Good morning, welcome to the Q4 presentation of Electrolux Professional Group. As always, I have Alberto Zanata, the CEO, and Fabio Zarpellon, our CFO, with me. My name is Jacob Broberg, I'm Head of Investor Relations. With that, I hand directly over to Alberto. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Jacob. Morning, to everybody. Straight to the result of the last quarter of 2022. During the fourth quarter of the year, the last quarter of last year, we continued to grow the business organically and obviously inorganically, thanks to the acquisition of Unified Brands, and improve earning and margin. In the quarter, we basically double the earning, moving from SEK 164 million to SEK 324 million, with a double-digit margin compared to roughly some percent, 7% of last year. This quarter completed a full year recovery of the business, where if I account to the full year, we went over the SEK 11 billion in sales. That is the record results in term of sales.
Over 1 billion in earnings, one of the highest ever, and back to double-digit in margin. If I look at the quarter, that is something that I can also recognize along the year. We continued to hold the price in the fourth quarter, fully compensating the delta material, so the delta cost on the material. We completed something that we announced since the beginning, that the delta would have been negative in Q1, more or less breakeven. So breakeven in the meaning, with a zero gap in the second quarter and positive in the third and more positive in the fourth one. That is exactly what happened. If I look at, again, at the full year, the price fully compensated the delta cost.
The other highlight of the quarter is the operating cash flow. It is one of the area where we are not performing for several reason, and also we can go also into the details, and I'm sure Fabio will comment about that later on, is the operating cash flow. Operating cash flow in the fourth quarter was very strong. In some way, as predicted and expected, it is normally very strong in the last quarter of the year, so in some way, no surprise about that. Thanks to this strong cash flow, we have also been able to reduce significantly, reduce the ratio between Net Debt and EBITDA that moved from 2.3 to 1.5 at the end of the year.
If we move on with the development of the sales, I mentioned the fact that the growth continued, the organic growth. The highlight of the quarter compared to others is that is more or less the percent of the growth, or the growth came more or less from each and every region. You see that the 14% in the United States, that is a restated number, so considering three months of Unified Brands, so the full Unified Brands. In order to have a comparable number showing the growth in the market, it's more or less the same that we had in Europe and in the Asia- Pacific region.
Asia- Pacific region is still slightly behind in term of growth to the other two regions because China is still, that for us is the most important country in that region, is still behind, but is the sign of reopening are very strong and very promising for us. If we move on to the food and beverage. Food and beverage in organic increased close to 10%. Also, in this case, the growth is quite similar in the different part of the world. Also, in this case, when we talk about Americas, we are considering a restated number for Unified Brands in order to have a comparable measure. We have to say that Unified Brands grew a lot, 20%, roughly, in the United States, so just in North America.
Unified Brands, we are very pleased about the performance of the acquired company. It is another highlight of the quarter, if you want, in addition to the price execution, because the company that we acquired in December 2021 performed very well. Separation from the group was completed on time, integration completed on time. In addition to all these things, we have been also able to deliver according to our target, both in terms of growth and in terms of earnings. Very good also from this point of view. Profitability of the food and beverage segment also improved significantly, because it's close to roughly 4x what it was the previous year.
If we move to the laundry segment, here we have in some way star performances, I would call it. We have been always talking about laundry as a resilient business, a highly profitable business, it's proven that, despite what happened in July, during the spring/summer last year when we had in some way a decrease of the performance due to the problem with the supply chain, we've been able to recover very well, both in term of growth and in term of profitability. We are ending up a quarter with a margin that is above 18%, very positive, increasing both the earning and the margin.
The other comment is that it is valid for laundry, for food, the order intake during the past weeks and months has been improving. We were commenting also after the Q3 that we would have expect a significant decline of the order intake in December because of the comparison with 2021, when we receive a lot of orders from customers, dealers, end users, that were placing the order to avoid the price increase or because they wanted to book production being afraid of not receiving the product. Reality is that the order intake was lower than what it was the year before, but it was a very healthy level.
It seems that the demand for our product continued, both for laundry and food and beverage, in all the region, including Asia- Pacific and Middle East, including the region that suffered the most the previous year. The only area with a relatively softening of the demand is still Europe. That's the reason why we are still obviously cautious in in our in our planning for the coming weeks. With this said, I would let Fabio comment the financials.
Thank you, Alberto. Good morning to everybody. As you heard from Alberto, we have delivered 10.7% EBITDA in the quarter without item affecting comparability, 10.4% for the full year or over SEK 1.1 billion in EBITDA value. We need to go back to 2018, meaning pre-COVID, but also pre-separation, to find over SEK 1.1 billion EBITDA delivered in a year. 2022 was also a year with, I would say, the highest historical performance in laundry. We delivered close to SEK 630 million in EBITDA with a margin at 16.7%. In food and beverage, the margin for the full year was close to 10% and 9.5 percentage point. You heard Alberto talking about Unified Brands, a successful acquisition.
Unified Brands is part of Electrolux Professional Group since December 1st, 2021, and the performance on Unified Brands have been accretive to the group margin, both in the quarter, it is last quarter, but also for the full year. One final note when it comes to the group common cost, we have an increase in the quarter, and this is related to project and advisory cost. Going through the P&L, what we can observe is that the gross margin in the quarter declined roughly one point compared to last year. There is one item. It is Unified Brands.
As I said earlier, Unified Brands is accretive to the group in term of EBITDA margin, but generating a larger portion of compared to remaining operation of a business with chains, we operate with Unified Brands with a lower gross margin, but also a lower cost to sell. That is the reason behind the accretive performance of Unified Brands. Alberto commented the regarding price. Price contribution was important in the quarter. We catch up the gap, the negative gap that we have between price and raw material for the full year. Now, the gap is positive, so we have more than compensating the direct material cost increase. Additional low single digit price increase are already in place since the beginning of this year.
The disruption in the supply chains have been somehow slightly down along the years, but they are still somehow affecting the productivity of our plans. When it comes to the SG&A development, we increase the SG&A in value. I believe that what matters is that we reduce the ratio from over 26% we had last year, 26.6% to 22% this year. Such a reduction is coming from three main factors. First, last year we had one-off cost. If you remember, we reported a SEK 56 million one-time acquisition integration cost related to Unified Brands. Unified Brands, as I mentioned earlier, is operating with lower cost on sale to sell compared to the remaining part of the business. We have also seen a reduction of the SG&A weight on sales also on the traditional business.
This is, I would say, a pretty remarkable results, because we have been delivering this whilst continuing to invest in the digitalization of our product offer as well as the company processes. We close the year with an operating working capital of sales at 16.7%. I believe that during the previous call, we have been commenting the disruption that we face on the supply chain, and the need to take also conscious decision to increase the reorder point for components, the safety stock for finished product in order to serve the customer. That was the main reason behind the development of the operating working capital ratio.
At the same time, I'm happy to report that, with improvement that we have seen in the supply chain, the action that we have been able to put in place, to work on the safety stock, for example. In December, we reduced operating working capital value compared to September by over SEK 300 million. We are going to see the positive impact in the cash flow. The second remarkable improvement we had in the quarter is related to the net debt. If you remember, before the acquisition Unified Brands, we had no net debt. We generate net debt to buy the company. We reach a peak of the net debt on EBITDA at 2.3x at the end of September.
Thanks to the good performance in the Q4 , now net debt are at SEK 2 billion , and our ratio on net debt is an healthy ratio of 1.5x . We are operating with a pretty solid balance sheet. As you see from the document, the company has SEK 1.1 billion in cash. We have a revolving credit facility of EUR 200 million fully available. We have no covenant. We have no reimbursement obligation for 2023. We are, let me say, pretty equipped to support the business development of this group in 2023. Last few words on the cash flow.
As Alberto anticipated, cash flow was pretty strong in the quarter, over SEK 0.5 billion , generated both from a solid EBITDA performance, also from a significant reduction of the working capital. With the stabilization of the supply chain, with the action we put in place on the operating working capital management, not only on the inventory, but also giving a more strict monitor on the receivable. I'm looking forward for a 2023, where I count that we are going to see a more normalized cash generation in line with the historical performances. With that, back to you, Alberto.
Thank you, Fabio. A few words about some highlights of the coming quarters in the year. Last year, we celebrated 120 years, or the 120th anniversary of our laundry business. This year, we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of our Molteni brand. The Molteni brand, it's surely not a large part of our business. It is a niche product, a niche portion of our business in the food and beverage segment. It is also something that is giving a lot of visibility. We have to remember that a large portion of the Michelin star chefs want to have a Molteni in their kitchen.
It is in some way, we call it the dream for the lovers for the guys who are in this industry, because it is the one used by the most famous chef and in the most famous schools. The second highlight is something we announced during the Investor Day. Is the introduction of the Electrolux Professional Group brand. It is the way to in some way endorse all the brands that are part of the family. It is part of the evolution of this company that through acquisition acquired companies with the strong legacy brands that they have a long history in this industry and that we want to leverage to further develop our business in the different area.
In the picture you see the example of the SPM, but the super important moment will be in some way tomorrow when the NAFEM show in the United States opens, and where we will introduce the Electrolux Professional Group brand to replace the Unified Brands, that was the one putting together the strong brand that we have and we acquired in the United States, Grohe, Randell, Power Soak, and CapKold. All important brands that now are we show to the market belonging to the Electrolux Professional Group. Last but not least, we continue to repeat, and this is will be something that we will continue to repeat during all along 2023, because we continue to be recognized as leader in our industry for what concerns sustainability.
We also started, and we submitted, our target for the Science-Based Targets, to start measuring our performance on the scope three. We already started actions to significantly reduce the impact of our product, for what concern the emission and the CO2 emission. It is important because more than 90% of the CO2 emission are coming from the usage of our product. We have ambitious target both with existing product, but also with the new product that are in the pipeline and that are going to come to market during the coming years. It is something that make me personally very proud, but makes whoever works in Electrolux Professional very proud to know that we can contribute to a more sustainable world.
With this said, if I have to summarize the quarter and the year, I have to say that again, the quarter confirm our performance along the year. We close, as Fabio said, with record high sales the full year, with one of the highest in earnings, doubling the earnings in the quarter and growing more than 50% all along the year. It is important also the earnings development, because thanks to this one, we improve significantly the earning per share. This also means that it gave the possibility to the board to propose a dividend that is roughly 50% higher, dividend per share higher than what it was last year.
The order intake during the quarter, the improvement started basically in September, so after the summer, improve month-by-month. Again, in December, it was not at the same level of last year for the reason that I explained also. This is giving us quite a positive, yeah, we are quite confident about the coming quarters. This doesn't mean that we are not considering what is happening around. The wave one actions to reduce the discretionary spending is still in place, because we need to be cautious of what is happening around us.
As the highlight of the quarter, we already said, repeating the price execution, this was important in 2022 to compensate, to fully compensate the delta material, but in some ways giving us an edge in 2023 for the beginning of the year, because we have been executing an additional price increase January 1st, not at the same level of the one we did it January 1st of 2022, clearly. An additional price increase that is giving us to compensate also the other inflationary item that have been coming against us, specifically, the increase of the labor, the transportation cost, the energy cost.
Unified Brands is now fully integrated, as you clearly understood, is one of the things, in addition to the price execution that makes us proud of the operational performance. Now we are expecting the value that we can create through synergy, cost, and sales synergies in 2023. At least during the last Investor Day, we said that the first step would have been the integration of the IT system. In the United States last year, we were running the operation with three system. Now they are already two, and we are planning to move that to one IT system during the summer of this year. We continue to be a leader in sustainability.
For sure, other company will move in the other, in the area. At the same time, our plan are such that we believe we will continue to move ahead and to improve our performances in this area. Concluding, I'm still optimistic on the future that is in front of us. The order intake is supporting this basically all over the geography. We see also China moving after the new Chinese year. At the same time, we continue to keep the different scenarios under control. We continue to look around us. We continue to have in place the wave one actions. Actions to reduce the discretionary spending, to postpone whatever is postponable in order to face, to be prepared for what it could come, in particular in Q1. That typically it is the stronger...
Sorry, the weakest quarter of the year, because of seasonality and because of the characteristic of the quarter. I believe with this said, I will let you, Jakob, check me for questions.
Thank you, Alberto and Fabio. With that, we open up for questions. Operator, please go ahead.
We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to question may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the queue, you may press star and two. Anyone who has a question may press star one at this time. The first question comes from Hampus Gustafsson from SEB. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. This is Gustaf again with SEB. A few questions, if I may. Firstly, going into 2023, the delta, the positive delta you had in Q4 regarding price versus raw mats, is there reason to assume that H1 will be also positively impacted, or are any of those price increases rolled back into 2023?
We are talking about the delta between price and material that we expect to be positive in Q1, during the first half of 2023, right?
Yes.
Okay. Yes, we expect that the price will continue to be there. As I said, we implemented another price increase, January 1st. With this new price increase, we are expecting to be able to compensate also the other inflationary item. I believe now we should not limit our analysis about the delta cost, the general delta cost increase just to the material. Material cost is stabilizing. In some cases, it's slightly going down, but less than expected, I have to say. We have all the other things; energy, labor in particular, transportation costs that obviously they also increase in 2022, and they are expected to be there in 2023.
Is it still a reasonable assumption that 3% to your top line will be the impact on price 2023?
It can be. Again, we didn't disclose the price increase. It will not be in the high single digit as it was last year. It will be on the low single digit, so 3% can be a guess. As usual, it is not. Typically, you don't have a flat price increase all across the geography and all across the product categories. The only time that we had something flat was when in May last year, we implemented the surcharge. In that case, it was a flat because it was specific for the cost. Now we are more, let me say, surgical going into the different geography and different and different product categories. You can keep it as a reference if you want.
It will be a low single digit, the price increase. It will be... It was a low single digit, the price increase that we had January 1st.
Yeah. Okay. Regarding the order book momentum, which seems to be then strong in Laundry and sequentially improving, at a lower level in Food and Beverage, do you see the same trends at the start of the new year in terms of order book momentum?
Y-yes.
The first month?
Yes. It is the trend that we saw in November, December is continuing also into January. In Laundry, it's surely positive. Order intake, I have to say that is a positive order intake also in Food and Beverage. Little bit softening or softer in Europe. It is a positive, a positive order intake.
Finally, could you just remind us what a typical order book length is for you? Is it like three months or something?
The order stock? Now it's shorter. I believe, last year I was talking about healthy order stock because a too long order stock was not so healthy because this also means that we are having too long lead time to our customers, so we are bringing back to basically normality. It is still longer than one and a half months as it was before COVID. We still are sitting on a good order stock or order book, as you call it.
Thank you. Just one more question.
Welcome.
I have a follow-up question from the web. It's Stefan Stjernholm at Nordea who asks about the net impact from raw material transportation cost and general cost inflation. Is there a need for further price increases after the one implemented in January this year?
I mean, I can answer this question. I mean, we are monitor the situation because we are operating in a pretty volatile environment, as you know. As it looks today, we are confident that with the price increase we have put in place January 1st , we are in condition to cover not only the direct material development, the labor and any other inflationary cost increase like the energy. We are, let me say, pretty positive in that respect. As you have seen in late 2021 and 2022, we are carefully monitor the situation, and we are ready to take additional measure, meaning additional price increase if the inflationary situation is accelerating compared to what we foresee today.
Sorry, to complete also Fabio's answer.
In some way, if it is related to transportation cost, as you said, or energy cost, one thing that we didn't use, we never used before that, but in May last year, we implemented the surcharges. The result is that it worked very well, because it was immediately impacting, it was effective day one, let me say, without any delay, and it worked pretty well through the distribution chain. We have the tools to eventually compensate big differences, even if we don't see them today.
I have a few more questions from the web. It's Magnus Fröblom from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond who asks why we are so cautious on outlook.
We are cautious about outlook because in some way, our industry is driven by investments in the meaning that if I look at in particular laundry, 50% of our laundry business is consumer-operated machine, so apartment house laundry, coin shops. That means that there are individuals or companies that are investing, and normally they are borrowing money. The interest rate are increasing, so at least this is making us cautious. The money is costing more. The same apply for the investment in kitchens. You need to get the money to buy the equipment, in particular the large installation, to buy our equipment and then invest. That makes us cautious, and as a consequence, remaining quite.
Trying to remain prepared to different scenario, to a possible decrease of the demand. Reality is that the order intake is still good, this means that there are still customer, in particular in laundry, that are placing orders to get our product. That is in some way the big things that is in front of us. We see order coming, at the same time we see the economical environment around us with the same challenges that probably you face.
One more question from the web. It's from Henrik Christiansson at Carnegie. What is driving the increase in group common costs? Is it related to M&A, or is it related to integration of Unified Brands? Some more details, please.
First, it's not related to Unified Brands, in the sense that the integration activity have been completed by the summer. In Unified Brands is operating fully part of the group with additional one-time cost. We are working on other initiative on different dimension, the reason about the increase we have seen in the quarter in the group common cost. There are different projects on different dimensions.
Thank you, Fabio. With that, operator, please go ahead if there are more questions from the phone.
The next question comes from Johan Eliason from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning. I hope you can hear me well. I had just a question on... You discussed the orders, et cetera. Previously, we've discussed a little bit where the orders are versus the 2019 level. How do you see that today in sort of food and beverage and laundry respectively?
They are on the pre-COVID level.
Already? Yeah.
Yes.
Just financial net moved up quite a lot in the fourth quarter. You have a very strong cash flow coming in though, but I suppose there's some sort of element of floating rates in those interest costs. How should we look at the interest costs into 2023? Should we expect this higher level that we saw in Q4, or how will this pan out?
There are two ingredients in the development of financial net. There is one that is somehow, let me say, also in our control. That is the level of financial net debt. As you have seen from our balance sheet, we reduce net debt, but we have also reduced the financial net debt. Let me say, I expect in 2023 to come back of, to a more normalized historical cash flow generation. We will be in condition to accelerate the reimbursement of our loans. We will reduce the base. The second ingredient is about the interest rate in it. I mean, for what we see at the moment, there could be some increase that are going to affect the financial net cost.
Let me say, in a normalized circumstances, I expect that the benefit from the debt reduction will overcompensate the potential increase on the financial cost or the interest rate going forward.
Okay, excellent. Many thanks.
You're welcome.
The next question comes from Karri Rinta from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. Thank you for taking my question. Firstly, about the organic growth on a full year basis. It was 16%-17% for both divisions. Can you give us an idea of how much of that was volume for food and beverage and for laundry? That's my first question.
Okay. For what concern the volumes, volume. Okay. For laundry, we have been growing volumes compared to the previous year and also compared to the pre-COVID level. Volume means units. For beverage, we are not yet on the pre-COVID level. The volume growth was not as strong as as in laundry in 2022, and it is still behind the pre-COVID level. Not in every product category. We had some product category, for instance, combi ovens, where volume grew in 2022 versus 2020 year, 2021, and they are already above the pre-COVID level. It is a product category in itself that is growing more than others.
There are other product category, like, for us, one core category is the cooking, the horizontal cooking, where we are not yet developing. It's more related to the project business, and as a consequence, it didn't develop as much as the other. If we look at the beverage category, they are all still behind, the numbers. They improved in, 2023, but they are still behind the numbers.
All right, thanks. Just a quick follow-up is this, you mentioned that combi ovens had a good sales momentum. That you ended up with roughly the same organic growth for both laundry and food and beverage. Is it because you had higher price increases in food and beverage or because you had a, I would say, favorable sales mix development in food and beverage?
Let's say that in food and beverage, there is a little bit a difference between food and beverage and laundry in the meaning that in food and beverage, we have been able to have the price increase much earlier than laundry. In some way, this was a comment after the second quarter of this year when we said that food and beverage was already compensating the delta cost material. On that time, we were focusing on the closing the gap, let me say, while laundry was not. This also because in food and beverage, we have been faster than in laundry to implement, to execute the price increase.
Not because we were lazy in one business compared to the other, but because the dynamic of the industries are different in the meaning that in laundry in particular, we have many contract with the public institutions, with a large distributor in the United States that grew a lot, by the way. It has to be noticed, this one, gaining market share versus competitor in 2022. But at the same time, with this big, big partner or customers, obviously the execution of the price increase is slower, and it took longer. So the component of price increase was lower in laundry compared to food and beverage.
Okay. That's very helpful. Just to follow up on previous question about the finance cost. Should we expect that in the coming quarters, the sort of the net number will be similar to what we saw in Q4? How should we model finance costs in the coming quarters?
Looking at the development, in particular into Q1 , I believe that quarter one may look like pretty similar to Q4 , 2022.
Okay. Then if you manage to deleverage and maybe the finance costs will be lower after that?
As I mentioned to you, we expect a normalized cash flow development in 2023 in line with historical. This will bring definitely strong benefit in reduction of the net debt and the financial net debt. Within this picture we know that Q1 we expect to have a solid cash flow. If you look into the historical performance, the cash flow in Q1 is never the stronger within the year. I'm taking this prudent approach when I give you some potential trend in the finance net in Q1.
Finally, you mentioned, When asked about prior quarters that, Q1 tends to be, and now we're talking about order intake, tends to be a weaker quarter. Can you give us any flavor on what you have seen so far in January? Is January always such a slow month, so it's very difficult to extrapolate from these early weeks of the quarter?
You are asking about a general comment about the January month, the characteristic of the month, right?
Yes, that's correct.
Okay. January... Yes, January is short first because of the, let me say the Christmas break where both the factories typically reduce production, but also many of our customer are come clearly off. It is a short month in term of working days. First. Secondly, it is clearly a low seasonality in the meaning that many customer have been ordering or getting the product before the Christmas break. It is also the month where all our customer distributor or end user are preparing for the springtime. The big month are from March onwards. The order intake in January was positive. I think I already said it.
We are reporting a positive trend in the order intake both in laundry and in food and beverage.
All right. Thank you. Those were my questions.
You're welcome.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. The next question comes from Linda Sandvik from DNB. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for having me. I was wondering if you could give some more color on the supply chain issues, like if you could say maybe how much it impacted EBITDA during the quarter, and if you have seen that it has eased during the first quarter, and when you expect it to fully normalize?
Okay. The supply chain, supply chain in Q4, in this case, as you mentioned, was impactful for the U.S. business more than the other. It normalize in laundry and food and beverage, particularly European and Asian factories, while was still a challenge for our operation in the United States. United States, it was mainly October, November. In December, we have been able to recover quite a lot. We did exactly the same things that we did for laundry during the spring. Pre-producing and then completing the product. Obviously not the same quantity of product, the same amount of product, much smaller and what that was the case or the reason why we have been able to recover already during the month of December, these delays.
Currently, it is not normalized yet. We do not have any situation that put us in an emergency case, in an emergency status. This is the reason why also we started to reduce the safety stock, not at the same level that we had obviously before the supply chain crisis, if you want to call it. We still have a larger than before component stock in our factories. We are gradually going back in general, on the component, also on the electronic component that have been the most critical.
Now we feel that we are better prepared than what we were before to possible other critical situation because all the critical components now they have a double suppliers that in some case we didn't have it in different part of the world in case something happened obviously on one side as it did for the Chinese supplier for laundry. The situation is surely better, but it is not normalized yet. Here and there are still cases that are, in this case, producing an efficiency, but not jeopardizing production from our factories.
Okay. Thanks. That's clear. I have one question on food and beverage Europe. I think you might have touched upon it, would you say that the demand in Q4 was stable and you feel like demand has softening or do you feel like it has softening? If you could say how like the start of the year.
Uh-
Continues to soften.
Food and beverage in some ways the area.
In Europe.
In Europe is the area where we saw a softening of the demand. We have also to say that in particular beverage in this case is very seasonal. Typically the last quarter of the year is the weakest quarter of the full year in beverage. Also because majority of our beverage products are frozen or cold beverages. They are typically the product for the summer. This is again one of the other reason why we are cautious in the meaning that we see that our customer in some way are postponing some decisions, looking at what is coming. This is one of the reason to be cautious in addition to the one that I mentioned earlier.
At the same time, if I look at the statistic about tourism or people traveling, they are not showing any decline. As a consequence, we are confident that the trend could even change during the coming months.
Okay. Thank you. That's all from me.
Welcome.
We have two more questions from the web. The first one is from Pär Börjesson. Do you see 2022 as a step to reach your medium-term EBITDA margin? Do you see 2023 better margins from better laundry performance and synergies from Unified Brands without any organic sales growth?
First to answer to the first question, yes. The answer is yes. It is a step in the right direction. Earnings improved significantly. We grew organically. We grew also inorganically and the inorganic acquisition, Unified Brands, was well integrated into the existing group. The group went above SEK 11 billion in sales as I reported beginning, record sales, with over SEK 1.1 billion in earnings and back to the double digits. It is a step in the right direction to grow the business in a profitable way, not just growing it.
This result has been achieved despite the extraordinary impact of the increase of raw material, despite the fact that we went through the closure of the operation in Russia, despite the fact that obviously part of the organization will also focus on the integration of Unified Brands, despite all the supply chain issues that means missing components, missing whatever that you can imagine created a lot of inefficiency inside of the operation. It has not been a quiet year, if you want to call it, from the operational point of view. If this is what happening in 2022, we believe that 2023, there are all the ingredients to continue in this profitable development. Uncertainty is still in front of us.
Again, we don't know yet what is happening to the energy cost. We know that there is inflation, inflationary items that are growing the labor cost. We don't see the cost of the material going down significantly. At the same time, for instance, we have already quite significant price increase that are covering our back. We have a lot of things, a lot of actions that are in place. In 2023, we are expecting clearly that Unified Brands will create value in term of cost, but also, and probably, at least from my point of view, even more significantly from the business point of view, in the meaning that there are many opportunity to grow sales working together with chains or even with distribution. Laundry is doing very well.
During 2023, we will also start to have the first benefits and payback, both in term of cost and business development from the investment that we have been doing on digitalizing the company. During the first half and second half, we will launch our connected solution, the One Connect, that we presented also during the Investor Day. It is something unique. It is something great. I'm very happy and passionate about that. We are also not completing because I believe it will be a continuous evolution, but continuously implementing the one platform, that is on the other side, the tool that is connecting dealer, service agent, customers, to us digitalizing the process. There are many things that could help us to continue in our profitable growth path.
Thank you. The final question comes from Arne Karlsson at Alecta. Can you elaborate on the China sales down in Q4 year-on-year, but trending sequentially strong to the better or what?
The China sales. I get it. China sales, they've been terrible in 2022, in the meaning that the factory was constantly closed, I would say. The people were locked at home, our customer didn't work. It was the big gap in the Asia- Pacific regions. We see now with the reopening of China, a restart of traveling, at least internally. I believe a lot will be seen during the coming weeks, because they are back from the Chinese New Year last Monday. They just restarted. Before that, the level of absentees also in our factory, you can use this one as an index if you want. It was very high.
It was still not a healthy situation. For what we can see, and we have a good plan for that, is that China should be the change maker, let me say, in our Asia- Pacific region performances.
Thank you, Alberto. With that, we finalize this Q4 call. Thank you for today, and speak to you next time. Goodbye.