Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's Q2 2024 analysts and investors conference call of Klöckner & Co SE. For your information, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to your host today, Mr. Fabian Joseph. Please go ahead, sir.
Yeah. Thank you very much, and welcome to our Q2 call. With me today, our CEO, Guido Kerkhoff, our CFO, Oliver Falk, and our CEO Americas, John Ganem. They will guide you through the presentation, and afterwards, we are happy to take your questions. With that, I'd like to hand over to you, Guido.
Yes. Thanks, Fabian, and welcome also from my side to our Q2 call. As in recent analysts and investors conferences, financial statements were prepared according to IFRS 5 and include our continuing operations. This means Q2 2023 figures have been adjusted in accordance with the requirements of IFRS 5. I would like to start right away with the highlights of this quarter, in which we once again demonstrated our ability to perform in a pretty difficult market environment. Shipments came in considerably above previous year's level, despite the ongoing challenging macroeconomic environment, due to the continued strong development of Klöckner Metals Americas, driven by our acquisitions in the second half of the year 2023. Sales were at a constant level year-over-year as a result of the overall lower price level, despite the increasing shipments.
Gross profit came in at constant level year-on-year, despite the significant steel price correction during Q2 2024. Despite these ongoing challenging macroeconomic environment and the significant steel price correction during the quarter, we achieved an operating result within our guidance range and EBITDA before material special effects came in at EUR 42 million, with a particularly strong performance of our U.S. business. A solid result considering the challenging challenges during Q2. Driven by our solid operating performance, we generated a strong operating cash flow of EUR 61 million, considerably increased year-on-year. In total, we generated an operating cash flow of EUR 18 million for the first half of 2024. Also, according to our guidance, despite the negative headwinds we had. As a result of the acquisition of NMM in Q3 2023, net debt went up year-on-year to EUR 779 million, but went down quarter-on-quarter by EUR 11 million.
You have to take into account that we spent almost EUR 400 million last year and just have an increase of EUR 183 million, which clearly demonstrates that organically, we can pay back our debt even in such a difficult environment. Let's now focus on the strategic achievements in the recent months. Generating less volatile earnings while increasing our underlying profitability base is a key part of our group strategy, Klöckner & Co 2025: Leveraging Strengths. Developing our HVAC is an important lever to achieve this goal. As you know, we closed the divestment of parts of our European distribution business Q1 2024 to focus on the more stable and more profitable HVAC business. Spot-heavy entities were exposed to the low margin, cyclical commodity distribution business.
Hence, the sale significantly reduced our exposure to the steel price corrections in H1 2024, and also prevented us from more windfall losses in Q2, despite they were. Our HVAC and service center business is more stable and less dependent on steel price developments, as these businesses are characterized by mainly long-term contractual relationships and strong customization. Also, in the first half of 2024, HVAC makes up around half of our operating results. We will now have a closer look on the strategic initiatives on how we further strengthen the HVAC in recent months. As we stated before, we have the clear goal of substantially increasing.
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