Welcome to the Q1 interim report presentation for AddLife. My name is Martin Almgren, and I am CFO for AddLife, and I will have the presentation today. Sorry. I will start short with AddLife in brief presentation. AddLife, as you all probably already know, we are a leading independent player in the life science market in the Nordics. Mainly Nordics, and from 2019, we have also taken a step out to Europe. We provide equipment, consumables related to services, mainly in the healthcare sectors in the Nordics and also the rest of Europe. We are today 40 subsidiaries and close to 900 employees. We are divided into two business areas, Labtech and Medtech. We have sales rolling 12 months of SEK 2.7 billion. During this quarter, we have done the rights issue of SEK 500 million, and I will come back to that a little bit later.
As I said, we are a Nordic player to start with, Nordic is our home market and has been our home market for quite some years now. The Nordic market has a population of about 32 million people. In 2018 and in December, we did an acquisition, as we have announced, we bought Biomedica in Austria. Now we have done the market extension, and this is our first interim report where we have sales included from the Biomedica acquisition. This acquisition is, as we used to say, it's a game changer for the AddLife group. We reach a new population of about 132 million people in Central and Eastern Europe. Together with our 32 million in the Nordics, it's a quite substantial market of about 160 million people.
As we have seen here, we have had a good growth since we were listed in 2016, and the Biomedica acquisition will, as we expect, continue this growth both in sales and in EBITDA. That was a short presentation. Let's go to our Q1 report that we released yesterday afternoon, just before we had our AGM meeting here in Stockholm. We call this report The Step Out into Europe. If we look at the sales in the Q first quarter, we had an increase of 41%. Our net sales in the first quarter totaled SEK 845 million compared to SEK 597 million. As I said, 41% increase, and most of this increase, 35%, comes from acquired companies, and this is mainly Biomedica. The organic growth in the first quarter was 4%.
If you look at the EBITDA, we had an EBITDA of SEK 70 million compared to SEK 57 million last year, which is a growth of 22%. The EBITDA margin ended up at 8.3% compared to 9.6% last year. If we look at the growth that we have had in the first quarter, and we look at the press release that we had in October, when we released the acquisition of Biomedica, then we said that the net sales effect of this acquisition would be 26% and EBITDA plus 18%. We are a little bit stronger on our sales than we expected and a little bit stronger on the EBITDA as well. Just as a comparison. If we go to the rolling 12 months, we have a net sales, as I said, of SEK 2.73 billion compared to SEK 2.354 billion last year. It's an increase of 16%.
Our EBITDA has amounted to SEK 257 million compared to SEK 237 million, which is an increase of 8%. The EBITDA margin ends up for the rolling 12 months to 9.4% compared to 10.1%. We see that the EBITDA margin in the quarter is lower than the last year. The reason for this, as we also write in our interim report for the quarter, is mainly due to the reason that the EBITDA margin in the acquired companies in Central and Eastern Europe has a lower EBITDA margin than the former AddLife companies. If you go to the business update for first quarter, we see that the business situation in the Nordic market is stable, with an increase in the underlying demand in the healthcare and for products used by researchers in Life Science. On the total in the Nordics, it's a stable market.
If we look at the Swedish market, we had a good increase in sales, and it's in both business areas and aimed at both health services and laboratories. We see that the research market has a positive market trend, and that's also thanks to the ambition that they have in Sweden to be a leading nation within Life Science, which is good for our companies selling in the research area. Looking at the Norwegian market, the business situation has been favorable and continue to be favorable. We see it in many areas, and primarily in the quarter in the welfare technology, and also in the research and health services. Looking into the Danish market, the last quarter 2018, we had to comment that the market and the investments were a bit lower. We have now seen a turnaround here in the first quarter in Denmark.
We see that the investments, especially among the pharmaceutical companies, has come back, and they have announced increased initiatives both in production units and in their research centers. There is a positive feeling in the Danish market in the first quarter. Going to the fourth Nordic country, Finland. The controversial healthcare reform has now been put on hold after the preliminary election that they had. On March 8th, they put this healthcare reform on hold, and we have been talking about this in our earlier reports. What we see here is an increase in uncertainty in the market at the moment. What we foresee is delays in different various projects, both in Labtech and in Medtech. If you look at our new markets in Central and Eastern Europe, they have reported stable growth, and they are in line with our expectations.
We have had a favorable market in Poland and Hungary during the quarter, on the total, they are in line with our expectations. Looking at the market for our own products, mainly in Benelux and China, here we see a continued favorable market in this quarter as well as in the previous quarters. If we go to Labtech, and just a first comment on our Biomedica company, 60% of our Biomedica business is allocated to the business area Labtech. When you see these figures here, we have 60% of Biomedica included. The net sales amounted in the first quarter 2019 to SEK 504 million, which is an increase of 43%. Acquired sales growth was 33%, and organic sales was 7%.
We had a good organic growth in our Labtech business area, and we had good growth in both our diagnostic companies as well as from our research companies. Both business areas delivered 7% organic growth, which is really positive. The EBITDA increased with 32%, corresponding to an EBITDA margin of 10.3% compared to 11.2% last year. We see that we had an increased number of users and increased usage of consumption on previously installed instruments, which means that we see a higher usage of reagents on our already installed instruments in most of our Nordic countries. This year, we don't have the same flu season in diagnostics as we had last year. Last year was a strong flu season. This year it's a quite weak flu season.
We have had good growth in our more traditional areas and also in our microbiology and molecular biology segments in this quarter. They have grown better than last year. As I said before, we see an uncertainty in the Finnish markets after the reform in the healthcare system has been put on hold. This has affected the Labtech business. We see slightly lower instrument sales and reagent sales in this quarter. As I said, what we see here is that projects are postponed, we hope they will come on later. As I said, we had an increased or better research market in the Danish companies in the quarter through increased sales to academic researchers and also to the pharma industry in Denmark. In the Labtech business, the Central and Eastern Europe have been in line with our expectations.
If we go out to the rest of the world, our own instrument sales in China has been good in the quarter, and we also see good performance from U.S., and as we have informed before, we still continue to see the positive signs after the restructuring of the U.S. company, where we shift the model and started to sell through distributors in U.S. instead, which has been good for our margins in Labtech. If we go to our Medtech business, here we have 40% of Biomedica allocated to this business area. We have a sales increase of 39%. Most of this is acquisition and comes from Biomedica, but also a small part from Korpinen that we acquired in July. Organic sales in Medtech was minus 2%. EBITDA in the quarter was SEK 22 million compared to SEK 21 million last year, which is an increase of 8%.
We have EBITDA margin in our Medtech business area that amounted to 6.5% compared to 8.4%. As I said before, part of this is due to the lower margins that we have in the new acquired business in Central and Eastern Europe. Also we don't get any help from our weak Swedish krona either. There are several factors behind this drop in margin, but main reason here is the lower EBITDA margin from Central and Eastern Europe. In the health services in Nordic, we have a stable business situation except from Finland. This is, of course, due to the healthcare reform. We are continuing our restructuring of our company in Finland and restructure their market offer in order to strengthen the company in the long run.
This we have informed also about in our Q4 report, we continue that restructuring work also in the Q1. The increasing requirements in public procurements in the Medtech business in all countries in the Nordics, here they are focusing more and more on sustainability, on delivery precision, and also on prices. We see both the challenges here, but also, of course, opportunities. Now we have, during 2018 and 2017, we reported we restructured our warehouse and our logistics function within Medtech. We are well-staffed, and we have a good logistic function in our Medtech business at the moment. That is seen as an opportunity for us. In Benelux, the favorable growth trend has continued, and in Benelux, we sell our own branded products.
We look at the Central and Eastern Europe, in the Medtech, it was somewhat better than we expected, mainly from Poland and Hungary. It is also positive to be able to say that we have initiated our first sales of own branded products into Medtech in Biomedica. Some of the own-branded products in Mediplast, we have started to learn and to take part in tenders in Austria. Home care in Norway, we had a weaker last month in the fourth quarter, but we see now that the market has come back in Norway in home care, and we have had increased sales in the first quarter. Here, especially, sales to the welfare technology has been really good. As we announced on April 30th, we did the acquisition of Wellspect HealthCare's business within operation and respiratory.
This will be incorporated into our business in Mediplast for the Nordic countries and in Biomedica for those countries that Biomedica will cover. We will also have a new company in Australia due to the acquisition of the Wellspect products. Looking at the cash flow for the first quarter, we had a really strong operating cash flow amounting to SEK 99 million compared to SEK 39 last year. Here we have a positive effect of SEK 20 million from IFRS 16. We also see that the profit increase will help us, and last year we had higher tax payments during the whole of 2018, and now we see that the tax payments have gone back to more levels that we expected. We have also been working effectively with our working capital in the first quarter, here we also have a positive effect on our operating working capital.
The net investment has gone up slightly compared to the previous year. This year, we invested SEK 60 million. For the Nordic countries, they are in line with the previous year, and we see some more investment in Central Europe on instruments that they have installed and rent out to their customers. I think this will be in line with the future investments. We look at our profitability, profit through working cap, we continue to perform above 45%. We ended up Q1 at 58%, a little bit less than the previous years. The reason is that we have another business model in Biomedica, and they tie up a little bit more working capital, especially in accounts receivable, compared to our normal AddLife business and AddLife companies.
If we look at the balance sheet, there are some changes since December. One is, of course, the new standard, IFRS 16, which has increased our own current assets with around SEK 240 million, also increased the interest-bearing provisions with the same amount, around SEK 240 million. As I said in the beginning, we did a rights issue during the first quarter. The rights issue was of SEK 500 million. This has, of course, affected our equity, which has increased, also our interest-bearing provisions, since we have been able to repay loans with this money. If we look at the net debt to equity at the end of March, we have 0.4 compared to 0.9 end of December. That is a quite good strengthen of our net debt to equity, and the equity ratio ends up at 52% compared to 35% in December.
We have a strong balance sheet at the moment with good possibilities to continue our growth, both organically and through acquisitions. If we look at the last page, we see that we have a profit growth of 8% for the rolling 12 months ending March 2019. If we look at the profit growth since we were listed, we will end up at 24%, which is well above the goal that we have of 15% annually over a long time. We have increased, of course, the number of shares. Now, end of March, we have 28,219,000 shares, and we are around 888 employees in our group at the moment. That was all I had. Now we open up for questions. Okay, I guess that we will not have any questions today.
If you want to call me or send me an email, you can do that after this meeting. You can also reach Christina from Monday. You can send her an email also as well if you want to get in contact with us. Thank you a lot for listening and calling in to our short presentation. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us. Thank you a lot. Bye