Welcome to the quarter 1 presentation from Sabtec. We are 2 persons presenting today, myself, Anders Tingbo, I'm the CEO of Sabtec. And my name is Kurt Aswan, I am the CFO. So we will spend about 30 minutes going through the first the highlights, financial highlights and then the operational and market update and talk through these highlights and end with a Q and A session. So let's just jump into it.
Just a moment, technical problem and change the slide.
So The financial highlights for the Q1, the organic revenue growth was 63% like we announced earlier. The export share has a significant increase in this quarter. The cash balance is strong with a total liquidity of NOK241 1,000,000. The gross margin is a little bit below the expectation and the ambition of the company. So it was 33% and Kurt will talk you through that in just a minute.
The operating expenses as a share of the revenue is 3 percentage points lower in this quarter. So the adjusted EBITDA was NOK 5,500,000. For the operational and market update. We can see that the new sales of electric vehicles in Europe continue to be strong. Subtech Go It's a new offering for the single family home market is launched during this quarter.
And we have also secured the production volumes for 2021 2022 in a new agreement with our production partner, West Control. During the quarter, we also established new subsidiaries in Germany and the UK, which are the 2 biggest countries in Europe with an increasing EV adoption. Going forward, we put up a new guiding with 70%, at least 70% organic growth within 2021 with a gross margin of about 40%. So Kurt, can you take the key numbers?
Yes. The revenues was SEK 73,100,000 in the Q1 compared to SEK 44,800,000 last year. And this is the same product range that we had last year. So there is no set to go in this figures. The export share was doubled to 38% 1st quarter against 19% last year.
And the gross margin is 33%. It's low it's down 6% from last year. This is due, as we have announced Before the product mix with the outgoing product Saptek Home, who will be replaced with Saptek Go, but this will first happen from April. We have also some Excuse me, in productions costs related to the subscription of 4 gs And that will be free for customer until the Q4 this year. The operator's expenses was 18,800,000 and related to the share of revenue, this is down 3%.
The adjusted EBITDA was $5,500,000 up from $4,400,000 last year. And it's been adjusted for the salary benefit of share option program for almost SEK10 1,000,000. And in percent, the EBITDA margin was 7.6%. And we have a strong available liquidity of 241,600,000.
So just to summarize a little bit, the revenues was So very positive with a high growth. We are having a gross margin below our ambitions. We have the plans for raising this gross margin during the second quarter, so that the second half of this year will be with a higher gross margin. Yes.
Yes, I mean, we are still targeting for 40% gross margin for the whole 2021.
So a little bit update on the DB markets. In our main markets Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. During the quarter, it was a total of 85,000 electric vehicles sold in these markets. If you look at the figure on the upper hand side of this slide, you can see that during The last quarter of 2020, the EV adoption and the EV sales was really up and it's on a new level in the markets where we operate. On the lowest picture you can see the growth in each of these four markets in the last three quarters.
So the Q1 of 2019, 2020, 2021. So Norway has, of course, the largest volumes, but the highest growth rates are in Switzerland and Sweden. Going a little bit further down Europe, Germany. We saw that 200,000 electric vehicles were sold in Germany and the UK in the Q1. It's the same picture on the right hand side, you can see that it's on a new level.
So in the end of 2020, the consumers in these countries really started to adopt and buy more electric vehicles and it will stay on this level and increase for the coming years. And what we See from one of the reasons is of course the falling battery prices and also for the push from the government, but also a lot of new electric vehicle car models being available for consumers. And Bloomberg New Energy Finance, They estimate about 500 electric vehicles models in the market by the end of 2022. So you will find an electric vehicle suitable for every need going forward. In total, we see that the kind of the share of electric vehicles as a percentage of total sales, It was 2.7% in the whole world in 2020.
It will rise to almost 10% in 2025 according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. So we are positive when it comes to EBIT option, which is the single most important driver for growth and revenues in Subtech. So the export share rose from 19% in the Q1 of 2020 to 38% this quarter. So as we mentioned earlier, the largest markets are Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland. And we have appointed country managers in Germany and the UK to manage sales directly to the market.
And it's the Subtech Pro that dominates the export sales from Subtech. Going forward, we will also introduce the new Subtech Go in these export markets. The Saptek Pro installation is It's also up, 840 new systems installed during the quarter, 540 in the Q1 of 2020. So installation is not the same as the number of charging stations. Installation is more like you prepare parking facility with the infrastructure from Subtech.
It can be from 10 to 200 parking base. And normally, at 10% of these parking base will be equipped with a charter and the rest will be a future possible revenue for the company and it has to be a Subtech charter that to add value to this installation. So this is a future kind of secured income for the company going forward. We offer automatic payment services to the pro consumers. We landed about 117 new contracts during this quarter.
We have a total of 850 contracts altogether and the number of active users is 16,500. So these services makes it easy to own and operate the Subtech Pro systems and you don't have to think about the bill or It will be paid and settled automatically every month so that you can drive your car and do other things in life than worrying about the energy bill from the energy that you use in your car. And one exciting and Kind of important milestone for Saptek in the Q1 was to launch the Saptek Go, which is the smallest, The fastest and most cost efficient charger delivering 22 kilowatts in the world. We also offer this with a service where you can charge on hours with lower energy prices during the night typically. This is offered to the installer network which is important for Subtech distribution and they have really welcomed this and it's about to be rolled out in the market.
We have been able to ramp up the production and Last week it was 200 charges produced every day and this is an increasing number. We also entered into a distribution agreement with a large international player in the energy sector that will commence sales of this charger in June and it will be kind of a market launch the next month. So in June, we will relieve the name and the progress. Regarding the future income from this product, we see it really as a competitive product in all of Europe. It's suitable for all cars and it's also very nice and neat to look at and to install in your home.
So we have to build up the distribution channels day by day. We have the installers today. We have some agreements. And also going forward, we will kind of recruit more of these large distribution channels for this product.
Yes, in the Q1, we have a new 4 year agreement with West Control. It's our producer partner located at TOW in Olga Land. The production capacity at Westgoldal is Sufficient to cover our production volumes for 2021 and also next year. Westmanthal will invest NOK 100,000,000 in the new Production facilities, including robotization, new production lines, stock facilities and fire Security Enchangments in the factory. Sourcing electronic components to produce and assemble the Sabtec charges has been a challenging task for several months.
But together with West Control, we have solved this problem. Our handling of risk of this risk includes buying lost modems and sometimes at bit higher prices.
These facilities will be raised during the year and we'll be operating from the end of 2021. So It's also an expansion of the production capacity for Subtech and it will be important, but we are also looking for additional production capacity closer to the European markets so that we can fulfill demand also for the next kind of 5 to 10 years so that we also can kind of diversify the risk with this component situation which has hit a lot of kind of electronic device producers globally. We will not go through a lot of technology update but We will cover the most important one that the Saptek Go is a workable tested product that is about to be ramped up production wise and also sold in large numbers. Regarding the cloud solution that all charters are connected to the cloud. We have a new agreement with base farm to manage the cloud.
It's Really heavy traffic between the charters and the and the cloud solution and it has to be stable. It has to work every day, every minute of the hour. And this is a very important task for Subtech going forward. Yes. Regarding growth initiatives, of course, as you can see, we Both have organic growth that is quite high.
This the main task for the management and the organization is to increase the organic growth and we really see results From the hard work that we do every day regarding the organic growth, opening new markets, recruiting new customers, EBITDAX is rising. So we guide on a 70%, at least 70% sales growth for the whole year of 2021 and as we mentioned, the gross margin should be around 40%. So this should be a profitable growth. 4th May, we signed a letter to buy Novavolt, which is an It's a reseller of Subtech in Switzerland. This is a profitable growing company and Switzerland is a very interesting market when it comes to willingness to adopt electric vehicles and also they are looking for the best solutions for charging.
So we team up with them after a due diligence that we will do now the next 6 weeks and hopefully we will conclude this transaction which will create economical value for the shareholders of Subtech both with the acquisition kind of when we do the acquisition, but also going forward with a very profitable and growing company. It will also be a kind of a platform for growth in the south of Europe going into Austria and Italy when these markets is ready for Subtech charging. So I think That concludes the structured presentation that we planned. So if you have any questions, we would very much like to answer this. And if you if you might have some questions or follow-up comments, So please do not hesitate to contact Saptek afterwards and we will be happy to answer questions and talk to you.
So thank you all for joining the session and wish you a nice day.