Good morning and welcome to the fourth quarter presentation of Solstad Offshore. This presentation will be held by CFO Kjetil Ramstad and myself, Lars Peder Solstad. There will be a Q&A session after the presentation, so please send in your questions, if any, on the chat. First of all, we follow the situation in Ukraine closely. We have an office in Odesa, and we have many Ukrainian and Russian seafarers on our vessels. It's too early for us to state if this will have an impact on the operations going forward, but we're monitoring the situation closely, and we have a close contact with our people on the ground. In the fourth quarter, it has been a quarter with continued progress for the company. The market continues to improve, and we have had the second quarter in a row with more than NOK 2 billion in new orders.
As you will see, most of the key numbers are better than we had in the fourth quarter of 2020. Revenue is up, backlog continues upwards, EBITDA is up, also EBIT, even if still a negative number, it's far better than last year. The value of the assets is a bit down. It is due to ordinary depreciation, it's due to sale of non-strategic vessels, and it is due to currency effects. I'm very happy to see that we are building cash with nearly NOK 2.5 billion by the year-end. That is give or take the same while equity is down, as we still have a bottom line in red numbers. Moving on to the business, there has been a large number of contracts signed in the fourth quarter. Commercial terms are getting better and better, and this trend has also continued into the first quarter of 2022.
As we see it, in some of the vessel segments, it will be quite tight when entering the main season. On average, we had 80 vessels in operation in the quarter with 86% utilization grade, which is quite good. We also sold two of the operational vessels as they were defined as non-strategic, and they were due for 20year+ . Those were the Far Scout and the Far Saga. We have great expectations for 2022 and particularly from the second quarter and onwards. There are still seasonal activity variations, and that's why we also plan for a large number of dry dockings and classing in the first quarter of 2022 to be ready for the main season when that starts from the second quarter.
We booked about NOK 2 billion in new orders in the quarter, and we have also booked about NOK 1.3 billion so far in the first quarter of 2022. We will come back to the backlog in more detail in a later slide. On the negative side, the COVID pandemic still impacts our operations by giving us extra costs, but also in some cases lost revenue. On the fleet, we continue to modernize our vessels, and the core fleet consists of 90 vessels, and they are operating globally with Norway, U.K., Brazil, and Australia as our main markets. At the end of the fourth quarter, 78 vessels were in operation while 12 are still in layup. Based on new contracts, we are now activating three more vessels from layup. It's the CSV Normand Valiant and the two PSVs, Normand Tantalus and Normand Triumph.
We continue to sell off the non-strategic vessels, and we sold 11 vessels in the fourth quarter, and a further five have been sold after the quarter end. This gives a total of 25 vessels sold in 2021 and 30 year to date. We still have six vessels held for sale, and we expect to have these sold within the second quarter of this year. We are also investing in upgrades of our vessels to reduce emissions further in line with our ambitions. We launched a NOK 300 million investment program during the quarter based on a grant from Innovation Norway of NOK 87 million. Battery hybrid systems will be installed on 11 more vessels during the coming three-year period in addition to the 10 vessels we already have upgraded with battery hybrid systems. We also look into other initiatives to reduce emissions further from our vessels.
When looking at the market, it is encouraging to see how the market develops. Within oil and gas, we see that the planned spending increases, rig count follows, and these two graphs give a good picture of what we can expect of activity in the coming years. Combined with the growth predicted in offshore wind seen on the right graph, which is just as relevant for part of our fleet, there are good reasons to believe in a significant growth in offshore activity in the coming years. What does this mean to Solstad Offshore? First of all, the combination of increased activity discussed on the previous slide and the fact that the supply of additional vessels to the market will be very limited in the coming years, this will benefit us in Solstad Offshore with our 90 vessel fleet.
Geographically, we experience that our main markets are developing a bit different with activity increase seen earlier in Norway, U.K., and Brazil compared to what we see in Asia Pacific and Australia. Having said that, the tendering activities are in general very high across all regions and both within offshore wind and within oil and gas. As you have seen from various stock exchange notices in the last months, award activity has also been quite high lately. As many of you have noticed, we established the Windstaller Alliance during the fourth quarter together with Aker Solutions and DeepOcean. This is a different offering to the wind market and has been well received by our clients, and Windstaller are involved in a number of commercial processes. I'm happy to announce that the Alliance has signed its first contract.
It's not a large contract, but it will involve two vessels from the Solstad Offshore fleet and with the contribution also from the two other Alliance partners. It's an important milestone for the Alliance. I mentioned the backlog, and this slide here gives a good picture of the positive development seen in the last quarters. We are booking more new contracts than we are invoicing for the third consecutive quarter. In the fourth quarter, the book-to-bill factor went as high as 1.6, and more important, margins on the new contracts are getting better and better. The backlog is divided between all segments we operate in, including renewable energy. As you will see from the graph, we have a good combination of contracts in hand for this year, and we have also plenty of available capacity going forward, which we see as a great benefit in a growing market.
Looking at the regions, Europe and Brazil are the busiest regions, and that is also where we get the better margins, while Asia Pacific still is a bit behind. I hand the word over to Kjetil, who will take us through the numbers.
Thank you, Lars, and good morning to everyone. I will then just go through the income statement. As you have seen, the process of building the company strong again is well underway, and we are making progress every quarter going forward. On the fourth quarter, the revenue is, as you can see, up with 11% for the quarter, and also the EBITDA margin is up with more than 40% in the quarter. For the year to date, we see an increase of 11% on the revenue side and a 20% increase on EBITDA. You will also see that on the graph on the right-hand side that this is applicable for most segments or for all segments. The anchor handling segment is way better in 2021 versus last year. The PSV segment is also better, and the same with subsea and marginally by also renewable.
Last year, you also remember that we had the restructuring completed, and you see a big effect on the restructuring effect on the net financing and also on the ordinary result before taxes. This year, it's negative, but it is according to the plan, and of course, that is important for us. We do what we say, so it's in line with the plan. On the balance sheet, it's fairly stable on the asset side, and it's good to see that the cash increases some. On the equity, you see that there is a decrease from last year, and that's mainly due to the result of the year. Of course, on the long-term debt, I will come back to that on the next slide just to give you a better understanding of how that has developed.
As you can see on the cash first, it's good to see that we are building cash both in the quarter, and we are producing more cash both in the quarter and for the year by some almost 50% increase in 2021 compared to last year. When you see on the long-term debt, and this is then a combination of long-term debt and the short-term debt, you see that there is a small increase, and this graph is explaining a little bit why. We have, when the restructuring was completed, we had a fair value assessment of our debt. As you might remember, this resulted in that we had approximately NOK 1 billion that was amortized over the period of the long-term debt. That is being added back on a monthly basis, so that is the NOK 270 million that you see that the debt has increased with.
Then we have the repayment of long-term debt, which is approximately NOK 400 million, and also the paid leases that we have approximately NOK 200 million for the year. Then you also see that there is a large currency effect of over NOK 450 million that takes the debt to short and long term to NOK 20.7 billion. With that, I will hand the word back to Lars Peder Solstad again to summarize it up.
Thanks, Kjetil. To summarize the presentation, things are definitely heading in the right direction. That goes for order intake, it goes for book-to-bill, it goes for margins, and also the same goes for tendering activity both within oil and gas and within offshore wind. We see that our utilization is up, same as EBITDA, and we have a solid cash generation in the quarter. We also continue to see that our global footprint is a huge benefit as we can offer local solutions in many of the most interesting areas we operate in. We continue to renew our fleet by selling off the oldest and investing in upgrades of the core fleet. All in all, a positive quarter, and our market view going forward has been further strengthened. That concludes our presentation, and we then move over to the Q&A session.
I have received a few questions, and they are very much linked, and they are linked to question number one, expectations to the Windstaller Alliance cooperation. As I said, we can see the effect of that. As I mentioned, the first contract was signed yesterday, and I cannot mention the contract or who the client is, but it's involving two of the Solstad vessels. It has a commencement now in the second quarter, so it's good to reach that milestone. We are bidding for a number of contracts, and some are small, some are quite large. That will contribute positively to Solstad going forward. It comes to the other questions. Some of them are linked to the CSV fleet and rate levels and so on.
I can at least say that you see that the market for CSVs is quite tight, particularly in the, let's say, the mid-size segment, while we expect the demand for the larger vessels to increase further moving into 2023 and onwards. When we see the effects from the new projects in Norway, we see the effects from everything happening in Brazil and Guyana and so on. Having said that, the projects we are doing also now on those vessels are quite okay. There's another one here linked to expectations to future accounts and when we can see a significant improvement there. As I said, as you will notice, we have a quite positive market view. We have had improvements quarter by quarter, year by year looking back, and we expect that to continue on the basis of a positive market view.
What that means to the values of the vessels, I don't think the only thing I will comment on that is that normally when we see better rates, that will also have a positive effect on the values of the vessels. There's a question linked to the first quarter and idle time and upgrades and mobilizations and so on. That's correct. There's a lot of dry dockings, mobilizations, a bit of idle time between contracts in the first quarter, so that will have an effect there. As I have stated already, we strongly believe in a very healthy market from the second quarter and onwards on the construction support vessels (CSVs), but also on other parts of our fleet. We look at our general market view for 2022 with the main effect coming in from the second quarter as very positive. The market view is very positive.
There's another question coming in on the type of contracts. This contract is on the I work, you work type of contracts. They don't exist anymore, or at least I hope it doesn't exist anymore. We don't do those types of contracts. It's typical in a very slow market. You do I work, you work, then it moves on to seasonal contracts, and then it moves on to 365 contracts. We are now in the process of the combination of the seasonal contracts and the 365. That is also a sign of a strength in the market. On the Maximus situation, on the chartering side, the vessel is booked for the majority of the year. On the financial side, I refer to what we have stated in the report, and you will find the updated information there.
There's another one regarding the North Sea and the balance, the market balance with vessels going in and out. What we see is that there are, especially on the anchor handlers, on the large anchor handlers, there are a number of projects around the world that require North Sea tonnage. A few have been announced already. There are many more to come, and we will see a number of large anchor handlers being unavailable for the North Sea spot market for longer periods in 2022 because they have projects other places in the world. That is very positive in two ways, both because you get quite well paid on the projects and the spot market in the North Sea gets tighter. That has a double effect, and it's also another good sign. That was the last question as far as I can see.
Thanks for joining the presentation, and I wish you a continued nice day. Thank you.