AutoStore ends 2025 with record quarterly orders and revenue, but full-year sales fall 10% and profit drops 40%

AutoStore closed 2025 with the strongest quarter in its history, but the record was not enough to rescue the year. The Norwegian maker of cube storage warehouse systems reported on 12 February 2026 that fourth-quarter revenue rose 9.0% from a year earlier to $179.7 million and order intake climbed 35.1% to $194.2 million, while revenue for the full year fell 10.4% to $538.6 million.

Fourth-quarter revenue was 29.3% higher than in the third quarter, the company said, and order intake rose 27.5% over the same span. The order backlog stood at $557.0 million at 31 December, up 21.8% on the year and 2.7% on the quarter. Gross margin edged up to 73.7% from 73.0%. Adjusted EBITDA was almost flat at $77.9 million against $77.0 million a year earlier, so the adjusted EBITDA margin narrowed to 43.3% from 46.7%. Operating profit (EBIT) fell 6.6% to $55.8 million, while net income rose 1.7% to $40.9 million. Cash flow conversion in the quarter was 84.3%.

The full-year accounts tell a harsher story. Adjusted EBITDA for 2025 dropped 19.4% to $228.1 million and the margin fell to 42.3% from 47.0%. EBIT slid 37.0% to $140.1 million and net income declined 40.1% to $81.8 million, according to the quarterly report. Order intake for the year rose 4.3% to $638.2 million, which gives a full-year book-to-bill ratio of about 1.18 by MEKAWIRE calculation. That gap between orders and shipped revenue is the main reason management argued the company enters 2026 in better shape than its annual numbers suggest.

Chief executive Mats Hovland Vikse wrote in the report that geopolitical and macroeconomic volatility through 2025 stretched customers' decision cycles, and that the fourth quarter brought positive momentum across a wide range of end markets. In the results release he credited a sharper strategy, 150 customers won during the year and the launch of eleven new products and features, which the company said extend the cube into adjacent warehouse workflows. The report did not name those products.

Several one-off items weighed on 2025. AutoStore started a transformation project in the first half of the year that included severance packages, and it wrote down inventory tied to its B1 Robot line. Excluding that write-down, full-year gross margin would have been 74.0%, the company said. It also made its final payment to rival Ocado Group in the second quarter of 2025 on a liability that matured on 30 June 2025, and it reports no remaining obligations to Ocado.

The balance sheet tightened. Operating cash flow fell 34.2% to $94.3 million, and cash at year end was $90.1 million compared with $296.1 million a year earlier. In November 2025 AutoStore refinanced with a $150 million term loan and a $350 million revolving credit facility and repaid $228.6 million under its previous facilities. In 2025 it also signed subscription contracts under its AutoStore as a Service model with a total contract value of $34.4 million, a small but growing recurring stream.

Founded in 1996, AutoStore says it has about 1,900 systems running in 65 countries, assembles products in Poland and Thailand and sells only through a network of system integrator partners. Its systems stack storage bins in a dense aluminium grid; battery powered robots travel on top of the grid, dig out the bins needed for an order and deliver them to picking stations called ports. Because the grid replaces aisles, the design packs far more goods into the same floor area than shelving served by people or forklifts.

The quarter compares unevenly with listed peers. Symbotic reported revenue of $630 million for the quarter to 27 December 2025, up 29%, with adjusted EBITDA of $67 million. Teradyne, owner of Universal Robots and Mobile Industrial Robots, booked $89 million of robotics revenue in the fourth quarter after cutting about 400 robotics jobs during 2025. Ocado's Technology Solutions arm grew revenue 13.0% to £561.2 million in fiscal 2025. AutoStore remains far smaller than Symbotic by revenue but converts a much larger share of each dollar into EBITDA.

The risks are visible in the same report. Margin fell even as revenue recovered, which points to mix, transformation costs and price pressure rather than volume alone. AutoStore depends entirely on integrators to reach customers, and it acknowledged continued uncertainty over global trade flows. Its cash cushion is now much thinner after the debt repayment, and the company has not detailed what it plans for the B1 Robot line after the write-down.

Investors will look to the first-quarter 2026 report in April for proof that the record order book converts into revenue at stable margins, and to whether the subscription model and the eleven new products lift sales per customer during 2026.