Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this Q1 presentation by StrongPoint. We are actually also here live in Oslo, so thank you so much for those of you attending here. Today's presentation is going to be of the short kind. We have a longer set aside 2 hours for a strategy update session. They will also be broadcasted to those of you following on the web. That's at 11:00 A.M. CET. But right now, I will be presenting the Q1 results together with Marius Drefvelin, our CFO. And Q&As we're going to save until we have completed the strategy update session. So now, very briefly, and again, to a lot more extent in the strategy update session, what is StrongPoint all about? We are providing or infusing retail technology in every shopping experience, whether that's online or offline, for a smarter and better life.
That sounds grandiose, so what does it really mean in practice? In terms of the solution that StrongPoint offers, we provide a number of in-store solutions and products, as well as e-commerce products and solutions. If you're in Norway, you would have seen in many, many grocery stores the Vensafe solution, for instance. This is the tobacco, typically, but also other high-value item protection that allows for a secure dispensing, which is important in today's environment with increasing theft being on the rise. We're also a proud partner of Pricer when it comes to electronic shelf labels. We at StrongPoint have been an instrumental player in ensuring that the ESL penetration in Norway and Sweden, and also growing in the Baltics and UK, is coming.
Lastly, as an example on self-checkout, self-checkout is actually one of the examples of solutions that we have developed in the Baltics and not yet seen here in the home turf of Norway and Sweden. But the solution is absolutely amazing. Not only is it cost-efficient being built and designed in the Baltics, but it also has a number of smart features and artificial intelligence to avoid theft. I think you've all seen, and this is not only in Norway, but the rise of theft in self-checkout solutions. StrongPoint has integrated its artificial intelligence solution to allow for theft detection and hence prevention. There's a number of other solutions which I'll go in more detail through in the strategy update session on the in-store. On the e-commerce side, I'm going to now just offer a little bit of flavor into what we're doing.
One is the order picking solution that StrongPoint developed on the back of an acquisition we did in 2018. We were then very proud of the solution and we're not more proud, or even more proud now, with Sainsbury's having embraced our order picking solution, one of the highest or best solutions to our knowledge in the industry, tailor-made for grocery retail. Again, we'll talk a lot more about our solutions in the strategy update session, but now the financials overview for Q1. First of all, it is disappointing to see a 6% decline in revenue. The decline deserves some explanation. Firstly, the Scandinavian countries, Norway and Sweden, have a slight growth. Its service revenues are stabilizing and growing at about 10%. And we're also executing on some electronic shelf label orders that we have, which are both contributing to an overall growth in the Scandinavian markets of 3%.
Unfortunately, we're being hit very heavily on the international side, and specifically in the UK. The UK alone explains NOK 21 million out of the NOK 22 million decline in revenues. This stems back to the shop fitting business that we have acquired, the ALS company that we acquired some year and a half ago, where we have not been able to uphold the activity levels that we would otherwise normally see there. As a consequence, the revenue as such is declining by 6% quarter-over-quarter. When you then go to the EBITDA, you will also see a decline here, and a decline of NOK 19 million, which is quite severe when you think of a revenue decline of a little bit north of NOK 20 million. About half of that EBITDA decline in Norwegian kroner stems from a gross profit reduction, simply driven by revenue decline.
The margin as such is pretty stable. But most of the decline, or the other decline, is driven by operational cost. And it's operational cost in Norwegian kroners. It's important to get across. We are, unfortunately, seeing a depreciation of the Norwegian kroner and the Swedish kroner versus the euro and pound. And that hits us when we look at the cost side of things. So despite having successfully completed the NOK 20 million net reduction in costs from Q4 and into Q1, this has not been enough to withstand the currency changes and general inflation. And that leads us to a negative NOK 6 million EBITDA in the quarter. Clearly not a result we're happy about. And as we'll be talking more about later, we're doing additional both cost measures, but also restructuring and commercial efforts to change that.
With that, I will briefly touch upon one point, which is not giving any revenue as such in the quarter. But that is really two major milestones. One is the Sainsbury's order picking win that we announced early January. I've labeled this as the most important and significant win in the history of StrongPoint. Sainsbury's is the second largest grocery retailer in the U.K., in a market, the U.K., which is the highest penetrated e-grocery market. And Sainsbury's, who's been in the market for a long, long time also with grocery e-commerce offering, has chosen StrongPoint's solution. That's so important, and we're going to spend a lot more time on that later as well.
And although it did not happen in Q1, but actually announced yesterday, is the revelation of who is the retailer we have been working with in Spain for many, many years now, actually closer to three years, to develop a revolutionary new cash management solution. And that customer is no other than Mercadona. I assume that if you're going to a vacation in Spain, it's very rare that you go to a grocery store like I do. But Mercadona is actually even bigger than Sainsbury's in terms of revenue. And the amount of cash transactions is 50% of all transactions in the store. That's about one-third of all turnover is cash-related, which means that the cash management solution offering that we have done now together with Mercadona over three years is going to be so, so important. So these are two super significant new ventures that we have finally gotten.
We've invested over many, many years, and we're very much looking forward to both seeing these fruits come to life in terms of revenue and profit. Later today, we'll also talk a lot more about these two major wins. With that, Marius?
Thank you very much, Jacob. I will go through some of the other key financials for the first quarter of 2024. I will start off with the earnings per share. On the left-hand side, you will see that for the first quarter, we had a -0.26 NOK in the EPS, obviously driven by the financial results that Jacob has touched upon. On the right-hand side, you will see the 12-month rolling EPS, which was negative 1.14 NOK. However, if you adjust for the non-cash items related to amortization of M&A, it's negative 0.86 NOK. 0.88 NOK, sorry. So, this was the earnings per share. If we move on to the cash flow movements so far this year, we have the impact of the operating result of -NOK 6 million from the EBITDA. However, we had a positive impact from working capital with an improvement of NOK 11 million.
This allowed us to reduce the bank overdraft with NOK 10 million during the period. We also had capital expenditure of NOK 6 million. This is planned CAPEX, mainly related to the Mercadona project. This is development costs and other purchases that we are mainly capitalizing in the balance sheet. All other development costs are expensed over the P&L. Other cash items included NOK 9 million in lease payments, mainly related to premises. There was a repayment of NOK 6 million on taxes, mainly related to Sweden. If we look further into the working capital items, it's important for us to convey that working capital development is highly dependent on the type of projects that we deliver and the volume, obviously. This will vary over time. We reduced the working capital with NOK 10 million. We see that we had a fairly flat development in accounts receivable.
We continue to have low loss on receivables due to the solid customer base. In addition, we had a reduction in inventory, which has a positive impact on the working capital. This is a high priority for us going forward. If we move on to the development in the net interest-bearing debt, we had NOK 77 million at the end of this quarter. This was a reduction of NOK 4 million compared to the previous period. We have been able to maintain and control the debt level over the last three quarters, which again is important to us. But I think more importantly, we signed a new agreement with a leading Scandinavian financial institution to refinance our current bank overdraft, increasing from NOK 150 million to NOK 200 million. And this consists of a revolving credit facility and working capital financing. And we expect this to be completed sometime during this second quarter.
This was an important milestone for us, and there's two main factors that I would like to highlight. First of all, we are now taking on bigger and more demanding international customers, which will increase the working capital requirement. Secondly, last quarter, we announced that we had a covenant waiver for the end of Q4 this year. With this new credit facility, we will not have a net leverage covenant. The covenant waiver will no longer be needed. There will be a 30% equity ratio covenant, which compares to our current balance sheet, where we have 46%. Obviously, there is still a lot of work left, but this was an important milestone for us to be able to deliver on the business plan. These were the key highlights and key takeaways from the first quarter.
As Jacob mentioned, we have a new session now at 11:00 A.M. with the strategy update. The next quarterly presentation is on the 12th of July. With that, we thank you for your attention and wish you a good day.