Hello, welcome to this Q1 report from Guideline Geo. My name is Malin Siberg. I'm the CEO of Guideline Geo. I'll start with a one-pager about the company, and then we will move our focus to the Q1. As always, please type any questions that you may have in the chat, and we will have a Q&A session in the end. Who are we? We are your guide to the subsurface. We design and manufacture non-destructive geophysical solutions that are used for subsurface surveys. Our main applications are utility locating, finding pipes and cables subsurface, ground investigations such as ground stability, prior to any type of infrastructure or construction, groundwater management to find and explore new groundwater aquifers. We're a stock listed company. We have more than 100 years of history, and given our size, we have a true global reach that you can see in the map.
We sell direct through our own subsidiaries and indirect through the industry leading partner network that are the blue dots. We are on a growth journey. Since 2020 to 2025, building size, and we closed last year at SEK 200 million. Enough about us. Let's move to Q1. It was a good quarter. It was a strong quarter.
Our net sales was flat compared to last year, SEK 49.4 million versus SEK 49.7 million, but if you look at this in comparable currency, it would have been a growth with 16%. Order intake, SEK 51.7 million versus SEK 46 million last year is a growth with 12%. Our profitability grew a bit from last year's Q1, SEK 2.3 million versus SEK 1.8 million EBITDA, and SEK -1.4 million versus SEK -3.3 million last year's Q1. We have a positive and strong operating cash flow, SEK 9.8 million, and we are still at a strong and solid net cash situation with SEK 23.6 million.
Let's look at the net sales and order intake split by region. If we look at APAC, it was not a strong quarter. In APAC, we see a continued strong trend in India, and that's really pleasing to see. We changed the distributor one and a half years ago, and they're doing tremendously good for us. On top of that, it's pleasing to see, and it helps us when we see EU signing a trade agreement with India that gives us confidence in a continued growth in India. China is on a poor trend and is behind the decline in APAC. We're not the only one that see a decline in China. There is strong competition with local vendors, and you also see more and more tenders requiring local domestic brands in their tenders. EMEA.
EMEA had a pretty solid net sales and a strong order intake that we haven't completely delivered yet. Europe is behind the growth, and I'll come back to that in some future slides, exactly what products we've sold in Europe. Middle East and Africa started the year pretty good, but since the Iran conflict was started, we've, of course, been impacted in the Middle East region. Americas, a strong quarter, year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter growth. We're doing well in Americas, really pleasing to see, and it's U.S. driving most of this growth. Specifically this Q1, also pleasing to see is that we saw strong order intake and sales from Brazil. We've also done some channel changes in Brazil that has been positive. Also here again, EU has signed a trade agreement with the Mercosur agreement, and that, in our minds, will also help us going forward.
Geopolitical instability, but because of our geographic spread and our strong partner network, even though we see negative trends in some parts of the world, we can always find pockets of growth where we are. Overall, happy to see this. We are exporting, and 95% of our sales goes on export. When you analyze us, you need to understand how the currency affects us. We sell mainly in U.S. dollars, quite a bit in Euros, and some in Australian dollars in our Oceania subsidiary. Our supply chain is mainly in SEK, and two-thirds of our employee costs are in SEK. Currency impact in Q1, if you look at our net sales, was SEK 49.4 million, but in comparable currency to last year's SEK 49.7 million, the net sales would have increased by 16%.
If you look at the graph showing the currency development, you can see Q1 2025, we averaged the dollar at around 10.80. In Q1 2026, we averaged the dollar at 9.20. Of course, that is what makes a difference. During the quarter, we had a headwind from the currency in our EBIT with +2.2. You had, again, if you look at the black chart, the dollar chart, you can see that during Q1 2026, we entered the quarter with the dollar at roughly 9.20, and we left the quarter at 9.50. That gave us the tailwind from the currency in the quarter. Enough about the currency. What about the products? This chart shows the sales between our product lines. Q1 was a strong MALÅ quarter.
Across most of our products in the MALÅ portfolio, which is really pleasing to see, our high volume product, the MALÅ Easy Locator Core, the 2D solution, really good sales. U.S., Europe, strong sales. Our Array solutions, our 3D solutions, also sold really well in Q1. Both the MALÅ MIRA Compact that I've talked quite a bit about, the newly released, and I'll come back to that, the MALÅ MIRA Flex also sold well in Q1, and also our earlier, the MALÅ MIRA HDR solutions, have been selling well in Q1. Again, we are doing pushes for growing on after market sales, and slowly, quarter by quarter, we are increasing our after market sales, and that is also pleasing to see. If we turn our eyes to ABEM, it was not as strong a quarter.
What was strong in the quarter was our TEM sales, and I'll come back to that in a product slide in a while. The light blue bar on top of the Q1 is what we call other, and this quarter, we had strong sales from our Reutech business in North America, and I'll come back to that, too. If we look at profitability, we were pretty satisfied with this result. EBITDA of SEK 2.3 million and EBIT of SEK -1.4 million. As expected and pretty okay. What drives this is a mix of things, of course. I mentioned the currency effect. The product portfolio mix that we sell does affect the EBIT level, of course. Some third-party products have lower margins, and some products are really high margin. That affects overall profitability or margin. We have some one-time effects, from a cost perspective.
We held two partner conferences, and that means a lot of travel and some additional cost around that. We also did an IT upgrade of our ERP system that was a one-time cost in this quarter. Net cash and cash flow. We had a positive operating cash flow, SEK 9.8 million. Q1s are often a good cash flow quarter because we sell a lot, we deliver a lot in Q4, and then we get paid in Q1. Expected, but still positive. We have a solid net cash situation, very similar to what we had after last year's Q1, SEK 23.6 million. I want to highlight a couple of things around our markets and our applications. In Q1, we saw strong sales and order intake from the Infrastructure customers and from Utility Locating customers, goes hand in hand with our MALÅ product lines, and mainly driven from U.S. and Europe.
Pleasing to see. The Groundwater market continues to go well for us, and again, here is where we saw a strong trend in sales from our TEM products. Then we also had a strong quarter from the Defense sector. For those of you who follow us, at the end of last year, we signed an OEM partner agreement with a partner in the Defense Industry, and we got multiple orders from this OEM partner in Q1. In Q4 last year, we also signed a framework agreement with the European armed forces, and they also continued to place order with us in Q1. Also pleasing to see. Some of you might have seen two press releases that went out in Q1, and they were about large orders that we got from mining customers in the U.S.
In North America, we are a distributor of solutions from South African Reutech Mining, and we sell their slope stability radars for open pit mines, like you can see in the picture, to make sure that the slopes are stable. In Q1, we got one order from a U.S. existing customer, of another radar solution, like you can see in the picture. We also got from an existing customer, a three-year service agreement worth SEK 6.0 million. Important for this business is also import taxes to the U.S. Last year, we faced 40% import taxes from South Africa to the U.S. and of course that impacted all new sales. Since February, that is now down to 10%, so this has helped open up this market for us again and I'm really pleased to see these large orders coming in immediately.
Early in the year, we focus on gathering our partner network. In Q1, we held 2 partner conferences, one for the Latin American partners in Argentina this time in Buenos Aires in February. For our Asian partners, we gathered 45 of our Asian partners in Thailand in early March. These are important to us because 65% of our sales is through our partner network. They are our salespeople, so we need to stay close with them. We need them to give us direct feedback what is needed on their specific market, in their specific regions. For that, these conferences are really important to us. We also provide sales training. We do product launches. We do product trainings, and we train them how to demo our solutions, hardware and software.
These groups have started to share between themselves customer cases and best practices as a way to learn from each other. Of course, it's also really important for us to build that network, to build those strong relationships between us and our sales channel. Product highlights, innovation highlights in the quarter. We launched, in the quarter, something that I call the MALÅ MIRA Flex, and you can see that on the picture on the top. It's a 3D GPR solution suitable for mobile infrastructure surveys, such as road investigations that you can see in the picture. The solution is the box under the vehicle. This is not a typical product from us. This is what we call an OEM product, where we sell components. We sell our radar antennas, we sell our software as components to a customer who integrates this into their full solution.
This has been really well received, and we started selling it a little bit before we launched it, and we already have quite a number of vehicles like this driving around the world doing subsurface surveys. The picture below is from the product ABEM GroundTEM Trek that we launched end of last year, and it's a mobile solution for water prospecting, groundwater prospecting, really easy to use, really helps increase in-field productivity for water surveys, and you can see the result directly in your app while you're walking. We took orders from end of last year, and we started shipping during the quarter. This is why I said that we saw strong trend for the TEM business in Q1. That was partly due to the build-up sales order backlog of these. In the U.S., in the quarter, we made a structural change internally.
We've had three offices in the U.S., and for a small team, that has been a bit too large of a cost to us. We've been thinking about this for quite some time. Due to a couple of reasons, a staff change was one of them, during Q1, we initiated to consolidate all sales, service, support, and the warehouse and administration to a new office in Denver, Colorado for our ABEM and MALÅ business. We'll move within the territory, as you can see in the picture. Our ambition is to strengthen the team by doing this. We know this will increase our internal efficiency and, of course, we will also get some cost savings on top of that. In Q1, end of Q1, we moved out of our current office in Summerville, South Carolina.
In Q2, we will move into the new office in Golden in Colorado. We will, though, keep our existing Reutech office where we have our warehouse for the service in Salt Lake City in Utah. It's a small office. The sustainability highlight for this quarter is around cables and around supply chain. Because a key cornerstone in our sustainability strategy is to have our supply chain as local to our manufacturing site as possible. That means close to Västerbotten in northern Sweden. Geo physical cables, they are a key component to our ABEM product lines. We sell a lot of cables. Customers can buy a kilometer of cables from us, and they're heavy, they're high quality, and they're costly. During Q1, we validated a new supplier of these cables in Västerbotten. That means that we have a dual sourcing of these important components going forward.
Our existing supplier in the U.S. for that market, and a Swedish-based supplier for the rest of the world. This shortens transports, and we increase our overall rate of local manufacturing of our parts. To summarize Q1, it was a good quarter. Despite the geopolitical turbulence in the world, our global presence through our subsidiaries, but also through our partner networks, makes us stay strong. We saw a strong growth in the U.S. this quarter. I'm really glad to see that. We've also focused on the restructuring of our own U.S. operations, and initiated a consolidation of offices. With that, I end the presentation and hand over to take any questions that you may have.
Yes. The first question we have is that you mentioned two large orders from the mining industry. Can you elaborate around this, and can we expect this to continue?
Yes. These orders are about what you can see on the picture. They are about our Reutech solutions, where we are a distributor for all of North America, Canada, U.S., Mexico, for Reutech Mining solutions. It's radar solutions to make sure that the slopes in open pit mines are stable, that you can drive and continue to develop that mine. One of the orders was to an existing customer for one more system, one more solution, that we expect to deliver, that we have delivered in Q1. The other order was for a service agreement, a three-year service agreement, because these radars, they need to be proactively maintained and also emergency maintained. Our office in Utah, we have three service technicians that continuously maintain and service these solutions. Two big and important orders in Q1.
I think I said that in the presentation, but important, last year, the Reutech business was really slow for us, partly because of the 40% import tax to import solutions from South Africa to the U.S., and that is now down to 10%, so this market has opened up again for us. That is really positive for us.
Next two questions are on the same topic. First, great to note your growth in the defense market. What are your plans moving forward in this growth market? The second question is, was this according to your expectations, the orders?
Yes, the D efense sector is obviously a growth sector, so of course, we are looking into that very much as well. We were really happy to sign the OEM agreement that we did end of last year with a partner in that industry who wanted to integrate our components into their solutions. We think that was a very good way of addressing this market because we don't have the sales channel ourselves towards that market. To join forces with that type of partner was strategically a good fit for us. That partnership has turned out really well so far. As I said, we got multiple orders from them in Q1. If you remember last year, we got orders from them even before signing the partnership agreement. We are on track with our expectations here.
I think that's a good example of how we address the Defense sector. We also get the direct customers, like the armed forces that we signed a framework agreement with in December last year. They did a purchase, and now we've seen another purchase in Q1. Again, when we sign these agreements, we expect revenue to come, and it's pleasing to see that it also is being executed on. Our plan is to continue on the direct sales, and also to go through these OEM partnerships for the Defense sector.
Last question right now is what triggered your reconstruction in the U.S., and what is your expected outcome?
Yes, we have been thinking about this for quite some time. It is a small team in the U.S., and having three offices, I think everyone can see that that is not the most efficient way to organize it. What triggered it was an employee change. One of our service technicians for ABEM MALÅ wanted to try out new jobs. She moved to our Utah office to start working with the Reutech business instead. That meant that we were decreasing the number of people working from our South Carolina office. We thought that was a good timing to actually close down that office and consolidate office to Colorado, which is our main office in the U.S. That was the timing reason. We have pretty high hopes on this.
There's always some turbulence when you do this type of consolidation, but we know that this will strengthen the team to be working from one office together, both product lines, sales, warehouse, service, and support, and admin in the same office. When you're a small team, that matters. It will strengthen the team. It will increase our internal efficiency. Of course, we expect a cost reduction because we're shutting down a pretty large office.
I think that finalizes the questions.
All right. Thank you for listening in, and see you again for the next que-