Q1 revenue presentation, which is also webcasted and recorded. I'm Xavier Martiré, CEO of Elis, and I am here in Paris with our CFO, Louis Guyot. I will first comment on the Q1 revenue numbers, and we then provide you with an update on our full year guidance. We will have a Q&A session to answer your questions. After our call, Nicolas Buron will be available to answer any of your questions offline. Before we start, please take the time to read the disclaimer. I'm very happy to report a very solid performance in the first quarter, with a revenue increase of +21.7%, of which 18.3% on an organic basis to reach more than EUR 1 billion in sales in Q1.
This good momentum reflects very good commercial activity this quarter, with a record of new contract signed in EUR terms, mostly in industry and trade and services. Hospitality continued to rebound on the back of a favorable comparable base, especially in Southern Europe and in France. Pricing also contributed to this good performance as the adjustments negotiated throughout 2022 to offset the inflation of our cost base, as well as the additional adjustments implemented since the beginning of 2023 led to a price effect of around +11% in Q1, in line with our assumption that the full year pricing effect, combined with better control of cost-based inflation, will lead to margin improvement in 2023. Generally, all our markets continue to be well-oriented, and we see no sign of slowdown across our geographies.
The only minor issue that we could flag would be that April was just a tough softer in hospitality. Aside from that, all lights are green, and the Q1 trading activity make us increasingly confident regarding the outlook we gave for 2023 at the beginning of March. We expect another year of strong organic growth with marked improvement of all main financial KPIs and further deleveraging. I will come back to this at the end of this presentation. Moving on to the next slide. Let's look at the evolution of Q1 organic revenue growth by geography, which all delivered double-digit performance. First, hospitality was well-oriented on the back of an easy comparable base, as Q1 2022 was still impacted by the Omicron variant. Therefore, all geographies with a significant share of hospitality were positively impacted, such as Southern Europe.
Second, price effect was strong across the board, and especially in Germany and in the U.K. and Ireland, to offset last year's significant cost increase. This led to more than +20% organic revenue growth in Q1 in these two geographies. Third, commercial activity was good in France and in the Nordics, with organic revenue growth of nearly 16% in both geographies. Finally, inflation in LATAM is much lower than in Europe. This led to an organic performance in the region lower than in the other geographies. The next slide provides a bridge between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023 revenue, which increased +22% year-on-year.
Half of the total EUR 180 million increase year-on-year came from pricing, with both the embedded effect of the adjustment negotiated through 2022 and the new set of price adjustments that has been implemented since January 1st to offset inflation of our cost base. Higher volumes contributed to this growth for around EUR 60 million. This is a consequence of a +3% volume growth of our business, driven by good commercial dynamism, which correspond to around EUR 25 million year-on-year, as well as the effect of the easy comparable base in hospitality, which brought another EUR 36 million of additional revenue in Q1. We noted a slight deceleration over the last few weeks. Our Mexican acquisition closed in July 2022, contributed EUR 26 million in Q1, and other acquisition closed in 2022 contributed another EUR 8 million.
Lastly, FX had a slightly negative effect in Q1, especially due to the evolution of the British pound and the Swedish krona. Moving on to the next slide. I'm very satisfied with how we have been able to handle inflation. This clearly highlights Elis' pricing power, which is a key component of our business model and one of the group's biggest strengths. I want to give you some color on the reasons for this success. First, I would like to remind you that inflation is a factor we deal with every year, and not only since the energy crisis last year. We already had some challenging years in terms of pass through, like in 2019, when we saw a very significant increase in minimum legal wage across many European countries.
Part of the reason why we have always managed to efficiently pass through the inflation of our cost base to our clients, is because we always have been very transparent with them, disclosing our main cost inductors such as minimum wage and energy price. At the end of the day, the price of these cost items are public data, so it was easy for our clients to understand the evolution of our cost base. Second, our services are essential to our clients' activities. Hotels and hospitals simply cannot operate without linen. The same goes for industrial clients. Uniforms are very often mandatory, and they need our service to properly run their business. Third, the cost of our service represents only a fairly small component in our clients' P&L.
As an example, we charge only between 5 EUR and 15 EUR for the linen of a hotel room, depending on whether we are talking about economical hotel or a palace. Compared to the actual price of a hotel room, you can see that the cost of our service is not very material. Also, our service is fundamental. When looking at our other end markets, the cost of our service is actually even less material for our clients than in hospitality. Bottom line, when we apply a + 10% or + 20% price increase, we are talking about between 1 EUR and 3 EUR more for hotel room that is often sold for more than 300 EUR a night. This is virtually not material for our clients.
Additionally, in most cases and in more geographies, pricing negotiation were made a lot easier by the fact that average room prices have also significantly increased over the last 2 years. Fourth and last, alternative solutions to our services are very limited. Re-insourcing is not really an option, and we don't see this happening in our market as it would result in a higher cost for our clients. Furthermore, our competitors have more or less the same cost base as ours, and there is no risk of disruption from an alternative way of providing the service. It means that everybody is facing the same inflation problem, and we have noticed overall rational behavior from our competitors in most of our markets. These 4 reasons combined explain why we have been successful with our pricing adjustment in this challenging cost environment. Moving on to the next slide.
Hospitality continued to show steady improvement in Q1, with all geographies showing good momentum. As I already mentioned, the comparable base in Q1 was easy, as Q1 2022 was somewhat impacted by the Omicron variant. This led to around additional EUR 35 million catch up in the quarter. We noted a slight deceleration over the last weeks, probably due to the social unrest in some countries. Pricing was also very satisfactory and was surely facilitated by the fact that our clients have also significantly increased their pricing over the last 12 months. Moving on to the next slide, let me give you some examples of initiatives we have recently implemented to capture additional organic growth. We regularly continue to roll out the offering of our services to small clients. As of today, we only address small clients in less than 10 countries.
Our ability to efficiently serve small clients is essentially linked to the density we have in a specific country. As we grow TDB everywhere, organically or through M&A, our density is also improving year after year, and we will be able to serve small clients in more and more countries going forward. This should contribute to margin expansion in the future, as the very efficient logistic in place with service to small clients generally leads to good margins. We are currently deploying our offer for small clients in Sweden and Brazil. We are being proactive in opening the nursing home market in both Spain and the U.K., which unlike other countries such as France or Germany, are still largely fragmented among small independent players that usually in-source washing. We currently observe some market consolidation going on along with an overall professionalization of the industry.
These larger players may have generally helped to transition to outsourcing linen washing. We work hand in hand with them in that process. Third, the post-COVID environment remains very favorable for Elis. With increasing need for hygiene in general, and notably for pest control and cleanroom business, which have delivered year-on-year growth of around +20% since the pandemic to reach cumulative revenue of EUR 250 million in 2022. Elis is already the leader, the European leader in reusable cleanroom garments, cleaning systems, goggles and related contamination control solutions. Our existing client base provides us with many cross-selling opportunities in these very technical, highly profitable markets. Finally, we have reinforced our commercial team for the washroom market in Poland. It's already at good market share in the workwear mass market, but less so in the washroom market.
We therefore have many cross-selling opportunities with our existing clients in the country. Before moving to our 2023 outlook, let's have a quick look at this graph that we present every quarter. There you see the evolution of top line and margin performance over the last two decades. It is fair to say that the last few years have clearly emphasized the strength and resilience of our business model. The backbone of this resilience is twofold. First, the diversified geographical footprint, with France representing less than a third of our business. Second, the diversified portfolio of clients in terms of size and end markets. It is worth noting that this resilient profile was significantly improved with the acquisition of Berendsen, and the addition of new countries in Central Europe and Scandinavia.
Consequently, you can see on the graph that margin has constantly been evolving at high and stable levels within a narrow range, a very narrow range, regardless of external events, and taking into consideration, of course, the impact of IFRS 16 from 2019 onwards. On top of that, one very interesting characteristic of our business that we saw in 2020 is that linen investments come hand in hand with top-line growth. That means that conversely, they mechanically go down during bad top line years with a favorable impact on cash generation. This led to two very strong years for cash generation during the COVID years in 2020 and 2021. 2022, free cash flow was nearly at the 2021 level at around EUR 230 million, and we expect free cash flow to improve by at least EUR 30 million in 2023.
Going forward, it should continue to improve every year on the back of top line dynamism and progressive normalization of change in working capital requirements. Moving on to the next slide. I remember that a few months ago, all market strategies were totally convinced that we would see a severe recession in 2023. At that time, we said that we were not seeing anything in our numbers suggesting such a slowdown. Today, it seems that these strategies are somewhat more bullish and expect instead a soft recession scenario. From our standpoint, we still do not see anything supporting that. In any case, I would like to remind you of Elis' very resilient model. In industry first, a large part of our clients operate in very resilient sectors such as food processing, pharmaceuticals and waste management.
Furthermore, with the fixed fee invoicing methodology we have in place with these clients, we basically charge them for the inventory in place. It means we are not impacted in case of a temporary and limited activity slowdown at our clients. Second, healthcare is very resilient by nature. Third, trade and services where just like in industry, we charge our clients with a fixed fee regardless of their activity level. Therefore, this end market is very resilient too. At the end of the day, we consider that only our hospitality end market, which account for 25% of total revenue, could be somewhat impacted by a global economic slowdown, even if we continue to see many construction or upgrade projects in the hotel sector in all our geographies, which should be a mitigating factor in case of a downturn.
You should also keep in mind that we are fundamentally less cyclical than hotel players, as the main reason why RevPAR goes down in times of crisis is a decrease in hotel prices, not occupancy rates. We charge based on occupancy regardless of room prices. Moving on to the next slide. I would like to come back to our significantly improved growth profile compared to before the pandemic. We have already discussed the structurally increasing needs by clients for hygiene products, traceability and sourcing security that obviously strengthened after the pandemic and contribute to accelerating the development of outsourcing. The need for a more secure supply chain also materialized as some clients reshored production operation from Asia back to Europe. The many shortages that appeared in Europe during the pandemic highlighted the importance of industry resilient in Europe and paved the way for some industrialization.
This is clearly an opportunity for Elis, and as I told you before, we have already won some contracts, like with a big semiconductor manufacturer in Ireland. There should be more opportunities like this in the near future, and this should further drive the growth of our workwear activity. I also want to mention that an increasing number of tender come with CSR components, an area in which Elis, as an industry leader providing circular services, is well advanced compared to its small competitors. These three drivers are essentially market driven, but we also are active on our side to further bolster our growth. First, increasing share of our revenue that is generated in countries with strong organic revenue growth, such as Latin America or in Eastern Europe, will mechanically contribute to the improvement of the group total organic growth.
In this respect, the deal we finalized in Mexico last year will be another catalyst. Second, as we saw earlier in the presentation, we are working hard to open new markets, to develop our product offering, and to roll out the range of our services to as many clients as possible. We are very confident that this internal initiative, combined with sustainably positive market trends, will support our organic growth going forward. Moving on to the next slide, before looking at the 2023 outlook, let me give you some detail on gas and electricity pricing, which has been, and still is to some extent, a stress factor for the market. As you know, energy, and especially gas, was a main contributor to the cost base increase that year and will continue to be a significant factor in 2023.
In 2022, only half of our gas volumes were hedged, meaning that we paid the spot price for the remaining half in a somewhat irrational market. Throughout the year, we have negotiated fixed rates tariffs starting in H2 2022 and covering 2023, 2024, and 2025 volume. As of today, 95% of our gas volumes are hedged at around EUR 75 per megawatt hour, and 90% of our electricity volumes are hedged at EUR 225 per megawatt hour. All in, these these fixed prices going forward make me feel reasonably relaxed about gas pricing for the coming years. The EUR 340 million energy bill that we recorded in 2022 should increase at a slower pace than revenue in 2023.
Looking beyond 2023, the energy bill should somewhat stabilize as our internal policy is now to secure our tariffs for gas and electricity for the year ahead. Now let's talk about our 2023 outlook. The good trading performance we delivered in the first quarter has reinforced our confidence regarding all the indications that we gave in March. As a reminder, we expect organic growth to be strong between +11% and +13%. The 2 percentage point difference between 11 and 13 correspond to a potential impact of a slowdown in Europe, which we don't see right now, as I said. Adjusted EBITDA margin should be up around 50 basis points, driven by top-line dynamism, productivity gains, and the implementation of fixed price contracts for most energy items, which will allow us to better control inflation of our cost base.
Adjusted EBIT should increase by more than EUR 100 million to at least EUR 650 million, so a minimum increase of +20% year-on-year on the back of the top line dynamism and a slight decrease in D&A as a percentage of revenue. Headline net income is expected above EUR 405 million, up at least +15% year-on-year, which correspond to a fully diluted EPS of at least EUR 1.65 for 2023. On the cash side, we expect the first step up of free cash flow to at least EUR 260 million, so up at least +16% year-on-year, driven by top line dynamism and progressive normalization of change in working cap requirement.
As far as debt is concerned, we expect the financial leverage ratio to be at around 2.1x at the end of 2023. We believe that this deleveraging trajectory should quickly make Elis eligible for investment grade rating consideration. Before we move on to the Q&A session, I would like to highlight the main takeaways of this presentation. First, Elis continued to see good revenue momentum in Q1 with strong activity across all geographies. Pricing was strong in Q1 at +11%, driven by the carry forward effect of pricing adjustments implemented in 2022 and those put in place in January 1, 2023. It underscores once again our valuable commercial relationship, allowing us to adjust to many external constraints. Also, we noticed some growth softening in hospitality over the last weeks. We still don't see any sign of slowdown across our markets and geographies.
All these elements combined make us increasingly confident in achieving another year of profitable growth in 2023, meeting all our full year targets and pursuing the deleveraging of our balance sheet. This concludes this presentation. I thank you all for your attention and we can now move on to the Q&A. Operator, back to you.
If you'd like to ask a question at this time, please press star one one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again.
Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Annelies Vermeulen with Morgan Stanley.
Hi there. Good evening. Thank you, Xavier and Louis. Can you hear me?
Perfectly.
Oh, great. Thank you. I couldn't hear anything. Three questions, please. Firstly on the hospitality weakness in April and through May, you mentioned that was due to the social protests. Was that majority in France, or did you see it in other geographies as well? How confident are you that it was purely due to that unrest rather than, say, an economic slowdown, which you know, you say you're not seeing? Again, do you have much visibility on that going forward as we look ahead into the second quarter?
Secondly, on the sort of record contract wins, can you, which I think you said was in industry and trade and services, is that increasing outsourcing levels, or are you winning market share versus competitors, or is it both? Lastly, just on one of your strategic initiatives to focus on, you know, smaller clients in geographies where you have a, you know, a good market share, that margin improvement part of it, is that purely due to scale, as you say, you know, you get the benefits of the scale of the network? Or does your pricing tend to be better with those smaller customers as well, relative to larger customers?
Hospitality first. It's a very small deceleration, so that means that we have still a good level of activity. I want not to amplify too much the message over the small slowdown of the growth in the last weeks. It was mainly France. Small impact also in Germany and in U.K., so the three country where we had this kind of protest, but mainly in France, of course, in Paris. It's clear that to see garbage in the street during some weeks is not a good advertising for tourism. We keep a very good level of confidence for the summer. It is the message given by our customer.
It is also the message given by the big name of this industry when they present their result and so on. Our customers said that they have a good level of reservation for the summer. We have absolutely no reason not to trust them and to be quite confident for the season. Obviously, it's too early to answer for this, for this, for the level of activity in summer. It is a small deceleration. I don't want to give a too bad message on hospitality.
For the level of contracts, and the gain of new contracts in the other market, first, it's very important to highlight that we have not changed our pricing strategy, so it is not by decreasing prices that we have taken these additional volumes. That means that in average, it is the same mix than usual in terms of gain of market share and outsourcing. No major event behind this record level of new signature. As I said, without any decrease of rate prices, even the opposite.
We have kept, as usual, a solid level of price, but thanks to the quality of the offer of Elis and reliability of the service we provide, we have been able to sign a lot of contracts. With small customer, the comment I made with the margin improvement is for the long-term, long-term impact, so that means that it is not a big change in profitability with the small customer in Brazil or in Sweden.
It is always a long-term strategic approach when you start to deal with small customer, because of course, at the end, the part of this new business in comparison to the existing basis of customer, it's quite negligible for the first year, so it will not change on the short term, the level of profitability. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight that it is the sum of all these initiatives that contribute to the reinforcement of the growth profile of the company for the long term.
That's perfect. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from David Cerdan with Kepler.
Yeah. Good evening, Xavier, Louis and Nicolas. I have a few question for you, please. First one is the price effect. Which kind of price effect do you expect for the full year? It was 11% in Q1. Do you expect this level to be the same over the next quarters? Second question is regarding the margin improvement. Do you expect this +50 basis point to be quite balanced between H1 and H2? Third question is regarding your energy prices, energy cost, sorry. You said that you expect a small increase. Is it in value or as % of sales? How much do electricity and gas represent as percentage of sales? The last question is regarding M&A.
Have you changed your mind on M&A for 2023? Thank you.
Okay. Price effect for the full year. We keep the guidance for 9% for the full year. It's quite normal to start with the bigger figures, of course, because we have a strong report effect of 2022. If you remember, After the summer, after the huge crisis on the energy market, we had to renegotiate some additional price increase in Q4 2022. Of course, we will have the report effect in the beginning of the year 2023, and it will be more balanced at the end of 2023. That's why this +11% in Q1 is totally in line with the full year guidance at +9% for the price effect in 2023. In terms of M&A, the last question. No, exactly the same strategy.
As we said, we never want to take any kind of guidance in terms of volume of M&A, because we don't want to make deal just to make deal. It depends on opportunities. We have, as always, a long list of targets in the pipe where we are discussing, but we stay quite selective and it will happen or not. I can never predict this. No big elephant on the pipe, but the normal level of opportunity of small add-ons. Same priority than always, existing markets to consolidate our position. It's a way to be very profitable in our market to increase our market share. Thanks also not only to the organic growth, but also thanks to this small acquisition.
I will give the floor to Louis for the two other questions.
For the margin improvement, it's quite regular through the year with some favorable base, you remember, for the summer, because in 2022, July, August, that was a big peak in the gas price. That impacted us. Plus difficulty to our people on the tougher productivity. I would say that it shall be slightly a bigger improvement in H2 than in H1, but of the same kind of range. Regarding gas, electricity, globally, gas is in the region of 4.5% to sales, the bill of gas. On the bill of electricity, 2.5% to sales, which is slightly lower than in 2022.
It gives you the answer that the growth of the bill is slower than the total revenue.
Okay. Just a follow-up question regarding M&A and de-leverage. How do you reconciliate your objective to de-leverage, and be investment grade and lower your financial charges with the M&A?
We have never said that we need to stop M&A to reach the target of strong deleveraging. By the way, if you have a look on what happened in 2022, in 2022, we have strongly deleveraged the company, 5x with a big acquisition in Mexico. That means that we are able to do both, small M&A and deleveraging. In 2023, we are still looking for small bolt-on, but we confirm that with a strong level of cash flow generation, strong increase of the EBITDA in euro, we will have a natural and again, strong deleveraging for 2023, 2.1x. That means that of course, we'll be below 2x for the year after, still continue to do some acquisition.
When you have a look on the level of price paid for small bolt-on, if we pay around the 4 x or 5 x maximum EBITDA, we are not so far from the 2 x leverage. At the end, the impact of this small bolt-on is very, very limited on the global leverage.
Mm-hmm. Okay, now this is very clear. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Oscar Belmass with JP Morgan.
Yes. Good evening, Xavier and Louis. I have three questions. The first one, last time you had one of these calls, you talked about the German market potentially seeing a bit more challenges in healthcare on the pricing side. Could you update us on how pricing in Germany is going? That's the first question. The second question on CapEx related to your free cash flow guidance. Can you remind us what percentage of sales or what level of CapEx you're expecting in 2023, and how the cost of linen is evolving? The final question, I guess, is more structural, but you talked about pest control and cleanroom. Could you give us a sense of how big pest control is? Can you remind us if you're approaching that end market independently?
Are your Elis technicians also doing pest control or are they separate? Thank you.
Germany first, it's still the most challenging market to increase price because we have more than 60% of the business in Germany is made with healthcare. As you know, healthcare is still the market where the negotiation are the most challenging because they don't have the same freedom for their own prices than the other industry, like hospitality, for instance, where hotels are able to change their price every day. It's not the same for public hospitals or nothing, and so on. That's why the negotiation is quite challenging in a context where it is a country where the level of inflation was the highest, with not only the impact of energy, but also the impact of the minimum wage that increased by 25% more or less in the last 12 months.
We are doing a very serious and good job. It is the reason why, for instance, when you take Central Europe, it is one of the region where the level of growth is the highest. It is driven by the incredible level of price increase in Germany. All in, we are at 17% price increase in Germany in Q1. You can see that it is a strong achievement. It's not yet enough to cover 100% of the balance of inflation in percentage. We are still in the middle of some negotiation with our major accounts in healthcare. We are doing a very good job.
It's not the end of the party for Elis, but I think that we can be quite happy with the evolution of the negotiation in the first quarter. CapEx related to sales, we still forecast something around 18.5% for the year 2023. Evolution of linen inside, we are signing a lot of contracts, so that means that each time you know that, more growth we have and more linen we have to invest. Nevertheless, some inductors are going the right direction. Cost of logistic is decreasing significantly in 2023. The freight costs are more or less going back to their initial level of price in 2021, so it's positive for our linen CapEx. The cotton is also decreasing.
That's why we can expect in the second semester, to obtain some better conditions for the investment in linen. All in it will be below 13% of net sales. Pest control, it represent around EUR 50 million now in our portfolio, and we still have a part of the job that is done with a multi-service approach. That means that it is a classical Elis technician that is doing both delivering the linen and making the service of Pest control when it is very simple, when it is just to monitor if a biocide has been eaten or not, and so on. When it is such kind of a check, we can leverage the logistic cost and use our classical Elis technician.
Of course, each time it is a more sophisticated action to save the situation with the customer when you have a rat infection or such bedbugs in hospitality and so on, of course, there we will use some dedicated technician.
Thank you very much. That was very helpful.
As a reminder, to ask a question at this time, that is star one one. Our next question comes from Christoph Greulich with Berenberg.
Good evening. Thank you for taking my questions. Two from my side, please. Firstly on the pricing. Have all the pricing initiatives for 2023 already been reflected in the Q1 revenues, or is there anything else to come over the coming quarters? Secondly, a follow-up on the record number of new contracts in Q1. Is this record with regard to the number of contracts, or is it with regard to the kinda EUR terms that come from the EUR that come out of those contracts? Is it possible to put it into context, like how much higher the number of new contracts was compared to previous quarters or, you know, previous Q1s that you've seen in the past? Thank you.
Pricing initiatives, the main part is already done. It was the key negotiation with major accounts in January 2023. What we still have to deliver in the year is a classical price increase in the middle of the year that we have in some countries with the small and midsize account, but it is very classical as we did every year. It's not a big challenge. What was more challenging, of course, was a strong negotiation with our bigger accounts at the end of 2022 and the remaining part bringing up 2023. For that it is done. That means that the level of confidence to deliver the 9% for the full year is very, very, very high.
For your question, in new sales, it is record in EUR, not in number of contracts, in EUR. I don't have the precise figures with me on the, how much it is above the, what we delivered in 2022.
We can illustrate perhaps with France, that's a level of signing of 8% for workwear, which gives you an idea of the magnitude of the sales growth.
Yeah, that's very helpful. Thank you very much.
As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question at this time, that is star one one. We're showing no further questions in queue at this time. I'd like to turn the call back to Xavier Martiré for closing remarks.
Okay. Thank you for your interest. Next meeting together will be end of July for the H1 results. Thank you. Have a good evening. Bye.