Welcome to Robit's Q4 and full year 2024 results analyses and press conference. My name is Arto Halonen, the Group CEO, and I'm here with our CFO, Ville Peltonen. At the end of the, we'll go through the presentation. At the end of the presentation, you have the possibility to ask questions either through the audio channel or through chat. First, a standard disclaimer about the forward-looking statement. In 2024, we delivered a clear improvement in profitability. Also, we were able to grow in a demanding market in two out of our three businesses in the Top Hammer and Geotechnical segment. Market demand remained at a good level in the mining segment, but we did not see the recovery or the improvement in the construction industry that we were earlier previous year we were expecting to see. Construction industry remained at a low level throughout the year.
Orders received for the full year dropped by 4.4%, and net sales by 2.8%. The drop in net sales was coming from our Down the Hole segment, whereas Top Hammer and Geotechnical grew. Profitability improved clearly from the comparison period. We delivered a EUR 2.6 million improvement in our EBIT. The improvement was a result of the, let's say, competitiveness, cost-saving actions we have implemented. We have renewed our Down the Hole supply chain as well as introduced a new product range, product family that is more competitive on the marketplace. We have taken also other cost-saving measures to improve the company profitability. Net cash flow from operations was EUR 1.5 million, down from 2023 when we had a very good operating cash flow.
The profitability improvement supported cash flow development, but on the other hand, more cash was tied into the net working capital, especially to the inventories during the year. Great achievement in 2024 was a reduction in our emission intensity. We are now almost 40% below our comparison period of 2020. Our target is to halve our emission intensity by 2030 from the base year of 2020. By 2030, from the base year of 2020, we are on a good pace in achieving that target. We continue to bring new innovations to the market. In the end of last year, we introduced H18 hammer, an extension to our H series hammer family, where we have earlier introduced already four, five, six, and eight inch hammers. H18 is the first of the H series hammers going into piling application, essentially supporting our geotechnical segment.
With this hammer, our customers are getting greater power output, lower air consumption, and it's a versatile hammer for all applications in the piling sector. Also, we brought to the market new shoulder-driven RG51 rods that are for surface drilling market. With this kind of shoulder-driven, more robust designed rods, customers are able to achieve faster penetration rate, longer lifetime, and also straighter holes. Also, due to these benefits, as well as due to the sturdier design, the downtime of the customers can be significantly reduced. If you look more closely on the Q4 development, in Q4, we continued the growth in top hammer and geotechnical segments. Top hammer grew by 5.8%, and geotechnical grew by 2.8%. We had a very challenging quarter in the down the hole business. Sales in down the hole dropped by 49.9%.
The main reason behind that is this one supply agreement that ended mid last year, as well as the weak market in the well drilling sector, which is an important segment for our down the hole business, as well as the exploration markets. Those markets were weaker than we anticipated earlier. Also on the new business opportunities that we had, we saw a delay in the customer decision-making and were not able to compensate for the loss that we had from the other customers. If you look at the market areas in Q4, the growth was driven by Asia and EMEA and East markets. EBIT did improve in Q4. Comparable EBIT was EUR 0.8 million, a small improvement from the comparison period. We were able to get control of the freight cost and the availability situation.
Freight costs were very high for us last year, and especially in Q2 and Q3. In Q4, as we anticipated when we published Q3 results, we were able to get those under control, and it did not have a negative impact anymore on our results in Q4. Cash flow from operations was negative, EUR 1.6 million. Big impact came from our payables that were significantly lower than at the end of Q3, and that pushed the whole cash flow from operations to negative. If you look at sales development for 2024 by market area, Australasia, we had a small positive which was mixed in Australasia. We had very strong growth in the top hammer segment. Let's say we continued that. We had already had two years of consecutive good double-digit growth numbers in Australasia when it comes to the top hammer business.
On the other hand, this DTH supply agreement that ended mid-year that was in Australasia, and that then impacted the DTH business in that market area negatively. Asia had a small positive sales development. Asia picked up the pace nicely during the year. Towards the end of the year, we were able to win more business from the mining sector, as well as there were tunneling projects in the Asia region that supported the good development or good progress towards the end of the year. EMEA and East, which is our largest market area, it was a bit mixed picture. We had pockets and areas within that territory where sales developed very well. On the other hand, especially I would say the construction-related markets in Europe, somewhat Middle East, they did not have that good development in 2024. In America, sales declined by 8.1%.
We had a relatively flat development in North America, so the decline essentially came from South America. There, especially mining sector, it's predominantly mining sector in South America. That contributed to the decline in the Americas market area. Our sustainability roadmap has four focus areas: sustainable partnerships, CO2 emission reduction in our value chain, happy and healthy workplace, as well as efficiency throughout the product lifecycle. We took good development in many of the areas during the year. I already mentioned the positive development on the CO2 emission intensity, where we are almost 40% below the comparison year. Also, one positive to highlight is the improvement in the employee engagement index that we had from 2023. That was a good step forward on that front as well. I will hand over to Ville to go over the financials a bit more in detail.
Thank you, Arto. As Arto already mentioned, our profitability improved in 2024, although the net sales declined. In Q4, our net sales declined by 6.6% to EUR 21.4 million, and the comparable EBITDA percentage decreased to 8%. On the comparable EBIT level, we saw an improvement in Q4 to 3.5% from the 3.3% in the comparison period, and the full year improvement was over EUR 2.5 million. In Q4, our result of the period also improved to EUR 0.6 million, and the full year improvement at the bottom line, the result of the period, was over EUR 4 million. In Q4, the net working capital increased on all levels, so the net working capital totaled at EUR 41.5 million. Inventories increased during the year to EUR 40.2 million, receivables increased to EUR 18.1 million, and payables also increased to EUR 16.8 million.
The net working capital percentage of the last 12 months' sales ended up at 46%. Our cash flow before changes in net working capital was EUR 1.4 million in Q4, and as mentioned, the net working capital increase affected negatively on the operating cash flow. That ended up at minus EUR 1.6 million in the quarter and EUR 1.5 million during the full year. Cash flow from investing activities was low, only minus EUR 0.2 million in Q4, and the cash flow from financing activities ended at minus EUR 2.1 million in Q4. We ended up at a EUR 9.0 million cash and cash equivalents balance at the end of the year, and total interest-bearing loans and utilized credit limits declined during 2024 and ended up at EUR 27.7 million, and that includes EUR 4 million of IFRS 16 lease liabilities.
Our net debt continued to decrease in 2024 and ended at EUR 18.6 million at the end of the year, and our financing covenant net debt to 12-month rolling EBITDA ratio was 2.87 at the end of 2024, an improvement on that as well. Equity ratio remained strong and improved to 50.7% at the end of the year. Our senior loans from financial institutions at the end of Q4, at the end of the year, totaled EUR 23.6 million, and the senior financing agreement is ending at mid-2026, so we will start the refinancing negotiation during H1 2025. Our current loan amortization schedule is EUR 1.5 million payments biannually at the end of June and at the end of December. We also have the interest rate swap of EUR 10 million that will end at the end of June 2026. Back to you, Arto.
Thank you, Ville. In 2025, our target is to continue driving the growth in the top hammer and geotechnical segment. As I said, those grew also last year in the challenging market conditions. The priority for us is to recover the down the hole sales and get back to positive development in the DTH segment, where we had a very challenging, especially second half of the year. We will focus especially on North America, Australia, and Africa markets. We will start the year from a lower level and expect that we will gradually improve on the down the hole business as well. Another focus area for us is the supply chain management and improving there. We saw last year that we had, let's say, some fluctuation, instability in the supply chain. On the other hand, we had a lot of air freight resulting from poor availability of some products.
On the other hand, on some products, we had too much inventory. Now we will implement an end-to-end planning process that we target to manage better the fluctuations in the supply chain and thus also improving the profitability as well as having more stable cash flow from operations. Product competitiveness is always a priority for us. We'll take kind of a market-driven approach there, understand the market price levels, and understand where we need to be in order to do profitable business in all of our target market areas that we want to address. Take a market-driven approach to reach the targeted gross margin levels in all of our product applications. Our long-term financial targets, just repeating those, is to grow faster than the market and then achieve comparable EBIT of over 10%.
Guidance for 2025 is that we estimate that our net sales will grow and comparable EBIT profitability in euros will improve compared to 2024. We expect that the mining market will remain at the current level and that the construction market still, beginning of the year, will be low and will start to improve in the second half of the year. There are also some risk uncertainties at this moment in the marketplace related to the tariffs and potential trade wars that are kind of outside of our control and pose some risk to the guidance. All in all, the year will start from a low level, but we estimate that it will improve towards the second half of the year and towards the end of the year. All in all, I want to thank Robit Team for the year 2024, and we look to deliver good 2025.
This was the end of the presentation, so we can take some questions now.
I can see there's a couple of questions from Aapeli Pursimo at the chat, so I'll ask those, and Arto, I'll leave the answering to you on these ones. How do you see the demand situation geographically?
Yeah, thanks, Aapeli, for the questions. Still, if you look, let's say, mining market is more of a global demand picture there, and especially gold has been a commodity that has been strong, and where actually Robit has a relatively high share in relation to the other commodities. It's an important commodity for us. Geographically, construction is where we see more geographical fluctuations in the demand picture, and there Europe is the weaker area. North America is still showing good demand, also some seasonality there as well, and some weakening during the winter season. All in all, North America is more strong in that area. Also, Asia, there's also in Asia many different countries with many different situations, but there are some important markets for us where there's, let's say, gradual improvement in the demand situation that we estimate to materialize in 2025.
As earlier said, still early 2025, we expect to be on the construction side at a low level.
Okay, the next question from Aapeli. How have you succeeded in new customer acquisition? On the other hand, have you seen any changes in the customer decision-making?
Yeah, the decision-making all in all in quarter four, in larger opportunities, we had larger tenders that were open. We saw delays in the decision-making, and many of the cases might still be open earlier this year. Clearly, there's been some postponement on that, which then, on the other hand, impacts also beginning of the year sales for us. The new customer acquisition, we had some good wins during quarter four, managed to secure, for example, another top hammer underground contract in Australia in quarter four that we will be ramping up. All in all, it's been steady wins, but also, as we mentioned, there are also some contracts that have come to an end. We will need to still pick up the pace of winning new customers early this year to deliver the targets we have at least internal.
Okay, the third question was, there was a sizable increase in inventories to secure customer deliveries. Are you satisfied with the current inventory level?
Yeah, one improvement area clearly for us this year, as I mentioned, is this supply chain management, supply chain planning. We've had too much fluctuation there. We were a bit too low on inventory levels earlier in the year to secure ramp-up of some new contracts. On the other hand, we did end the year with slightly too high inventory levels. If you think where our inventories are today, they could be on a slightly lower level. Our availability situation has improved naturally, but the inventories are not at an optimal level at the end of the year situation. That is something we will work on during this year.
Okay, no more questions in the chat. Is there anyone online? I think not. Okay.
All right. Thank you, everyone, for joining, and this ends our broadcast from here in Lempäälä. Thank you.
Thank you.