Hello, welcome to our Q3 presentation. My name is Malin Siberg and I'm the CEO of Guideline Geo. For any newcomers, I'll start us off with a brief introduction to who we are. We design and manufacture non-destructive geophysical solutions, both instruments and software, for three main applications. It's for the utility locating market, it's for the groundwater market, and it's for general ground investigations subsurface. We're a stocklisted company listed on First North Growth Market. We are more than 100 years old, and given our size, we have a truly global reach through our direct sales, through our sales offices worldwide in Orange, and through our indirect sales and support channel, our partners worldwide in more than 80 countries. Let's move our focus to Q3. Q3 was a strong quarter for us. Order intake was up 20% and net sales was up 9% to SEK 46 million.
EBITDA was SEK 5.1 million and EBIT SEK 0.9 million, both positive. We have a positive operating cash flow, SEK 0.6 million, and we have a strong net cash situation, a continued strong net cash situation with SEK 19.9 million compared to SEK 4.7 million last year. We do have quarter-to-quarter variations. Those of you who follow us know that. If you look at the year-to-date highlights, we are up 12% in order intake, we are up 9% in net sales, we have a positive EBITDA of SEK 8.1 million, still negative on EBIT, - SEK 5.5 million, and we have a strong operating cash flow this year to date. If we break down net sales and order intake to markets and to regions, I can start with the market and application side and provide a couple of highlights from Q3.
We continue to see a strong demand from the infrastructure market and specifically utility locating. This quarter, the U.S. continues on a strong path as well as the U.K. Tough years last year, but this year, U.K. and U.S. are leading this growth. The groundwater market in Q3 was strong in Asia. Asia is typically strong here, but this quarter, Asia stands out. We continue to get requests from the defense industry regarding demining surveys, both from Europe and from Asia, more than previous years. If you look at the tables, they show sales and order intake breaking down per region. To highlight a couple of things in Q3, we saw a growth in EMEA compared to Q3 last year, + 38%. We were flat in APAC, but if you look at the year-to-date numbers, APAC is the strongest region with a year-over-year growth here.
Americas was down 5% compared to Q3 last year. It's mainly Latin America that is behind the slower progress here. If you look at year-to-date numbers, we actually see growth in all three regions, which is very pleasing to see. If we look at our net sales numbers broken down by product line or brand, we can see that both MALA brand and the ABEM product lines grew this quarter. In MALA, there are two products that are the main factors behind this growth. It's a continued growth of the Easy Locator Core, our smaller GPR product, but also coming from our most recent release, the MIRA Compact, our multi-channel, our array solution for larger surveys that are behind the growth. Also good to see is that we see a growth from our aftermarket.
We have a large installed customer base, and in the aftermarket, we include things like accessories, upgrades, trainings, things like that are included in our aftermarket growth, and that has been growing quarter by quarter. The same goes for ABEM. We see a growth in our aftermarket sales here as well, but also in our main ABEM product, the ABEM Terrameter LS 2, our resistivity instrument for groundwater surveys, but also a pretty strong growth from our TEM product line. The light blue on top of the chart is called Other. It's a mix, but the main part here is often driven by our Reutech sales. We are distributed to Reutech Mining in North America. We distribute and sell their radar solutions for ground stability in open pit mines. It's both a new product sales, but it's also a service business.
This has been weak this quarter, and it's been weak this year. One of the reasons why the Reutech business has been weak this year is because of the U.S. import tariffs. Reutech is a South African manufacturer, so they are impacted by a 30% import tax of the systems that we import from South Africa to the North American market. Of course, that has affected our sales, and it will affect our sales. Not the service business, which is a steady and ongoing business, but our new product sales will be affected and have been affected. We also got new levels of import tariffs on our own, the Swedish manufactured products, ABEM and MALA, and that is now 15% on everything we import to the U.S. We are a true export company, Swedish manufacturing, and we sell in mainly U.S. dollars worldwide.
We also sell in euros in Europe, and we sell in Australian dollars in Oceania. Our supply chain is mainly in Swedish kronors, and two-thirds of our people are paid in Swedish kronors. When the Swedish krona is strong, that affects both our top line and our EBIT numbers, our EBITDA and EBIT numbers. Those are the numbers that we report every quarter. In Q3, we continue to have a headwind from the currency, - 0.6. Year to date, because of the strength in kronor in the beginning of the year, we are down - 4.8 due to the currency affecting our profitability. This is the EBITDA and EBIT per quarter: EBITDA 5.1 and EBIT 0.9. As I said, it is affected by tariffs, and it is affected by the currency effect that we do see. This quarter, I also want to highlight two one-time effects that impacted our profitability.
We had an employee event bringing all employees worldwide to northern Sweden. I'll talk a little bit more about that. We also launched our new website that we've been working on throughout the year that impacted EBIT in Q3. If we look at the cash flow and the net cash situation, we have a positive operating cash flow of 0.6 for the quarter. The reason is that we are continuing to work on our stock levels to get them to a healthy, stable situation. We still have what we think we know is a stable net cash situation with 19.9 million in net cash. On top of that, we have an additional SEK 10 million in an unused check credit. During the quarter, we signed two new distributors in the U.S. They are targeting the utility locating market in the U.S. That is big, and it's growing.
We were actively searching for distributors in states where we were not previously as active as we wanted to be. We signed two companies: Pres-Tech, based in California, and that will cover California and Arizona for us for our utility locating products; and Burton NDT, they're based in Texas, but they cover both Texas and also Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana for us for the utility markets. This is very much in line with the company channel strategy to grow our sales through distribution through our market leading partner network also here in the U.S. If we shift focus to our innovation agenda, I want to highlight the MALA MIRA Compact tow hitch carrier. The new here is the tow hitch carrier. It enables our MIRA Compact that's been available for some time now to go mobile.
You can attach it to any type of vehicle, and you can drive highway speeds and get real-time GPR data. It's been very much requested for, and we launched it in the end of June this year. We had an introduction campaign throughout the quarter, and we've seen very strong reception of this new accessory, and we've seen a strong order intake throughout the quarter. Shipments of the new accessory started early October, just after the closing of the quarter. That was an accessory. What we see is it's our software that really drives the sales growth of our GPR solutions. You can see on the video an example of what our software does. For us, we really invest in bringing ease of use and helping out with visualization of GPR data to make it easy for the user to interpret and analyze what they actually see.
We see that our vision platform, that we call the MALA Vision Platform, has really helped get strengthened interests from end users and specifically driven a growing interest for our larger GPR solutions, the multi-channels, the array solutions within GPR. Branding and communication. In Q3, we launched our new website based on our new graphical and brand identity. It's also a new modern technical platform to build on going forward. I talked about the one-time effects, and this is one of them. In early September, we gathered all our employees for an event in Storforsen, which is up north in Sweden in Piteälven. We do this because one-third of our employees are based outside Sweden, and we have employees in 10 countries, and only in Sweden we have three offices.
We continue to invest in our strong company culture, and we think this is really key to make sure that we have this efficient, swift, good collaboration across time zones and cultures. That is key to us. On the agenda for these days, of course, we talk about strategy. Of course, we talk about the plans ahead. We spent an extra day bringing the leaders together for leadership development. We spent time on application trainings, but also on breakout sessions to make sure that we really use the time efficiently for each and every person that we bring to Sweden. As you can see in the picture, we also spent some time on team-building activities. To round up the Q3, the message I want to send is that we had a strong order intake and net sales in this quarter.
We have positive EBITDA and EBIT in the quarter despite these one-time effects. We see a continued strong interest specifically for our larger GPR array solutions, both software and hardware. With that, I end today's presentation and hand over if you have any questions to me.
Yes. You mentioned some one-time costs that affected the results in Q3. Can you tell us more?
Yes, obviously. We are roughly 90 people in the company, and bringing 90 people to northern Sweden, you can do that math yourself. Of course, that is an investment for us. We don't do that every year. We've historically done that every second or third year, but of course, that is a big investment. Also, the web launch. We needed to update our web, the technical platform for our website. At the same time, we also did an update to our brand identity. That, of course, is an investment. It's a one-time investment as well. Those two, if you look at EBITDA and EBIT comparing quarter by quarter, that would have been a positive number, a positive comparison number if we didn't have these one-time effects.
Another cost that increased was the personnel cost. It was up with 34%. Is this due to something special?
I can't see that number straight out of my head, but we have, if that is a quarter-by-quarter comparison, there are some changes in how we count on headcount compared to last year's, and I think that's a note in the previous quarterly reports. Also, there has been a shift of consultants moving to employees, and that's actually a cost saving. I think if you read the notes in previous quarterly reports, that should be in there.
How will these costs, not only personnel, but costs in general, develop moving forward?
I can't really talk about the cost going forward, but of course, we have a very cautious and systematic cost control to make sure that we are not overspending compared to our sales numbers. I've talked about our forecasting mechanism that we implemented last year, that we monthly both go into detail about the forecast in terms of sales volume, but also, of course, in our cost and OpEx spending. As I think most of you know, most cost is connected to headcounts. Of course, that is tracked and monitored very, very closely.
Also curious on future investments. Could you give us some information on that, please?
We are a tech company, and we are continuously investing in our innovation. We continue to invest in building new products, bringing new products to market, and we think that is why we are strong in the GPR and the resistivity sector specifically. We have invested heavily on R&D, and we're continuing to invest heavily in R&D.
Could you tell us about the underlying market? Are there any signs of improvements?
Yes, I think I've talked about this both this quarter and last quarter. Last year, we saw very weak quarters in the utility infrastructure market, both in the U.S., absolutely in Europe, and in China. Since the beginning of this year, we've seen a comeback, a bounce back, both in North America and in Europe in the utility and the infrastructure market. That's been absolutely a big shift compared to last year. On the other hand, we've seen a negative change in the water sector, specifically in the Middle East and Africa, where quite a lot of the funding to projects that use our equipment to find water was affected when U.S. aid was shut down earlier this year because that affected NGOs and funding of that type of project, and that hit our sales in that region during all of this year, actually, so far.
Are the sales of Reutech Mining profitable, and do they have a material impact on the group's overall profitability?
Yes, as I said, our Reutech Mining business is both new sales and a very complex service and support where we have service contracts with our existing customers. The service business is a stable business, and it's a very healthy business. The tariffs I talked about are only affecting the new product sales when we sell a new radar solution to a customer. That is what has been affected and will be affected because of the tariffs.
Could you describe how the process of signing new distributors works? Is it a competitive process involving multiple suppliers, and does it usually translate quickly into new sales?
It's very seldom a competitive situation where a distributor chooses in between us or someone else. It's an active search from both parties where we search for a partner in a specific region or a specific application. It's not a quick process to find someone and then get the due diligence from both ends to see that it's a good match. Once we sign and agree on targets and ways of working, it's a process to get the sales up. The two that I spoke about in the U.S. for this quarter have already turned into sales. They've been off to a good start because they know their business, they know their customer, their region, they represent other equipment in the same domain. That's made it easy for them to get a good start.
CapEx is significantly lower than last year. Is this the normal level going forward, or should we expect an increase in the coming years?
I can't really talk about the future, so I think I'll pass on that question.
The 20% increase in order intake, does it mainly relate to deliveries expected in Q4, or does it also include orders for 2026?
Good question. I think it's on the top of my head, it's mainly deliveries in 2025. Something might go over, but typically our delivery terms are shorter than that. I expect most of that to be delivered in 2025.
Is the growth observed in Europe linked to the large infrastructure programs planned in the region?
I think it's more related to the general bounce back of the infrastructure and construction market in northern Europe and our sales abilities, rather than one or two larger infrastructure projects. Of course, there are those connections, but there is not one large infrastructure project that is driving our growth.
I think that finalizes our questions.
Thank you for attending, and see you again in this setting in a quarter's time. Thank you.