Welcome to the quarterly presentation of NRC Group. I'm joined here today by Ole Gulsvik, our new CFO, who started in the company first of March. Ole will go through our key financial figures later in the presentation. We will also run a Q&A session at the end, and for those of you being online, you can write questions in chat as we go through the presentation. On the first page here, you see a picture from our Nittedal station project. This is a project that is showcasing NRC's business model and strategy in a perfect way. This is a picture from last week where we, within five days, demolished the old railway bridge through our own demolition and recycling company, putting in place a new railway bridge constructed by our civil construction unit.
Finally put in place, we have all rail technical disciplines reestablishing the operation of the rail tracks, putting in ballast, sleepers, rails, installing a new signaling system and a new catenary system all within five days. NRC Group, we build sustainable infrastructure, and our strategy is to be able to deliver all required work in that process. Quarter one started out with strict restrictions from the pandemic and was followed by the war in Ukraine and increased raw material prices. I would like to thank all our employees for the great work done, making sure all our projects run according to plan and limiting the effects of these external events. Because despite these external events, NRC Group see a positive development in Q1.
We deliver improved results, we deliver strong cash flow from operation, and the good order intake we saw throughout 2021 is starting to show in our revenues with a 7% growth rate, adjusted for currency. You see continued strong performance in Finland, while the increasing revenues and improved profit comes from a positive development in our Norwegian and Swedish operations. The order backlog is somewhat lower than what we have seen for the past 3 quarters, although at same level as last year. The reason for the somewhat lower order intake is the fact that we haven't won any bigger projects in Q1 . As said before, with a more focus towards bigger projects, our order intake will be a bit more volatile going forward. I guess you have also seen the 2 important wins published last week.
Our health and safety KPIs are showing mixed results. We do see a good improvement when it comes to the lost time incident frequency, and we also see an improvement when it comes to total recordable injuries. However, it is still at a too high- level, and this quarter, we also had one serious injury in our company. We cannot be satisfied with these results, and we need to continue the hard work to improve. The sickness absence rate is somewhat higher than same quarter last year, and this is due to the effects of the pandemic. As said, NRC Group build sustainable infrastructure, but we also care how we do it. April this year, we published our sustainability report, and I want to share a couple of highlights from that report today.
First of all, in our activities in 2021, more than 60% of our revenues would be classified as aligned according to the EU taxonomy. As more companies start to report on this, we believe this will highlight NRC Group's unique position and our unique business model in the construction industry. A second important achievement in 2021 is the fact that we were able to reduce our CO2 footprint by 13.5%. This was done by taking good choices in our projects and investments in more sustainable machinery. I'm happy to say that we are well on track in order to reach our 2024 target of reducing CO2 emissions from our operations with more than 30%. The war in Ukraine has created more uncertainty in the market, shown by higher raw material prices.
NRC Group has very limited exposure, direct exposure to Ukraine and towards Russia. We have seen very little impact from the rising material prices so far. We also believe to be well protected in the short- term for these increased material prices, and it's mainly connected to three reasons. First one being that our customer delivers most of our rail technical equipment and have the price and the supply risk for it. Second element is the fact that a majority of our contracts are indexed towards different construction cost indexes. In the case of increased material prices, revenues in the projects will increase at the same time. The third element protecting us in short- term is our operating model and our strategy to try to procure as much as possible when it comes to services and materials early in the project at fixed price.
However, we are not immune in NRC Group either and especially when it comes to potential disruptions in the value chain, it's difficult to forecast where and how they will materialize. So far, we have seen very little impact from this. We do also face a medium- to long-term risk as government spending on defense will increase, this might have an effect on government spending on infrastructure. However, we have not seen any projects being canceled so far, and we believe that government still will have a high- priority on investing in sustainable infrastructure. Ole, now it's time to go through the financials.
Thank you, Henning. Financially, we had a good Q1 , and we had a solid improvement in most of our finance and KPIs. The revenue came in at NOK 1.2 billion, which is a growth of 7% over Q1 last year in local currency. This was driven by a very strong growth in Norway with 18%, and the same with Sweden, with a 19% growth over Q1 last year, measured in like-for-like currency. It was partly offset by a reduction in sales in Finland with 10%. We will come back to the different countries later on in the presentation. Our profits, which we measure as EBITA, excluding M&A costs, improved with NOK 22 million compared to the Q1 last year and came in at NOK -37 million.
This also gave an improvement in the EBITA margin to -3.2% compared to -5.2% in the same quarter last year. As you all are aware of, Q1 is a low- season for our industry and for NRC, so we measure our performance based on our improvement over last year. Some other more detailed comments on the different P&L lines. As you can see, the M&A expenses came in at -NOK 1 million, and we have earlier guided that, we expect the 2022 M&A expenses to be well below what we had in 2021. You can also see that the depreciation is reduced to NOK 45 million in the quarter compared to the same quarter last year.
This is because we have a smaller asset base, and we're utilizing our asset base better now than we did a year ago. A couple of comments also to the amortization of NOK 9 million. NOK 6 million of this is related to amortization of PPE from the acquisition of VR Track back in 2019, and we expect this amortization to be completed around year-end 2022. The remaining NOK 3 million here is related to amortization of IT investments. Lastly, as you also can see, is that the net financial items is -NOK 14 million, and this is down from last year. The majority of this reduction is related to us having less interest-bearing debt and thus less interest costs compared to last year.
If you look a little bit more longer- term or on a longer- term development, measured here as a rolling twelve months performance, we have now seen a steady improvement in our profits for the last few quarters, and our EBITA came in at NOK 161 million in Q1 2022. Operational turnarounds takes a long- time, particularly in the project business. What you have to do is to gradually renew the order book, basically getting new contracts at better margins and replacing the old loss-making contract. Order book of NOK 5.3 billion and an equity ratio of 48%. Our cash is NOK 593 million, and this is somewhat down from the year-end, which were at NOK 626 million.
The reason for this reduction is related to our losses we had in the quarter, and also that we had a reduction of debt in the period. This was partly offset by very strong net working capital, and I will come back to the cash flow in the next slide. Our gross interest-bearing debt is now NOK 1.4 billion, and this is a reduction during the quarter of NOK 82 million. Out of this, NOK 50 million is related to favorable currency mix, and the rest is reduced interest-bearing debt through bank installments and also less lease liabilities.
As a sum, we have then NOK 843 million in net interest-bearing debt now, which is an improvement of NOK 48 million during the quarter. If you like to measure this without leases, we have a net interest-bearing debt excluding leases of only NOK 383 million at Q1. Then there have been a couple of questions related to how the booking of the AGN Haga projects. We have a 20% ownership in a company called AGN Haga, which execute two projects in Gothenburg in Sweden. We treat this as a financial investment, not only because of the size of our ownership, which is 20%, but also because our only participation is related to having a board representative. We don't have any operational involvement at all.
The projects are very complex, and there has been significant changes over the last year. The book value of this investment is only NOK 500,000 in NRC's balance sheet. However, there might be scenarios where we, for commercial reasons, would like to inject more capital as according to our ownership structure. Our cash flow from operation was solid NOK 69 million, and this is NOK 52 million better than we had in the same quarter last year. We are satisfied with this performance. It's well above the reported EBITDA at NOK 7 million. As you can see, we had a very strong operational cash flow the last three quarters, and one of the reason for this is the steady improvement we had in net working capital that came in at -NOK 84 million in Q1.
One of the reason of this is that we have, over the long period now, focused on working capital in the organization and into the projects, and this has given results. However, we expect the net working capital to be volatile from quarter- to- quarter going forward. If we go back to the left-hand side of the slide, you can see that the seasonal pattern here is to have a weak operational cash flow in the first half of the year and a strong operational cash flow in the second half of the year. In light of that, we think it's particularly strong with the NOK 69 million in the Q1 . Moving all the way to the right-hand side, we can see that in addition to operational cash flow, we also have cash flow from investment activities of -NOK 7 million.
This includes NOK 20 million in positive proceeds from sale of machinery. Lastly, we have cash flow from financing activities at NOK 91 million, or minus NOK 91 million, and this is NOK 36 million related to bank installment, NOK 41 million related to lease payments, and the last NOK 14 million is interest cost. In total, we have now NOK 593 million in cash. Looking at our financial position, we have NOK 375 million now in bank debt and NOK 600 million in bond debt. The bank debt installment profile is about NOK 35 million per quarter going forward, and it falls due in Q1 2024, while the bond falls due in total in Q3 2024. Looking at the liquidity sources side, we have the mentioned NOK 593 million in cash.
Then on top of this, we have an undrawn credit facility of NOK 200 million. In sum, we have around NOK 800 million in available liquidity. Lastly, if we look at the leverage ratio to the right-hand side, we have seen now a steady improvement in the net interest-bearing debt divided by EBITDA, and it came in at 2.4 times EBITDA in Q1. We are happy with this development, and it's in line with our target to be below 2.5 times EBITDA. Lastly, looking at the backlog and the order intake. The order intake came in at just shy of NOK 900 million, which is on par with what we had in Q1 2021. This was a book-to-bill of 0.7.
If you measure this over the last 12 months, we have now been steady around 1.3 over 3 quarters. Our total backlog is NOK 7.3 billion, which is 23% higher than we were at the same time last year. More importantly short-term, out of this NOK 7.3 billion, NOK 3.5 billion is for delivery for the rest of the year, that meaning Q2 to Q4. This position is 19% higher than we were in the same time in 2021. With that, I give it back to you.
Thank you, Ole. We will have a short operational review, and we will start with Finland. We still see a strong performance in our Finnish operation, although the activity level is somewhat lower this quarter compared to last year. This is, of course, also impacting our results. The lower activity is driven by lower volumes from our light rail business, as we did hand over Tampere phase one to our client Q1 last year, and also that our Jokeri Light Rail project in Helsinki reached their peak production year in 2021. The lower volumes in light rail is partly compensated by a higher- activity level in our rail construction business.
Looking at the order intake, we see that we have somewhat lower or significantly lower order intake in Q1 compared to last year, and that is mainly due to the fact that we haven't seen any bigger wins in Finland in Q1 . We have a very strong order book in Finland and during the past twelve months we have a book-to-bill ratio of 1.5. Looking at the tender pipeline in Finland, we see a reduction in the tender pipeline, and especially in the rail construction segment, we see a big discrepancy between what budgeted levels are forecasted or are for this year versus what we can see of actual projects in the tender pipeline. However, we have a strong order book in the rail construction segment, so this is no immediate concern for us.
Of course, we would like to see this situation change rather soon than later. All indication points towards that direction, that there will continue to come projects going forward in Finland in this segment. Looking at the maintenance business, we have identified zero projects out for tender in the next nine months. In practice, this means status quo for our maintenance business for the next year. In Norway, we see that the high order book we had entering the year is really reflected in a high revenue growth. Like Ole said, 18% this quarter versus same quarter last year. This growth is driven by rail construction and environment. We deliver a strong improvement in results in Norway, and we are able to deliver a positive EBITDA in the low- season quarter one, which I would say is really strong.
The results improvements are coming from environment and most of it from our demolition and recycling business, where we started an improvement program one year ago. The order intake in Norway is somewhat lower than what we saw last year due to not publishing any bigger wins in the quarter. As you have seen, we did publish an important win in Norway last week with the letter of intent of doing the biggest mass transportation contract in NRC Group's history. This will give a good baseload, load capacity for our mass transportation unit for the next four years and will be a good foundation for growth in that business. Important for NRC Group, it's a sustainable contract. We have invested in new trucks fueled by biogas that will be utilized to execute on this work.
We expect the final contract to be signed within this Q2 . We see that we still have a high- tender activity in Norway, although somewhat lower than what we saw last quarter, and the reduction is mainly driven by rail construction, where Bane NOR has awarded two bigger contracts in Q1 , where we unfortunately did not win any of them. With the big win we had on Trønderbanen quarter three 2021, and still a tender pipeline with a lot of interesting opportunities, this segment is still a good growth opportunity for us going forward. We can also see higher- activities in Sweden due to also entering the year with a stronger order book. The growth here is mainly coming from rail construction and civil construction.
With a higher- activity and a healthier order book, this also results in better results and we expect this improvement to continue throughout this year. Our order intake in Sweden is more or less in line with last year. We have seen an okay hit rate throughout the quarter, but competition is still intense in Sweden. More important than the order intake in Q1 is the contract win we published last week, where we won the Västra Götaland West maintenance contract in Sweden. This is an important win for us because it is our existing contract today, and it confirms the competitiveness of our Swedish maintenance business. Looking at the tender pipeline in Sweden, it's still at very high- levels, both in rail construction and rail maintenance.
As you see, we have 9 tenders coming up in the Swedish market within maintenance in the next 9 months, reduced to 8 as of now, as we have already won one of them. For the remaining 8, two of those is our own contracts. We expect the first one to be awarded during Q2 , and the last one will most likely slide into Q3 before we see any decisions. As you can see, there are lots of opportunities in the market. To sum up Q1 , it has been a positive quarter for NRC Group, where we deliver improved results, a strong cash flow from operation and a growth rate adjusted for currency of 7%.
The war in Ukraine with rising raw material costs have had limited impact so far, and we believe to be well- protected in short- term due to our contract structures and operating model. However, there's some increased uncertainty for medium to long- term due to increased government spending on defense that might have some impact on also priorities within the infrastructure segment. However, we believe that there will be strong priorities, and investing in sustainable infrastructure will still be prioritized going forward. Our operational focus will remain the same. We will focus on our core processes within tendering and project execution to generate profitable growth. We still see solid performance in Finland, and we expect the performance to remain solid in 2022.
We see that the very positive development that was starting to show in Norway second half of 2021 continues in Q1 , and it's expected to continue going forward. We also see finally, that results are improving in our Swedish business. The order intake has been a bit weaker in Q3 , but we believe that the two significant wins we published last week is a positive signal that the strong order intake we saw in 2021 will also continue going forward. Now we will take the last bullet as well. The financial outlook is unchanged. We believe that the positive operational and financial development will continue, and we see moderate to strong revenue growth this year and a moderate increase in EBITDA margins compared to 2021. We will open up for questions.
Hans-Erik Jacobsen, Nordea. In terms of wage growth and your ability to keep workers, is that an issue?
I think the wage growth is mainly related to Norway when we look at how the negotiations are going in different countries. In Norway, we can expect an average salary increase between 3.5%-4%, while in Sweden and Finland we are closer to 2%-2.5%. 50% of our employees are situated in Finland, so this limits, of course, the effect or the extraordinary effects we see on salary increases in our business. This is a limited concern for us. Of course, we always calculate with salary increases, but some higher increases in Norway this year. In total, for NRC Group, this has limited effect.
On the two rail contracts you lost in Norway, was that entirely due to price or were there other issues?
Mainly related to the price. We were fairly tight on one of them and a bit, further ahead of the field in the last one.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Simon from DNB. In terms of handling the supply disruptions, how are your contracts signed up today if you, for instance, can't get a hold of steel, can't get a hold of concrete elements, if there's actually supply? Because we got the price element that is indexed, but if you aren't able to actually deliver these products in projects, how will that affect operations and potentially economic impacts of that?
Yeah. If you are not getting the sourced supply, it will of course delay the project if you are unable to source it from other sources. That's obvious. In this situation, we will always try to use the force majeure clauses in our contracts, which quite clearly defines what kind of responsibility we need to bear our own cost and what kind of responsibility the customer is having, or the cost the customer is having due to this delay. So typically, if you are in a force majeure situation, we will not be applied penalties for late deliveries. Of course, this is if the situation arises, a discussion we need to take in each separate project. I will say we see customers having a fair approach to this given the situation in the market.
Maybe you should comment also if is this a rail technical equipment and the client is delivering?
Yeah. Rail technical equipment then, the responsibility is not on our side, and then our exposure is also limited. What is also important to say that we haven't experienced any supply shortage giving significant impact in our production as of today. I think, as time moves forward, we should see a normalization if events are not escalating. Yeah.
There was also an asset sale in the quarter, impacting the figures and on the cash flow. You can just elaborate a bit, what was that and in what division was these gains recognized?
Yeah. We had some sales of machinery this quarter as well. It was around 15-.
It was NOK 19 million in book effect and NOK 20 million cash effect.
Yeah. It was more or less the same level as we had in Q1 last year. It's in the Finnish business.
Depreciations, you come to amortizations, and that was good, but depreciations also fell almost 10% year-on-year. Could you please elaborate about what you expect for that going forward as well?
No, well, it depends obviously on the different projects. As we mentioned now, we have one.
Quite a significant project on mass transportation, which requires some investments. All in all, we expect actually the depreciation just to be kind of around this level. We see that our asset base is lower, and there's no particular reason for this except that we don't need this. We are more efficient when we're utilizing our assets. We think this is the correct level going forward, but I haven't done a detailed calculation on it.
Thank you.
There are no indication within the quarterly report, but are there any minor project write-downs in the quarter?
We always have minor project write-downs in a quarter. That's always given. Of course, in a big portfolio the goal is to have more positive adjustments than negative adjustments. This should be the normal situation. This has been the situation in Q1 , but we will always have project write-downs.
I have a question.
Yeah.
From Arctic.
Yeah.
Carl Fredrik Byke. How concerned are you about the potential cancellations of projects or tenders going forward?
In short- term, not concerned. I think, our main concern is the medium to long- term effects. I think it's unlikely to see big reprioritization of projects being late stage in the planning phase. In short- term, not concerned. We haven't seen any examples from our business yet. Medium to long- term, yeah, we will see what the politicians do. We believe that sustainable infrastructure should be a priority also in the future. We believe our segment to be more protected than the general infrastructure segment. Good. That was all the questions from today. Thank you for participating both here in Vika and for those of you participating on the stream. Thank you.