Nel ASA’s €135 Million EU Backing and New Platform Can’t Outrun a 73% Order Collapse

Norwegian electrolyser maker Nel ASA sees shares crash 26% amid dwindling orders and rising doubts over commercial viability, despite EU grants and Samsung partnership.

Nel ASA’s stock has suffered a brutal week, tumbling nearly 26% to close at €0.26 on Friday, following a single-session slide of around 13%. The sell-off comes not from a sudden corporate disaster but from a growing chasm between technical promise and commercial reality — a gap that investors are no longer willing to tolerate.

The Norwegian electrolyser maker had only just touched a 52-week high of €0.37 on May 25, riding the wave of a next-generation pressurised alkaline platform unveiled that same month. The system, developed over eight years, targets total installed costs below $1,450 per kilowatt for a 25 MW plant. Nel has secured EU grants of up to €135 million to cover as much as 60% of the industrialisation costs for its Herøya production hub, which will initially boast 1 GW of annual capacity with a long-term ceiling of 4 GW.

A partnership with South Korea’s Samsung E&A, announced in parallel, was meant to provide the commercial credibility the market craved. Samsung offers a blanket guarantee for jointly built projects, a move designed to ease project financing hurdles. Yet that enthusiasm evaporated once the first-quarter numbers landed.

Order intake for Q1 2026 came in at just 85 million Norwegian kroner — a 73% plunge from the same period last year. The order backlog shrank to 1.113 billion kroner, down 24% year-on-year. Revenue slipped to 148 million kroner, marginally below the prior year’s level, while the EBITDA loss narrowed to minus 100 million kroner from minus 115 million. Still, management conceded that the current backlog is insufficient to keep 2027 production capacity busy.

Nel has responded with aggressive cost-cutting, slashing its workforce by a quarter to around 300 employees. The downside: the company has warned that the smaller headcount could strain project execution. A small but welcome relief came in the form of a new order worth 70 million kroner in the second quarter, alongside a $7 million PEM purchase order. But these are seen as too modest to shift the narrative.

Analyst sentiment reflects the pessimism. Of 13 analysts covering the stock, not one rates it a buy; seven recommend selling. Berenberg has a hold rating with a price target of 2.30 kroner. The relative strength index sits at 40.5, not yet in oversold territory, but with annualised 30-day volatility near 105%, swings can be vicious in either direction.

Technically, the stock is now hovering around its 50-day moving average. A breach below that level would open the door to the 100-day average at €0.22. Nel still retains a sizeable liquidity buffer of roughly 1.4 billion kroner, so near-term solvency is not a concern. What investors want is evidence that interest can be converted into contracts.

The next milestone is the half-year report, scheduled for July 15, followed by a second-quarter update on July 22. Those releases will test whether the Samsung alliance can begin to generate the order flow that has so conspicuously been missing.