We start. Welcome to AQ Group Investor Presentation for Quarter Four. I'm James, I'm the CEO of AQ, and I also have together with me Christina, she's sitting here beside me. It's a great pleasure I can present our numbers for the full- year 2022. Yeah, let's go. In brief, we have record turnover and record result. Net sales increased by about 32% to almost SEK 2 billion. It's way above our growth target. Our operating profit increased with similar 30% to SEK 148 million. EBT also increased a little bit less, with 24% to SEK 137 million, and our profit margin for the fourth quarter was 6.9%, which is a little bit below our target. We'll get back to that.
Cash flow from operating activities was very good of SEK 140 million in the quarter. Earnings per share after tax and dilution increased with 53% almost to SEK 7.27, which is a good, really good quarter. If you go for the full- year, I think you read the report, but, yeah, we managed to cross SEK 7 billion in sales, which was a milestone for us. It's the first time, operating profit increased with only 10% to SEK 491 million, still an increase from last year. Also, EBT increased with 9.3% to SEK 482 million. The profit margin before tax was 6.8%. We'll get back to the margin discussion a little bit later.
Cash flow from operating activities for the year was SEK 208 million, which is below our target, which we should be at a level close to our EBT in cash flow. It has been a tremendous growth year, and it gives some cash. We will get back to good cash flows going into 2023. Earnings per share after tax, after dilution increased with 12.2%, which is a little bit lower than our average, but it's quite okay. Equity ratio is very, very high and the board of directors with this strong growth in mind and that we will continue to grow also very strongly this year proposes a dividend unchanged from last year of SEK 3.33 krona per share.
Earnings per share growth, I usually show this graph and I'm very happy to see that we continue to grow even though I would have liked to grow it a little bit more in 2022, but we had two quite weak quarters in the beginning of 2021, then we improved as the year went by. Still, our earnings per share growth on average for the last 10 years has been 18%, which I think is, yeah, it's really strong. We will continue in this way also going forward. I seem to get a bit too much in front of the text here.
Turnover in the quarter was record high and very, very strong of course compared to the quarter last year, but also strong if you look at it sequential. We still have long lead time on some components, but it's getting better by the day. I think the component constraints are becoming more like usual. We always have some components that are hard to find and we should be good at finding those. I think it's getting better and better. We have also started seeing deliveries of these battery systems that I've been talking about the last quarters from Bulgaria.
Our big wiring systems truck project is a little bit behind the plan, I would say six weeks behind schedule, but we have started with about 50% of the volumes already now in quarter one, and we will be in full swing in quarter two. We grow very strongly in mainly in electrification, so it is Inductive Components for drives for ships and Med-tech and for commercial vehicles. We have a very strong growth in almost all of our business segments where we operate. The organic growth is super high. Of course, this is in many ways also an effect of this, the many price increases that we've had to do to compensate for costs that are out of our control.
I would anyway say that the organic growth in this quarter is approximately 16%, and then we have about 10% that is driven by price increases compared to same period last year. We also see if you can maybe recognize that the organic growth is much lower than the net sales growth, and it is of course an effect of the currency, which was I think 7% in the quarter, had a positive effect on the net sales. Acquired growth, we are zero in the quarter. It is below our target of we want to grow 5% per year, and I think this year with we had some spill of this Schaffner acquisition.
We are looking at things all the time, but as I said in the last call, we have focused on our very, very strong organic growth this year. We will continue to have a big focus on our organic growth in, also in this year, but I think there is a lot of companies out there that would fit into, to AQ, and we're trying to get them to like us and want to be part of our family. We're, as usual, continuously working with acquisitions. If we look at the margin then, I'm not super happy about our margin in the quarter. I think it should have been equal to our goal. I can say that last quarter, we were talking about compensating for increased costs with our automotive customers.
I believe that we have done that in this quarter, even though the agreements were done very late in the last month of this quarter. With that said, we are now moving into more normalized territory when it comes to price increases. We will continue to work on our pricing with all our customers and analyze our parts as we normally do, but it will be not the same story in 2023 as in 2022. We believe still that we can do a lot to improve our margins by reducing... We have some loss makers, some companies in the group. We are about 50 subsidiaries, and some of them are not performing as they should. We put a strong focus on them to improve their operations and profitability with different countermeasures.
We also have a number of high growth factories where we have recruited a large number of people, it is natural for these people to increase their profitability the longer time they are employed with us. In the beginning, they are maybe doesn't have the same productivity as someone who's been working for us for a year or two or 10. I think that the productivity will gradually go up during 2023, and this will of course also improve our profitability going forward. What I do know, however, is that we will continue to be in this span between 6%-10%, but of course, I'm aiming to be on the top of it rather than now very close to the bottom of this span.
If you look at the cash flow in the quarter, it starts to go back to normal levels. We are still a little bit behind where we want to be. We see that our efforts in improving the inventory turnover is starting to bear fruit. We can say that compared to last quarter, the increase in our inventory is very low, but increase in sales is quite high. Of course, that is a way to turn your inventory faster. We have appointed now dedicated resources that work on this and help our companies to improve in this area. We believe also that better control of this will also improve our profit and on-time delivery going forward. This is a key focus area for us in 2023.
Here is the slide on inventory value and inventory turnover. We, our normalized level is at three. Because of different reasons, partly high growth, in availability of not available materials, in combination with high increase in raw material prices, I've seen that our inventory turnover has gone down. Now we see that it's starting to pick up again, and my target is that we will be back on the normalized level this year, meaning 2023. We still have quite big investments in increased capacity, and we can say that we are pretty much done in our facility in Lithuania now.
All machines are in place, all people are recruited, the volumes are picking up gradually during quarter one this year and will be in full swing, as I said, from quarter two. This will impact our turnover this year with EUR 40 million. Compared to 2022, it will be EUR 40 million more in turnover in this factory alone. On the bottom picture there is our renovated, new electrical cabinet factory in Bulgaria. It, the last quarterly report, I showed a picture where there was no walls and it was not finished. Now, building is finished, machines are installed in some parts, so we have welding machines in place, blasting, and so on. We are starting now to do serial production in this facility from February.
Full production, I believe, will be end of March, also in this factory. We believe that we will add another EUR 40 million of turnover for this product group and in this factory compared to 2022 in 2023. It is very exciting projects and take a lot of our efforts to make this, these fantastic customer opportunities realized. To move from there to our net debt. Our cash flow is quite good in the quarter, meaning that our net debt is decreasing, but as you can see, our investment activity in quarter four has been quite high.
Also in quarter one, we will be at the same level as in quarter four, I think, with the capacity investments, and then it will flatten out a little bit during the rest of the year. I believe that our debt situation is very much under control, and we have a very low net debt through EBITDA. This gives us of course opportunities to do opportunistic acquisitions, but also to invest in these kind of big customer projects that we keep seeing. We'll get back to some more opportunities later on in the presentation. Our on-time delivery is really at its lowest level ever, I think, in December. So we are delivering about 88% of our order lines on time, which is not what we are used to.
However, I believe that now we are starting to catch up with our capacities. As you've seen, the turnover in December is very good, so we have been able to deliver out quite a lot of delayed orders. I think that the trend will start to reverse now, and we will get back to normal levels. It will pretty much follow the inventory turnover improvement. We are, of course, putting a lot of effort into this area to work with our suppliers and customers to make them happy, I mean, to make our customers happy. It is still a challenge for us with the high growth we have, I can say.
But I think we have many strong local entrepreneurs that are managing their customer relations in a good way and are increasing capacity in an extremely quick way, I would say. Not happy with results, but happy with the actions we are doing. If you do the right actions, the results will come. We have some projects for future growth. We've had the same ones for quite a long time, and it will be a little bit the same. We have still this battery storage project in Bulgaria, and we believe that the customers we have in this area will continue to increase in the coming years. We believe that this should still be on this slide.
We're working with one global leader in high voltage systems to design and produce supercapacitor banks. It is also an exciting growth project that we see in Europe at the moment. Here we do the design work and the development of the product together with the customer in Sweden, and then we produce all these big electrical cabinets in Bulgaria. We believe that we together with our customer will make this a success. This is a little bit new slide. We're growing a lot in electrification, I've said, and we see a strong trend at several of our big drives customers that they are selling more drives now to reduce their customers' energy bill.
If you change a drive, old drive for an electrical motor with a new one, you can save between 20%-40% of the energy consumption. We deliver the Inductive Components and sometimes the complete drive, it's the top left picture there, for our customers. We see an extremely strong growth in Estonia, where we believe that we will add a lot of volume this year. It was already a very strong year last year, but we will add even more volume this year. We even starting now to support these factories with some other factories that we have recently acquired as well. On the blue ones you see there, that is typically marine transformer, where we design and produce the whole transformer.
This is something we're doing in our factory in Finland. This factory is now fully booked for 2023 and 2024, meaning that we will have a fully loaded factory with good, previously unutilized equipment will be fully- utilized now. We believe that this will be also a growth factor in 2023 and 2024 for us. These transformers are then marine approved. It's very high requirements, and they are sitting on ships, different types of, really big ships. Last one is a new one maybe for you, but we are also working hard with our defense customers, and they have now through many sad circumstances, been very successful in securing a lot of new orders.
These are existing customers for us, where volumes have been quite low for several years, but now volumes are really picking up. We are both delivering wiring systems and sheet metal products to different defense vehicles, mainly in Europe. We believe that this is somebody has to do it, and we believe that we have a good setup, where we have designers in Sweden and the low manufacturing footprint and also production capacity to deliver these systems to different customers that produce transport vehicles and armored vehicles of different kinds. We believe that, yeah, we have already secured orders for about SEK 200 million that should be delivered over the coming four years.
That is some exciting new opportunities that will ensure that we continue to grow also in 2023 and 2024. With that, we have still 12 minutes to go, and then I open up for questions. If you raise your hand and then I will try to... First up is Johan Dahl.
Yes. Hi, James. Just a few questions. You talked about many of the growth projects, now just recently, and you put a number to some of them. If you just try to add up the various buckets from where you have sort of firm orders that can be incremental growth, 2023, 2024. I mean, you put a number on the wiring factory in Lithuania, for example, on the marine system. If you add it all together, what are we talking about? No one knows exactly what the outcome will be, but...
I think we are very careful people in AQ. I'm sorry, I will not give you a number. Of course, I have an idea, but we don't like to predict the future. I think we already wrote in the quarter three report that we will grow at least with SEK 1 billion in 2023. And if I don't beat that, I will be very disappointed. Yeah.
Okay. I got you.
That is what I had to say because the things can happen very quickly, but we are extremely optimistic about our growth prospects in 2023, at least.
Just finally on the you talked a lot about previously in 2022 about erratic customer behavior, you know, affecting your on time delivery, et cetera. If you look on profit improvement, 2023 potentially, how much does that correlate with your on time delivery? Have you seen your customers becoming more predictable in how they order from you?
I believe in several segments, they have become more predictable. The thing is that, well, of course, if I have a customer delivering a system, and they have other components that are late, then they will try to postpone our delivery as well. Otherwise, they will get overflown with equipment. We see that they are getting more predictable and that they are able to meet and deliver what they believe is on time, and that helps us, of course, as well. However, there are still disturbances in the market, and there is always. I believe that our on time delivery will be very much improved. It will improve our inventory turnover, which will give us a better cash flow.
At the same time, it should give us also better profitability because then we don't have to do a lot of. When we have disturbances ourselves and our customer have disturbances, that gives us lower productivity as well. It should give us a margin improvement. As I said, we promise to be in this span between 6 and 10. Of course, we should be able to reach our target, so to speak.
Thanks.
Okay. We have another question here. I don't see who it is. fund meeting, it says. I don't know who it is. There we go. It's Sindre, maybe. You're unmuted.
Okay, James, do you hear me?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, ye`ah. It's Sindre from Arctic Asset Management here in Oslo. Congratulations with the good numbers. Just a couple of questions. It appears that the tax rate is close to zero. Is that kind of correction on previous quarters, and what can we expect going forward?
I think I will let my CFO answer.
No, it's not a correction. It is, if you look in the balances, we have increased the deferred tax asset. It is related to lower taxes in the future. We do a lot of investments in Europe, for instance, in Lithuania. We have also done it in Sweden and so on. Specific countries are giving tax incentives if you do a lot of investments in buildings and machines and so on. That is actually due to deferred tax assets, in relation to big investments in Europe. Yes, we will benefit from them in the future with paying less taxes for profits we are making.
We have been very carefully in putting those in because, yeah.
Yeah, because the tax situation in Europe going forward is going to be, it's a lot of new EU legislation affecting taxes and so on. We have made a very prudent estimate of the tax benefits going forward.
Yeah.
Okay, thanks. Then on growth, I appreciate that you don't want to guide specific number, James. I mean, Lithuania and Bulgaria should add close to SEK 800, maybe a little bit less since it's not fully 12 months for both of those. But then you're pretty close to the... Well, quite close to the SEK 1 billion. You have price increases, and then you have new initiatives. Just taking the current price increases for the full year of 2023, shouldn't you be, let's say, aiming much higher than the SEK 1 billion mark?
Yes, I agree.
Okay. Just maybe on the more cautious side, you have never said it, but at least a couple of your, let's call them peers, have expressed that during 2022, on occasional orders, they got very well paid in the sense that they were asked to buy components in the gray market, so to speak, at very high prices, and they just put that extra on the bill. I mean, it doesn't impact the margins, but it impact the top line on volumes. You haven't been subject to that impact at all, have you?
No, no. I think it's more when you're doing PCBs and circuit boards, that is more common practice. I think occasionally we do the same, but it is nothing that affects our top line significantly. I would say no, it does not affect. Again, we can say that we have had one-time payments for customers to compensate for electricity during 2023 to compensate for certain extra costs that we've had. I think it's not a big and it's not a significant amount, that's why we don't mention it in the report.
Okay. Finally on, you revealed some numbers that, indicating that, Schaffhausen factory actually delivered a positive contribution, but it's still, let's say, far below the group average. How does that look for 2023?
I'm quite positive still. I think that we have been able to do a lot of changes. 2023, I'm expecting them to deliver according to our average profitability.
Okay. Finally, Mexico is progressing on its turnaround. Do you expect positive EBIT contribution in 2023?
Yes. Mexico is now showing a small profit.
Okay. All right. Thank you.
Thank you. Any other questions? Still have four minutes. Meeting is one hour, but I don't think. We like to be fast.
James, just a question. Can you just talk a little bit about what's happening in the board? There was some announcements this morning. Not any sort of judgment as such, but just explain to us what's happening.
No, no, but we can say how it is. I mean, Patrik has been in our board, chairman of our board for a very long time. He has several other assignments, and he feels that he is overloaded, so to speak. He has decided to leave us. Then, he's not overloaded, I wouldn't say, but he has decided to prioritize his other engagements. Then, Claes Mellgren, who is the founder of the company and has been the CEO, he decided to take the position as chairman. Yeah. We also have a change, of course. Vegard leaves the board, and he is replaced by Kristina, sorry.
Kristina, who has been, who is, I'm very happy that she's joining the board because she has a great experience running AddLife, which is a really nice group of companies which operate in a little bit similar way, even though they are more letting their subsidiaries be a little bit more than us, but still they're building their business in sort of the same way with the same values. She is also an advisory to our, I don't know how to say this, Aeternum Capital, who is one of our biggest owners. She will represent their shares in the board, so to speak. She's replacing Vegard then. I don't know what to say more about that because.
No, that's good enough. That was all. I was just wondering of those affiliations, et cetera. Thanks.
Yeah. By the way, if there are any analysts in the meeting, there is still a chance to be the first one who have coverage on AQ. You know, it's, you either you're first or you're, you need to be better than other, everybody else. It's a good opportunity to have coverage of a company that will, yeah, continue to grow and make profit and have fun. Yeah. If there are any other questions, then I think that we're done. Another great AQ year and I believe that 2023 will be better. Thank you so much from me and Kristina.
Thank you.
Thank you.