CaetanoBus' Japanese Shareholder Mitsui Cuts Its Stake to 19.7% as British National Express Cancels 60% of Coach Orders — Ovar Plant Books a 2025 €13.8 Million Loss and 88-Worker Layoff Through June

The Vila Nova de Gaia coach manufacturer CaetanoBus has been pushed into a deep restructuring in 2025-2026, with its long-standing Japanese shareholder Mitsui & Co. halving its participation, its largest British customer National Express cancelling roughly 60% of pending orders, and a parallel layoff process now reaching 88 workers. ECO's exclusive read on the company accounts and the shareholders' positions, published Tuesday morning, lands a structural picture rather than a one-off bad year.

Mitsui Drops Out of the Capital Call

Mitsui & Co., which had built a 38% position in the CaetanoBus capital structure since its initial 2021 entry alongside majority shareholder Toyota Caetano Portugal (TCP), declined to participate in the most recent €15 million capital increase. The decision aligns Mitsui's posture with TCP's stated direction but mechanically dilutes the Japanese position from ~38% to 19.7%. The combined Toyota Caetano Portugal majority is reinforced by the asymmetric subscription, but the read on the partnership is unambiguous: Mitsui no longer wants additional balance-sheet exposure to the platform. Between 2021 and 2024, the two shareholders had injected approximately €45 million of fresh capital into the company.

The National Express Cancellation

The single largest operating shock came from National Express, the British coach operator that had been a CaetanoBus anchor customer for the long-haul touring-coach line. Starting October 2025, the British buyer cancelled approximately 60% of its pending orders — a withdrawal CaetanoBus management quantifies as more than €20 million in lost revenue. The cancellation hit a touring-coach production line that had already been disrupted by an October 2024 fire in the Ovar plant. The combined effect was a forced reduction of installed capacity and the related labour functions.

The 2025 Numbers and the New Layoff

CaetanoBus' 2025 closed accounts:

• Revenue: €118.3 million, down 12% on 2024.
• Units delivered: 365 in 2025 versus 371 in 2024.
• EBITDA: -€2.7 million.
• Net result: -€13.8 million.

On top of a 40-worker reduction processed in 2025, a further 88-worker layoff is now under way and is scheduled to complete through June 2026, taking the Vila Nova de Gaia and Ovar workforce to roughly 500 employees at the bottom of the cycle. CaetanoBus management has framed the loss-of-orders impact as 'materially compromising the recovery trajectory and reducing installed-capacity utilisation'.

The Strategic Read

The Mitsui dilution does not end the partnership — the Japanese trading house still holds nearly a fifth of the equity and continues as a strategic counterparty in the hydrogen and electric-bus pipeline that has been CaetanoBus' export-platform pivot since 2022. The signal it sends, however, is that the Japanese side is no longer co-funding the recovery on the same proportional basis as before. The August 2025 alliance with a Chinese urban-bus partner, separately announced, sits inside this same restructuring envelope: shifting the platform mix away from over-reliance on the British touring-coach channel and toward urban-electric and hydrogen verticals where the demand profile is structurally healthier.

What This Means for Expats

• One of the country's most internationally exposed industrial brands is in deep recovery mode. Foreign-resident readers tracking Portuguese industrial benchmarks for relocation or B2B-supplier mapping should treat the 2025 numbers as a cyclical low-water mark in CaetanoBus' multi-year pivot rather than a structural collapse — but the headcount reduction is real and concentrated in the Ovar/Gaia corridor.
• Bus and coach replacement programmes will see longer lead times. Carris' fleet-renewal pipeline (which sits inside the broader Lisbon zero-emissions plan) and the Porto STCP electric-bus tenders both depend partly on this manufacturing footprint; lead times on touring-coach orders specifically should be expected to lengthen through Q3-Q4 2026 as the platform absorbs the National Express withdrawal.
• Hydrogen-bus rollout depends on this plant. The CaetanoBus H2.City Gold hydrogen bus — already operating in Cologne, Aberdeen, Pau and other European pilots — sits at the centre of the strategic pivot. For foreign residents tracking sustainability and clean-mobility timelines in Portugal, the hydrogen platform's continuation is the more important read than the touring-coach contraction.