Hello everyone. Welcome to Betolar's first quarter 2025 business review. Happy to have you listening to our webcast. I am Tuija Kalpala. I am the President and CEO of Betolar. Firstly, just briefly about the disclaimer about the forward-looking statements. About our agenda, I will be briefly talking about the main events and the highlights in first quarter. We have the financial review. Last, we have the questions and answers. Please, if you have any questions, please use the chat box online and ask any questions you may have. We will address those at the end of the session. Let's get started. During the first quarter, our main events and after the period, actions that have happened. A couple of them are highlighted here. Firstly, we announced the hollow core slabs production very early this year.
Together with Konsoli Parma, we are entering now the production phase on the world's lowest emission hollow core slabs. The SidePrime service. SidePrime is the service that we launched at the end of last year. It's a new service where we are analyzing the potential of different kinds of waste and side stream materials. We announced earlier this year that we have been doing some work together with Alva Yhtiöt. We have been analyzing their side streams and their potential to be used as a substitute for cement for our GeoPrime solutions. We also announced a new patent. We were granted a new patent on a climate cabinet that is standardizing the storage conditions for test samples. This is something that we have developed primarily for our own use in our laboratory.
Of course, thinking about that, this is something really useful that others could benefit also from. I would say that the biggest news and the biggest highlight during the period beginning this year was this metal separation and production of green cement. I will be spending some time today talking about this in more detail. In short, we have developed this new innovative method that is combining the separation of metal from waste materials and the production of green cement. Very interesting case. This is also something that we will be also opening more during our capital markets day that will take place in May. As another highlight, we have now officially entered the Canadian market. We announced yesterday that we have a new cooperation with Canadian Royalties in Canada. We are developing a cementless rock fill solution for them.
I will talk about that also a bit later. Our management team also is growing. We have been, so far, three people in the management team. We are happy that Juri Talja is now joining the management team in the company. He has been with us about six months, and he is our new Chief Growth Officer. Yes. The highlights. The market situation, as we have discussed before, we see very strong interest in our low-carbon and waste-free solution, especially within the mining sector. This is good. Of course, the development of this is taking some time. It is not very fast to enter new deals in the mining sector. It takes some time to get these. We are definitely getting some momentum in the mining sector with our solutions.
As discussed earlier, we still see that the construction market is low and it's very limited in the momentum at the moment due to the market conditions. If we are looking at our sales in first quarter, it showed significant growth compared to the previous year, but fell short of our own expectations. This is mainly due to the challenging macroeconomic conditions. To the extent implementation time for mining solutions, as I just mentioned, a lot of these things, it takes time to get these mining solutions implemented and get these things going. We are working very hard every day on getting more traction on the mining side. To that point, we were able to get the first cementless rock fill project launched. This is the first public announcement. We have a couple of projects related to cementless rock fill at the moment ongoing.
We also have this fully cement-free shotcrete that we have been piloting. This is the Outokumpu case. Those things are also going as planned. Now, of course, the big thing for us is that we were able to open the Canadian market with this cementless rock fill project that we announced yesterday. We are really looking forward now to the opportunities that we have in the Canadian market. The innovation side is this breakthrough in metal separation technology and green cement production. For that, we have filed seven new patent applications in addition to those that we have filed earlier. There are a lot of new patents that have been filed related to this metal separation. About this opportunity that we have now in Canada, this is our first reference for developing this cementless rock fill solution.
This is a 100% customized solution that we're developing for Canadian Royalties and their Nunavik Nickel project. We are targeting to commercialize the solution in early 2026. It will be based now on this techno-commercial study and the piloting that we are starting doing right now. This solution is very innovative. It replaces cement with industrial side streams in these rock fill applications and offers a cost-competitive and also very effective way of reducing CO2 emission in mining. It's really quite an interesting opportunity for us because it's not only helping to reduce the CO2 emissions for the mines, but it's also a very cost-effective solution and at reducing the cost. The hollow core slabs that we have developed together with Konsoli Parma. We talked about this also last time, but this is something that happened in the first quarter.
We have now been working together with Konsoli Parma for some time now to develop these world's lowest emission hollow core slabs. We have an agreement with Parma for this to make it actually go into the production phase. We have a three-year contract that covers all Konsoli's countries. We're really looking forward to it. The situation for this is that we're right now looking for the first project where we can implement these hollow core slabs. I would like to talk a little bit about our new innovative method for recovering these critical and strategic metals and producing the green cement. A little bit about the background of this new development and why we have been developing something that is really related to critical and strategic metals.
As you know, since the beginning, we have been really focusing on utilizing industrial side streams and developing low carbon and cement-free technologies for construction, mining, and metal industries. We have this AI-based data platform that we have been created to bring value from industrial side streams and to really accelerate our solution development. We have been really focusing quite a lot on this GeoPrime product. How we can replace cement in different kinds of concrete products and really bring down the CO2 emission and reduce the use of virgin resources. This has been really the core and understanding the opportunity with different side streams and how these side streams can be utilized. Lately we have put quite a lot of focus on thinking about these unutilized, so unused side streams.
We know that there are side streams that are already commoditized like GGBFS, so the typical slag that is used as a replacement for cement. We have been really putting quite a lot of R&D effort on understanding can we use these kinds of waste materials and can we turn them into value. Now we had the breakthrough on this development. We were able to identify these kinds of side streams that are not utilized today and they are ending up in the landfill. How we can take the metals, the strategic and critical metals out of these waste materials and have value for those and at the same time create this kind of binder material that is a green cement.
This is really the core and what we have been wanting to do is to find the own kind of binder that we can use that lowers the CO2 emission. It is also at the same time like a circular product. This is really the background for that, why we are now talking about these critical and strategic metals and what it has to do with us. For us, it is really that we are really interested ourselves in the green cement. This metal side is something that will bring a lot of value to our customers. In briefly, what does it mean? It means that we will be utilizing these unutilized industrial side streams. In this picture you can see that we would be using two different side streams for this.
With this process, we are able to extract the metals, the critical and strategic metals out of this kind of waste material. There will be two different products as a result of this process. One is, of course, these metals, and the other part is this green cement. We will be talking about more technical details about what is this actual method during our capital markets day. I am inviting you to come and join that event. We will tell more about these technical aspects, what does it mean, and of course more about the opportunity for Betolar. What does it mean money-wise? What is it going to bring to our top line, this technology? Lastly, I want to talk a little bit about what is the impact and what is the benefit of this new innovation that we have.
We're now moving to a commercial phase of this technology as we have now filed all the patents and we have done excessive tests related to this and all the tests are looking extremely positive for this technology. We will get out these critical and strategic metals out from this waste material. Based on our test a couple of weeks ago, we can get up to 99% of these metals out, which is a very significant number. It really improves the yield of the metal extraction for the metal companies. Of course, this is related to the security of supply locally because we are able to extract more of these materials out from the waste material that would otherwise end up in a landfill.
As a result, we will get this green cement, which can be then utilized as a low carbon green cement in our own projects that we have for this GeoPrime product that we have been developing and selling over the several years. This is really a cost-efficient alternative. It can potentially also lower the cost of construction. We are really excited about this opportunity and the possibilities that this will bring globally to our customers. The big thing is also zero waste, that as a result of us utilizing these different kinds of unused waste and side stream materials, there will be no waste left after this process. We are just converting these waste materials into valuable materials. Of course, reducing the fact that these materials do not have to be landfilled. We will reduce the cost of negative environmental impact as well.
But again, as I said, we will be talking more about the monetary impact of this to Betolar and to our customers during our capital markets day. Let's move on to our next topic. Our CFO, Mikko Wirkkala, will talk about the financial review. Go ahead, Mikko.
Thank you, Tuija. Let's have a look then at our financial figures and start from the net sales. Our net sales was EUR 164,000. This was roughly EUR 100,000 more than last year. Despite the high growth numbers in percentage, we are not satisfied with the level so far internally, as Tuija mentioned already, but we are looking for more growth. As we have said in our guidance, we are expecting our full year net sales to exceed the level of 2024. Our EBITDA then was roughly minus EUR 1 million.
That is already a EUR 1 million improvement from the previous year. Here the main driver has been the cost-saving actions that we performed last year. That is explaining the majority of the improvement. We also have the grants that have been booked in other operating income, which is not visible here. That is also affecting our EBITDA, our cash and cash equivalents, and short-term fund investments. At the end of the period, that was EUR 10 million. We have also added a new financial indicator to the presentation. That is called liquidity and Andron grants. That is typically what we have been presenting later on, where we combine our cash investments and Andron loans and also Andron grants. We have added it here to reflect the runway, how much we have cash and also liquid funds available in our company.
If we then move to our operational indicators, our order intake was EUR 90,000. This is also a level where we are not internally satisfied and we are below last year's numbers. Last year's numbers, it's worth noting that there we had one big single project order that we got in during the first quarter there. This is also reflecting our current situation, where we have projects and one single order can be rather large. It depends on when one deal actually realizes or when the order is coming in. That is also affecting our numbers there. As it's clearly visible in the numbers, our order intake was only EUR 90,000 in the first quarter. One new research project or non-recurring engineering project was initiated during the quarter.
Our number of personnel, 34 average during the quarter, that compared to previous year. It is much lower. Here the cost-saving measures are clearly visible, what we have been achieving during the last year. Moving on, looking at the more detailed our cash balance and the liquidity. As mentioned already earlier, our cash balance was roughly EUR 10 million at the end of quarter. Access what we have done during the quarter. We were raising the last installment of the loan from Climate Fund and the number was EUR 2.5 million. That was increasing our cash balance during the quarter. We have still EUR 2.1 million remaining from Business Finland and also other grants what we have from other institutions. Combining all of these, our new financial indicator liquidity and Andron grants that amounts to EUR 12.4 million.
As I mentioned already earlier, our guidance for the full year remains unchanged. We are still expecting our net sales for 2025 to increase from the previous year levels. These were the first quarter financial figures in a very nutshell. Next, we will move on to questions and answers. Here I also invite Soila on stage.
Thank you, Mikko. All right, we have received a lot of questions. The first one is, what is the main business driving your growth in 2025 and 2026? Is it shotcrete, concrete-based backfilling, or metal extraction?
Very good question. 2025, 2026, this year and next year. We have just published this metal separation or extraction technology. That is something that we are now commercializing. We are starting and we are thinking and doing all the strategies and sales plans as we speak. That is something that we are moving forward right now. Of course, the base backfilling that I mentioned, we have now the first public reference in Canada for that. That is something where we see growth opportunities definitely in that solution because it is not only reducing the CO2 emissions, but it can potentially also reduce the cost for the mining company. That is definitely another area. Of course, we have the shotcrete. There has been a lot of interest in this kind of shotcrete that is low emission and even cement-free. We see that is also something that is interesting in the market and a lot of customers are asking about it. I would say that definitely those are the areas where we see growth.
Of course we're also working with the construction industry and we have also other solutions to these industries or this industry. Typically these are quite a little bit smaller. Typically these are NREs and pilot things. Of course we have several customers who are already using our GeoPrime solution. That's of course an area that we're also working on and looking at growth. As mentioned, the market situation in the construction side is a bit challenging right now and there's not a lot of new projects ongoing. That's of course affecting that market and it's a little bit slower than we would like at the moment.
Okay, to the metal extraction again. About the next steps, you described some of those just that we are starting to commercialize the metal extraction and the green cement. Are there some other concrete steps that we are taking?
Number one is now commercializing it. We have done tests in our own laboratory. We have done pilots in external testing facility. We will of course also continue as a parallel doing more tests and further developing. It is really more about now commercializing this and finding the new customers for this. Very good. Okay, have you seen any pickup in order activity in April after the period? This is good. We can't really give any forward statements. What I can say is that if we look at, for example, last year quarter one and quarter two, typically at least in our side, we see that typically the first quarter is slower, much slower than the rest of the months.
Of course the market situation is very tough right now because of quite many things ongoing. We have seen that there's a lot of more discussions and things are picking up, so to say. Let's see how the market conditions will move forward. We're very happy, for example, now that we announced yesterday about this Canadian Royalties, our first reference in Canada. We can move. We're really looking at also now growing our footprint in the Canadian market.
Thank you. Are you planning to recruit more people in the coming quarters?
Yeah, that's also a very good question. We have been recruiting, not a lot, but a few people. Now with this metal extraction that we have, we just announced Juri Talja is joining the management team. He's really taking a lead on commercializing this metal extraction side.
We see a lot of growth opportunities. That is something that we are now doing the strategies and really now thinking what do we need in order to move forward. What I can also say is that these recruitments that we have been doing and might be doing, they are really related more on the sales side and also the technical side of this technology. In general, also we have been looking at improving our sales and sales personnel and our capabilities in increasing the sales because of course everything is about sales.
Thank you. That was it. That was all the questions that we have received. Thank you for listening. Hopefully we will see you at our capital markets day that is coming on 14th of May, in a couple of weeks. See you there.