Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for tuning in and listening to our Q2 results for 2020. My name is David Wells. I'll be giving a summary of the highlights, some input into the technical work that we are doing and a summary and outlook of our expectations. My colleague, Kim Bowman, will also be giving a summary of the financial data.
I apologize that this is a prerecorded webcast. Unfortunately, to travel restrictions related to COVID, we decided to maintain this format similar to last quarter, which means as a result that we won't have our normal live Q and A session at the end of the year presentation. So I would ask if any of you have ticked the questions that you want answers to, to reach out to either Kim or myself, and we'll endeavor to respond to you. I will just bring your attention to the disclaimer that we will make some forward looking statements within this presentation. So moving on to our highlights.
I'm pleased to say we've had an excellent quarter. We've achieved well. We've exceeded our expectations across all metrics that we measure. We've maintained our revenues at US19.2 million dollars largely driven by a very strong performance in our renewables section, whose revenues are up 70% compared to this time last year. We achieved a $1,600,000 operating EBIT and an adjusted EBIT of $1,800,000,000 which represents a 10% margin, which is a record for ourselves.
During the quarter, we raised our targeted cost synergies for the Braemar transaction up to $2,800,000,000 from $2,500,000,000 and we expect these to be realized during the second half of this year and into 2021. We had a strong operational cash flow of US2.6 billion dollars and our cash position is robust at $11,000,000 up from 10,100,000.0 at the end of last quarter, even though we paid a dividend of 1,500,000.0 during the quarter. So all in all, very pleased with the performance. Moving forward to slide five. COVID nineteen, of course, has had an effect on us as on anybody else, but I think largely we've had some we've been largely unscathed, because of it.
We've been able to service the majority of our clients globally because of our extensive global footprint. We're definitely the largest independent consultancy out there. We have people on the ground in a 160 locations around the world, and we've more or less been able to service the majority of requests for work that we've been given, whereas some of our competitors have been struggling to reach those locations. So therefore, as a result of that, we have definitely picked up some extra work. Also in the quarter, some of our operating costs, staff costs have been reduced by COVID nineteen relief programs that we have received.
There have, of course, been some negatives. Our Q2 numbers are a little bit lesser than we would have expected because of the, fast tracking of some of our operations, particularly in The Middle East and India into Q1, and also the seasonal effects associated with the Southwest Monsoon does affect our offshore operations. I think the worst part of the COVID nineteen, pandemic from our perspective is the difficulty associated with travel. These travel restrictions are making it awkward for us to get to some locations to service some of our clients, and we have to constantly watch what's going on in the world and to try and get around those by being being smart and traveling from different places where we can, but there are inevitably some opportunities that we have lost. Having said that, in terms of our staff and in terms of our health, we haven't had any setbacks internally, and I'm pleased to say that we are complying with government regulations and government recommendations in terms of how to conduct our business.
Moving to slide six. For those of you who don't know us too well, I'll just spend a couple of slides talking about the kind of work we do. So we provide high end consultancy services to the global energy shipping and insurance industries. Those are related to project consulting, accident prevention and risk management, and instant response. Moving to slide seven.
Our business streams are put into four different sectors. The renewable sector, where we provide independent engineering consultancy services to the offshore industry and increasingly to other renewables industries. To the offshore sector, where we provide traditional services to the oil and gas, market, mainly related to risk management. The shipping sector where we provide a worldwide emergency instant response and surveys to the marine insurance industry and to ship owners. And finally, in the adjusting business line where we provide loss adjusting and dispute resolution services to the insurance market.
Moving to slide eight, where do we stand in the world? I'm pleased to say that we are still recruiting, we're still getting bigger, number of our employees has increased during the quarter by about 3%. We have achieved now over 50 offices around the world with additional offices being opened to service our renewable sector, and we're now operating in 33 countries. It's a very large footprint. It's hugely beneficial to us and our clients to be able to service locally and service around the world.
If we move to slide nine, this gives a breakdown of our business streams. On the left hand side here, we can see how it's broken down into the various business lines I just described. Of importance is the renewable sector is growing. It's up quarter on quarter, now standing at 15%. Our green side is largely stable, and we've had a slight lessening of our offshore oil and gas activity to 48%.
On a global spread, we're pretty well balanced across the world with good representation in all regions. Moving to Slide 10. I think it's worth spending a little bit of time here on what we're trying to achieve. We are a growth company. We differentiate our strategy between our renewables business and our material business in offshore marine and adjusting.
Renewables is clearly our growth platform. We have grown 70% in the last year and will continue to focus on growth going forward. Organically, we are increasing our global footprint through new offices and using our existing competence to service new markets, not just offshore wind, but also other renewables such as floating solar. We are actively seeking to expand our service through M and A opportunities as and when they might occur. Offshore, marine and adjusting are slightly down in the quarter due to unseasonal seasonality and the effects of COVID.
But we'll continue to grow these, and we'll be focusing on improving profitability through leveraging our global scale, better use of technology, and further industry consolidation. We have very ambitious targets. We anticipate that 50% of our revenues will be driven from renewables and other green services by 2025. That is ambitious, but we do expect to get there. On a group level, I want to highlight that our key priority is to improve capital efficiency through improved collection of cash and cash management, which will enable us to increase our war chest to grow the company and to return more cash to shareholders going forward.
Moving to Slide 11. I now want to take you through some of the sectors that we're working in and to give a little bit of background as to what's going on. I think this slide is particularly important and particularly interesting. The left hand graph is gives the summary of FIDs as final investment decisions that have been made year on year over the last eight or so years. You can see there's a growing trend as we as we move forward.
2019 was a record year. US31.9 billion dollars were committed to the renewable sector. This year, in the 2020, we have already exceeded that level with $35,000,000,000 being committed. That's extraordinary growth by any measure. Conversely, on the other graph, I'll come back here again, when the renewables industry started, the major three top developers took the lion's share of the market.
As we move forward, that share is constantly decreasing as more and more new players enter the renewables market, more and more asset owners, more and more investors, more and more players. This is good for us as a consultancy because the more players enter this market, the more opportunities there are to service new clients. And I think this has been borne out by the expansion of our services. If we move to Slide 12, what are we doing? We are following the trends around the world.
The expansion of renewables into all new sectors and all new countries is is growing at pace. During q two, we've opened up new offices on top of what we did in q one. So we've opened up offices in Poland, in Japan, in South Korea, and expanded our services in The United States. The latest of our offices in Poland was only set up some six weeks ago, and already we've been verbally advised of a significant contract award, which hopefully I'll be able to give you more details of in the next quarter once the contract is formally signed. In The States, we see this as a growing market.
We've already been awarded some work on the Mayflower Wind project, and I'll give a little bit more detail on the next slide about that one. What's also hugely exciting about the renewables section is floating wind. This is really good for us because it allows us to use our experience across the group. All majors as well are taking increased interest in this sector. And in Q1, we won the landmark Erebus contract working for Total, which was Total's first big investment into floating wind.
This is a three year contract in itself, which will generate over USD 6,000,000 for Aqualis Bremar. So it's exciting times, that is for sure. Moving to Slide 13. I just talked about the Mayflower Winden project. This is a joint venture between the oil company Shell and EDP Renewables, and we've been awarded a framework agreement for the provision of engineering support services to that facility.
This is quite a big farm. It'll generate 1.6 gigawatts of energy and will come on the grid in the mid twenty twenties. We do see The states as having a lot of potential going forward, and it'll be interesting to see what happens in the forthcoming election and how expectations will change thereafter. Moving on to the next slide, Slide 14. In the offshore sector, we tend to monitor what is happening in the CapEx spend and what's happening in rigs on the contract, particularly jackup rigs who work in shallow water, which is our main area of focus.
There's been a significant downturn during the course of this year related to the COVID pandemic. Numbers of rigs working has continued to fall, but we do feel that we have probably reached the bottom. Haul prices are stable at the moment, and there is an expectation, I think, that is a question of time before things start improving. We don't think much will change over the next few quarters. It takes a while for the oil companies to start increasing their budgets, and we're watching this space very closely.
But whilst it's going on, we move to the next slide. We have had to cast our net wider to new opportunities. So this is an interesting project. It's based in Hong Kong. It's a cross bay link.
It's a construction of a bridge. We have been engaged here to provide engineering support services to the EPC providers for the transportation installation of the bridge sections. These will be installed using the float over method, which is quite common now in the oil and gas industry. And our staff in our Singapore office will be heavily engaged in this operation, and I think it's an example of how we can use our experience and our competence to cover new markets when the chips are down. Moving to next slide.
These are two projects that we have become involved with. The first is for the construction supervision, construction monitoring of two new wind turbine installation vessels in China for our client Ouyang. This is a follow on from previous awards that we won earlier and this is the new build of two of these two lift boats. Again, this is being serviced using competence from our oil and gas sector into the renewable section. On the right hand side, we have a contract also with a major Chinese company, ZPMG, for the installation of a transmission station offshore China, the first to be installed in China by the float over method, again, using our existing competence from the oil and gas sector, which is migrated now to the renewables industry.
So there's a lot of crossover between our various offices and our staff between different business lines. If we move to Slide 17, this is in our marine section, again another example of cross fertilization between business lines. This took place in Australia and followed a cyclone Damien, which resulted in a number of ships getting wrecked on the coast. We were initially appointed by the P and I insurance company to do damage surveys. After we started this work, this moved on from damage surveys to to recovery of the vessel, to load out the vessel onto a heavy lift transport where we provided marine warranty services for the insurance market, taking the vessel to Singapore where we acted as the owners representative for monitoring repairs.
So it's another fine example where we've cross fertilized. We started projects using one set of staff and have managed to add additional gain additional work as the project moved from stage to stage. Moving to next slide. Our adjusting team, we are continuing to expand that. During the course of the quarter, we have set up in Malaysia, where we have now gained the appropriate registrations to be able to do this kind of work.
And this follows on from the work that we did in Russia early on, which we opened up early this year. Russia is a good case in point. We're experiencing high activity in that office now and also starting to drive business into different sectors, and we'd like to think the same will happen in Malaysia. Another example too is that we have spread our net, and we have been getting a number of business interruption claims related to the COVID nineteen pandemic, which is another string to our bow. Moving to Slide 19, back to statistics now.
This is our backlog for quarter by quarter. It's got a nice trend, a nice growth trend. This has covered really our offshore oil and gas and our renewables sections only because it's measuring projects that we can we have a fairly firm idea of the value, whereas our marine and adjusting sections tend to be call out contracts. So we've got a nice trend there. In Q1, the awarded the Total's Erebus contract gave us a good boost, but we continued that boost going forward.
We now have over $20,000,000 of backlog, which is good, particularly for a company like ourselves, which tends to work on call out contracts and master service agreements with our clients. Moving to Slide 20. What's quite pleasing in these times of difficulty where COVID has caused ramifications to how global business is done, we are still recruiting, still growing our company and still getting people on board. We increased our staff numbers by 3% in the quarter. We've maintained the high utilizations quarter by quarter And we've also maintained and increased the levels of subcontractors working for us, which means that we are maintaining our flexible cost base and we'll be able to easily adapt to how the market goes going forward.
So with that, moving to Slide 21, I'd like to pass across to Kim Berman, our CFO, to give you some financial numbers.
Thanks, David. To make the comparison of our financial performance easier, we have included pro form a combined figures for revenues and adjusted EBIT as Bremar Technical Services was fully consolidated from Q3 twenty nineteen. We are proud to present a record profitability and cash flow in the quarter, especially considering the challenging business environment. Our EBIT and EBIT margin has improved every quarter since Q3 'nineteen, our first quarter with combined operations of AQUALIS and Bremer technical services. Revenues for AQUALIS Bremer in Q2 is $19,200,000 flat from Q2 twenty nineteen and down 3% from Q1 twenty twenty.
Adjusted EBIT increased to $1,800,000 representing an adjusted EBIT margin of close to 10%, up from 7% in Q1 'twenty and up from 5% in Q2 'nineteen. The margin improvement is driven by operating efficiencies and the revenue and the cost synergies that we have successfully realized to date. The billing ratio is slightly down from Q1 twenty twenty. The combination of AQualis and Braemar technical services has improved and broadened our geographical coverage and broadened our service offering to clients worldwide. This has helped us to maintain our billing ratio in Q2 twenty twenty.
We have a resilient business model where we focus on maintaining a lean operational structure with a focus on flexibility through the use of subcontractors. Next slide. The regional revenues for Q2 twenty nineteen excludes BTS figures. Q2 twenty twenty figures reflects the enlarged group of Qualys Bremer. We are pleased that we have achieved strong profitability across all our segments in the quarter.
This has been led by APAC region with 11% EBIT margin. Our renewable business continues to expand, as David touched on. Revenues for renewables increased with 70% versus Q2 twenty nineteen and seventy two percent versus Q1 twenty twenty. Our business is expanding strongly on the back of our talented staff and a large office network, a strong market position and a growing renewables market. We are very excited of the growth opportunities ahead.
And so far in 2020, we have announced entry into several markets, including Poland, South Korea and Japan. These investments in recruitments of new staff and setup of offices will affect our results in the short term, but give us a strong platform to continue to grow our renewable business in line with our ambition. We have encouraged and facilitated increased cooperation across the enlarged Aqualis Bremert Group, both across regions and across the business streams. This has been important in order to both realize revenue synergies as well as operating efficiencies. We are very pleased that the intercompany revenues, a metric for cooperation, has increased significantly from Q1 twenty twenty, proving the success of the merger between Aqualis and Braemar Technical Services.
Next slide. Revenues for Q2 twenty twenty is up 95% from Q2 twenty nineteen. The growth from Q2 twenty nineteen is mainly due to the acquisition of Braemar Technical Services. Adjusted EBIT is $1,800,000 The adjustments we have made to the reported figures relate primarily to the customization of our ERP system, share based compensation and M and A costs. In most of the countries we do operate, we do not qualify for any relief due to COVID-nineteen.
And we have made few furloughs and staff reductions due to COVID-nineteen. So it's mostly business as usual. In Q2 'twenty, we have benefited from COVID-nineteen support schemes in a few countries, such as Singapore and China, for a total amount of $400,000 Finance income is impacted by $100,000 related to the revaluation of performance based warrants issued to Bremar Shipping Services in connection with the acquisition of BTS in June 2019. Aqualis Bremar issued two similar sized tranches of performance based warrants, in total close to 6,000,000 warrants to Braemar Shipping Services in connection with the BTS transaction in June 2019. The first part is linked to certain thresholds for gross margins for our adjusting and marine business, and the second tranche is linked to thresholds for the adjusted EBITDA for the combined group.
The measurement period for the gross margin and EBITDA is from 04/01/2019 and two years onwards. The revaluation of the warrants done in Q2 twenty twenty assumes that 10% of the performance based warrants are exercised, in total, 600,000 warrants. Net foreign exchange gain loss no, sorry, net foreign exchange loss of NOK 100,000.0 is driven by the weakening of the U. S. Dollar.
Income tax is mainly related to withholding taxes. Next slide. We have increased the cost synergy target to $2,800,000,000 and have realized $2,100,000 as of Q2 'twenty. The realized synergies have largely been achieved through streamlining office infrastructure and reducing admin costs. The remaining synergies of $700,000 are driven by admin costs and integration of one common ERP platform across the group.
We can conclude that the acquisition of BTS has been a success in terms of realizing cost synergies and improving the profitability of the underlying business. We are pleased that the rollout of Oracle NetSuite's ERP system is close to being finalized. We have completed the rollout of the enhanced version of NetSuite's ERP system to 17 operating entities covering the former b t BTS adjusting and BTS offshore businesses. We expect to complete the rollout of NetSuite for the former BTS marine business entities by October 2020. This will be a major milestone for us as a group and will allow us to standardize and streamline internal processes further, improve management information and further refine our tools and most importantly, quicker invoicing and improve our working capital management.
To realize the full benefits from the NetSuite rollout, staff will need training and practice. Some of the synergies related to working capital will not be realized until first half twenty twenty one. Next slide. Our working capital ratios are improving steadily. This is the fourth quarter in a row with improvements.
We have made several changes over the past quarters, and we are starting to see the effects. Improvements in working capital haven't continued into Q3. Our internal target is to accelerate the working capital improvements. Getting the whole group, as mentioned on one ERP system, will speed this up. Our group target is to reduce the working capital ratio to 100 by 2023, and we are on our way.
We do expect that some of our clients will face more cash flow challenges, and we are taking measures to improve and adapt our cash collection processes to changes in the market conditions. Next slide. We are very pleased with our strong underlying cash flow during the quarter, with cash increasing from $10,100,000 to $11,000,000 despite paying out $1,500,000 in dividends to shareholders. We achieved an operational cash flow of $2,600,000 impacted by profits in the quarter, reduction in working capital and foreign exchange movements. We maintain a solid financial position with $11,000,000 in cash at the end of the quarter.
With that, I'll leave the word over to David.
Thank you, Kim. I would just like to conclude now with a summary and our short term outlook as we see it. It's been a good quarter. We've had strong operational performance in a difficult market. We've achieved record margins and cash flow, and our cash balance has increased despite paying a dividend in the quarter.
Q3 does tend to be weaker, mainly due to seasonality effects in the Middle East region, where the Southwest Monsoon closes down some of our marine operations, and also during the summer months, many of our staff take holiday. We also have the added effects of the COVID pandemic to deal with. We have high ambitions of targeting 50% of renewable of our revenues coming from renewables, not just offshore wind, but also other renewable sectors such as floating wind. In our mature business lines, we have seen good progress on profitability and we'll continue to focus on that going forward. Oil and gas activity is expected to be a little muted in the short term, but we believe we're well prepared.
We have a highly flexible, employee basis with high numbers of subcontractors in the oil and gas sector, which gives us a high resilience to market weakness and an ability to adapt to current circumstances. We are focusing on capital efficiency and on returning capital to shareholders. We have paid a dividend of €1,500,000 in Q2, and we expect to pay a similar dividend in Q4. So in summary, I think we're in a good position. We've performed well.
We look forward to the future. And I would like to conclude at this point our Q2 results. I will reiterate one more time that because we are unable to take a live Q and A session, if you do have any questions that you'd like to put to us, please reach out to either Kim or myself, and we'll endeavor to answer those questions. So thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening, and we look forward to giving our results in q three.