Welcome to Careium Q1 Report 2023 presentation. For the first part of the conference call, the participants will be in listen-only mode. During the questions and answers session, participants are able to ask questions by dialing star five on their telephone keypad. I will hand the conference over to CEO Christian Walén and CFO Mathias Carlsson. Please go ahead.
Hello, everyone. A warm welcome to the Careium report for the first quarter of 2023. I am Christian Walén. I'm the new permanent CEO since the 27th of March. Together with me, I have my CFO and colleague, Mathias Carlsson. Before we dive into the material, I would like to express my great excitement for joining a company with such a strong position as one of the leaders in Europe across the technology-enabled care sector. This market is, as you all know, particularly interesting with the changing demographics. We are seeing an increase in people across the age of 65+ . In addition, we're also seeing smaller cohorts of people who are the younger generation supposed to take care of the senior population.
We have increased pressure on care and healthcare systems, we have a shift from analog to digital infrastructure rapidly closes down. This puts Careium in a fantastic spot to compete and provide value for its customers and end users. Since joining and before diving in, I want to express a special thank you to all employees and leaders within this fantastic business. You have given me an equally fantastic welcome, and it's great to be on board. With that, we move over to the quarterly report and its highlights. Starting out, the first quarter of 2023, a solid performance across sales, operating profit, and cash flow, which is reflective of our ambition of profitable growth. We're very happy to see continued success and customer appreciation across the Swedish markets, where we are implementing and winning new contracts continuously.
In addition, we are proud of the strong product sales in the United Kingdom, which is up 24% compared to same period in 2022, which is reflective of the transformation from analog to digital. Going forward, to align more with shareholders and promote transparency, we will disclose information regarding our different regions in a slightly different way. In particular, our business in the Netherlands will be disclosed separately. Other regions should be understood as predominantly Germany and France. In the quarter, we also experienced a cyberattack on the 23rd of March, which forced us to an 18-hour disruption of services in the Swedish business. I want to express our greatest thank you to all our colleagues, partners supporting us, and also our customers working together to resolve this situation.
We were up and running again with service level in the same day as the event occurred. With the highlights out of the way, let's head over to sales and gross margin for the first quarter. We saw organic growth of 8.7% compared to Q1 2022 and adjusted for currency effect, this growth amounted to 7.1%. Service sales made up 142.5 million SEK compared to 139.4 million SEK in the same period last year, which indicates an increase of 2.2% versus last year. The product sales amounted to 51.6 million SEK, which is up from 39.9 million SEK, same comparable period last year, which is an increase of 31.9%.
Our gross margin reached 38.9% in contrast with the first quarter of 2022, where we attained 39.2%. This is mainly due to an increased cost of service delivery across our alarm receiving centers, predominantly in the first part of the quarter due to high sick leave. Onwards now to our markets. As stated previously, we will disclose a bit more information. You will also find in our full report some historic data to promote greater transparency. Starting out in the Nordics, we saw sales up 8.9% compared to the first quarter of 2022. Coupled with this, we also saw high and positive performance across our service delivery in spite of the sick leave, so it did not have an effect on our operation. Predominantly, as stated, earlier stages of the quarter.
Connections at the end of the period were 134,700, which is up 4.5% compared to the same period last year. Moving on to the UK, we saw sales increasing 2.6% compared to the first quarter of 2022. Product sales, as stated as a highlight, up 84.4% compared to the same period last year, which is of course reflective of the great demand for Careium's digital services and products. As many of you know, the analog infrastructure connected to social alarms will more or less be closed down come 2025, which is a strong driver for this development. Gross margin in the UK for the quarter amounted to 34% compared to 35.8% in the first quarter of 2022.
This reflects efforts and investments to attain higher levels of service performance, which we also clearly see in our operations. Moving on then, first time we disclosed the Netherlands fully presented as a standalone market. We drove sales 12.4% compared to up from Q1 last year. This is driven by the work in creating a stronger customer mix and also adding new connections. The gross margin that is slightly improved here is also to some extent due to specific customer projects in the quarter. As you can review in the full report, you will see that gross margin levels in the Netherlands are fairly high. In other markets, which is predominantly Germany and France, we saw a decrease of 21.6% compared to the last Q1 2022 across our net sales.
This is due to lower levels of sales in Germany. That is a negative, we also saw higher gross margins reflective of a better and stronger product mix. Moving on to profitability for the quarter, EBITDA amounted to SEK 25 million. If we compare that to same period last year, it was at -5.5 million SEK. EBITDA in the first quarter of 2023 was not affected by any restructuring costs or non-recurring items. Last year, this effect on EBITDA was SEK -27.7 million. At the EBIT, we delivered SEK 7.3 million, which comparable to the same period in the last year amounted to SEK -24.3 million. Exactly as EBITDA, EBIT in the first quarter of 2023 was not affected by any restructuring costs or non-recurring items.
Last year in the end of the first quarter, the EBIT amounted to SEK -27.8 million. This improvement in profitability, it is driven by our focus on sales and the cost reduction and efficiency gains that follow our ongoing action programs from last year. With that, we move to cash flow. Cash flow concurrent activities in the first quarter amounted to SEK 37.9 million compared to SEK 22.1 million in the first quarter of last year. Cash flow improvements reflected our improved profitability, of course, and also as we stated in our quarter four report in 2022, our ongoing work to decrease working capital balance. Free cash flow for the period amounted to SEK 28.2 million, in contrast with SEK 4.5 million in the same period in 2022.
Cash total SEK 53.4 million at the end of Q1 2023 compared to SEK 112.6 million in the same period in 2022. Our bank overdraft facility showed SEK 28.3 million compared to zero in the same period last year. Our net debt for Q1 2023 amounted to SEK 223.7 million at the end of Q1. First off, I want to compare that with a net debt of SEK 253.6 million at the end of the previous quarter, that is Q4 2022.
If we compare the figure for the end of the first quarter 2023 to last year, that is 2022, net debt at this point in time was SEK 158.4 the end of the first quarter in 2022. At the end of this quarter, we complied with the bank agreed covenant waiver. To conclude our report before opening up to take any questions, as stated, our highlights from our perspective consist of strong sales and good organic growth, a free cash flow of SEK 28.2 million, and a very strong quality improvement across our KPIs related to service delivery, predominantly in the U.K., that we are very proud to be able to offer our customers. We did see challenges, particularly on gross margin due to sick leave, Sweden, Norway mainly impacted by this.
There's a bit of a lingering headwind regarding availability and cost for components. In addition, the cyberattack that caused a temporary service disruption, and following a thorough investigation, a personal data breach of a limited nature also took up a lot of time, effort, and resources. If we look ahead, we conclude that we have a successful start to our Back to Profit program, as we talked about previously, and we're now really looking forward to taking the next steps. Taking stock of our gains and learnings and continue to invest in driving further efficiencies across digital hardware innovation and also hopefully to be able to present a few interesting product launches during the autumn.
Of course, we will also review our organization, system landscape, et cetera, to drive further efficiencies. We are now focusing more on the mid and the long-term gains to set the company up for success. With that, we conclude this presentation, and we'll be happy to take your questions.
If you wish to ask a question, please dial star five on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, please dial star five again on your telephone keypad. There are no more questions at this time. I hand the conference back to the speakers for any closing comments.
We have a question here from this chat, where they ask you on the EBITDA, which we have reported earlier, but we have not reported in this quarter. The EBITDA is around SEK 4 million above the EBIT level, so SEK 11 million approximately. We also have a question here whether we will present financial targets in near future.
In response to that, I would say that we are not ready to disclose any financial targets at the present. Hopefully we'll be able to do so in the future, but for now we will not. Yeah. It seems that there are no more questions from the chat. All right. Given that, we thank you all for participating in this session.
We really want to underline that, to the extent of what we are bound by rule sets, we are a transparent and a company that is willing to engage with our shareholders. Please don't hesitate to reach out to promote a better dialog. With that, thank you all for listening in to this report presentation and see and hear you next time for the second quarter. Thank you all.