Taaleri: Joensuu Biocoal's bankruptcy casts a shadow over Bioindustry

Translation: Original published in Finnish on 3/21/2026 at 11:21 am EET.

Kauppalehti reported on Friday that Joensuu Biocoal, partly owned by Taaleri, has filed for bankruptcy. While the news is a clear strategic disappointment for Taaleri's Bioindustry business, its direct financial impact is marginal in the company's overall picture. However, the indirect impact is greater, as a successful project would have served as a critical reference for Taaleri's Bioindustry business. The forecast changes are very small, and this has no impact on our view of Taaleri's fair value.

Small impact on figures

Joensuu Biocoal is a co-investment project for Taaleri. The project's original size was around 20 MEUR, with Taaleri's share being around 2 MEUR. The rest of the capital has come from investors. In our view, the key reasons behind the bankruptcy include challenges in commissioning the plant, challenging customer acquisition, and high wood prices. Taaleri already announced in February, in connection with its Q4 report, that the test runs at the Joensuu bioindustry plant had revealed additional funding needs to improve energy efficiency. As a result, the company halved the value of the investment on its balance sheet to 0.9 MEUR. Due to the bankruptcy, this remaining item will be fully written down. In addition, we consider it possible that the company also has smaller receivables from the project. However, their share is small, at most hundreds of thousands. For a company the size of Taaleri, a write-down of ~1 MEUR is very small when compared to the company's equity (+220 MEUR) or our 2026 earnings forecast (EBIT 2026e: 26 MEUR).

Strategic reference point would have been important

The most significant negative impact of the bankruptcy is related to the reference value of Taaleri's Bioindustry business. We note that while the Joensuu bioplant was a separate co-investment project for Taaleri, with financing coming directly from investors, the team is the same as the one managing the Bioindustry funds. Thus, we believe the failure of the Joensuu project will complicate the fund's future fundraising (estimated 2027-2028). We have previously raised concerns regarding Bioindustry's next fundraising round, as the market situation in the sector is currently challenging.

The other dimension relates to the company's planned biocoal plant in Canada. The company has been preparing this project for some time, and we previously considered the investment decision likely. However, the probability is now inevitably decreasing, as the failure of the Joensuu project will very likely affect investor interest in the Canadian project.

Finally, we note that the Bioindustry business's share of Taaleri's value is quite small in our calculations, and it mainly consists of the Fintoil investment. The weakened outlook for Bioindustry and the ongoing challenges in the real estate sector underscore the company's need to find solutions for the Other Private Equity Funds segment. At its fall CMD, the company stated its goal to launch new strategies for this business, and we would not be surprised if we heard about an expansion into a new asset class during 2026.