Nel ASA’s Two-Speed Reality: A 52-Week High Collides With a 73% Order Crash

Nel ASA shares rally 46% on hydrogen sector momentum, but analysts remain bearish amid a 73% order collapse and deep cost cuts. Insider buying and a new electrolyser platform offer cautious hope.

Nel ASA’s shares have surged roughly 46% in the past 30 days, yet not a single analyst covering the Norwegian hydrogen specialist rates it a buy. The disconnect between market momentum and operational reality has rarely been starker.

The rally owes more to sector tailwinds than to anything happening inside the company. It was Bloom Energy that lit the fuse: the US fuel-cell player reported a doubling of first-quarter revenue to $751 million, powered by electricity demand from AI data centres. That lifted the entire hydrogen complex. ITM Power rode a partnership with Rheinmetall on synthetic fuels, while Plug Power jumped 12% in a single session. Nel was simply swept along.

The stock hit a 52-week high of €0.32 in early May and now trades at €0.28 — still roughly 40% above its 200-day moving average. But beneath the price action, the numbers tell a grimmer story.

Orders collapse as costs are slashed

First-quarter revenue from customer contracts slipped 5% to 148 million Norwegian kroner. EBITDA remained deeply negative at minus 100 million kroner — an improvement of 15 million from the year-ago period, but hardly cause for celebration. The real shock came in the order book: new orders cratered 73% to 85 million kroner, while the total backlog shrank 24% to 1.11 billion kroner.

Management has been cutting deep. Staff costs fell 21%, and the workforce has been reduced by 26% from its peak. Liquidity stands at roughly 1.4 billion kroner, which the company says is sufficient to carry it through to the end of 2026.

An insider vote of confidence

Amid the turmoil, board chair Arvid Moss placed an unusual bet. Two days after the weak quarterly numbers landed, he bought 100,000 Nel shares at an average of 2.25 kroner — a moment when the stock had dipped to 2.20 kroner. Insider purchases of this kind are rare and are typically read by the market as a signal of conviction.

A new platform and two post-quarter wins

Nel has been working for eight years on a new pressurised alkaline electrolyser platform, which it finally launched commercially on 6 May. The system operates at 15 bar, cutting the need for downstream compression and boosting energy efficiency. It is modular, a deliberate shift away from the bespoke, long-lead-time projects that have historically plagued the industry. Chief technology officer Marius Løken expects the standardised design to shorten project timelines and reduce risk for industrial customers.

The platform is initially targeting projects between 50 and 150 megawatts. Nel is already planning to scale production at its Herøya facility in Norway from a starting capacity of one gigawatt per year to four gigawatts. The European Union is backing the expansion: up to €135 million from the EU Innovation Fund will cover a large chunk of the cost. The company aims to produce the first 500 megawatts of the new platform by year-end.

Two orders for Nel’s PEM division — each worth roughly $7 million — came in after the quarter closed. One is from the Douglas County Public Utility District in Washington state, which plans to produce green hydrogen using hydropower. It marks the first time Nel has sold a unit to a public utility. Commissioning is scheduled for the first half of 2027.

Analysts hold fire

Berenberg’s James Carmichael kept his neutral rating on the stock but trimmed his price target from 2.60 to 2.30 kroner, citing the persistently weak order intake. No analyst covering Nel currently recommends buying the shares.

The company will publish its half-year results on 15 July. By then, the market will have a clearer sense of whether the May product launch is generating real orders — and whether the order book can finally reverse its downward trajectory. For now, Nel’s share price and its fundamentals are travelling in different directions, and it is far from certain which one will blink first.