Good morning, everybody. It's 10:00 A.M. o'clock, at least in Stockholm today. Most welcome to this investor meeting with AddLife. Speaking is Kristina Willgård, the CEO, and we also have Martin Almgren, our CFO, in this phone conference. We just released our second quarter report a few hours ago, we will try to lead you through what has happened during the second quarter and our thoughts about the market and what we are doing actually in AddLife right now. Going to the second page, for those of you who are not that familiar with AddLife, we are now an independent player in the life science market, both in the Nordics and in Europe, that is something I will come back to.
What we do is that we provide equipment, consumables, and a lot of services, mainly to the healthcare sector, also, of course, to some pharma industry, food industry, vet industry, and other surrounding industries in our environment. Right now, we are approximately 40 subsidiaries in the group, we are just about 900 employees. We did last quarter a share issue of approximately SEK 500 million to further increase the growth in the group and continue the pattern that we have done for the last few years. We conduct our business in two business areas. One we call Labtech, the other one is Medtech. In the Labtech area, we work with the diagnostics and the research side. In the Medtech area, we work more with healthcare, hospital, special surgery, and home care.
Summarizing the rolling 12 months sales in the group, we now are close to SEK 3 billion, actually SEK 2,952,000,000. If we look at the graph on the right side, we have had a growth since 2004 of on average 14% a year, around 6% of that has been organic. What we have done in the group since December, actually, is that we have moved from being a complete Nordic player, even though we have had subsidiaries in China for many years, we have really focused the Nordic market, where we in 2018 had more than 90% of our sales. After the acquisition with the Biomedica in December, also when we now in 30th of April, acquired the product portfolio from Wellspect, we are now a European player. That's why we have a headline in this report, a European AddLife.
This has really been a game-changer for us in the market. Why do we call it a game-changer? Well, first of all, if we look at the acquisition of Wellspect, that has meant a lot of changes in our organization. We have done changes in the logistic and the distribution, which now goes directly from the Nordic market out to the European market and in some cases, directly to end customers in their homes. That is when we are talking about respiratory medicine. There has been a lot of work in our Medtech companies during the last quarter to enable a complete change of our logistics and distribution. What is a European AddLife? Well, that means that we now have a much broader market access.
We actually cover all the European market, either with our own companies or through the distributors that we have for the Wellspect products. The only countries that we are not actually active in right now is Ireland and Portugal. As all of you probably know, some of these are very small markets, but some of the others are much larger markets. We are actually also with the Wellspect acquisition now in Australia with our own subsidiaries, and as I said, we are still doing business in China. What we have done is that we have built a new platform for the future, a platform where we can start much more cross-selling of our own products. We can also attract the suppliers we have today in different countries and give them the opportunity to use us as a sales channel in new markets for them.
Of course, we are now much more attractive to other suppliers who want to go into the European market. The third one for this platform is, of course, that we now have a broader way to find acquisition candidates that we can add on to our existing business. If we go to much more of finance figures and what actually happened in second quarter. We did sales in the second quarter of SEK 844 million. It is a growth with 36%. The organic side was 2%, which was much weaker than in the first quarter. The main reason for the weaker organic sales growth is that we have the Easter holiday in April, and this is the same pattern as we had in 2017, where second quarter was much weaker organically than the first quarter.
If we look at May and June, we had good development in our subsidiaries the last two months in this quarter. In this quarter, we reported an EBITDA of SEK 68 million, which was a growth of eight percentage, and the EBITDA margin was 8.1%, a decline with two percentage units. Why is that? The first explanation for the lower margins are that we have lower margins in the Biomedica geographies. That is something that we reported already when we did the acquisition in December. Over the years, we see that Biomedica has had somewhere between four and seven percentage of EBITDA margin. In this quarter, we also had very strong instrumental sales in our diagnostics companies in Sweden and Denmark.
Those of you who know how we do the diagnostics business know that initially we have very low margins or even negative margins in selling these instruments. Over time, we will have much more positive development due to the fact that we can sell more reagents on these instruments. In this quarter, we also had the integration project in Mediplast and Biomedica for the Wellspect product which of course cost a little bit extra for us during this period. As we will see also for the coming four or five months, we will have extra cost for this transition due to the fact that Wellspect HealthCare are still the product owner of this portfolio, and we have to pay them until we have all the registrations and like with the regulatory authority. Summarizing 12 rolling months, we are close to SEK 3 billion, an increase of 90%.
EBITDA increased to SEK 362 million, also that's an increase of 8%, and our EBITDA margin was close to 9%. Going forward with the business update in the quarter, well, the business situation in our market is still stable. We think it hasn't really changed anything since the last quarter. The only reason is actually the April hit by the Easter holiday. Underlying, we have an increased demand both in healthcare, home care, and product for researchers. We look at the Swedish market, which is robust. We have increased sales in all our business areas, both to health services and to the laboratories. In the quarter, the Swedish government did present the need for the huge investment they have to do in the healthcare until 2026. Persons more than 80 years of age will increase with 36% in the coming six to seven years.
The government in Sweden actually think that they will have to increase spending with SEK 90 billion to healthcare and home care, and that is everything from products to building new elderly homes. If we look at the Nordic Norway market, business has in the second quarter been more varied, and that is mainly because we have weaker instrument sales to laboratories. We see that several researchers haven't received the grants the same quarter as they received last year. In fact, we didn't get so much instrument sales to the laboratories in this quarter. It's much more favorable if we look at the healthcare and especially also in the home care. We see an increased demand for the welfare technology.
The government really focuses now to stay longer at home, they are trying to find new innovation that really underlie or help these elderly people to stay at home. Coming further to Denmark, we see the improved situation from the first quarter continued in this quarter in several segments. We had specifically high activity in the diagnostics companies, strong sales growth also in Denmark, lot of instrument sales, meaning that the margin in Denmark declined a bit during this second quarter. Finnish market has still and are still cautious. There was a new government in May, and they have announced a modified healthcare reform. The uncertainty remains in the quarter where we see weaker sales due to delays in various projects.
It's mostly when we talk about investments in instruments in the laboratories. Also investments in home care, because we see that there is a hesitation of building elderly homes, and also that means that we will be later in the projects that we are looking for selling bathroom-related assistance devices in the Finnish market. Coming to our new markets, Central and Eastern Europe have developed according to our expectations. The first six months with Biomedica on board has really developed as we expected when we acquired this company in December. In this second quarter, we see that Romania and Czech Republic have been favorable. We see they have won a few new tenders, and they have also increased their sales in the research field with suppliers that we already have in the Nordic countries, and they are growing strong in that field, which we think is very positive.
The Austrian market has been somewhat more weak, and that is mainly due to Clinical IT products. Clinical IT is a product portfolio which we don't sell in the Nordics, but Biomedica sell it. Last year they had big project sales in the second quarter, and now they see that it will be somewhat later in the third or fourth quarter during 2019. We have an ongoing project, where we work a lot with Biomedica to initiate that we sell our own products in these markets, and especially within the Medtech area, and Lars-Erik Rydell, who is responsible for this part, is doing a great job training the staff in Europe and helping them to do the tender business in a good way in our new geographies.
Talking also about our other products which we have in the Labtech area, out of the Nordics, we see a very good growth in especially U.S. and China during the last six months. The Labtech business, what happened there? We have a growth of 28% in the quarter and 35% year-over-year. Organic year-to-date, we have 3%, and the explanation is what I said before. We have a decrease of EBITDA during second quarter, and that is mainly due to the higher instrument sales in the diagnostic field within Sweden and Denmark. We also have, as you know, weaker sales in Finland, which hits our margin as well in this quarter. Otherwise, I think I have commented more or less everything about the Labtech business going forward.
Talking about the Medtech business, we see that the sales growth in the second quarter is 47% and 43% year-to-date. Organically, this is 3%. We know that it is troublesome for you guys to understand really what happens when we take on the Wellspect companies, because actually we have part of the Wellspect deal is organic and part of it is acquired. The business that is included in Australia and Biomedica are reported as acquired, and the business that is included into our Mediplast company is a part of the organic. That's why it's somewhat troublesome to really analyze the figures for you from an outside perspective. Nevertheless, we can say that the sales growth from Wellspect for the first two months has developed exactly as we thought when we were doing the acquisition.
EBITDA in the quarter increased with 22% and the margin is 8.1%. For year-to-date, it has increased with 16% and the margin is now 7.4%. I also think that we have commented more or less what we have done in the rest of the Medtech business on the previous slides. Martin?
Yes, looking at the cash flow in the second quarter and the year to date, we see that we have a positive cash flow and an increase in operating cash flow compared to the year before. Part of this comes from the IFRS 16 implementation, which as we have written in the report, had a positive effect of SEK 42 million on the raw adjustments and on cash items. Otherwise, we see also that the tax income paid has been lower this quarter and also in the year to date for the six-month period. Last year, as we wrote in our report, we had increased one-off payments last year that we don't have this year. We have also had a positive change in the working capital this year so far.
In total, the operating cash flow ends up at SEK 164 million compared to SEK 68 last year. In the quarter, we have had a dividend payment of SEK 62 million as well. Going to the profitability and profit through working cap, we are still above the 45%, which is our financial goal. We end the quarter at 53%, which is lower than in the previous quarters and the previous years. The main reason for this is that the Biomedica Group has more working capital tied up in accounts receivable. I think that was about profitability. Looking at our balance sheet, as Tina said, we did a rights issue of SEK 500 million which explained the equity increase and also the increase in equity ratio. We end the quarter at 47% equity ratio, and we have a strong balance sheet to continue our growth.
If we compare June to December figures, we have an effect on the other non-current assets due to the implementation of IFRS 16, and the effect in the end of June is around SEK 230 million. The net debt to equity ratio is 0.6x. We have a strong balance sheet to continue. Finally, some key ratios. The profit growth, which is our financial goal as well, is 8% for the rolling 12-month period. As I said, the return on working capital is 53%.
Okay. I think we open up if there are any questions. Seems to be silent. I will summarize and say if you want to have a question directly to either me or Martin, just give us a mail or a call, and we will try to explain and help you to understand our business better in AddLife. I would like to thank you for listening in, and we wish you all a great summer.