Nel ASA’s €135 Million EU Grant and New Platform Face Off Against a 73% Order Collapse

Nel ASA shares rally on sector momentum from Bloom Energy, but Q1 orders collapse 73% to 85M kroner. New electrolyser platform and €135M EU grant offer hope amid cash burn.

The Norwegian electrolyser maker Nel ASA is living a tale of two realities. Its stock has surged roughly 40% above its 200-day moving average, touching a 52-week high of €0.32 in early May. Yet beneath the market euphoria, the company’s first-quarter numbers tell a far grimmer story — one of plunging orders, shrinking revenue, and a balance sheet that, while adequate, is burning cash at a worrying clip.

A Rally Borrowed from the Sector

Nel’s recent share price momentum owes more to its peers than its own performance. The spark came from Bloom Energy, which reported a doubling of first-quarter revenue to $751 million, powered by surging electricity demand from AI data centres. That lit a fire under the entire hydrogen complex. ITM Power rallied on a synthetic fuels partnership with Rheinmetall, and Plug Power jumped 12% in a single session. Nel was simply carried along for the ride.

The stock now trades at around €0.26, down from its 52-week peak of €0.32 but still well above the levels that prevailed before the sector-wide rally. The disconnect between price and fundamentals is stark.

The Numbers Behind the Noise

Nel’s first-quarter 2026 results, released in April, were anything but inspiring. Revenue from customer contracts slipped 5% to 148 million Norwegian kroner. The EBITDA loss improved marginally to -100 million kroner, a 15 million kroner better than the same period last year, but the headline figure that caught the market’s attention was the order intake: a staggering 73% collapse to just 85 million kroner. The order backlog shrank 24% to 1.11 billion kroner.

The company has been cutting costs aggressively. Personnel expenses fell 21%, and headcount is down 26% from its peak. Cash and equivalents stand at roughly 1.4 billion kroner, which management says is sufficient to fund operations through the end of 2026. But with the order book drying up, the question is how long that runway will last.

A New Platform, a €135 Million Backstop

On May 6, Nel officially launched its next-generation pressurised alkaline electrolyser platform — the culmination of more than eight years of development and testing at its Herøya facility. The company claims the system can deliver total installed costs below $1,450 per kilowatt for a 25 MW plant, a 40% to 60% reduction compared to the industry average of around $3,000 per kilowatt.

The platform is fully modular, skid-based, and designed for outdoor installation, reducing civil engineering work and project timelines. It operates at 15 bar pressure, cutting downstream compression needs. Production capacity at Herøya is up to 1 GW per year, with potential to scale to 4 GW.

The industrialisation effort is backed by a grant of up to €135 million from the EU Innovation Fund, covering as much as 60% of eligible costs. The final investment decision was taken in December 2025.

Insider Confidence Meets Analyst Skepticism

In an unusual move, board chair Arvid Moss purchased 100,000 Nel shares at an average price of 2.25 kroner just two days after the weak quarterly results hit the wires. Insider buys of this magnitude are rare and are typically interpreted as a vote of confidence in the company’s trajectory.

The analyst community, however, remains unconvinced. Berenberg’s James Carmichael maintained his neutral rating but cut his price target from 2.60 to 2.30 kroner, citing the persistently weak order intake. Not a single one of the 22 analysts covering Nel currently rates the stock a buy. The consensus price target stands at 2.09 kroner, slightly below the current trading level.

Two Post-Quarter Wins, But a Long Way to Go

Nel did secure two orders for its PEM division after the quarter closed, each worth around $7 million. One of them came from the Douglas County Public Utility District in Washington state, marking the first time Nel has sold an electrolyser to a public utility. The plant is expected to begin producing green hydrogen from hydropower in the first half of 2027.

But these wins, while encouraging, do little to offset the 73% quarterly order collapse. The company is also developing a new PEM platform that it says will cut stack costs by 70%, though no commercial launch date has been set.

The Next Catalyst

All eyes now turn to Nel’s half-year report, due on July 15. That will be the first real test of whether the new alkaline platform can convert technical promise into tangible orders. For a company whose stock has been riding a wave it didn’t create, the pressure to deliver on its own terms is mounting.