Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Addtech presentation of the third quarter. For the first part of this webcast, all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and afterwards there will be a question and answer session over the telephone. Today, I'm pleased to present Niklas Stenberg, CEO, and Malin Enarson, CFO. I will now hand over to Niklas Stenberg. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to this presentation of Addtech's third quarter. As you already heard, it's with me and our CFO, Malin Enarson. As you understand, this was a very different quarter for us. It started up very good with good momentum in the group in October. Then we were hit by this cyber attack on October 30th. With that in mind, this is actually a report that we are proud of. As you can see, we still managed to grow organically with 5%, which I believe is a good proof of the resilience that our decentralized structure brings. When I present Addtech to investors, I usually say that culture always beats strategy. This outcome in this report is the result of a great culture. A few words around the cyber attack. I will not spend so much time on that.
If you have more questions, we can take it after in the Q&A. As you might have seen, we have been as transparent and open as possible around the attack during the whole process. This was a ransomware attack, but for us, it was never a discussion to pay any ransom. That's not in our philosophy of doing business, and we also don't want to feed a criminal system like this. The financial impact of the attack on the third quarter was SEK 90 million, which is a mix of direct costs and also lost business. I would really like to emphasize that this attack has only hurt us in the short term, and we have really got fantastic help and understanding from both customers and partners.
If you look on the revenue, given the IT attack and the fact that there were a lot of days off this December, we, as I said, feel it's a solid report, 5% organic and also acquisitions have added. Our calculations show that we have lost about SEK 130 million in sales during Q3 due to the attack. It's a mix of not being able to deliver some lost projects and also some of our companies have asked their customers to postpone projects. If you put back this sale figure of SEK 130 million, we land on an organic growth of about the double, so 10%, and all business areas grows organically to varying degrees. Scrubber business accounted for a great part of organic growth also this quarter.
I will talk more about the scrubber business later, but it's important to note that we're having a solid organic growth also without that niche. If we look at the underlying demand, I would say that the general feeling is rather more positive now than six months ago. After summer, there were a lot of signals of a slowdown in primarily the mechanical industry sector. Today we don't get the same kind of signals, and I also feel it's emphasized by recent macro statistics. As in Q2, it's the more cyclical sectors where we do see some signs of slowdown. It's more of a leveling out situation, and also here we have had strong growth last year, so the comparison figures are tough.
Telecom on fiber side and system side was not as good as expected, but continued stable markets was electronic industry in Finland, for instance, and energy segments. If we look on the result, I would say it's okay on the total, given the circumstances. The fact that we only lost 4% compared to last year is very good. If we clear the IT attack effects, we would have made a profit growth of around 33%. Underlying a very solid profit growth still, and we are continually having good leverage on our organic growth. We are successful in keeping costs under control and getting the results with us. A short word about the margins. Q3 is always weak in terms of results for us, but adjusted for the IT attack, we would have been around a rolling 12 figure, and that's clearly better than last year.
A short word on the different business areas. Automation, a stable development. Acquisitions contribute quite a lot on top line, but we still have good organic growth. Continued good demand in our largest segments. For instance, mechanical industry, we saw a quite lower activity in the first quarter, but a clear improvement in second quarter. Now same feeling in Q3. The leveling demand that we write about in the report applies primarily to customers who have some waiting of some investments of new projects. Defense is going really well, we see clear growth here. Fiber installation, that is one part of Automation, has varied. Still not good in Sweden, even though the need is great here. The margin was affected by the IT, also we have a couple of acquired companies that underperform, also some one-time costs here.
Components, here we have very tough comparisons, because we had a strong quarter last year, and also it's worth mentioning that Components was particularly affected by the IT attack. Many companies were hit. Here we have, as you know, a lot of OEM components for electronic markets, special vehicles, and the Energy sector. Overall stable demand, not the same amazing momentum as we saw last year. It's not like earlier this year where customers were draining the stocks. Now they need to buy components again. Norway was a good market still. Finland, very good with a lot of electronic industry where they still invest. Sweden, Denmark, stable, I would say. Cleared from the IT attack, the margins would have been better than last year and about rolling 12 level.
Energy, I must say it's impressive to have this margin increase, even though they were also of course hit by the IT attacks. The fact that we have no direct growth on the top line, it's really according to plan, you could say, because we have strategically decided not to go for some big projects on the transmission side with very low margins. We have a lot of new projects to calculate on, and we have a really good position. We see a slight slowdown for companies in electrical installation materials, but also here we have tough comparisons. To summarize, overall a good quarter and a clear margin improvement. Industrial Process continued very strong. Certain acquisition effect, but above all it's organic growth, and primarily scrubbers.
If we start with some words about the scrubbers, as we said on the Capital Markets Day in September and also after Q2, there has been a hesitation in demand in the market ahead of the new regulation, IMO 2020, that came into force now in January. As you can see in the report, sales have remained very good, about the same level as in Q2, but we have noticed clearly lower demand for new projects. We have emptied some order backlog, as I write in the report. We still have order stock to take from, we hope for demand, of course, to pick up again. As I also write in the report, our estimation based on discussions with our customers is that demand will pick up again in the first half of 2020.
We can see that the shipyards are also building up capacity in Middle East and Europe. Today, most of the scrubber installations is done in Asia, but there is a demand for more capacity. Finally, Power Solutions. Cleared for the IT attack, we had an okay organic increase here as well of a few percent. I have to say, a quite crappy quarter in result, because even if we take out the IT attack effects, the margins would still be not so good. That is due to some one-off projects with poor margins and non-favorable product mix. This margin in this quarter, I think we have never seen this bad a quarter in Power Solutions on the margins, but it's not alarming in any way. It should perform in much higher levels. The largest segment here is special vehicles.
We see some leveling off on some segments, but we're also taking new projects here, and we have the Electrification trend as well. No reason to be afraid here. If we look on the whole period up until now, we can summarize an increase of 19% in turnover, of which 11% organic, and a growth on EBITDA of 23%, 28% if you take away the IT effects, and still very good margin improvement. Overall, I would say we are very pleased, and we think that these accumulated figures give a very good picture of our situation. Underlying, normal, good organic growth, and then scrubbers on top. How do we see the future? Well, overall, I have a very positive picture of Addtech's possibility to continue profitable growth. We have good positions on the market and in many areas that are driven by macro trends.
2020, if you believe in macro statistics, we will not be able to count on any major growth, maybe a couple of percent, but we are usually able to outperform the market by a few percent. Yeah, I'm positive about our future. Acquisitions, as you know, is a very important part of our growth strategy. We have, up until now, made nine acquisitions on six different markets, accounting a total revenue approximately of SEK 600 million. As you know, our year has not ended yet. We have our new year celebration of end of March, so there is still time for more acquisitions. Our pipeline, I would say, looks very good. We have a lot of ongoing projects in different phases. Over to you, Malin.
Yes, thank you. I have not planned to comment the income statement or the balance sheet. I can say a few words about our cash flow. We had good hopes for good cash flow leaving our second quarter. We found ourselves in a completely different situation than expected. Unfortunately, we see now that the cash flow in the quarter was a bit weaker than last year's third quarter. The weaker cash flow reflects both a slightly weaker profit, but also a negative effect on working capital. This is mainly due to the IT attack, but also due to the usual situation that we tend to increase our inventory levels during December. In the period year to date, we still see a better cash flow than last year, though. We believe to be back on track during our last quarter.
When we look at our key financial indicators, we can look at our important profitable working capital. We can also see there for you that remember that we have been on levels around 56% earlier quarters this year. We are now back on the same level as last year, 54%, but we believe due to the IT attack and the situation with the working capital that this is a temporary dip in the curve. Our gearing and leverage is on expected levels for the time being.
Okay, final picture before we let you ask questions. Sustainability is an important area for development for us, and during the last year, we have increased speed when it comes to initiatives here. During the last quarter, we have, for example, performed a new stakeholder dialogue and updated our materiality analysis accordingly. Like we said the previous report, we are in the middle of process of adapting our sustainability work to better align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Another really interesting activity that we have done was to map all of our existing operations towards the Sustainable Development Goals. It became really clear that we already have a lot of business that are contributing to these goals, and we see many opportunities for growth here going forward. That was it. Please go ahead and ask questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you do wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad to register. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing zero two to cancel. Once again, that is zero one on your telephone keypad if you would like to register for a question. There'll be a brief pause whilst any questions are being registered. As there are no questions registered, I hand back to our speakers.
Okay. It was obviously a very clear and filled presentation.
No question marks there.
No questions. Yeah. With that said, we are back on track in Addtech. We're leaving the IT attack behind us mentally, and now have full focus on future growth. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
This now concludes our conference. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect.