Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the CANCOM SE Earnings Call for Results of the Q1 of 2023. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. Let me now hand the floor over to Mr. Florian Mangold.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our earnings call for Q1 of 2023. The next few minutes, Rüdiger Rath, our CEO, and Thomas Stark, our CFO, will take you through the main events for the Q1 of 2023. With that, I'll hand over to Rüdiger.
Welcome everybody to our first earnings call in 2023. I'd like to give you a short overview over the significant developments in the Q1 2023. On the top line, we saw a positive development on revenue and gross margin. Trading was in line with our expectations. We see a strong demand for services which is related mainly to consulting and support services. Unfortunately, that is overcompensated by a negative impact on our cost positions due to higher personnel costs, inflation-related cost increases on that, and one-off effects from the profitability and efficiency program, which we announced last year. Our EBITDA is below our expectation. On the operating working capital, we see a positive development compared to the Q1 2022. That was related to lower inventory build-up. The receivables are slightly down on the first quarter.
As you saw last week, we announced the acquisition of K-Businesscom. I'd like to give you a short overview at a glance of them. We get revenue by approximately EUR 520 million, by an EBITDA on 28% and happy that 1,650 employees joined the CANCOM family. On the market statistics, we are acquired the number two in the Austrian market. That supports our strategy to get the leading Hybrid IT service provider in DACH, we strengthen our presence in Austria. Additional, we get competencies and digital platforms and a high markets demands on security, which we now are able with some Cyber Defense Center from K-Businesscom can answer major questions we get from customers. On the financial results.
On the revenue, you saw the 7.1% increase. That is mainly related, yeah, to the volume we had in the trading, yeah, on hardware and software goods. We know that isn't what expected. We show and are happy to show growth on the top line and as well on the gross margin. As mentioned before, yeah, that is diluted by cost increases, especially on personnel expenses and on SGA, which leads to an EBITDA drop by minus 8.8%, yeah, compared to Q1, 2022. The EBITDA margin is around 7.6%. I think, yeah, that it's obvious to see. At the end of March explains, yeah, why we like to give you more information about our businesses and on more details. We look on the businesses mainly on four pillars: training, consultancy, support, and managed service.
To give you an overview, which we see behind and calculated behind the different pillars. In the Trading is the revenue and gross profit of sale of hardware and software, including marketing revenue. What is it just to customer relationship in that? That is the project or purchasing agreement, multi-year pro-framework contracts, as well e-business, yeah, which is our cloud marketplace or our e-commerce shop. On the Consultancy pillar, you see the consultancy or professional services as well transition and transformation. There is we mainly act as an architect or trusted advisor. We are engaged with the customer. In the Support pillar, yeah, we have software and hardware maintenance, or CANCOM warranty products, user help desk, and specialized field services and on-site support without operational responsibility and on-site services like reactive services we deliver to our customers. It comes mainly from multi-year support contracts with an underlying SLA.
On the managed services, the main or differentiator is the proactive services on software or hardware or assets that are necessary for the provision of services in our XaaS businesses. It's normally in the ratio of one to many relationship, SLA-based, remote delivery in the data center, our data center or data center in the customer. That are the four major pillars where we want to give you a little bit more insight, which we announced end of March. To guide you through, we see in general, yeah, that the trading covers 70% of the revenue. If you add the consulting support and managed services gross margin, the share of the gross profit is 70% of the total. You see it in lighter color below. You should see that in the trading, we had a gross profit of roughly 17%.
We increased our gross profit roughly 2.2 percent points compared to Q1 2022. The major demand in consulting and as well in the support area, you can see an increase on the revenue by roughly 13.4% and on the gross margin by 50%. What we like to show here is as well, where are our scalable core competencies, where we like to drive growth as well for our future businesses. Therefore, in the support area, we had an increase by 12.6% on the revenue side and on the gross margin by 8%. We see that there our efficiency goes up, and we can drive on the support services our gross margin. On the managed services compared to Q1 2022, we had the strongest growth in 2022.
It's a little bit difficult to compare here, but we had a slight drop from EUR 30.1 to EUR 27.5 on the revenue side, yeah. We are still were able to keep our gross margin more or less on the same levels. In general, yeah, you see the details, yeah, on the gross profit margin as well on the revenue side, where we now want to give details in the future to get comparable, yeah, with our own businesses and targets we have internal. Now, I'd like to hand over to my colleague, Thomas.
Thank you, Rüdiger. Well, great to have you all in the call today. It's a pleasure for me to spend the next, well, about 45 minutes with you. Just as you are used to it, I would focus on the financial KPIs and to give you a brief overview on what has actually happened with regards to them. Starting point is CapEx, the headline is significant reduction visible. Well, we started actually in the Q2 2022, that was perfectly in line with what we have communicated to you as a financial community, and we have been able to, well, get a good starting point in 2023 with a CapEx in the Q1 2023 of EUR 4.5 million. This is even slightly below our plan.
The CapEx to sales ratio of 1.4% is just great from our perspective, even if you take into account that the business volume that we have, so the comparable number before we had those adjustments according to our IFRS with regards to the revenue, was would have led to a ratio of 1.0. A good starting point, and we anticipate and can confirm that we are in line, and we continue spending about the level of at least within our range for the next three quarters to come and going forward. Slightly more difficult to assess and, well, depending a little bit more on external factors is cash flow and working capital.
Well, it looks like we have improved, we actually have improved compared with the previous year. Nevertheless, we are not really satisfied with what we see as the level of working capital requirements is still higher than usual. Whereas AP are at a level that is very well fine, inventories are still about at the same level as last year. Still a roughly EUR 100 million of inventories to run the business required. Well, with regards to the customer behavior and to, well, the accounts receivables and where we had the, well, I think, the toughest impact of the supply chain issues, we are still at a level that is of about, well, roughly EUR 400 million of AER. This is something that we plan to reduce.
Clearly, looking at the trend lines, on the bottom part of the slide, we actually assume a similar development for the cash flow compared with the previous year. However, a stronger than usual inflow in Q3 and Q4. The goal that we have set ourselves in order to come back to normal, is still in place, and this is something that we should normalize in the course of the year. PPA-based amortization and P-EPS effect, well, that's pretty much unchanged, compared with the 31st of 2022. However, there will be a strong impact that is triggered by the M&A transactions with K Business. Well, this is depending or the first time consolidation date is depending slightly on the antitrust authorities.
The most likely date for calculating it into your models will be the 1st of June. That's basically what we assume to have done those formal things in order to get to a final closing. That means you have about seven out of 12 months that you can assess as to be integrated into your models. You've read about the purchase price. It's about EUR 200 million in total. We have equity of about EUR 40 million to EUR 50 million. That means you can potentially assess what amortization effects might be. We will provide the information clearly in the financial statements, planned for 14th of August, I think. Then we will make an adjustment to the slides that's just ahead of you.
Finally, the forecast, well, the slide, will be to be changed clearly as we will have to take into account the K-Businesscom. Not yet knowing exactly when we will have the first time consolidation, we have to wait. I think the most important message for you is standalone and not including the K-Businesscom. What are the prospects that we see and what do we see as a forecast? There we can clearly confirm the forecast. From today's point of view and given that we are in a good demand position, as Rüdiger explained to us, and gross profit has grown nicely as well.
We are very confident that we are achieving the forecast standalone, and that's the basic message of this slide. We've actually confirmed the forecast of as given for the year, full year 2023. Finally. Well, two more things to come. First of all, the financial calendar 2023. First of all, I think the most important event to come for you, and hopefully we will meet a lot of you in person, are the Capital Markets Day. We will be in Frankfurt on May 23rd and in London on May 24th. Please benefit from the opportunity to get in touch with us.
We are looking forward to talking to you and for sure we will talk a bit, a little bit more in detail about, well, what is the business going to develop, what is the long or midterm strategy, and more about our prospects that we have as a combined organization with K- Businesscom. Finally, this is as an appendix available for you, we have just as you are hopefully used to it, we have summarized all the new details on the development for this splits that we have provided or that Rüdiger has provided in a short and brief overview for you from a more long-term perspective. There you can find all the data starting with 2020.
You have three full years in a row and the year that's ongoing. Hopefully that helps. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us. Florian and I will answer your questions, whatever you might be interested in. The reason for not going further back is that we had U.K. and especially effects that are very difficult to eliminate. 2020 is a very good starting point, and I think three years are a good idea to provide you with data about the development that we have seen in the each individual pillar. That's basically from my side. Thanks a lot, and I'm handing over back to Florian for potentially your questions.
Thank you, Rüdiger. Thank you, Tom. operator, please open the floor for questions.