The second quarter has so far not been too impressive for Vestas when it comes to order intake, but traditionally, orders clump together in the last days before the quarter ends, so it’s still too early to talley up the numbers.

”It’s pretty quiet at the moment. Hopefully something will happen in the next few days. It’s not like there haven’t been any orders, but the champagne corks are not exactly popping when you look at the order intake so far in the second quarter,” says Head of Equity Research Jacob Pedersen from Danish Sydbank to MarketWire.

So far in the second quarter, Vestas has announced onshore wind orders of just under 700MW, while the same quarter last year saw an announced order intake of 1753MW, to which unannounced orders of 370 megawatts were added.

Final spurt may be coming

Last year, Vestas announced 11 orders in the last two days of the second quarter with a total capacity of 1075MW - so there’s still hope for some good days ahead for the wind turbine manufacturer.

”We know that the last days of the quarter are traditionally big for Vestas - sometimes it’s not just the last two days, but the last 3-5 days. It looks like we have to conclude that it will be the very, very last part of the quarter that will save our order intake for the second quarter and meet our expectations. But we sure are trailing behind,” says Jacob Pedersen.

On onshore segments, he expects Vestas to hit ”at least” 12,000MW in order intake for the full year.

”I’m very cautious about having an expectation for the individual quarter, because the orders don’t just come like pearls on a string - they come very unevenly throughout the year, but for it to look good, I think you need to at least deliver an onshore wind order intake of somewhere between 2500 and 3000MW in the second quarter.”

”If you land below 2500MW, I don’t think anyone will think it’s a particularly strong quarter,” says Pedersen.

With an expectation that Vestas will have unannounced orders in the second quarter of around 500MW, Vestas still needs to announce around 1300MW in onshore wind orders to reach around 2500MW.

”Right now it’s looking tight - you really need to get the order intake going in the last days of the quarter if you’re going to deliver the 2500MW of onshore orders that I’m expecting. But they have done it before,” says Pedersen.

If the second quarter ends up leaving a slightly bad impression on the order side, it doesn’t necessarily change much in terms of long-term perspectives.

”We’ve lived with the fact that there was a single quarter where things didn’t quite pan out, and we’ll do that again, because we know that these orders don’t just come like pearls on a string,” says Jacob Pedersen.