Savaria Q2 2026 Earnings Call: Complete Transcript

Savaria (TSX: SIS ) held its second-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. Below is the complete transcript from the call. This transcript is brought to you APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit for a consultation.

4% growth, with an EBITDA margin of 21%. The company highlighted strategic growth in North America and Europe, including the expansion of its home elevator market and the opening of a new paint shop in Greenville. 6%, and discussed its acquisition strategy, including recent acquisitions of Baxter Laboratories and VPAL in Italy. 87 times.

6 billion in sales by 2030. Operational highlights included the success of Savaria One in driving growth and profitability, as well as the integration and strategic plans for the VPAL acquisition. Management expressed confidence in sustaining growth and improving margins despite some inflationary pressures in the patient care division. Full Transcript OPERATOR Good day, and thank you for standing by.

Welcome to Savaria Corporation's Q2 2026 Investor and Analyst call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentations, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one-one on your telephone.

You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one-one again. Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Sebastien Bourassa, CEO.

Sebastien Bourassa, Chief Executive Officer Thanks, Stephanie, and good morning, everyone. So today I will start with a small recap of our Q2 results. Then Steve will update us on financial, and JP will provide an update on Savaria One, followed by a Q&A session. 4% that is well balanced between patient care and accessibility, and we achieved an EBITDA margin of 21%, which really showed that the Savaria One success over the last few years continues to be present, and I'm very thankful to our team for all the hard work that they make those great results quarter after quarter.

So today there's three things that I would like to highlight. First, the growth. I'm happy that we have a third good quarter in a row in terms of growth, which shows that some good incentives that we have put in place for the next five years are starting to work in North America. We continue to develop the market of home elevator with architects, builders, contractors, and of course dealers.

We increased our sales focus on stairlift, dumbwaiter and material lift, continue to have a push with architect and builder, and good lead time is really helping this product line. We added a state-of-the-art paint shop in Greenville for the manufacturing of a wood cab, which will be in operation—we're starting to be in operation in the third quarter for direct store and will be launched for dealers in October—and that will really help us complete the best product offering features for dealers. And also a building expansion is on plan to open in Q4 this year.

In Europe, we expand the one-stop shop with Primord, the VPL, incline, and now with the VPAL product line, it's pretty much a complete product portfolio, so that will really help us for the future. And we continue to be the partner of choice on stairlift in patient care. Growth has been good since the beginning of the year, but margins are slightly behind what we desire as there's been a bit more inflation in this division than others. But we did a mid-year price increase, and I'm hopeful that by the end of the year in the fourth quarter you will see an improvement on the margins.

As before, the strategy to own the room and continue to drive the long-term care continues to be the core of activity of this division. 6%, which really shows that we continue to improve, we continue to have good initiative despite the small contraction we had in the patient care in the second quarter. Third, acquisition. As we said during the investor day, we had the ambition to do some acquisitions in the next five years for approximately 200 million—some small, mid-sized tuck-ins that will help us in some area where we see some more potential, or bring some new products to our distribution network to continue the best product portfolio with a one-stop shop.

So far this year, we did Baxter Laboratories in Texas, which showed that we want to grow our presence in this booming market in Texas. And in July we closed VPAL, a small manufacturer home lift and low-rise commercial in Italy to help us to develop Europe with some code-compliant products. 7 at the end of the second quarter, liquidity continued to grow and now at 333 million available for capital allocation, we are in very good position. To conclude, I'm quite happy with the first six months of this year.

6 billion of sales with an EBITDA over 220 million by 2030. So thanks to all the people at Savaria, that follows an extra third growth. And thanks for the analysts for your good works. Steve, financials please.

Stephen Reitknecht, CFO Thank you, Sebastian. Good morning, everyone. I'll now provide some additional detail on our second quarter results. 6%.

7% growth on a year-to-date basis. 1%. That's a 50 basis point improvement over prior year, driven by continued gross margin expansion across the business. 87 times as at June 30, giving us significant flexibility to support our growth strategy, including acquisitions and planned capital expenditures.

8 million in the quarter. 4%, as I mentioned, over last year. 8% contribution from the acquisitions of Baxter earlier this year and Western Elevator last year, as well as a positive foreign exchange impact of 1%. 4%.

Sales increased in both Canada and the United States, while Europe continued to deliver another strong quarter, supported by continued growth in stairlift sales. 7 million, entirely driven by organic growth. S. sales and continued growth in the UK.

6% compared with 39% in Q2 2025. That's an increase of 60 basis points. 8 million year over year, providing testament to the continued success and ongoing benefits of Savaria One. 8% in Q2 2025.

The increase was driven by higher revenue, gross margin expansion, lower other expenses, and the termination of strategic initiative expenses following the completion of Savaria One last year. This was partially offset by higher selling and admin as we invest for growth. 6% last year. 9% last year.

7 million last year. 2 million, mainly due to a lower debt balance. 7 million last year. 23 per diluted share, in Q2 2025.

Now taking a look at cash flow and liquidity. 3 million in Q2 last year. The increase was mainly driven by higher net earnings and a favorable unrealized foreign exchange gain, partially offset by higher income taxes paid this year. 6 million last year.

3 million for the Greenville building expansion and related equipment for that site. 5 million at year end. After quarter end, on July 1, 2026, we acquired all outstanding shares of VPAL SpA, a manufacturer of residential elevators based in Ferrantillo, Italy. Total consideration was 13 million Canadian, or 8 million euros, subject to customary adjustments for net financial position and net working capital.

Our Q2 results support our long-term outlook. 1%. Building on this momentum, we continue to target annual revenue growth of approximately 12% through 2030 while maintaining adjusted EBITDA margins of at least 20%. And with that, this concludes my prepared remarks.

I'll now turn the call over to JP for additional comments. JP Yeah, thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. So today I'll speak about three things: how Savaria One is fueling growth, how Savaria One is also helping us with better margins, and a little bit about the Vipal acquisition. For me, the key message is that year to date we're on track with our objectives of organic growth for the business as well as profitability across the board.

For example, the fact that both segments grew 7 to 8% in Q2 is a big success and the growth we see is balanced across product segments as well as across geographies. But a lot of this is due to some efforts we did in the recent past and in the last two years. So I'll give you a few examples. In the patient care business, we had a lot of success in Q2 installing ceiling lifts, but that is in part due to the fact that we upgraded our ceiling lift lineup with the M-Series and started selling it about a year ago.

And with that we won bids that we installed in Q2, also in Silvalea in the UK. This is a smaller part of our business, but still strategic. We moved to a new factory about a year and a half ago, which allowed us to have better capacity, production capacity, and now we are selling into the NHS. We're able to grow this business because we can produce more at a good price.

We also revamped our lineup of slings for Silvalea, so that's also helping that business grow. Another thing that's important in patient care is that we did improvements in the sling manufacturing of St. Louis and also worked with external partners to have more capacity for the disposable slings. And now we had a good growth in sling sales which we were able to ship thanks to all these efforts we did in the past.

S. in St. Louis. So in the current context we can really assemble close to the market now, especially in North America.

As Sebastian mentioned in his address, we had great growth again across the board. It's been a consistent theme for North America. But one of the highlights for me is the growth we had in our direct stores, where we made deliberate efforts for years to develop our referral networks, to do education with architects, to also go and work with contractors and promoters of multi-unit residential projects who now spec our lifts in their offer, and that pays off. So now smaller direct stores have orders for multi-unit projects that are very substantial.

And finally, when we bought Matot, we spent a ton of efforts to in-source production in Brampton, to make the production process also faster and leaner. And this is paying off because now we are growing Matot sales, but we're also able to produce and ship in much shorter lead times than we used to in the past, and that's helping our sales. Finally, we also migrated our website to a new domain this quarter and the website has been redesigned to provide us better domain authority as well as enable better AI search visibility, which is critical in the current world.

In Europe, we reengaged with growth by winning back historical dealer relationships thanks to our consistent efforts in improving product quality. We also expanded cross-selling of platform lifts, so we're now selling Artira and X3 platform lifts across all markets in Europe, including in our own direct stores in the UK and Netherlands. We also continue to drive growth in the largest direct markets by having innovative commercial strategies and just great delivery overall consistently. We also see that now not only are we recognized for better quality, but we are starting to introduce new product innovations.

For example, we introduced the K2 stairlift earlier this year and just now we changed our new outdoor rail for the 4000. So that's a new offering that we think is going to have some traction. And finally, we made a number of small commercial changes that make it simpler to do business with us. So the overall message for me is that we are rigorously managing growth initiatives in Savaria One, just like we focused a lot on cost initiatives in the past.

This being said, we continue to also improve our costs and you can see it in the expansion of gross profit, the expansion of the bottom line results each month. We continue to implement initiatives. So for example, in Q2 we implemented at least 50 new initiatives and a lot of those relate to procurement to reduce the cost of goods sold. And you can see that that shows in our financials.

And this is especially relevant in today's world because we know there are inflationary pressures across the board. But in most of our businesses we're able to offset those with either efficiency gains in production or material cost reductions thanks to our initiatives. The only exception this quarter is patient care where, as Sebastian mentioned, we had some pressures from some commodity cost inflation that we now need to counter with some price increases mid-year. So our focus as a business continues to be on growth and this is where most of our attention and our efforts are oriented towards.

But people working in the factories and people working in the offices on procurement continue to innovate, continue to improve our business nevertheless so we can improve our cost position. Finally, the last highlight for me from Savaria One is the capacity expansion in Greenville, as Seb mentioned. So I'll be brief, but the fact that we now have—we already were assembling Eclipse in Greenville for months, but every quarter, every month we are expanding the capabilities over there. We also had investments of new machinery.

S. S. S. market.

Third topic for me is the Vipal acquisition. So just a bit more details on that business. We closed the acquisition in early July. It is a strategic acquisition for us because of the know-how of this team at Vipal in the lift business, because the fabrication process is largely in house, and because the technology is well known and renowned in Europe.

What happened is very shortly after, two weeks later, we had a large group of our global leaders, including myself and Sebastian, who went there to kick off the integration plan. So we already are in motion to integrate the business. And in fact, I am speaking to you from Italy, where I'm doing a roadshow with the sales team of Vipal this week to meet our top dealers and their top dealers. So we're definitely in motion and we are already seizing opportunities to cross-sell in both ways.

So, meaning we can cross-sell our products to their dealers and vice versa, we can sell Vipal to our dealers. And this is going to be an integration that will take years with different steps. So we are very excited about the acquisition. We got a lot of ambitions for Vipal, but of course we'll go step by step, first by selling the products that they have today and over time, improving the operations, improving the products, and really integrating them in our business.

So, in conclusion, we see good performance year to date and in Q2, and that comforts us that there's a clear link between our efforts in Savaria One and the results we see in the business. Thank you. That's it for me. Seb, over to you for closing words.

Sebastien Bourassa, Chief Executive Officer Thank you, JP.