91% probability KONE's FY2026 adjusted EBIT margin reaches at least 11.8%. Guidance of 12.3-13% was left unchanged, Q2 delivered 12.6% with the margin up 40 basis points, and service and modernisation are offsetting a Chinese new-build market expected to fall about 10%.
KONE left its full-year 2026 outlook unchanged: sales expected to grow 3-6% at comparable exchange rates with an adjusted EBIT margin of 12.3-13%. Q2 2026 revenue rose 3.1% to EUR 2,938m with adjusted EBIT of EUR 370m at a 12.6% margin, up 40 basis points. H1 2026 adjusted EBIT was EUR 663.5m at an 11.8% margin, with sales up 5.0% at comparable exchange rates. Service and modernisation sales grew 5.6-8.8%, offsetting a decline in New Building Solutions, particularly in Greater China, where the market is expected to decline around 10%. Wage inflation was cited as a continuing headwind. Source: KONE half-year financial report for January-June 2026, 22 July 2026.
We lock a binary: KONE's reported adjusted EBIT margin for full-year 2026 is 11.8% or higher. Confidence 91%.
Guidance is 12.3-13% and was left unchanged rather than trimmed. Our threshold sits half a point below the floor of that range, and exactly at the margin the first half already delivered.
An elevator company looks like a construction play and largely is not. Every unit KONE installs becomes a maintenance contract lasting decades, and service and modernisation carry far higher margins than selling the equipment. That is why H1 sales grew 5% at comparable exchange rates and the Q2 margin expanded 40 basis points while New Building Solutions was declining, with the Chinese market specifically expected to fall around 10%.
The mix shift is doing the work: service and modernisation grew 5.6-8.8% and now carry the result. This is the structural reason the margin guidance held when a pure construction supplier's would not have.
The threshold is set at 11.8% because that is precisely what H1 delivered, and KONE's margin is seasonally weighted to the second half — Q2 alone was already 12.6%. Asking the full year to match its weakest half is a deliberately low bar against a guidance range starting at 12.3%.
The residual 9% is wage inflation, which management flagged and which lands directly on a service business where labour is the dominant cost, plus the possibility that the Chinese decline steepens beyond the 10% assumed.
Finland had no lock in 270 predictions, and neither did elevators. Both were verified absent before building.
The verification method nearly failed, though, and it is worth saying so. The first coverage probe for this tranche searched sector keywords — defence, reinsurance, cosmetics — and returned zero for every one, which read as open ground. A precise re-probe on company names found Rheinmetall, L'Oréal, Munich Re, Philip Morris and Marriott all already locked; the briefs simply describe them by their metric rather than by a sector label. Three duplicates were one step from being built. A zero from an under-specified probe is not evidence of absence, and the fix is to probe the thing itself rather than a word you expect to find near it.
RAOSCAFF locks P-271 on 2026-09-02, before the FY2026 result. Scored against the adjusted EBIT margin as reported by KONE for the twelve months to 31 December 2026.
The threshold equals the margin H1 already delivered, in a business whose margin is seasonally weighted to the second half. Q2 alone printed 12.6%.