Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Arribatec's third quarter report. As per normal, I will talk now you through the financials, also show you what we have achieved in the marketplace, and mention a little bit about the operations as such. First, the highlights. We managed NOK 132 million in revenue for the first quarter. That is a 12% growth, and as last quarter, it's all organic growth. We had a positive EBITDA of NOK 9 million for the quarter. That compares to negative NOK 6.7 million a year ago, so an improvement of NOK 15.7 million.
Also, we had, at the end of the quarter, NOK 40 million. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Arribatec's third quarter report. As per normal, I will talk now you through the financials, also show you what we have achieved in the marketplace, and mention a little bit about the operations as such. First, the highlights. We managed NOK 132 million in revenue for the first quarter. That is a 12% growth and, as last quarter, it's all organic growth. We had a positive EBITDA of NOK 9 million for the quarter. That compares to negative NOK 6.7 million a year ago, so an improvement of NOK 15.7 million.
Also, we had at the end of the quarter NOK 40 million in cash for the group. We also had success in the marketplace. We won a contract worth NOK 22 million for Flytoget, for installing 29 new ticket vending machines for them. That project has already started up, and a large part of delivery will be done between now and May next year. Overall, we signed 374 new deals, or contracts for scope extensions and new business, at a total value of NOK 135 million. Here, we see more details on the performance and revenue.
As I said, it's 132 million, organic growth at 12%. Recurring revenue for this quarter, 54 million, compared to 44 million a year ago. That is 11% growth and also accounts for 41% of the total revenue. Lastly, as I said, EBITDA, 9 million, an improvement from 6.7 a year ago, and that gives us also an EBITDA margin of 6.8%. As I mentioned several times during our presentations, we are looking to increase our revenue outside of Norway. So, and Norway alone accounted for NOK 82 million revenue in the last quarter, and that is a 17% growth compared to a year ago.
The Norway now accounts for 63% of the total revenue of the group. Europe, that is, continental Europe and U.K., NOK 39 million in revenue. That's the same level as we had a year ago, and it accounts for 29% of the total. Lastly, rest of the world, that is basically North America or U.S., NOK 11 million in revenue this quarter, and that is NOK 2 million above where we were a year ago. U.S. accounts for a total of 8% of the group revenue. Again, I just want to repeat, we have today 17 offices in 10 countries around the world.
We have currently 354 full-time employees, whereof some of them are long-term hired consultants that also is working for us. And we do business with more than 1,700 companies across the world. Here, as you have seen before, this is a figure showing how we have divided our company into 5 business areas. The three larger ones that you can see on the top, they are what we call industry-agnostic. All companies with more than 50 people or more than NOK 25 million in revenue need services or products from one of these three areas.
We have a lot of cross-selling between these BAs, which means that a customer in EA & BPM also will be buying cloud services from us, for example, or a ERP client ask us to host their entire IT infrastructure, and we will be doing that from our cloud business area. As you can see, we also have two smaller what we call business areas, but they are industry verticals, Marine and Hospitality. It's in the name, you understand which industries they are catering to. Here, I want to talk you through what we have done within each of the BAs. First of all, business services has a total revenue of NOK 65 million for this quarter.
That is slightly down compared to where we were, same period last year, and that predominantly stems from a slower sales of new large ERP projects in the Nordics. We have still a 14% margin and a EBITDA of NOK 9.1 million. EA & BPM, which is Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management, we have a total revenue this quarter of NOK 24 million, with a EBITDA of NOK 5.2 million. What's interesting here to note is the growth rate, 23%. We are satisfied with that, and we think that it's possible to even get this higher. The same goes for the EBITDA margin, 21.3%.
With volume, we expect to see a slight improvement in the EBITDA margin. Cloud ended the quarter with NOK 32 million in revenue. That is a 20% growth compared to where we were same period last year, with an EBITDA of NOK 3.4 million or 12% EBITDA margin. Hospitality, we are installing and delivering automated check-in and check-out kiosks to hotels, predominantly in Nordics and in Continental Europe. We are growing faster now, 75 percent, or sorry, 74% growth year-on-year, with NOK 2.1 million Norwegian krone in revenue.
Part of that revenue, around NOK 350,000, stems from delivery of software to the Flytoget, or the airport express train project. We had a negative EBITDA this quarter, and that's predominantly because summertime is the high season for hotels, which means that we are not able to install many of our kiosks during that period. Hence, we have a revenue lower than in a normal or non-seasonal, non-summer season quarter. So we expect this to improve for fourth quarter. Marine is on a fantastic journey. As you may remember, we restructured Marine during all of 2022.
Now we are showing NOK 12.5 million revenue, which is back to the level that the company had before we started the restructuring. We have an EBITDA of NOK 5.4 million, which is 43%, EBITDA margin. This is, for us, a very healthy contribution now, and, while we may not be able to keep 43% for the coming quarters, we are gonna see high revenue, sorry, EBITDA margins for the future. Here, this is a busy slide, and what we're showing here is the last seven quarters, how each of the—how the revenue for each of the business areas have developed, accordingly.
As you can see, what this kind of wave here indicates, we have seasonalities in our business. Typically, first quarter and fourth quarter are the best quarters, and you can see third quarter actually represents a low point in our annual cycle. As you can see, we had first quarter this year, NOK 150 million. This quarter, we are at NOK 132 million. But if you look at the pattern for 2022, we expect a significant lift from third quarter to fourth quarter. We saw that in 2022, and we expect to see the same thing for December, or sorry, fourth quarter, 2023.
Also on the top, recurring revenue, it is a high number now. We have been around 35%, recurring, revenue. That is very high for the third quarter, predominantly because we had a slower activity on the consulting side. So the relative portion of the recurring revenue has grown for this quarter. Also, revenue outside Norway hovers around between 38% and 40%, and the third quarter is just a confirmation on that. So I think it's important for you to notice that we are a consulting heavy as a company, and that has seasonal implications for us, and you should expect to see this also going forward.
Sales and development over the last seven quarters. We have NOK 135 million in signed contracts for scope extensions or new work. That is 115% up compared to where we were a year ago, where so Third quarter 2022, NOK 63 million in new sales, while Third quarter this year, NOK 135 million. Again, we also have seasonality in these numbers, but not so pronounced as we have in the revenue side. On the right-hand side, the graph on the right-hand side, you can see how each of the business areas fares in terms of sales improvement from one year ago.
Apart from Business Services all the other BAs have significantly increased the sales success in third quarter this year. Then some important wins during Third quarter. First of all, we have Flytoget. That is something we have mentioned in several previous presentation. It's a very important contract for us, both for-- and this is won by our Hospitality, NOK 22 million over four years. And a big chunk of that is actually software development that actually goes into this ticket vending machines. So we are very happy to be working with Flytoget, and we have an excellent cooperation with them. Then we won another contract in Hospitality for CABINN Hotels in Denmark.
They have several hotels, and as you can see here, this contract has a value of NOK 6 million over three years. So it's a significant amount of check-in kiosks that will be installed. And we, of course, also have all the other upsales possibilities here. Another important win for us was our BORI BBL partner extended their contract with us and enlarged it. This is cloud outsourcing or actually outsourcing of the IT infrastructure to us. Seventeen million NOK over three years, and has already started up this contract.
DoblougGruppen, also a civil engineering and construction company, a new contract for cloud, NOK 4 million, duration over three years and has already started as we speak. Lastly, we wanted to, and this we are very proud of, Sykehusinnkjøp signed an agreement with us for a solution for planning and performance management using Hypergene as a system. So we will install that, implement it, and it has a NOK 4 million value over the three years. Those are the, let's say, samples of the type of contract we are going after and that we managed to close in the last quarter. Cash flow development.
So as you can see here, we have, at the end of the quarter, we had NOK 40 million in cash. What's important to do here is to look at or comparing third quarter this year versus third quarter last year. Last year, we had a negative cash flow from operating activities of 14 million. This year, we are actually cash flow neutral from operations. Additionally, in the previous year, we had negative cash flow, both from financing and investing activities at a total of NOK 7 million, while we have a positive 1 million combined cash flow from those two financing activities and investment activities during this quarter.
FX effects are mostly unrealized effects. So we have NOK 40 million booked as cash balance at the end of the quarter. However, also this quarter, we had a large chunk of payments happening or coming into us after we have closed the book. So, as per 23rd of October, we had NOK 55 million Norwegian kroner in the account. So we are happy with the development. We see that we are close to having also positive cash flow from operations, and of course, we are working hard every day to achieve that. Balance sheet, as you have seen many times now, we do not see much movements in our balance sheet.
We have an equity ratio of 52%-53%, and there are only small movements on the balance sheet if you compare to end of 2022. So we have a total balance now of NOK 509 million, while we had NOK 515 million in total balance sheet value at the end of 2022. So that is what we wanted to share with you today. I also would like to talk a little bit about the outlook, the way we see the world. We expect a similar growth rate for 2023, as we saw in 2022. So that means around 20% growth. We see a robust demand for cloud services and Hospitality.
We also, of course, expect to continue the growth story, and building SaaS revenue base for themselves. Marine also, we are bidding on several large projects that is in the market now, and we expect to have clarity on these bids within fourth quarter. We also are seeking and pursuing cooperation with AI and Machine Learning companies. And we have great hopes for some of those partnerships that we are looking at. EA & BPM hyperautomation is sought after, but we also see a general interest from the marketplace for the consulting services that EA & BPM is providing.
We are actually looking at employing a significant amount of new consultant into the company for this part of our business. Lastly, I have to say again, we are still chasing better margins, and we believe that we will be able to improve the margin itself in the coming quarters. With that, I'll give you a couple of minutes and then come back and answer the questions you may have. Thank you. Yes, and thank you for the questions. We have received quite a few, and I'll take them one by one here. The first question: How do you see Unit4's decision to move to only cloud-based offerings will impact Arribatec's different business areas?
First of all, we think this is an opportunity for us, and this will create more business for Arribatec. Our customers, many of them will, we think, choose to go on a, call it a, digitalization run. And we stand ready to help them both with the actual, let's say, move from on-prem to cloud-based services for Unit4, but also to help them technically through our cloud services and also with a change management, so to speak, offerings from EA & BPM. So we actually see the decision by Unit4 having a positive impact on several of our business areas. Let me see. When does the company expect to get to a positive cash flow situation?
As you have seen now from the Third quarter numbers, we are basically cash flow break even for the quarter t his is a volume game for us and also a profitability game. We expect to stay close to cash flow positive through this year. And then as soon as we get higher volumes, we will also see a positive impact on our cash flow, particularly in the operating cash flow. However, this is also a matter of timing in terms of account receivables and account payables, obviously. But overall, we expect with a little bit more volume to be in a positive territory for cash flow.
This is a longer question. I'll take it in English. It's written in Norwegian, but anyway, the third largest owner, Arriba Invest, has, according to previous given information, lock-up on the last third of the shares that they are holding. That lockup is relevant until April twenty twenty-four. Further, the question says, newly updated shareholder list shows that Arriba now have started to sell these shares. And the question is: "Is the lockup agreement, has the lockup agreement been changed?" So first of all, we have noticed that Arriba Invest has sold shares. And, as to the question here, we have not changed any terms related to the lockup.
And then the comment related to the Danske Bank credit facility. We have used about NOK 14 million of it per the end of the last quarter, as you saw on the chart. And we had only a drawdown of a little bit less than NOK 1 million in Second quarter. Again, we are clearly working towards a positive cash flow for the business. We are looking for aggressive growth also for next year. It requires cash, but we have, as I said, a plan for staying cash flow positive as soon as we get a little bit higher volumes.
We have a good dialogue with Danske Bank, and we will continue to use the credit facility as the fluctuations in our cash flow, both seasonal and also moves. Let me just refresh here. One more regarding the outlook. The company expects similar growth rate in 2023 as compared to 2022. What about 2024? We have not finished our, let's say, operating plans and financial budgeting for next year, but there is no secret that we still continue to look for growth at least the same level as we have experienced both in 2022 and 2023.
However, that is our ambition, and our final plans and budgets will show what is possible to achieve. One more refreshing here. Yeah. There's no further questions. Thank you for participating, and by this, I would just say thank you for be here and see you again in a couple of months. Thank you.