Good afternoon. I am Mikko Kuusilehto. I'm the Group CEO of Robit, and I'm joined today by Ari Suokas, our Group CFO, to go through the Q1 2026 financial results. We're happy to present a quarter where we clearly saw strong growth in orders and a clear improvement in profitability. Our orders received increased by 20%, reaching EUR 24.1 million. This was due to a very stable demand on the mining industry side, as well as a clear increase in activity in the piling business in the Nordics. Our net sales remained roughly on the same level year-on-year on EUR 21.3 million. Our comparable EBIT increased clearly, more than doubling from the year 2025, reaching EUR 1.4 million. Our net cash flow from operational and financial side improved as well. Net cash flow from operating activities was EUR -1.5 million, improvement from EUR - 2.2 million the year before.
Our net liabilities were EUR 16.6 million, reduction from EUR 21.7 million the year before. We saw a clear improvement in our performance in the Americas where our revenue increased by over 30%. Still, the EMEA region remains the biggest region in our portfolio. Most Softer development was on Asia and Australasia side, where our revenue decreased from last year. When looking at the SBU side, the Top Hammer business remains the biggest share of our revenue, but we saw significant improvement from the Geotechnical side. When looking most specifically into the development of the SBU side, we saw that the Top Hammer net sales decreased 15%, falling to EUR 12.9 million. Our Down the Hole business increased by roughly 4%, and in the Geotechnical side, we saw a clear increase of 53%, roughly 53%, reaching EUR 5.4 million revenue. Like I said, we saw clear improvement on the profitability.
Our comparable EBIT was 10.7% of the net sales.
I'll continue here. Thank you, Mikko. If we take a look in a bit more detail about the financial figures. The net sales remained largely unchanged year-over-year at EUR 21.3 million. We had really positive net sales in our Geo business, like Mikko highlighted. But at the same time, we saw a decline in our Top Hammer business. When it comes to the SBUs, our Geo business was very positive all in all, in the net sales and with the orders. With the profitability, there was a clear improvement or a significant improvement in Q1. Our EBITDA percentage increased to 10.7% and our EBIT in Q1 increased to 6.5%. This was driven by our healthy margins, as well as the tailwind with our currencies. Our Q1 result for the period strengthened and was EUR 0.9 million. Moving on to working capital.
Our working capital totaled to EUR 41.6 million. Our inventories increased to EUR 39.4 million, and this was due to increased material costs. During the early part of the year, we have seen significant growth with tungsten, which is a major raw material in the carbides. We also expect the inventories to continue increasing in Q2, driven by the high tungsten prices. Our receivables decreased year-on-year to now EUR 19.6 million in Q1, and our payables increased to EUR 17.4 million. This was again due to increased material cost, specifically with the tungsten and our orders received during Q1, which we will need to prepare now for selling in Q2. We also have some seasonality here. When looking at the graphs, we see that traditionally Robit has had increase in net working capital from Q4 to Q1. Our cash flow was very close to last year.
Our cash flow before changes in net working capital was EUR 2.3 million. Our operating cash flow was negative EUR 1.5 million and our cash flow from financing activities resulted in EUR 0.2 million. Our financial position remained on a healthy level. Cash and cash equivalents at the end of Q1 were EUR 8.2 million, so pretty much on the same level as last year. Total interest-bearing loans and utilized credit limits were EUR 24.8 million, and this includes IFRS 16 liabilities of EUR 3.1 million. Our capital structure remains strong. Our net debt decreased and was now EUR 16.6 million. Our financial covenant also net debt/12- month EBITDA was now 2.83. We continuously monitored this KPI, and we do the necessary actions to ensure that we are below 3.0, which is our financial covenant level. Our equity ratio remains strong at 51%.
Our loans from financial institutions at the end of Q1 totaled EUR 20.9 million. Now when the interest rates have been going up and down, we as a company have also an interest rate swap, which enables us to focus on the operations and is providing us some hedge towards the interest rate fluctuations. Our interest rate swap is EUR 10 million, and that has no effect on last year end of June. Handing over to you, Mikko.
Thank you, Ari. Although the start of the year was a positive one, still the fact is that we have to continue working on the basic fundamentals to make sure that we are more successful in the future. As has been said in the past, we focus strongly on growth. This growth comes through our active participation with our distributors as well as selective direct presence in the market. We have to focus on those applications and segments where we win on performance and reliability. Especially in this type of circumstances where we're living in the geopolitical sector at the moment, and where we see the tungsten prices increasing tremendously over the past six months. It's clear that we have to focus on pricing knowledge.
We have to focus to find ways how to mitigate the price increase and tariff risks that are involved in the daily business that we are running. All in all, I'm a strong believer in the fact that with a strong face-to-face presence in the market with actively engaging with our distributors, we will be able to find ways how to improve the performance also in the coming quarters. That work is something that needs to continue from our side day after day. Now looking forward, we keep our guidance as has been informed earlier, so we expect that our net sales will increase and our comparable EBIT and profitability will improve compared to 2025. Adding to questions.
Yes. That was all. Thank you. Now it's the time for questions. First are there questions online?
There are no more questions at this time.
Okay. We'll take the questions from the chat functionality. There are a few questions from Arttu Keränen . The first question, orders received increased nicely, but we're focused more on the project side, the Geotechnical. How do you see the project market for the rest of the year?
Yeah. If we look at the current activity that we see in the Nordic markets, we do still expect that the business will develop positively during the latter part of the year. We see that there are a number of tenders at the moment in the market, and that gives us confidence in it that we sort of foresee that there will be positive development during the latter half of the year.
Thank you, Mikko. The next question. How about the more continuous business Top Hammer Down the Hole side? How have sales effort progressed?
Yeah, I guess we could sort of see the positive development with the sales efforts when we see that our numbers are trending in a positive way. The fact is that we have plenty of work to do to improve our performance in the markets where we operate so that we can get the growth in the other SBUs also to be happening quarter- on- quarter. That work continues to be done on the daily level in each of the entities and with all the distributors that we are supporting in their markets. Let's hope that we see better performance in the coming quarters with those elements.
Continuing on that one. In Top Hammer orders and revenue decreased compared to comparison period. What is the main hurdle of Top Hammer at the moment?
Yeah, I guess there's no single sort of cause that would explain the call up on our side, on that side, it's actually when you look at the Top Hammer development over a longer period, you can see that it has been a sort of sliding trend for us. Of course, the market dynamics have changed a lot during the past years. Competition has increased tremendously in the Top Hammer segment. That, of course, is having an impact on it. The other thing is that although certain portion of the business is a sort of quick turn type of business where revenue can be generated on a relatively short sort of time span.
The fact is that still with the large contract, it takes quite a while to come to that state that you are able to prove your product performance and the added value that it brings compared to the current suppliers. In that sense, for us, where we stand at the moment with that business, it means for us that we have to continue that active sales and promotion work in the markets to ensure that we get that value added proven to the customers, and they are now able to divert contract into our pockets.
Thank you, Mikko. The next question. Profitability developed strongly. How much of this was due to the sales mix, i.e. larger share of Geo? Can you elaborate a bit how much exchange rate support EBIT in Q1?
If I'll take the specific now, first, the exchange rate supported EBIT, so we are talking about few hundred thousand impact, positive impact in Q1. What comes to the profitability of sales mix, we had the healthy margins across all the SBUs, and we need to work continuously that all the SBUs have healthy margins, especially in this situation where we have a high inflationary pressure coming especially from the Tungsten.
The next question. Tungsten remains as a challenge for the time being. How successful have you been in mitigating the effects?
Well, if I continue, I would say that in Q1, we have been still successful and we have been capable of ensuring that we have healthy margins in all our SBUs. That work needs to continue in coming quarters, especially where we have seen that the Tungsten price has also continued to increase still during Q2. It might continue still in the latter part of the year. That remains to be seen.
That was the last question in the chat.
Yeah.
Oh, okay. There's one more. Sorry. Have you seen any effects from the Middle East situation?
Yeah, we have actually seen in the recent sort of weeks, especially in certain Asian countries, that they are clearly affected by the shortage of fuel. This problem is secluded to certain specific countries in the Asian region, that are not having a great impact on our business. That's pretty much the only market where we've till now sort of seen clear impacts of the Middle East situation affecting the business environment.
Are there any further questions? If not, then thank you for participating in our Q1 results review. Thank you.