Good morning out there. My name is Per Ronny Stav, Group CEO of Arribatec Group. Together with me today, I have Geir Johansen, our Group CFO, and we are here to present our first quarter financial report. 1st, I would like to give you an introduction. Back in 2015, I founded Arribatec Group, and we stayed as a private-owned company until we went public in September last year. After this, we have went through six acquisitions, two more acquisitions in process: Integra Associates, U.K. Based consultants that we acquired, and also the Spanish-based Grupo Hodei. Out of this, we have built a new powerful experience management team, and we are day by day taking new steps in integrating these organizations into one Arribatec Group. We are cross-selling, we are expanding geographically, and we are really capitalizing on the platform we have built through these acquisitions.
Also, moving our customers to cloud is highly on our agenda, and we have proven successful also within this area in recent periods. All in all, we have signed more than 100 contracts globally, which makes me extremely proud of what this combined team that we have built through all these acquisitions have managed to deliver. Arribatec One Solution. What is One Solution? One Solution is a new way, disruptive, the way business softwares are delivered and deployed in the market. Everybody in the market today talk about cloud solutions, and we also believe that the future is cloud.
We although believe that there will be hybrid solutions for many years to come, and we also see that there are more and more complexity brought into all companies globally with a set of different applications to cover different processes, and hence the complexity in all companies are getting more and more complicated. This interferes in also tight system integrations, et cetera. What we do is that we take this complexity out from our customers. We provide some systems, we take other systems that they have, we integrate them, we deploy them, and we deliver this as a service. Meaning that the customer is released from the pain with complicated system landscapes as we take responsibility as a professional part and delivering this as One Solution. All our acquisitions are vital to support our One Solution strategy.
Individually, they are delivering vital competence systems or solutions for us to be able to penetrate vertical markets, delivering holistic solutions. Being able to take such control over such complexity on behalf of the customers delivering this as a service, we need full control on the system side, integration, but also infrastructure, cloud, everything. That's why we have done acquisitions within this area of cloud. We have bought companies having specialized operational vertical software and combining this with our strategic partnership on the ERP side. Combined, we can deliver fully integrated set of business applications in cloud, deployed, governed, fully responsible by us for a predictable price which no one else in the market are offering today. How was our strategy received in the market? I'm really proud to present our first figures. Revenue growth of 177%, from NOK 35.8 million- NOK 99.2 million.
Further to that, we also had an amazing period where we have grown the EBITDA from NOK 4.3 million- NOK 10.3 adjusted. Adjusted means excluding M&A one-off cost. Another important KPI are the annual recurring revenue, ARR, which we have grown by 560%, up to NOK 31 million within this quarter only. If you look at this from a pro forma perspective, where we are Much to the ARR, but we have plans, and we have set a strategy on how we are also transforming their business to contribute in to building our ARR. For us as an international company, it's important to also show that we are capable on one side, but also are delivering and expanding internationally. We still see that Norway has a big part of the revenue, but roughly 33% of the business is outside Norway.
In Norway, due to, of course, several of the acquisitions reside in Norway, we had a huge growth in Norway, but in the EU and in the U.S., we see a strong organic growth. In EU, we have 124%, including the acquisition of IB, but excluding, looking at pure organic growth, we see organic growth of 73%. To me, as a manager responsible for this company, how my team have performed, I can't say anything else than I'm super happy and really proud, and it is a great pleasure presenting these figures to you as investors of the company. To give you more details about our financial performance, I will give the word to Geir Johansen, our Group CFO.
Thank you, Per Ronny. As Per Ronny showed earlier, our revenue for Q1 ended at NOK 99 million, which is 177% increase year-over-year. If we break this down by region, we see more than 3x volume from Norway in Q1 this year compared to last year. As you can see from the chart, we did almost NOK 67 million worth of revenue for Norway only. Region Europe had 127% growth and ended at NOK 25 million in regional income, while U.S. increased by 100% from NOK 4 million in 2020 to NOK 8 million in Q1 this year. If we break this down by service, we see a different picture. We have, over the last year, been pushing pretty hard on driving up the annual recurring revenue. We now clearly see the effect in the financial performance both from this push and for the group in total.
ARR is pretty important for us as it gives us visibility for cash flow for the next months and years ahead. It also reflects that our concept of solution as a service actually gains acceptance among our clients and in the marketplace at large. The graph shows that we have a ARR for the quarter of nearly NOK 31 million , and this is a significant growth compared to the NOK 4.7 million a year ago. The services revenue is NOK 60 million. That is 100% growth compared to the same quarter last year. Lastly, our one-off services or one-off sales, mostly consisting of license sales, is up to NOK 7.5 million, which is a NOK 5.5 million increase from last year.
Also, we want to show you here how the, call it the old Arribatec organization, has performed and also how much the companies that we have acquired during the quarter or two quarters have contributed to our growth. In first quarter 2020, Arribatec had a revenue of NOK 36 million almost, while we now are at NOK 41.8, so a 17% growth there. However, the acquired companies delivered NOK 57 or more than NOK 57 million of the total revenue for the quarter. For us, that means that we have done good acquisitions, we buying well-functioning companies that deliver the goods from the get-go. Our total balance sheet at the end of the quarter was NOK 525 million, with total equity of NOK 357 million and a cash balance of NOK 92 million.
Looking at the assets first, to the right of the slide, we see goodwill of NOK 183 million, which all stems from the six companies that we have acquired. We don't buy much hard assets. We'd rather buy people, software, and customer relationships. Customer relationships and software are both recorded and categorized in the account as intangibles, and they account for NOK 34 million and NOK 65 million respectively out of the total of NOK 99 million. Other non-current assets of NOK 39 million consist of right of use assets, PPE, and deferred tax assets. Trade receivables is split 50/50 between old Arribatec and acquired companies. We haven't seen any significant development within the account receivables in the company. Other current assets is IFRS 16 related contract assets and other accruals.
Finally, as I said, we have NOK 92 million worth of cash in the group as of the end of the quarter. Compared to year-end 2020, our total balance sheet increased by some NOK 110 million. As you can see, the shift between NOK 188 million in cash to NOK 183 million in goodwill represents the acquisitions that we have made, and the balance sheet reflects these acquisitions at the end of Q1. If you shift to the left side of the slide here and look at liabilities and equity, we can see that Arribatec had a total equity of NOK 357 million at the end of March and an equity ratio then of 68%. The only bank debt that exists in the company is three small credit facilities that totals NOK 11 million as of end of the quarter.
50% of the current liabilities in our balance sheet came with the companies that we have acquired. There is no significant development within the old Arribatec Group in that category either. Moving on to the cash flow statement. During fourth quarter of 2020, Arribatec raised NOK 235 million in gross proceeds through share issues. In addition, three acquisitions closed in fourth quarter last year, where NOK 65 million was settled in cash and the targets brought with them NOK 12 million in cash at closing. Looking at the cash flow for the first quarter this year is pretty straightforward. During the quarter, free cash flow from operations were negative by NOK 6 million. This mainly due to the fact that the working capital developed negatively, both from AP and AR standpoint.
We closed three acquisitions in Q1, and we partially paid those acquisitions by cash, NOK 101 million in cash, and the rest was settled in shares. However, also these companies brought cash with them at the closing date to a total of NOK 21 million. All in all, cash flow or net cash flow from investing activities was negative by NOK 88 million in last quarter. Ended the year with NOK 91 million in cash. That after financing activities required NOK 3 million, which is basically repayment of some of the drawdown facilities we have and a small amount of interest payment on that. Lastly, I want to talk a little bit about the equity development for the group. Arribatec pre-acquisitions, meaning back to October, November last year, we had a total equity of NOK 271 million.
As you now know, we acquired three companies during the fourth quarter, Fácil, Microsky, and Innit, and we issued shares to the sellers. However, while the acquisitions were taken into our books in fourth quarter, the shares to the sellers for those acquisitions were not issued until we got into first quarter this year. Which means that we had a total equity by the end of 2020 of NOK 316 million. We have closed two additional acquisitions during this quarter, whereby Qualisoft required us to issue shares for NOK 31 million and Maksit, where we haven't issued the shares yet, requires another NOK 10 million worth of shares being issued.
All this is already reflected in our balance sheet, even though the shares have not been issued. At the end of the quarter, we have a total equity of NOK 357 million. Additional to this, looking a little bit forward, we have a merger between Arribatec AS and Arribatec Solutions ASA that will be undertaken in June, whereby Arribatec Solutions ASA will issue some 125 million new shares to some of the existing shareholders in Arribatec AS. Once this is done, in the middle of August, all shares of Arribatec AS will be fully owned by Arribatec Solutions ASA. That concludes the review of the financial numbers from the Q1 report. Thank you. Per Ronny, you take it from here.
Thank you, Geir. As a part of our One Solution strategy, also the fact that we have acquired a lot of companies, we are rebranding the company from Arribatec Solutions to Arribatec Group. We have also taken a lot of steps internally in integrating and delivering on this One Solution strategy, combined with all the acquisition companies that we have taken on board over the last few months. We have, in other words, transferred all these individual companies with different service solution offerings and built a global solution or a global organization and divided the total group into five principal business areas.
These five business areas are business services, which is principally the old Arribatec, consisting of ERP, BI and analytics, and research management, as well as software development and DevOps services. We have also the enterprise architecture business process management, which is derived from the acquisition of Qualisoft. Cloud, it's our cloud service offering, consisting of the acquisition from Innit operations and Microsky in Bergen. Marine is our offering for the marine industry, derived from the acquisition of IB. Hospitality, consisting of our own Certify Level 2 prior to the acquisition of Fácil, which has also then been merged into our vertical offerings within the hospitality business. All these acquisitions, this new strategy, this new organization, have formed also the basis for our new global market management team, consisting of five different business area managers.
In addition to that, we also added geographical country managers for Sweden and the U.S. With this, we have secured a common management platform, common management team, to drive the development of the company in the same direction of One Solution and to deliver on that strategy. We have also, during this time, expanded geographically into six different new countries, Singapore, Dubai, France, Netherlands, U.K., and Germany. In this period, we have also delivered and managed to win significant new contracts in everything from Magellan Partners, Altum, French, Spanish, now they're German, U.K., Dubai, et cetera, contracts, which is significant and have also then fueled the creation of these companies and also a solid platform for securing business in these countries individually. This gives us the following current global presence. We are operating out of 15 different countries.
As we saw earlier today, we have good activities in Europe, in the U.S., and we are also expanding beyond that with the establishment of Dubai, Singapore, et cetera. We have more than 250 people in the different offices globally, and we are serving more than 850 large enterprise customers. What is very important for us is to fuel the organic growth, which we have now built through the acquisitions. We have a fantastic platform, and we see a strong spirit in the team to deliver on this new strategy and to work together as one company. We have, as I said, a strong platform for fueling further growth. We will combine the growth with new acquisitions, we need to prove ourselves and to the market that we are also capable of growing organically. We will keep focus on cross-selling and upselling.
We will focus on moving that forward. It's very important to really capitalize on what we have built so far. We see great potential to grow further, and this needs to be taken care of from an organizational perspective. Further to this, we are also seeing that we are succeeding in the market communication. Our new strategy and communication, delivering One Solution, is also extremely important to continue communicating to the market to get their acceptance to fuel this growth organically. To show you a little bit what we have done as well from an organizational or organic growth perspective. We have closed a lot of deals, as I said earlier, but many of these give you some examples within each and one of the new business areas. In enterprise architecture business process management, we have secured deals, among others, with Aker BP, Vår Energi , Gassco, and so on.
In the maritime sector, we have secured with MSC, Mediterranean Shipping Company, which is by far one of the largest container ship companies and also a major cruise liner based in Europe. In the business area, we are also winning deals both in France, Germany, Sweden, Norway. In the BI segment, we have signed significant deals, among others, with Arbeidsgiverstyret in Norway, a frame agreement, one in a public tender, worth up to NOK 20 million. On the DevOps side, we are also delivering the summer campaign for Circle K, among others. On the cloud area, we have secured Innovation Norway, Brage Bank and so on, as also significant wins during this period. In hospitality, we still invest, but we see a great potential. We have signed multiple deals of strategic interest.
We have continued developing the solution, and we are ready when the market is coming back again now to deliver amazing solutions to revitalize the hospitality industry. To really fuel the organic growth, we see a great need for continue investing in our sales activities. We need to increase the sales capacity, pre-sale capacity, but also continue developing our One Solution concept. In that, we do things in a different way. We are building new practice on how things are implemented, how things are developed, how things are customized, and to secure a cost-efficient model to scale this in a cost-efficient way moving forward. When it comes to M&A, as I said, we will of course continue acquiring companies, in combination with a strong focus on the organic growth. We have four different pillars in our M&A strategy. One is solutions and services.
As you probably understood, the One Solution concept is very tightly linked to what type of solutions, what type of services we are offering. We look at solutions where we can deliver more to our existing customers or getting customer bases where we can go in and take a strong position into new verticals. To win in the market today, you need to combine technology, services, and solutions that is fit for purpose, in the different verticals you're operating. That's why we have a great focus on combining our core ERP systems with operational software. Hence, that's why we have also bought different vertical solutions like IB in the marine and hospitality. Geography has been vital to our success so far. We believe that focusing on covering new geographical areas will be important to support our customers going globally.
Also being able to cover local requirements, legislations, et cetera, and holding that as a competence is very important to be able to deliver One Solution with quality, then we also need to include these type of elements into our service offering. We also see that spreading little bit geographically will give us a stronger footprint, of course, but we will also be more unique than most of our peers are able to offer today. Technology. As a technology company, this is also very important. With the complexity and the totality we are offering, technology is the backbone in everything we do. Of course, being in front of the technological development is important, but we also see how technology can provide us tools and solutions to optimize, standardize, and also secure that we can deliver competence or competitive solutions moving forward.
Of course, on the competence side, as a competence organization, we win deals every day. We satisfy our customers on daily basis. Because we have a strong competence, we are unique in many areas. We have vertical competence, technology competence, integration competence, et cetera, and we are looking at fueling and adding more competent people that can continue and contribute to the organization, and to also continue evolving what we are delivering of services and solutions by capitalizing on these unique competencies. I think that was it for me today. Remember, Arribatec, One Solution. Now we will take a short break, and then we will be ready for Q&A. Please feel free to post your questions in the channels that has been informed in the invitation. Welcome back. We are now ready to answer some questions. We have received some on our different channels. Geir, can you please?
Sure. Yeah, the first thing we've got a question about is the geographical areas which we're going to prioritize going forward. What's our comment to that?
As we can see from our last acquisition, U.K. is, of course, of vital importance for us. We have, generally speaking, a wish to deliver on becoming a true global player, which also means that we are expanding into new geographical areas, which we have also partly communicated through the setup of Dubai and Singapore. The U.S. as well is a very important market for us, and we aim to continue growing there, both organically and also exploring M&A activities in that region.
Yeah. Good. Now the question here is about the cloud and cloud solutions. What is it really?
That's a good question. Cloud is actually many things. Cloud is how you deploy your business software. We, as I said in the presentation as well, we need to control the entire value chain from where things are deployed. That's why we also acquired Innit and Microsky to get competence and capacity to drive cloud journeys and cloud migration strategies for our customers. This means that we are actually taking control. Either we are doing it in Azure, AWS, or even in our own data centers, how we are deploying and hosting business applications to secure that we can control the entire value chain from how it's installed, deployed, operated, and also be able to customize, integrate the applications to deliver on this One Solution strategy.
Yeah. Thank you. Then you have a question more to the heart of how and what we're doing. The question is, what is the estimated length of the contracts that we win? Yeah, there's also a question on margins, but first, what's the length of the contracts?
We sign different types of contracts. The public tender contracts that we are winning is typically four years plus two, or 4 + 1 + 1 . The research institute contracts we have signed, for example, they are five years long. Normal standards is between three to five years as the normal.
Yeah. There's a question about the recent announcement we made about Integra. The question is, what's the rationale and how do we see it fit into our suite of services and solutions?
Integra is a very interesting acquisition. First of all, we are covering a new geographical area. They're very complementary, but also similar to the old part of Arribatec, with good presence locally in the U.K., but also serving a lot of international customers, and have long experience in delivering business software on a global scale. Further to that, it's also important for us to continue growing our partnership with Unit4. With Integra, we will be by far the largest in the entire ecosystem globally. We see a great potential combining forces, both from a solution, geographical, but also a partner and solution perspective.
Okay, next one is back to the contract and projects. Is there a maintenance cost during the contract, or does this become extra income seen from a customer perspective? Yeah.
The maintenance part, our contracts, if you look at XaaS concept it combines both our own software, third-party software, infrastructure, everything. The part that belongs to our third-party software, we have an initial investment that we are discounting over the contract period. Plus that we also get the running maintenance that will also continue after the first three or five-year period that we have committed to in the contract. With that said, this model as well secures that we are actually accelerating the margin after the contract ending if we deliver good quality and the customers will continue after the first initial contract period the margin is accelerating on our side.
Right. Next here is about the acquisitions and the synergies. How will acquired companies perform better with us than without us?
Yeah. First of all through the acquisitions, we have become also Tier 1 Microsoft partner. We are seeing a lot of what synergies on the system side, also on the license side for internal use. We have centralized now everything with a common cost center out of all units. We also see that based on our strategy and our approach, we are also able to transform the acquisitions into more ARR and XaaS concepts. The idea behind all this is that all these acquisitions are contributing either to capacity, geographical presence, or even solutions that we can also upsell and extend our One Solution concept to existing customers.
I guess also the cross-selling between existing units and new units is driving-
Absolutely. We saw that earlier as well that we have several good examples already how we are already after a short period of time as one company able to cross-sell and also utilize resources between the different entities and business areas.
Right. That is what has come in so far. We can give it a little bit more time and if there is nothing else coming in, we will terminate it from here.
Yeah. It's always possibilities as well to send questions to IR.
IR.
ir@arribatec.com as well.
Very good. It's quiet here, so.
I think we call it a day. We wish you all a good day, and we hope that you liked what you have heard today and that we are delivering according to your expectations. I can guarantee you one thing, we will continue be dedicated to the business, work hard to generate value for all our shareholders. Thank you.