Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this first quarter presentation of StrongPoint's results. My name is Jacob Tveraabak. I'm the CEO of StrongPoint, and as always, I have Hilde Horn Gilen with me here today to present some figures as well. We have an agenda that goes like this. I will be giving you a short recap of what StrongPoint does. We'll then go through the Q1 highlights and figures, and then I'll leave it to Hilde for even more detailed financial figures. StrongPoint is all about leveraging what we call the double opportunity. We see, have seen, and are believing in the future e-commerce to continue growing. There are two effects of e-commerce.
One is the margin pressure it puts on the brick-and-mortar stores, which leads the stores inevitably having to become more efficient, and technology solutions is an obvious part of that. That's number one. Number two is the fact that e-commerce in and of itself drives more demand for e-commerce logistics solutions. StrongPoint offers the full range of last-mile solutions as well as fulfillment solutions from manual picking to automated picking. That is also the second opportunity for StrongPoint. That's a double opportunity arising from the e-commerce growth. At StrongPoint, we believe in purpose and our purpose given also this double opportunity, I'd say is almost evident. It is bringing retail technology for smarter and better life, and that is both offline, and it's online.
When you look at the amount of logos we have on this page, there's sort of an indication of the breadth that we have when it comes to serving customers in the core markets, in Norway, in Sweden, in the three Baltic countries, and in Spain, and as we're seeing also internationally. Our focus is on both going wider, meaning getting more of these customers or retail customers on the client list of ours, but also to be going deeper and having a more significant relationship with these established brands, and we're doing both. We have an affinity towards the grocery retail segment, and that brings along with it a number of spillover effects to other very exciting retail verticals.
Before diving into Q1 figures, I wanna assure this audience by restating our financial ambitions for 2025. Top line of NOK 2.5 billion and an EBITDA margin of 13%-15%. I hope that you will see that the Q1 figures are going in that direction to achieve this financial ambition. We remain very confident. To today's topic, Q1 highlights and figures. First of all, financially, very exciting. We are tipping the NOK 300 million mark within one quarter. That's the best quarter on the top line ever in StrongPoint's history for the retail technology business. We're also doing a number of exciting progress or milestones with regards to customers. We'll talk more about that in a second.
There is a number of other, call it enablers, that needs to be in place to achieve the financial ambitions and the strategy that laid out in 2025. Let me start with the top line, the revenue in Q1 just tipping the NOK 300 million mark. A 21% growth, a remarkably strong growth in a quarter in and of itself. This becomes even more strong when you consider firstly the disadvantage we have had on the foreign exchange, which would otherwise have led us to a 24% growth, but also the ongoing component shortages that are pushing revenue out in time, so pushing the deliveries of order out in time, not canceling them, but pushing them out in time.
If you had not had that component, constraints, we would have actually gotten up to an additional 6 percentage points or in total, a 30% growth. Just very, very strong growth in and of itself with 21%, even more so when you think about the situation globally. The growth stems predominantly from very good sales of Pricer ESLs in Norway and in Sweden, but it also stems from a remarkably good quarter in Spain. Spain growing by more than 50%, 50% this quarter versus same quarter last year, and we'll give Spain some additional attention as we've done for the last few quarters. When we move on to the EBITDA, you will see that we have a NOK 12 million EBITDA, or just south of 4% EBITDA margin.
Again, both the FX and the component situation would have left it some NOK 4 million-NOK 5 million higher. More importantly is, for this audience to understand that we're making a very conscious decision to invest in the future. Those of you that have been following StrongPoint knows that we are expensing the investments we're doing. You will find a very clean balance sheet. We're expensing this on the P&L. This investment goes into marketing, it goes into product development, it goes into sales resources, particularly in e-commerce, but also in the new and existing in-store solutions.
I think this is very important to bear in mind that this is a very conscious decision to build for the future, to build a scalable business that will enable us to achieve the 13%-15% EBITDA margin that we have laid out in the 2025 financial ambition. Looking at the relative shares across the product offering or product segments that we share, this really is a story about a society opening up after COVID. You'll see the in-store productivity portion of StrongPoint's revenue growing. It's a natural climate to start again doing more installations in-store. This is also reflected in the payment solutions, again, predominantly by Spain opening up its society and allowing for more cash and card sales in those communities.
It's also, say on the flip side, with the reopening of society, you would have experienced a slowdown or even to some extent decline in e-commerce volumes, versus earlier COVID-related quarters. That said, we believe this is a blip. You know, the e-commerce fundamentals are very, very strong. In this quarter, this comes out both through not increasing the number of licenses or number of orders going through our e-commerce picking solution. It also affects naturally the franchisees or the chains' say short-term willingness to pay, or pay up in click & collect lockers when the in-store solutions are again growing.
That said about e-commerce and moving into customer success stories, the first and very interesting customer success story in that respect is Salling Group. Those of you on LinkedIn that are following Anja Madsen, the CEO of føtex, would have really liked to understand what has happened during Easter. I can assure you that when Anja Madsen did a fantastic commercial for StrongPoint's lockers, that was not in StrongPoint's sort of any arrangement. It was purely driven by the fact that føtex believes in click & collect lockers, and having the CEO stand up and talk personally about her experience with the lockers, I mean, there is no better commercial than that for both customers of ours and at the end of the day and consumers.
If you haven't seen it, go to Anja Madsen's LinkedIn account. It's a fantastic commercial for StrongPoint and again, following the order of the lockers with the Salling Group. We also had a continued good traction on self-checkout in the Baltics and with the agreement with Palink, so the IKI brand in the Baltics. Lastly, we also announced a framework agreement with SPAR International for e-commerce s olutions, but actually also our cash management solutions. In addition to being a hunting license, this is also a promotion of our solutions internally in the SPAR International network. Great progress here on a number of customers. Last highlight for me, I wanted to talk a bit about the, call it, enablers also for the 2025 strategic ambitions. Firstly, Spain just deserves a little bit of attention.
One thing is the 50% top-line growth, which in and of itself is remarkable. As said earlier, this is to some extent based on the fact that society is opening up, which is reflected in the cash management solutions being sold. The Spanish organization has also been very good at pivoting towards serving the grocery retail market even more so. We are delivering a number of our e-commerce solutions there, as well as our self-checkout solution. Very, very well, big credit to the Spanish team there. We're actually now in Q1 close to a break-even in Spain. Again, if you're following StrongPoint very closely, you would have seen that last quarter we promised that we would be getting to a break-even at the end of 2022 in Spain.
This is an additional hats off to the Spanish team for achieving this. The future looks great for the Spanish operations. We also strengthened the executive management team of StrongPoint with two very solid personalities. Chris Mackie, a British citizen, heading our e-commerce sales establishment. Magnus Rosén, a former ICA executive that will be or is heading our Swedish operations, and we're not sending him to Spain quite yet, but our Swedish operations, and doing that in a very solid manner. Welcome to both of you. I know you've been in the role for two months already, and I'm looking forward to continuing the growth both in e-commerce and in Sweden with you.
Lastly, we announced at the last Q or quarterly presentation that we had signed a non-binding term sheet to acquire the shares of Air Link Group. Air Link Group has operations in U.K. and in Ireland. That due diligence following this signing of term sheet has been ongoing, and it's ongoing, and it's in its final phases. We'll just settle now by saying that due diligence is going very well, and we will return when we have more information on that point. I think with that, I'll turn it over to you, Hilde, please.
Thank you, Jacob. Good morning, everybody. I will start up, as usual with my presentation of the rolling 12 revenue and EBITDA, following obviously the first quarter revenue performance that Jacob just showed you. The rolling revenue, 12 months, came out to NOK 1.033 billion. We now crossed a magic line of NOK 1 billion in revenue for the retail tech only. That is an increase of NOK 50 million or 5% in one quarter. We are very happy with that, Jacob. Looking at the right graph, you see that the EBITDA has declined when we are looking at the rolling 12, and that is something I will present more in the next slide.
We started off with this bridge with a gross profit increase of NOK 12 million, which is of course from the higher revenue in first quarter. Now, the gross margin has declined in Q3 with actually 3.3%, stemming from more than one reason. First of all, the product mix. As Jacob showed in the relative share slide, the in-store productivity has increased while the e-commerce has declined a bit in the quarter. We have a higher gross profit on our own solution, [audio distortion] . With that split, we have a decline in the gross margin. We also need to comment on the inflation rates.
With the component shortages that we experience, especially within the payment solutions, we see that to get hold of the necessary components, we need to shop the components wherever we can find them, and that puts a pressure on price. Also, the COVID situation in China has led to price increases on raw material and on freight. We are affected by both those elements in addition to the product mix. We have accrued in the first quarter NOK 2 million as cost of the due diligence ongoing in the U.K. I wanted to just show you the figures on the investments that we are doing in e-commerce. Now, the bridge is showing increased cost on top of what we had last quarter, the first quarter in 2021.
You see there is an equal split between R&D cost and sales and marketing cost, NOK 3 million each. The e-commerce R&D spending are shared between the picking software and the click & collect development. We have in the quarter finalized the Q-commerce part of the generation three of the picking software. Finally, hitting or affecting the EBITDA is other payroll and OpEx of NOK 6 million that are very much linked to increased number of personnel. We are 18 more people than now compared to year-end last year, and 28 more compared to first quarter last year. We are doing what we have said we are to do, increase the number of sales resources. We ended up with a Q1 EBITDA of NOK 12 million.
If we look further down the P&L, we come to the net profit and the earnings per share. As you see on the screen, we have an earnings per share of NOK 0.11 from first quarter this year. That is down from last year of NOK 0.23. It also are influencing the rolling 12 months earning per share. Looking at the cash position, we have a very solid cash position in StrongPoint. We had a cash at NOK 174 million at the end of last year, and it has increased by NOK 11 million. Of the elements on the screen in the bridge, I would like to comment on two specific items. First of all, the change in working capital is increased by NOK 6 million, or increase in cash that is, so it has declined.
To some extent, we are not too happy about that. I have instructed the purchase organization to get hold of the components that they can get hold of in the market, and we are willing to invest or to bind capital on inventory more than what we have achieved. It just shows the pressure we have on finding the components. The inventory has declined, obviously because of the high revenue, and that has moved to an increase in trade receivables. As normal, we are not worried about the risk in the trade receivables, as that is just. We have a very good track record of regaining all that cash. Secondly, and the largest number on this slide, is earnout received.
I want to point back to December 2020 when we sold the cash security business. The purchase price of that is not revealed, but we agreed that a part of the agreement was that we had a earnout situation for EUR 4.7 million for the period 2021 through 2023. The results for 2021 came up to a maximum level of earnout for the cash security business, and that has given us a positive cash element of NOK 20 million. For those of you really following us, you know that we did not accrue all of that earnout as gain, as there is a risk always attached to earnout. I can assure the investors that there are only upsides for the next two years of earnout for that deal.
We ended the cash position at NOK 195 million, and the net interest-bearing debt continues to be negative or positive, so we are in a positive cash situation. Based on this and the forecast, forecasted liquidity needs going forward, the Board has proposed to the Annual General Meeting following this quarter presentation a dividend of NOK 0.8 per share. The ambitions of the Board has been to continue to pay and increase the dividend year- on- year, and this year's proposal follows the trend since 2012. We welcome you to join in the Annual General Meeting starting at 9:00 A.M. today. The financial calendar for the rest of the year is that we meet up 13th of July for the Q2 and the 26th of October for the Q3 presentation.
As always, we are available for direct meetings with investors that would like to see us. That was my slides, and now, Jacob, do you want to come in and help me with answering the questions?
Absolutely. Of course.
So.
Any questions incoming, Dominic?
Yeah, we have two questions, both related to e-commerce. We'll ask them at the same time. Why is e-commerce not scaling faster? A sub-question to that, specifically a question on why we're not further on locker sales?
Okay, first of all, you know, this is a quarterly snapshot of what is going on, and we're comparing this quarter with same quarter last year when we were in the midst of COVID basically everywhere. That's one part of the answer, Dominic, is about there's not been an increase in the number of licenses or volume going through the picking solution. That explains the flat, softer software sales that we had. When it comes to lockers, I think, you know, it's a reflection of the grocery company's priorities. I mean, with society opening up, we have seen that the investments have been going into in-store solutions.
That's not to say that there's no investments in click & collect lockers and such, but a lot of it has been going into in-store solutions and both medium term and of course long term, we're expecting that to grow. This Q1 was a reflection of society opening up.
No further?
Okay. I think with that, we'll thank you all for watching and wish you a continued great day. Thank you.
Thank you.