Hello everyone and Welcome to this Q4 Webcast with Bawat, hosted by Arctic Securities. My name is Andreas Sie, equity analyst at Arctic, and will moderate today's session. With me today is Marcus Hummer, the CEO of Bawat, who will now guide you through the results and give you some guidance for 2024. After that, we will move over to a Q&A. With that, Marcus, the word is yours.
Thank you, Andreas. Thank you very much. Thank you to the audience, and Welcome to the Introduction to the Q4 Results and actually also the full year results for 2023, including our guidance to the 2024 full year, which was released earlier today on the 21st of February. Looking at both the quarter and the full year, I think the key message here is that we have doubled our order intake relative to 2022. A very strong finish of the quarter and also a strong finish of the full year. We are well within the guidance of SEK 42 million-SEK 50 million that we guided on earlier in 2023 and a significant increase in volume. A significant increase also in gross profit is reported for the full year.
We went from SEK 17.1 million in 2022 to an almost 56% gross profit in 2023. The numbers are a little bit skewed from an extraordinary income from a lease income, but even if we normalize for that, we had a 30, so 30.2% gross profit in 2023 for the full year. We even made it to an EBITDA breakeven in the last quarter. For us, this signifies two things. First of all, that we have now established that we can grow on business volume, and the business we do, we do that in a profitable manner. So for us, the road to breakeven is almost purely a volume gain from now on.
I'll come back to that in the guidance. And the volume gain is also about scaling. And this is why we also are happy to say that the reported joint venture from last quarter is now signed and in place. It's a joint venture with Damen, where they will manufacture our mobile units, which is part of our growth opportunities. Not only will they manufacture and assemble our mobile units, the Damen global sales network is also now actively out promoting the units for us. This actually means that with the organization we have in Bawat today, we have the opportunity to grow the business without putting in any significant changes into the SG&A.
The organization that we have today will actually be able to deliver also on the guidance that we will see on the next page. The last thing that we believe is important to report from the quarter is the organization and the hiring of two very seasoned BWMS, so ballast water management executives that have joined our team in the U.S. and which will focus on our ballast as a service or Bawat BaaS. This is a service where we are selling ballast water either treated or we are receiving it untreated. We actually had a small case here in Bremen harbor. We'll come back to that on the next page.
But this is a significant growth area where we also, from a competitive point of view, stand alone and thus in a very extraordinary and unique position. Post-quarter, early January, we completed, as promised, our last equity raise in a directed share issue. So we raised SEK 6.5 million and now have the full equity in place in order to call the convertible bond from our NEFCO financing package from last year of EUR 1 million or a little more than SEK 11 million, which actually means that we are looking into 2024 with a full finance package in place. And that actually leaves us to the guidance for 2024.
First of all, before I jump into the numbers, we have decided at Bawat that in the past we guided on order intake. We were a growing company, a scale-up company, where order intake and volume were the most important figure to guide on. But as we are maturing, we also believe that sales and EBITDA are the important numbers to guide on. So for 2024, we are changing our guidance to sales and EBITDA. Before I say the numbers, it has to be noted that these numbers are not comparable to 2023 figures. This is because with the establishment of the joint venture between Damen and us, there is a consolidation effect that means that it's not one-to-one comparable.
Should we have guided on order intake this year under our old 2023 guiding principle, we would have guided on order intake in the area of SEK 70-90 million, meaning that we once again would be doubling our order intake year-on-year. The new guidance on sales and EBITDA is on sales between SEK 42-54 million. On EBITDA, we are looking at SEK -12 to -7 million for the full year, but with an improved EBITDA over the quarters. We are now guiding for a break even in the last quarter of 2024, which is exactly in line with our communicated expectations during the IPO two years ago, where we guided and said during 2024 we would reach break even.
This is where we are now. So we are looking into a very, I would say, very promising 2024 where we will reach our IPO guidance on break even and on volume. Thank you very much, Andreas. That was the few words from my on the Q4 and 2023 performance and the guidance for 2024.
Thank you for the presentation, Marcus. Now let's move over to the Q&A. So the first question here is: Referring to the recent happening at the Bremen port where the Bawat BaaS solution helped a vessel with urgent ballast water treatment need, do you think we can see more of such happenings in the future?
We will definitely see more of this. The whole Bawat BaaS is, to some extent, built on the fact that we see a lot of non-compliance vessels arriving into port or vessels having need of ballast water for other reasons. On the exact case in Bremen port that we saw a few weeks back, the vessel came in and had a faulty system on board and were not able to deballast the vessel. So faced with the alternative of going back out of port and do ballast water exchange costly and lengthy in time, we came in. We had a mobile system available in Denmark that we trucked down, and within 24 hours we were in place.
You can actually see on the pictures on the presentation here how we have connected up to the vessel, and we managed to discharge the vessel, treat all the ballast water. This is exactly the part of the service model that we are now building equipment up to, not only in Europe but also in the U.S. Don't forget, we are getting close to the September 2024 final compliance date, where ports need to be more active in making sure that whatever is deballasted and discharged in port lives up to the compliance. So for this business here, we see it as quite an opportunity across the globe, but with a specific focus here in 2024 on the U.S. and Western Europe.
Thank you. So the last question here is: What are, in your opinion, the main benefits with the new Damen JV, and what are the key factors to make this JV successful?
I think the main benefit for us in Bawat is the opportunity to scale quickly on the assembly and manufacturing on mobile units. Remember that we are, to a large extent, an engineering company with no fixed assets. So in order to build these mobile systems, we need a partner that can do that. And working now with a partner as Damen, who not only has the ability to source and manufacture but also has a very extended sales network into the maritime industry, that gives double benefit for us, meaning that we can actually now scale the sales and the installations of these mobile systems without scaling on our SG&A. So we can actually deliver on this budget that we are looking at in 2024 more or less on the same SG&A backbone as we did in 2023.
Yeah, thank you. That was all the questions. I would just like to thank everyone for tuning in. I don't know if you have any closing remarks, Marcus.
No, just to say that I'm very excited about 2024. If we now, for three years in a row, can be able to double our order intake, I think we have proven the maturity and also the uniqueness of the Bawat equipment and technology. Thanks very much for listening all.