Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I am Yeli, your conference call operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the ElvalHalcor conference call and live webcast to present and discuss the first quarter 2024 trading update. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Angelos Giazitzoglou, Deputy Group Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Giazitzoglou, you may now proceed.
Hello, and thank you for joining us in our webcast for the financial results for the first quarter of 2024. Today, with me is Mr. Spyros Kokkolis, former CFO of ElvalHalcor and now Deputy CFO of Viohalco. As always, we will give you an overview of our performance, and in the end, we will hold the Q&A session. The presentation and Q&A will be later uploaded to our website. Before we delve into more detailed slides, let me run through some key figures. Starting with sales, although demand remained weak in most markets, we managed to increase our volumes to 146,000 tons. A small increase by 1%, but against a weak European market. Our adjusted EBITDA remained resilient at EUR 49 million. We will see more details in the next slides.
We continued our efforts to decrease net debt as it was one of our main targets. In that area, we did very well. We closed at EUR 765 million, EUR 48 million better than December of 2023, EUR 190 million lower than March of 2023, and despite the drop of adjusted EBITDA, the ratio improved to 3.5. Let's take a quick look at the macroeconomic data. Weak global demand for metals affected LME prices in 2023. The trend now is in the opposite direction in all metals, aluminum, copper, and zinc. Possible headwinds for our working capital, but also a positive sign for the recovery of demand. In natural gas, prices are remaining steady. This is helping us to keep energy costs at reasonable levels. Now, interest rates are still in elevated levels as inflation remains over target levels.
Looking at our cost breakdown, we see a decline in energy participation from 18% to 13%. This is mostly due to decreased price in natural gas, as we saw in the previous slide. Inflation affected other parts of the chart. Now, talking about volumes. In the aluminum segment, as we mentioned before, despite the weak demand in most sectors, we performed better in 2024 compared to 2022 and 2023. Strong performance in beverages, weak in foil. In the copper segment, our volumes remained slightly lower than the respective quarters of 2022 and 2023. Still going strong in Sofia Med products. Weak demand for tubes and extruded brass persisted. Moving forward to profitability. In terms of adjusted EBITDA, starting from the aluminum segment, we see that first quarter is down from the respective quarter of 2023.
Drivers to that were lower conversion prices combined with lower premiums which shrunk benefits from scrap usage. In the copper segment, we note a small decline due to lower quantities in tubes and extruded brass. Next slide is about profitability per ton. Starting from the aluminum segment, headwinds that started in the last quarter of 2023 continued to affect 2024, especially in foil. Prices in this sector in the first quarter of 2023 boosted our profitability. It is worth to say that in the first quarter of 2023, adjusted EBITDA was higher than the average for the whole year. In contrast to this year, foil prices dropped significantly and dragged our profitability down. In the copper segment, we see a small decline, but levels are still over the year average. Lower quantities affected fixed costs per ton. Moving forward to EVA.
In the aluminum segment, we see a significant decline which has mainly to do with foil prices. We have never seen such weak prices in that sector. It was the last to be hit by destocking later than other products, but more severely. In the copper segment, the favorable mix affected EVA per ton, which rose even further, but this was not enough to sustain profitability. Moving to markets. In the aluminum segment, the most dominant market remains packaging, even though in flexible packaging we continue to face headwinds. However, in rigid packaging, the market we invested in the last couple of years, we managed to increase volumes. In the copper segment, markets are remaining sluggish and no significant changes appeared in our shares. In geographical distribution, both segments maintain their strong export orientation.
In the aluminum segment, we enhanced our sales in the US despite the disruption we came across regarding the use of Russian aluminum. In the copper segment, we increased our share in the European markets. In the next slide, starting from the aluminum segment, despite the negative market conditions, we managed to increase our sales volume compared to 2023 by utilizing the increased production capacity. Soft market conditions, which were a combination of very high stock levels and weak demand in all sectors, affected our adjusted EBITDA results. Lower average metal prices, lower conversion prices in aluminum, and lower volume in copper affected our revenue. The effect of declining metal prices is running its course. Only EUR 4 million metal losses in comparison to EUR 14 million. Metal losses had led our EBITDA to smoother drop compared to 2020.
EBIT and adjusted EBIT couldn't follow different paths than our EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA and dropped compared to 2023. Our financial result is better than 2023 despite the increased interest rates. This is clearly due to the significant decrease in our net debt. EBITDA, finally, dropped compared to 2023 to EUR 15 million. Moving to the next slide, let's see how we did in profitability. Lower volumes in the copper segment slightly affected our EBIT. Lower conversion prices, weak demand in segments like flexible packaging and construction, along with sluggish industrial activity in Europe affected our profitability. SG&A were affected by the deconsolidation of Etem. Without Etem, we would have a slight decrease of EUR 1.6 million. Positive impact in interest cost. It could have been even better. We reduced our net debt, but this partially had been offset by the higher interest rates.
Less negative metal result had a significant positive impact. Moving to cash flow, we did very well. Robust EBITDA at EUR 45 million. Interest payments, EUR 7.4 million. We managed to reduce working capital. Much more to be said on the next slide. We paid taxes. Investments were low at EUR 20 million. The company leveraged profitability and working capital to repay long-term debts. In the first quarter of 2024, we carried out repayments of long-term loans amounting to EUR 32.2 million. With all that, we increased our cash position by EUR 17.4 million. In working capital, the continuous upgrade in interest rates that started in 2022 has made effective working capital management more critical than ever. Tighter monitoring in inventory, renegotiation of payment terms with suppliers, and good management of receivables created sufficient room for decreasing working capital to EUR 586 million.
Continuously, we improve our inventory working capital as percentage of sales from 21% to 18%. Next two slides are about net debt. Good cash flows facilitate the decreasing of our net debt to EUR 765 million. Net debt to adjusted EBITDA remained stable in 3.5, slightly lower than the first quarter of 2023. Our unwavering commitment is to decrease the net debt furthermore, improving also performance to achieve the target of 3. Only 7% of our loans are short-term. Only 41% of our debt is now on a variable rate. As we are repaying loans, this percentage gets lower, and does our average cost of debt. By that, we also mitigate our risk from interest rates. Last but not least, CapEx.
Our big investment plan in the aluminum segment was completed in 2023, with the installation of a new cold rolling mill and a new lacquering line. In the aluminum segment, we will continue to do mostly maintenance CapEx and small improvements. In the copper segment, we started extra investments in 2023 to unlock incremental capacity and further growth. For 2024, in both segments, we plan a similar level of CapEx as 2023. To sum up, before we take your questions, in the first quarter of 2024, in an adverse environment and weak markets, we managed to increase sales volume. We achieved a resilient profitability, and we are very proud for our performance in working capital management. Finally, we significantly decreased our net debt. Thank you for your attention, and now we can proceed to the Q&A session.
The first question is from the line of Vangelis Karanikas with NBG Securities. Please go ahead.
Good morning all, and thank you for the presentation. One quick question regarding the aluminum adjusted EBITDA per ton
Which in the first quarter, based on my calculation, was slightly above EUR 200. This is one of the perhaps the lowest number I can remember for the company. My question is, do you see any signs of this number improving in like coming quarters and coming closer to, let's say, averages of above EUR 300 in the previous years? Thank you.
As I said, in 2024, we continued to operate in a very adverse environment and weak markets, especially in Europe. We also mentioned that we have significant pressure in terms of prices and demand in constructions and in flexible packaging. Foil is that sector that we had the biggest pressure in prices and affect our profitability for the first quarter. We expect that if the environment gets better, if the central banks start to decrease interest rates, we will see a better, a positive climate in demand and maybe a recovery.
This will give us room to take some quantities with increased price in terms of the sector that we face this problem, and this is foil. It depends on the market. We are ready to capitalize on opportunities. We have the capacity and we are just waiting for the trend to show us the way.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Giazitzoglou for any closing comments. Thank you.
Thank you very much for joining us today to our webcast. I would like to repeat that it was a difficult quarter for ElvalHalcor, but I think that we did well in sectors that like volumes, net debt and working capital. We are expecting that next month the economy will go better, and this will give us room to increase our profitability even more. Thank you very much.