Good morning, and welcome to Axacto's 2nd Quarter Presentation for 2021. This presentation will be divided into 5 parts. We will start by giving a short recap of who is Axaktur before we take you through Q2 main events followed by the financial highlights. We round off with an updated outlook and a Q and A session. As always, you may ask questions live after I'm done presenting or through the available chat function.
Now let us move to Slide 3 for a short company introduction. Aksaktur was established in December 2015 with headquarter in Oslo. Our main focus is on collection and acquisition of nonperforming loans from financial institutions, meaning we are both buying nonperforming loans and doing collection on behalf of banks and other financial customers. Axaxtel operates in 6 European countries: Spain, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Finland, and we are close to 1100 at these. The company is listed at Oslo Stock Exchange, and our main shareholder, Geviran, owns approximately 44% of the shares.
Please move to the next slide for a quick reminder of our remaining focus areas. The 1st 5 years, Axaxt will focus on aggressive growth to build scale and market entries to get presence and diversification. Establishing effective and efficient IT and operations was important in order to handle own portfolios and third party clients in the best possible way. Today, the focus is on profitability, operational excellence and to grow scale and size in existing markets. The goal is to improve the internal equity and to create long lasting competitive cost of loanages.
Axocto is aiming for dividend payments within the next 2 to 3 years. Please move to the next page for more details on our strategic positioning. Aksofter is pursuing a niche strategy to disrupt the industry on cost to collect. The main elements of this strategy are the following. We have carefully selected the 6 markets where we believe to have the best risk reward.
These markets have well developed and functioning legal systems for debt collection, an efficient market for portfolio transactions and financial institutions that are actively using the 3PC market. Main focus is on fresh business to consumer unsecured debt within the bank and finance segment. Destination is high volume in combination with high average claim size, and the financial institutions are willing to Pay for the additional value created by the collection companies. Axtraptel also clearly prioritized the combination of NPL acquisitions and third party In addition to be a product area with attractive margins, the strategy gives scale advantages without requiring significant capital. It offers access to relevant data.
It has a clear diversification effect and strengthened customer relationships. As you can see, the result when it comes to the cost position has been satisfied. Here it is important to focus on the trend as we obviously have higher cost to collect versus income in the 1st years of operations due to scale disadvantages. We expect the ratio We continue to go down over time as we gain more scale effect and we consider our cost position to be one of our key competitive advantages also in the future. That was just a short recap of our quarter, and I will now move to Slide 7 for main events in Q3.
As many of you already know, Q2 and Q4 are normally the 2 strongest quarters from a seasonality point of view. Q2 this year was no exception. We can note positive development in Q2 for both quarter on quarter and year on year comparison. Especially year on year shows significant improvement, but please bear in mind that Q2 last year was a weak quarter due to high negative impacts from the pandemic. The only figure that is on the low side is the NPL investments.
I will come back with more details later in the presentation, but the explanation for the low investment level is twofold. Firstly, there has been a limited number of transactions in the market. Secondly, We have seen examples of price pressure on portfolios in certain markets, particularly in Spain. I would like to underline the strong cash EBITDA level of €66,000,000 and we are also pleased to deliver a 7% annualized return on equity to shareholders. One off effects were more or less canceling each other out.
On the negative side, we have €900,000 in restructuring costs in connection with our cost reduction program. Further, we have negative effect of €600,000 on amortized loan in connection with early repayment of the Nomura credit facility, but we also had a €1,500,000 gain on unrealized effects. As mentioned during our Q1 presentation, Axocto has been working to establish credit rating. Please move to the next slide for details. We are pleased to announce credit ratings from the 2 industry leading agencies, Moody's and S and P.
For us, this represents a milestone in our financial history, and we believe this is an important stepping stone towards attracting a larger and more international investor base and by that, further reduce our cost of funding. Moody's ended up F1 with a positive outlook and S and P with a B rating with stable outlook. For RockSachter, this is just the first step. We will continue to work on the necessary parameters to improve the ratings over the next years. Please turn to Slide 9 for details about the cost reduction program that was introduced in December.
The program is targeting an annual saving, north of €5,000,000 and most of the cost savings were implemented during first half. We expect full saving impact from Q4 this year. The total cost ambition has been increased slightly from €4,800,000 to €5,200,000 and the savings are materializing quicker than first anticipated. The corresponding restructuring costs are estimated to increase by $300,000 2 of the most important improvement initiatives implemented during quarter was outsourcing of car repossession services in Germany and home shoring of back office functions from the Baltics to Finland. Please move to Slide 10, where we will share more details on our gross IRR levels.
As part of our work to increase And in true transparency, we would like to share more details on gross IRRs going forward. Let me start with a short definition. Gross IRR is calculated using estimated monthly cash flows over a 180 month period. Gross IRR is assigned at the internal rate of return that makes the net present value of the ERC equal to the NPL book value. The advantage of looking at gross IRR instead of net IRR is that we are clearing out uncertainties regarding cost differences between companies as it is purely based on the book value and ERC.
Now if we look at Asaktor's current NPL book, The gross IRR is 15.8%. The relatively low level is reflecting the fact that SAKTOR acquired significant volumes in the period 2016 to 2019, when the market prices on portfolios were historically high. If we look at the estimated gross IRR for the volumes we have acquired in first half of twenty twenty one, it increases to 22%. And if we look at the committed forward flow contract, we expect a gross IRR of 23.2% at the CapEx volume of approximately €160,000,000 As you can understand, the interesting finding here is a strong improvement from current book to new book, which is actually up 47%. We expect the market prices to stabilize in the area between 18% to 22% in our markets, and over time, Our book will gradually become more profitable.
We hope this new information is useful for investors and will make you more able to understand the future value creation in Please move on to Slide 11, where I will give a short update on ESG. As we emphasized in Q1, ESG related topics has a high priority for Axapto. Since then, we have had 2 developments that we would like to share with you. Firstly, Sustainalytics has ranked Absaxtro's 2nd best out of 151 Companies within consumer finance and among top 5% of companies globally. Secondly, we have signed up on UN Global Compact.
UN Global Compact is the world's largest corporate sustainability movement, and it provides a universal language for corporate responsibility. By signing up, we continue to demonstrate our public commitment towards sustainable development. As I said last time, our stock is determined to continue to drive ESG improvement and contribute to raise the bar for the industry. This was the last item we have on the main event. Please move to Slide 13 for Q2 financial highlights.
If we start with the development in gross revenue, we are pleased to deliver €95,000,000 corresponding to a healthy 34% increase compared to same quarter last year. Again, Q2 last year was, of course, challenging with several weeks of lockdown on legal systems in Spain and Italy, in addition to other negative effects from the pandemic, so the comparison might not be the best. Although not fully back to pre pandemic levels, We did see an increase in all three business segments from previous quarter. One last point I would like to mention is that the gross Revenue for Q2 is normally seasonally strong, partly because of tax returns for debtors in several of our countries. Let's now look a bit more into detail of each of the business segments starting with NPL on the next slide.
In Q2, the NPL collections continue to normalize, and we delivered an all time high gross revenue for the segment. This translates into 27% revenue growth year on year despite the fact that we have a marginally declining book value on NPL. I would also like to underline the fact that the portfolio amortization rate has increased to 40% and the contribution margin was at a healthy 79%. On the next page, we will give more details on which assumptions we are taking regarding the collection curves going forward, and show the performance in Q2 versus active forecast. For the Q2, we performed in line with our active forecast on unsecured NPL and the collection came in at 99%.
As you can see from the graph, we do expect a lower cash collected in Q3 due to seasonality. We are, however, satisfied with the accuracy in the actual performance versus active forecast for the quarter. Axas Corpus continues to have a conservative approach when it comes to active forecast and revaluations. On the next page, I will give some more comments to the NPL CapEx of the slide. As I said in my introduction, our stock will have, like in Q1, a modest investment level for the quarter.
We have earlier stated that we will show capital discipline and not let us be easily carried away in transactions where competitors with high need for Aksaktiv invested more than maintenance CapEx last year. This, in combination with the fact that we have been able to adjust Our cost base puts us in a position where we don't have an urgent need for retailing volumes and hence we will continue to show capital discipline. With that said, our CapEx will increase going forward. We have significant and increasing forward flow commitments for the coming quarters and into 2023. AxtroFTord has maintained the book value over the last 12 months, and we expect that investments will exceed the CapEx for the next 12 months period.
Please turn to the next slide for further comments on the GPC data. GPC revenues reached $30,000,000 for the quarter, slowly ramping up from Q1. We still see negative impacts related to COVID-nineteen, particularly for Spain and Italy. However, customer retention during the pandemic has been high, but the volume has been on the low side. To reverse as society reopens in the second half of this year.
We have seen a positive change in the bank's willingness to sign new contracts, And during Q2, we did sign several large 3PC agreements. We expect this to flow through from Q4 analogues. Contribution margins are returning towards pre pandemic levels ending at 30%. Please note that the contribution margin in the second quarter was burdened with €700,000 in restructuring costs, but of course this is much less than the €2,800,000 restructuring costs we had on 3PC in the previous quarter. Please let's move to the next slide for more details on our runoff segment Rios.
As stated, Axtrokter is not doing any new investments in reals and it is a pure Renault segment. Given the fact that we are now in the tail of Portfolio, we are very satisfied with the level of €13,000,000 for the Q2, but as in the previous quarter, the prices were a bit disappointing, taking the contribution margin down to minus 19%. We sold just north of 3 60 assets and the inventory has gone 42% since Q2 last here. The fully consolidated book value at the end of the quarter was reduced to €55,000,000 Let's move on to the next slide, where we will present more details on the reported financials. Total income came in at €6,000,000 up from €29,000,000 same quarter last year and also up €5,000,000 from previous quarter.
The reported EBITDA came in at EUR 22,000,000 corresponding to a margin of 34%. Please note that the EBITDA margin was burdened by €900,000 in restructuring costs. Cash EBITDA came in at €66,000,000 up from 44 7 quarter last year and also up EUR14 1,000,000 from previous quarter. On the next slide, we continue with details on elements below EBITDA. The cost discipline is starting to materialize in lower depreciation.
Net financial items are showing positive development, But please note the 2 onetime effects, a positive FX effect of €1,500,000 and a negative effect of €0.6 €6,000,000 in relation to repayment of the Nomura Credit Facility. Net profit after tax came in at €7,000,000 for equity holders and minus $3,000,000 for non controlling interest due to negative margin on Rios. The tax rate is still high, but excluding Rios, the tax rate is down to 28%. We are expecting further reduction in the tax rate going forward. On the next page, we will look closer at the return on equity development.
It is well known that the profitability on the Migos has been disappointing since back in 2018 and the fact that the return on equity during the pandemic has been leaked both for our software and the industry assets. As we anticipated in Q1, we have again started to see a gap between the two curves where we compare return on equity including and excluding Rios and expect this trend to continue over the coming quarters. The return on equity might vary quarter by quarter due to seasonality, etcetera, but we definitely expect the trend to be positive year over year going forward. As we have indicated earlier, our software is aiming for dividend payment as return on equity gradually improves. We have not set a hard date for this ambition, but 2 to 3 years should be a realistic timeline for the 1st dividend.
With that said, let us move to Slide 23 for an updated outlook. With the COVID situation a bit More on the control due to vaccines, but potentially heading towards a 4th wave in several countries, I would like to partly repeat what we said during the Q1 presentation. We believe that COVID-nineteen impact on business has stabilized, and we do not expect sudden movements in either direction. But the pandemic continued to affect our business negatively. Q3 is normally seasonally weaker than Q2, a trend that we expect to see this year, unlike last year when Q3 outperformed Q2 for obvious reasons.
We expect return on equity to increase over time, but with short term stations, pre PC volumes are expected to gradually return to pre pandemic levels as societies reopen. Our cost reduction program is ahead on both pipeline and estimated cost savings. MXNAK SAKTA will continue strictly prioritize NPL deals with satisfying profitability, and we are taking a bit more moderate view on the total investment levels for 2021. We still target a CapEx around €200,000,000 but this is obviously highly dependent on market activity in Q4, and hence CapEx deployment will be back end loaded. Further, the credit ratings are expected to reduce interest costs on potential future plans.
This concludes the presentation, and we will now open for questions. Please remember that you can find more information in the supporting information and appendix attached to this presentation. Thank you. And there are no questions on the line. So I'll hand back to our speakers for any closing comments.
Okay. Thank you very much. So This is John Solly speaking. I'm sitting here with the Investor Relations responsible, Kirussoir, and we will take your questions. And so far, we have only received one.
And the question goes, how certain can you really be that the IRRs will stabilize at 18% to 22% And will you be buying below 18% if the portfolio is big enough? If I start with the first part of the question. So No, we are looking at what we see in the market today, we are fairly confident that 18% to 22% will be an interval where most We don't see any reason why the why portfolio should fall below 18%. At least with the information we have today, it's not already a realistic scenario. If it happens, Axaxtel will not be buying portfolios.
That's Currently, at least. But again, highly unlikely scenario that we should fall below 18, especially on a portfolio level, I would say. But yes, so that is the only question that we have received so far. So then I guess we close the call. Again, thank you for attending this Q2 presentation.