Hi, welcome to Tomra's first quarter results presentation. My name is Bing Zhao, and I'm responsible for investor relations in Tomra. This time we have had to adapt our reporting to a new digital format with our CEO present in Switzerland and our CFO, Espen Gundersen, and I present in Norway. For those of you watching the webcast, hopefully you will still get the same seamless experience thanks to our webcast crew. You will still have the possibility to post questions, which will be addressed towards end of the presentation. Now I would like to hand it over to our CEO, Stefan, to take us through the highlights during the past quarter. Please, Stefan.
Thank you, Bing, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for dialing in and listening to our webcast about the first quarter result. I am waiting a little bit because it seems that the slide I want to have just arrived now. The first quarter 2020 was a good quarter. We experienced top line growth of 11%. However, we have to remember that the Norwegian crown had a quite turbulent period. If we take adjusted for currency, revenues were up 3% for the group. We had an increase in operating expenses that is stemming back to our efforts to invest in future revenues growth, both in ramping up the collection solutions business and building our circular economy activities.
This is something that is of strategic importance for Tomra, and you can expect us to continue investing in building up exactly these activities where we strive for a global leadership role. Cash was good in the quarter, NOK 265 million, and the EBITDA earnings increased with about 10% to NOK 288 million. One of the highlights of the quarter is definitely that we had strong order intake in Tomra Sorting Solutions. Recycling and Mining had already a very strong quarter to compare with last year, so they had less of an increase, but Food made a good contribution to the growth. That also led to that we would now have an all-time high order backlog in Tomra Sorting Solutions.
As you all are aware of, in later part of the quarter, we were hit by the pandemic coronavirus, and I will talk a little bit more about that on the next pages. Please, next page. Before going into the pandemic, let's just go through the highlights of the quarter. In TOMRA Collection, it was a rather uneventful quarter. We had good activity level in Northern Europe and Australia continued to perform well. The other regions were stable. We had the big exhibition, which takes place every three years called EuroShop, and that took place in February this year. We were lucky because we still had a lot of attendance from customers from close and far. We had made quite a, let's call it investment in demonstrating our capabilities and our new developments.
The people visiting could see our new MultiFeed R1, that attracted a lot of interest, but we also demonstrated our digital capabilities, our connectivity, and the broad portfolio covering everything from the smallest of stores up to industrial sites. Really interesting. Of course, we could also have an opportunity to visit the other industrial players, and I think there was very little doubt that Tomra stood out as the leader, both when it comes to innovation and the broadness of our offering. Very happy to experience that. Food had a strong quarter, as I mentioned in order intake. If you recall back from last year, actually the first and second quarter were a bit slower, so we compare on a lower level too. We have to admit that. We did struggle a little bit with the order intake the first and second quarter of Food.
As of third and fourth quarter, we could see a stabilization, and it's now nice for us to experience that the first quarter 2020 also built on that positive trajectory. That was really, I think, one of the key highlights here. Another, of course, is that our food division got a new leader. He started in January. His name is Michel Picandet. He comes from the whole food industry, his entire career. A very international, very experienced, and both leader and food expert. That has been a very exciting period for us to experience his onboarding and he's, as we speak, fully in charge. That's very nice. We also had, in February, the FRUIT LOGISTICA, which is one of the most important food processing exhibitions. This took place in Berlin.
Here, in the same fashion as when I talked about EuroShop before, we could really see the full capabilities of Tomra, where we demonstrated the different technology platforms we have, our investments in new sensor and groundbreaking sensor technologies, and groundbreaking artificial intelligence applications. Tomra is definitely also here at the forefront, investing in sensing, in artificial intelligence, in digital platforms. Building on our past strong experience with hardware. Recycling and Mining, also strong quarter, strong order intake. As I said, not a strong growth because they really had a strong first quarter last year. We just have to remember that history plays a role here too. Beyond that, not so many events to talk about.
As you can see on the illustration here, we also are proud of our new artificial intelligence solutions or the machine learning, with which we can actually sort even more accurately than before, and the machines are now getting quite advanced in finding the smallest of differences between materials that are being sorted. Very important for the future of Recycling. With that, I ask you to turn to the next page. I'd like to elaborate a little bit with you about the whole coronavirus situation. We will do that first on the group level and then go through on the division impact. Obviously, it is something that made us all very uncertain initially, and as a leadership team of Tomra, we have really stepped up our activity level when it comes to how we lead the company, the crisis management.
If we say the following way, that before the coronavirus, we used to have one formal meeting every month. Now we have one every week. In fact, we are talking more frequently. If we, before the virus situation or the pandemic situation, used to make a forecast update on a monthly or bimonthly basis, now we do it on a weekly or biweekly. That has been important because, if I look into the financial planning, it started off with quite big uncertainty. If you look at the gap in between which we think of a min and max in our possible future scenarios, in the beginning, that gap was quite big because there were a lot of uncertainties.
As we have progressed and tested the drivers, tested the business indicators, talked with customers, talked with our people, we get better and better understanding for how this will impact the business. That road that was quite broad in the beginning is now much more narrow, which gives us more confidence in our ability to talk about the business going forward. We have to remember that we are still fairly new in this situation, so things can change, but we now feel much more confident, much more educated than we did, say, a month back. Important for us has been really to, number one priority, I dare to say, was the whole safety and well-being of our employees. We invested a lot here in making sure that people were protected, setting up home office environment.
Where people physically had to meet, we made clear separations in workforces and took all protective measures you can in order to maintain control of a virus-free environment in, say, workshops or labs. It has worked out fairly well. We have had in total, as of yesterday, six cases reported in Tomra of coronavirus infection. Five are recovered and the sixth are under recovery, and there's no crisis there. So far, we feel that it has been working well. We have also stepped up the communication significantly, where we talk frequently with our people, recognizing that they are working in an isolated environment. They have questions, they have need for information, they have need to connect and feel part of something. The feedback we get from the employees through our surveys is positive throughout. In a way, it's been working very well.
I'm very pleased with what the people have done on the whole people and organization side here. Customer, our livelihood, that's a reason for us to exist is to handle our customer requests and help them solve their problems. Here, of course, a big shift, since you cannot travel and meet customers so much. In a way, initially, a lot of customers were not very available because they clearly had to figure out how to organize and run the business under this new scenario. Meanwhile, we have been able to establish very good dialogues, in some ways, maybe even more frequent, at least. Maybe saying close is maybe not the best word, but more frequent dialogues with the customers. For instance, if I take the Food business, we've done 1,000 deep interviews here now to understand the business situation of our customers. That's quite impressive.
We are working with different technologies. The traditional service is continuing, and I'm very proud of that has been able to hold up. We have also deployed a lot of new technologies with virtual tools, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. Our ability to produce or covering our entire supply chain, including our suppliers, our own operations, is in a good stage. We had some initial hiccups. You might recall that the virus initiated in China, that was very much coinciding with the Chinese New Year, in a way, helped us because we had already buffered a little bit for those components which we source from China, to make sure that we could cover the Chinese New Year. As we speak, our Chinese operations are back to 100%. We have full activity level in our European plants as we speak.
Also there, we had some hiccups, but they are recovered, and only in New Zealand we have a slight reduction, so we are maybe at 80% instead of 100% there. That doesn't cause any disruption because we have been able to offload that operation a bit with the other network of operations we have. Really, I'm proud to say that we are able to deliver when it comes to the whole shipment. We have actually been a little bit proactive, shipping to customers in advance, just being cautious so that we are not getting stuck in any importation or transportation issues. So far, very good, and we have had no serious quality issues when it comes to our order backlog.
The customer wants the goods and at maximum, there have been minor delays from some customers and very often because of the new plans might have been delayed due to other reasons. We have been able to honor our obligations, and I'm very proud about that. We are up and running, and we have a close to normal operational situation. Obviously, with this kind of completely new economic situation and all the scenarios we are fed with from the external world, a very central part of our activity was really to stress test and try to understand and get the full control of our own situation. I'm dare to say that we have a satisfied situation. We have taken, and we took very early a lot of measures to reduce cost out.
Like hiring freeze, stopping investments, all non-necessary spending out, travel ban goes, not ban, but that travel restriction goes for free almost here because that's not possible to travel, but also all cash out on consultants. We really brutally went in immediately and just capped on that. We have planned also for addressing the workforce activity. We have done some reductions in areas where we need, both reduction of people and Kurzarbeit or short time work. We have used the tools which are there, same time trying to be careful with our employees, finding the right balance here, and I feel we are on a good track there. We are better in control of our financial outlook than we were in the beginning, and we feel that, just, it's not a disaster here.
I'll come back a little bit to why. We're also preparing for recovery. We see there would be a world after coronavirus, and we have a clear strategy we want to head with Tomra. We haven't altered that one, so it's more navigating through these lumpy waters now, and we ring-fence important developments when it comes to new market development, circular economy, ramp up when we need that, sensor developments, digital developments. We haven't stopped that. There is even more need for our services in the future, and we continue to invest in that. We try to do the right things here, cutting where it's possible and has an immediate effect, and do not disturb the long-term strategic plan which we have laid out for the company. With that, I ask you to go to the next page.
This illustrates what has been the implication of our coronavirus for TOMRA Collection. If we just start with a customer base in Collection Solution, most of the customers are retail. Retail continues in, I think, all markets to operate, and pretty robust, resilient during such a crisis situation. People will continue to eat food like before. They would probably eat less from hotels, restaurants, and catering, also partly because that's been closed. They would go more to retail. Our retail customers are operating with strong demand, meaning that we have a strong customer, cash-rich customer, and the demand activity is high. Actually, in a way, we can see also a snapshot of this on the graph which we have up on the left side here.
This graph, where you see three lines, one is a flat line, one is the pink, which shows a dip and return, and one is a lighter blue, which is showing a dip where it stays down for a longer period of time. That is an illustration of the activity level on our reverse vending machines. You know that out of our 83,000 machines we have installed in the world, most of our machines are actually connected today. We have instant feedback on the activity level. It's almost like if you think of a flight tracker, where you can see what's happening in the air. Obviously, it's not very much on the flight tracker today. Here you can see it's not happening on the Tomra RVM tracker. The RVM tracker tells us that in the European part of the world, the volume development, it's a stable situation.
The pink line indicates Australia, where we had a dip. We can also see that in this case, New South Wales and Queensland, we have recovered from that dip. We are back into the original scenario. There was a dip, where people were afraid of using, or there was some restriction in the movement of people, but that has recovered. We do, however, still have a challenge in parts of North America. That is the lighter blue one, where you can see the volume has gone down there. That's also where we have been forced to take most of our measures when it comes to cost adjustments. This is really our online tool basis. We could even do hourly.
We have a full understanding of what's happening in our RVMs, with that, we also much quicker than ever in the past are able to adjust for any scenarios, a positive or a negative scenario. We are using that, and this is something part of our internal management platform tools. When it comes to new deposit markets, Scotland has indicated they have now submitted their final DRS regulations to the Scottish Parliament, we expect the legislation to pass in this year, that in 1st of July 2022, the scheme would go live. That's a step forward now. Slightly delayed from the original planning they indicated to us, now things seems to be on the move again. Western Australia is, as you know, done deal. They have decided, they have gone out for a tender process and everything clear.
There was a disruption in the startup. They're talking about starting up the system either by November 2020 or by June 2021, depending on the coronavirus. There's no disturbance from legislation or things like that. This is purely adjusting the startup date due to the virus outbreak. Very positive, I'm happy to say, is that the Netherlands have communicated that they will introduce a deposit on smaller plastic bottles as of July 1st, 2021. There has been a system in place in Holland for a long period of time for objects bigger than one liter, and now they will also cover the smaller bottles. We think that is just wonderful news. It's great for building up a more sustainable and more circular economy-oriented economy in Europe and in this case, in Netherlands. We're very happy about that.
Beyond that, our operation, I think I have covered a lot. Important is, again, to remember that these customers we have, the retail, it's business-essential. It's business-society critical services. They do continue. We have to continue to support them. We see where we have the activity level, as I talked about the graph before. What we have learned much more is to do online sales, and that's really working nicely. Our field service needs to continue to operate. We do that. We have live status on the machines, as I talked about, and our production is able to operate and it's continuing. Of course, we have worked a little bit about touch-free RVM concept so that people are not concerned about the spread from that point of view.
The business is in a good shape, and I think the team has responded in a most fantastic way when it comes to how to handle the whole situation. We are very delighted about the progress, especially here with the Netherlands introducing a DRS on small bottles. With that, I would like to move to talking about the next page, which is food. Food business, again, we are lucky in Tomra because food business is also a business critical and essential or society critical and essential business. We cannot just stop producing food. People need to eat. The trees doesn't stop growing apples because there's a coronavirus. They need to be processed. If you have planted an acre of new farmland, you need to process that independent on the virus situation or not.
If we think that there will be a stop here in the food, we think wrong. Food will need to continue. Certainly, there will be disruptions, and the food situation, the food processes have gone through quite a test here, and I'll talk a little bit about that. This is an industry that is in itself resilient, except for some short-term hiccups. If we just look at what we have experienced in this period, so when it comes to production of food, that goes for both harvesting and processing, when you package it, sort it, and so on. Here, the biggest challenge for our customers have been the access to labor. When, for instance, migrants cannot come in, seasonal workers coming in from cross-bordering to help out, that has been for years a very national pool of resources for the farming industry.
When that is disrupted, that cause a disruption for them. Their supply is under pressure. They are at some points even not able to fully harvest what they should. That's what they could, what they have grown. That has been one of the challenges. I think it's getting better. The politicians have been able to understand the challenges and take measures around it. It's been, for sure, one of the challenges here. The next has been the whole distribution. If you take U.S., for instance, I understand about 50% of the food consumption is channeled through hotel, restaurants, catering. That sector has been completely shut down. People have to turn back to traditional ways of cooking food, how we have cooked food for thousands of years, to cook at home. The processes have not been necessarily all ready for that.
Some of them were really focusing on the HORECA sector, and then there's a shift. Obviously, this is a very innovative, a strong sector. They are able to change, but it takes some time. Also logistics has been under pressure, especially shipping of fresh produce cross borders. We have seen lines of trucks crossing borders, trying to cross borders in Europe, for instance. For some product types, that can be devastating. We have also seen, as a result of HORECA shutdown, we have seen the demand for some categories of food being reduced. For instance, french fries, which is widely sold over McDonald's and the like, that demand is down, and also especially the North American region, where HORECA has such a big part of the whole food value system. That's the most challenged area we have for the time being. Also the consumption.
People continue to eat. They will go more to retail, as we have talked about before. Some of the people have actually forgotten how to cook. It's also a challenge here. The food industry really has to retrain them. What our grandmother used to teach us has unfortunately been lost in the new fast-moving world, and hopefully we'll come back with that, as people learn again. We have used a lot of very innovative ways to handle the customer side. We have virtual tests been doing fantastic. We are selling through using virtual testing. We have used virtual support for installations, and we are doing more and more remote support of our customers when it comes to performance measures and so on. It's really interesting.
What we would anyway would have had to do in terms of transforming to digital, to more remote tool sets, is now catapulting forwards. We get the catalysator here through the virus. As a company, when I'm on that note, it's not only bad that we have these challenges. We will also draw a lot of new learnings and can actually accelerate some of the initiatives we have been striving for and having on the strategic agenda for a long time. Now is the time to push the button and go on. I think Tomra will actually be somewhat a different company, more agile and a bit smarter after the crisis. It helps us become better also. We just need to endure this difficult phase now. With that, let's go over and talk a little bit about the Recycling and Mining business.
Recycling and Mining, again, I dare to say, society critical, essential business. We need to continue handling waste. People continue to generate waste that needs to be picked up from the homes, that needs to be processed, and that business is ongoing. Our customer, in this case, they don't talk about the crisis. They might have challenges when it comes to how they operate their fleet of trucks and plants, and they might need more automation to have less people in the plants, but they don't talk about crisis. They have long-term contracts, and they work through that.
If we look at, for instance, the municipal solid waste and the plastic upgrading, which you see on the left side here, these together makes about 70% of the Recycling business, these two. We experience very robust business situation there, driven by legislation. Driven by the need to invest in new infrastructure and also driven by the whole sustainable packaging initiatives of the fast-moving consumer goods companies. We see that is not debated. That is continued. That's a wave that will not stop because of corona. Now people recognize we need to be smarter, we need to be more sustainable. Our consumers will not reward a company that do not provide smart and more sustainable solutions in the future. That's a trend which we see is continuing. We can clearly experience this here.
There are also sectors where we are affecting negatively, and definitely in the metal sector where our customers, metal scrap yards and the like, which will then process the metal into material that can be reused for instance, car manufacturing. Certainly, that sector is down. The whole commodity price sector is down. Look at oil, metals, and of course, that also affects their business dramatically. That sector is clearly challenged today. The mining sector, even though we haven't seen too much challenges until now, we expect that one also to be a bit challenged. 70% of the Recycling and Mining business is in a good stage with the municipal solid waste, the plastic upgrading doing well. Metal is definitely a challenge. We expect mining also to be a challenge, but I have to say, until now, we've been blessed. It's been going well there.
As I said, if we now go to the right-hand side of this picture, we have invested a lot in smarter technologies. I talked about artificial intelligence before, connected machines with digital platforms. The best municipal solid waste treatment plants today, they can operate completely automated. At times with corona, where you have shortage of labor and you don't want people to be close, that becomes even more in fashion, that kind of solutions. Spot on for us, I would say, and we will continue to work on that. I'm also very proud and actually take the opportunity when I address this to all of you, we have some fantastic people. We have some mines, very remote mines, and we have people that have volunteered to stay at the mine for uninterrupted period, because they know they cannot go back and forth and meet their families.
They have volunteered to stay at the mines for a longer period of time to ride the wave here with the customer, or the wave is maybe the wrong word, go through this period with the customers and really support them at site here. It's not something we have pushed our people, but maybe that's a sign for the, what I consider, wonderful culture we have in Tomra. People are willing to step up. People are willing to go the extra mile, and these are examples for that, and that happens in the mining sector. There it's actually needed because the mines are remote, and in some instances, people are not able to travel in this country. Very glad to say that. We have also set up a stay connected site for our customers. We really try all the positive ways to ride out this situation.
With that, we can change to the next page. I will just talk shortly about the circular economy. Again, it's a strategic initiative for us. We see that this will be a major part of our business in the future. Right now, Tomra actually plays a very important role in being able to build, be a catalyst for building these concepts because there's a desire to do sustainable packaging, to go circular economy, but there's a lack of tools, lack of know-how, and one of the few companies in the world that can really offer solutions for that is Tomra. Obviously, we want to position ourselves, we want to contribute here, through collaboration to position ourselves as the number one, and I think that's actually happening.
We are, for instance, part of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, which is the biggest industrial alliance globally to tackle this problem. Together, we have more than 1 million employees. We are committed as an alliance to invest $1.5 billion over five years to develop solutions for ending plastic waste and building up circular economy. We are at the World Economic Forum, meeting with the right people, connecting and sharing our experiences. We are signed up to the European Plastics Pact, which really recognize that material needs to be reused. It's too good not to be used. It is essential for society, but today, we don't harvest the full value out of it. Basically, we are destroying most of the values, and that's really what we have to do.
On the right side, you can also see where we are working together with a company called Viridor on how we can implement such a circular economy solution in real life, not only on a conceptual stage, but really already today bringing some tangible solutions. I'm really proud about that. Again, this is a strategic area for us. We will continue to invest, and our ambition is clear. We want the world to become more sustainable, and we want Tomra to be a leader in this future games. With that, I stop here and pass over to Espen. He will talk about the finances and the outlook.
Thank you, Stefan. Moving to page 11. As always, starting with the currency, more important than ever. NOK depreciated significantly in March, that influences almost all figures that we present today. If you look at the end of March figures compared to the beginning of March figures when it comes to exchange rates. We see that the USD has strengthened almost 20%, the EUR is almost 17% versus, or during the quarter. For those figures, that's measured at a point in time, meaning typically the balance sheet or the order backlog, those are the relevant figures to look at this for. If you look at those figures, that's average for the period, typically P&L, you see that the figures are somewhat lower because as I said, the depreciation came mainly during March.
The relevant figures year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter is 10.6% up on the USD and 7.3% up on the EUR. Moving to the next page. We see how this influenced the different balance sheets and P&L line items. Overall, the balance sheet has grown with 14% as a consequence of currency changes, meaning NOK 1.5 billion more of assets. Also, the liability increases with the same percentage, and then the residual, the equity, has actually increased with NOK 703 million just because of currencies during this quarter. If you look at the P&L, as I said, the impact is more modest because the depreciation came late in the period, but still we have a positive 8% on revenues and 11% on EBITA. We hedge our predicted future cash flows.
To make this more transparent and simple to understand both internally and externally, we do not account for this down to the EBIT line. We make the spot come through every month, every day in all line items down to EBIT, so it's easy to understand how currency impact. We don't need to know that this period was hedged at that level and so on. Instead, we account for these contracts as trade contracts and consequently book them at market value, and all those contract needs to be reevaluated at exchange rate end of March, and that created a negative effect, a loss of NOK 190 million reported on the net financial income line during the first quarter. Moving to page 13. 11% up on revenues on group, currency adjusted to 3% is collection. That's the main contributor with a 5% increase. Sorting is a small decrease of 1%.
Gross contribution margins are stable. Operating expenses is up 4%, but that's mainly stemming from increased ramp-up costs in TOMRA Collection around figures NOK 10 million and the circular economy initiatives also around figure NOK 10 million, which is reported under Group Functions. Despite a further increase in, let's say, future-oriented cost, we still managed to increase EBITA with NOK 207 billion or currency adjusted pretty flat compared to last year. Going to page 14, TOMRA Collection. Strong sales in the Nordic, stable in the rest of Europe. In North America, we had a good period all the way up until mid-March when the throughput volume started to fall because of the lockdown. We ended the quarter currency adjusted rather unchanged compared to same quarter last year.
Rest of the world is mainly Australia and also had a good improvement all the way up to the last week of March, where also the volumes in these regions started to fall. Gross margin is unchanged. Operating expenses, as I said, slightly impacted by increased ramp-up costs, but bottom line, NOK 151 million in EBITA and 30% margin. Moving to page 15, Sorting Solutions. Somewhat slower sales or installations in Americas this quarter, but is offset by stronger sales in Europe. In total, a stable business, 1% up on revenues currency adjusted, and the conversion ratio is 77%, maybe 78%, which is in the middle of the range that we indicated at the end of last quarter. Gross margin is increasing, and that's a consequence of Tomra Food continuing to improve their margins.
Operating expenses almost unchanged when we adjust for currencies. That gives an improved EBITA of reported NOK 114 million of EBITA in this quarter. Moving to page 16. Order development, order backlog significantly affected by currencies. This is illustrated by the red areas in the bars. Looking at order intake also adjusted for currencies, we were up 11% compared to same quarter last year, particularly if you have a higher take in Tomra Food. The order backlog, also adjusted for currencies, still up 13% and we consequently have an all-time high order backlog by the end of first quarter. If you look at the estimated backlog conversion ratio, it's now estimated to be 60%-65%, meaning that the revenues of the upcoming quarter will indeed be around the area 60%-65% of the current backlog.
It's lower than usual, but we have been down this area two times before. We'll come back to this on the outlook statement. As I always say, this is not guiding, this is just an indication for you that want to model us on a more quarterly basis. Moving to page 17, the balance sheet. As I said, it's 13% It's 14% currency effect, that's more or less all the effects you see on the balance sheet is related to currencies. The underlying fixed currency effects is not very material if you compare to the end of the last year. If you look at the working capital, we have had some inventory built up, but also a positive development on the receivables, payables and the contract liabilities.
It gives overall a positive development of the working capital and consequently also an increase in cash flow from operations ending up to NOK 265 compared to NOK 229 last year. The equity is unchanged, the gearing measure, that's interest bearing debt on EBITDA on a rolling 12 months basis is now at 0.9 without IFRS 16 and 1.4 including IFRS 16. This is slightly up, meaning a higher gearing because we have our loans nominated or swapped into EUR. Consequently measured in NOK also the debt has increased, in the way we report this and that influence also the gearing percentages. Moving to page 18. We have a solid financial position. We have NOK 900 million of unused committed credit lines at the end of the quarter.
We have some loans that will expire in first and second year becoming short-term debt. We are in the process to look into refinancing this in the quarters to come. There's no indication that there should be a problem to refinance. We are in a very good position, good dialogue with the banks and money still available in a rather easy way for Tomra. Going to page 19. Last night we had our annual general meeting. All agenda items was approved in line with the board and the nomination committee's proposals. The dividend proposal being the board granted an authorization to resolve dividends after our discretion, dividend up to NOK 75 at the later stage was approved. We have had KPMG for 26 years as auditor and consequently we run a tender process and then PwC was nominated and then elected as our new group auditor.
Beside that there was no change in the composition of board of directors. Going to page 20, the last page. Now is the difficult part. Talking about the history is easy. Talking about the outlook is always somewhat more difficult and particularly this is somewhat turbulent times. I think it's important to understand that the momentum in Tomra has been good through first quarter before the crisis came. We are maybe not essential business, but we are selling to essential businesses. Food retail, they are doing good overall. They will be there and they will have a demands and there's a market. Food producers, they will be there. Great opportunities and the momentum and the drivers behind that business, they're not going away. Waste management need for solutions and the need for these businesses is going to be there.
Regardless where you look, our customers are overall in good shape and that's a very good starting point for Tomra. Of course, what's happening out there will for a period of time also could have a negative influence upon us. There could be problems getting parts, getting machines, getting people across borders. Some installations could be delayed for that reason or store owners or farms or processing plants, pack houses that don't want activity in their plants for different reasons during these times. Some service could be delayed because we can't send out the service tech or they don't want us to visit them exactly now. It could be delayed or postponed for a period. It could be true that where activity is lower for a period, but we don't see that the underlying momentum in the businesses has changed.
Consequently, we talk about more delays or a temporary reduction in activity in some of our businesses. More precise, going down to the units, starting with collection solutions in Euro, it is resilience overall. The stores are open, the volumes are coming back, but there could be delays because store owners maybe don't want installation this week or this month and have some postponements. Overall, the service techs more or less is doing the same job. We have people in the local markets who don't need to cross much borders, and so on. Activity is not very much affected by the current trend line. In U.S., we have a significant part of our activity dependent upon volumes. With the lockdown in Northeast, in particular in New York, also going to Connecticut, we see redemption centers close down.
We see bottle rooms closed for a period, and consequently, lower volumes and lower revenue for Tomra. We believe that many of these bottles will not go away. They will come back when things open up again. This is a delay in revenues. For the time being, activity is lower in that region. Same thing we experienced in Australia, as Stefan talked about, but it was for a period of time. April was low, but going into May, we see volumes is coming back to activity around now is now on the level more or less what we saw before the crisis.
When it comes to ramp-up expenses, we said at the end of last quarter that we believe that we would, on top of what we had used last year, invest additional NOK 100 million to NOK 150 million on ramp-up and other future-related expenses, mainly the late collection but also some circular economy costs that hits the group pension fund. In the first quarter, we reported round figures, as I said, NOK 20 million in additional costs, NOK 10 of them reported in collection and NOK 10 on group pensions. I think this could be a good indication also what we'll experience in the quarters to come. Consequently, somewhat lower OpEx spending on this than we indicated at the end of fourth quarter, and also in line with what Stefan said, that we are looking at cost and are cautious on non-essential spend.
Going to Sorting Solutions and the third part of this, we ended last quarter with a solid order backlog, but some delays in installation should be expected. People, machines, parts crossing borders, and so on. The order intake in particular in processed foods could be negatively influenced by the current situation. In Recycling and Mining part of Sorting Solutions, the underlying momentum is still good. There are, however, differences between the business streams. Again, as Stefan touched upon, metals and mining are more dependent on commodity prices, and we expect a lower activity and a lower order intake in those units as long as the trend market is ongoing. Currency, as you know, we have a significant positive impact on the weak Norwegian crown.
If the current regime continues throughout this quarter, this will, of course, also have a very positive effect on our bottom line. That concludes our presentation, and we open up for questions from the web. Kym, maybe you can guide us through this.
Yes, of course, Stefan. I'm starting with a question from Frederick Case regarding dividends. How about the postponed 2019 dividend? How do you see the timing of that now?
I think it's the board's privilege to decide when and what to pay out in dividends. I think they will monitor the situation as we go. It's still not more than one month ago that they decided to go for this approach to be on the cautious side. I think they are not ready to record or give any more kind of signals around this at the current stage. Let's see what they end up with but nothing more to report on that question for the time being.
Thank you, Stefan. Maybe also next question for you. Let's see. A question from Mikkel Nyholt-Smedseng in Carnegie. Can you best guess the financial impact on the throughput decline in North America for Q2 and 2020?
What I can say is that most, maybe 75%, 80% of revenues in Americas is volume dependent. A little more than half our revenues is from our material recovery business, where we take responsibility for pickup, transportation, processing of materials, and consequently a direct link between volumes and revenues, but also through our throughput contracts and our redemption center activity. We have a direct link between revenues and volumes. As indicated on the slides Stefan showed, volumes down 50%. If you say that 80% of our revenues are volume dependent and that volume is down 50%, then it's only 40% down. That's kind of the current status. How this developed months to come is dependent upon, of course, how the easing of the initiatives when it comes to the close down, and that's not up to me to speculate upon.
We could also get a positive impact when the things are going back to normal, meaning bottles that has been stored is now being redeemed also. We should be cautious on speculating on that, but I think you have the reference points and the information that we have, and from there you have to try to model this out.
Thank you, Espen. A follow-up question from Mikkel. How do you see the lower OpEx ending in 2020 affecting business estimates for 2021 and beyond?
I think so far we have not done anything that will hit our ability to grow the business. It's more householding. Yes, we do not travel because we can't travel. You do not use consultants if you really don't need it. We are not doing anything that hits our core. There are indeed projects that we are dependent upon and so on. It's minor in the big context, but you will experience that OpEx reporting in second quarter. It will go down at least currency adjusted compared with last year. At the same time, it's not of a magnitude that it will influence our ability to deliver in the future, because we believe that what we see is a temporary situation, and we have to sit through this and through that also prepare ourselves for things to happen afterwards also.
I think that's kind of the view we have upon it and hopefully also answer the questions.
Thank you, Espen. With that, there's no more questions from the web. It seems like everything was loud and clear. We conclude the presentation. Thank you for watching and continue to stay safe. Thank you.