Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Kitron's first three quarters and Q3 results for 2016. My name is Peter Nilsson, I'm the CEO. With me today is Cathrin Nylander, CFO of Kitron. The third quarter is characterized by some weaker sales than last year in July. Stronger demand, however, in August and September. Overall, the underlying growth was negative of 2% in the quarter, but still achieving NOK 462 million of sales. Order backlog, however, is strong. We see a continued underlying growth of 11%. Overall profitability increased from 5.6% margin last year to 6.5% margin, generating just over NOK 30 million in EBIT. Our working capital continued to reduce by 8%, now below NOK 500 million.
Overall, for the first three quarters, we see an underlying growth of 2.7%, pretty much impacted by customer demand in July. Profitability for the first nine months 5.5% versus 4.8% last year. If we adjust for the one-off in Q1 of NOK 5 million, the profitability is 5.8% for the full nine months. Capital efficiency, of course, the same continued to improve. In the quarter, we signed one new major contract with Dentsply Sirona, the world's largest manufacturer of professional dental products and technologies. We estimated the contract at the time to be worth around NOK 100 million for the first three years.
We're very happy that this initial production has already kicked off, and we're now quoting on specific programs for that contract. Very promising outlook on Sirona. Also in the quarter, we strengthened our cooperation with Aidon and received orders for more than NOK 100 million over the next three years. Manufacturing really starting up and output coming out on that. This increases our current business scope with Aidon and solidifies growth in Kaunas, Lithuania operations. Some other significant changes in the quarter in September and October, the two largest shareholders in Kitron, Sievi Capital and Kongsberg, sold all of their outstanding shares, significantly increasing the free float of the Kitron share.
The investors are primarily Norwegian and some Swedish institutional investment, investors and funds.
Okay, I'll talk a bit about the financial statements as of Q3 2016. As mentioned, we had a negative growth in the quarter of 1.1%. We still have a growth in the industry sector, but as you can see in the quarter, the growth is only 9.4%, and it's basically due to postponements into future quarters. Another thing that we can see is that the medical devices is slightly down 10.8% compared to last year, which is actually more of a seasonal effect where medical devices were strong last year. In the quarter, we have a reduction of NOK 5 million in total.
Offshore marine is down 60%, as you can see, in the quarter, and that is actually about NOK 10 million, so the other ones have grown NOK 15 million. It's still, you know, a quarter which is basically stable compared to last year. If we look on the totality, for the three quarters this year, we're at the growth of 6.7%, and it's about up NOK 96 million approximately. We see here industry, 36% cumulative, and to compare it with offshore marine, 64.9%. Industry has actually grown compared to last year, about NOK 110 million, and offshore marine is over NOK 60 million down, meaning that the other ones have grown about NOK 150 million in total.
We have a growth, but it's shadowed by the offshore marine in total when we look at the total figures. When we look on the sites, we see continued growth, strong growth in Lithuania and Sweden, but less of a growth in Lithuania for this quarter. Again, the same reasons as we told before. Norway is down, basically expected, due to the offshore marine reduction and also that they had a strong medical quarter last year. There is a 15% reduction in Norway and Sweden is up 13.4%, Lithuania up 15.7%, and the others are slightly down 4.2%, basically a reduction in the U.S.
Now, looking at the profitability level, as mentioned, we have an EBIT margin for the quarter of 6.5% and a profit of NOK 30.1 million, and compared to NOK 26 million last year. What we can see then is that we have an improvement in margins in several sites, meaning that the cost effects, cost reductions that we're doing are taking effect. What we can see compared to last year, there is a strong improvement in Lithuania. Just as a comment, when we look at this graph, that we had a one-off in Q1 2016, bringing the margin down. For this quarter, we would like to highlight something that is not necessarily spoken so much about and affects our net profit.
It is the fact that we have group internal loans that affect our net finance. It's $11 million loan and then EUR 1.9 billion loan. What you can see that the net financial items in Q3 2016 is -NOK 7.4, where the RGU was -NOK 0.4, and the other financial items are NOK 3.2. Compared to last year, we have positive net financial, w here the net RGU was +NOK 8.7, and net financial was -NOK 3.8. Whereas with the RGU is seriously affecting our net profit, we have actually improved the other financial items. We're showing this to make our accounts more transparent going forward.
You can also see here the earnings per share that we see as well, which is the reason for this explanation that we're having. Lithuania drives the profitability in the quarter, as you can see. Norway, in spite of a reduction of NOK 28 million in the quarter compared to last year, they're showing approximately the same result, which is an increase of the margin from 3.3% to 3.6%. Sweden has a reduction in the margins, even though they're growing. We see that they have some efficiency challenges which affects their margin currently, which we're working on. Lithuania has improved from last year from NOK 4.3 million to NOK 8.1 million in results and an improvement in the margin from 3.8% to 6.3%, a substantial one.
The others are on the same level as last year, basically. Cash flow. The Q2, or Q3 cash flow, I'm sorry, is NOK 36.4, basically on the same level as the NOK 6 million above the profit and slightly above last year. Now, what we can see is that we have removed the working capital compared to last year, down to NOK 497 million, and it's attributable basically to improved supplier terms in trade payables but also lower sales in the quarter or better linearities. We have lower trade receivables. The cash conversion cycle is 99, which is a reduction from 104 last year.
It's a figure that is slightly higher than we want it to be at this point of time in the year, but we know we will work on it during Q4. Also the ROC, but that has improved from 17.2 to 19.3 this year for Q3. We see improvements although we are wanting more of this progress. Market development.
A couple of customer programs have pushed out demand from the third quarter over the next few quarters, really solidifying high demand from our Swedish and Lithuanian operations. We also see our general strengthening of our order backlog. 11%, as I said earlier, of underlying growth, driven by defense industry and energy telecom over the next of the next two to three quarters. NOK 980 million in order backlog compared to NOK 916 million of last year. Next slide.
Our outlook. Our original outlook for this year was between NOK 2,050 million and NOK 2,250 million with an EBIT margin of between 5.3% and 6.3%. Due to currency effects in some of these postponed projects, we expect revenue to be in the lower half of this indicated range. For the full year, revenue is driven by industry and defense aerospace sectors, and the profitability continues be driven by a cost reduction and improved efficiency overall. For Kitron, thank you for watching our third- quarter webcast, and we'll see you for the fourth quarter.