Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CANCOM SE earnings call regarding the full year 2021. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Sebastian Bucher. Please go ahead.
Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today's earnings call for the full year 2021. I'm Manager Investor Relations at CANCOM. Sebastian Bucher is my name, and I hope you'll have some good minutes with us. I have Rudolf Hotter, our CEO, and Thomas Stark, our CFO, with me as usual, and they will be available for questions after the presentation. Rudi, please go on.
Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our earnings call for the results of the financial year 2021. My colleague, Tom Stark, and I will present in the next half hour the main financial KPIs and some additional information about the development of CANCOM in 2021. From today's perspective, with the breakout of the war in Ukraine, the year 2021 looks already very far away. That is why our main goal for today is to give you an understanding what the business looked like in 2021, and afterwards, put the focus on the current year, 2022. The financial year 2021, in my perspective, had two major factors. First, our business model as hybrid IT service provider has paid off. We were able to use basically every chance that the market offered us in 2021.
Sale of devices for mobile work, supporting the public sector in its efforts to digitize, help businesses to stay operational after cyberattacks and protect others from being hacked. Keep IT components available for our customers as best as possible. Due to our business model with its wide portfolio of products and services, we were able to fully benefit from the current IT boom. Second main factor was, of course, the sale of our activities in U.K. and Ireland. The profit for the period was strongly influenced by this. But please do not forget to take a look at our EPS from continuing operations also. This reflects our operational performance in the core markets and shows a nice performance as well. This operational performance of the existing business is the main reason why the executive and supervisory board proposed a dividend raise to EUR 1 per share.
It is not a special dividend based on the UK sale or purely based on our high cash position. It is a sustainable dividend that the CANCOM SE can pay out also in years to come based on our expectations for the business development. Ladies and gentlemen, the results for the financial year 2021 show the strength of CANCOM. Corona pandemic, IT component shortages, change in the federal government in Germany, which always has effects on the public sector business. All this have been added to the already very competitive market of IT services and products. Nevertheless, CANCOM delivers record levels of revenue and profitability. I'm very proud to lead such a team and such a company. The revenue grew by 10.9%, the EBITDA by even 21.6%, and the EBIT increased by outstanding 31%.
Our EBITDA margin thus improved to 9.3%, and all these figures are like-for-like comparison as the figures for 2020 have also been presented here without the U.K. business. This great development was achieved by both segments. Let's start with the cloud solution business. The cloud solution segment came out at the end of 2021 with revenues of EUR 238 million. This means a growth rate of 12.2% compared to the previous year. As we kept on saying during previous calls, the cloud business will perform better as soon as the sales funnel starts to fill up again, as customers start to sign strategic long-term contracts. The growth rate was to a large extent based on solutions for hybrid work scenarios. For example, Desktop as a Service.
Based on the development of the previous quarters, the EBITDA margin in the end came out at 33.6%. Now, let's take a look at the results in the IT Solutions segment. The IT Solutions segment in 2021 again showed its huge importance to the group in terms of being the backbone of the business. IT Solutions not only delivered a very nice double-digit revenue growth rate of 10.6%, and by this cracked the €1 billion mark again. It also opens up doors for selling cloud-based services as well. When thinking about the revenue in the IT Solutions segment, please keep in mind that since 2020, we do not report the full business volume for software deals anymore. This revenue volume consists of hardware sales and service delivery within IT projects.
Only a very small proportion of software is now in there, as we only show the margin, gross profit on software license deals as revenue. The development of the revenue is even more astonishing, as this is of course, the business segment with the most exposure to the IT component shortages. Our order backlog as well as our backlog of unfinished projects is on an unusual level. Even versus 2020, where we already had the pandemic, the backlog grew by another 20%. Tom Stark will give you further notice on that later. Dear ladies and gentlemen, ARR growth of 24% is fully in line with our expectation, and the ARR is a major anchor that makes us more resilient against crisis. Here also, all figures are presented without U.K. business.
I now hand over to Tom Stark, who will lead you through more financial details and some additional KPIs.
Thank you, Rudi. My name is Tom Stark, CFO of CANCOM, and just as usual, it's a pleasure for me having you here on the call. Let's start with some significant events in 2021. A significant event from a financial perspective, clearly was the divestment of U.K. business, which definitely affected most of the financials of the reported years, 2020 and 2021. From business perspective, the profit from the sale was EUR 228 million shown in the results from discontinued operations. With a EUR 273 million overall profit of the period, we have shown an outstanding result in 2021. Earnings per share reached EUR 7.1 per share. The operational performance from continuing operations resulted in an earnings per share of +26%, EUR 1.17. Continuing operations consequently performed just great.
From an accounting perspective, classifying the UK business as discontinued operations ultimately meant adjusting the P&L, however, not adjusting the balance sheet and therefore not adjusting the cash flow statement. With respect to the P&L, we provided dedicated columns for you with and without adjustments. With respect to cash from balance sheet effects, we provided you with all the details of this in Section A 7.4 and A 2.2.3 of the financial statements. One final comment from a technical perspective. With regards to the classification of licensed business as agent business, we already changed our accounting policies with Q1 2021 and already commented on this. You will find, nevertheless, a detailed description of the effects in Section A 7.2 of the financial statements.
The development of operating working capital was very much influenced by the priorities set in the current macroeconomic circumstances and facing the supply chain constraints. We definitely steer the company according to the rule business first. As always, our working capital ratio climbed up to 4.2%. The sale of the U.K. business is taking into account as well as the last 12 months sales that are reduced due to the revenue recognition of license business. The ratios are a result of higher inventories and the lowering of trade payables. Both of these effects would not be present to that extent in a regular business environment without supply chain restrictions. We definitely currently opt for getting our hands on IT components and putting them on stock, and we even pay suppliers faster if this helps to source components we need.
This supports us to be ready for delivery when we get an order. This also means that we tie more capital in the company than usual. The working capital in total as of end of 2021 is EUR 54 million, which is way less than the backlog that was generated due to the high demand and the supply situation. We expect this ratio to improve as soon as we enter more regular circumstances in the IT world. Cash flow also very much followed the rather unusual circumstances. Industry standard by far is to generate the highest cash inflow in the fourth quarter of any given year. This is based on the seasonality of the IT project business, and those of you who follow CANCOM for years know this from us.
With regards to the full year 2021, we nonetheless see a nice improvement to operating cash flow to EUR 72.3 million. I already guided you towards an operating cash flow of EUR 50 million-EUR 70 million during our capital market days in November. We absolutely exceeded even this guidance. Compared to the previous year, we made an improvement, which is actually higher than you can see in the statements, as 2020 includes cash flow from U.K. operations. The full details are described in section 8.2.3. Plan for 2022 is to further raise the operating cash flow. That's clear. As the current environment is very much dominated by the Ukraine war and there's still ongoing supply chain constraints, I currently do not guide more precisely. We will do so in the course of the year.
The CapEx slide shows the development of the CapEx in the last couple of quarters. You see already the declining trend that I mentioned in our Capital Markets Day. We guided there for a CapEx to sales ratio of 2.6%, and we came out slightly below this. CapEx will be lower in 2022 than in 2021. We do not have any major special investments ahead of us, and the ongoing are phasing out in the course of 2022. We will go on following our path towards the midterm target of 1.5% CapEx to sales ratio. The amortizations and just consequently, the impact on the earnings per share did not change compared to the status of the third quarter call. We still see the same effects.
Amortizations have gone down a lot with the sale of our U.K. business, positively affecting EBIT. 2022 EBIT, as of today, will only be affected to a EUR 4.2 million by amortizations. Earnings per share from continuing operations with a great development from a 0.85 euro per share in 2019, 0.93 euro per share in 2020, and finishing this year with a 1.17 EUR per share. The executive and the supervisory board have decided to propose to the general meeting a dividend of EUR 1 per share. This is the second consecutive raise of the dividend. Let me comment on dividend and payout ratio briefly. In general, dividend policy reflects our strong belief in the mega trends of IT and the opportunities that we see as CANCOM.
First and foremost, we focus on investing in the growth of CANCOM. We have shown quite stable payout ratios of 40%-50% in the past, which is high compared with our position as a growth stock. We still want to utilize, firstly, the money for growth in a promising market. Specifically regarding this year, when talking about dividend payout ratios, we should not exceed. This dividend level is absolutely sustainable going forward. This dividend is corresponding to this. We will grow quickly in the well-known payout ratios. The absolute amount of the dividend will be defined depending on the status of our share buyback program shortly before the annual general meeting. We are ending today with a brief overview of our financial calendar. All of the data are disclosed on our newly released CANCOM website.
Our non-financial report, including detailed descriptions of our sustainability strategy, released in the course of this year, 2021. Our progress with respect to our ESG efforts will be released on April 29. This is the date that I would like to highlight and where I would like to point out with the financial calendar ahead of you. With this given, I would like to hand back to Rudi for the forecast.
Thanks, Tom. After this overview of 2021, I will now inform you about our view on the current political and economic developments. We are shocked by the Russian attack on Ukraine and followed the news very closely since then. We are sad to see the disaster happening in Ukraine, and as we have a subsidiary in Slovakia, we try to help supporting refugees there in close cooperation with local NGOs. As a clear statement to the capital markets, we say we have no subsidiaries or employees or any noteworthy customers or suppliers in Ukraine or Russia. First of all, from a business perspective, CANCOM is not affected directly in any way by the war. Of course, we see the Ukraine war as a potential risk to the economy as a whole. CANCOM in the last couple of years was quite resilient.
This is why we are still confident to remain on our dynamic growth path. Of course, our customers are part of the general economic development, and it's always better for us to see them in a good shape than in a bad one. When we, at the end of this call, present our positive guidance for 2022, please keep this as a factor in the back of your head. We have lesser visibility on the business than usual. What will 2022, apart from the war, corona, and supply chain shortages be about? It's about the fact that hybrid work scenarios are becoming the new normal. It is about the fact that cybersecurity should be on the A list of every IT department in the world, and keep being in service is the top goal.
It's about the fact that the customers need to invest in IT in one way or another. Based on these expectations, the executive board of CANCOM expects group revenue to rise very significantly in 2022. Gross profit and EBITDA are expected to do the same. When we talk about very significantly, we mean above 10%. In the cloud segment, we also expect very significant growth in all KPIs you can see on this slide. In the IT solution segment, we expect revenue to rise very significantly and EBITDA to grow significantly. Dear ladies and gentlemen, thanks for your time and your interest in CANCOM.