We will start with the highlights for the first quarter, followed by a sales and operations update. We will also provide an update on the construction project. After that, Jean-Charles will present 2022 annual report, then we'll provide comments on P&L, cash flow, and balance sheet, as well as a more detailed view of our financing. We will close off the annual report with our progress and at the end of the presentation will be a Q&A session, and you can ask questions in the chat box and Teams. On to the highlights. First, I want to put emphasis on that in the first quarter we had EUR 5.6 million revenue, which is up 55% last year from the first quarter last year.
The average revenue per kilo came in at EUR 15.10, which is EUR 0.60 up from the last quarter of 2000. This increase was mainly driven by an increased proportion of large-sized fish. Large-sized fish are sold at higher prices than smaller-sized fish. The production is another highlight in the quarter reached 421 tons, and also that is a new record for The Kingfish Company. We have been operating our phase II hatchery and our pump house since January, and we are nearing completion of our phase II grow out facility. I will come to that one. Another highlight in the United States is that we did start the sale of our first trial batch of fish that were produced in Maine at our location there, at our temporary location.
We also completed the shipments of broodstock from the Netherlands to Maine, so that we now have the complete start of a broodstock in Maine. Next slide. If we move on from the highlights and go in a little bit more detail as to sales. We increased our volume in the first quarter of 2023 to 375 tons. That was 18% higher than the last quarter of 2022. The increase in volume was driven again by solid demand in all our markets, both in food service and in retail. I feel we're doing very well on that one.
During, as I mentioned, during the quarter, we were able to increase proportion of large fish in our sales mix, and as a result of that, we were able to increase our average revenue per kilo above EUR 15. Overall, then, revenue for the quarter was EUR 5.6 million, which is no less than 55% higher than the first quarter of 2022. I would say a very satisfactory development. When we move to production, in terms of net growth, productivity, and total harvest volume, the first quarter of 2023 was the best quarter to date. We have been running at a steady state of our phase I here in Zeeland for a while now, but we still managed to further increase biomass production in the first quarter to 421 tons.
Which corresponds to a productivity of 0.86 kilogram of growth per cubic meter of growing space per day, which on a quarterly basis is also a new record for us. Mortality in production remains low, is on par with results last year. We continue without having had a mass mortality event for four years now, and our grow out systems are clearly robust. The new hatchery was commissioned in January, and we have already produced two rounds of juveniles with excellent results in terms of numbers and quality of those juveniles. The next years, we actually project to have a large capacity in juvenile production, more than we really need for phase II, and this will allow us to select only the highest quality juveniles, which will translate into further improvement of results in the grow out.
When we move to Maine, we like to highlight that since the end of last year, all state, federal, and local permits have been secured. In March this year, the local municipal board, review board, decided in our favor in an appeal that was filed by our opponents against the construction permit. In spite of the fact that they basically, they lost the appeal, they have now filed a new appeal with the Superior Court of Maine. We do remain confident that the courts will rule in our favor and that all permits will be sustained. We expect and hope that these matters will be resolved before the end of this year. Broodstock transfers from the Netherlands to Maine have now been completed. The shipments started last year, and all the parent fish are now on site to provide locally produced fingerlings.
We plan to continue to grow small numbers of fish in our temporary hatchery in Maine and create several broodstock groups before initiating large scale production after we started the construction, of course. We are currently selling some of the fish produced in Maine of a size around 2 to 3 kilos in a limited release batch of Dutch Yellowtail. These have been distributed to a number of restaurants and have been received with great enthusiasm. Construction, yeah. When we move on to the construction of our Zeeland phase II, 95% of all equipment has been installed and phase II is nearing completion. In January, we commissioned new pump house, new hatchery, and we connected to a new electricity grid, which now connect us directly to the windmills standing right in front of our building. All these are operating successfully.
As mentioned earlier also, the hatchery has already delivered two batches of fingerlings of excellent quality. We have, however, met some difficulties in completing the final instrumentation and automation of certain components of our grow out system. To ensure that all elements function as needed, we have delayed the date of stocking on the first grow out system till May, till next month. We project, though, that to have phase II fully operational by September 2022, with all systems stocked with fish. As a result of the project review and the revised planning, the CapEx forecast for phase II has been adjusted to EUR 95 million. This adjustment is mainly driven by the revised planning and the additional work needed for the grow out system.
It should be noted that the total CapEx amount for phase II also includes works for a potential further expansion, phase III, in fact. The first harvest from the phase II extension is expected to take place in the first quarter of 2024, we expect to reach full harvest run rate in the fourth quarter of 2024. As we conclude these highlights for the first quarter, I'm now handing over to Jean-Charles, who will provide comment on the 2022 financials. There you go.
Good.
Jean-Charles.
Yes. Thank you, Vincent, good afternoon, everyone. Now going back to 2022 and the presentation of the financial results, where Kingfish has demonstrated clear progress towards profitability. Before talking really about the results, I just would like to highlight the fact that we are changing slightly the presentation of the P&L, introducing the Operational EBITDA, which is the EBITDA before fair market value adjustment and also before growth expenses, and the growth expenses being the expenses that we incur now for the growth of tomorrow. That's mainly today, the expenses we incur in the U.S., particularly to run the hatchery. We think that with this presentation, we align with the market and our peers, and we will create better clarity in our financials.
Looking at 2022, we had a very good, very good year, with the revenue increasing very strongly by 81% to close to EUR 19 million. Also the Operational EBITDA declining the loss, the Operational EBITDA loss declining by 38% to EUR 3.9 million, which is an improvement of EUR 2.4 million. This despite the fact that we have encountered significant input price increase during the second half of the year, particularly with feed and energy, and we have been able to offset this price increase by increasing our own prices, but also by productivity and efficiency improvement in operations.
Zooming on the operating performance and especially the Operational EBITDA per kilo, we see that we are really on track to reach profitability as soon as we scale to 3,500 tons, which will be the case when phase II is fully operational. Running at 1,500 tons now, steady state capacity for the last 4 quarter, we can show that the EBITDA loss have halved compared to last year. We have a loss now of EUR 2.6 per kilo compared to EUR 5.3 per kilo last year, while the revenue during the same period increased by 30%. This is a clear improvement showing that we will be profitable when we reach the 3,500 tons from phase II.
Our cost of goods sold have increased, as a result of the higher prices, offset by the improving productivity and the lower FCR. We see a positive trend this year in production cost with the input price stabilizing or declining. That's feed, that's energy and some other products are the price, the cost is declining very heavily, sometimes by half. Also, we have been able to introduce new feed formulation with a reduced cost and improved performance. We have done, we are performing right now promising trials that should help us to continue this reducing the feed cost. Two, in build organization, marketing organization, and the support functions. In the first half of 2022, which has had an impact on the, on the cost in the second half of 2022.
The SG&A cost and the SG&A cost per kilo have increased in the second half of 2022. We are now sized, equipped, organized, also to deal with the 3,500 ton that we will have starting in 2024 and 2025. Which mean that will really help us to reach profitability level at the time when we reach our full capacity of phase II. Cash-wise, we are also reducing the cash burn from operation per kilo sold from EUR 6.6 to EUR 4.9, which we are going in the right direction. Working capital has increased, which is the reason why the total net cash burn on operating activity has increased.
This is a result of the increase of working capital because of the inflation, for the cost of the biomass, but also increasing our price has an impact on the receivable. Which is the reason why the cash burn for 2022 has increased by EUR 1.2 million. However, during the period, we have received the first two tranches of the equity raise that we did in September last year, so approximately EUR 20 million. We have received another EUR 15 million in January 2023. Looking at financing. On phase II, we have spent EUR 33 million until the end of 2022, and EUR 82 million until the end of Q1.
We are fully funded to complete the construction in September 2023 for phase II, with the remaining facility available in the SFA, the lease facility, and the proceed from the third tranche of the capital raise that we received in January, EUR 15 million. We are now monitoring our liquidity position, our liquidity needs to finance the biomass and the working capital growth for phase II, and also to comply with our financial covenants, particularly the liquidity covenant in the third quarter of this year, as well as the cash that we need to prepare the future extension project, whether it's in Zeeland or in the U.S. We are currently looking at different options and different timelines, and we are considering raising additional financing, including equity, in the second half of this year.
Okay. back to me, I guess. Some comments on our ESG targets. Two years ago, we introduced an ESG program in which we seek to improve our ESG targets by 25% by 2025. This is our so-called 25/ 25 Program. As such, we are pleased to report that since 2020, we have so far reduced our CO2 footprint by 12.4%, and our fresh water use by 40%. All our electricity comes from sustainable sources, wind and solar. Including other sources of energy, 86% of the total is coming from renewable sources. We will continue to work on increasing that percentage by reducing, or hopefully even at some point of time eliminating, the use of natural gas and fuel.
We renewed in 2022 all our existing certifications, and we also obtained a Raised Without Antibiotics certification by BAP. We are the first facility in Europe to obtain this certification. Due to a shift in feed supply during 2022, we did not accomplish our targeted reduction of the Fish In-Fish Out ratio. Mitigation plan is now in place. We are still committed to reaching our long-term target in 2025. For more details on our operations and our sustainability targets, please refer to our integrated annual report, which has been available online since early this morning. Moving on to our business outlook. As we have mentioned before, we will more than double our capacity after commissioning our phase II extension.
This will enable us to meet the growing demand of yellowtail kingfish and fish protein in general. We are on a firm path towards profitability as we are moving forward to reaching this full capacity in Zeeland. This extension will not only provide us with the effects of scale, but also enable us to further improve our production KPIs and reduce costs. With our operational track record of improvements quarter on quarter, as well as by the progress we are making by fully moving to the third generation of our fish, Kingfish is ready to become profitable. We project to conclude the appeals of our licenses in Maine this year, and in the meantime, we continue the detailed planning and design of both the project in Maine and a potential phase III extension in the Netherlands. If I conclude stating maybe once more our business case, we.
Next one. We believe that Kingfish has a sector-leading operational track record with robust productivity, system stability, and a consistent output without any mass mortality events to date, and we will work very hard to avoid that forever. We are a market leader in Europe with a proven playbook, as well as advanced plans to capture the growth potential in the European and in the U.S. markets. Kingfish has developed advanced yellowtail genetics and will continue to develop these to further improve the performance of our fish in our RAS systems. In conclusion, we have an attractive, sustainable operating model with a low impact on natural resources, serving an increasing demand in the market. With that, let's open up for questions.
Yeah. Thank you, Vincent. If you have questions, you can raise your question in the chat or raise your hand.
Chat hands.
Any question?
Look at the chat.
No, no question yet.
I see. Can you provide the split of the large and small fish? If you are referring to the first quarter, I think we were doing 46% large fish and 54% small fish in the first quarter. There was a second question.
Yeah, that was the same question. Can you provide, some data about the size of the fish, so, during the quarter? that's what you-
That's, yeah.
... what you've mentioned. Any other questions? Okay. Sure. No one has any more questions. If there are no more questions, thank you very much for your attention, and we will close now this session. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.