I'm extremely happy to be standing here right now. Not because it's spring only, but because we are delivering on our promises, or rather, our targets that we set back in 2016. At the time, I think we were we had 322 MW in operation, and we set a target to reach 1.5 GW, or 1,500 MW in operation or in the construction end of the year. By the financial closure of South Africa earlier in the month, everything is ready to start construction for absolutely everything. Of course, the rest is under construction. We're not there, but we are confirming that we will reach the targets by end of the year. In fact, we are reaching them much before that. I'm happy to say that.
The other project there, the Mozambique project, is one of those projects that you don't give up. We didn't, and we also had financial closure there. A bumpy road, but I'm extremely happy that we are actually providing the northern part of Mozambique and the population there with renewable energy. It's a major milestone for Mozambique, and it's a major milestone for us. We will see a ramp-up in the development construction revenues over the next 6 to 8 quarters as a reflection of the NOK 8.5 billion of projects that we're going to deliver on. With regards to our pipeline and the future, we are presenting a new country to you this time. I'll go a bit into that later in the presentation, and that's Ukraine.
We have added 150 MW to the pipeline, and we have also won a project in Cameroon of 25 MW. That is also a good message of what to come for further growth after 2018. Taking a look at South Africa. If you're familiar with South Africa and if you're familiar with Upington is sort of up in the left-hand corner, pretty close to Namibia and not so far from Botswana. If you're interested in sun, not surfing, but at least sun, go there, because it's more than 2,500 hours of sunshine every year. It's one of the most perfect places on the Earth to actually generate renewable energy from the sun. This is almost $400 million in project cost.
It's also quite pleasing to see that the tariff that we signed up with, or signed the contract with, is about $0.092 per kilowatt-hour. We bid at $0.77 back in 2015. Of course, as a part of the bidding conditions, we could have inflation adjustment, which we have enjoyed, so to speak, from then until now. That means that the tariff, as we signed the contract, is $0.092. That translates into NOK in revenue, when it's up and running, a little bit less than NOK 500 million. South Africa is a bit peculiar, and I think you may know this already. As a part of our contract with the government, along with everybody else that is in this business, we also have to have Black investors, so Black economic empowerment, equity, or trust.
In this case, this will be 35%. We're quite happy about that too, because as I have defined it, a Black Industrialist investor will participate in these projects when they start construction. Mozambique, a bit longer PPA, 25 years. Norfund is there with almost 23%, and EDM, the local utility, has one quarter of the stock. We are a majority owner in the project. Construction has started, and we will build throughout the year. Anticipated COD, or commercial operational date, the date when we start generating revenues, is in the beginning or end of first quarter next year. Well, we're not resting elsewhere either. Malaysia is under construction. I was there Wednesday before Easter and went to Gurun. This is a picture of Gurun. It's in a tropical climate, quite hot, but we have very good progress on the mounting of panels, as you can see here.
In fact, I was looking at the picture on the first slide, Mikkel, it reminded me of another part of Malaysia, which is Cameron Highlands. I think this was actually Cameron Highlands with the coffee plantations. It's an interesting picture in that respect. Brazil, the project we're constructing together with Statoil in a 50/50 joint venture led by us, where they want to learn. It's moving extremely well. We have, as other Norwegian companies, experienced a lot of rain. Actually, the heaviest rainfall in many years. It hasn't really affected our progress. Honduras, we have also shared with you that we had some issues there with regards to demonstrations, and that made us stop the project for a while. We're now up and running, and we're aiming for completion of the project early first quarter or end of third quarter this year. That is also good.
Now It's a bit difficult sometimes when you're sitting on the outside to understand how the project schedules are put together and how they're being progressed, so to speak. We decided to share with you our picture of all the projects that are under construction and the ones that will start construction during the year. For Malaysia, if you compare this schedule to the schedule that we had 6 months ago, this is slightly going to the right. The reason is that we have adjusted the progress to the availability of grid, to connect to the evacuation point, so that we can sell the electricity. There's no point of us completing the projects two to three months ahead of the time that we can actually access the grid. That's why it has moved to the right.
We're progressing well on all three sites, we will see COD starting from the first project in the beginning of the third quarter this year. Brazil, according to plan, we will start production in the beginning or third, fourth quarter this year and start earning revenues. Honduras, more or less on the same schedule. This has been going on for a while, but it's very good that we're now back in construction and ramping up. Mozambique, I've covered already. For Egypt, this is six projects at the same location. In fact, this is our largest order ever, as you may appreciate. We'll start construction in the beginning of June, or maybe as early as May. With regards to South Africa, we don't show that here, but we will start road construction already in June.
Really ramping up construction will happen in the middle of or towards the end of the third quarter. Once we are done with all these project, we are at 1,100 megawatts in operation, plus the 323 or something like that we are having in electricity production at the moment, confirming our target for end of the year. Just to say that if you look at all these project and if you look at revenues earned, progress, you can give or take 50% of the NOK 8.5 billion into revenue this year and the remaining in 2019. I'll have to invite you, Mikkel, to present the numbers.
Thanks, Raymond. This time, we'll start to give you an update on our financial reporting. We last year started to present our financials based on proportionate consolidation, and we received very good feedback on this way of putting together our numbers and presenting them. Therefore taking this way of presenting it one small step further and basically introduce this as a basis for our segment reporting. What that means is that we, for the power production segment, now present our proportionate share of revenues in EBITDA and not presenting that on 100% basis as we used to do in the power production segment. It's also affecting our development and construction business where we, for instance, in Brazil at the moment, have a 50/50 joint venture also on the EPC side together with Statoil.
That's also something to keep in mind when you look at the numbers that we take in half of that revenues and EBITDA in that segment for that project in Brazil. When I look at the economic interest across our existing portfolio, it's about 46%, and that's the numbers that we then basically use to adjust this P&L with. Another effect of presenting the numbers on a proportionate basis is that we then include what we call asset management revenues in the power production segment. I will explain a bit more about that in a minute, but that is impacting the top line, the revenues in the segment. When it comes to non-financial reporting, I would like to basically encourage you to look at our sustainability report that we published before Easter.
We have now based this report on the framework from the Global Reporting Initiative, the GRI framework, which is basically a well-known framework for this type of reporting, and it's covering a range of indicators, economic, environmental, and social indicators. There's obviously increased focus among our stakeholders on this report, both on when it comes to debt and equity providers on the project level, as well as debt and equity providers at the corporate level. I'm happy to refer you to this report, and I think you'll find some good information there. If we then move on to the proportionate financials. EBITDA here is up 25% year-on-year. The increase in revenues and gross profits compared to both last quarter and last year is really mainly driven by increased development and construction activities. The revenues and profitability in the other segments are basically stable.
The EBITDA margin is somewhat reduced compared to a year ago, and that is basically due to the shift of activities from mainly power sales a year ago, to now have power sales and development construction activities included in that mix. Cash flow to equity reached NOK 21 million, up from NOK 7 million in the same quarter last year. Again, the growth here is explained by development and construction activity. As Raymond alluded to, we're looking to increase this activity quite significantly in the next few quarters. Onto the power production segment. Our proportionate share of power production reached 68 GWh in the quarter, compared to 69 GWh in the same period last year. This is really very stable. We have not added new plants into the portfolio in this time frame. On 100% basis, production reached 157 GWh, slightly below our guidance of 160 GWh.
The increase in revenues from the same period last year is really explained by higher production in South Africa, a stronger ZAR. The ZAR has strengthened quite a lot with the changing political environment in South Africa. Also increased asset management revenues for plants under construction. We provide what we refer to as asset management services to power companies, and this includes financial reporting and accounting and contract management, really, on behalf of the project companies. This is a service we have provided all along, but it has not really been visible the way we presented this segment earlier. Since we now take this in on a proportionate basis, this type of service becomes part of the P&L. EBITDA is in line with the previous quarter and the same period last year.
Again, the margin is somewhat down because the top line has increased based on asset management services. O&M is really fairly stable, as we've seen also in the last few quarters. Q1 is typically a bit weaker for seasonal variations. Also in this quarter, we had some additional costs related to the establishment of a plant control center in Cape Town. This is really a one-off cost, and we're not expecting to see this OpEx level in the next few quarters that we have now in the first quarter. Just to have that in mind. Then when it comes to revenues in development construction, NOK 417 million and an EBITDA of NOK 15 million. Overall progress across our construction projects of 33% at the end of Q1. I would like to say that IFRS is quite conservative in the way we measure progress, and we're not challenging IFRS.
If you do a true cost, take progress based on true committed cost in a project, and the way our team is managing this, progress is about 10 percentage points higher than the 33%. On this contract portfolio, that represents about NOK 250 million of revenues. It gives you an indication of what that means. That being said, Malaysia progress has been moderate in the quarter, as Raymond have explained. It has to do with us adapting to the new grid connection timeline. It will ramp up quite a lot progress now in the next quarter. Also, the gross margin was moderate, around 10% in the quarter, below what we've guided on. That has to do with the mix of projects we're currently executing.
That will change also in the next few quarters, we are confident in our guidance on a 15% gross margin overall for the portfolio going forward. Looking at our financial position, the cash position have strengthened quite a lot with a positive working capital movement. Total assets stood at NOK 10.6 billion, up NOK 0.4 billion from end of last year. It's mainly based on further CapEx investments, but also some currency movements, obviously. To the left of the table, you can see that the consolidated cash in the group stood at NOK 2.5 billion, we had NOK 1 billion of free cash in the group. This is really related to working capital, I will talk a bit about it on the next slide.
When it comes to the group-level book equity, as defined in our corporate bond agreements, it strengthened further to NOK 2.2 billion, with an equity to capitalization ratio of 75%. We have also now established a three-year RCF of NOK 60 million with Nordea and ABN AMRO, which is a facility we will continue to utilize when we move into more construction activity in the next quarters. Looking at the movements of free cash at the group level through the quarter. We had received NOK 113 million of dividends from plants in operation. We invested about NOK 150 million in equity in new projects in Mozambique and Brazil mainly, but also some in Egypt. Egypt will start construction very soon, so we're injecting more equity into that portfolio. A fairly limited amount on development CapEx in this quarter. We will see that change also in the quarters to come.
Right now we have a lot of focus on developments of early-stage developments, we see that also in the OpEx level under the D&C segment, which has increased somewhat because we spend more on early-phase development. NOK 400 million of working capital movements, that is really reflecting the way we've structured our projects, we talked a bit about this in the past. We are very cautious in the way we structure these EPC projects and that we make sure that we have at least a cash-neutral working capital position as a starting point. We also utilize some supply finance to work on the working capital side. That is the effect we see here. It's giving us additional liquidity buffers if we have any delays or any issues on the project execution side.
I thought I could also recap shortly on how we see funding of plans in construction and in backlog. This slide we have presented in the past. It's more or less unchanged. It's 1.2 gigawatts in total now in construction and backlog. There's 100 megawatts that we have not closed financing for in the backlog. It's closer now to NOK 13 billion of CapEx in total to realize this backlog. This 1.2 gigawatts. Close to NOK 10 billion of project finance debt. We will invest about NOK 1.8 billion of equity. Right now, NOK 850 million is the remaining equity to be invested by us into this portfolio. We will continue to have some corporate costs. We will continue to develop new projects. On the user side, we're sort of expecting NOK 1.4 billion-NOK 1.5 billion of spending over the next 18 months or so.
On the sources side, we have NOK 1 billion of cash as I referred to, but we also have NOK 700 million of reverse working capital that's ahead of us. As you can see on the right-hand side. The after-tax D&C margins of close to around NOK 1 billion is the same as we have guided on before. The cash flow from operating plant is also the same. We are funded here to realize this portfolio, and the way we structure the working capital side is important then to understand that that's also a way for us to make sure we have the cash to invest equity and can take out the margins at the right time. Raymond, I'll give the board back to you.
Thank you very much, Mikkel. Ukraine. You know where it is? I'm sure you do. It's a country that is in desperate need for more electricity, and of course, they've been relying on gas supplies from various countries, particularly one. What a lot of people do not know is that they have had for many years a renewable program, and that this is not new to them. In fact they have almost 800 MW of solar installed. They've also been working on the PPA, power purchase agreements, to make this into a form that would satisfy Scatec Solar's and other international companies' criteria, so that we can safeguard our investments in a 20-year perspective. We started looking at Ukraine a year and a half ago, and I'm happy to say that we have had extremely good response from Ukraine.
We are at the final stages of concluding several projects there, and some of them have moved into the pipeline. The difference here from other markets is that this tariff, which is extremely high, $0.15. Like 16, 17. Sorry, EUR 0.15. $0.16, $0.17, is only going to be there for next 10 years. By 2029, we have to finish, or we have to move into the merchant market. Well, is that possible? Yes, it is. In our financial models, in Ukraine, on the projects there, we will put into the model a 10-year perspective so that we get our investments back, returns back in 10 years. 15% on execution, and 50%, 15% on the sale of electricity. We have not at this point, and I don't think we will, add any sort of speculative pricing above zero after 2029.
That's an upside. Anyways, this is extremely promising and is of course, 3 times the tariff on other projects that we are working on that have a PPA of 20-25 years. For us, full speed ahead on these projects, to have them up and going, and we are also in close dialogue with EBRD. I mean, EBRD, I understand, are a leading bank in Egypt, so we have a very good relationship with them. They have already invested in other projects in Ukraine, approximately EUR 12 billion. They're ready to debt finance our projects. I'll be happy to get back to you, once we move further with these projects, not too far into the future. Short summary, well, one thing is to deliver on the goals.
Of course, our focus now is to make sure that we meet our budgets on the NOK 8.5 billion worth of projects over the next 12 to 16 or 18 months. Those of you that are experienced in the execution side of projects know that you need to be very diligent. You need to know what you're doing. You have to have solid plans to actually deliver on time. In this case, we are executing projects on three continents. Of course, I'm happy to say that we have an operating model that we have been perfecting over the past 24 months, where we had lower activity that is actually being rolled out and tested, and is giving us a real confirmation that our teams know what they're doing.
To the right, on the bars there you see our goal, which we have confirmed today on 1,500 megawatts by end of the year. We are working extremely hard now. Well, we're always working hard, but I mean particularly on the opportunity side and pipeline side to convert some of these 3,600 megawatts of projects into backlog. I'm actually eager to get to end of May so that we can spend time with you and also share with you our new goals for the next few years, so that you can get a feel for that. I'm not going to be tempted to move into that area right now. You can see that the market is there, and also that what we've been guiding on, 15% in terms of EPC margin and power sales.
Well, there are a lot of opportunities like that in our pipeline and opportunities. I think we're moving towards the end of the presentation, and we'll be happy to take any questions that you may have. This is Cameron Highlands.
Andreas Keplinger. Three questions, if I may. First of all, on the Ukraine project, who will be the counterparty? How will the deal be structured in terms of the counterparty risk here?
It will be as usual. It'll be the utility, government state utility, that will be the counterparty. In terms of security for the PPA, it will be similar. I mean, it will be government guarantees, as we have had in many other countries where, I don't know all the details about utility, but I would expect it to not have the sort of the highest rating. A sovereign type of guarantee would be expected and would accompany the power purchase agreement.
On the pipeline then, there's been some progress in Pakistan in terms of the PPA. Is this the most likely project to be listed into the backlog in the pipeline right now? Would you highlight any other pipeline projects ready for the backlog soon?
There's a bunch of projects ready for the backlog, but we have to have something to share with you by end of May, right? Of course, pipeline, Pakistan is one of those. It doesn't enjoy $0.15 tariff. It's a bit lower. Like in Egypt, for example, when we got the $0.085 tariff, for us it would be, "Hmm, how can we make this into a project that is meeting the targets and the guidelines on profitability that we've been sharing with you?" Of course, Egypt is meeting them. Pakistan has been a bit lower than $0.06 per kilowatt-hour, we are looking at the execution model. We can't really confirm that we're there, but we're working on it.
Finally, perhaps you don't know the answer to the question, what's your best guess on when the Integrated Resource Plan for South Africa will be presented?
I follow South African politics in detail. As you may know, that has been a bit of a challenge over the past few years, but it's extremely nice now to see that the new president, President Ramaphosa, is determined to have an inflow of foreign funds. I mean, the project in Round Four represents NOK 40 billion, which is like an oil field being developed in Norway. They recognize that. The growth is low. They want more foreign capital. They haven't been really in need in more electricity over the past year, but they will need that in the future. We are confident that the next phase will move ahead with more renewable projects. Like I said, I think it's a fantastic place. Right now, we don't compete with anything.
We compete with our ability to make it profitable, we do not compete with coal, nuclear is out, or any other source of energy in South Africa, which is quite nice for the environment too.
Okay, thanks.
Very good. Anything on No. Very good. Okay. The sun will be out pretty soon. Look forward to it. Thank you very much for attending. I hope to see you all by the 30th of May at our capital markets update. Thank you.