Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Asetek 2021 annual general meeting. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Peter Madsen. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Sarah. Let me just start out by stating that we are in the room here, our Chairman of the Board, Mr. Jukka Pertola, the Chairman of the Meeting, our Attorney, Tyge Rasmussen, our Auditor, Mr. Mads Meldgaard, our CEO, André Sloth Eriksen, and myself, the CFO, Peter Madsen. With that, I'll hand over the microphone to Chairman of the Board, Jukka.
Thank you, Peter, and dear shareholders, welcome to this year's annual general meeting of Asetek. It is somewhat different general meeting than under normal conditions due to the risk of spreading COVID-19. To protect the health and safety of all, and in compliance with Danish government's restriction measures, we have strongly recommended that shareholders participate via this virtual conference setup instead of participating in person. Considering these circumstances, we also have encouraged all shareholders to exercise their influence by casting a postal vote or to grant the board of directors a power of attorney. Minutes will be prepared for those shareholders and other stakeholders who do not have the opportunity to participate today, and it will be available on our website, asetek.com.
In accordance with Article 10.1 of the Articles of Association, the Board of Directors appoints the Chairman of the Meeting, and the Board has chosen Tyge Rasmussen, attorney at law, and I'm very confident to give the floor to Tyge, who will lead us through the agenda for today. The stage is yours, Tyge.
Thank you, Jukka. Before confirming the formalities in connection with the notice and having this general meeting, it should just be mentioned that for personally listening to the annual general meeting on the webcast, this is a service offered by the company, but it is not possible to speak or ask questions. The general meeting is here in the room, and it is only a service so that you can hear as a shareholder how the action and how the general meeting is consummated. There are certain formal requirements for a general meeting, and it is my task as a chairman to check whether these are adhered to. Firstly, notification of the date of the general meeting has to be available no later than eight weeks before the general meeting, and this has been available on the company's homepage and the financial calendar, so this requirement is adhered to.
Secondly, on the 30th of March in 2021, the general meeting was convened by publishing the agenda and the full text proposal and the notice on the company's homepage, and it's also been forwarded to an email to shareholders who has registered to receive notification by email. Therefore, the AGM has been convened timely. Thirdly, certain documentation has to be available, and the notice, convening the general meeting and the necessary ancillary documentation such as the remuneration policy and other documents has been available on the homepage since the 30th of March, and therefore has been available timely enough. We can also see that the annual report has been available since, and actually also the proposed remuneration report has been available since February 2021. All is in accordance with the Articles of Association and timely convened.
In conclusion, it can therefore be confirmed that the general meeting has been lawfully convened. We can see that all votes have been given by proxies and postal votes, therefore the total share capital present at this general meeting is DKK 498,603.1, that leads to there are 4,986,031 votes which have been presented. That means that the general meeting constitutes a forum for the transaction of business set out in the agenda. Also, I can inform you that based on the proxies and postal votes received, all items on the agenda have been adopted. Okay. We move on to the formal agenda of the meeting, the first item is number one, regarding the Board of Directors' report on the company's activities during the past financial year. In this regard, I will pass on the word to the Chairman.
Thank you. Dear shareholders and friends of Asetek, 2020 was an exciting, busy, and in the end, very strong year for Asetek. We started out being a little pessimistic. The prior year, 2019, had not been strong, and we were looking at various scenarios that were all impacted by the American customs tariffs that slowed down the market. Soon, however, the tariffs took a mental back seat, and instead, we all focused on how to struggle with the pandemic, and we had no idea what to expect. As we all know by now, the pandemic kept people at home, and the sales of electronics for both work and entertainment grew remarkably.
At the same time, data centers were forced to increase their capacities, and some of the brighter ones also chose servers with liquid cooling. We saw our revenues increase throughout the year to culminating Q4 with $29 million and a 34% growth for the whole year. Both business segments contributed to the revenue growth. Gaming and Enthusiast increased by 25%, and Data Center more than tripled. In Gaming and Enthusiast, we continued our strategy of getting closer to the consumers and the gaming community. The keywords are about storytelling, innovation, quality and reliability. We have also increased our efforts in branding Asetek as the cooling solutions name behind our customers' brands. We have now co-branding agreements in place with several OEMs, but we are also connecting directly with gamers and enthusiasts via the CoolNation Forum. As you can hear, we are here having this conference on the beach.
In 2020, we also launched our new strategic focus area, SimSports. For some time, we have been looking for a new business area that would fit into our core competencies and the desired profile. In SimSports, we found a high-growth area that is still very fragmented and would benefit from consolidation and from an end-to-end approach. We recognize that it's outside our historic cooling business, it's firmly inside our core competencies mechatronics. There is a strong strategic fit with the Gaming and Enthusiast markets. We are still early into this, we are very enthusiastic on SimSports and clearly see it as a new growth opportunity. To kickstart the SimSports business and to shorten the time to the market, we made two acquisitions, including gaming software technology, consultancy, hardware, and mechanical designs.
We bought IPR from Finland-based Granite Devices and gaming hardware and software technology from U.K.-based Ultimate Game Tech. Finally, let me mention our sustainability work. This area is growing in importance throughout the society, and we are committed to support this development with the necessary investments and management focus. You can find our new sustainability report on our website, asetek.com. I would like to extend my thanks to the Asetek team, around 140 good people working tirelessly on bringing innovative, reliable products to the world. I would like to mention my fellow board members. It has been a decent, inspiring group of individuals with a broad list of relevant experiences. Chris Christopher, who joined the board in 2012, will not be up for re-election this year.
On behalf of the company and on behalf of the rest of the board, I would like to thank him for his many, many years of service to Asetek through a very critical phase. Thank you, Chris. With that, I will hand the floor back to the chairman of the meeting. Thank you.
Thank you, Jukka. Given the format of this general meeting, I allow myself to conclude that there are no comments to the report, and we can move on to item two on the agenda. Item two is the nomination committee's report on its activity and the proposed remuneration to be paid to the members of the board of directors, board committees, and the nomination committee. We'll start out with report on its activity, for that purpose, I will leave the floor to CFO, Peter Dam Madsen.
Yeah. Thank you. Let me start out by apologizing for our very enthusiastic audience of seagulls that comes with the location here. It's quite noisy. Mr. Sønderby, who is the Chairman of the Nomination Committee, was not able to be here today. He asked me to convey a few words in the reporting of the committee. In addition to Mr. Sønderby, we have Claus Berner Møller and Jukka Pertola, who's also the Chairman of our Board, on this committee. They met three times last year. The meeting activity last year in 2020 was somewhat lower than in 2019, simply because of the fact that they were not spending cycles on recruiting additional or new board members throughout 2020. Hence the smaller amount of meetings.
The work that was performed by the committee was around the proposal of the remuneration for the board of directors, as well as the annual assessment of the capabilities and competencies of the board of directors. Floor back to you.
Thank you. Second item on the item two is the proposed remuneration, and this is described in the notice of the general meeting, and therefore I allow myself not to elaborate on that proposal, and just conclude based on the postal votes and the proxies that it has been adopted. Further is a provisional recommendation, which is also mentioned in the remuneration next year, which is also mentioned in the notice. With that, we can move on to item three, and actually also item four, which we suggest you to handle as one item for, you can say practical purposes on this general meeting. The first item on that is adoption of the auditor annual report, and next is appropriation of profit or loss as recorded in the adopted annual report.
Before putting the annual report to vote, I kind of ask Peter Dam Madsen to accomplish this item.
Very good, sir. Thank you. 2020 was a strong year for Asetek. We grew our revenue by 34%, from $54 million up to $73 million, almost. The gross margins increased to 47%. I believe that was a record, if you look at it per annum, from 42% in 2019. The increase was primarily driven by a change in our business model, which we have discussed in detail through many of our investor meetings throughout the year. Operating expenses increased by 6% throughout 2020 to around $23 million, and that reflects an increase in investment in our company's infrastructure. We increased our staff by 35% throughout 2020, and these expansion increases came in the latter part of the year, when we started seeing the increase of our revenue.
The first part of the year, the operating expenses were kept at a relatively low level in recognition of what we, at that time, thought would be a challenging year. One of the significant impactors throughout 2020 was foreign exchange rates, which were unfavorable to us throughout the year. Our EBITDA was $15.6 million in 2020, compared with only $6.2 million in 2019. Our comprehensive income after taxes was $11.6 million for 2020, compared with only $1.1 million in 2019. A strong year. The income here corresponds to $0.35 of income per share, versus $0.02 in the negative for 2019. Shifting focus over to the balance sheet. Our total assets sum at the end of 2020 was $71.4 million, compared to $54 million at the end of 2019. The principal components of the change that increased was our receivables.
That increased by $10 million. Of course, that's what comes with an increase of what was 78% increase in the fourth quarter revenue compared to the year before. Cash went up by $2.6 million as a result of all this extra activity, and hence the earnings, and as a result of us using money on both the business acquisition and share repurchase program. Finally, talking a little bit about the cash flows. I actually did that already. We had $11.4 million come in from operation. We then spent $4.8 million on intangible assets and purchase of property and equipment, and a relatively significant sum on repurchasing our own shares also. All in all, we have these $24 million in the bank. Jukka, you mentioned the sustainability report, which is available, as are all our other reports, on our website. Back to you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you. It's also suggested that the profit is appropriate, as just suggested in the annual report. Based on the proxies and votes provided, I can conclude that both the suggestion but also the annual report has been adopted. Congratulations on Asetek for a beautiful annual report for 2020.
Okay. Thank you.
We move on to item number five, which is a presentation and adoption of the remuneration report. As mentioned in the beginning, the remuneration report has been available on the company's homepage. Before concluding on the votes and adoption of the item, I would like to give the word to Peter Dam Madsen.
Yeah. Thank you. Yes, the remuneration report was presented together with the annual report when we sent out the notice of this meeting, and hence, you can read the details on that website. I just want to point your attention to one fact, and that is the fact that this is the first time we present a remuneration report. We live, we learn, and we learned that we needed to do two additions to the report that was sent out in order for the actual report to be compliant with the legislation. Those, I'm just showing on the presentation here, those two additions. One is on page eight, where we state clearly that the remuneration paid out was in compliance with the policy in place. That statement needed to be there.
The other one is a note on page 10, where both our auditors thank you, but also some of our investors have pointed out that we needed to have a specific note detailing how, individual by individual and goal type by goal type, how the cash bonuses were met or not met. We have added those two comments in the report. We have clearly marked that they have been added after publication, and this new report with its additions is now the formal report. Back to you.
Thank you. As the Chairman, I've read through the changes, and also assessed that they are of non-material significance and impact. Therefore, also on that basis, I conclude that based on the proxies and the posted votes, this remuneration report has been approved. We can move on to item number six, which is election of members to the Board of Directors. The Nomination Committee has proposed re-election to the following members: Jukka Pertola, Jørgen Smidt, Maria Hjorth, and Erik Damsgaard. As Jukka Pertola mentioned in the beginning, Chris Christopher is resigning. The Board of Directors has confirmed that they agree to the Nomination Committee's proposal.
Information on the nominated candidate is available on the company's homepage, has been there throughout the period, and all the managerial posts held by the candidates in other Danish-owned enterprise, which is to be informed before election, with reference to the Danish Companies Act, is also available and it's in the annual report, page 54, item 21.5 for the ones who need to look at that. With reference to the proxies and posted votes, it can be concluded that Jukka, Jørgen, Maria, and Erik Damsgaard has been elected. Congratulations on the election to all of you. Next item is item seven, and that's election of members to the nomination committee. As it appears from the notification, the nomination committee proposes reelection of the following members. That is, Ib Sønderby, Claus Berner Møller, and Jukka Pertola.
With reference to the proxies and posted votes, it can be concluded that the election has been adopted. Item eight is election of auditor. In accordance with the recommendation received from the audit committee, the board of directors proposes the reelection of PwC, Statsautoriseret Revisionspartnerselskab, as the auditor. Before concluding on the votes, it should be mentioned that the audit committee has informed us that the committee's recommendation is free from influence by any third party and no clause of a contract and an issue with any third party restricting the choice by the general meeting to certain auditors or audit firms has been imposed on the audit committee. With that note, I can conclude that election of auditor has been adopted, and PwC continues as the auditor of the company.
That leads us to item number nine, which is proposals by the board of directors or shareholders. The first is item 9A, which is where the board of directors has proposed to authorize the company to acquire own shares. For the exact wording of the proposal, I refer to the notice forwarded. With reference to the proxies and the posted votes, I can conclude that the item, as described in the notice, has been adopted. Next item is item number 9B, where the board of directors proposes that the new remuneration policy is adopted. It's been prepared and adopted in accordance with Section 139 and 139a of the Danish Companies Act. With reference to the proxies and posted votes, which we have received, I can conclude that this item has been adopted. Last item is remuneration to the chairman.
If anything is to advise to the Danish Business Authority, and that item has been approved as well. Thank you for the confidence in that regard. With ending item number 10, I can conclude that there is no further business to transact on this general meeting, and therefore I will give the word back to Jukka to end the general meeting.
Thank you. I'd like to thank all our shareholders for their interest and support. Finally, of course, I would like to thank the chairman for a good and very effective steering of this somewhat different general meeting today. Thank you for that, and thank you for interest. Have a good day.
Thank you. That does conclude the conference for today. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.