Ladies and gentlemen, a welcome also from my side, and thank you for joining our today's conference call. Our prepared slides are available under the Investor Relations section of our website, www.r-stahl.com. Shortly after we will have finished this call, a replay of the entire conference will be provided for download at the same place. Please be aware of our disclaimer statement, which you'll find at the beginning of the slide deck. And now, I will pass on to Dr. Mathias Hallmann, our group's CEO, who will walk you through the presentation.
Thank you, Ms. Schäuble. Ladies and gentlemen, very warm welcome to our Q2 2024 analysts and investors conference call. From my side, as always, we start with a summary. Last quarter, we actually had, from my point of view, surprisingly stable order intake after the development in the second half of last year. We ended at EUR 88.5 million, only slightly below the EUR 89.3 million we could achieve last year. We see a slightly increasing demand from the chemical industry. We see activities in the nuclear sector, but we also see a significant change in the structure of the business. We see more and more projects, which were not there over the last couple of years, but we see less day-to-day business, indicating the weakness of the markets in general.
Sales grew in almost all regions, and we saw a year-on-year increase of 16.4% to EUR 89.3 million. EBITDA climbed, as a consequence, by 26% to EUR 10.9 million, resulting in a margin of 12.2%. Again, we do have a negative free cash flow of EUR -2.7 million due to further buildup of working capital. I would, I would expect this has been the last quarter for a while with negative free cash flow. These were still effects from the supply crisis we saw as a consequence of the COVID crisis. We discussed it several times. We had to make decisions between pest and cholera. Pest would have been not being able to deliver.
Cholera , we see—we have now, but we are at the end of the quarter, which is the high stock levels, as we had to place orders via different channels in order to make sure that we get the materials we need. Net profit doubled almost from EUR 1.9 million to EUR 3.7 million quarter-over-quarter, supported by higher sales and improved efficiency, and that ended in again also doubled earnings per share of EUR 0.57. If you look into the regional distribution of our sales, we see a slight increase in Germany. If you would look into the first half, you would see a minor decrease in Germany.
This still indicates our very strong position in the chemical industry, which slightly recovered, but is still not, still not on the level it used to be in the years before. We do see strong development in the central region, growth of 18.4% to EUR 40 million. For me, that's a clear indication that our strategy is still working well, that we are gaining market shares, because this is definitely not representing the development of the overall market. Same in Americas, with strong increase of 45%. Honestly, on a still low level, but we are making progress, and 13% increase in Asia Pacific, which leads then to 16.4% overall. Looking in our profitability analysis, we see the sales number you already heard.
We have a little bit a reduction of finished goods. Therefore, our total operational performance is below sales, but still significantly ahead of Q2 2023. The first really good thing is our cost of material. We see a cost of material ratio of 30.6%. That comes from the reduction of finished goods at the one side, but on the other side, it also indicates a very, very healthy margin structure. And that's even more important when we have in mind that the structure of our sales is changing from standard business to project business. And we were not really able making money with projects in the past, but now we also have a solid profitability level there, and this is...
This is actually a very nice development from our point of view. What's not so nice is the increase in personnel costs and other operating expenses. We discussed it already in the Q1 call. Personnel costs are driven by staff expansion and wage increases. I would dare to say 70% of that is probably wage increases, and 30% is staff expansion. But looking forward, this is not going away. We expect more wage increases in the coming year. And that clearly indicates where our focus for the coming periods needs to be, and that's efficiency, because otherwise, these personnel cost increases are going to eat up everything.
Other operating expenses we discussed are mainly driven by our one-time expenses for the EXcelerate project. We think that 80% of these costs are behind us, so, this, this will come back on a reasonable level, in Q3 and latest then in Q4. So that all ends in an EBIT of EUR 6.3 million, against EUR 3.5 million in, in the last, quarter, or in the quarter Q2 2023. Financial results, went from EUR -4.8 million to EUR -1.9 million. This is mainly due to the discontinuation of our Russian, business, with what we discussed extensively in the, in the first quarter. We, we typically had a contribution of EUR 800,000-EUR 900,000 per quarter over the last two years, and that's, that's not here anymore. EBT, EUR 4.4 million.
Taxes, we have under control, and then we see the net profit we discussed. Free cash flow or cash flow statement. Yeah, there we see everything we discussed. The net profit, which increased, then we have some minor changes from other income and expenses. Here we have mainly currency translations and change in provisions, but that's not a major effect. The major effect below the cash flow comes from the change in working capital. As I indicated, this should, this was the last quarter. We have such numbers. We already saw a nice development in June. We have a solid development in July, and I expect that this is going to change now significantly. And I come back to that when we come to the outlook.
So then, cash flow from operating activities is slightly negative, and that all results with the investing activities in a negative free cash flow of EUR 2.7 million. Net debt level is at EUR 48 million. With the current profitability, I don't see, I don't see a problem, with that- with those EUR 48 million. Nevertheless, we are aiming to bring that down in the second half of the year. When we look into the, I cannot say historical development, but the development over the last 3 years, we see that we had a, we had a strong growth phase, from 2021 to the first half of 2023, with respect to orders. Then, we saw weakening markets on the one hand side, but also destocking activities on the other side, especially in Q4 2023.
So, orders went down. On the other hand, we were significantly improving our operations footprint and have it on a stable level of about EUR 90 million per quarter at this point of time. And then we see a good recovery on the orders in Q1 and Q2, and this is what somewhat surprised us, but it also indicates, as I said before, that, or we think that this is an indication for the solid implementation of our strategy. Overall, this results in double-digit growth again for 2024, and we would expect that this is going somewhat to continue, and that leads me to the guidance. We would expect sales at probably the upper half or at the upper end of our sales forecast of EUR 335 million-EUR 350 million.
We will definitely remain in the EBITDA range of EUR 35 million-EUR 45 million. That was somewhat under pressure after the first quarter. Now we feel very comfortable with this prediction. Free cash flow, we will definitely improve, and we would expect a number by the end of the year. And if we don't see significant effects on the interest side, we would also expect a increase on, in our equity ratio. That's all clearly depending on the environment we are working in, but I think this is nothing that which needs to be mentioned. We all know that. Yeah, this is it from my point of view. Overall, pretty uneventful quarter, nevertheless successful. The focus is clear.
For the future, we need to make sure that we work on efficiencies, so in order to avoid that inflationary effects are going to eat up our profitability. We will continue to drive our strategy in order to continue to grow, but overall, I see us on a very solid track to achieve our targets in the future. Thank you very much, and I'm open for questions.
The first question that we have comes from Konstantin Völk of Nu Ways AG. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good morning, everybody. Here is Konstantin Völk from Nu Ways, and thank you for taking my question. So about the revenue increase, how much of the 16.4% increase is coming from price increases, and how much is driven from volume?
Yeah, good morning. Thank you for your question. There's something between price and volume, and that's mixed, and therefore, it's always a guess, an educated guess, but I would say 70% is volume.
Okay. And do you plan to make further price increases during the year?
We are not making price increases during the year, but we are definitely putting another price increase into the market by the end of the year. We already decided that, and it will be communicated to the markets in Q4.
Okay, understood. And in look, they are in the report you mentioned for the order intake in nuclear in the second quarter, and how much was that? And is it for the power plant from EDF in U.K. and France, or is it something else?
I think it was around EUR 3 million.
Okay. When do you expect further increases for order intake in nuclear in the coming quarters?
We are expecting that one big plant will be released in the next couple of months, but I would expect orders to come. We are specified. Those orders will definitely come to us, but it will probably, they will probably come next year. Not this year, I don't see more orders from this segment. The segment is still in a, I would say, in a starting phase. I would expect the peak of that in 10 years, probably, because we all know that those projects need time. But on the other side, I see us very well positioned to catch this business then.
Okay, understood. So more in the mid term.
Yeah.
About order intake in general, so look quite good in Q1 and Q2 now. Do you think that's sustainable throughout the year, or should we see again, order intake in the high 80s or low 90s in Q3 and Q4?
Q3, we see a good pipeline. We see a good pipeline. Again, we see more projects than we saw before. We also see that in the second half, everybody becomes aware that winter is coming. We will be seeing more lighting orders. It's always surprising that probably people need to move to the end of the year and to understand that winter is coming. And, so no, I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic, but it's probably a little bit more fluctuation in it, due to the amount of bigger volumes and the weakness in the day-to-day business.
Okay, sounds good. Then I have one last question about chemical. So just read the production numbers of the first five months in 2024 of the German and European chemical industry, and the numbers are, as you mentioned, slightly better than last year, but still relatively muted. What's your opinion on that? Could this be an inflection point, or do you expect it to stay weak in the coming quarters?
We see some recovery, but we don't see that it's moving up to the level it used to be. What we hear from the chemical industry is they all have severe cost saving programs in place.
Okay. Thank you very much. That's from my side.
Very welcome.
Thank you. We'll pause a moment to see if we have any further questions. At this stage, there seems to be no further questions. Would you like to make any closing comments?
Yeah, I can. Yeah. Then, from my side, thank you very much for attending this call. We will hopefully see or meet each other for our Q3 call on November 6th. And, until then, I wish you all a nice summer. Thank you.