Hello, my name is Malin Siberg and I am the CEO of Guideline Geo. I'm here to present the end-of-year report to all of you. As always, I will start with a very brief introduction to the company, who we are and what we do, and then we will dive into the numbers. Guideline Geo, we are your guide to the subsurface. We use non-destructive geophysical methods, and we can detect things that are hidden just below the surface and down to approximately one kilometer down below. You can use our instruments and software for many applications, but our main applications are groundwater management, finding groundwater reservoirs and managing them in a sustainable way. Ground investigations is about whatever you want to build: infrastructure or buildings, railroads, tunnels, skyscrapers, power plants. You need to know your ground prerequisites, your ground stability in the design and the execution process.
Here's why geophysics can help. Our third main growth application is utility locating, which is all about finding pipes and cables in the ground used in any type of infrastructure or roadwork. Our customers are both private, like contractors and consultants. Contractors typically are utility locating customers. But it's also governments, authorities, and we can find that specifically in the groundwater management sector. Also a pretty strong customer base in academia and research. If that is what we do, this is who we are in brief. We are listed on Nasdaq First North Growth Market, and we are an industry tech company. We're a Swedish export company in industry tech, which means that we design and build and sell our solutions, our instruments, and our softwares. We are on a growth path, and we have set a strategy for a sustainable and profitable growth going forward.
We have a truly global reach both through our direct channel, the orange dots on this map, and also through our indirect, our partner network throughout the world in more than 80 countries worldwide. We are made in Sweden. We have design and manufacturing in Sweden and headquarters here in Stockholm. We go to market under two well-known market-leading brands. It's ABEM, the orange one, ABEM in Swedish, and MALÅ, that comes from our municipality in Västerbotten up north in Sweden for the white brand. We are unique in this industry because we carry four geophysical methods. We have solutions and instruments for four different methods. It's GPR, that stands for Ground Penetrating Radar. I think you all know radar, but we send our radar signal down into the ground. This is very efficient if you want to do fast surveys, but you can't go very deep using radar.
Our other four methods are TEM, Transient Electromagnetics, Seismics and Resistivity IP. As you can see, they differ in the depth that you can go. TEM is the deepest method. They are sometimes complementary to each other. Like when you want to find water, you can use TEM and resistivity. Sometimes these methods stand more alone separately, depending on application. That was very short about us as a company. Let's move our focus into the Q4 financials and the Q4 events. Also I will walk you through the full year numbers. Let me start with another number. Last year we celebrated 100 years as a company. I'm extra excited to present that our 100th year was a successful year. It was a growth year and a great year financially. I will now walk you through the financial numbers.
So it was a record. Q4 was a record quarter for us, and 2023 was a record year for us financially. If we start to look at net sales, our net sales grew by 35% compared to last year. And if you look at the full year numbers, we passed our magic bar. We passed the SEK 200 million bar that we had set up for ourselves and ended up at SEK 201.4 million, which is up 16% year-over-year. Our order intake for Q4 was SEK 55 million. And again, for the full year, it was strong. We passed the SEK 200 million also here. I will go into details why there is a discrepancy between SEK 63 million and SEK 55 million if you look at net sales and order intake in the following slide.
If we move our eyes to EBITDA and EBIT, our EBIT margin was 15.6% for the quarter and 14.6% for the full year. Our operating profit, EBIT, was 11.4% for the quarter and 9.4% versus 4.0% last year. We're proud of the change in EBIT this year and in this quarter, of course. The cash flow was positive both for the quarter and for the full year. We had a strong Q4 cash flow. For the full year, we ended up at a positive number, 3.9%, but a somewhat lower number than last year's 6.4%. This was the summary. I will go into more details and the reasons behind these numbers in the following slides. Let's look at net sales. As I said, Q4 was up 35%. We really did a fantastic end-of-year push, and everything went our way. So sales did their work.
The distributors did their work. We managed to ship. Operations did a fantastic job. So a really strong end-of-year push made us reach these numbers. For those that listened to our report last quarter, we talked about the launch of our newly new GPR solution, MIRA Compact, and the backlog that we had grown since the launch and that we had planned to ship that backlog in Q4. We did. We managed to ship the entire backlog, which means that we can really see as a big contributor to the strong Q4 numbers. It was also when I talked about the gap between order intake and sales in Q4, that is partly because of this. Also we have a seasonal effect in our industry that our Q4 is often stronger. We can see that specifically in the government type of customers worldwide.
If we look at full year, we were up 16% compared to last year. And we think there are several reasons behind this. We have had a stronger business focus, a stronger sales focus. And we have improved our sales management, both with new people and new ways of working. And that has given results. One effect of the improved sales management is also our channel development. We've talked throughout the year about our new partners, how we worked with our partners, our partner event. And that has also given effect over this year. We have a strong product portfolio. And we have launched news to our partners and to our customers throughout the year. And that has also helped our growth. And of course, being an export company, we have had a currency effect.
But compared to last year, it's, of course, been not as big impact because of the trend of the Swedish kronor. If we break net sales down into region, we can see that in Q4 we were very, very strong in APAC and also in Americas. All three regions showed positive growth numbers. But this is the split. If we look at the full year, I'm proud to see that it's a steady growth in all our three regions. And that's exactly what we want to see. So the full year spread between the regions is looking good looking at. If we move our eyes to order intake, the Q4 was up 31%. And APAC and Americas were the strongest regions. We continue to see strong order intake in MIRA Compact and also on our best-selling resistivity instrument, the LS2.
End of year, we typically see a strong demand, strong orders from our customers and governments and academia. We could see that also this year. If you look at the full year again, I'm super proud to see that we have strong order intake in all our three regions. That is good to see. If we move to profitability, and let's start with the EBITDA numbers. In Q4, we had an EBITDA margin of 15.6% compared to last year's Q4, 12.9%. The reason behind was, of course, the strong net sales helped out. That's the main driver for this increase. But also we saw strong product margins in Q4. If you look over the year, the EBITDA was 14.6% compared to 13.1% last year. The net sales growth is the main driver for this.
We could, of course, see that we have grown our staff. The cost of personnel has gone up, but not in the same extent as our sales have grown. We have actively, and I've mentioned this before, worked with our product portfolio management to improve margins and to make sure that we discontinue non-commercially viable products and also worked on our margins in different ways. So that has helped bring up our margins and also, of course, the EBITDA. If we look at EBIT, this is a quarterly comparison for the last two years. So this is the seventh consecutive quarter in a row with a positive EBIT. EBIT for Q4 was 11.4%, which we consider is a strong EBIT. It is, of course, again, driven by the strong net sales in the quarter and a strong product margin.
We can also see that we had reduced depreciation from earlier R&D projects that was no longer needed to depreciate. Again, we do have a seasonal effect on sales. That also gives us a seasonal effect on EBIT. You can see over the quarters that we have had pretty fluctuating quarters from an EBIT perspective. This slide shows us the split between our two product lines, our two product brands per quarter. As you can see, we continue to have two strong brands, equally important brands, ABEM and MAlÅ. The Q4 number was a MAlÅ boost, a blue boost. That is because of shipping the backlog of the Mira Compact orders that we had received since our launch earlier this year.
If we look at cash flow, this growth, and we've had growth over years, that it has had an impact on cash flow, we have to say that. But if we look at the net cash flow for the quarter, it was 5.7% compared to last year's 1.7%. And for the full year, 3.9% compared to higher in 2022, 6.4%. And the main reason for the strong quarter was, again, I talk about the MALÅ MIRA Compact project, which was a big R&D investment for us, a big R&D project for us. And we capitalized that project the first three quarters. But the project was completed in the end of third quarter. And we didn't capitalize in Q4. So that is one reason for the improved net cash flow in Q4.
That's also the main driver for our full year net cash flow being lower than last year, that we have had a big capitalization of that R&D project throughout the first three quarters. Now I'll move over to a few events during the quarter. The main event was that we did an acquisition of our distributor in Australia, Geonix Pty Ltd. They have been a long-term partner to us since many, many years. So we know them well, and they know us well. So that feels very good. The reason for us to make this acquisition is that we want to strengthen the local presence in a key region and get direct customer access, both for sales and service and support. The acquisition was done as an asset purchase agreement. We signed it in early December.
Then, according to plan, the acquisition was effective January 15th this year, when the operations in the former company were transferred into our newly formed company, Guideline Geo Australia, based in Sydney. The operations of the former company had a turnover of roughly SEK 12 million in their last financial year. And the purchase price of this asset purchase was approximately SEK 8 million that we paid in cash and that we funded through a bank loan. So we are super excited about this acquisition. And we expect a positive impact of net sales, of course, but also on EBIT already from the first year. If that was a big thing for our sales channel development, we continue to also work with our partners and change our partners where we see a need to. And in APAC, we signed 2 new distributors.
In Japan, we signed for Swedish investors on the call might know Gadelius, which is a trade company, a Swedish-Japanese trading company. So they are starting to work as our distributor in Japan. In EMEA, we signed a new partner in southern Germany specifically for the MAlÅ brand. And we also found a new distributor to work with in Turkey. Also in December, we signed a strategic OEM agreement with a Danish company called TEMcompany. The purpose of this, or the objective of this, is that we and TEMcompany want to increase the use of TEM methods in the groundwater sector, finding and managing groundwater reservoirs. And there are 2.4 billion people that live in water-stressed areas worldwide. So the water crisis is growing worldwide.
We and TEMc ompany, we share a vision to make TEM methods and resistivity methods to find groundwater more easy to use by non-experts. That we really, by doing this, can make real and sustainable impact to the water crisis worldwide. The purpose with these new agreements is the intent is that TEM company will design and manufacture TEM products for us. We will bring them to market. We will sell them. We will support and service these solutions globally through our own channels and through our partner network under our ABEM product brand. We are really excited about this. We see that TEMc ompany products really complement and they strengthen our existing product portfolio targeting the groundwater sector. We already have our TEM products. This is a good complementary product line to us.
Talking about the groundwater sector and the groundwater management, we also have the resistivity method. The main resistivity instrument is called the Terrameter LS2. These are the sales growth numbers on the Terrameter LS2. Year-over-year, we saw 45% growth of our resistivity instrument LS2 over the past year. We can see growth in all our three regions. For groundwater, you can use both resistivity and TEM separately or as a combination. The LS2 is by far our best-selling product. And that we also start to see a growing demand for our TEM solutions, both our own and those that we hope to see from the new partnership. On the MAlÅ side, for those of you that have listened to me before, in Q3, we launched the new MAlÅ, the big new solution for GPR, MAlÅ Mira Compact.
That consists of an instrument and a newly released software platform that we call MALÅ Vision Desktop. This solution is targeting utility locating, finding pipes and cables in the ground, large surveys, fast, high productivity. And it also other types of ground investigations like archaeology is a good example. And we launched this internally to our partner network during the partner conference in June last year. And in September, we did this external launch to our end users. And in Q4, we had planned to do our first shipments. And we did. And the vast majority of these shipments went to our partners worldwide to be used as demo equipment and rental equipments and to use them in the sales process going forward. So the key takeaways from this presentation is that we had a record Q4 and a record full year.
An important highlight is our acquisition of our distributor in Australia that is now completed and incorporated in Guideline Geo. We are continuing on the strategic transitioning to a stronger business focus in this company. I would like to take the opportunity to express a big thank you to our customers worldwide, to our employees that made this year a very successful year, to our suppliers and to our distributors and partners, but also to you. We have seen many new shareholders over this past year. So thank you for your support. Then I think we will have time to take questions if you have typed in questions in the chat along the presentation.
Yes, there are several questions today. And the first is, how long will it take before we see the first labeled product from the Danish partnership?
We have actually already launched our first product internally coming out of this new partnership. And in a few weeks, we will also do the external launch to our end users. So it's on its way.
And how large part of the capitalized costs are related to the Mira Compact? And are there other products in the pipeline that are being capitalized in the balance sheet?
It is, as I said, the Mira Compact was a large project for us. But it's both the development of an instrument and the control software and the processing and vision platform. So it has been a big project for us. So the vast majority of the capitalized last year was from the Mira Compact project.
Order intake was about SEK 55 million. But you invoiced SEK 64 million. Please explain the large difference.
Yeah, again, I think it relates very much to the MIRA Compact. We had seen a backlog since the internal launch in June and the external launch in September. We had started to take orders. But we didn't ship until Q4. So we had grown a pretty big large backlog of MIRA Compact. And we managed to ship them in Q4. So that's the reason for the gap.
Regarding the software, how has it been received? And is your subscription service growing as you predict? Does it add anything to the margin boost? Or is it still too small?
With the MIRA Compact and the Vision platform, we have seen a jump in number of registered users and subscriptions. And it has been received really well throughout this autumn by our customer base.
It's still, from a revenue perspective, a pretty small amount so that we don't publish numbers on that separately. But it's driving our net sales. It's driving our instrument sales. And we see more and more subscriptions coming up.
Can you tell us more about the operation in Australia that you bought?
Yes, it's a really nice operation. It's a small operation with a turnover of roughly SEK 12 million. They have been our distributors. So obviously, they know how to sell our solutions. But they also service and support our solutions. And they also, as a business line, have services. They actually do surveys and have rentals of our solutions. They've been a distributor for us. We've been their main partner. But they've also distributed two other product lines.
Their main focus, and I've actually used that in their trade name, MALÅ, so they've focused mainly on GPR and MALÅ so far. But they have sold also the ABEM product line. So here, of course, we see an opportunity to grow this even further going forward.
The development made on MIRA Compact, can some of it be used towards improving other products? Please elaborate.
Yes, specifically on the software side, there are a lot of software improvements, both on the control software and on the processing and visualization platform. And of course, that can be used also for our other solutions. So it's a big gain here.
Can the really strong growth in the groundwater segment be explained? And will it continue?
The growth in the groundwater sector and in our resistivity instrument specifically has been almost a bit surprising to ourselves too, the really fast growth.
I think it is an impact that the climate crisis is a water crisis. There is a growing need in many regions to have control over your groundwater reservoirs and manage them in a sustainable way. I can take one example. We talked earlier this year about Afghanistan, no, Pakistan, sorry. In Sweden, SGU has a responsibility to have control over the Swedish groundwater. It's an authority that has that responsibility. The municipalities around Sweden have the responsibility to make sure that citizens have fresh water. More and more countries are doing the same way that Sweden has done on our groundwater. We had a large order to Pakistan who wanted to build up the same type of control mechanisms to have a country-controlled groundwater solution. For that, they need these types of instruments and solutions.
We see that happening in more and more countries going forward. Yes, we see a potential to further growth in the groundwater sector. That is why we see that resistivity and TEM are really good methods to help solve these problems.
We have several questions regarding the future and what we expect for further organic growth. If we can see these new levels as the new mark, so to speak, is there any comments we can make on that?
Of course, I can't talk about the future. I think it's sometimes easy to talk about the future by looking back. What I'm saying is that Q4 was an exceptionally strong quarter for us. Many things went our way. Nothing went against us.
So the MALÅ MIRA Compact, end of season, there were many factors and the seasonal effect, many factors that made this quarter a record quarter for us. And if you look at the quarter by quarter on EBIT, you can see the pretty large variations. And you can also see the seasonal variations. So I think looking back is often a good way to predict the future.
And maybe the last question here. Considering that you are talking more and more about software, are you shifting the business model somewhat? Or is it all towards hardware sales with service add-ons?
We definitely see that our software solutions drive our sales. But our business model is so far that we sell solutions. And the solutions include software and hardware. So we don't see the business model moving over to generating software from generating revenue from software alone.
It's the solution selling that drives our growth.
With that, I think we need to stop this.
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