Stockholm-listed engineering group Sandvik published its second-quarter 2026 interim report on Friday, July 17, and the numbers extend the pattern its Q1 set in April. Order intake reached SEK 37,799 million, up from SEK 32,206 million a year earlier — growth of 17% at fixed exchange rates, all of it organic. Revenues rose 23% organically to SEK 36,752 million, and adjusted EBITA jumped to SEK 8,306 million, lifting the adjusted EBITA margin to 22.6% from 19.0% a year ago.
Adjusted earnings per share came in at SEK 4.59 against SEK 2.96 in Q2 2025, with free operating cash flow of SEK 3,590 million. CEO Stefan Widing presented the figures at a webcast the same day. For a group that booked SEK 36.8 billion in orders in what was already a record first quarter, a sequential step up to nearly SEK 37.8 billion — without acquisitions or currency help — confirms that the demand driving Sandvik’s order book is structural rather than cyclical noise.
The corridor read-through: same machines, same mines
NorthSouth HQ covered the Iberian dimension of Sandvik’s order book in detail after Q1: Boliden Somincor, operator of the Neves-Corvo copper-zinc mine in the Alentejo and one of southern Europe’s most automated underground operations, runs Sandvik equipment alongside a multi-year automation and electrification retrofit programme. Sandvik’s service centre in São Domingos de Rana, in the Lisbon metropolitan area, handles parts logistics and field service for Portuguese and southern Spanish operators alike. None of that changed this quarter — what changed is that another three months of record group orders have accumulated on top of it.
The Swedish mining-equipment presence in Portugal is a three-company story. Epiroc, Sandvik’s closest peer, employs 52 people in Portugal from its base in Oeiras and a service centre in Aljustrel, works directly with Boliden Somincor at Neves-Corvo and with Almina at Aljustrel, and is part of the Metro do Porto Ruby Line project — details the company laid out to Portuguese journalists this spring, when its media team added that it would “always be interested” in future Lisbon metro work. Atlas Copco completes the trio. Between them, the Swedish groups dominate the supplier base for underground hard-rock mining on the peninsula.
Monday’s report is the other half of the story
The demand side of that equation reports on Monday. Boliden publishes its Q2 2026 interim report on July 21 at 07:30 CEST, with CEO Mikael Staffas and CFO Håkan Gabrielsson presenting. It will be the fifth quarterly report to consolidate Somincor since Boliden completed its €1.3 billion acquisition of the Neves-Corvo operation (together with Zinkgruvan in Sweden) in April 2025 — and the first Q2-on-Q2 comparison with a full prior-year quarter of Portuguese production in the base.
Boliden’s Q1 gave a taste of how weather-exposed the Portuguese asset can be: Somincor lost roughly a week of milled production to heavy precipitation early in the year, even as the group’s operating profit excluding process-inventory revaluation surged 70% to SEK 4,432 million. Neves-Corvo produced 110,600 tonnes of zinc concentrate and over 30,000 tonnes of copper in concentrate in 2025, and the operation targets around 4.5 million tonnes of processed ore in 2026. Somincor has invested some €430 million in the operation over four years, per figures reported by Portuguese business daily ECO in March.
Automation capex is the corridor’s quiet flywheel
The reason a Sandvik group print matters for a Portugal-Nordics publication is the shape of the demand underneath it. Sandvik’s growth is being driven by brownfield expansion, automation retrofits and aftermarket volume — exactly the categories that mature underground mines like Neves-Corvo and Aljustrel consume. Every quarter in which Sandvik’s orders compound at high-teens organic rates is a quarter in which the installed base at Iberian operations gets deeper, the service relationships get stickier, and the switching costs for any non-Nordic challenger get higher.
Portugal’s lithium pipeline adds the greenfield kicker. Savannah Resources’ Mina do Barroso project in northern Portugal, holder of a favourable Environmental Impact Declaration, remains the most advanced western European hard-rock lithium project, and its engineering-and-procurement phase maps directly onto the battery-electric loaders and automation-ready drill rigs that Sandvik and Epiroc are building their product roadmaps around. When equipment shortlists for the Portuguese lithium projects are drawn up, the field-service density that the Swedish trio already operates from Oeiras, Aljustrel and São Domingos de Rana is a hard advantage to bid against.
What to watch next. Boliden’s Monday report will show whether Neves-Corvo delivered a clean quarter after Q1’s rain disruption, and its capex commentary will signal how fast the automation programme rolls forward. Verisure — another Stockholm-listed group with deep Portuguese operations — follows on July 30, and Vestas and Pandora report in August. The Q2 earnings season keeps handing the corridor fresh data points; Sandvik’s record print is the strongest one yet.