Hello, everybody. Today we have reported our first quarter report of 2021, and I'm delighted to show you some information about what we have managed to do in the group so far this year. Look at the quarter in the total, we had really a record quarter. Once again, I must say, we have for the last full year actually had fantastic results in the group. In this quarter, we have exceptional strong organic growth in the Labtech business area, and I will come back to that. If you look at the sales side, we have sales of SEK 1.7 billion, which is 65% better than the same quarter last year. We had a result EBITA of SEK 326 million. It's actually 209% better compared to the same quarter last year. Actually, SEK 326 is even more than the full year result we had in 2019.
We are doing fantastic job within our organization. The EBITA margin ended up at 18.8%. You should all be very proud of being part of this journey together with us. I will also now talk a little bit later on about the two strategic acquisitions that we have done early in April. Talking about the first quarter, of course, we have to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic is still here, and we had a third wave in this quarter, and it has actually been very tough in most of the countries where we have our business. The sales on the COVID-19 side were SEK 620 million in the quarter, which was very high. It was intensive COVID-19 testing in all countries. The diagnostics company had really good sales due to that.
We also have seen very high activity around virus research, that is mostly when you're looking at the gene sequencing on the different mutations of the COVID-19. In the Medtech field, we have seen, of course, a setback in elective surgeries. We all see and read about there is less procedures taking place in all hospitals around the world. The hospitals really have to reallocate the resources and work within the COVID pandemic instead. Coming into the Labtech, we saw a sales growth of 84%. Everything was organic. It's a fantastic quarter. If we take away the strong COVID-19 sales, we actually had an organic underlying sales of eight%, which is still even higher than the normal average we have had on the organic side for a number of years. Summarizing the Labtech business, we had sales of SEK 1.1 billion in the quarter.
EBITA ended up on SEK 262, and the margin was 23.2%. That is exceptional high. Very well done by all of you working in these companies in our group. If you look at the Medtech figures, we had a very good sales growth of 38%. Most of that was driven by the extra PPE sales we had in Central Europe. We didn't actually have so much PPE sales in this quarter in the Nordics. As we all know, it was a setback in elective surgery. Organic underlying, we had 2% growth in the quarter. In the Medtech area, we also have our home care companies, and they have still difficulties to go out to the elderly homes due to all the difficulties with meeting elderly people in the pandemic. Sales for Medtech in the quarter ended up at SEK 611 million. That was +38%.
EBITA of SEK 64 million, the margin ended up at 10.6%. That is more or less summarizing the quarter. It has been a very good quarter, especially in Labtech, but a little bit tougher in the Medtech. I think we all see that the elective surgery hopefully will come back now when more vaccination has been done of all of us actually in the countries. Directly after the quarter, we did two really large acquisitions, adding into AddLife Group. The first of them is a company named Vision Ophthalmology Group. It has business in Switzerland, Germany, U.K., and Poland. They are focusing surgery, eye surgery, you could say, or ophthalmology surgery. It's a niched company in a very attractive segment where we didn't have any business before.
This segment is, of course, growing because we are getting older and older, and the technology is just developing very fast. Vision Ophthalmology Group has 190 employees. They had last year a sales of SEK 700 million. Looking into the other acquisition that came just five days later, it was Healthcare 21. That is a group with a headquarter in Ireland, but also have business in the U.K. It's more or less split 50/50 between these two countries. Net sales last year was SEK 1.7 billion. They have 450 employees. Healthcare 21 very much look like the Medtech business that we have in AddLife. They also have some businesses within diagnostics and research, and actually home care as well. Both these companies, of course, a very good and big add-on to the AddLife group.
If we summarize and look at these companies coming into our organization and said, if we take the figures for 2020 and put these on top, we would actually have had 1,800 employees, and we would have had 70 subsidiaries in the group. You can see the difference, Labtech, somewhat smaller now because these two companies are coming into the Medtech segment. Sales would have been SEK 7.6 billion in 2020, and the EBITA would have been SEK 1.1 billion. This is really a big change to our group. Another change to our group is actually where the markets are, where we now do our business. If you look at the left side here, you see the sales per market that we had in 2020, where we had some 35% of sales outside of the Nordic countries.
With these two new bigger groups into our organization, we should have had more than 55% sales outside of the Nordics in 2020. You see, it's a big shift from being a Nordic player to a more European player. This is actually the new AddLife that we now develop together for the future. What will happen with the new AddLife? Well, we are actually now a European player in life science. We have a very strong market presence in a lot of geographies, and that is a fantastic platform for us to develop for the future. We will continue with the decentralized model that we have had for so many years because we have seen that the small-scale business, large-scale wise, have been very good for us. We think this is a superior model for the future.
We will continue to focus on our vision and corporate philosophy. Of course, we will do much more work also within the AddLife Academy. We will get access to larger markets, more customers, and more niches. This is a great opportunity for us to broaden our internal network in the group. We will also, by this, get stronger supplier relationships that could give synergies of selling products between the companies in the group. We therefore see that we can increase a lot of internal opportunities, and we also get opportunities to sell our own branded products in new markets with these expansions. Even after we have done these two acquisitions, we have still very strong financials, so we can continue our growth strategies. I hope this gives you a little bit of a flavor of where AddLife have moved over the last three months.
We have a very good foundation, and you guys, you do a fantastic job in our companies. We're all looking forward to the future within the AddLife. Have a really good day. Thank you very much.