Welcome, everybody, to this Q4 presentation by StrongPoint. My name is Jacob Tveraabak, and I'll be joined today by our CFO, Marius Drefvelin. As always, I will provide a short introduction of StrongPoint, our company. I'll give an update into the Q4 highlights and some customer success stories, and then Marius will provide additional financial information. Regarding StrongPoint, we are a retail technology company trying to put in retail technology in every shopping experience for a smarter and better life. What that means is impacting and helping grocery retailers drive efficiency, hence boosting margins, and also providing their customers, the end consumers, with a better shopping experience. To do that, we are providing a number of solutions. We have a quite wide portfolio of solutions constituting both what we call in-store solutions as well as e-commerce solutions.
A lot of these solutions are own IP, but in addition, we're also including some third-party partners and their solutions. All of this is to ensure that our customers, predominantly grocery retailers, get the best and most efficient operations and provide the best shopping experience for their customers. We are present in nine countries, and we are serving all major retailers in most countries. Our traditional home turf is the Norway, Sweden, and Baltic markets in which we serve all major grocery retailers. In the additional countries that we have included through acquisitions, we're already starting to get more and more of the logos for the grocery retailers in place. A vital part of what provides the best experience to our customers and providing StrongPoint with operational leverage is by not only selling solutions, but also doing the installation, the service, and the support.
This full value chain ownership provides both us the opportunity to provide the best experience for our customers and the products and their achievements, but it also provides us with an excellent opportunity to create customer intimacy over time. Actually, this year, we've been doing so for 40 years out of Norway, and we are very excited about taking what we have proven to be a winning formula in the traditional markets, also out to the larger markets, in particular the U.K. Now, to the Q4 highlights, and I will start with the revenue development for StrongPoint. In the quarter, we are experiencing a NOK 9 million, or a 3% growth in revenue compared to the same quarter last year. The growth is predominantly driven by Sweden, which is having a quite nice growth of 19%, or NOK 14 million.
What's holding back the revenue development is really a decline in Spain, where we're seeing a NOK 9 million decline in revenue. Other markets are more stable. It should be said also that if we're looking at our recurring revenue and a 12-month recurring rolling revenue, we're seeing a quite nice increase of 15% up to, or with, NOK 46 million. Marius will explain more what the details of that recurring revenue are, but that is an important part of understanding how our business is developing, getting more and more recurring revenue. Looking at the EBITDA of StrongPoint, we have a NOK 26 million improvement. Obviously, this is coming from a very poor quarter last year with minus NOK 21 million. An improvement now leads us to NOK 5 million. Obviously, with the top line we're having, this is far from satisfactory profitability levels.
That said, we should also note that in the traditional markets, Norway, Sweden, and the Baltics, we are now approaching the targeted profitability levels that we're aiming at. As you can understand, there are things holding us back. Specifically, in the quarter, it's again been shop fitting, specifically in the U.K., but it's also been the Spanish operations. Both those elements are obviously, or those two areas are obviously key for us to improve and do something about, and that is also focus now and into the rest of 2025. Now, as we're going into customer success stories, there are three elements or three parts of that that we're highlighting. Obviously, a lot's happening, but three things we want to highlight. I want to start off with self-checkout. Self-checkout in the Baltics has been a smashing success for a long time.
Last quarter, we announced that we're rolling out, and we're continuing to roll out our self-checkout solution to the largest grocery retailer in the Baltics, namely Maxima. Now, this quarter, we are announcing both the sale of self-checkout solutions to Rimi, part of the ICA Group, and Iki, part of the Rimi Group in the Baltics. I'm super proud about this solution because we have developed both our own software and hardware, and we're seeing customers in the Baltics applying either one or two of those solutions, both hardware and software. We are also continuing to be both hopeful and, with persistency, working to get these brilliant self-checkout solutions into the other markets that we operate in: Norway, Sweden, the U.K., most notably.
The fact that we're again winning self-checkout solutions in the Baltics is, for us, a testimony of the high-quality level solutions that we have, both on theft prevention, on user ability, and on cost levels. Stay tuned. The second thing we want to highlight is Vensafe. Our Norwegian and Swedish investors would hopefully know about and be familiar with the Vensafe product. It's been around in the market for many, many years. Now, it's starting to gain traction in the U.K. In this quarter, we had two live proof of concepts with Sainsbury's and Asda, with slightly different use cases. One using the Vensafe as the traditional tobacco dispensing machines that we typically see in Norway and Sweden. The other one using non-tobacco products only.
With a third major grocery retailer very soon coming into stores as well, we are very hopeful again about the promise that Vensafe can give to U.K. retailers, where theft is really a big issue nowadays. We know it'll take time to get customers and end users accustomed to a solution like Vensafe, so we should expect these proof of concepts to take both one and two, and perhaps even three quarters before we get to a proper rollout. We are very excited to see the Vensafe landing in the U.K. with these very esteemed grocery retailers. The final bit I wanted to highlight in this quarter was the announcement of our multifaceted partnership with VusionGroup. VusionGroup is a French stock-listed company. It's a leader in digitalization of solutions for physical commerce. Now, what does that mean?
The VusionGroup has a platform to which you can tag on very specific solutions. One of these solutions is electronic shelf labels. The electronic shelf label business of VusionGroup used to be known as SES-imagotag. It has a 50% global market share of ESLs. It also has its platform, Captana cameras and sensors. It has a retail media platform. Now, with StrongPoint, we are integrating our e-commerce offering, in particular our order picking solution. That is actually one of the two parts of the partnership. The first being StrongPoint as an ISV, an independent software vendor, where StrongPoint will be able to access VusionGroup's platform and its customer to do selling of our order picking solution.
The second bit of the partnership is a value-added reseller or a VAR partnership, where we will be selling VusionGroup's entire portfolio, including its electronic shelf labels, to customers in the nine markets we operate. The selling of and marketing of electronic shelf labels is something we'll be able to do at the very end of June this year. I want to contextualize VusionGroup somewhat, though. This is a major leap for StrongPoint. It's a major company in the digitalization of physical commerce. VusionGroup has a EUR 2.5 billion or more than EUR 2.5 billion market cap. It has annual sales of approximately EUR 800 million. It also recently announced its $1 billion deal with Walmart, the world's largest retailer. Needless to say, we are very excited about this partnership and what we can achieve together.
Finally, I wanted to provide the investors with an update on two significant projects that we have been providing some update on all along. One of them is the Sainsbury's order picking rollout. Now, we won the project beginning last year, and we started the rollout at the end of Q2 last year and well into Q3. Now, in Q4, there's been a freeze period for any rollout of IT or IT-related project at Sainsbury's, as any other major grocer in the U.K. or elsewhere for that matter. Now, we have started again rolling out our order picking solution to ever more Sainsbury's stores. We continue or we expect to continue this rollout in Q1, in Q2, and also probably into Q3 in order to be complete with the rollout to all e-commerce stores or all stores being used for e-commerce fulfillment in Sainsbury's during Q3.
Feedback so far has been very good, and we are very much on track to deliver on this very important project. The second project I wanted to provide an update on is CashGuard Connect. CashGuard Connect is a revolutionary cash project for grocery retailers specifically. It has been a project that we have co-developed with the largest grocery retailer in Spain. The project has taken a lot longer than we anticipated and expected. This is due to a high complexity of the project itself, but it has also been taking more time due to the fact that our joint venture partner has now been going into an insolvency process. We believe that insolvency process will be solved. There has been established an administrator in Spain to handle that. In parallel, we are working to continue the development and the industrialization of the project itself.
It has taken a lot longer than we anticipated, and we now need to have full focus on getting the project back on track and getting it out in the market. There is absolutely very much focus now on ensuring that we have a product we can take out to the market that will be absolutely key, both now in Q1 and Q2. With that, I'd like to hand over the word to Marius Drefvelin.
Thank you, Jacob. I will now go through some of the other financials for the fourth quarter and the year 2024. To start off, we had an earnings per share in the fourth quarter of negative NOK 0.05. Although a negative number in itself, this is a significant improvement compared to the fourth quarter last year.
As shown on the figure to the right, the 12-month rolling earnings per share has improved, particularly during the second half of 2024, due to better operational performance. At the end of the fourth quarter, the rolling 12-month EPS was negative NOK 0.72. That was our earnings per share, but what about the recurring revenue? These figures show the recurring revenue on the 12-month rolling basis. This consists mainly of two parts. First, service agreements, which relate to maintenance and support agreements, plus field services and spare parts on our products. Second, our license revenue, which includes both third-party licenses and our own IP. In addition to these two core components, our recurring revenue also includes rental revenue of CashGuard in Spain. Compared to the fourth quarter last year, the total recurring revenue increased by 15% to NOK 358 million.
This growth is fueled exclusively by a 60% increase in license revenue, mainly from our order picking and self-checkout solutions. Moving from our recurring revenue, what about the cash flow movements for 2024? We started the year with NOK 39 million in cash, which has improved to NOK 82 million at the end of the year. The change in EBITDA was minus NOK 2 million for the year, so limited impact on the cash flow movement. However, we've had a big improvement in working capital, NOK 80 million during the year, mainly due to reduced inventory. Furthermore, we completed the refinancing in the fourth quarter and have currently withdrawn NOK 120 million on our revolving credit facility. This added approximately NOK 30 million in cash.
On cash outlays, we spent NOK 40 million on CapEx, of which NOK 28 million relates to the development of the CashGuard Connect project in Spain, and NOK 3 million on our own POS solution in the Baltics. These are planned investments. All other development costs are expensed over the P&L. The other main cash item was leasing payments of NOK 29 million. Now, let's move further into some of the key components of the working capital development. As you can see, the working capital level has decreased significantly during the year, freeing up cash. The main reason for this is a reduction in inventory due to rollouts of ESL and self-checkouts, as well as reductions of lockers and CashG uards. Moreover, we have improved the balance between accounts receivable and payable.
This is due to the working capital financing that we started to implement during the second half of the year, reducing the debt collection period and hence the accounts receivable. As we have noted in previous financial presentations, some of our revenue is still project-based, and therefore, working capital levels will depend on the volume and type of projects that we deliver. Turning from our main working capital changes this year to the development in net interest-bearing debt. During the fourth quarter, we have reduced the net interest-bearing debt by NOK 51 million to NOK 58 million. This is due to the improved operational performance, working capital improvements, and the new financing arrangements that I have covered earlier. This left us with NOK 102 million in disposable funds at the end of the year, up from NOK 61 million at the end of Q3.
We are now seeing the results of the work done, both operationally and financially, to improve the headroom. We will continue to monitor this closely going forward and improve wherever possible. More importantly, this allows us to support the ongoing growth initiatives, particularly in the U.K. Finally, we had a 45% equity ratio at the end of the quarter, as compared to our covenant of 30%. Later today, there will be a Q&A call at 11:00 A.M. CET. Please log in through the link on our website, where you can post your questions. The next quarterly presentation will be on the 29th of April, with our first quarter 2025 results. With this, I thank you for your attention and wish you a pleasant day.