United Bankers Q4'25 preview: When will the sales engine start delivering more power?

Translation: Original published in Finnish on 2/9/2026 at 7:00 am EET.

Source: Inderes

United Bankers will publish its 2025 financial statements release on Thursday at approximately 9:00 am EET. We expect the company to report a positive result, particularly driven by strong performance fees from forest funds. New sales of spearhead funds have been challenging throughout the year; thus, we will focus primarily on the sales outlook in the report. 

Forest fund performance fees compensate for sluggish sales of spearhead products

We forecast that United Bankers' (UB) H2 revenue will settle at 28.9 MEUR, which is roughly on par with the comparison period (H2’24: 29.1 MEUR). The company recorded very high performance-linked fees during the comparison period, and we predict that these will be roughly cut in half to 4.5 MEUR. Performance fees come entirely from forest funds, which have continued to perform well. However, recurring fees (asset management and fund management fees), together with a clear improvement in the Capital Markets Services segment, fully compensated for the decline in performance fees. Predicting performance fees is extremely difficult in the short term, and even large deviations are possible. We note that the performance fee accrued for a single six-month period has a very limited impact on the company's value.

We expect assets under management to exceed 5 BEUR for the first time in history. Sales of the company's key spearhead funds (forest, real estate, renewable energy) have remained sluggish due to the challenging market environment. However, this was offset by strong sales in asset management, and sales of funds investing in listed markets also picked up in H2 from a sluggish level in H1. Overall, though, new sales have been mediocre at best, and the company's sales engine is clearly underperforming.

Strong performance fees support profitability

We expect UB’s H2 EBIT to be 9.2 MEUR (H2'24: 9.9 MEUR), corresponding to an EBIT margin of around 30%. While profitability will continue to be significantly supported by performance fees from forest funds, profitability adjusted for performance fees should also clearly improve from the comparison period, as cost growth is only moderate. Profitability adjusted for performance fees has consistently remained modest for UB, marring an otherwise exemplary track record. Therefore, the development of profitability adjusted for performance fees is one of the most interesting aspects of the report, as it is a key value driver for the stock in the future.

Although UB's official dividend policy does not mention increasing dividends, we believe the company intends to steadily raise them over time. The company has increased its dividend since 2018, and this year will certainly mark the eighth consecutive year of dividend increases. We expect a moderate dividend increase of EUR 0.05, estimating the dividend at EUR 1.15 per share.

Focus on spearhead fund sales recovery

The most important aspect of the report concerns the company's outlook, particularly new sales of its spearhead funds. These products, which have a high fee structure, are central to earnings growth in the coming years, and a pick-up in their sales is essential for the company to properly realize its earnings improvement based on recurring fees. The expansion into Private Equity funds, announced in January 2026, is a logical step toward broadening the product offering and leveraging the sales engine more effectively.

We expect the company to provide guidance for growing operating profit in 2026 (our forecast 19.6 MEUR / +7%). However, it should be noted that our forecast includes not only an upturn in sales but also significant performance fees of 11 MEUR (2025e: 11.3 MEUR), which are generated by only a few forest funds. Consequently, the guidance largely depends on the company's view of the amount of performance fees because without significant performance fees, there is no prospect of earnings growth.