Growing in a positive sense for us, and especially now when we have these digital door locks as well. Home automation here is very popular. We saw also strong growth in Latin America, a whole 43%. 10% is organic, despite then that Brazil is quite dull, to say the least. We still are growing strongly in most markets, including Brazil, and the 43% rest is coming from acquisitions. We've done three strategic acquisitions in recent times, Silvana, Metalika, and ODIS. That is, of course, adding a lot of turnover there. Still a small part of the world, but increasingly important as we move forward into the future. On the pedestrian side, we have launched a completely new range of swing door operators, and they're also doing very well with double-digit growth, not more than double digits, but double-digit growth.
We see also here, they are becoming popular also in emerging markets. They're a little bit more expensive normally for an emerging market, but the functionality is very good with these products, and therefore, they have become increasingly popular in high-end type of applications. Turning now to our situation on the globe. The mature markets continue to do well. Americas had 9% organic growth in the quarter. Very, very strong situation. Of course, we have to remember last year, first quarter was quite weak in the U.S.A. We had severe winter and a number of other disturbances in our sales. Looking to Australia and New Zealand, we had also good evolution, 8% organic growth, while Europe was more depressed, only 2% growth in the quarter, and altogether, 3% growth of Europe. In emerging markets, a mixed picture. South America, as I mentioned, 10% organic growth.
As you can see here, it's 2% of our total. Still, it's important to grow where the market is growing as such, or especially when you have young populations with growing wealth. In Africa, we grew underlying 10%, but in reality then, because we had one project order that did not come into Africa this quarter, we grew 0%, in fact, but it was 10% on our ordinary business. The same is in Asia-Pacific, 2% organic growth, with China minus 10. In China is, in fact, for the group, 10% of total turnover on year-over-year level. Of course, it's a heavy drag to have minus 10 in China that takes away a full percent of growth. Still, I must say, a positive situation. China, there is a lot of stimulus coming into the market.
It seems as if China has, at least on the order side, we see some revival, even though it's, I think, still believe we are going to see a decline going forward. Looking to the sales growth, a very good picture, I would say. As I mentioned, this quarter was fantastic, but this is then the nominal growth that we had year-over-year. We can see from 2010 that we've grown more than 80% since then. A very strong growth, where we have grown 2%-4% organically, that's the blue here, per year. An average about 3%, 3.5% per annum since the crisis. That means that we have added some 22% growth. On top of that, the rest of the 80-plus turnover growth has come from acquisitions, which is part of our DNA in a way. A very positive situation.
Here is something that is even more positive, and that is that the profitability has more than followed. It has continued to develop in a positive sense. We have turned the rather low-margin companies into good citizens, I would call it, that are contributing to the group. The profitability has grown by more than 80% since then, or 20% improvement in the last four months. Very soon, we will shoot through the SEK 10 billion mark here. I hope I can stand here next time and tell you that, but I cannot guarantee it. It looks good. Looking to EBIT level, 16.3% flat. In this quarter, we had something we had not really expected. We had quite some negative currency influence, 0.3% negative from currencies.
This has, of course, to do with all these movements of currencies in the quarter as such, and also that currency has been so big as an add-on. We have a little bit lower margin on that. Carolina will show later on a little bit more detail on this. We also had the 0.1% of dilution. Despite that, our margin increased 0.2% in the quarter, and in the last 12 months, we are flat on 16.3%. I feel very satisfied with this score, since we are continuing to maintain and improve what we acquire as companies. It's difficult to do anything about currencies. They are as they are.
When you look to the manufacturing footprint, we are running now, since 2013 is our last program, we have closed 69 factories since we started in 2006, and 84 factories have converted, so we are approaching an end stage. Those of you that are observant know that we acquired last year 20 companies and another four in this quarter. Of course, there is some pent-up demand building, but for the time being, we don't see very much of it. We have about SEK 840 million left in our provision for the remainder of the programs that we are running. It looks good, and we get very nice savings out of these programs. Looking now to the margin, as I mentioned, it improved by 0.2%, where we had a negative currency of 0.3% and acquisition 0.1%.
What you can see then is our leverage was very good, in fact. It was 0.6%, higher than we normally have, but we also had a higher add-on from turn on the organic growth of 5%. Here, volume grew by 4% and price was 1%. Price element is becoming less than in the past, simply because we don't have that kind of inflationary pressure on salaries and raw material as we have had in past years. Altogether, a pleasing picture with good leverage from growth. Turning to acquisitions, I normally get very excited, and I am excited about that. It's a lot of activity. The problem is you have to be cautious because people don't give it free of charge. Things have become more expensive. We have done four acquisitions so far this year, with an annual size, say, of SEK 750 million or 1.5%.
We're running at the rate of this 5% added turnover per annum. I'm going to go in now into a little bit more detail in a few selected of our acquisitions. Quantum Secure is an important addition for us when it comes to access control and identity management. What they do is that they have a software that is providing for the customer advanced identity management, and it sounds a little bit hieroglyphical. To explain it in a simple way, many public facilities have visitors every day of thousands and thousands. Take an an airport, for instance. They have legacy systems or a multitude of legacy systems. They have time and attendance systems and a lot of things that they monitor the security of the site, but they have it in a decentralized way.
We see here there is a trend in the market where you put one system on top that manage the whole. This is very much to do with compliance. Quantum Secure is the leader in this field in the world. It's still small, but has been growing fast for many years. That's also why you see we talk about bookings. We normally never talk about bookings. They normally get an order, it takes a year before you get it installed. That's the reason in this case. It's neutral to earnings per share from day one. At least we hope it will be that, simply because we paid some money for it, but also that the company is in a startup phase. We are investing a lot because it's growing at a high pace. A very exciting addition to the group. Switzerland, completely different.
MSL is a small company in Switzerland. They produce multi-point locks, electric locks, and various kinds of lock cases. Why are we going into this? It's a very nice acquisition for us to bolt on on what we already do in Switzerland, so we can come in a situation where we can do full specification for total door solutions also in the Swiss market. Switzerland, like many other markets in the world, they have different cases to other markets. Since it has been a small market, we haven't really had enough attention to build it ourselves since it's very expensive. This gave us an opportunity to really become relevant in Switzerland. This is very exciting when it comes to our Swiss market coverage as such. Very positive. Then we have another one, emerging market in this case, and this is Teamware. We acquired that today.
Also this night, in fact. SEK 240 million in turnover. Doesn't sound much, but it's the absolute leader in Malaysia, and we are number two as Assa Abloy, together we create a very strong number one. Here we get complementary channels and products as well, that also, again, allows us to go full in specification in this market. Malaysia is also one of the South Asian markets of importance since it has a nice level of GDP. They have a wealth there that is growing year after year after year. It's a positive situation. Turning now to the divisions. We start by EMEA. We saw strong growth, as usual, almost I said, in Scandinavia. In Finland, this wasn't the first time we see that, but we see good traction in Finland as well. Eastern Europe and Africa, emerging markets continue to do well for us.
We saw good growth in U.K. and Iberia, Spain is coming back, very positive. While Germany and Israel was flat in this quarter. Germany hasn't been flat before, but it can vary between the quarters a little bit. When it comes to the negative, we continue to see, especially Holland, as being a weak market, France being weak market, and Italy continued weak in the quarter as such, and all three had negative sales. We also made this strategic move into Switzerland as well. Looking to profitability, we had 15.9%, down from 16.1% last year on the back of 3% organic growth. Here you can see that the leverage from saving was good, but we also had quite some dilution mainly from currency, but also in this case, a door company that we bought last year in Poland that also has the lowest seasonality in the first quarter.
Therefore we lost two tenths of a percent, altogether a pleasing picture in Europe. Americas, here, we pretty much grow across the board. Canada is weak and high security is a little bit every quarter is different depending on that there are quite some projects coming in into that varies between the quarters. Apart from that, all part in America is doing quite well, including the residential, but also South America and Mexico. A very positive picture. 8% organic growth. Here, as I mentioned, that we have seen important moves into South America growing at 43% pace. We see strong demand in USA itself. People in U.S. are more and more accepting digital door locks as the item that manages their home alarm systems, they open it through the lock that is connected to the alarm system.
A very positive situation, also nice for us since we are leaders in digital door locks. We are well-positioned for this. Altogether, a good situation. Our leverage was half a percent each positive, but we also had dilution half a percent, mainly from currency and South America and Canada and Mexico that have weak currencies. 21.1%, just like last year. Here I can say also we did an important investment in the quarter of R&D people. We're adding more people since we get so much traction from R&D. This is a more long-term investment, but of course, it's not free of charge. Looking to Asia Pacific, a little bit more difficult picture, I would say, since we are declining there, but it's China really that does it. Australia and New Zealand, as I mentioned together, was 8% organic, a very positive situation.
South Asia and North Asia were also growing at a good pace. China, on the other side, was declining double digit, quite a negative situation. Here also, in a way, helped by our credit policy. We try to avoid big losses. A lot of these companies, or our customers in China, are construction companies, and they are working with thin capital. Therefore, we need to be careful when it comes to credit. First they pay and then we give, not the other way around. This is hampering our growth ability a little bit on the short-term. We did exactly the same in Iberia, I can tell you that it was positive in the sense that customers understand and appreciate it, even though short-term you might feel a little bit from it.
On the government side, we have seen the government stepping into the market and giving more incentives for the Chinese market. We don't know really what effect this will have, but it will be positive, but will it really be enough to kickstart the market again? That remains to be seen. My bet is that China will continue to decline for a while longer. A positive for us that are in acquisition mode is that many companies are for sale in the Chinese market. Of course, do you dare to step in? I think we do. We have quite some capability to restructure. We have reduced our, I wouldn't say footprint, but we reduced our staffing in China in the last three years now by 40%, and first quarter was as high as 8% less people altogether.
This is coming from outsourcing, automation, but also leanification of our operations in China. That made also that the margin was pretty reasonable, 10.2%. This is our weakest quarter, down from 10.6% one year, but the main difference was the currency gain, -0.3%. Altogether, stable and despite China, a good situation in my opinion. Global Technologies, fantastic growth in this quarter, 12%. Global Technologies is very difficult to say what it's going to be. Sometimes you get a lot of stuff, other quarters you don't get. We had an easy comp, like in Americas to last year. Last year, first quarter was weak. We saw strong growth in GovID in this quarter, IDT, which are our inlays as well, and on the product sale side. Good growth in our traditional access control and identity management business.
Altogether, a positive picture, just like Americas had and Entrance Systems had. The [Ostimo] is now completed. We still have some double laying, but we are in principle into our new facilities, and it looks good. Hospitality on the back of many hotels rushing in to buy locks for Mobile Keys. We see a very strong growth situation there, and also the profitability follows as a consequence. Margin expanded in the quarter to 17.4%, up from 17.1% the same period last year, where we also here had to fight some negative currency and dilution. Entrance Systems, also a positive picture. Here we have, of course, reshuffled a lot of our resources and closed a lot of factories. You always fear that you're going to stop growing due to this. This has not been the case. We are growing at a 5% pace.
Very strong and solid growth in North America, just like the other two divisions I mentioned, but also in some segments in Europe, like FlexiForce and a few others. In principle, Europe here, it was at 0% or slightly above 0%. Europe is weak on the industrial side still. On the residential side, we see a weakness, even though orders on that side improved in the first quarter, but we still don't see it yet in our invoicing. Europe is, in my opinion, tough, but improving. Despite that we are fighting with a tough Europe with price pressure and all that, our margins expanded in the quarter from 11.6% to 12%. This is the weakest quarter for Entrance Systems every year, this bodes good for the year. With efficiency improvements of rather large magnitude go across Entrance Systems.
Again, currency negative is a little bit repetitive, but the currency negative of 0.4%. That concludes my overview over the divisions. I'd like now to hand over to Carolina that will guide you through the financials.
Thank you, Johan. Good morning. A strong start of the year for Assa Abloy. I will start with the financial highlights and the top line here. A full 24% growth. Most important part, the organic part. We saw a good 5% organic growth in the quarter. We have one working day more in some parts of the world. We also estimate the price effect to be 1% and the volume to be 4%. Acquired growth 3% in the quarter, mainly a carryover effect from the acquisitions we did end of last year and in emerging markets. The big one, currency, 16% top line growth from currencies. I will come back to this one a couple of times during my presentation. A full 24% top line growth.
If you add then to that the good efficiency savings that we saw in both manufacturing footprints, but also all the other efficiency programs, we had a strong development of the EBIT, up 25%. The margin also increased from 15.1% to 15.3%, although we saw typical dilution from acquisitions, but also from currency. Cash flow, operating cash flow. Q1, seasonally very weak for us, and this is no exception. It was seasonally low in the quarter. We continued to see low interest environments and the financial net was stable. We add the tax rate estimated to 26% like previous years, we get an increase of the earnings per share of a full 28% in the quarter. Deep dive into the P&L, starting with the bridge. Again, the organic growth.
5% organic growth, we saw a good drop through in all divisions from this good organic growth. The only one that was almost flat was negative 10 basis points on organic was, for obvious reasons, APAC, which was also negative on the top line. The combination of the good organic growth then in the divisions with the efficiency programs gave us a very good drop through of 27%, therefore a margin expansion of 60 basis points in the quarter. Currency, a full 16% effect on the top line, this is mainly a translation effect. The biggest impact that we have seen has been from the U.S. dollars, but also from EUR and GBP and U.S. related currencies, I would say. Here we have the same drop through as we had in the first quarter previous year with 13% on currency.
Due to the sheer size of it with the 16%, that did dilute the margin with 30 base points. The opposite effect we see on the acquired growth. We had only 3% acquired growth in the quarter. The drop through from acquisitions 10%, it's in line with what it should be. It's mostly emerging markets and quite a lot in China, which is seasonally very low in the first quarter. 10% margin on the acquisitions, but since it's only 3% on the top line, the dilution was only 10 base points on the margin. That brings us from 15.1 to 15.3. Looking at the P&L from a different perspective, components of sales, we get this picture. I compare with and without acquisitions. Here you can see it's quite a big change. Starting with direct material.
The raw material part is roughly a third, that's affected from that. On raw materials, we saw some going down on the steel and some of the others going up. The big effect here is really a mixed effect with both within divisions you have within Global Tech, where there are more project sales with higher direct material content. Then you have also like Americas within Entrance Systems, which is also significantly higher on direct material. What you see on the other hand is the same effect on conversion costs. You have the opposite and therefore the gross margin actually improved with 20 base points. That was very good. SG&A, we saw a good development of SG&A last year on the percentage here, we continue to have that beginning of this year as well. Also helped by the organic growth here.
I think we found a good balance between investing in the front end that Johan talked about, both in R&D and the specifiers. On the other hand, becoming more efficient on the support functions with standardization and automation within what we call the Seamless Flow Program. Just a comment on acquisitions. As you can see here, you add them on, they have the typical P&L split with the higher direct material content, specifically in the emerging markets for this one as well. From the P&L to the cash flow. First of all, please have a look at the yellow bars that you can see just to show you how strong seasonality we have on cash flow, because Q1 is by far our weakest quarter, and we saw the same in this first quarter.
A comment is also that the group grew with 24% on the top line, which also means that we have used more working capital as expected. If I look at the efficiency measures there, we have on the DSO, it's up three days, and I would say that one day of that is due to China and two days is really due to the size. We see similar on inventory up a couple of days and also payables up a couple of days because of this. What did the cash do to the debt? Well, it helped the debt down, on the other hand, the currencies had a big effect on the net debt because we translate all the different currencies here into kronas as well. We had an effect of SEK 1.2 billion on the debt from currency.
We had roughly SEK 1 billion spend from acquisitions. That brought us from SEK 22 billion to SEK 25 billion in net debt. With that said, I would also say that the gearing is actually down to 64%, and the net debt EBITDA ratio is flat on 2.3. A very beautiful slide, the earnings per share slide. If we start with the EBIT, that was up 25%. We had a higher debt but continued low interest rates, which made the financial net flat. The tax rate estimated to 26%. That overall brought the earnings per share up to a full 28% improvement to SEK 4.36. With that, Johan, I give back to you for conclusion.
Thank you, Carolina. A very fast conclusion on this quarter. I wish I could stand there all day, say the same thing, but we will see next quarter. Strong growth, 24% as we have underlined, in most markets we grew nicely except in APAC. We have a good pipeline from acquisitions as well, which bodes good for the added turnover from that part of the business. Emerging markets also improved one percentage point to 23% over last year. We are continuing to expand our total share of sales in emerging markets, which I think is very important for the long run. Profitability improved 25% and earnings per share 28%. A very good quarter. With those words, I close our overview and open up for Q&A. Our eminent Niklas Ribbing will ask probably a few intelligent questions.
We will take both questions from the audience here and the telephone conference. I will start you all with the usual question on current trading. What have you seen so far this month?
Very surprising question. We have so far seen around 3%, more or less in line with the Q1. It's a month of the same number of working days, we have, of course, a continued drag from China in that number.
Okay. Thank you. Carolina, there is quite a big change in the P&L components here. Can you explain a little bit, and give some color to it?
Yes. One part is on the direct material. I think you need to look at it together with the conversion cost because this is mainly a mix effect. Part of it is mixed because of within a division, like we have the project sales within Global Technologies, which are significantly higher on direct material, but then lower on conversion costs. Then we also have a mix effect because of the translation and like Entrance Systems in the U.S., which is much higher on direct material. It's mainly a mix effect, and that's why you also see that the gross margin is actually improving with 20 basis points.
Thank you, Carolina. I think we'll turn to the telephone conference directly. Remember, one question and then one follow-up. Operator, please.
Our first question comes from Mr. Guillermo Peigneux-Lojo from UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, everyone. It's Guillermo from UBS. Thank you for taking my questions. First, I think, Johan, in your comments, you mentioned stagnant Europe. Obviously this is a very familiar picture. It's been stagnant for a while. Is it more stagnant or less stagnant given all the quantitative easing and stimulus that the European authorities are putting in place?
No, I think it's pretty much the same. It varies between which market is going up, which market is going down. It's pretty much the same situation. We should also remember, Assa Abloy is large in France. France has a negative evolution right now, we are impacted by that. Generally speaking, I don't see much of a difference. Europe is sort of walking sideways. We are growing at a few %, on a continuous basis. No drama. I don't see a really strong pickup. The only area where we have seen a positive situation, we have seen little bit more orders on the Entrance Systems side than we have seen in other quarters. Hopefully we see some revival, at least on the industrial side. Then of course, depending on the markets, U.K. is reasonable, Sweden is reasonable.
Finland turned positive in this quarter. It's not all bad. I repeat, Europe does not grow its population, underlying it's not such a growing field. I think it's very important for us that we establish ourselves strongly in emerging markets where we see there is healthy demographics supporting sales.
Then my follow-up is for Carolina regarding the dilution effects into the 2Q. Can you give us maybe some clarity as to how much you expect the effects to be 2Q, maybe in terms of revenues and also whether it's going to be as dilutive as it was in the 1Q? Thank you.
I would say that the currency for the full year, we expect to be around 12% effect. You can see that it's strong in the beginning of the year because we had 16% in the first quarter, so somewhere in between for the second. When it comes to dilution, we see strong seasonality here, and the Q1 is the lowest one that we have, and it's the same as previous year. For Q2, we estimate it to be slightly dilutive as well, probably around 10 basis points. For the rest of the year, around flat, assuming stable rates.
Okay. I go back in line. Thank you.
Thank you. Next question, please.
Our next question comes from Mr. Peter Frölén from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. Good morning, Johan. Good morning, Carolina. My question relates to profitability trend in EMEA. You also mentioned that sort of the growth is not really there on fundamentals. If you look at the profitability trend, it is negative despite significant efforts. When can we expect sort of another savings program? That's really how we should think of this. You managed to squeeze out quite a lot of savings in the quarter, and if you take that out of the picture, the leverage is not very high. Please could you allude to how we should think about another savings program predominantly maybe then for EMEA?
First, I'd like to correct you. The trend was not really negative. We had currency problems in Europe and also acquisition dilution. To take that away, then margin continue to expand. We are not in a difficult situation from that perspective. The same was with Entrance Systems. It's not so that we have a negative situation, but we get the dilution from acquisitions and that we cannot do anything about, and the currency is the same. When it comes to savings programs, we still run a number of projects. Many of those are directed towards Europe. Remember, we have reduced by 40% our situation, our staffing in China. We haven't asked about any restructuring money for it. We have to have projects then that really are substantial.
We haven't made many acquisitions in Europe in recent times, so therefore, we have not spoken about restructuring programs. We do on a continuous basis, leanification improvement, efficiency improvements, et cetera. Carolina also spoke about seamless flow, where we automate our transactions in the group, and we get good traction out of that. Right now, I don't feel like we are in a mood where we need to do major reshuffling of our activities.
Okay. That's very clear. Thank you. I get back in line.
Thank you, Peter. Next question, please.
Our next question comes from Mr. Andre Kukhnin from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Yes, it's Andre from CS. Thanks for taking my question follow-up. The question is, just picking on your comment on pricing, I guess it's the usual one. Could you just elaborate whether you are putting prices up at all or in this deflation environment, is that inappropriate?
Yes. First, we are market leaders, so we always increase price. That's a healthy thing. The second is that a lot of markets have devaluated, so there we have hefty price increases to recover those losses that we will otherwise suffer in a short while when the inventory has been consumed. There, we do it on a sort of standard way. We have a number of markets where we do the regular increases, where we have seen some brass material, but mainly zinc has gone up, so some specific areas we need to improve as well. Altogether, we have 1% net price increase in the first quarter. Not too bad considering a non-inflationary environment that we have. If we need more, we will do more.
Great. Thank you for clarifying. The follow-up is just on Entrance Systems, the comments on growth. Is this business taking share in Europe and U.S. now with the acquisitions being integrated and with an expanded product offering there?
It's hard to tell because the market is pretty fragmented. We are at least growing better than a few that are public. I cannot really say we are outgrowing everybody. We are doing okay, and we have a lot of new products that get great interaction. Also what I think is important, at least for us, that is that we make money in what we do. We have a margin that is much higher than most competitors, if not all. That is, of course, due to that we operate in a more efficient way, which I think is very important. Growing for growing is not really interesting. Growing with profit is what is really something, and that is the foundation for us also to create money, to be able to do acquisitions.
If we don't create money flow in the form of cash, we cannot continue to do what we do, consolidate in the industry.
Very clear. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Andre. Next question, please.
Our next question comes from Mr. James Moore from Redburn.
Good morning.
Please go ahead.
Johan, Carolina, everyone else. On the cash flow, thanks for your explanation on the softer cash flow this quarter. Can I ask a bigger picture question on cash conversion? I think your cash conversion was below 90% for the whole of last year. Previously, it used to be some way above 100%. Could you give us a sensible view for cash conversion in the next two to three years? What for you are the key moving parts in that?
Yes. First of all, I think the target is really to have 100% cash conversion over time. That's basically as good as you can get, assuming that you have a balance sheet with working capital and CapEx in order, which we do. That is still our target. If we compare last year, we were 20% higher cash compared to EBIT for the full year. I think we have proven that we have that record. Now in the first quarter, I would say it was seasonality for the first quarter and the target stands that over time we want to continue to have 100% conversion.
Okay, thanks. Could I follow up with a slightly different question on savings? They look to me like they're coming in a bit better than we might have thought. Could you perhaps update us on the savings profile and maybe help with the split of these MFP and capacity savings divisionally?
The savings do come in very well. We saw in the quarter we had SEK 60 million from MFP in the quarter, and we had SEK 80 million from other efficiency programs. The profile is that we will save SEK 150 from the MFPs this year and another SEK 50 next year. It's looking good.
Divisionally, where does that land?
Yeah, a lot of the savings come in where we had acquisitions in the last year, so it was the Entrance Systems as well as partly in EMEA and some in APAC. As Johan mentioned, most of what we do in APAC, we do outside of the MFP.
Sorry, just on this. The leanification and the seamless flow stuff, is that in the capacity?
Yes.
Okay, thanks.
Thank you, James. Next question, please.
Our next question comes from Mr. Alasdair Leslie from Societe Generale. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Just a question, clarification on China. I think you said that was down 10%. I was wondering whether you could just clarify what the underlying market didn't now achieve, perhaps underperformed, given, I guess you said you were still taking a stricter approach in terms of credit with customers. I think you said last quarter it was around about four percentage points, and maybe how long you expect that underperformance to go on for?
It's difficult to tell. The Chinese market has been growing year-over-year for probably 20, 30 years at a high pace, and somewhere you need to reach the ceiling. We can see that concrete consumption is down quite a bit. We see that land that is given for construction is down, or residential construction and commercial construction is down. China is on a sort of investment level much higher than any other market. I think it's bound to come down. If it's this year or next year or the year before, it's difficult really to tell, but clearly it's that China is on an, in my opinion, a little bit higher level than it's long-term sustainable. Therefore, we have adjusted already since several years back. I think the underlying market is quite negative.
We do not think, despite our credit situation, that we are losing any share. We are, on the other side, not taking every order. The reason for it is, of course, that we estimate that some customers are not really in a capacity to pay once they have got their installations done. The reason is construction companies is by definition, working on with the capital of the suppliers. That is a very high risk, of course. We have to be careful not to go too far out on the risk. That is with the symptom we see right now, that people or our customers are paying us less efficiently than in the past, despite our increased efforts to get paid. There is some cautiousness there. We are basically not thinking we are losing market share.
Thank you. Did you have a follow-up question as well?
Our next question goes to Mr. Peter Frölén from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. You mentioned, Johan, that the comps were easy in both GT and Americas. Could you help us to understand if the demand is sort of flattish sequentially into Q2 in those two areas? What would that mean in terms of organic growth year-over-year?
Our quotes are quite okay. They're just on 10%, growing at a 10% pace, so it doesn't look too bad. However, if you look to where the business is taking off when it comes to statistics, we see that on the Hospitality side, it's quite still negative. On the educational side is slightly positive, but not really supporting very strong growth. Commercially, retail is strong, and the office buildings are strong, not our main segments. The market is not yet there where we would like to have it. That's why I'm cautious. I cannot say that every quarter we're going to grow some 8% or something. I've seen that in some of your analysis that you expect that, but I think we should need to be careful because the market is not growing at a very high pace. We are doing quite well in this environment.
The same question for GT, please. What to expect in the second quarter if demand is flat given tough comps in Q1?
We don't give forecasts, but GT is doing okay, but it's very hard to say. You know as well as I do, we have many of these products coming and going, so it's very hard. Underlying business is healthy. We see also a very strong interest in Mobile Keys. Even though we haven't seen so many orders coming in yet, we still see a lot of companies that are very attracted by the idea of complementing their keys to Mobile Keys as well. There are a number of drivers on the product side that also talks for a good evolution. Again, looking back to the market, I'm cautious in my expectations. I don't think we should be over-enthusiastic. It will take some time before this market really bounces up in a strong way, at least in my belief.
The mix in GT, sorry for a second follow-up. How much did that adverse effect on the profitability?
First, we have Austin, which I mentioned, we have double manning, we have quite some people extra still. Hopefully they will leave us now in the second quarter. That is one thing. Also, we had the lower margin items that grew the most. There, we got a negative mix. This was compensated by Hospitality that grew nicely in the quarter. Altogether, we did not see a negative impact out of it but of course we are under that situation. If you talk about only HID, we had a negative impact from that. The mix was not ideal.
That is very clear. Thank you. I get that claim. Thank you.
Thank you, Peter. Do we have any questions from the floor here in Stockholm? Let us go back to the telephone conference then. Operator, please.
Our next question comes from Mr. Sebastien Grouteux from Exane. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. A question on China, APAC. I'm trying to reconcile your comments about stricter credit policy in China and the increase in working capital we had in APAC, as well Carolina comments about the number of receivable days impacted by China. Should we expect receivables to come down in China given this strict credit policy you put in place?
Well, I would say to start with, it's still a tough situation in China. We are still way too high in China than we want to be, but we would have been even higher if we hadn't put this credit policy into place. We're still not there where we want to be. We will continue to work hard on it and hopefully get improvements, but it will also depend on how the underlying market goes.
Okay, just to follow up also on APAC, depreciation and amortization charge has gone up quite a lot in Q1. Is there any impairment of receivables in that number?
No. We continue to invest in semi-automation, I would say, in China and some in IT, and we continue to buy companies in China, so that's where it comes from.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Sebastien. Do we have another question from the telephone conference?
We have a follow-up question from Mr. James Moore from Redburn. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, everyone. I just thought I'd follow up, because you mentioned the digital door locks business is doing very well in the U.S. I wondered if you could just help us a little bit in terms of sizing how big that is now, what sort of market share you have with your leadership position, and is the profitability there materially above the group? I'm just trying to think about future mix benefit of this business continuing to grow.
We normally never talk about how large it is. It's important that we should remember it's a starting market, so it's not so that it's insignificant. The growth that we have got out of it has been very positive, and we see very good signs. We have signed up with several other home automation companies, it will continue to grow from what we can see. Margin-wise, digital door locks is a little bit lower than our average, and the reason for it is this is more residential-oriented, and also, we don't yet have built the really large volume. I feel very good about it. I think the digital door locks will not contain lower margins moving forward than our ordinary locks for residential applications. Also, as you probably noticed, we also acquired Digi Electronic Lock in China in, was it last quarter or quarter before?
Which is, of course, offering us an even lower cost point. This looks good from that point of view as well.
Thanks. Talking of innovation, could you help us with the innovation ratio? I missed it if you said it earlier, but how is that looking?
Well, new products turnover is, in the quarter, 31%. We have a very high pace on new products. Our aim is to reach 25%. We don't want to be too high, because then we have to prune so much behind. I think 25% is a healthy level, even though on temporary basis you can have more. Then we see that our new innovations, they're very popular, at least judging from the shows that we show them for other people. Now we're also moving our ability into the cloud, where we're launching a number of cloud services to our customers. In principle, we can get more of recurring revenue in the future than we have today, where customers, in a way, don't really have the hardware. They rent it from us on a monthly basis.
Quite an exciting evolution as well, even though it's very early days today. We have seen in the market there is a strong interest for this.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you, James. Next question, please.
Our next question comes from Mr. Jeff Kessler from Imperial Capital. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for taking my call. I wanted to just follow up on the question with regarding some of the, not just the digital door locks, but the market as digital door locks affects small business and medium-sized business, which is so far an area that has not been penetrated that greatly by the digital area. Your competition has introduced some locks that are somewhat replacements and perhaps a migration path from mechanical to digital. I know that at the last trade show, you were introducing some of the same types of locks. I am wondering how you see that the small to medium business market fitting into your growth plans, and how you plan to also migrate the digital types of locks as replacements for the small-medium business to allow their migration path to be easier to essentially cut cost and cut time of installation.
Well, first, the digital door locks are wireless, so that means that it takes you only a few minutes to change from what you have on your door to something new. It is a rather simple operation. They operate over the hub, and you can choose whether you would like to have this as cloud or if you want to have a local system around it. We have, as you said, in the show in the USA, we launched a total solution for small and medium-sized companies and also for the multi-housing. This holistic approach with different kinds of locks, depending if it is an interior door, exterior door, fire door, exit door, et cetera. Totally comprehensive, including the software, which is a very easy operable software as such. There is a strong evolution in this direction. If you turned into Europe, this is already the case.
In Europe, people already use digital locks to a large extent for this, but they are of an expensive kind. We think the market will go more into, at least in the residential side, more into the more simple to install, simple to operate environment. Here we see also an opportunity then for recurring revenue, and we see a good opportunity for selling Mobile Keys because people will look for security, they will look for convenience, and they will send the keys to people they like or like to allow into their houses in a secure and safe way. We think this will drive some nice sales for us.
Okay. As a follow-up, do you think that the channel, the integrators that you use are taking to this and are learning this process fairly easily because of its ease of installation? Or is the software component for them a little tough for them to handle at the moment?
Well, I think it's a hurdle to start with. We have numerous training centers. We take our partners in and we train them on actual situation, how to do it. Of course, they feel probably a little bit resistant like everybody else. When you get a new computer, you sort of think, "It must operate like my old one. It cannot be different." It is different. It's a learning curve. I think our experience is good. We see that people take that to them and they work with it and they start to offer these kind of solutions that for the end users are a much better solution than we have seen in the past, and also in a way less expensive to operate than we have seen in the past. Still maintaining reasonable margins for us.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Jeff. Do we have any more questions? Operator, please.
There's no other questions. If you'd like to ask a question, please press 01 on your telephone keypad.
There's no questions from the floor here. I'll hand over to Johan for some closing remarks.
Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming here today. An exciting day for Assa Abloy's history in the sense that we did another good quarter where I feel very proud over with earnings per share improving a whole 28% and also top line improving by 24%. Thank you.