Hi, again. We had some feedback that a lot of people were not able to get into this meeting. We went through our whole presentation, but I think it's not fair that so many people missed out on it through probably IT problems, which we are not exactly understanding what happened. I think it's fair to do it again. I hope you still bear with us. Our excuses for these hiccups. With that, I would like to go to our highlights of 2024. First of all, of course, welcome everyone. We are very pleased to share with you our fourth quarter results. By way of highlights, I would like to mention that in Q4, we achieved a 60% volume increase of our sales. For the first time, we surpassed 2,000 tons of shipped volume in the year.
Our operational EBITDA improved by EUR 1 per kilo in the year. Jean-Charles will comment further on that. Meanwhile, at the end of December, we initiated a biomass adjustment plan, which by now we have almost concluded. I will speak to that later. Finally, we executed a fully underwritten EUR 40 million private placement equity raise, which was concluded at the end of this year and had broad support of our shareholder base. This has strengthened the company's financial foundation, and it will support the acceleration of our sales towards full farm capacity. Moving on to production then, going a little bit more in detail. In the fourth quarter, our biomass production remained stable at 641 tons, which is very similar to the levels we had before. Our standing biomass reached the level of 1,120 tons, which is actually more than is optimal for production.
I'll come back to that. Production successfully met the various size requirements of our clients, but we noted an increasing demand for larger size fish. Before, for us, a large size fish was 3 kg or 3+ . Now our customers are asking us for 4+ and even 5+ , which we are able to meet to a certain degree, these larger size fish. As we advance with our fourth generation of fish on the farm, which we expect to grow faster, we believe we can also in the future meet demand for larger size fish while the production time will remain the same. As in the quarter before, we continue to control biomass production to growth, basically. As I mentioned, we had too much biomass on the farm. This control of growth resulted in higher than desirable feed conversion rate.
We did expect that under the circumstances, but it is not exactly where we want to be. This brings us to the action we have taken to improve that, a biomass reduction plan. Back in December, we decided to reduce this biomass from 1,120 ton to a more optimal level of around 900 ton, which we wanted to reach by the end of the first quarter in 2025. As mentioned, we are actually there now. We have done that. This biomass volume of around 900 ton is sufficient to produce the harvest level that we want to reach this year. It will help us to improve our production KPIs. To reduce biomass, we've taken out a certain amount of small fish, one kilogram fish out of our farm. We have filleted most of them and frozen them for sales as frozen fillets.
We also, at the same time, aggressively promoted the sales of small fish in certain retail sectors. That went actually quite well. As a result, we have accounted for a EUR 1.2 million reduction in the fair value of our biomass at the end of Q4 2024. Jean-Charles will say something more about that. If we move on to sales, when we compare with the fourth quarter of 2023, we actually increased our volume by 62%, which is, I would say, a very nice large step. This was driven by our enhanced sales capabilities. Our focus now is very much on food service. We have made good progress in the food service sector, both in Europe and in the U.S., and we will continue to do so.
Year on year, our revenue growth was 44% through higher volumes, although some of those volumes were sold at lower prices than the year before. I will come back on that in the next slide. Tariffs, of course, is the word that we see in every headline. Now, today, they may also happen on seafood in the U.S. We do not know for sure. We hope not, but it could happen. The U.S. is about 15% of our total sales volume. If indeed tariffs would happen, and if they would be in the order of 25%, it will be tough to grow volumes as fast as we plan to in the U.S. We will then have to focus more on Europe as we do today. It remains to be seen what Mr. Trump will do.
When it comes to price and size mix, the revenue per kilo in the quarter was EUR 13.40. This was lower, as you can see in the graph, than in 2023. This change in revenue is mostly the result of strong promotional activity in retail and mostly of small fish. When it comes to larger size fish, prices remained resilient despite some of the launch initiatives we did with new customers to get the product into the market. The full year revenue per kilogram was EUR 13.90, down from EUR 15.10 in the year before. This decrease was mainly a result of promotional activity. The push to—now we're just still on the previous slide, but okay—the push to reduce the number of small fish also resulted then in an increased proportion of small size fish in our mix.
It went up to 51% in the last quarter. We think from here on, we will see an increase of the portion of large size fish as we have no longer access to small size fish in our farm. With that, I'd like to hand over to Jean-Charles, who will focus on the financials.
Yes, thanks, Vincent. Good afternoon, everyone. Let's start with our production cost. Our production cost in Q4 remained above our target levels. Also, we've started to see a positive downward trend. The main driver continues to be our FCR, which stayed above normal. This was primarily due to the biomass growth control measures we maintained throughout the quarters. These measures put some pressure on efficiency. That said, we've also seen some improvement in other key production indicators. We are still benefiting from lower feed price. This is largely thanks to falling raw material cost, particularly fish meal and fish oil, and the strong partnership we've built with multiple feed suppliers over the past two years. These collaborations are now really paying off, delivering better quality feed, improved biological performance, and lower cost. It's also worth mentioning that we haven't yet fully captured the global drop in feed prices.
We expect further benefits in the near term. Energy prices have remained mostly stable in the quarter, with a few temporary spikes in the spot price late in Q4, but also into early Q1 2025, but without major impact for us for the time being. Outside of feed and energy, we've continued to keep both other fixed and other variable costs well under control and supported by several operational efficiency initiatives. Regarding profitability, this is our top financial priority. This remains achieving positive EBITDA in the short term. Q4 was a challenging quarter. Despite the strong volume growth that Vincent mentioned, we've invested significantly to open new markets and build relationships with new customers. This included promotional efforts and launch-related pricing activities. We have also now a fully staffed and strengthened sales and marketing team in place.
We spent EUR 1 million more in 2024 on sales and marketing than in 2023, and particularly in the third and fourth quarter of this year. Another factor impacting Q4 profitability was the cost of the fish harvested during the quarter, which reflected elevated production costs incurred throughout 2024. As a result, EBITDA per kilo declined compared to Q3 to minus EUR 3.4 per kilo. A quick note on the biomass reduction plan Vincent mentioned earlier. To accelerate the reduction of the biomass by approximately 300 metric tons by the end of Q1, we are harvesting a significant number, more than normal, of small fish. These small fish will be sold fresh or frozen via special channels at a lower price point. This has led to a write-down of the biomass value by EUR 1.2 million that we recorded in the last quarter of last year.
In our manager P&L that you can see in the press release, this write-down is treated as a one-off exceptional item. Despite this challenging quarter, the outlook remains unchanged. We continue to target EBITDA break-even during 2025. To get there, we are focusing on four key levers. First one is scaling to full capacity. This remains our most powerful lever. Over half of our cost base is fixed. In 2024, we sold around 50% of our capacity. We are now running closer to two-thirds, and we plan to ramp up to full capacity very quickly. With volume growth exceeding 60% in Q4, we think we have demonstrated strong commercial traction for the product, and we expect this momentum to continue into 2025 to fully benefit from the scaling effect. Second lever is focusing on high-value segment.
We are prioritizing large fish sales to food service customers because that's a segment with strong growth potential and also very attractive margin. Also here, we've done very good progress in the last quarter of the year, showing very strong growth in this segment. On the biological performance, we also see significant upside in this area. With the biomass reduction program completed in the course of Q1, we should soon be operating at a much more optimal level than we have been in 2024. This should result in stronger biological performance in the near term. We also expect gains from the fourth generation of fish that we introduced in the farm recently in the course of Q4. We will continue to benefit from ongoing R&D programs and other innovations that we are introducing in the farm. Last but not least, the cost discipline.
We continue to keep a very tight grip on cost. The last two years, we've learned a lot from new activities and pilots that we have conducted in both commercial and operational areas. We learned a lot from the success, but also from the challenges we faced in these areas. That really helps us to allocate resources to the areas which are most likely to yield the best return. We are really focusing on cost control, but also very good resource allocation to have the quickest return possible. As an illustration of the cost control and the resource allocation, we did some strategic review at the end of last year. We finally decided to consolidate the hatchery operation in the Netherlands.
You know that over the past few years, we maintained a pilot hatchery at our U.S. site to secure the broodstock and to support future production in the U.S. In parallel, we've significantly expanded our hatchery capacity in the Netherlands through our phase II project. We have a new state-of-the-art facility that was commissioned in early 2023, and it's now the world's largest yellowtail hatchery. This hatchery has performed exceptionally well for almost two years, delivering very high-quality, consistent output, and also successfully raising the fourth generation fish. Given that the U.S. expansion project is still pending a final investment decision due to the ongoing legal proceedings, we've explored alternative ways to ensure fingerling supply once the operation commences, starting in the U.S.
We are confident we can deliver eggs or fingerlings from the Netherlands to the U.S. should the dedicated hatchery not be operational when we start production in the U.S. As a result of this strategic consolidation in the Netherlands, we've impaired also the U.S. hatchery-related assets, fixed assets, leased assets, and deferred tax assets by approximately EUR 1.2 million. We recorded an exceptional provision for restructuring for an amount which is quite immaterial. It's really important to stress that this decision to consolidate the hatchery in the Netherlands does not impact the broader U.S. expansion plan, which remains unchanged. Vincent will provide more detail on this in the next few slides. Regarding our cash position and liquidity, the cash usage in 2024 was primarily driven by two factors and also in the last quarter of the year. First, the working capital increase.
We've seen a real strong buildup of working capital, particularly biomass and frozen inventory amounting for the whole year to about EUR 5 million. This is more than what we expected, but also this is more than what we need for normal operation. The second driver of the cash usage for the full year and for Q4 are the CapEx. We incurred the remaining phase II capital expenditure mainly related to the completion of the processing facility in Q1, but also the completion or the connection to the grid and the completion of some facilities outside of the farm. We now expect inventory and biomass levels to normalize over the next few quarters, especially for the frozen inventory. We've brought a dedicated sales manager for our frozen product line, which is already helping us to accelerate that channel development and reduce the frozen inventory.
Also, with the biomass reduction plan, we expect the biomass to reduce significantly starting in Q1 from this year. On the CapEx front, now phase II is fully completed. It is behind us, and we completed it in line with the plan and the budget we had. Going forward, capital expenditure in 2025 will be focused exclusively on the farm CapEx and will be significantly lower than in 2024. We have ended the year with EUR 8.8 million in liquidity and available financing facilities. On top of that, we recently, in January, completed the EUR 14 million equity raise that we announced late December 2024 with full support from all our key shareholders. This is a strong signal of trust in our strategy and the execution.
To wrap up, this quarter marks the first tangible result of the strategic steps we took in 2023 and early 2024, particularly the reinforcement of our sales team. These efforts are now driving some results with the volume growth accelerating very strongly in Q4 to over 60%. While we are not yet at EBITDA break-even, we have a clear and actionable path to profitability. The four key levers are in place, and our focus now is on executing again this plan and reaching our target in the course of 2025. With that, I'll hand it back to Vincent.
Great. Thanks, Jean-Charles. Expansion, I think in previous presentation also, we have been working on two different options. One in Maine, where we have a permit to build a facility with a capacity of up to 89,000 tons. The other one is here in Holland. Again, as also we've commented before, when we received all our permits by the end of 2022, beginning of 2023, those permits were appealed, both the municipal permit and the state permit. We went through several court cases. We have won all those cases. However, we are still awaiting the final decision of the Business Court of Maine on the state license. The hearing was in June, and frankly, we had expected a final judgment earlier, but it should come soon.
We expect to have a final decision by a judge within the next couple of months, and we expect it to be in our favor. In spite of these almost two years' delays, more than two years' delays now, we remain committed to the U.S. expansion plan, and there's no change there. However, in the meantime, we have been sort of paralyzed with the U.S. project. We have been working on our phase III project in the Netherlands, and we've been working on a design to increase production here by another 2,500, maybe even 3,500 tons. We submitted a permit request somewhere in 2023. We have cleared the permit basically with all but one entity, and that is the local municipality with whom we are in discussion about road access. I really expect to come to a favorable agreement there pretty soon.
A construction permit for phase III here in Holland should be issued. In the meantime, we have been working on the design. Of course, we built phase two. We have had it in operation for a year and a half now. There are many learnings. We have seen that we can do better in the next round. We have been working on a design for a phase three, which is also applicable in the United States, where we basically increase the size of all units, where we focus on simplicity, simplicity in terms of operation, simplicity in terms of maintenance, and most importantly, on a lower CapEx cost per kilo. We have done a sort of phase I or first step of the design, an LOD 100 as it is called. We are still not totally satisfied. We are going to do more work.
We want to see how we can do even better than, although that already looks better again than what we built before. We think we can still do better, so we keep working on that while we are waiting for one of these permits to come through. We continue working on expansion. As soon as we also here in our current operation meet the targets that we have set ourselves when it comes to sales and when it comes to cost, etc., we would move on with an expansion either in the U.S. or here in Holland. Talking about sustainability, back in 2020, we set ourselves targets to achieve over the next five years for several KPIs, amongst others, the forage fish dependency ratio and the CO2 produced per kilogram fish produced. The yellow line in this presentation here shows the 2025 target.
On both, you can see we have actually beaten the target already. When it comes to CO2, we did increase production further in 2024 from 5.2 to 4.2 kg of CO2 per kilogram produced. On the fish forage dependency ratio, it actually remains stable, although we reduced fish meal and fish oil in our feeds and also used more fish meal and fish oil from fish processing waste. The positive effect of this was offset by the higher feed conversion rate. We stayed basically where we were before. We do expect that with this biomass reduction, we will get a lower feed conversion rate, and then this number should also improve further. When it comes to the numerous certifications we have, we have renewed all of them in either 2024 or just here at the beginning of 2025.
The requirements for these certifications become more and more stringent year on year, but I'm glad to report that we have passed the grade everywhere also in the last round of certifications. Let me summarize the presentation by looking at the main takeaways. First, performance in 2024 has given us further confidence in the strength of our production platform. We have increased our production significantly. We have increased our sales. Once we have lowered our biomass, I think we also further increase our production KPIs. We are seeing momentum building up in our sales. We expect also that volumes in 2025 will be significantly higher than in 2024. Within the next two years, we hope to get to maximum production capacity of this facility. We are in 2025.
We remain very focused on our current operations, but we do continue to prepare preparations for an expansion in another location or in this location here in the nearby future. This morning, we presented, we published our annual report. I would encourage it's on our website. I would encourage you to take a look at it. It provides much more details on the issues we have or the things we have just discussed. It, of course, provides all the details on the financials, especially when it comes to sustainability and R&D. I think there's some really interesting materials in there, which I encourage you to take a look at. With that, thank you for your attention and support as we continue our journey. We will be looking forward to build on our current results and continue our growth trajectory. Very sorry for the IT hiccups.
I'm extremely glad most of you hang in there or have hung in there and were able to see our the second time we did our presentation. Now we are ready to take your questions. If you'd like to ask a question, please unmute, state your name and the organization you represent, and go ahead. Does it work? Can you also use the chat or not? You can also, no. It seems that there are no questions. I do hope this is not due to another IT hiccup. If so, if you have any questions, also please feel free to write to our investor relations and email, which you'll find on our website. We'll be happy to answer any question that you may have in writing, and we'll come back to you very fast on that.
Again, frankly, I hope my excuses for the IT hiccup, but I'm glad that most of you have been able to participate in our presentation. Thank you so much, and see you again in a couple of months.
Thank you.