Thank you and welcome to the Devyser Q2 earnings call. It's a great pleasure to have you all here. It's our third earnings call as a listed company. Please turn to slide two. Today, you will listen to me, Fredrik Alpsten, the Devyser CEO, and Sabina Berlin, our CFO. I have also asked Ulf Klangby, the founder and deputy CEO, to join us during the Q&A session. Slide three, please. Before we go into the Q2 figures, I would like to give you a quick summary of Devyser. We are a Swedish company founded in 2004 that develops, manufactures, and sells diagnostic kits and software for advanced DNA testing. Our products are adapted to the leading DNA sequencing platforms, especially to the NGS platform, the next generation sequencing platform, which is the latest and fastest-growing platform.
We have also products to the early platforms like qPCR and standard sequencing. We are working within three focus areas, hereditary diseases, oncology, and post-transplantation monitoring. We sell our products to the clinical diagnostic labs, either via our own sales reps or via distributors. We're based in Stockholm, but we have subsidiaries, sales offices in eight countries. We are today around 95 employees. What do we do? We develop, produce, and commercialize genetic testing kits to guide targeted cancer therapies. It enables rapid diagnosis of hereditary diseases and post-transplant follow-up. All development and all production are taking place in-house in our facilities in Hägersten, south of Stockholm. How do we do this? I think the reason why we have been so successful, strong growth during a number of years, is because we put the customer, the routine diagnostic lab in focus.
We provide easy-to-implement, maintain, and use solutions, resulting in substantial time savings, and by that, cost savings for the customer, the lab. Turn to slide four, please. The growth in the company is high. From 2015 to 2022, the growth has been 37% per year on average, despite the big hiccup in 2020 due to COVID-19. Also, 2022 has started very well, as you will hear a bit later in the presentation. Since the company was founded in 2004, we have sold products for more than 2.5 million diagnostic tests. Our products are sold in more than 45 countries at the moment, but we have up to now had a very European focus. We have a very nice business model, and that has generated nice gross margins over time, 79% for the last 12 months.
I must say almost pharmaceutical margins. The nice thing is that they are improving as the volumes are increasing and the proportion of direct sales is increasing. The company started as an R&D company, and we have until today developed and launched 28 CE-approved products. The company has been very successful in developing products efficiently. It takes us 6-18 months from a product ID to a finalized and launched product. Turn to slide five, please. As said earlier, we are active with diagnostic tests in 3 areas, hereditary diseases, oncology, and post-transplant monitoring. The biggest area is hereditary diseases. Products for diagnosing hereditary diseases currently make up about 70% of our total sales. A few years ago, we decided to start diagnosing in oncology, and sales currently make up about 20% of our total sales.
We have products for diagnosing hereditary cancers, such as BRCA breast cancer. In the autumn of 2020, we launched our first product for post-transplant monitoring in stem cell transplantation. It currently accounts for a small part of our total sales, but it's growing rapidly, and it's by far our fastest-growing area. With the NGS technology, we can measure very low levels of the donor's and recipient's bone marrow and very accurately follow the development, and thus at an early stage, see the diseased bone marrow is about to grow back, and you can now start treatment at an early stage. We are, since beginning of 2021, developing a product for post-transplant monitoring of solid organs. The first product in this area is a product for kidney.
In terms of volume, the post-transplant monitoring area is very interesting, as testing is done frequently on each person, so during the remaining life of that person. Turn to slide six, please. What's the reason to our success? The basic principle of all our products is process excellence. We are very good at developing and manufacturing genetic test kits and software for the routine diagnostic lab. We do not address the research labs where quick and easy handling is not so critical. Our customers can be a small specialized lab or a large global lab chain, such as Unilabs or Synlab. Their whole business concept is to sell and deliver large volume of fast, accurate diagnostic results.
This is where Devyser products and focus on process excellence make a difference. We sell reagents that can simplify the lab's workflow and thereby reduce the risk of errors, both by staff but also by robots. Not least that it makes up different test results. We do this by offering very streamlined and simplified test protocols that reduces time, which leads to cost savings for the lab. Turn to slide seven, please. We currently sell in about 45 countries. Up until today, we have primarily focused on the European market, which accounts for more than 90% of our total sales. We start selling via distributors, but we have converted some countries from distributor sales to direct sales. We are now selling our products via own sales guys in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, U.K., Spain, Benelux, and France.
That's the blue countries on the map. We see very nice sales development in all these countries. Since 2021, we have also set up an own sales organization in North America. We have not sold here earlier, but U.S. is the biggest IVD market in the world and the biggest. The market with the highest prices. We are very optimistic about the North American market. In the yellow countries on the map, we are selling via distributors. Turn to slide eight, please. For many years, Devyser has focused its operations on developing world-class products. There has been much less focus on marketing sales. However, this has started to be fixed properly. We have now a very clear growth strategy consisting primarily of three strategic initiatives.
We will continue with our growth by strengthening the sales organization in key markets. It means primarily strengthening the direct sales organization in Europe, but it also means increased focus on some of the markets with distributor sales. The second initiative is a geographical expansion into new markets. We are primarily talking about U.S., Canada, where we are still in a start-up phase with our direct sales organization. It also means expansion in some Asian countries. The third initiative is focus on core products and launch of new products. To maintain high growth, we think it's important continue with that. With that, I'll now hand over to Sabina, and I ask you to turn to slide nine, please.
Thank you, Fredrik. I'll be starting with going through some of the important events that we saw during the second quarter for Devyser. We have had a good quarter with continued growth in sales and strong margins. One specific highlight was the contract we won with Héma-Québec in Canada for a non-invasive fetal RHD testing. The total order value amounts to just over SEK 16 million, with an additional option to prolong the contract. We also saw two valuable additions to the management team with Theis Kipling, who joined from Atlas Antibodies in June to take up the position as a new Chief Commercial Officer, and with our recent hiring of Camilla Wiberg as our Chief HR Officer. Camilla has been working with us as a consultant for a few years and knows the company very well.
Both these individuals contribute to the strengthening of the management team, will be important in the growth journey we are on. At the annual general meeting in May, the shareholders elected Fredrik Mattsson as a new board member after one of the company's founders, Ulf Klangby, had decided to step down from the board to fully focus on the management team and Devyser's business development function. On slide 10, please. You can see that we reported net sales of SEK 30.9 million in the second quarter of the year, making this another record quarter, which we're very happy to report. Compared to last year's SEK 21.8 million in sales, we see a growth of 41.5%.
Gross profit for the quarter came in at SEK 24.7 million or 80%, well above last year's 74% for Q2 and 76.9% for the full year of 2021. Our loss at both EBIT level and after taxes has increased compared to last year, but this is as expected since we make heavy investments this year to create a foundation for a continued growth. We closed the quarter with a liquidity of just above SEK 400 million after the share issue in December, and we continue into the rest of the year with a strong cash position. Next slide, please. Number eleven. To see that Europe remains our strongest market and grows rapidly. Asia Pacific is still quite heavily impacted by COVID and has seen a small reduction in volume in the second quarter.
U.S. is growing with triple digits, and we'll see a large contribution from Canada once the first orders from Quebec will start coming in about a year from now. Our direct sales with Italy providing a large portion of direct market revenue made up a little over 70% of our revenue this quarter. Our distributed business remains strong and will continue to be an important strategy in parallel with our direct market approach. Let's move on to slide number 12, please. Gross margins have remained quite stable between 70% and 80% over the past years and landed above 80% in both Q1 and Q2.
The revenue trend is also easy to see with both 2022 quarters over SEK 30 million. On slide number 13, we have listed here our financial targets, where we have a growth target to achieve an annual organic growth in excess of 30% and in 3-5 years achieve a gross margin in excess of 80% and operating EBIT margin above 20%. In this quarter, we showed that we have achieved two out of three of those targets. I will hand over to Fredrik and then to our Q&A session.
Yes. Thank you very much, Sabina. I'm handing over right away to the operators, which will start the Q&A session.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch tone phone. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question will come from Erik Moberg with Analyst Group. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for taking my questions. I have three. Firstly, regarding the exciting new software award attained in Canada. In a broader perspective and in terms of future tenders, could you please elaborate what this contract win means for you? Is this product also being pursued in tenders in the U.S.A?
Yes. Thank you, Erik, and thank you for your question. Yeah. This is our first bigger tender that we have won in North America. That step is important for us. It's also important because we foresee a couple of other tenders coming in the next 6-12 months as in Canada regarding RHD. We are optimistic. We can see that we can fulfill the requirements. Of course, we cannot promise anything, but we are optimistic for future tenders. As worldwide, it's rather close collaboration between Canada and U.S. It can also spill over a bit to the U.S., even if this is more a Canadian tender. I hope it answers your question.
Yes. Thank you. In the report, you mentioned that there's strong chance that you will meet the goal of reaching 20% operating margin sooner than expected. Before I would assume that would be around 2024-2026. Can you please elaborate on this?
No, I will not elaborate it to detail about that. We put our financial goals in this October, November last year before the IPO. Now we have reached two of them, and we are optimistic to reach also the third one. We said that we had a rather big period here. We said three to five years, but we think we can do it earlier. I don't want to be more precise than that.
Okay. Thank you. The last question, you still show strong gross margins, 80% compared to 24% same quarter last year and 83% last quarter. Is there any seasonal effects that we should account for in Q3 and Q4? Or can you add some flavor to the differences between quarters?
No, the main reason for increased gross margin, that's higher volumes. If you see higher sales, you can anticipate higher gross margins. We do not see any special seasonal effects. Q3 is normally a slightly weaker sales quarter because we have a lot of sales in Italy. Italy, they close down in first part of August. Maybe we have slightly lower sales in Q3 due to that.
Okay. Thank you. That's all for me.
Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. As there are no more questions, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back to Fredrik Alpsten, CEO, for any closing remarks.
Thank you. Thank you for participating in this earnings call. We have seen a very good quarter, and we are very optimistic for the rest of 2022. Thank you, and let's keep in touch for the next couple of months. Thank you.