Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today at SATS Group's first quarter earnings briefing. I'm Carolyn from Corporate Affairs. I'd just like to let you know, we are using a new system today, so if you want to ask questions, please click on the red button on the top right of your screen. I hope you have time to review the highlights of our results. We have about an hour here, so I appreciate if you could restrict your questions to two, so as to give opportunity to others to ask questions. For the record, please note that during the call, when we make forward-looking statements related to operational, financial, and market trends for future periods, which are based on management's current views and assumptions, the actual results may differ materially from those projected or implied in such forward-looking statements, so please exercise caution when using this information.
I will now hand you over to Kerry, President and CEO, to start off the presentation, and then it will be followed by Manfred, our CFO, to take you through the results. So over to you, Kerry.
Thank you, Carolyn. A very good morning, everyone. Again, thank you for taking time to come to our first quarter presentation. Let me just jump straight into some of the key highlights. I think as you saw from the press release, first quarter net profit has jumped to SGD 65 million. That is a significant improvement compared to last year of negative SGD 39.9 million. So it's a SGD 95 million jump in net profit. And really attributed to a few things. Clearly, from a cargo volume perspective, we are really benefiting from tailwinds of the growth in cargo volume. And that's over a few factors. One, obviously, port congestion, as we all know. The continued Red Sea challenge in there.
And of course, which I think is very pleasing, is the continued growth of e-commerce shipments, particularly from Asia into Europe, as well as the U.S.. So that has really helped drive the continued growth of our cargo business. And in many of our stations, we actually have good operating leverage to benefit from the increase in our profitability. Second one, obviously, is with aviation meals. We have seen an increase in the consumption of aviation meals, not just in Singapore, but also in Japan, as well as domestically in China as well. Our unit, Nanjing Weizhou, is coming back very strongly in terms of the volume that they're serving, and we continue to see good growth momentum in the domestic market.
All these helped us to increase our volume in aviation meals. You can see that almost 27% of volume year on year. And this led to a 15.5% growth year on year. Again, a lot of those growth, you can see, dropping a lot into the bottom line itself. Very pleasingly is also EBITDA. We continue to show improvement in the EBITDA margins. You know, as you know, we do have a target to try and get into the twenties, but it's showing good momentum in the growth of EBITDA margins. And of course, cash flow, you know, we continue the good positive momentum.
So this quarter itself is increased to almost SGD 926 million to about SGD 37 million in free cash flow. So also from a financial standpoint, it is a good first quarter. We are pleased with the results and with a lot of momentum in what we've done over the last year, paying off in this quarter itself. Let me move on to the next slide. This slide, very important commercial and operational updates. You know, while we ride on the volume growth that we're seeing, good tailwinds in cargo and some of the food business, I think it's important that we continue to establish a strategic growth initiative for ourselves.
And this slide here really shows what we're doing to establish those future growth plans for SATS. The Mitsui partnership, which you read as well, this is a very strategic partnership to allow us to get channel access. And Mitsui being one of the largest trading company in Japan, combining together with us, leveraging on our food technology and our food know-how, and, you know, through a very targeted demand generation channel, which Mitsui will provide to our team. And that is gonna help us increase our utilization of our food factories that we have established in China, India, as well as in Thailand. So that is something for the future, which we believe will put us in good stead.
It will also open up channels to us in Japan, and that's, I think, gonna help us also with our business development opportunities in Japan. Japan is one of the biggest market for ready-to-eat meals, and we believe having a presence there and being able to crack the market together with Mitsui will put us in a very good position. The second one, I'm gonna highlight more of the Shunfeng side, which again, as we know, when we did the acquisition of WFS, e-commerce was a targeted segment for us. And as we start to leverage on the network, we are targeting a lot of the e-commerce players, and we do want to form a more strategic partnership with them.
And not just the usual handling of the e-commerce, but looking at how we can provide more value add or specialized handling services for all these e-commerce players. So with this MOU with Shunfeng, we are expanding our relationship with them beyond Asia and Liège, which, as you know, is our freighter hub in Europe. That is also where we manage China's volume as well. So with Shunfeng in there, I think the collaboration and all that in the e-commerce space is gonna help fill up our space there as well. The next one, Kuehne+Nagel. This, in fact, this is something that we signed in October last year.
I'm pleased to say that, we have now moved on to quite a few POCs, but this particular Sea-to-Air trials is an important one. You know, with a lot of supply chain disruption, having an alternate mode where you're combining ocean and air, it's a product that I think is starting to gain a lot of traction. And we've started a trial in Long Beach to LAX, and that's proven to be successful. We're also now starting some trials here in Singapore as well. And if these trials work, hopefully that converts into an actual product that Kuehne+Nagel can sell to their customers. And this is all gonna help drive efficiency, but I think importantly, give consumer or customers an alternate supply chain mode, where they can balance cost versus their speed of supply chain.
The next one is the formation of Singapore Hub. Again, you've seen the announcement in there. This is an important shift for us. Firstly, it allows us to have a focused team to continue to grow Singapore Changi Airport. This is our home base. It's important we continue to be best-in-class in Singapore and continue to support the growth of the Changi aviation ecosystem and particularly of the airport as well as our largest customer as well. But I think at the same time, it gives us an opportunity to have a team to now really focus on really growing the business in Asia, and then that allows us to form a global network that's competitive with both Americas and EMEA together, Asia Pac.
So a team under my colleague, Bob, will be tasked to really take a handle and grow this APAC business going forward. And the last one, I just wanna show the terminal that we have in Madrid. As you know, Madrid and Spain is one of the fastest growing for us. And in fact, it's driven a lot by e-commerce as well. We have been operating in over, I mean, in a stressed environment, in a sense that volume is huge in Madrid, and we are running out of space. So this fifth cargo terminal in Madrid is gonna give us additional capacity to grow more business in Spain.
Hopefully that will translate to a higher growth trajectory for us as we have more capacity being put in place. Now, the bottom of the chart just shows you an update of where we are in terms of synergy. As you know, SGD 100 million was a target when we did the acquisition. Pleased to say, year to date, or at least from the time we acquired this, more than a year, we have now closed SGD 51 million out of SGD 100 million. So I have to say, very good progress both from a commercial and operational standpoint. Clearly, there's more to go. We are gonna shoot for more where possible, but this is what's on the run board at the moment.
In financial fiscal savings, you heard, at our year-end results, SGD 50 million is there. We do have still some initiatives to try and take out more costs, in that, but those are plans that we have, going forward. Next slide, please. A bit of showboating here, in terms of, what we have done, but I think it's also important to recognize that, our associates are getting recognized, for the good work they have done. I think being the largest is one, but I think we need to make sure that we do well and service our customers, in terms of good performance and quality. So AISATS, for what they've done in the airport in Delhi.
AAT, as you know, AAT, we are number three cargo handler in Hong Kong, but I'm pleased to say that they've been recognized as a service provider of the year in Hong Kong itself. So also, kudos to the AAT team. On the food side, we continue to be recognized for what we've done, particularly around the authentic Asian cuisine. For the sixth year in a row, we have been recognized as the Airline Caterer of the Year for Asia. So, good recognition of what our team has done for our airline customers. Then the last one, I think, again, something that we are very proud of, recognized as being the most transparent company in SGX.
So this is clearly recognition from both the finance, legal, and comms team in how we actually, you know, show our information to all our shareholders as well. So with that, I will pass it on to Manfred to take us through the financial results.
Thank you, Kerry. Good morning, this is Manfred here. I'll take you through some very high-level numbers. You would have had the benefit of, you know, the results from last night's release. I'd like to devote more time for Q&A to make this meeting a bit more purposeful. In the executive summary, slide five here, you can see that the key highlights are set out at the top of this slide. Revenue of SGD 1.37 billion, that's about 15.5% growth, with the EBITDA of SGD 249 million, which is about 18.2% margin.
EBIT actually grew about 13 times, and you know, we'll go into another slide that will show you where our operating leverage kicks in. Share of results, 35.6. Even if you back out the one-off, about SGD 7.3 million, you know, it still represent a 33% year-on-year growth. PATMI came in at about 4.7% margin. This is about SGD 95 million favorable variance compared to same time last year. We have set up some notes here. I'm gonna leave it for you to read, and but suffice to say that both gateway as well as food have also grown in tandem.
Now, at the bottom of this slide here, key operating statistics, I'd like to call out cargo growth. Air cargo growth of 19%. This outpaced industry growth of reported by IATA for the six months of about 13.4%. Aviation food coming very strongly, and we grew at about 26.8%. All three major catering businesses all firing up at the same time. SATS Catering, TFK, as well as Nanjing Weizhou in China. Next slide. I won't dwell too much into this, except to just give you the orientation here. I've covered the year-on-year growth for the group. We have also included the Singapore data here, just to give you a sense of how Singapore is also faring.
The blue bubble here actually shows the level of recovery compared to pre-COVID. So you can see that we are almost at 100% of pre-COVID already. Then, the bottom of this slide shows you a sequential quarter and quarter uptick. We can see that all the metrics have grown, albeit that the last box here shows the headcount. We today have a group headcount of about 51,000, which is about 2,000 increase compared to the same time last year, given the volume that we have to handle. Slide seven. A quick slide here to show you segmental growth. The year-on-year change, you can see that revenue increased about 15.5%.
Cargo grew 17%, ground 3.3%, and then food solution grew 29.3%. Now, cargo today for the first quarter is now representing 51% of our total revenue. This actually increased from 50% recorded in the fourth quarter of last year. Okay, Singapore contributed about 34%. You can see that the Asia Pacific 11%. Both India and Americas combined came in about 54%, 55%. Yeah. Next slide. I'll just run through this very quickly. I just want you to maybe focus on the last column. You can see revenue 15.5%. OPEX actually grew 8.7%. You can see the huge positive draw here.
As a result of that, the EBIT expanded by 13 times from 0.7% margin all the way to about 8.2%. And then, I mentioned that share of results, SOAJV, even if we back up 7.3, it still suggests that there's a 33% growth year on year. And PATMI, we actually grew by SGD 95 million, reversing a loss of SGD 29.9 million of first quarter last year to about SGD 65 million. Okay. Next slide, please. Cash flow. Just wanna call out the operating cash flow and free cash flow. The top and the bottom, you can see that there's a variance, positive variance of SGD 124-125 million, thereabout. And this, we are very pleased with this.
We were able to reverse a negative free cash flow of SGD 89 million to this quarter of SGD 36.7 million. Okay, next slide. Yeah, this basically give you a pictorial illustration of how quarter and quarter the cash flow is. There's seasonality in our business. As a result of that is that, you know, every quarter there will be a different due to timing of collection, payments, as well as networking capital management. Not to mention also the lease. The leases have varying varying period of of payment. One slide on the balance sheet, very quickly. You can see that the total debt today is about SGD 4 billion. We made a repayment of about SGD 68 million. I forgot to call out earlier.
We committed that we will repay up to about SGD 200 million this year. We have already done about SGD 68 million, and with the increase in cash flow, we're confident that we should be able to meet that commitment of repayment of SGD 200 million. Cash position stood at about SGD 684 million, which is a slight increase of SGD 25 million. Now, there are three metrics here which are annualized in nature, so I just want to call out to qualify it. ROE of 10.8% is on an annualized basis. Likewise, for the gross debt EBITDA ratio, coming off from 4.6 to about 3.5 times. That is also on an annualized basis. Yeah, take note. One slide on the quarterly trending, twelve, slide twelve.
Just to call out sequentially, you can see that both EBIT as well as EBITDA after leases. You can see there's a very nice trending upwards, and that goes to show the operating leverage kicking in. I mentioned that the revenue grew 16%. OPEX grew half of that, and therefore, more profitability is actually falling through down to the operating level. As a result of that margin have expanded from 0.7% operating margin all the way to about 8.2%. And we believe that there's still some way to go here, as operating leverage continue to work in our favor with the scaling up of revenue.
Share results, you can see that it's very nicely, consistently above a SGD 30 million mark, which can suggest that there's a run rate of about maybe SGD 110million-SGD 120 million per year. And EBITDA margin, okay, before leases came to about 18.2%. Our own expectation has always been that we want this to scale beyond the 20% mark. And then, after leases is 10%, again, you know, we would want to continue to focus on quality of earnings and then move this beyond the 10% mark after. Yeah. Next slide. I probably include two slides here to just give you a sense of the progress.
Most of you would have recognized this flight path slide that we showed in the last quarter. Maybe I'll ask, can we maybe go to the next slide? I'll touch a little bit on the entire transformation journey. A recap on our industrial logic. We have always believed that the acquisition of the WFS is the right thing to do, and we are the right full owner. Simply because we believe that, you know, by combining with the largest cargo player, allows us to diversify our base, number one. Number two, is actually to chart a new growth path for the company, and we are truly a global aviation services platform today.
Largest global air cargo handler with leading position in key strategic hub in the developed market, Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, provide that growth path, and we are now in trade routes responsible for more than 50% of the global trade flow, so the industrial logic and the entire investment thesis is playing out, and we are very glad that integration is progressing well with synergy tracking the target that we have set for ourselves, so today we are more than 50% of the SGD 100 million that we targeted. This is without counting the SGD 50 million-SGD 60 million of annual financing as well as fiscal savings. The combination of WFS with SATS, you know, provide us a very, very scalable business and operating model.
You can see that in Kerry's earlier slide, explaining all the different initiatives, commercial initiatives that we are doing, this is a result of, you know, who we are today. And, you know, the network that we have, the advantages, the competitive advantage that we have. And operating out of the resilient markets, this will provide us with significant growth opportunity. And the last point here is management remains committed to continue to drive value, to continue to drive, shareholders return, and hopefully to be able to deliver on our commitment of, restoring profitability to the right full level, as shown in the earlier flight path. Now, with this, I'm gonna hand you over to Kerry, to cover the outlook, and then we'll go into Q&A.
Thank you, Manfred. Just in terms of outlook, just on the cargo side, let me just briefly touch that. We remain very positive on the cargo side. From now till the end of the calendar year, we believe volume will continue, hopefully maintain at least where they are, the past quarter. And we believe the e-commerce side is still pretty much driving that growth. The Red Sea issue continues to be a problem for many of the shippers, and hence the sea-to-air cargo is there. And I think you would have read in many reports as well, a lot of the airlines themselves are raising rates and because of tight space that's out there at the moment.
We believe that puts us in a very good position to continue to benefit from this shift in air cargo. And that, you know, hopefully that will allow us to continue that operating leverage that we have. Food side, we believe that the travel will continue as well, and the momentum will be maintained in terms of the in-flight catering food that we are producing for our customers today. Next slide. Yeah, and I think the integration remains on track. I want to say that the team is working very, very hard to position ourselves even more with our customers. I think Manfred alluded to it. Because of our network, we are having very different conversations with customers.
We're very targeted around the top 20 customers and using our network to drive differentiated service offerings. That's very key. I mentioned earlier around the initiative we're doing to position us for future growth. Those partnerships and those MOUs that we sign, it's all about driving future growth. It's all about creating something different from what we are today, and that's gonna be a big focus for us as we move forward. Of course, as I mentioned, the Changi hub remains a very, very important part of our business. Having a team in there to focus and work closely with the ecosystem partners, we believe will enhance our status here in Singapore. At the same time, also offer us opportunity to tap on the growing Asia Pacific market.
And again, our associates and JVs out there, working even closer with us going forward, we believe will help drive better growth opportunity for the whole group. With that, I think that's it. We're open for Q&A.
Yeah, we're open for Q&A.