Manufacturing & Industrial Technology

HELSINKI – October 30, 2026 -- Stora Enso lifted third-quarter adjusted EBIT by 28% to EUR 161 million (126), lifting the adjusted EBIT margin to 7.2% (5.5%), as the board approved a Demerger Plan to spin off its Swedish forest assets business into a new listed company.

Organic sales rose 2% on higher board deliveries and containerboard prices. Reported sales fell 2% to EUR 2,240 million (2,283) because of divestments. Higher board volumes, lower variable costs and the ramp-up of the new consumer board line at Oulu drove the earnings gain.

IFRS operating result falls to EUR 47 million on impairments and fair valuations

The IFRS operating result dropped to EUR 47 million from EUR 231 million. Items affecting comparability totalled EUR -63 million (+117), mainly impairments, restructuring and disposals. Fair valuations and other non-operational items were EUR -51 million (-11), mostly from the fair valuation of biological assets.

HELSINKI – October 30, 2026 -- Stora Enso's Board of Directors has approved a demerger plan to spin off its Swedish forest assets business into Bergslagets Skogar AB, with completion planned for 31 March 2027. The five largest shareholders by votes, holding about 28.6% of shares and 69.9% of votes, have irrevocably committed to vote in favour, subject to customary conditions.

Shareholder vote set for 15 December 2026

An Extraordinary General Meeting is expected on 15 December 2026 to decide on the cross-border partial demerger. Stora Enso expects to publish an information brochure for shareholders by 24 November 2026 at the latest. A listing prospectus will follow shortly after completion and before public trading begins.

Bergslagets Skogar intends to apply for admission to the regulated markets of Nasdaq Stockholm and Nasdaq Helsinki. It would be a Swedish public limited liability company.

Global – October 30, 2026 -- Industrial architecture teams choosing between Sparkplug B and plain MQTT are really comparing the cost of maintaining a custom application contract with the cost of adopting and operating a shared one. Sparkplug B defines industrial conventions on top of MQTT. It does not replace MQTT or turn a broker into a historian.

Plain MQTT leaves naming, typing and state to the application

MQTT provides client-to-broker publish/subscribe messaging, topic names, topic filters, QoS choices, retained messages, sessions and a Last Will mechanism. The specification does not require JSON, a device model, metric names, data types or an industrial topic namespace.

Teams using plain MQTT must therefore define five things themselves:

Global – October 30, 2026 -- An MQTT topic convention that works in a pilot can become unmanageable after a second plant, a new equipment vendor or the first external integration, according to new TDengine guidance. Inconsistent paths make subscriptions overbroad, access rules hard to review and equipment identity ambiguous downstream.

Six-level namespace separates stable identity from changing values

The illustrative structure is industrial/{site}/{area}/{line}/{equipment_id}/{message_class}, with classes such as telemetry, event and health. It is an organizational convention, not a protocol-mandated industrial schema. Values such as pressure, mode or batch number belong in the payload. Putting a transient device state into the path, as in plant-a/line-2/filler-07/running/pressure, splits one asset across routes.

Neuss – October 30, 2026 -- Pudu Robotics has opened its European headquarters in Neuss, Germany, consolidating sales, demonstrations, training, warehousing and after-sales service after 11 European markets each recorded annual business growth above 60% over the past two years.

Eleven markets post growth above 60% a year

The growth markets are Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic and Poland. Pudu's business now spans more than 20 European countries and 16 industries, including retail, food and beverage, hospitality, healthcare, transportation and education.

Named European customers include EDEKA, Albert Heijn, Carrefour, Marriott, Van der Valk, Pizza Hut, Intermarché, Denner and Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Berlin – October 30, 2026 -- Digital procurement provider FACTUREE has raised its headcount from 53 in 2025 to 62 so far in 2026 and scored an employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) of +42.4, as it was named one of Berlin's best employers for 2026.

The award comes from a study by the daily Tagesspiegel and the Sozialwissenschaftliches Institut Schad. It assessed working-time models, health protection, additional benefits, equal opportunity and development options.

FACTUREE hires to expand personal customer support alongside its platform

The Berlin company, founded in 2017, gives industrial customers access to a network of more than 2,000 manufacturing partners for custom-made drawing parts. More than 30,000 customers now use the service. FACTUREE is developing the platform further, including with AI, while expanding personal customer support, which requires additional skilled staff.

Munich – October 30, 2026 -- ClimatePartner has subjected its label for printers, "Print Product with Financial Climate Contribution", to independent third-party review since May 2026, in response to stricter EU rules on sustainability claims that have applied since 27 September 2026.

EmpCo directive bars offset-based climate claims

The EU directive Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (EmpCo) tightens the rules for environmental claims and sustainability labels. It prohibits statements that attribute a neutral, reduced or positive climate impact to a product on the basis of greenhouse gas compensation. Companies may still disclose financial support for climate projects if the communication meets the applicable requirements and is not misleading.

ClimatePartner Managing Director Moritz Lehmkuhl said printers need reliable foundations to communicate their climate engagement transparently under the new regime.

Memphis – October 30, 2026 -- MSM Solutions has launched PortalTrack Print Quality Inspection, a software platform that checks every label at the moment of print and has already run on 40,000 labels a day in the company's own service bureau.

Zebra AI scanners turn label printers into inspection stations

The platform uses Zebra Technologies' fixed industrial scanners with AI-powered anomaly detection and AI-OCR tools. It verifies 1D and 2D barcodes and confirms that human-readable text matches the encoded data. MSM is a Premier Solution Partner and Registered ISV in the Zebra PartnerConnect Program.

If the system detects a defect, it triggers an instant printer interlock, so unreadable labels never enter the supply chain. APIs let the validation data feed into enterprise systems.

New York – October 30, 2026 -- Daikin U.S. Corporation expects its North American data center cooling business to exceed approximately $3.3 billion by FY2030 and plans to raise production capacity to 2.5 times 2024 levels, according to its annual U.S. Business and Innovation Report.

Daikin plans $163 million test lab and San Diego hub for data center cooling

The company is investing in a new Data Center Hub in San Diego to accelerate solution development and customer engagement. It is also planning a $163 million Advanced R&D Test Lab to develop next-generation cooling technologies. Daikin attributes the growth opportunity to rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and digital services, which is increasing demand for advanced cooling.

OSLO – October 30, 2026 -- Nordic Semiconductor (OSE: NOD) has demonstrated Bluetooth High Data Throughput (HDT) running in silicon, a feature that raises the maximum Bluetooth Low Energy transfer speed almost fourfold. The company is one of the first vendors to show support for the technology.

Longer packets target wearables, hearing aids and PC accessories

Bluetooth HDT adds support for longer packets and new ways for the radio to pack more data into each transmission. Nordic says wearables, smart home devices, PC accessories, hearing aids and other Bluetooth LE products will be able to move data significantly faster while keeping the energy efficiency of Bluetooth LE.