Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Cambi's fourth quarter results presentation. I am Dragoș Tâlvescu, director of corporate relations at Cambi, and I will moderate today's call. In the coming half hour or so, you will hear from Cambi CEO, Eirik Fadnes, CFO, Mats Tristan Tjemsland, and Managing Director of Cambi Invest, Maarten Kanters. Together, they will walk you through the most important developments in the quarter and our current business and financial outlook. At the end, we will be happy to answer your questions, including those received before the start of this call. You can submit questions in writing any time during the call in the Q and A tab. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and will be available for replay on our website later today.
Before we begin, let me caution that in the presentation we may make forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements. Now, without further ado, I will give the floor to Eirik Fadnes, Cambi CEO.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Let me start by saying that 2022 was a historical year for Cambi. As a focused business built on decades of operational experience and proprietary technology, we have a world-leading market position. The results we present for the fourth quarter today demonstrates the benefits of that focus and the scalability of our business. In our 30th anniversary year, we entered two new markets, Morocco and Bulgaria. We launched and sold new products and improved energy efficiency and acquired technologies to broaden our product portfolio. Moving on to the key financials. As we have talked about in previous quarters, it has been a turbulent year, with the geopolitical situation affecting our project in Ukraine and also progress on other projects being affected in the first part of the year. Material prices have increased significantly.
We've experienced longer lead time on materials, and we have experienced a general inflationary pressure. Towards the end of the third quarter, supply chain challenges started to ease, customers gained pace at site, and we had an accelerated progress on projects in the fourth quarter. Despite the challenges, we expanded our margins and improved our operating cash flow and achieved this while making good progress in meeting our medium-term order intake targets and also maintaining our gross margins on new projects signed. For the year, the value of new equipment orders exceeded NOK 900 million, and we closed off the year with a record order backlog of more than NOK 1 billion. The demand for spare parts and other services reached record levels.
Revenue from spare parts and consulting increased by 31% from last year with a margin expansion of 460 basis points, delivering on our strategy of increasing recurring revenues. The services segment's total revenue ended $10 million lower than last year due to fewer upgrade projects executed in the year. Due to the mentioned margin expansion, the gross margin in services ended in line with the year before. With the recently announced upgrade project in Dublin, we expect the segment to deliver growth in revenues from 2021 levels in 2023. I want to thank everyone in Cambi for their hard work and determination to achieve an excellent performance in this challenging external environment. Let's take a look at the new contracts that we signed in the fourth quarter.
Cambi signed three contracts in the fourth quarter with a landmark project in the U.S., an industrial client in South Africa, and the first contract in Bulgaria. In Bulgaria, we signed a sizable contract to supply two THP systems for the main wastewater treatment plant in Sofia. In San Francisco, we signed a major contract to supply three THP systems as part of a comprehensive project to upgrade the biosolids digester facility. In South Africa, we will supply two THP systems to treat industrial biosludge at Sasol Secunda operations. Let us now turn to the outlook. Going into 2023, conditions in our industry remain attractive, and we started the year with a record level order backlog with expectations to deliver growth in both revenue and profits in 2023.
Over the longer term, our growth opportunity is very exciting, driven by urbanization, need for investments in critical infrastructure, tighter regulations, and for our industry to be more sustainable. Sludge management has a critical role to play, and over the coming decade, wastewater treatment plants need significant investments to transition to net zero. To meet that target set by an increasing number of utilities and cities, they need to adopt new solutions and become more sustainable. This makes our thermal hydrolysis solution well-positioned. I am confident in our ability to deliver excellent outcomes as a high-quality business with strong market position, proprietary technology, and our strategy to ensure sustainable growth. Overall, we deliver a strong set of results for the fourth quarter, and we are highly confident in our prospects.
Reflecting this confidence on behalf of the board, I'm pleased to announce a dividend of EUR 15 per share, subject to AGM approval. We are making good progress in our DBO developments, which I will now let Maarten take you through. Over to you, Maarten.
Thank you, Eirik. Let me talk you through the updates on DBO projects, both during the fourth quarter and also a little bit on the recent developments here. In Q4, we saw several customers announcing DBFO projects to the market, and we delivered a number of expression of interests as well as indicative proposals. These were mainly aimed towards projects in the earlier stages of development. While on the more mature market opportunities, the progress was a bit slow in the quarter, with most of the projects we were focusing on were awaiting customer actions or decisions. After reviewing the capital needs across the mature DBO pipeline, we foresee that the development approach that we have followed will be less capital-intensive than anticipated.
Therefore, we are acknowledging that Cambi is expected to take ownership stakes in these projects that range between 15%-40%, which is slightly lower than the 30%-50% which we communicated at the time of the IPO. This is mainly the result of those projects that are progressing well. Those are the ones where we have joined forces with strong partners. In addition to that, we are increasingly confident that we will be able to partially finance the equity contribution through the profits generated from equipment sales into the projects. Over to the recent developments, with a conditional award on a U.S. DBFO project. This is a project that we've been working on since 2020. The public procurement process has now been completed.
That resulted in a conditional award to the consortium that Cambi is a part of. After we submitted a proposal, a year ago, that scored strong on both technical and financial selection criteria as set by the municipality. This is a great step forward. Though the award is conditional on two elements, it's both to negotiate final terms with the municipality, as well as obtaining the necessary permits to build and operate the sludge treatment facility. For these, the project requires approval by regulatory bodies. Some permits are to be provided by the municipality itself, while others require state EPA approval. It's especially the latter that's difficult to predict here. A firm DBFO contract might be signed towards the end of this year. We will come with more concrete information on the project once this is available.
For this particular project, we are working together with strong, well-established local partners, where Cambi will take a minority interest in the project and also deliver core technology. I'll move on to the next page, please, for a recycling update. On the existing biosolids handling contract, everything went according to plan. We were also able to secure two additional contracts in the quarter in Sandefjord and Gjøvik, with a combined value of just short of NOK 2 million. In terms of soil sales, typically the fourth quarter has low activity as the winter season starts, but still the sales volumes were slightly above the year before. For the entire year, the soil sales volume ended up at 220,000 tons, which is just 10,000 tons less than the year before.
This is mainly due to lower activity in the construction sector in Norway, as I explained on earlier updates. I move to the Soil Factory. All the equipment has now been delivered and the plant is set up. We've started the operations. We expect to be fully operational later this month. As you can see from the picture here on the left-hand side, the production has already started. You can see that there are several bags, pallets full of bags ready for shipment. We've seen an increasing interest from garden centers in these peat-free products, and we expect to be able to produce the planned volume of soil bags ahead of the spring season. With that, I'll give the word to Mats for the financial results.
Thank you, Maarten, and good morning, everyone. I will now take you through the financial results for Q4 and full year 2022. We're happy to report a strong financial performance in the last quarter of 2022. Q4 revenues ended at NOK 157 million, which is up NOK 70 million from the NOK 87 million same quarter last year. A key driver for this strong performance is accelerated execution on equipment projects as the supply chain challenges experienced early in 2022 started to ease and several projects started to gain pace, as also Eirik mentioned earlier. For the full year of 2022, the revenue was NOK 440 million, slightly below NOK 458 million in 2021.
EBITDA was at NOK 29 million in Q4, which is up NOK 34 million from the negative NOK 5 million in Q4 2021. The increase is primarily driven by higher project revenues, in Q4, gross margins also saw an uplift from 52% to 57%, contributing positively to the EBITDA. Sales and general and admin expenses were NOK 12 million higher than the same quarter in 2021, reducing the EBITDA. A key driver for this is increased sales activities, more hired in personnel, and a general cost increase from inflation pressure that we see. For the full year of 2022, the EBITDA was NOK 3 million, down from NOK 39 million in 2021. Looking at the Cambi Group segment on the next slide. The revenue was NOK 136 million in Q4, up from NOK 66 million same quarter last year.
The uplift is primarily driven by reaching delivery milestones in several equipment projects. The project in Lviv, Ukraine remains on hold under the clause of force majeure. Services revenue ended the quarter at NOK 22 million, which is slightly up from NOK 18 million in the same quarter of 2021. For the full year of 2022, the segment revenue was NOK 341 million, down from NOK 359 million in 2021. The EBITDA ended at NOK 31 million in Q4, up NOK 35 million versus NOK -4 million in the same quarter last year. A key driver for this uplift is the revenue increase from projects and also the previously mentioned improvements in gross margins. Looking at the Cambi Invest segment. The reported revenue in Cambi Invest is solely from Grønn Vekst, part of the recycling sub-segment.
The revenue here was NOK 21 million in Q4, which is in line with the same quarter last year. For the full year of 2022, the revenue was NOK 99 million, which is at the same level as full year 2021. There were no major disruptions in production or deliveries of soil volumes. EBITDA for this segment was negative NOK 2 million, which is slightly down from negative NOK 1 million in the same quarter last year. This reduction is primarily driven by increased activity in developing DBO projects. Now looking at the order intake and the order backlog development for the company. We are very pleased to report a record high order intake in Q4 at NOK 604 million, which is significantly up from the same quarter last year.
The order intake is primarily from the three mentioned contracts signed during the quarter, which Eirik mentioned earlier. For the full year of 2022, the order intake was over NOK 1 billion, up from NOK 480 million in 2021. Looking at the order backlog, it reached an all-time high by the end of Q4, surpassing the NOK 1 billion mark. This order backlog provides a solid financial foundation for the coming years for Cambi, let's have a little bit close look at the backlog distribution. Based on our estimates, we have indicated the order backlog distribution over the next years on the left-hand side, we estimate that close to 80% of this backlog is executed before 2025. Looking at the order backlog currency distribution, we see that the backlog mainly consists of U.S. dollars and euros.
These two currencies make up more than 3/4 of the total order backlog as of end of 2022. Now looking at some recent announcements in 2023 that will have an impact on the order backlog, which we reported end of Q4. There's one negative and one positive announcement, which in sum will reduce the order backlog in Q1 2023. The first one is related to the project in Calgary, the large contract to deliver THP to the Bonnybrook Wastewater Treatment Plant in Calgary, Canada will not be extended. This contract was signed in 2016, but has repeatedly been delayed by the customer due to budget constraints. The financial impact for Cambi is limited as the latest project schedule expected the project to begin its execution in 2026.
Although we have now removed it from the backlog, we are optimistic that there may be an opportunity to revive the project on a later stage. The second announcement is related to the upgrade project in Dublin, here we have signed the early works for the upgrade project in the Ringsend Wastewater Treatment Plant in Dublin. These two announcements will have an impact on the order backlog in Q1. We see support from strong economic, regulatory and environmental drivers driving the demand for our products going forward. Let's have a look at the equipment contracts. As of end of 2022, we are pleased to report that we have signed NOK 911 million of equipment contracts.
We previously have communicated an expectation to sign NOK 1 billion of equipment contracts in the two-year period 2022 and 2023. Reaching this NOK 1 billion target for 2022 and 2023 is expected shortly. On the back of this, we have now also decided to establish a new target to sign NOK 1.2 billion of new equipment contracts for a two-year period, 2023 and 2024. Let's have a look at our balance sheet. The assets were NOK 574 million end of 2022, up from NOK 523 million. Intangible assets increased from the transaction with Veolia in the middle of 2022, where we acquired the complementary technologies, as Eirik mentioned earlier. The cash position increased to NOK 167 million in 2022, up from NOK 70 million end of 2021.
Financial assets, mainly money market funds, decreased from NOK 201 million as of end of 2021 to NOK 102 million end of 2022. The reduction was partly used to fund the transaction with Veolia I mentioned earlier. To summarize this, Cambi maintains a very strong financial position. With that, we are ready to move over to the Q and A section.
We have received several questions. I will start by reading out the first one. You can still submit questions in the Q and A tab. The first question is: What was the average margin for projects completed in 2022?
I think I can answer that. We see that our projects typically have a gross margin of above 50% and which is depending on the scope of projects. Larger projects typically have lower gross margin. On the top of this, we typically have other project-specific costs such as payroll, hiring personnel, and travel, and et cetera. This will reduce the gross margin on projects or this will reduce the average margin for projects. I cannot go into the details on the exact project margin that we have, but this gives an idea.
Thank you, Mats. Next question. On your updated order intake target, could you elaborate the changes on a like-for-like basis and if you have applied a different foreign exchange rate compared to Q3?
The 911 that we reported on equipment contracts, it uses the actual FX rates in our books, not the fixed Q1 FX rates. Like for like, the equipment order intake in using the Q1 fixed FX rates would be NOK 810 million . We have a positive contribution from FX development. In addition, also the 911 also now includes smaller variation orders, which are below the NOK 5 million mark, which we excluded previously.
Okay. Next question. In terms of backlog, we expected NOK 456 million to be executed in 2023. The question is: Could you provide any details on how large share of this relates to equipment contracts?
The backlog distribution is an estimate that we have made. I cannot comment on the exact share of, you know, how much relating to the equipment contracts. I think a good proxy would be the historical share that the equipment revenues make out for Cambi.
Thank you, Mats. The next question. Notice is the solid gross margin in Cambi Group compared to last year, while personnel expenses and OpEx went somewhat up. Given the cost inflation across industries, how much have we managed to pass over to customers, and what is our expectation on margins going forward?
Yeah. Thank you for the question. I mean, we see inflation pressure across the regions where we operate. What I can say is that we have been successful in maintaining our margins on new contracts signed. Larger contracts that have typically a long duration, we also have included price escalation mechanisms in the contract. In sum, we are able to protect our margins.
One more question. Are there any details you could provide on the conditional award of the DBO contract announced in February? What assessments are you doing in terms of return requirements, leverage, and risk-sharing?
There's a lot I would like to talk about, but I need to be careful what we share here. As the contract is, I mentioned already, it's conditional on final terms and obtaining necessary permits. While securing those conditions, we will, in parallel, together with our partners, also work on putting in place all the necessary commercial contracts connected to the plant. That has a significant impact on how the project looks. At this point, there's lot of moving objects that we still need to secure. Once we have more concrete information about the project economics, we will come back and inform the market.
Okay. Doesn't look like we have received any other questions. Give it maybe 10 more seconds. Okay. It seems like these were all the questions for today. Thanks to all attendees for your attention. We hope that you found the presentation insightful. The video recording will be available under the Reports and Presentations tab on Cambi's website later today. We also invite you to follow us on LinkedIn, where we regularly post the latest updates. Thank you all, and have a good day.