Hello, and welcome to today's Finwire broadcast presentation with Bulten. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. If you have any questions, you can submit them in English using the form on the right. With that said, I'll hand the floor to you. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Welcome to our Q1 presentation at Bulten. We have a short agenda for you today, and then we open up for questions afterwards. We will start with going through some key items for Q1, talk about some momentum that we have in our C-parts business. We have some comments on our financial position, and then we speak a bit about our order intake reporting before I hand it over to Anna to talk about our Q1 financials. Then we'll wrap it up with some focus items that we have going forward. All right. I think looking at the first quarter, I think what we can see is that the volume is down a little bit. Half of it is currency, half of it is volume driven.
We can see that even with volume decline, we have done quite a lot of improvements during the year on our cost position, which creates a lot of resilience, and therefore we can deliver a pretty decent margin anyhow. We're pretty happy with that. That's a good step in the right direction. We can also see that we have improved our gross margin. It's actually the best margin that we have reported in a couple of years. That is a very important metric that we monitor tightly and we keep pushing for. It obviously creates a good upside if we get more volume into the business if we have a strong GP, so happy about that. You might have read in earlier communications here that we have changed our business model in the U.S.
In the past, we have had a factory in Cleveland, Ohio, that we are now turning over to become a distribution center where we basically are trading fasteners and related items instead. This factory has a history of being built for Volvo, basically. Volvo had a lot of volume plants in North America. We built the plant to support and follow them, and we never really got enough volumes to make that profitable, and therefore we have now terminated that and shifted Volvo over to buying from Europe, basically. I think that is a good step in the right direction. It also helps us improve the margin over time, and it's a small but important part of our transition of Bulten to a more profitable and stable company. Next point is that we have had some important wins in our C-parts business.
I think that is quite important going into wind power and defense, and I think we speak a bit more about that on the next page. One of our three business types that we have in Bulten is a distribution business, where it's related to C-parts, obviously still a lot of fasteners and related items in that, but we are working quite hard with enhancing our value creating services. We do more kitting, more inventory management, more quality control, more integrated supply chain solutions in here. We're developing our offering, and that is progressing in a nice way. We have established a business in China, and we have now our first orders in China, and most of this is to other segments than automotive. Obviously, all of it is related to other parts than automotive.
We are particularly targeting the renewable energy sector, and we have some important wins in wind power. I think there are quite significant upsides to doing that well. We have customers that like what we do that promise us good volumes if we keep delivering the way we deliver. We are quite happy with that and excited about the opportunities in wind power. You talk about defense, we just recently won a first defense order. Obviously, with everything going around in the world, getting the defense is important. In this case, it is a customer that build a type of armored vehicles.
What we are doing is that basically we consolidate a lot of items that they use for making these vehicles, and then we do a kitting operation where we create different kits for different parts of their assembly line, and then we feed them with that. It's a very nice business for us, and there are very good opportunities for future volumes in here. We're happy for that, and we do hope that we can penetrate other defense customers in the future as well, both in Asia and in Europe. Happy for that. Good development. Overall, we are going into 2026 with a strong momentum in our C-parts business. We included a slide that we don't normally talk about, but I do this because in our last earnings call, there was some confusion.
I got a question in that call about if we were looking to make some kind of share issue or take in more capital to the business. My answer was, that could happen if we have a very attractive acquisition on the table. That is actually what I meant. There is no plan to make any share issue or take in any capital to the business. We are fairly sound. We have worked a lot during last year to strengthen our balance sheet. We have an adjusted net debt to EBITDA of 2.2, and there are no plans to do anything on a defensive way. If something super attractive comes up, yes, but then it's an offensive move that we make to strengthen the business. As you can see here, our interest-bearing debt has reduced by about SEK 200 million or 20% since last year.
We feel that we are in a good position with our company, and we are getting a healthier balance sheet every day. We have made a change to our Q1 reporting in that we have stopped reporting order intake. For those of you who have followed Bulten over time, both during my days here, but more so in the past, we have in multiple occasions commented that our order intake is not really a good metric. It doesn't really show the development of the business. As most of our order intake is related to forecasting and schedule changes from our customer, it's not really order intake. Having been here now for a year, having been in all the business reviews and all the companies, nobody tracks or follows or take any note to these numbers.
It is not an indication of where Bulten is heading or going, and therefore I feel it's probably more misleading to communicate that than guiding. Therefore, I have decided that we will stop reporting order intake in this way. Given we're now in new year, and it's the first quarter of 2026, we think this is a good time to do so. With that said, I go over to Anna to go through our financial results for the quarter.
Thank you, Axel. The year-on-year decline in net sales reflects lower volumes following the cyber attack in the second half of 2025. Cyber attack towards one of our biggest clients, that is. While we can see that we have stabilized sales towards the end of last year, as well as for the first quarter this year. When we look at the Q1 this year and exclude currency effects, the decrease versus last year's first quarter is only 6%. The mix shift reflects both continued growth in non-automotive segments and lower automotive volumes. Since 2023, the share of sales from our defined growth segments has increased with 10 percentage points to 17.5%, contributing to reduction in OEM light vehicle exposure from 68%-58%, and a more diversified revenue mix.
The first quarter of this year delivered an adjusted EBIT of SEK 78 million, equal to 6.2% EBIT margin, and this is in line with the adjusted numbers for the same quarter last year. The second half of 2025 was affected by the previously mentioned cyber attack, and we can see that the numbers are stabilizing, and we are coming back to more healthy levels again. Here we have some rolling 12 months key indicators, and as Axel already mentioned, our adjusted net debt in relation to adjusted EBITDA is at around two, which is also at the same level as last year. Now back to you, Axel.
Thank you. To wrap up, before we go over to Q&A and see if there are any questions from our shareholders or listeners here. We have a lot of focus on profitability to both protect margins in some places and expand margins in other places. Most of that is around that we want to generate much bigger cash flow. Obviously, that has to do with strengthening the balance sheet, but also to have firepower to go and make more offensive moves and speed up our transition to more business in the non-automotive segments, and create a healthier mix for the group. That is very high on our list for this year. When it comes to these new business segments, we are making quite a lot of work around India to get into the consumer electronics industry, or not get into, but expand.
We have significant business through our current factories in Taiwan and China and towards this sector. We have a very high demand for our products in India, both for customers that produce in India, but also that want an alternative source to China and Taiwan. We are quite excited about the opportunities here, and we believe we can make good inroads on that over the year to come. We also see great opportunities in medical technologies. We see great opportunities in renewable energy, and we are spending more and more efforts and time in expanding those type of businesses. That will be an important part of 2026 as well. Then we continue with our footprint optimization. We are not happy with the overall structure. We need to improve more.
We need to consolidate some of our footprint to create better leverage and better utilization of our assets. It will continue to be an important project for us also going forward. With that said, we hand over to some Q&A.
Thank you for your presentation. Now we open up for questions. As a reminder, if you are following on the phone, you can ask a question by pushing star nine to raise your hand, and I will give you the word. We have not received any written questions at the moment, so we can wait 10 seconds and see if somebody is writing something. Yeah, there are no questions coming this time. I give you the word to you for some closing remarks.
No, that's great. That means everything is crystal clear, and we have been transparent enough. We're happy for that. We look forward to coming back and present our Q2 to you next time.