Glossary — B3 Consulting Group

Glossary — B3 Consulting Group

Company-specific terms used in the thesis, dossier, and report prose. Project-wide language lives in the project glossary (CONTEXT.md).

Specialist company

B3's organizational model (Swedish: specialistbolag): instead of one big consultancy, B3 is a group of entrepreneur-led companies, each focused on a specialty (cybersecurity, cloud, healthcare digitalisation, …). B3 establishes or acquires them together with the entrepreneurs who run them, initially often as associates, then gradually buys up the ownership via internal acquisitions. The model is B3's recruiting pitch — senior consultants get real ownership of their own unit — and the reason the group carries large non-controlling interests.

Internal acquisition

B3 buying up the entrepreneur co-owners' stakes in a specialist company, governed by put/call option agreements: consideration is based on the unit's earnings over several years and is settled in cash and/or newly issued B3 shares. Examples from 2026: B3 Skilled 95→98% and B3 HealthTech 70→100% (paid in shares, May 2026); B3 Secure, B3 Next and B3 Connect consolidated as subsidiaries in January 2026. Some options run far into the future (B3 Consulting Poland exercisable 2030–2050; Habberstad from 2029).

Non-controlling interests

The share of a subsidiary's profit and equity that belongs to its minority owners — in B3's case, the entrepreneurs who still co-own their specialist companies. Reported profit therefore splits into a parent-shareholder part and a minority part; only the parent part backs earnings per share. In the second quarter of 2026 the minorities' share (+2.5 MSEK) exceeded the entire group profit (+1.9 MSEK), leaving parent earnings per share negative — the leakage the thesis's minority buy-in foundation watches.

Associate

A company B3 co-owns but does not control (typically an early-stage specialist company); it enters the accounts by the equity method — one profit-share line, no consolidated revenue — until B3's stake grows enough to consolidate it as a subsidiary.

Organic growth

Revenue growth with acquisitions and disposals stripped out — the growth of the business B3 already had. The company's own comparability measure, and the cleanest reading of the Swedish IT-consulting cycle in B3's numbers (double-digit negative through 2025 and into 2026).

Utilisation

The share of consultants' available time billed to clients (Swedish: beläggningsgrad). The consultancy's capacity-use gauge: revenue moves with headcount × utilisation × price. Trough was Q3 2025 at 81.7%; back to 86.1% in Q2 2026.

Co-workers

B3's headline headcount measure: employees plus associated consultants who work only for B3. The narrower "employees" count runs ~40 lower. Numbers in this project use co-workers unless said otherwise.

Operating profit (EBIT)

Profit from operations before interest and tax — B3's headline earnings line. EBITA is the same before amortisation of acquisition-related intangibles. Adjusted versions strip items affecting comparability.

Items affecting comparability

One-off costs and gains the company reports beside its ordinary result (restructuring, divestment effects, …) to make quarters comparable; "adjusted operating profit" excludes them. Where a B3 figure here is adjusted, the extraction note for that report says what was stripped.

Equity ratio

Equity as a share of total assets (Swedish: soliditet) — the balance-sheet cushion. 32.3% at 30 June 2026.

Senior secured bond

B3's main external financing: a bond with first claim on pledged assets ahead of shareholders. A 250 MSEK three-year senior secured bond (within a 300 MSEK framework) settled 16 July 2026, refinancing the bonds maturing 2027 — larger than the entire market value of B3's shares at the time, which is what makes the equity a thin slice on the enterprise. Net debt excluding lease liabilities was 163 MSEK at 30 June 2026 — 3.3× the last twelve months' operating profit before depreciation (the company's own leverage gauge).

Habberstad

Norwegian consultancy acquired February 2025 as B3's Norway expansion (segment B3 Norway), agreed sold back at original cost (~NOK 15.9 million) in July 2026 — an expansion unwound after 17 months. The extraordinary general meeting approved the sale on 19 August 2026, clearing the last condition; completion is expected during August. B3 keeps its Norwegian recruitment company, Habberstad Rekruttering og Utvikling.

Segments

B3 reports three: B3 Sweden (the core, ~79% of revenue in the first half of 2026), B3 Poland (~12% of revenue, the group's highest-margin segment; a delivery hub with roughly a third of its revenue in Poland and the rest on Nordic assignments, notably Finland), and B3 Norway (Habberstad, being divested).

MFN

Modular Finance's public news relay (mfn.se) — where B3's regulatory announcements and press releases are mirrored with a fetchable feed. This project's Stockholm counterpart to Oslo Børs NewsWeb, since B3's primary distributor (Cision) blocks automated readers.