Nel ASA's Cost Breakthrough Clashes With a Sinking Order Pipeline and a New Rival's Price War

Nel ASA unveils alkaline electrolyser at $1,450/kW, nearly halving benchmark. Faces pressure from Stiesdal's €500/kW system. Revenue drops 5%, order backlog down 24%.

Nel ASA has taken the wraps off a next-generation pressurised alkaline electrolyser that slashes system costs to less than $1,450 per kilowatt for a 25?megawatt configuration — nearly halving the typical $3,000/kW benchmark. The Norwegian company also claims capital expenditure savings of 40% to 60% and energy consumption below 50 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of hydrogen. Yet just two weeks after the 6 May commercial launch, Danish rival Stiesdal Hydrogen unveiled a 6.5 MW electrolyser that targets system costs under €500/kW, instantly ratcheting up the pressure on Nel’s new platform to compete on price from day one.

The product arrives backed by a billion?dollar production build?out. At Herøya, Nel already operates a 1?gigawatt?per?year manufacturing line and has sketched plans to expand to 4 GW. The European Union is supporting the industrialisation with grants of up to €135 million, and another €11 million payment is expected in the second quarter of 2026. Meanwhile, the company is already working on its next bet: a new PEM platform for which a prototype stack is slated for 2026. Nel aims to cut stack costs by roughly 70%, with a possible market entry no earlier than 2028 or 2029.

Financial performance, however, tells a more sobering story. First?quarter revenue came in at 148 million Norwegian kroner, down 5% year on year. The EBITDA deficit narrowed to 100 million kroner from 115 million a year earlier — progress, but hardly a breakthrough. Order intake collapsed 73% to just 85 million kroner, leaving the backlog at 1.11 billion kroner (down 24%). Nel has responded by trimming its workforce by roughly a fifth since the start of 2025, bringing headcount 26% below its peak, and personnel costs fell 21%. Still, cash and equivalents of 1.44 billion kroner provide a solid cushion while the company waits for the new platform to generate revenue.

The PEM division remains a drag. Segment revenues slid 14% in the quarter, which management attributed to cancelled or delayed US incentive programmes. Nel did notch a $7 million follow?up order in April for containerised PEM units and a separate second?quarter order worth around 70 million kroner. But with the PEM sector under pressure and the new alkaline platform still untested in large?scale contracts, visibility into 2027 is thin — a point the company itself has acknowledged.

Analysts have greeted the share price rally with caution. Berenberg recently cut its target to 2.30 kroner and Citigroup to 2.40 kroner; the consensus stands at 2.14 kroner. The stock currently trades at €0.28, roughly 11% below its 52?week high reached on 5 May and well above its March trough of €0.18. The relative strength index of 15.6 signals deeply oversold conditions, but the year?to?date gain of nearly 50% — and a more than 50% rebound from the March low — has created a disconnect between the share price and the underlying order book.

Adding to the uncertainty, Nel still has to decide the fate of two mothballed 500?MW atmospheric alkaline production lines. Any write?off would compound the 799 million kroner in impairments already booked in fiscal 2025, a year when revenue fell 31% and the net loss reached 1.27 billion kroner.

The half?year results, due on 15 July, will be the next critical milestone. For the May product launch to carry conviction, it must soon translate into firm, sizeable orders. If it does not, the gap between what Nel’s technology promises and what its operational reality delivers will become ever harder to bridge.