I have Katarina Strivalll, who is the CFO. And before kicking off the agenda, I would just like to sum up and talk a little bit about Albert and the conclusions from the second quarter. And Albert is a leading Nordic EdTech group, who has a plethora of different education products, which are aligned with the curriculum. We are a global player. We have six product brands and several sub-brands, who are together sold on more than 10 different markets across the world. We sell our products both to schools, what we call B2B, and to consumers, that we call B2C, and this gives us dual revenue streams, which makes the revenues much more predictable and scalable.
If we look at the second quarter in more specific, we're very happy that we're now back to organic growth after a few quarters where it's been declining growth. And this is very much due to very strong momentum in the B2B sales in the U.S. We also said before that we have a very clear path to profitability, and therefore, we're very happy that this quarter we now land on SEK -1 million in EBITA, which is a strong proof point that we are on track. We're also well-funded, and with the cash at hand, we should be able to get to positive cash flow. So that is- that are the conclusions. And during this presentation, we will now start by talking a little bit about the Albert Group and our strategy going forward.
Then we'll spend most of the time talking about the second quarter, both from an operational perspective with some highlights, and then definitely the financials, and then we conclude with talking a little bit about the future and where we're headed before we open up for all of you to ask questions to us, which we really look forward to, so with that said, let's get started. I think we have talked about this before. I mean, the reason for us existing is really that we wanna face the formidable challenges that we see in education. There are many kids out there that who struggle in school, and especially in the mathematics subject, and one reason why they are struggling is that there isn't equal access to qualified teachers.
And the second thing is, or the third thing is, that if you can't get the support you need from schools, you maybe not even can get the support you need from your parents at home. And therefore, these differences that typically are related to socioeconomic inequalities. So if you are in a socioeconomic weak area, you probably don't have the same opportunities as in a strong area. And what we wanna achieve then is to really help every child out there to reach their full potential by making learning fun and personalized. And to do that, we wanna really put the learner or the children in the center and then work with them in their learning journey, both at school, together with the teachers, and at home, together with their parents.
In order to achieve this, we want to build an ecosystem of different learning products. We started, as you probably know, if you followed us for a long time, back in 2015 , when we just had the product, Albert, which was a math product, sold to consumers, mainly in Sweden and later on in the Nordic markets. Since 2022 , we have expanded a lot. We have added new products, both in B2B and in B2C. We have added new markets, so now really start to build this ecosystem of different products. It also means that we've gone from being the math app, Albert, really being the education ecosystem of Albert Group. Now our portfolio of learning products consists mainly of digital learning apps. That is definitely the main products we're working on.
We have a few books and physical prints, and then we have the Strawbees construction kits, which are. The purpose is to really learn about science in a fun way by both doing, like, physical construction. You can do programming on the computer and so on. And then lastly, we have educational films, which is a very appreciated way for children to learn new things. And these products, they are sold under eight different product brands, which you can see here on the slide, and they're all under the Albert Group umbrella. Our focus markets are the Nordics, the U.K. and the U.S.A., but we're also present on many other markets. We have our headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden, but offices also in Stockholm and in England and Scotland.
And we know that our products are really loved by teachers, parents, and children out there. So to give a few examples here, I mean, one is from Albert Junior, a very recent quote that was sent to us from a parent, Didi, whose son is four years old, and she said that, "My son has autism and ADHD, and your app is so far the only thing that makes him sit still and focus. He is four years old but has already learned 20-22 letters of the alphabet after just four days.
So really, thank you so much." And another example is from our construction product, Strawbees, and a science teacher in California, the U.S., and he says: "One of the things that I think is forgotten with coding and why I like Strawbees so much is the physical computing side, the designing side of the computing." This is really the thing where you can build something physically, and you work with a computer and programming at the same time, so you can get instant feedback on what you're building. And the last quote here is from the math app, Sumdog, which we mainly sell to schools. And here's a quote from a head teacher or principal in this, in Scotland. And she says that: "Using Sumdog as part of our multi-pronged approach to teaching math has been effective in raising maths attainment at Juniper Green.
It has brought the fun back to math, and children are motivated and excited to learn." ... I think this quote is sort of spot on because it really talks about the multi-pronged approach to teaching, which is so much what we believe in. You should have the normal textbook and the teacher-led teaching, but then work with other methods as well, like apps, like films, like construction kits, because it's a better way to learn, and therefore it's fun to hear that. The teachers out there really appreciate that as well. And that hopefully gave an introduction to Albert and our products and where we are, and so on. And now we'll move into the quarter two results. But before going into quarter two, I will just start with a quick recap from quarter one and what we said when we met you all a quarter ago.
And then we talked a lot about the profitability program that we launched in the end of January with a purpose to really accelerate the journey to profitability. And that profitability program had four focus areas: focus more on B2B because it was more stable and profitable. We wanted to maximize the current business, sort of double down on the areas that work well and reallocate resources there. And then thirdly, improve efficiency and capture synergies. And the main activity here was a big restructuring of the organization to go from, like, a group of standalone companies to more like one united organization who work together towards common goals, which will also reduce personnel costs. And lastly, just have a more cost-conscious mindset and save cost in general, like co-locating offices and so on.
We also said back then that in quarter one, we took many of, like, the one-time costs for this program, and in quarter two, we expected to have some minor one-time costs, but now we should start really to see the positive impact of the program, and from quarter three onwards, just the positive ones. And now we'll talk more about the results of this profitability program, first from a qualitative or operational perspective, and then from a financial perspective. And some of the highlights then from the second quarter really start with this restructuring program, because it did take a lot of focus for the management and for the organization to create and then start moving into this new organization, where we start working. To some extent, in new teams, with new leaders, with new ways of working, and so on.
Therefore, I'm really happy now when we concluded the second quarter to really see that we are done with the restructuring. All teams are operational. People see... really are understanding why we're doing it and are motivated going forward. We can also see in the financials when we concluded the second quarter, that we achieved to reduce personnel costs by 10%, which we planned to do. Why is this then so important for us? Yeah, besides obviously the profit improvement or reducing cost, I mean, this really makes us stronger. Bringing the competencies together really make it easier to sort of share best practices and support each other. This is also a much simpler structure to manage.
Of course, it was on paper before we did it, but now, when we have been operational for four months in this structure, it's we can really see that, I mean, one united management team can operate everything in a successful way. And it's also a very scalable structure that we can use when we acquire new businesses in the future. The second achievement is the breakthrough of the Strawbees product in the U.S.A., and you can see it on the picture is what a typical Strawbees product looks like. You build something physical with these colorful straws, and then you can either do just the straws, or you can add, like, the programming unit and the robotics, as you see on the picture here.
And what has happened now in the second quarter, or if I take May here specifically, is that we had 90% more sales this year in May than we had last year. So it was, I mean, strong overall, but we also saw a real nice thing with three sales records during the quarter, where we landed orders of over $100,000 to big customers like the Los Angeles Unified School District, Virginia Beach, and other big players. And just to give a perspective, like the LAUSD, the size of just the district is sort of half the size of all the elementary schools in Sweden. So we have a great opportunity just to grow within those customers. And this is so important because we have been on the U.S. market for 10 years now with the Strawbees product.
I mean, we have been trying out different sales models, and we have spent a lot of time in really building relationships with schools, decision-makers, and so on. Now it seems to work, and we have typically started with smaller projects together with the customers. They appreciated the Strawbees product. Now they come back, and they place much bigger orders. We see that we can, in a very efficient, well, way, utilize the existing customers to sell more to them. We've also seen that the brand awareness and reputation have grown so much for Strawbees in the U.S. People know of us when we go to fairs, we speak to customers, and so on.
But also the word of mouth, of one teacher telling another teacher, or for instance, one school telling the overall district to use Strawbees, has also made sales much simpler. And of course, this will help us to grow sales in the U.S. And the last example is a very interesting one from England, and that is that we have entered into a distribution partnership with YPO. And YPO, for those of you who don't know it, it's sort of the biggest distributor to schools in the U.K., and they started with selling everything from supplies to computer and hardware and electricity and so on. But now they have been around for fifty years, and as part of their fifty years anniversary, they said, "We want to do something new." And they have really seen a need out there...
for a bundle of EdTech products, because there are so many EdTech products on the market, and it's hard for the schools to really find high-quality, good EdTech products, so YPO scanned the British market for the best EdTech products, and they selected three EdTech products to be as part of their core offering, where of Sumdog is one of them. So they will now be offered as part of the Learning Box EdTech bundle, which will be started to be sold to all schools in England from September this year, and for us, we see this as a great opportunity to really complement our own direct sales in England, because with YPO, we're already selling into all schools in England.
We will very quickly build brand awareness, we'll get the visibility to educators, we can do marketing together, we can do sales together, which really both can drive sales for us and grow our market share in a very quick and cost-effective way, so really looking forward to see the results of this later this autumn, and especially in the next years. And those were three operational key points. We will now move into the financial section here. But before going into the financial results, I would like to stop here for a minute. Because on the line of sort of continuously improve our financial reporting, create better transparency, and make it easier for you as shareholders or analysts and investors to really follow Albert, we have decided to do some changes and updates to the financial reporting, and we have done three ones now for this quarter.
And the first one here is about that we're gonna provide more detailed reporting of sales. And the reason for why we do this is that, as I mentioned in the beginning of this presentation, we have gone from being the math app, Albert, which was only sold B2C in subscriptions, to now having multiple business models. We're selling to target groups, being both families and schools, and into many different markets. And therefore, we, the purpose is really to increase the transparency and facilitate understanding of our business. And therefore, we will start reporting, and we already did now with this quarter, the revenues really split by target group, B2B, B2C, business model, which is done, is the product sold through a subscription or a non-subscription? Is it a physical product or a digital product? Is it B2B or B2C?
We will also segment the sales on, based on the country, or market, and then go from Nordics, U.S. and U.K., which are the three main markets, and also the rest of the world. And of course, as before, talking about organic and acquired sales. The second update is to make it clearer, with annual revenues. And a little bit similar to what I talked about before is that our business model has expanded from B2C SaaS or subscription revenues to now both being subscriptions and non-subscriptions. And I mean, ARR was originally designed to really work for subscription businesses and not really suitable for non-subscription businesses. Although, I mean, our non-subscription business is very much repeat sales to existing customers with high predictability and so on, why we think that it could fit as an ARR, metric as well.
To make it even clearer to follow us, we're now gonna divide these two. We will report ARR, but that will only be for the pure subscriptions from B2C and B2B. For the non-subscriptions, they will not be included in the ARR. Instead, we will sort of do, like show what is the revenue that we generated from that non-subscription in the last four quarters, which then become an annual value. If someone who follows us would like to get an estimate for what is our annual revenues, you can then sum up the ARR from the subscription business and the revenues from the last four quarters from the non-subscription business. The last area and update here is more accurate measure for operational profit.
As you probably know, if you followed us for some time, I mean, our core focus right now is to make our operations profitable. The profit metric that we have been mainly reporting before is EBITDA, but the issue with that metric is that it also includes the depreciation of capitalized R&D, and therefore not fully reflect operations. In our case, we do have quite a lot of capitalized R&D, so that those depreciations make it hard to understand, is the operations going towards profitability? Therefore, we think EBITA is the better measure to really track how that is going. In the reporting, we're now much more clearer add EBITA as a reported metric in addition to EBITDA. We will still have EBITDA there, so you can follow that.
But we will mainly talk about EBITdA because it's more related than to the operational profit. So with that said, let's now move into the actual numbers. And as I mentioned before, we now, to just keep in mind when we look at the numbers, is that we should now start seeing the effects of the profitability program. Let's start with sales. And as I mentioned in the introduction, we're very happy now that sales is back to organic growth. We had net sales of SEK 49.5 million in this quarter, which is then a 3% organic growth compared to the same quarter last year. And all this growth is then organic. I mean, still, like all the subscription revenues are very stable and recurring.
I mean, the main difference really driving the growth in this quarter is this breakthrough sales in the U.S. of the Strawbees product that I talked about before. Then looking at how this sales is split by the different segments and so on. Looking first on the target group segmentation here, we can now see that sales to schools, school groups, and the education sector, B2B, has grown from 57% to 62%. And the driver of this is really the growth in Strawbees, which is B2B sales in the U.S., but to some extent, also that B2C has declined due to slower customer acquisition. If we go to the middle one here, which is the business model, we can see that the biggest business model is still B2C digital subscriptions, which stands for 38%.
Second is B2B digital product subscriptions, which stand for 33%. And here we, for instance, have the Sumdog product, we have the Film och Skola, educational film subscriptions, and so on, which is the second biggest one with 33%. Then we have a very small segment, which is B2B digital products that are non-subscriptions. And I guess the easiest way to really explain this is that if you're like a Viaplay or Netflix customer privately, you typically get access to a lot of films and series in your on your subscription. But sometimes you want to watch a film, typically a recently released film, but that one is not included in your subscription, so then you need to pay, like, a one-time rental fee to get access to that film. This is a little bit similar.
Like, some of our rental films are provided on a pay-per-usage business model instead of a subscription, and that amounts to roughly 5%. And the last category is B2B physical products, non-subscription. Here, the Strawbees sales is the vast majority, but we also have some B2B sales of physical and rentals of physical movies that are sold to places which don't have internet access. And the last segmentation here is by market. As you can see here, the Nordics is our biggest region, with 54% of sales. U.S. is number two with 24%, and then U.K. comes third with 14%. The rest of world stands for 8%. So really, our three core focus markets make up 93% of sales.
U.S. is the one that has grown the most lately, which is then much thanks to the Strawbees breakthrough in the U.S. market. The Nordics has declined a bit, which is then due to the lower Albert sales. And now that was it about the revenues, and now we'll talk a little bit more about the profitability and the cash flows. I will hand over to Katarina to talk more about this.
Thank you, Jonas. Here we can see that in the quarter, compared to previous year, we had SEK 2 million better in EBITDA result. We almost made black figures this quarter, with the EBITDA of SEK - 1 million . This improvement is due to higher net sales and lower personal costs, and that is according to the restructuring program plan that we have talked about earlier, and it's according to plan. In the accumulated June result, we have a slightly worse result than in 2023, the same period. However, adjusted for items affecting comparability, it is more similar to last year's EBITDA. We had a negative cash flow in Q2 of SEK 21 million , of which SEK 80 million came from operations changes in working capital.
This is mainly due to larger payments of royalty liabilities in Q2, and this had a negative impact on the cash flow compared to Q2 previous year. These payments also include royalty payments that were invoiced and paid in 2024, but should have been invoiced and paid in the end of 2023. The result in Q2 contributed to a positive cash flow, while the result accumulated in June had a negative impact on it. As we can see here, it fluctuates between the period, and it's important to also look at the total half year. This is because Swedish Film invoiced its large volumes in January this year instead of February, as they have used to do in previous years.
And this means that the payments this year are in Q1 instead of Q2, and this is the main reason for these fluctuations, as we can see here. Here we can see the cash flow for the first half year compared year-over-year, and the total cash flow from the first half of this year is SEK - 15 million , and this is compared to SEK 1+ million last year, and this is a difference of SEK 17 million worse than last year. And the difference between the years is because capital was injected during this period in 2023 in connection with the acquisitions we had then, and this affected cash flow last year by approximately SEK + 21 million .
And this means that the change compared with the previous year is rather positive when we compare the first half year without these acquisition effects. Now we can mention that a lower result in this period also contributed to a lower cash flow, as we can see here. And here we can see the second quarter year-over-year, and cash flow in the second quarter was SEK -21 million , compared to last year's SEK 10 million , SEK -10 million . And this is a decrease from the previous year of SEK 10 million . However, the result is slightly better and contributes positively with SEK 3 million this period. The decrease compared to last year is mainly due to working capital, as we also mentioned before, and this gives a negative cash flow in this period of SEK 17 million .
This was mainly due to reduced current liabilities related to the payment of these royalties I mentioned before, and payments for these, and also from payments from the restructuring program. Increased current receivables, accounts receivable in B2B, have also resulted in a negative cash flow in the quarter, as they have increased due to increased sales, as Jonas mentioned before, and this sales has not been paid for yet. It hasn't been due yet. Then we can see the cash flow changes here during the second quarter. The main reason for the negative cash flow changes during the second quarter this year is then due to the changes in working capital on SEK 17 million.
This is, as I mentioned, also, operating liabilities decreased by SEK 12.7 million, mainly due to these royalty related liabilities within Swedish Film. And as we mentioned in Q2 this year, there have been more payment this year compared to last year, and some of this is invoiced this year and should have been invoiced in 2023, basically. And reservations of reserved restructuring program costs had also a negative impact while they are been, have been paid out during the second quarter, and the increased accounts receivable in the B2B sector also increased the cash flow. Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Then I leave it up to you, Jonas.
Thank you, Katarina. So, happy to leave this quarter with being back to organic growth, almost reaching the positive EBITDA, and so on. But now let's look forward. And I've been talking about our strategic roadmap a few times before, but I think it's worthwhile to repeat, because that's really what guides us. I mean, we see that we are on a long four-step journey, which started, I mean, many years ago, when the first step of that journey was to build a strong market position for Albert by growing, by investing in own product development, in marketing, to build a big portfolio of paying subscribers, but also to acquire businesses to build this ecosystem of learning products for B2B and B2C.
And once that was in place and we had a strong market position, the second step was to really lay a solid foundation, which was the focus last year, when we started to really shift the focus from the growth to profitability and start to really bring the group of acquired companies together and, the typical scale-up phase of a company. Now, we are in the yellow stage here, which is then the focus to reach profitability, and that's by what we're doing, by sustaining or slightly growing sales and adapt the cost structure, so we bring that down and become more efficient to really optimize the current business and double down on what's working well and reallocate resources there, and really starting consolidating the group to a united company. And that should take us to profitable EBITDA.
And with that in place, it's really about, in the longer term, grow towards the vision of becoming a leading EdTech player in Europe, and both then grow the current business by going to new markets, with new products and so on. And we do see a lot of opportunities out there already now. It's also to be able to continue the M&A agenda because there is still a need for consolidating the European EdTech market out there. And now with the new structure we have, it's also so much easier to leverage that one, to integrate new acquisitions. And to really make it even clearer what the focus is on this strategy journey, we this morning sent out an update of our financial objectives.
The previous objectives have been around for many years now, and it was done when the company was still looking totally different. It was a B2C SaaS company, only presence in some markets and so on. And now we have adapted the financial objectives to really fit the current situation, to align with the strategy we have, with the focus on profitability and cash flow in the short term, and with profitable growth in the longer term, and also to align it with the type of company we are today, that we both have subscription business, non-subscription, we have digital products, physical products, we have B2C, which can grow fast, complemented with B2B, which is more stable, and so on.
And with these new objectives, we really think that we are much more tailored to both the strategy and the current situation. So this new, maybe I shouldn't really say new, because they've been focus areas for some time, but we haven't really had them so clear. And that is the first objective, is really to achieve positive EBITDA in 2025. And that we want to do to really prove that the business model we have is profitable and scalable. The second objective is to achieve positive cash flow 2026 with existing cash, and this is really to ensure that we are financially self-sufficient, and we don't require external capital injections to cover the operating losses, so the operation should really fund itself. And with these two more short-term objectives, we have a more longer-term ambition, which is to strive for double-digit profitability growth.
This is really, too, because, I mean, at heart, we are a growth company who wants to grow and have big ambitions. This is what we think that really guide us for profitable growth and also to create long-term shareholder value in the company. If we then connect these financial objectives to the strategic journey we are on, I mean, number one here very clearly comes into this yellow phase we are in right now to achieve positive EBITDA and also then to achieve positive cash flow in 2026. Those are really the two big proof points we see before moving into the more growth-oriented phase, where we strive them for double-digit profitability growth. To show the progress towards these ones already now, I think we can focus on the lower line here, which shows EBITDA.
I mean, we have gone from back in the blue phase, when it was very big losses. We did during 2023, I mean, really start to focus on profitability, which had a good impact. Around the year-end here in quarter four last year, in quarter one this year, we did a lot of restructurings and had several one-time effects that impacted the results. But I will say that now all those things are cleaned out. So now in the quarter two results, it's, I mean, no one-time effects or anything. It's like pure EBITDA in here. And we were at minus one, so we're really on a good track towards the target of positive EBITDA.
And to bring some transparency on the actions we're planning to take to really take the next step, both in growing the top line and improving profitability on the margins here. We do see great momentum in B2B sales right now, and some of, like, four focus areas here really are to, I mean, harvest more from the strong position we have in Scotland. And here the focus is, since we have a really strong market position, is to reduce churn. That is both by improving the product, but also to work bettering customer success with customer onboarding, training, and support as long as the customers are customers of us. And then secondly, it's about winning England. It's a bigger market than Scotland. We have a smaller market share, so it's a great opportunity here.
Here we think this partnership with YPO, that I talked about before, is one good opportunity to really speed up this journey. We also have the good sales in for Strawbees in the U.S., where we now have cracked the way how to sell there. Now we're gonna capitalize and ride that strong momentum in a better way. We're also gonna exploit the revenues between especially Sumdog and Strawbees, which is something we have now started in the last weeks and months, especially in the U.K. and Scotland. To sort of introduce Strawbees to the Sumdog customers, which we have really long and good relationships with, and this seems to be very positive. I'm excited to see how this will fall out during the fall. On the B2C side, I mean, the big flagship product is really Albert Junior.
So here it's about capturing the full potential of it in the existing markets. We're also now scaling to new markets, because as I mentioned, I mean, one of the reasons for why B2C was slower this quarter was that it's been tough with customer acquisition during the spring. And by opening up new markets, we can easily acquire more customers without increasing the customer acquisition cost. And also, we're seeing good effects in bundling different B2C products, like Albert Junior and Albert Teen or Albert and Jaramba and so on. And that creates a more attractive package, which we can charge a higher price for and which in turn leads to better LTV. And more some general principles for improving revenues and profit is our mantra now are double down on what's working well and reallocate resources there.
We're currently conducting a strategic review of all our different products and brands and markets to see which are the ones having strong momentum and proof points, and really allocate more resources there from the areas that are not performing as well. Also to start seeing cost synergies in the new organization, which we can already now see after a few months in it. We do have some upsides, which we don't build into the base plan, and that is that the KPIs in sort of like customer acquisition cost, the churn, conversion from trials to paying, and so on, that they return to the levels they were at, like two years ago before the recession started, and also that we could acquire profitable companies at good valuation. It's not something we count on in the base plan, but those could be upsides.
So to go in for the conclusion, and I think the big takeaways of today's presentation is that now we have articulated very clear financial objectives to achieve positive EBITDA and cash flow with the cash at hand. And with the recent proof points from this report, with almost reaching a break-even on EBITDA, we are on track here. We're also very happy that sales has returned to organic growth, and a big contributor is the Strawbees sales in the U.S. And thirdly, that we are now seeing the good synergies in the group. With the new organization, operations is smooth. It's very easy to find and capture synergies. So with that, we conclude the second quarter, and as a, as a strong one. But now we are interested in hearing questions from all of you. So let's open up for questions.
So Martin, do you have any questions for us?
Yes. Thank you so much for the presentation here. We go right ahead there. Can you tell more about the breakthrough of Strawbees sales in the U.S.? What should we expect here going forward?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, to some extent, I think I can repeat on what I said before. I mean, it's been long and hard work to really build a strong brand and relationships in the U.S. market, and also really to adapt the product for the needs over there, because the curriculum is different and learning and teaching methods and so on, and now we've been on the U.S. market with the Strawbees product for roughly 10 years, so we have the relationships. We have with the schools, with the teachers, and the decision-makers, but I think it's also a little bit of a, you could probably call it the catch-up effect, because in many times we have to start with, like, smaller, like, almost pilot projects or smaller orders to individual class or school and so on.
But then when they have sort of seen the beauty of the Strawbees product, they typically wanted to expand it to more classes and more schools, so they are refilling because to some extent it's like, consumables, where you build stuff and the kids bring it to home, or, you have to replenish stock as well, so they are buying more. But also now that, I mean, the brand has become stronger, with the teachers, they talk to each other, or maybe a single school, which belongs to bigger school district, I mean, that, head teacher or principal, they talk to the purchaser on a district level and say, "Hey, we should use this in the other schools in the district," and so on.
For instance, these are what happened in the Virginia Beach deal, which was one of these $100,000+ deals that, I mean, we started to sell into a few individual schools, which were focused on science and STEM, but they were spreading the word to a district level, so they'd made this big order. Looking forward, I think. I mean, of course, sales take a long time in B2B in general, Strawbees and so on. But as we now see, I mean, we have very many big, interesting customers on board, and given the size of them, we think we're just seeing the start. We are very hopeful about continuing to have strong Strawbees sales in the U.S.
Thank you. Could you explain why the EBITDA is strong, but the cash flow is very negative in the quarter?
I can take that one.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
This is due to the working capital, mainly, as I mentioned, and it's mainly linked to the royalty payments that are big compared to last Q2, and also a substantial proportion of older royalty debts has been cleared this quarter. This means that we have paid more royalties in Q2 compared to the previous year. And also the reserve restructuring costs that were paid out in Q2 has also reduced cash flow connected to working capital. And of course, also the increased accounts receivables in the B2B companies, mainly Strawbees, where we have increased sales and where the invoices has been invoiced, but the invoice are not due until after Q2.
Thank you. You mentioned that the new organization structure has made it easier to capture synergies. Can you explain more about this?
Yeah, I can take that one. And I think I can start with the internal synergies. I mean, one example, I think we can say from the product development organization. Like before, we just had a lot more standalone teams, where maybe we just had one teacher, pedagog, in the team. They didn't have anyone to bounce ideas off with and so on. And now when we bring these people together, I mean, we can so much easier share best practices and use each other as a sounding board. And this, for instance, has made it much easier to work with pedagogy across the group, where we can start initiatives in AI to see how we can develop that by collaborating.
But it can also be like our design team, which has become more like an in-house resource, that instead of going and buy design resources from external consultants, the internal design team can now support all the different products. On the commercial side, I think I can take the example of what I mentioned before, where we see, for instance, B2B sales and distribution, and now we have, I mean, one vice president on B2B sales, Tom, and he's responsible for the different sales. So now it's been very easy for him, for instance, on the Scottish market, where we have good relationships with a lot of the local authorities for the Sumdog product, to sort of introduce the Strawbees product as well to them.
And then it can just, through a few phone calls, be easy to get, like, a webinar or a sales meeting with 40 schools, which would take a lot of time and effort for someone who doesn't have those contacts, to get in front of so many schools. So I think those are some examples. Over to you, Martin.
Thank you.
Mm-hmm.
Another question here: How is it that interest income only amounted to SEK 9,000 in the quarter?
Can you repeat that question?
Yes, of course. How is it that interest income only amounted to SEK 9,000 in the quarter?
... I think you can take that to an interest income. Yeah.
Yes. It mainly depends on that we had a higher interest last year.
Mm-hmm.
And that was the more than usual cost last year.
Thank you. You mentioned that a strategic review is being carried out to redistribute resources to the best performing assets, areas.
Mm-hmm.
Can you give any indication of which products or markets may be prioritized or possibly deprioritized, so to speak?
Mm-hmm. I mean, given where we are right now, I mean, we do see strong performance a little bit like I showed in the revenue split before, that the U.S. market is performing very well. So that's one of the areas, and where we also have the proof point from how sales is going with the Strawbees product. So it's a typical one if it's like, I mean, we have sales and operating models now we can really invest more in it and scale it. So that's in terms of a product and a sales market that works well. Another example is the Albert Junior product, which has performed very good now from a customer acquisition perspective in the Nordics and Poland and U.K. during the summer.
Therefore, we said now it's time to really scale it to new markets, which we did a few years ago, but we've housed it during last year due to the profitability focus. I think that's an example of a product where we are focusing more on that.
Thank you. Moving on to the last question here. You talked a little bit about U.S. earlier, but besides the breakthrough in the U.S., are you exploring other international markets you wanna expand to? And how do you see opportunities and challenges of further global expansion?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I would say, I mean, a little bit like I just mentioned, for some of the products, I mean, we do look into further international expansion. But if I were to put this on a kind of like a three-step journey, we think we're... Given that we are, especially in the U.S.A. and in the U.K., which are two big markets for ed tech products, we still have much more room to grow in those markets with existing products. So first and foremost, it's more about growing each product where they're already today. Second focus is really, if I can call it, like cross-selling. So like we're now doing with, we have a strong position with Sumdog in the U.K.
Let's introduce Strawbees there, which is then really a market expansion for the Strawbees product since it hasn't been present there before. But that makes it possible to utilize the sales and distribution muscles and the network we already have without investing in building up new ones. It's more about the market localization of a product. So right now, I would say that's more of the strategic focus, to cross-sell and localize our existing products for the markets that already perform well, and then we talk about the U.K., and the USA, and the Nordics. To go into totally new grounds, I mean, right now, I mean, our strategy is to explore this in two ways. You can say one is to use our B2C products like Albert Junior.
It's very, you can say, easy to localize it to a new market in comparison to some of the B2B products. So getting into new market, sort of with a small investment, so we can try out to see what's the interest in our products, our brand, on that specific market before starting any big one. As I mentioned in the, in the quarter two report, in the CEO word, I mean, we have done some experiments during the second quarter, and we launched Albert Junior in some new markets starting this fall and onward, and we will come back to which markets that are later on. Another way for us to explore new markets, more for some of the B2B products, is through resellers.
So especially, like over in Asia right now, we're working with some resellers that we've had long-term relationships with, who started to sell small quantities of, for instance, Strawbees, and over time they have come back and purchased more, and more, and more. And seeing whether resellers have good traction also gives a good indication for us if we should move into such a market with more direct sales going forward. So hopefully that sheds some light on the expansion question.
Thank you so much, and thank you, Jonas and Katarina, for presenting here today and answering all our questions. Thank you all for tuning in. I wish you a pleasant weekend.
Mm-hmm. Thank you so much from us as well.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.