearances and the operational maturity to serve a regional health authority. Note that the Netgain sale requires clearance from the Swedish Inspectorate for Strategic Products, the same body that had to clear the Nethouse sale. That is a direct signal that the work touches defence or critical infrastructure, and it is a barrier a new entrant cannot simply buy.

Switching costs

Moderate to high, and specific rather than generic. Once an implementation partner has configured a customer's ERP, they hold undocumented knowledge about why particular decisions were made. Replacing them means paying a new firm to rediscover it. The application-management contracts that follow implementations are consequently sticky, and they are where the recurring revenue in a consultancy actually lives.

The Würth relationship is the cleanest evidence: a decade-long collaboration culminating in the wurth.se launch, per the Q1 2025 report. Nobody stays with an agency for ten years on price.

But the honest calibration is that these are switching costs, not switching impossibilities. There is no regulatory qualification, no installed hardware and no multi-year requalification cycle. A determined customer can change partners at the end of a project phase, and in a soft market with plenty of available consultants they sometimes do. This is the mechanism behind the organic decline discussed in Section 8.

Concentration

CombinedX does not disclose customer concentration figures in the interim reports I reviewed, and I did not find a disclosed top-customer percentage. What is disclosable is the structural point: the group deliberately runs five brands across four platforms and four or five distinct end markets, so no single customer relationship spans a material share of the group. The concentration risk that actually existed was subsidiary concentration, with Nethouse at roughly a quarter of revenue and EBITA, and that has now been removed by selling it.

Contract structures

The mix is three-part. Time-and-materials consulting is the bulk and is the most exposed to utilisation and rate pressure, which is precisely what the Q2 2026 numbers reflect. Fixed-price project work carries delivery risk but better margin when executed well. Application management and support contracts are the recurring layer, typically annual or multi-year, and are the most predictable revenue in the group. Public-sector framework agreements, concentrated in Netgain, are multi-year but volume-uncommitted, meaning they grant the right to be called rather than a guaranteed spend.

Revenue predictability is therefore moderate. There is a recurring base, but the marginal quarter is decided by utilisation, and utilisation is decided by whether customers start projects. Qwist made exactly this point in the Q2 2026 report: he attributed the margin compression not to weak demand but to low billing rates, with personnel costs reaching 72.4% of revenue against 66.9% a year earlier.

5. Competitive Landscape

The structure of the market

The Nordic IT consulting market is fragmented at the top and even more fragmented below. There is no dominant player. Instead there are roughly four tiers competing at once for overlapping work.

At the top are the global system integrators (Accenture, Capgemini, CGI, and now NTT DATA more aggressively in the Nordics) who win the largest transformation programmes and increasingly buy the Nordic specialists rather than compete with them. Below that sit the large listed Nordic generalists (Tietoevry, Knowit) who compete on breadth and scale. Third are the private-equity-backed consolidators (Nordlo, Iver, Sigma, Devoteam, Fellowmind) who roll up mid-sized firms. Fourth is a long tail of platform specialists, which is where CombinedX's subsidiaries live.

The structural shift underway right now is consolidation of tier four into tiers one to three. CombinedX has been on both sides of it in the past six months: buying (ERPkonsult, Align) and then selling (Nethouse to Nordlo, Netgain to NTT DATA). The Netgain transaction is the pattern in miniature: a 60-person Swedish ServiceNow specialist being combined with another acquired specialist inside a global integrator to reach the scale needed for the largest programmes.

Where CombinedX wins and loses

It wins where the buyer's criterion is "who has done this exact thing in my industry." Elvenite against a generalist in a food ERP migration is not a close contest. It wins where the software vendor's own sales team decides who to introduce, because partner tier and CSAT scores are objective and CombinedX's companies score well.

It loses in three places. Against the global integrators on the largest multi-country programmes, because a 600-person group cannot staff a 300-consultant transformation. Against the private-equity consolidators on price and on acquisition firepower, because they have cheaper capital and a mandate to buy. And against everyone in commoditised web and application development, which is why Ninetech's Linköping operations were transferred out and why Enqore's Jeeves practice was closed.

Barriers to entry

Genuinely modest, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. Starting an IT consultancy requires no capital and no plant. The real barriers are narrower: vendor partner tier (which requires certified headcount and delivered references), the specific reference customers that public procurement scores on, and security clearance for defence-adjacent work such as Netgain's. Those take two to four years to build, which slows entry without preventing it. It is a barrier to rapid entry, not a moat.

The evidence for this is in the numbers themselves. If the moat were deep, organic growth would not have been negative in every one of the last six quarters.

Named competitors

Market capitalisations below are approximate, sourced from public quote pages, and stated as of August 2026 unless otherwise noted. They move daily and are included only as a peer-size reference.

Honest read on the moat

There is a defensible position at the subsidiary level (Elvenite in Nordic food-industry M3 is genuinely hard to displace) and a much weaker one at the group level. CombinedX's holding structure does not itself create advantage; it creates a portfolio of small niche positions plus a corporate cost layer, funded by a management fee of roughly 3.4% of revenue as disclosed in the Nethouse and Netgain divestment releases. Whether that holding structure earns its keep is precisely the question the board's own strategic review is now asking.

6. Industry

What drives demand

Enterprise IT consulting demand in the Nordics is driven by four things. First, ERP replacement cycles: on-premise systems reaching end of vendor support force cloud migrations on a schedule the customer does not fully control. Infor's push of on-premise M3 customers toward CloudSuite is a live example and is the direct source of Elvenite's pipeline. Second, digital commerce investment by consumer-facing brands. Third, public-sector digitisation, funded by government budgets rather than corporate profits, which makes it counter-cyclical. Fourth, and newest, AI adoption, which as of 2026 is generating far more advisory conversation than committed implementation spend.

Size, growth and the current state of the market

The Swedish consulting market in 2026 is in its third consecutive year of deterioration. Per Cinode's Konsultkollen 2026 study, average revenue growth across Swedish consulting firms fell to 2.6%, down from 7.5% the previous year and 16.7% in 2022. Average operating margins fell to 4.4%, from 5.7% the prior year and 7.6% two years before. The stated causes are lower utilisation, price pressure and rising costs. Cinode's data identifies the IT sector specifically as having lost the most, having previously been the industry's growth engine.

That context matters enormously for reading CombinedX's numbers. A 9.5% adjusted EBITA margin for FY2025 against a Swedish consulting-sector average of 4.4% is a materially better outcome than the sector, even though it is well below the company's own 12% target.

The bifurcation

The most important structural feature of this market right now is that it has split in two. A 2026 Swedish market analysis describes specialists in AI, cybersecurity and cloud raising fees 5-7% annually while generalists face price pressure or stagnation, with defence, energy, infrastructure and cybersecurity growing strongly on the back of government investment and shifting security policy. Firms with clear niches in those areas are performing significantly better than the broad market.

This is precisely the split CombinedX's strategy is built around, and it is also the split that explains the company's mixed results. Its ERP specialists sit on the good side of the line. Its traditional development and generic digital work sits on the bad side, which is why it has been actively closing and transferring those operations.

Where CombinedX sits in the value chain

Squarely in the middle: between the software vendors (Infor, Microsoft, IFS, Optimizely, ServiceNow) who own the product and the IP, and the end customers who own the budget. Implementation partners capture the services spend around a licence sale, which in enterprise software is typically one to three times the licence value over a deployment. The partner's leverage is limited by the fact that the vendor controls the relationship at the top: vendors can and do introduce competitors, change partner tiers, and in some cases sell professional services directly. Infor's own consulting arm competes with Elvenite for the same work.

Regulation

Three regulatory threads matter. The EU AI Act shapes how European enterprises can deploy AI, creating both compliance work for consultants and, in the case of the proposed Xalerate investment, a product opportunity around governed, auditable AI usage. Public procurement rules govern roughly the public-sector half of the addressable market and favour incumbents with documented references. And export-control and strategic-products review, administered in Sweden by the Inspectorate for Strategic Products, applies to transactions involving defence-adjacent capability, as evidenced by both the Nethouse and Netgain sales requiring ISP clearance.

There is also a geopolitical thread management has raised directly. In the Q2 2026 report, Qwist discussed European dependency risk on advanced AI models, referencing US export controls on advanced AI models announced 12 June 2026 and subsequently reversed. That episode is the commercial premise behind Xalerate's pitch of EU data residency and model-provider optionality.

Cyclicality

High, with a lag. Consulting demand tracks corporate capex and discretionary IT budgets, which are among the first things cut when boards get nervous and among the last restored. The lag runs both ways: the downturn shows up in utilisation before it shows up in revenue, and the recovery shows up in pipeline conversations before it shows up in billable hours. Qwist has been describing exactly this pattern for six consecutive quarters, and in Q2 2025 wrote that "the economic turning point hoped for has not yet materialised."

Public-sector work is the natural hedge, and CombinedX is about to sell the subsidiary that holds most of it.

Tailwinds and headwinds

Tailwinds: forced cloud ERP migration cycles; European AI governance creating demand for compliance-aware implementation; Nordic defence, energy and infrastructure spend rising; and consolidation raising exit valuations for good niche assets, which CombinedX has just monetised twice.

Headwinds: three straight years of falling sector margins; oversupply of available consultants compressing rates; AI-assisted development potentially reducing the hours required for exactly the traditional development work the group is already exiting; and large integrators pushing further down-market.

7. Growth Triggers

Drawn from the six most recent reporting periods (Q1 2025 through Q2 2026) plus the post-period announcements of 26 August 2026. Sources are the interim report press releases and the associated announcements, which carry management's own forward-looking language.

• Elvenite's Norwegian expansion via ERPkonsult. Elvenite acquired ERPkonsult in Norway effective 1 October 2025, extending the Infor M3 practice into a second country. (Q3 2025 report, 24 October 2025)

• Merger of Two and Absfront into a single Microsoft specialist by year-end 2025. Announced 26 August 2025 and confirmed as a planned completion in the Q3 report; the merged entity became Enqore. Management directly linked the group's profitability improvement to this class of consolidation. (Q3 2025 report, 24 October 2025; repeated as completed in the Q4 2025 report, 11 February 2026)

  "sammanslagningar vi gjort av våra specialistbolag" - Jörgen Qwist, attributing profitability gains to the mergers of the group's specialist companies, Q3 2025 report.

• "Vision Leading Brands" replaces "Vision 2028," with the bar for a Leading Brand raised to 250 MSEK of annual revenue. Strategy shifts from growth-by-acquisition-of-new-companies toward add-on acquisitions into existing brands, plus explicit openness to spin-offs of group divisions. (Q4 2025 year-end report, 11 February 2026)

• Full-year contribution from Align and ERPkonsult. Pro forma FY2025 revenue including a full year of both acquisitions was approximately 1,008 MSEK at a 10.3% adjusted EBITA margin, versus 947.7 MSEK and 9.5% as reported. Management presented this as the run-rate starting point for 2026. (Q4 2025 year-end report, 11 February 2026)

• Enqore's refocus onto Microsoft business applications only. The Jeeves ERP offering was discontinued, affecting seven consultants, at a 1.7 MSEK transition cost. (Q1 2026 report, 30 April 2026)

• Nethouse divestment to Nordlo for 345 MSEK, and the resulting capital return. Agreed 1 April 2026, completed 29 May 2026. In Q1 2026 management said analysis of shareholder distributions was underway; by Q2 2026 the board had put a number on it. (Q1 2026 report, 30 April 2026; quantified in the Q2 2026 report, 17 July 2026)

  The board intends to return approximately 220 MSEK, roughly 11 SEK per share, to shareholders during 2026 from the Nethouse proceeds. - Q2 2026 interim report, 17 July 2026.

• Ninetech exits traditional software development in Linköping. The Linköping operations were transferred on 19 May 2026, explicitly to reduce exposure to commoditised development work. (Q2 2026 report, 17 July 2026)

• Management expects an improved autumn 2026 from restructuring and pipeline. Qwist cited improved customer dialogues and the effect of the spring restructuring on resource utilisation. Note this is the sixth consecutive quarter in which management has expressed forward optimism about a market turn. (Q2 2026 report, 17 July 2026)

• Netgain sale to NTT DATA for 107 MSEK plus a conditional 2026 earnout. Announced 26 August 2026, conditional on Swedish ISP clearance, expected to close within five weeks. Adds approximately 100 MSEK, or roughly 5 SEK per share, to distributable excess liquidity, bringing the total to approximately 320 MSEK or roughly 16 SEK per share. (Netgain divestment announcement, 26 August 2026)

• Proposed investment in Xalerate AB. The board proposes subscribing for newly issued B shares for a total of 21,500,000 SEK, in two tranches with a first tranche of 12,000,000 SEK, at a valuation of 40 MSEK, giving CombinedX approximately 35% of shares and 3.5% of votes. Xalerate is a Karlstad-based AI platform company (org. nr 559575-8698) offering three products per its website: Chat (a governed team AI interface with audit trails), Memory (a shared organisational knowledge graph) and Gateway (a single governed API endpoint to 70+ models from 10 providers with EU data residency, served principally from Evroc infrastructure in Stockholm). Requires approval at an extraordinary general meeting on 18 September 2026 because it is a related-party transaction: chairman Niklas Hellberg exercises decisive influence over Xalerate. (Board proposal and EGM notice, 26 August 2026)

• Strategic review of the entire group. The board has initiated a review covering group structure and future direction, explicitly evaluating "avyttring av hela eller delar av verksamheten, strukturaffärer, förvärv av nya verksamheter, kapitalåterföring till aktieägarna eller en kombination" (divestment of all or part of the operations, structural transactions, acquisitions of new operations, capital return to shareholders, or a combination). HDR Partners AB is financial adviser and TM & Partners is legal counsel. No fixed timeline; the company will not give regular updates. (Strategic review announcement, 26 August 2026)

Trigger summary

8. Key Risks

1. Persistent negative organic growth is the central problem, and it has not improved

Mechanism. Reported revenue growth has been flattered by acquisitions for two years while the underlying business shrank. Organic growth by quarter: -4.9% (Q1 2025), -7.5% (Q2 2025), -2.5% (Q3 2025), -4.5% (Q4 2025), -9.5% (Q1 2026), -8.2% (Q2 2026). That is six consecutive negative quarters, and the two most recent are the two worst. Full-year organic growth was -5.0% in 2025 against a stated financial target of exceeding the IT consulting market's growth rate, in a year when that market grew 2.6% on Cinode's data.

The mechanism is simple and compounding. Fewer billable hours means lower utilisation; lower utilisation means either you carry idle consultants (crushing margin) or you shed them (shrinking future capacity). CombinedX has done both: headcount fell from 606 to 528 between Q2 2024 and Q2 2025 per the Q1 2025 report.

Calibration. High probability, moderate-to-severe drag. This is not a tail risk. It is the current operating reality, and the acquisition engine that masked it has now been reversed into a divestment programme.

2. Margin has broken down, and management's explanation points at pricing, not volume

Mechanism. Q2 2026 adjusted EBITA fell to 10.2 MSEK on a 4.6% margin, from 17.9 MSEK and 7.6% a year earlier. Personnel costs reached 72.4% of revenue against 66.9%. Qwist attributed this in the Q2 2026 report to low billing rates rather than weak demand. That distinction is important and not reassuring: a volume problem can be fixed by a market recovery, but a rate problem means the firm is discounting to keep people busy, which is what a commoditising business does.

Against the 12% adjusted EBITA target the company has set itself, a 4.6% quarter is not a miss at the margin; it is a different business.

Calibration. High probability of persistence through 2026; moderate severity, partially offset by the fact that the sector average is 4.4% and CombinedX's full-year 2025 figure of 9.5% was well ahead of it.

3. The Xalerate transaction is a governance risk, and it is being flagged by third parties

Mechanism. The board proposes investing 21.5 MSEK of shareholder cash into Xalerate AB, a company founded in 2025 in which the chairman of the CombinedX board, Niklas Hellberg, exercises decisive influence. That is why the transaction must go to a shareholder vote under the Swedish Securities Council's statement 2019:25. CombinedX would receive approximately 35% of the shares but only 3.5% of the votes, on a 40 MSEK valuation.

Three features of that structure warrant scrutiny. The company is paying most of the money for very little control. The valuation of a company founded in 2025 with no disclosed revenue is being set in a transaction where the counterparty is the chairman. And the money is being deployed at exactly the moment the board is otherwise returning capital to shareholders and reviewing whether the group should exist in its current form. Affärsvärlden explicitly raised the conflict of interest while maintaining a positive view on the shares overall.

None of this means the investment is wrong. Xalerate's product thesis (governed, auditable, EU-resident access to frontier models) is coherent and fits the AI-sovereignty theme Qwist himself raised in the Q2 2026 report. But the process risk is real, and it is a small-cap governance pattern that institutional investors discount.

Calibration. Moderate probability of shareholder friction at the 18 September EGM; low financial severity (21.5 MSEK against roughly 351 MSEK of cash at the end of Q2 2026); potentially meaningful reputational and governance-discount severity.

4. Selling the two best-performing subsidiaries leaves a smaller, less profitable remainder

Mechanism. Nethouse generated 253 MSEK of revenue and 34.8 MSEK of EBITA in 2025 (before management fee), which is roughly a 13.8% EBITA margin. Netgain generated 97 MSEK of revenue and 9 MSEK of adjusted EBITDA, roughly 9.3%. The group's overall adjusted EBITA margin in 2025 was 9.5%. Removing 350 MSEK of revenue at above-average profitability leaves a residual group of roughly 600 MSEK carrying a corporate cost base sized for a billion-krona company.

The management fee disclosed in both divestment releases, roughly 3.4% of revenue, is the tell: that is head-office cost allocated to subsidiaries. When the subsidiaries leave, the head office does not automatically shrink with them.

Calibration. High probability, moderate severity. This is arithmetic, not speculation. Whether it matters depends entirely on what the strategic review concludes.

5. The strategic review is genuinely open-ended, and "sale of the whole business" is on the list

Mechanism. The 26 August announcement names divestment of all or part of the operations as an option under consideration, with a financial adviser and legal counsel appointed, no timeline given and an explicit statement that the company will not provide regular updates. That is the language of a company that has put itself in play.

This cuts both ways. It creates the possibility of a control-premium outcome, and it also creates the possibility of a long, uncertain period with no news, during which operating momentum is hard to sustain because employees and customers know the group's ownership is unresolved. Consultancies are peculiarly exposed to this, because the asset walks out of the building every evening.

Calibration. Certain that the review is happening; the outcome distribution is genuinely wide.

6. Key-person and retention risk in a people business under strategic uncertainty

Mechanism. Every subsidiary's value is embodied in certified consultants and the relationships they hold. A consultant who leaves takes the customer knowledge with them and can often take the customer. The combination of falling billing rates, restructuring (four separate restructuring events across the six quarters reviewed), and an open-ended strategic review is the classic setup for senior attrition. The group's disclosed eNPS of 53 in Q3 2025 was healthy, but that was measured before the strategic review and before the Q2 2026 margin collapse.

Calibration. Moderate probability, high severity if it hits a specific practice like Elvenite's M3 team.

7. Vendor dependency

Mechanism. Each subsidiary's economics rest on a partner relationship with a single software vendor. If Infor changes its Nordic partner strategy, restructures partner tiers, or expands its own professional services, Elvenite's deal flow changes without CombinedX doing anything wrong. The same applies to IFS and Align, and to Microsoft and Enqore. The group has no leverage in these relationships.

Calibration. Low probability in any given year, high severity when it happens, and largely uncontrollable.

8. AI-assisted development compressing the hours in the work itself

Mechanism. The most direct threat to a business that bills hours is a tool that reduces the hours required. Code generation is already visibly reducing effort in application development, which was Ninetech's traditional business. Management appears to understand this: transferring out the Linköping development operations and closing Enqore's Jeeves practice are both moves away from labour-intensive, low-differentiation work. Configuration-heavy ERP work is more insulated, because the constraint is domain knowledge rather than typing speed, but it is not immune.

Calibration. Moderate probability over three years, moderate-to-high severity, and management is already acting on it.

9. Walk the Talk

The six reporting periods used: Q1 2025 (7 May 2025), Q2 2025 (17 July 2025), Q3 2025 (24 October 2025), Q4 2025 year-end report (11 February 2026), Q1 2026 (30 April 2026), Q2 2026 (17 July 2026). The most recent is 43 days old, well inside the 90-day window. Note again that these are written CEO commentaries and press releases accompanied by recorded investor presentations, not transcribed calls.

The arc

Q1 2025 (7 May 2025) - defending profitability, conceding growth. The starting position was honest. Revenue grew 6.5% to 239.2 MSEK but organic growth was -4.9%. EBITA of 27.3 MSEK gave an 11.4% margin, close to the 12% target. Headcount had fallen from 606 to 528 year on year, attributed to a lower recruitment pace and restructuring. Qwist's framing was that the market remained cautious and that the company was defending profitability while accepting growth pressure, but that "even in uncertain times there are thousands of things for us to do."

That is a defensible trade-off, clearly stated. Judge it on whether profitability was actually defended.

Q2 2025 (17 July 2025) - the first miss, openly admitted. It was not defended. EBITA margin fell to 6.8% (7.6% adjusted), revenue fell 6.6% with organic growth at -7.5%. To his credit, Qwist did not spin it:

"We are not equally satisfied with Q2 results." He added that the "economic turning point hoped for has not yet materialised."

Two commitments were made in the same report. The strategic one, to move the offering from pressed-rate markets toward specialist-shortage markets. And the operational one: increased sales, improved utilisation and careful cost control. The Align acquisition was announced as evidence of the strategic commitment.

Q3 2025 (24 October 2025) - the operational commitment delivered. EBITA margin recovered to 8.6% from 5.1% in the year-ago quarter, a genuine improvement, and Qwist attributed it specifically to the mergers of specialist companies. Organic growth improved to -2.5%, the best of the six quarters. The Absfront/Two merger was announced for completion by year-end, and Elvenite's Norwegian ERPkonsult acquisition was announced. Trainee recruitment of 19 people signalled confidence.

This is the quarter where management looks best. They said they would consolidate to improve margin, they consolidated, and the margin improved.

Q4 2025 (11 February 2026) - the revenue target hit, but only on a technicality, and the strategy quietly changed. Full-year revenue was 947.7 MSEK. The stated financial target was revenue of at least 1 billion SEK by 2025, including acquisitions. Reported revenue did not reach it. Management presented a pro forma figure of approximately 1,008 MSEK, adjusting for full-year contributions from Align and ERPkonsult, and Qwist described reaching "the billion-kronor milestone." That is a fair pro forma calculation and it was clearly labelled as such, but it is not the same as delivering the target as written.

More significant is what happened next in the same report: Vision 2028 was replaced by "Vision Leading Brands." The bar for what counts as a Leading Brand was raised to 250 MSEK of annual revenue, the emphasis shifted from acquiring new companies to add-on acquisitions, and management for the first time raised the possibility of spinning off group divisions. Read at the time, that looked like a strategic refinement. Read with six months of hindsight, it was the announcement of the divestment programme. Management flagged the direction before executing it, which is to their credit, even if the framing was gentle.

Q1 2026 (30 April 2026) - a record margin quarter and the first sale. EBITA of 30.0 MSEK on an 11.6% margin was described as a record-strong operating result, and it was the best margin of the six quarters. But organic growth deteriorated to -9.5%, the worst of the six. The Nethouse sale to Nordlo for 345 MSEK was announced. On capital return, management said only that analysis was underway.

The pattern by now is unmistakable: margins are being held or improved by cutting and consolidating, while the underlying volume keeps eroding.

Q2 2026 (17 July 2026) - the operational commitment breaks. Adjusted EBITA fell to 10.2 MSEK on a 4.6% margin, roughly a 40% decline in absolute terms year on year. Personnel costs hit 72.4% of revenue. The headline EBITA of 117.4 MSEK was almost entirely the 111.5 MSEK book gain on Nethouse. Qwist attributed the compression to low billing rates rather than weak demand, disclosed 4.8 MSEK of one-time restructuring costs, and again expressed optimism about the autumn based on improved customer dialogues.

That optimism is now the sixth consecutive iteration of the same forward-looking statement across six reports. Not one of those turns has yet materialised in the organic growth line.

What management did deliver in this report was a hard number on capital return: approximately 220 MSEK, roughly 11 SEK per share, during 2026. Five weeks later, on 26 August, that was converted into a specific EGM proposal of 11.00 SEK per share totalling 214,265,711 SEK with a record date of 22 September and payment on 25 September, plus a second tranche of 5.00 SEK per share contingent on the Netgain closing. That is a promise made and converted into a formal shareholder resolution in under six weeks.

Promise versus outcome

Assessment

This is management that is credible on structural and transactional promises and unreliable on market and margin forecasts.

The structural record is genuinely good. Every merger they announced, they completed, on the timeline stated. Every divestment they hinted at in the Vision Leading Brands framing, they executed within six months. The Nethouse sale closed on schedule at roughly ten times EBITA. The capital return went from a vague "analysis underway" in April to a signed, dated, quantified EGM resolution in August. When Jörgen Qwist says a transaction will happen, it happens.

The forecasting record is poor, and it is poor in a specific, repetitive way. Six consecutive reports have contained a version of "the market should improve from here," and six consecutive quarters have delivered negative organic growth, with the two most recent being the two worst. Qwist is not dishonest about it. He said plainly in Q2 2025 that "the economic turning point hoped for has not yet materialised" and he did not hide the Q2 2026 margin collapse behind the Nethouse book gain. But an executive who has been wrong about the same thing six times in a row has earned a discount on the seventh prediction, and the autumn 2026 optimism expressed in the Q2 2026 report should be read with that discount applied.

The financial targets deserve one blunt note. The 1 BSEK revenue target was presented as reached via a pro forma adjustment while reported revenue was 947.7 MSEK. The pro forma was clearly labelled and the arithmetic is legitimate, so this is not misleading disclosure. But describing it as reaching "the billion-kronor milestone" in the same report that replaced the strategy framework is a soft touch on a target that was missed as written. The 12% margin target and the above-market organic growth target have simply not been met at any point in the six periods reviewed, and management has not formally withdrawn or reset either one.

Net: they do what they say when what they say is a transaction. They do not do what they say when what they say is a forecast. For a company now defined by transactions - two divestments, a capital return, a related-party investment and an open strategic review - the first half of that assessment currently matters more than the second.

10. Shareholder Friendliness Index

Dividends. The ordinary dividend has been cut in each of the last three years: 2.00 SEK per share for FY2023, 1.40 SEK for FY2024 (approved at the AGM on 7 May 2025), and 1.00 SEK for FY2025 (approved at the AGM on 6 May 2026). That is a 50% reduction over three years, tracking the decline in earnings rather than signalling distress, and it was never presented as a policy change. Sitting on top of that ordinary stream is a far larger extraordinary distribution driven entirely by asset sales: the board proposed on 26 August 2026 an extraordinary distribution of 11.00 SEK per share, totalling 214,265,711 SEK, for approval at the EGM on 18 September 2026, with a record date of 22 September and payment on 25 September 2026. A second tranche of 5.00 SEK per share is proposed conditional on the Netgain sale completing, with a record date of 14 October 2026 if the sale closes by 9 October. Combined, that is roughly 16 SEK per share and approximately 320 MSEK of excess liquidity, sourced from the 345 MSEK Nethouse sale and the 107 MSEK Netgain sale rather than from operating cash generation.

Buybacks and dilution. There is no buyback. I searched the full three-year period and found no repurchase programme at any point: the AGM on 7 May 2025 approved no share repurchase authorisation, the AGM on 6 May 2026 approved none, and the company has confirmed it holds no own shares. Nothing has been repurchased in the last ~90 days either (MoatMap records zero buybacks since 31 May 2026), and nothing was repurchased before that window. The share count has moved the other way. CombinedX has consistently used equity as acquisition currency and as employee compensation: an extraordinary general meeting on 13 February 2025 approved a directed issue of up to 78,438 shares; a directed issue worth 25,032,288 SEK was made to Align Holding AS on 19 May 2025 as part of the Align consideration; the AGM on 7 May 2025 established a warrant programme of up to 350,000 warrants (series 2025/2028, exercisable 1-30 June 2028 at 110% of a ten-day VWAP); and both the 2025 and 2026 AGMs granted the board authority to issue up to 20% of outstanding shares. Shares outstanding are approximately 19,478,701 (derived from the 214,265,711 SEK total of the proposed 11.00 SEK per share distribution). The direction of travel over three years is modestly upward, not shrinking.

Verdict: Returns Capital, but through asset sales rather than operations - roughly 16 SEK per share of extraordinary distributions is being handed back from the Nethouse and Netgain proceeds even as the ordinary dividend halves and the share count slowly grows, which is a liquidation-style return rather than a compounding one.

11. Insider Activities

Sweden is an open venue under EU Market Abuse Regulation Article 19, with PDMR notifications filed to Finansinspektionen's insider register at marknadssok.fi.se within three business days. The MoatMap database block is the spine below, cross-checked against the register aggregators and Swedish financial press for the most recent two weeks. That cross-check turned up two material transactions on 26 August 2026 that had not yet appeared in MoatMap's 2026-08-28 snapshot, both of which are reported below and flagged as such.

Recent transactions

Excluded as non-market: the 19 May 2025 subscription by Align Holding AS of 25,032,288 SEK, which was acquisition consideration in the Align deal rather than a discretionary purchase.

Buys - reading the signal

The 26-27 August window is a textbook cluster buy, and it is unusually easy to interpret because the trigger is dated and public. On the morning of 26 August 2026 the company announced three things at once: the Netgain sale, the Xalerate proposal, and the opening of a strategic review of the whole group. Within hours, three separate insiders bought stock in the open market: the largest shareholder, the CEO, and a subsidiary CEO.

Edastra's purchase is the largest and the most informative. Edastra AB is CombinedX's largest shareholder and crossed 10% ownership in March 2025. Christian Hellman has been CEO of Edastra since 2020 and a CombinedX director since 2023 per the company's board page, which also records that he worked as an equity analyst from 2006 to 2020 at Carnegie, Nordea and Erik Penser, and holds an economics degree from Lund. He owns no shares personally; his exposure runs entirely through Edastra. Buying roughly 400,000 shares for about SEK 15m across two days, on top of a SEK 4.7m purchase ten months earlier, is an already-concentrated holder adding meaningfully to an already-large position immediately after learning what the strategic review will consider. Hellman had previously stated, when Edastra crossed 10%, that "CombinedX has a business strategy that appeals to us. We see great potential in the company and intend to be a continued active owner."

The CEO purchase is the one to flag. Jörgen Qwist bought approximately SEK 2.5m of stock on 26 August, on the day he presented the divestments and the Xalerate proposal. Per the group management page he already holds 1,145,429 shares, so this is not a founder establishing a first position; it is a CEO with a large existing stake choosing to add to it with cash at the precise moment the company put itself in play. This is a very bullish signal. A CEO who thought the strategic review was likely to end badly, or who thought the 4.6% Q2 margin represented a permanent reset, does not write that cheque on announcement day.

Mathias Dyberg's purchases are tiny in absolute terms - roughly SEK 43,000 confirmed in the register, with aggregator reporting suggesting around 2,400 shares in total. As a value signal this is immaterial. As a breadth signal it is not: Dyberg runs Elvenite, the largest remaining operating business and the one whose prospects most determine what the continuing group is worth. An operating-company CEO buying at all, on the same day as the group CEO and the largest shareholder, widens the cluster from "the holding company thinks it is cheap" to "the person running the main asset thinks so too."

Three insiders buying inside 48 hours, spanning the largest shareholder, the group CEO and a subsidiary CEO, with no offsetting sales, is cluster buying in its clearest form.

Sells - working out the why

There is exactly one sale in the twelve-month window. Björn Magnusson, Head of Administration, sold approximately SEK 110,390 of stock on 13 November 2025. No reason is disclosed in the filing or in any source I located, so I will not guess at one. Two pieces of context are worth stating without drawing a conclusion from them. First, the size is trivially small: per the group management page Magnusson holds 287,075 shares directly plus 51,798 indirectly through Q13 Management AB plus 10,000 warrants, so a SEK 110,000 disposal is a rounding error against his position. Second, he is described on that page as a co-founder of the subsidiary Netgain AB, which the group agreed to sell nine months later, though there is nothing linking the two events and I am noting the connection only so a reader who spots it independently knows it has been considered.

One older transaction is worth flagging for completeness because it is a transfer rather than a market trade: Edastra acquired 250,000 shares directly from chairman Niklas Hellberg at SEK 41.50 per share in an internal trade between insiders, disclosed by the company in 2024. That was a block transfer between two insiders, not open-market activity, and it is outside the twelve-month window.

Net assessment

Insiders are decisively net buyers, by a ratio of roughly 140 to 1 by value over the last twelve months. The activity is concentrated in the 26-27 August window and is broad rather than isolated: three distinct people, at three different levels of the company, all buying within two days of the same disclosure. Nothing was sold in that window, and the only sale in the entire period is a sub-SEK 120,000 disposal by an administrative officer five days after the Q3 2025 report.

What has changed recently is the trigger. Edastra had been a steady accumulator for eighteen months, so its buying is a continuation. Qwist's purchase is the new information. The CEO buying SEK 2.5m of his own stock on the day he announced that the board would consider selling all or part of the business is either a statement that he expects the review to surface value above the current price, or a statement that he expects the continuing operations to recover, or both. It is difficult to read it any other way.

The one qualification is that none of this insider buying resolves the governance question in Section 8. The same board that is buying stock is also asking shareholders to approve a 21.5 MSEK investment into a company controlled by its own chairman. Insider conviction and insider conflict are both present here, and they are not the same thing.

Read: bullish signal, driven by an unambiguous three-person cluster buy including a large, unforced CEO purchase on announcement day.

12. Scenarios

Bull case

The strategic review does what strategic reviews with an appointed financial adviser and an explicit "sale of all or part of the operations" mandate usually do, and it produces a transaction. The Nethouse and Netgain sales have already established the price at which the market values these assets: roughly ten times EBITA for a well-run 250 MSEK Nordic consultancy, paid in cash by a strategic buyer who needed the capability. Elvenite is the most obviously saleable remaining piece, because Nordic Infor M3 depth in food and process manufacturing is genuinely scarce and there are a small number of global buyers - Columbus among them, Infor's own ecosystem partners, the large integrators building ERP verticals - who would rather buy that capability than build it. Align is a smaller version of the same argument in IFS.

In this world the holding company works as a disposal vehicle rather than an operating group. Shareholders receive the 16 SEK per share already proposed, then further tranches as each brand finds its natural owner. Management's transactional credibility, which is the strong half of the Section 9 record, is exactly the capability the situation requires. Meanwhile the autumn recovery Qwist has been predicting for six quarters finally arrives, utilisation lifts, the 4.6% Q2 margin proves to have been the trough, and the assets are sold into an improving rather than a deteriorating market. The insider cluster buy in August turns out to have been the people with the most information acting on it.

A softer version of the bull case: no sale of the group, but the review concludes that the remaining four brands are the right portfolio, the corporate cost layer is resized for a 600 MSEK company rather than a billion-krona one, and the Xalerate stake gives the consultancies a differentiated AI governance product to sell into an EU customer base that is increasingly nervous about model sovereignty. The group re-emerges smaller, more focused on ERP, and earning something closer to its 12% target on a much cleaner revenue base.

Base case

The most likely path is slower and less decisive than either version of the bull case. The Netgain sale clears the Inspectorate for Strategic Products and completes in the autumn. Both distribution tranches are approved and paid, and shareholders receive roughly 16 SEK per share by mid-October. The Xalerate investment is approved at the EGM, probably with some dissent recorded and some commentary about the related-party structure, and 21.5 MSEK leaves the balance sheet in two tranches for a minority economic stake with almost no votes.

The strategic review then takes longer than anyone expects, because they always do, and because the company has said explicitly it will give no regular updates. Through that period the continuing business grinds: organic growth stays negative but less severely as the comparison base gets easier and the restructured cost base does its work; margin recovers from the 4.6% Q2 trough toward high single digits, helped by the removal of the loss-making and commoditised operations already exited, but does not reach the 12% target. Elvenite continues to win preliminary studies and convert some of them, Align delivers its first full-year contribution as an integrated business, Ninetech stabilises at a smaller and better-quality revenue base, and Enqore fights for share in the Microsoft channel.

The group ends the period materially smaller than it started, with a large cash return delivered, a portfolio of four specialist brands, an unresolved question about whether the holding structure earns its 3.4% management fee, and a strategic review that has narrowed the options without yet concluding. Management delivers roughly what it has guided on transactions and continues to be too optimistic about the market.

Bear case

The bear case is not a collapse. It is a slow erosion in which the good assets leave and the difficult ones do not.

Nordic consulting margins spend a fourth consecutive year compressing, and the "low billing rates" Qwist identified in Q2 2026 turn out to be structural rather than cyclical, because AI-assisted delivery genuinely reduces the hours a customer needs to buy. Utilisation stays weak, the autumn recovery does not arrive for the seventh straight quarter, and the group's remaining businesses discount further to keep consultants billable. Personnel costs stay above 70% of revenue.

The strategic review finds buyers for Elvenite and Align at reasonable prices, because those are the assets with scarcity value, and finds no buyer at an acceptable price for Ninetech or Enqore, because those compete in crowded channels against better-capitalised rivals. What remains after the good pieces are sold is a sub-scale group with a head-office cost structure it cannot support, and the corporate overhead that was spread across a billion krona of revenue now sits on a fraction of it. The extraordinary distributions, having been paid, are gone; the residual business is not generating enough cash to replace them; and the ordinary dividend, already halved over three years, goes to zero.

Underneath that, the people risk compounds. Consultants at the businesses that were not sold spend eighteen months knowing their employer is looking for a buyer and did not find one. Senior consultants at Elvenite, who are the scarcest resource in the group and the most portable, get recruited by the acquirer's competitors or start their own practice, taking the M3 references with them. A consultancy's value evaporates through the front door, one relationship at a time, and it does so fastest when the ownership question stays open.

The governance strand runs alongside. The Xalerate investment, made into a chairman-controlled company at a valuation set without an arm's-length counterparty, either fails commercially or succeeds in a way that mostly benefits a shareholder base CombinedX holds 3.5% of the votes in. Either outcome makes it harder to attract the institutional shareholders a small-cap needs, and the discount that small Nordic companies with related-party dealings carry becomes self-reinforcing.

Sources: CombinedX Q2 2026 interim report | Q1 2026 interim report | Q4 2025 year-end report | Q3 2025 interim report | Q2 2025 interim report | Q1 2025 interim report | Quarterly reports archive | Investor presentations archive | The CombinedX family of companies | Board of directors | Group management | Nethouse divestment announcement | Netgain divestment announcement | Strategic review announcement | EGM notice, 18 September 2026 | AGM communiqué, 6 May 2026 | AGM communiqué, 7 May 2025 | 2025 annual report announcement | MFN press release archive | Finansinspektionen insider register | Insider transaction history, allaaktier.se | Börskollen CombinedX news and insider coverage | NTT DATA acquisition of Netgain | Xalerate product site | Xalerate AB company registry, allabolag.se | Cinode Konsultkollen 2026 | Swedish IT consulting market 2026 analysis | Columbus Global Infor M3 partner page | CombinedX company history, Wikipedia | Redeye research landing page | Affärsvärlden