Well, it is 10:00, I hope that most of you have come into the line. Most welcome to this telephone conference in AddLife, where we will discuss the Q1 report. It is me, Kristina Willgård, who is the CEO of AddLife.
Martin Almgren, CFO of AddLife
We will try to present our report as good as possible for all of you. Whenever in the end, we would like to open up for questions. I think we will start, it is a few seconds more than 10, we will start on our website. You hopefully have seen that there is a presentation, where you can follow what we will talk about right now. First of all, a short presentation of AddLife. We are a leading independent player in the Life Science market. We work in different niches, mainly in the Nordic market in Life Science. The Nordic market is about SEK 50 billion large, we who have the turnover a bit more than SEK 2 billion, we of course see a lot of possibilities to grow further in this market.
When we talk about independent, we are independent when it comes to that, we are mostly a distributor in the market. 80% of our sales comes from other suppliers products, but 20% of our sales in the group come our own branded products, of which a small part we produce ourselves. In the market, we sell equipment, instrument, medical devices, and different consumables to our customers. Very important for us is the added value that we can give the customer, that is mainly service in the market, which is so important when we sell advanced instruments, mainly in the diagnostics area and in the research area. Today we have 34 subsidiaries. I hear that it is coming a lot of new people into the line. I hope you have a chance to follow.
We have 34 subsidiaries, and we act in two business area, and we call it Labtech, where we have diagnostics and research, and then the Medtech, it's Medtech and home care, in that area. 12 months rolling, we have sales of SEK 2.3 billion, close to SEK 2.4 billion. We have a vision to strive to improve people's lives by being a leading and value-adding player. We just ended the call internally in the group where we informed our employees and our MDs in the group about the result. I think all of them can sign in that they in one way or another work with products or services that in the end try to improve the lives of us all. Our offering is standing on four legs, you can say. In the bottom we have the products, which is really what we do.
We sell products mainly in the market. The products are very important for us. It's important that we have the right suppliers who have a good innovation in the product development, and that we can really make sure that the customer can choose the products that they really need, either for the research or for doing a good surgery on the patient. To be successful in the market, it's not just enough to have products, because when you just sell products, the only thing you can work with is pricing. We work a lot with added value to our customer, and I would say the basis for our journey and our success so far is the knowledge we have internally in the group where we sell a lot of advice.
We sell training, in the way that we see that a lot of our customers really need the help to decide what products, what instruments they should use to do what they want in their businesses. Very important for us, mainly in the Labtech area, is the technical service that we give to our customers. The worst that could happen is that we have an instrument where we do a test and the instrument doesn't give the right answer on the test, which in the end could make sure that, or could happen that a patient will have the wrong medicine and nobody want that to happen. Technical service is very essential for our performance in the Labtech business. As most of you know, we work in a decentralized organization where we have our subsidiaries who are very entrepreneurial, and they really have their own business acumen.
They are flexible, they are efficient in the market, and they have a large part of freedom to develop and to conduct their own business. What we try to do is to put this together as a group and really to find synergies between our companies. We want to find ways of working smarter, to use each other's resources smarter. We are working hard to build a network between different people in different companies to share knowledge, and to find ways also to go to market and to meet customers. We are working hard to be a sustainable company, both when you talk about CSR questions, but also when you talk about financial sustainability. We are aiming to have a strong balance sheet, which means that we can invest and develop our business and continue acquisitions going forward. Let's start to talk about our Q1 report.
The Q1 report, we said growth continues. That's what we have seen happen in the first quarter. In the quarter, we had a net sales close to SEK 600 million, which was a 4% growth from last year. We had an EBITA margin or an EBITA that was SEK 57 million, which was a growth of 7%, and the margin strengthened to 9.6% from 9.3%. You all know that we have a target that we want to grow at least 15% a year on our EBITA. If we look at the rolling 12-month figures, we see that we have a net sales growth of 14% and an EBITA growth of 14%, which was quite close to our financial target. The EBITA margin was stable on 10.1%. If we look into the Q1 figures, we see that organically we had a decrease of 4%.
Of course, we have been questioning how come this happens. What we have seen is, as you also read in last year's report, is that the first quarter in 2017 was an exceptional good quarter. We have 27% growth, of which was organically 12%. In this year, we had Easter in March. Last year, Easter was in April. In all the Nordic countries, we see that around Easter, people tend to take a lot of holidays, and we see that the hospitals don't have so much planned operation or activities. We also see that researchers tend to not work the last days into the Easter. When we calculate, we see that we had at least three to four less sales days in March this year than last year. Of course, that makes this year a bit slower.
I would say the thing that really affected us mostly was the weak sales we had in our Medtech division when we talk sales to hospitals in Finland. Last year, we wrote in our report, we have seen the trend throughout 2017 that Finland has been a bit weaker throughout the year. There is an uncertainty in the Finnish market around the healthcare and social service reform which we think has a big implication of the decrease in sales in Finland. This hit us really this quarter. The positive in this quarter was the strong flu season. In the fourth quarter, we had that as a discussion point when we saw that the fourth quarter 2016, we had a strong flu season, which was very positive.
This is for the diagnostics companies, this is a big impact because we sell a lot of tests to the laboratories during the flu season. This year it came in the first quarter. Our diagnostics company did a very good quarter when it comes to result because this is really just reagents sales in the quarter, which we have good margins on. If you summarize the first quarter, we see that the results in the quarter or the improvement in the results comes from our diagnostics business, and that's mostly in Finland, where we had two diagnostic companies who have done a very good job in the first quarter. In the quarter as well, we did two smaller acquisition. It's a company called Food Diagnostics, which we will integrate into our Swedish diagnostics company in second quarter.
This was the first step for us in the diagnostics area to go into more food industry because we see that a lot of interest around the world and also in the Nordic countries about what do we really eat and how does the food look. We see there are much more tests around the foods in a lot of laboratories, and we think this is a small step to go into that area. In the Medtech business, we did a smaller acquisition of a company called Ossano Scandinavia, which works in back and hip surgery, and they are a really specialized company, which is a good company to integrate into our business we have in the Mediplast company in Medtech. About the market in the first quarter, I would say the business conditions remain unchanged.
It's a positive market. We have the underlying trends with the growing and aging population, which means that there is a greater demand both for hospitals, but both for researchers to find new innovative medicine to treat the different diseases that comes up. There's a lot of new technology coming in who are interesting and that we can take into our companies and distribute to the market. We also see that the tenders are larger and larger, and in some countries like Denmark, the discussion is about doing nationwide tenders in 2020. Of course, the competition is tough on these tenders. If you are in the tenders, you are a winner, but if you are out of the tenders, it could be a bit tougher.
So far, I would say we have been very successful, both in Denmark and other countries to be and take part in the larger tenders. The different governments in the Nordic countries are focusing a lot on Life Science, which we have written in the report both in the last year and again in this quarter. Swedish Government, for example, are investing a lot, to make sure that Sweden comes back to be a leading Life Science nation. A few years ago, we were there, but a lot of our pharmaceutical industry left the country. There is a lot of investments here where we see funds going into especially smaller research companies, but also investments into the healthcare. The government has really decided to put in a special Life Science office, where they try to push these questions even harder.
For us at AddLife, we are very proud that we will have a meeting with the person in charge for this office within the coming weeks and see how we can, as a part of the business, help Sweden as a nation to be even stronger in Life Science. On the Swedish market, there was a positive situation both in the Labtech and MedTech areas. What we saw in our diagnostics area was that we had high instrument sales to laboratories, which is very positive going forward because that means that we have got a lot of new tenders. The first thing that happens is in a tender is that we put out instruments.
Not that positive is that the margin on the instrument is very low, and we know that the reagents we will sell coming the last four or five year will have a very good margin going forward. The sales to healthcare was good and in line with last quarter. The Danish market, as I said, has a very high activity. There are continuously investments in the hospitals from the government side. What we have seen the last year is that there have been a bit of cutbacks in public funding for researchers in Denmark. The research people are much more dependent on the private fundings, but we see that the fundings is still coming a lot from the private investors in the market.
For us to supply the market, we haven't seen any change due to the difference from a government and a private perspective from the funding side. We have seen that the sales has been stable and the pharma industry is continuously their investments, not as much in the research side, but still very much on the production side in the pharma industry. Finland, as I said, it's a very two-part market for us. We see that in our Labtech business. We have a very good market. It has been improved both for our research companies and for our diagnostics companies in this quarter. They had reported a really strong sales. Influenza in the Finnish really was on the top level that I think, I would say all-time high in Finland in that sense.
As we said before, the healthcare reform is postponed, and we see a weaker sales into the healthcare. We expect this to be a bit more stabilized when we go further into 2018 because we think that there will be much more clear what will happen in the reform coming forward. The market is a bit hesitant, and unfortunately, we got hit in this quarter about that. Norway market conditions, I would say positive, stable demand in all areas. We have delivered very good, as normally, I would say, both in the diagnostics and in the lab side. What has been a bit more challenging in Norway is that we see higher increased competition in the larger tenders in home care. The home care market in Norway is tender-based, and they are nationwide.
It's a organization called NAV who do all the tenders from the government perspective, and the market in the home care in Norway is Yes, for a long time, and is still developing very positive, but we see into the national tenders and, of course, want to grasp part of the market. We talked about the exports. Export is around 9% of our total sales. They have developed very good for the healthcare and Benelux, which has been a small part of our business, is growing steadily and has done so very well for the last year.
When we talk about the instruments that we sell outside of the Nordic countries, it has been more stable. We have also seen that it has stabilized in the U.S., which has been weak for a long time. Martin will come back and talk about the things we do in the U.S. business.
If we look at the business area Labtech, in the first quarter, we had a sales growth of 3%. All of the growth is organic here. We had an EBITA increase of 11%, and the EBITA margin increased from 10.3 to 11.2. As Kristina said before, we had a strong flu season, which is behind this, and also the diagnostic part had a good positive quarter. If you look at the rolling 12-month figure, we have a 10% increase in sales and EBITA increase of 1%. In the comparison figures in March 2017, we have a pension plan adjustment of SEK 7 million, which, if we adjust for that, we had an EBITA growth of 6%. Our operations in Baltics that we talked about in the last quarter is developing according to the plan.
We have had positive discussions with the suppliers. In the first quarter, we have a small profit also from the Baltic company. In the U.S., we have signed an agreement with a distributor who will take over our sales that we had in the sales company in U.S., and they were selling our own instruments. This will take effect in Q2. We expect here to have good sales in the future with lower expenses. As Kristina said, we have one small acquisition in the Labtech area, and it's Food Diagnostics. If we continue and look at Medtech, we have a sales increase of 5%. Here we have organic sales decrease of 11% and acquired sales growth of 15%. As Kristina said, we have an Easter effect here, and we have weaker sales in Finland that's behind the organic decrease.
On the other hand, the sales growth comes from our home care business that we have acquired in Norway. We see that, as Kristina said, there are greater competitions in the nationwide home care tenders in Norway. The EBITA margin in the quarter is 0%, so it's unchanged compared to last year. If we look at the rolling 12 months, we have a sales increase of 21% and an EBITA growth of 41%. If we look at the cash flow and look at the operating cash flow, we have in the first quarter, SEK 39 million compared to SEK 47 million last year. The main change here is income tax paid. In the first quarter, we have had a change in payments mainly in Norway and Finland. We have made the payments in the first quarter this year. Last year, we had the payments in the fourth quarter.
The taxes are paid in a different period here that we see. We had a good development in the working capital, that couldn't compensate for the taxes. A little bit weaker operating cash flow in the quarter. If we look at the profitability, profit through working cap, one of our financial goals, we have a stable development here, and we continue to be around 65%. The quarter we ended at 64. If we continue to the balance sheet, there are only minor adjustments here. We had a stable net debt to equity of 0.7, which is a little bit decreased compared to last year, and the equity ratio of 42%. We have a stable balance sheet and a good balance sheet to continue our growth. We have also good liquidity of SEK 263 million available to continue the growth here.
Finally, the selected financial ratios that we see that we have a stable trend now of EBIT above 10%. We are at the moment 601 employees at AddLife.
I think we should open up for questions right now. Do you have any? Okay. Seems to be very quiet. For those of you who have questions and don't want to raise them in this phone meeting, I hope that you either call Martin or me or send us a mail, and we will try to answer or discuss with you as soon as possible. Hope to hear from you forward. This was the 25-minute call for today. If you don't have any questions, I wish you all a great weekend and hope that we hear from you next quarter again. Thank you.