Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's analyst conference call of the CEWE Group following the publication of the Q1 figures of 2024. I'm delighted to welcome the CEO Yvonne Rostock as well as CFO Dr. Olaf Holzkämper, so the management board will guide us through the presentation and the results shortly. Kindly note that by now every participant is in listen-only mode, but after the presentation we will move over to our Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your questions directly to them. Having said this, Dr. Holzkämper, please go ahead, the stage is yours.
Thank you very much and good morning to everybody and welcome to today's Q1 2024 conference call of CEWE Group. Great weather, great numbers, and as you can see behind, this is a real wall, not a digital wall. We are in our new and great studio here at CEWE. I hope you like it, but quite frankly, it's an interim solution, but we all know interim solutions stay for quite a while sometimes. So here we go, and I hope that we will enjoy you also with the great numbers that Yvonne now is going to start to present.
Thank you, Olaf. A warm welcome at our Q1 call as well from my side. Most of you I met personally at our annual press conference six weeks ago. There we shared our record results for 2023. Now six weeks later, I'm more than happy to be able to present an excellent start as well into 2024. In the next 45 minutes, we will cover the following points. We share the results in a nutshell. We look at the corporate development and the business segments. We sum it up in the group results, and then we will dive into financial details and close with an outlook before we then go into the Q&A session. Let's get started with the results in a nutshell. As the CEWE Group, we are proud to publish that in Q1, our group turnover raised by EUR 10.3 million to a record of EUR 165.7 million.
This is an increase of +6.6%. To put it in perspective, I can say that to reach our yearly target, we require a growth of 5%. With this 5% growth of the yearly target, we would then be at the upper range of EUR 820 million for the total year. We are good on path. For the group EBIT, we increased a +EUR 2.9 million up to EUR 8.1 million, which is a +55%. To put this in the same perspective, in order to achieve our yearly growth, we would have to grow in the total year by 4% to reach the upper end of the range of our EUR 87 million. To sum up, if we look on this one, we can say top line and bottom line developed successfully. We had a real strong start into the new year.
With this, we clearly confirm our targets for 2024. Let me guide you through the corporate development and the business segments, and starting with our biggest segment, which is the photo finishing. Before the numbers, let's follow up on the direction of the CEWE Group. We defined this beginning of this year. We are striving to increase our number one position in photo finishing in Europe. In order to achieve this goal, we believe it's important to stay focused on our mission. Our mission, inspiring people to create and share personalized photos and print products at highest quality. We achieve this by providing an outstanding user experience along the entire customer journey, and here innovation is key to success. This will enable us to stay ahead and build our position as the market leader.
Next to the mission and to live up to this mission, we defined a common set of principles. All starts with the consumer at the center. We then, if we go around the circle, build on strong brands, innovation, sustainability, and efficiency, all carried by one team sharing the same values. The key principle of customer centricity, it's one of the biggest awards that we can get, is the feedback from our consumer. Some of the feedbacks, it's anecdotal when they praise products or services, the speed and the quality, speed of delivery, the quality. This feedback is also measured in the Net Promoter Score. This is a KPI internally, which I'm happy to share because here as well, it's quite well above 60% alongside with some of the well-known brands like Apple. We increased on the last 12 months rolling up to 62.6%.
This is what a great NPS can look like in real life. This is what we mean by consumer centricity, doing everything to make our consumer happy. We do everything to excite and inspire them every day. The question is, what inspires and excites people? The answer is innovation. Innovation as well as the main target to be in the service for our consumer. But innovation is as well our dedication. It is helping us to shape the future of our market. It's our responsibility as market leaders being always the first. Innovation is embedded into our way of working. There's a strong top-down approach as well as a bottom-up approach. The bottom-up approach, there are processes behind.
We had just as well hosted in Q1 our innovation days, welcoming 1,000 team members here in Oldenburg to exchange on innovation and product and service improvements. Still, we are particularly proud and pleased that the innovative strengths of CEWE have once again been recognized by an external honored international share, the Technical Image Press Association. And we received three awards for three brands in 2024. If we look into it, the Best Photo Service Award went to the three stickers, the Free-Form Stickers s, which can be created and cut and picked directly at our CEWE photo station. For Pixum, we received the award being the best consumer photo printing app. And for WhiteWall, we have been awarded to receive the best or to be the best photo lab for our ultra HD sharpening of black and white photo prints.
And that's the thing that really is important to our consumers and to us is sustainability. It's a passion and a strong mindset in CEWE. It's as well a responsibility for our people and our planet. And it's important that we are future-fit. The 14th Sustainability Report is now published, and all the details about our efforts on sustainability activities are summed up there, and they are published on our website. We are proud to be awarded by Statista and the Financial Times as well as a climate leader, and we received this in 2023. Consumers require as well best quality, fast and reliable service at a competitive price. In order to provide this, efficiency is really key to us. Efficiency in production, in collaboration, in services, and in tools. In 2024, we continue to invest. And you know, for us, after Christmas is already before Christmas.
So we invest in automated processing, whether it's printing or sorting. We invest as well into strategic production expansions. In April, we celebrated the significant extension of our production site in Koźle, which you see here on the picture, on the big picture, the new hall at the back of the picture. How it looks inside is this. This is an area where you can see what we did not only extend, but as well we built a specialty for our photo gifts. Here's the textile production for Koźle, which we insourced end of 2023, which already took part during the last Christmas season. The consumer search as well for strong brands as an orientation. Strong brands are important in the fast-moving consumer goods, and as well they are important for photo finishing. Strong brands are key for us.
Historically, CEWE has transformed from private label to the CEWE brand and then to the House of Brands. So you may ask, what are we going to do now? We are going to make sure that the brands are strong, they are differentiated, and they are loved brands. So the example of Austria that for the first time we became the most loved brands of Austria is very valuable to us, and it's a great consumer recognition. And this is built by two things. First, by building the global brands of CEWE, but as well giving it the local touch with local activities, with supporting the local photo culture, and with local families as ambassadors transmitting our inspiration to our consumer.
So far to the principles and where we are standing there, in the beginning of this year, we defined as well our strategic priorities to reach our goal of the number one. So if we look at the strategic priorities, these we have defined, and we are working now alongside these priorities to build on. So what you can see, it starts with the brands, which we just talked about on the left bottom, expanding the brands, strong, differentiated, and loved brands. We come to the second, innovation in terms of products and as well technologies, focusing on our core products and core services. Then as the number three, we can talk about the international growth. International growth meaning with a focus on Europe.
DACH is the strong base, Western Europe as an accelerator, and Eastern Europe continuing its success story using further opportunities in countries where we are not yet leading. Number 4 means developing the two channels, B2C relevant for all our brands. The combination of B2C and B2B2C is very valid for our CEWE brand. Here it is important to have this balance and together with our partnership of our retail partners. On number 5, we are working on going from multi-channel to omnichannel. In this priority, there's a lot of potential. Consumers would like to have seamless transit, seamless between channels, between software, between the photo station and the online. So they would like to be perceived and welcomed in one world. There is a lot of potential behind, so it's one of our priorities we are following. We then come to the ordering channels.
On the ordering channels, we are developing all of them. The ordering channel of the software is still the elephant with as well high growth in terms of value. But we would like as well on top to focus and to accelerate on the mobile, which we see as well as a growth driver for the future. Retail, 7, is more and more comes from the hardware business. We have strengthened this footprint, and we have turned this in more and more of an experience store to our photo finishing. And this means for us, we go further this direction of vertical integration and putting the photo finishing more and more forward. And point 8, operation, vertical integration with quality and efficiency. The example what we've seen there, it is covering everything, production, logistic, as well as supply chain, and customer service, of course.
This is important to deliver the best results behind. There we do as well investments as in 2024, we continue our investment track in machines and in services, but as well in the way we are approaching it. This is on the priorities. If we sum this together, we have set our strategic priorities. The number one is playing a huge role for us. Being one House of Brands with one common goal, with one common set of principles, a set of strategic priorities, we have shared the priorities for photo finishing and delivering this as one group with one team. And the one group we have launched, thank you. The one group we have launched, and this is the sign, it's a platform. It goes beyond the different segments.
So whether it's photo finishing, whether it's commercial online printing, it's covering and hosting all the brands, and it's hosting and giving a home to all our team members. The group, in fact, is supposed to be more than the sum of the parts. We have launched this internally in Q1 as well as externally on all relevant channels. A group can only work if this is carried by the team spirit. This is carried by our team. Here you see the team on the innovation days where we have launched this new group approach. This is the one team. At this moment, I would like to thank wholeheartedly each of them for their contribution in Q1. Contribution in Q1, we can now dive into the figures, hard figures of the Q1. In photo finishing, we had a strong first quarter.
The turnover once again rose significantly by 9.1%. We achieved EUR 137.6 million. We achieved this despite macroeconomic challenges. Yes, you can say, on the one hand, we might be fortunate because we are less dependent on macroeconomics, because we consider and the consumer considers the product range offers a value which exceeds their price. That's a good point. But we cannot rest on it, and we did not rest on it. We continue to create this value for the consumer. We invest in innovations, products, technologies. We ensure quality, and we let the consumer know about it. We invest in marketing. In Q1, we increased this marketing invest in value as well as in percentage. We develop our brands. We are happy to say that all pure photo finishing brands could contribute as well to the results of the Q1.
We are still expanding our cooperation with our partners and our footprint in photo kiosks. We can say even we don't have precise numbers as this market is not covered by one of the auditors or experts like Nielsen or GfK. We can say we extended our market position. So far to the top line. If we look at the bottom line, we can say as well that the bottom line has benefited from it. We increased the bottom line by EUR 2.4 million and reached EUR 7.5 million, a very strong result as well for photo finishing. Going a bit in the quarterly distribution, having a look there, we can see a green tick on the box. We had targeted in turnover range between EUR 126 million-EUR 135.5 million, and we have achieved EUR 138 million. Yes, we are above, we exceeded our own planning.
This is good because if you see as well, it is important. We did it because due to or despite, we can say, some of the calendar and holiday shifts, which was not set, which was significant. It's as well important to have a strong quarterly first quarter start as we are now moving into the more challenging quarters, Q2 and Q3. If we look at the EBIT, we see a green tick as well for the Q1. Here again, we exceeded our target, which we set as a range between EUR 5.8 million and 6.6 million, delivering 7.5 million. And this is as well an important good start for us looking at being prepared for the more challenging quarters in Q2 and Q3. Diving on one level deeper and understanding how the turnover is constituted. On the left-hand side, you see the number of prints.
You see there with a +0.5, we are in the middle of the range. Here we can see some of the impacts of the calendar and the holiday shifts. But we are in the middle of the range. If we look one further right, we see the value per photo, and there you see an increase of 8.6%. This includes two factors. First, the price increases. Second, the premiumization towards more value-added products and towards more expensive products. If you combine the volume and the value, you come to the 9.1%, which is the increase of the turnover. If we look on our core product, the CEWE photo book, we can see that there we have a slight decrease with -1.5% in the first quarter. This is for us somehow expected due to the calendar and holiday shifts I mentioned.
But we reassured, and this was mainly concerning March, we reassured in January and in February, we showed a nice increase between +2% and +7%. We reassured once more because if we would look at the turnover from the CEWE photo books, it increased with +6% in the first consumer. This is an important number, 1.2 million. It's a number, but as well behind, we have families and consumers whom we made happy with these photo books. We can move on to the commercial online print. The commercial online print is constituted the results of the commercial online print is constituted out of the three different brands with the main contribution in the middle with SAXOPRINT.
If we look at how we have landed our first quarter, you see that despite the decline in top line -4.9%, we managed to have an EBIT increase and to deliver a positive result on the EBIT line with EUR 0.8 million. This is always a fine line between the best price strategy and as well the profitability. Here it was important for us next to the best price strategy to ensure that we have a very good profitable start as well into the year. Yes, macroeconomics are here more challenging than in the photo finishing business. If we look at retail, on retail, please be remembered that this is the hardware business we are looking at here. The hardware business means the cameras, albums, frames. The photo finishing business is included in the segment photo finishing, which we just went through.
If we look on the hardware, we can see that we achieved a turnover of EUR 6.6 million, which is a slight decrease, minus 1.5%. We managed with the mix of the things, an EBIT increase of plus 41%. It's still slightly negative, but close to break even in Q1. We have a look at the others, which after the sales of futalis became a very minor segment. We have taken out here on this view futalis turnover as well in 2023 to have it comparable for 2024. This combines more the results from corporate costs and real estate property with a stable result in EBIT. We are now able to sum up on the group level.
On the group level, we can say that all the business segments, we have added up to this 165 and the +6.6% we have seen in which way was very much driven by the photo finishing in top line, the more challenging top line in online print. If we look at the EBIT, we can see that each of the divisions contributed to the bottom line result, lion's share photo finishing, a good contribution, a strong contribution of commercial online print, and an improvement on slide level for retail. With this, I'm happy to hand over to you, Olaf, for the financial details.
Yes. Thank you very much, Yvonne. And let's look at a couple of pages we have back there. And the first one is always, let's look at the P&L first. I think you did already explain, obviously, the development in the different segments. And the top line segment development obviously adds up to the first line here. But it drives the structure underneath in the lines that indicate where is our value generation. So you know and we have explained that a couple of times. I'm sure you know by now that in our segment photo finishing, we do generate a lot of value by actually doing things ourselves, by having personal costs in there, by having other costs in there, marketing costs in there, and so on and so on. And that is why there's always limited cost of materials in photo finishing.
But there's more personnel costs and more other operating expenses in there. So that is photo finishing. And we saw an increase in photo finishing in Q1 as we just looked at. Now, in the other two segments in commercial online print, and in particular in our retail segment, we do see a different structure. We do more cost of material, but less personnel costs and less other operating expenses. And we see a decrease in revenue in these two segments. And looking at that is driving the kind of structure we do see in the next lines here. So yes, we have talked about the 6.6 increase, nice increase in terms of revenues. Next two lines, nothing really important in there.
Other operating income, yes, we do see a slight increase there, which is also different bits and pieces, gains from exchange rate differences and income from the recycling material we have in there, slight increase there. Cost of materials, we do see in spite of the revenue increase, we do see a decrease in cost of material here by EUR 2.4 million. We do see, obviously, a tremendous decrease in cost of materials in percent of revenue from 26.9%-23.8%. This is driven by exactly the change that we just walked through. We do have the changes in the revenue structure, more photo finishing, less of the other two. That is leading to less cost of material in percent of revenue, which was increased, obviously, by the higher sales, especially due to the price effects in there.
These price effects did intensify this development in terms of decrease in material cost % of sales. The price increases were not able to compensate in the other two lines, personal and other operating expenses, the effect because there we did see the increase in % of revenue. We did see the increase in personal expenses to 33.4% of revenue because there's like EUR 5.9 million more costs because we did have more personal in photo finishing operations. We did have more personal in central services. We did have a wage increase in some of those situations there. This has been leading to the situation in personal expenses. The same is true for other operating expenses, increase in terms of % of revenue to 35.9% in millions, up by EUR 6.7 million.
We do see there selling expenses, which is our value generation there, which is marketing mainly. We do see a bit more exchange rate losses there, which are in line corresponding to the exchange rate gains we have seen above. So these are the developments in the operational lines of our P&L structure in terms of amortization, depreciation, no change at all in terms of absolute numbers, which means a decrease in % of revenue. So if we add it all up, we have a nice situation as Yvonne explained already, EUR 8.1 million in Q1 EBIT is a successful quarter we can build on for the rest of the year. That was the P&L. We move over to the balance sheet and look at the traditional balance sheet here on this page. Yes, we do have an increase in assets overall by EUR 41.5 million.
That is in line with the revenue increase, which we are seeing right now already and which we're even more going to see, hopefully, as we go through the year, and especially Q4. That is the important quarter. So that makes sense at all. Q4 is being prepared, and we do see the increase in assets here. If we look on the liability side, yes, obviously, the equity ratio is the number we like to look at here as a conservative company. We like the situation we have. You do see a 66.6% equity share, which is a decrease from the 67.1% you might notice here.
Then you could be asking, "So why do we see decrease?" I mean, given all the success we've had in last year and given the success of the first three months of this year, so why do we see looking back 12 months ago, why do we see a decrease? The decrease is because we do have a strong cash position. We are aware of that. If we see share prices that we appreciate and that we consider worth buying, we do buy our own shares. We have share buybacks in there of EUR 12.9 million, as you see in the box on the right-hand top. If we take out these EUR 12.9 million and put the bag in there, we would have seen an increase in the equity ratio to 67.3%.
So that is the reason that has been the reason why we do see this slight decrease there. But it was completely planned for. It makes sense in our eyes because we are strong. The cash is not visible here, but the cash is visible on the next page, which is, as you know, the management balance sheet, right, too, we like to create for you to show you what does it mean if we take out the balance sheet elements we do not have to pay for in terms of interest or dividends. And looking here at the capital employed and the capital invested, yes, we do see the cash position. It's not greatly visible. It's on the left part, capital employed. In the last column, you do see the EUR 83.6 million we have as a cash position in there.
This is a big item given our balance sheet situation, given the way it looked like in the last years after Q1. And yes, also for that reason, we do have the ability to buy the ex-shares if we consider it useful. And we do so as we just talked through. And we have done so all of last year pretty much. So that is something if the share price makes sense, yes, we like to do it, and we think it makes sense. But all in all, we do like to develop our company. And that is why the EUR 83.6 million we see there are needed. We are going to use them to do something with it. And you are aware that 2019 was the last acquisition, WhiteWall at that time, the last acquisition that we have done.
Now, we have not done any acquisition in the meantime due to corona and whatever operational reasons, but also because prices that we were looking at, starting discussions here and there about any company that could have made sense for us, the prices were too high. And I was just sort of encouraged again this morning over breakfast when I was reading the Handelsblatt. I was reading an article on the private equity situation. And they were saying, "Oh, yeah. And the funds that we have and the acquisitions there, vintage 2020, 2021, and 2022, they will have a hard time being successful at the end of the day because prices we paid at that time tended to be a little bit high." You see? That was black and white. And that was exactly the reason why we didn't do it because we look at the numbers.
And if it makes sense, yes, we're happy to buy. And if numbers don't make sense and things are too expensive, we don't buy. And if we don't buy, cash happens to be still visible here. And that is why we are happy to have the cash here, and we will use it. But given what I just talked through regarding how others tended to behave, rest assured that we don't do anything stupid with the EUR 80 million we're seeing there. We will try to use them as wisely as possible to the benefit of the company. So that was on the visible EUR 80 million we are seeing there on the cash position. If we look at the rest of the capital employed there, where did the changes come from?
Yes, a little bit of the money that was freed up by the net working capital at the bottom was used on top of the non-current assets. And there you see, if you read through the box, the most important change is the real estate projects that we have in our photo finishing production. Yes, there's something happening in Freiburg in Germany, close to the border of France and Switzerland. But there's also happening something in Koźle, which Yvonne talked through at the beginning. Koźle has been built up in the last years for our labor-intensive products. And that is exactly what you could have seen on the picture, what you could see on the pictures that Yvonne shared before. So that is mainly the increase in non-current assets. And in net working capital, you see a decrease that, to some degree, funded both increases you see above.
working capital, you can read through all the details at the bottom, but mainly taxes, that the tax position that had been changed, we had an increase with a decrease in tax receivables and an increase in tax liabilities. That was obviously a positive effect on the cash flow of the 12 months that we are looking at here, not on the cash flow, sorry, on the cash position and the balance sheet. So that was on the capital employed. If we move over to the capital invested, no big change. I mean, yes, we talked through the increase in equity already, the two positions at the bottom, gross financial liabilities and non-operating liabilities, no big change, nothing to talk through in detail. So that was the balance sheet looking backward and comparing 12 months.
If we look at the comparison, what happens in this quarter cash flow-wise, so it's the cash flow of the Q1, yes, you do see that actually there's no big change compared to what was usual, what used to be the case in the last quarters. The most important thing we see on the left-hand side, cash flow for operating business, is the position number two in this list. We have seen a decrease of EUR 6.2 million there. That was due to the fact that last year, we had a one-off increase because some retail partners didn't pay in Q4 of 2022 what they should have paid, but they paid it immediately in Q1 of 2023. That was EUR 6.2 million that we have to compare ourselves against now. That is why there is a decrease now visible here.
But it was more an extraordinary increase of last year, which is funding the decrease now that we see here. The 6.2 million are actually driving the whole thing. That's the development you see there in operating business cash flow. The decrease you do see is even only a 2.1. So they are countermeasures or they are countereffects visible. Yes, there is more earnings. You can see on top of 3.2 million and the cash flow from that. And there is more that's a positive effect on cash flow in other net working capital. It's mainly obvious. We still have to pay sales tax liabilities due to the increased business we have there. So those are the most important countereffects we have seen. All in all, not a big change that we could look at there. In investment, yes, we do see an increase in investment.
We do see an increase by EUR 2.7 million. That is basically 100% driven by the little supplementing company acquisition we had done in commercial online print. But it was not a sort of real acquisition. The company was part of our supply chain anyway. We used them as a provider before, as a producer for some of our products. And now they're part of our company because these products, it's mainly large format prints, are very successful, have a handsome margin. And we'd like to have them on board as part of our company. So it's only a supplementing little thing there, but it makes sense. These are the two changes we have seen, not a lot all in all. That is why overall, you do see a free cash flow position for Q1 of -EUR 26.9 million.
That fits, if you look through the last years there, it fits in the flow of things. That's a very typical normal Q1 as we tend to see it. The last number we really close with is the ROCE situation. ROCE increased again to 19.2%. It's a great position we see there. CV is clearly value generating, obviously, if you look at this number. It's great. So what do we do in the AGM? We did put out already a proposal for the dividend of EUR 2.6 to be paid. Hopefully, that is going to be approved by our shareholders. Then it's going to be the 15th dividend increase, consecutive dividend increase we have seen over the last years. That is quite an extraordinary number as we have seen also in the last years. Two years ago, it was number 13.
With this number 13, out of all more than 600 companies listed on the German stock market, we have been position number 5 in there. Now, 2023, we increased for the 15th, sorry, for the 14th time. Because others didn't increase, we stepped up to position number 3. Now, another company didn't continue the increases. With the 15th year now, we happen to be number 2 out of 611 stock-listed companies in Germany. We think that is quite an extraordinary position we are on. Those were the financial details.
For the outlook, Yvonne, I'm happy to hand back to you.
Thank you very much, Olaf. What can I say for the future and for this year? If we go one chart further, this is one of the D&A charts of CEWE. It's important for us to develop the line as well as for the dividend as well for the business. Here, we have targeted EUR 770 million-EUR 820 million as a top line, knowing that we are targeting the upper end of the range. The lower end was defined to integrate potential macroeconomic effects we could not already foresee for the planning. So that means with all the things we have seen today and with all the things what we have delivered in the Q1, we feel confident to confirm this target of EUR 820 million. If we go to the EBIT line here, we had set ourselves a target EUR 77 million to 87 million for this year.
Here as well, with the things we have shared today, and we are confident to go for this target range and to confirm the target range up to EUR 87 million EBIT. We start with the consumer. The consumer stays at our center of all our efforts. We can only invite you to capture your particularly nice moments in photos. Now, with the weather becoming very nice, use the momentum to shoot the photos. Then you're invited to turn them with us into your personal memories. We love the photo products. We look forward to deliver versus our targets in 2024. Thank you very much.