Thank you very much and, a warm welcome to you all. We are quite pleased to report the strong improvements in this quarter. Let's dive into the numbers. Next slide, please. Page two. As can be seen, sales came in at SEK 886 million, which meant that we grew by 33%, which is a quite high growth, but also according to plan in the quarter. Organically, we grew by 5.1%. We are quite pleased with the 5% because that means we are growing with the market, and also given that we have made some changes during the course of last year, where we had unprofitable units and contracts which we are no longer dealing with, and we are still growing with the 5%.
That is, of course, we're pleased to see that number. In terms of profitability, EBITA, we came in at SEK 61 million, and that's a significant improvement and a very strong trend, so we are quite pleased with the results. The margin came in at 6.9% in the quarter, and we have been working for the last two years because Q1 has been our slowest quarter. Given the recent acquisition and also organic improvements we've made within the business have led to the result, and we're quite pleased to see that we could achieve almost 7% margin in the first quarter.
In terms of profitability for the last 12 months, we achieved 8.2%, and that means that we are in line with the 8% target for the first time. We're quite happy with that one. We have been on an upward trend for several quarters, but it's nice to see that we finally achieved that target. That was, to me, at least, that's the highlight of this report. Earnings per share came in in accordance with plan there at 0.27 SEK. Cash flow came in at a very strong SEK 79 million, pretty much related to the high activities we had in the fourth quarter. Then we saw that we had a cash flow coming in from the fourth quarter into the first quarter.
Leverage are coming down to 2.3. We also made several acquisitions. We've made 4 acquisitions within the quarter, and then we have finalized Aktiv Veidrift after the reporting period. That means that we have made five acquisitions year to date. Next slide, please. Slide 3. Taking a slightly longer view on what's going on here, we can see that the CAGR for the last three years is quite impressive 34%. We are growing at a steady pace, even though it's a quite high pace. Profitability-wise, we have a CAGR of 123%, and there we can see that we more recently have increased the profitability of the business pretty much according to plan.
That means that we right now are at SEK 278 million in EBITA for the last three years here. It's going pretty much according to plan, and we're happy to see the improvement in profitability as we have been talking about for the last, I would say two years. Next slide, please. Page four. Where does the growth come from? Well, organically, as I mentioned, we grew by 5%, and that is pretty much in line with where the market is growing with. Then we have made the acquisitions with another 26.5%. All in all, I believe that the revenue came in pretty much according to plan.
It's a strong quarter, and we're happy to see the growth rate that we are, and we are growing in line with the market. Next slide, please. A few words on the acquisitions we have made so far. We started out by Rainset in Finland, and this is Ahto and Tero. This is basically a sweet spot company. It's a landscaping company with a revenue of EUR 4 million. It's operating in the Helsinki area. They are well known by our two guys in Finland, Tapio and Tommy from Viher-Pirkka. It's been on their list for a long time. We have been in a dialogue with those guys for quite some time, and we were able to have them coming on board in the first quarter.
We have another company, and this is Utemiljo in Hallandsåsens. This is a company founded back in 2008 by Oskar, and he's a third-generation entrepreneur, so he has the green DNA in the blood. Public customers, also a sweet spot company, and we do welcome them to the group. It's a very nice addition to the companies we have in the region, and we are starting to have, I would say, quite a cluster from basically from Malmö all the way up to the coast there. We have several companies in that region. It's a very nice fit, and as I mentioned, warm welcome to the company. Next slide, please. This is page seven. We also made an acquisition in Norway, in Oslo, Glenn Syvertsen, that was founded not so long ago, back in 2011.
It's a well-known company by our existing CEOs in Norway, and we are starting to have quite a cluster of, or I would say, really excellent companies in the city of Oslo. It's a fine company and,
We've been at annual revenues, you can see of about NOK 35 million with 14 employees, and we do welcome this company to the group as well. Next slide, please.
We always give example of some projects that we like to highlight during the quarter. First of all, it's worth mentioning that the mainstay of our business consists of small and medium-sized projects. We are awarded, I mean, of course, seven contracts every day. Here are some examples of the larger ones. The first one is with the city of Helsingborg, where we were awarded five contracts worth roughly SEK 75 million per year, and they span from two years up to, I think it's seven years.
This is renewal of some of our existing contracts, but also an expansion with add-on of a few more. The work is ground maintenance taking care of the green areas in the city. Next slide, please, to page nine. Next project is a large infrastructure project awarded to Håkonsen & Sukke, a quite newly acquired company in Norway. So we are doing the landscaping work in connection with the train station in Drammen in Norway, southwest of Oslo. This is quite unusual project. It spans over four years. It is of course an example of true infrastructure and the important role we play in creating our cities and creating value to the society. This starts 2022 and completes at 2025.
Next slide, please, to page 10. This is another project, awarded to Håkonsen & Sukke, where we are doing underground work, including technical installations, and then above ground work and landscaping, in Tønsberg, which is also south of Oslo in the oldest city in Norway, I found out. The work is worth approximately NOK 30 million, and it spans over two years. Fantastic project for us. Next slide, please, to page 11. Order backlog increased by 10% to SEK 5.7 billion. We have good order visibility. The order backlog consists of multi-year contracts, and then we have the below one-year contracts, which are renewed constantly. SEK 5.7 billion is a healthy order book and gives us good visibility and makes planning for the business possible. Next slide, please.
Page 12. Here we look at the income statement and balance sheet. I'd like to comment on. We saw the total income of SEK 886 million in the quarter, and the operating profit was SEK 39 million, earnings before tax SEK 22 million. I'd like to comment on the financial expenses, which were higher than last quarter. This is driven to some extent by that we have larger outstanding debt and a commitment fee. The largest part is actually revaluation of earn-outs due to currency fluctuations between the Norwegian krone and the Swedish krona. Next slide, please, to page 13. Performance per segment. We saw growth in most segments, and fantastic margin development in some of the segments. Let me run through segment by segment shortly.
We saw margin improvement in Region South of 6.1 percentage points, and steady sales. Region Mid, we saw an expansion of 5.4 percentage points in margin, which is quite strong, and the growth was quite strong as well, NOK 70 million. Region Stockholm, we've seen a positive trend as we've been talking about for many quarters. Here we actually saw that we increased margin by 13 percentage points between last quarter and this one. Region North, roughly the same sales. We had a strong quarter actually last year in Region North, but despite that, we managed to increase profitability by 3.1 percentage points. Norway had another fantastic quarter with more than doubled sales and roughly maintained profitability.
Finland, we had that first quarter is low season in the Finnish operations that we have. All in all, we increased the margin from 2.2% last year to 6.9% this year, up 4.7 percentage points. Next slide, please. Page 14, financial position. Johan commented on the cash flow. The leverage actually decreased to 2.3, down from 2.9 last year, we were at 2.4, I think, in Q4. This is despite actually the acquisitions that we made. We paid some earn-outs during the quarter, and we also repurchased shares of SEK 24 million. We're quite pleased with the leverage going in this direction. It's a continued focus on acquisitions. Cash was SEK 332 million.
Next slide, please. Page 15. Over to you, Johan.
Just to mention or comment on the financial targets we have. Those are the four that we are supposed to be growing by 10%. Right now we are at 40%. We are growing significantly higher or faster than the financial targets. In terms of profitability, we have had since we made the IPO three or four years ago that we should reach an EBITA of 8%. As I did mention, I'm quite happy to report that for the first quarter of this year, we are actually at 8.2% for the last 12 months in terms of EBITA. That is kind of a breakthrough for us, so I'm happy with that one.
Not saying I'm content at that level, but I'm happy to report that we achieved the target that we have had. Carl-Fredrik did mention about the leverage where the target is 2.5 times net debt EBITDA, and we are at 2.3, even though we are continuing to grow faster and making additional acquisitions. In terms of dividend, we had the goal of 40%, and so far we have not made any dividends. Next slide, please. Page 16. This is just to sum it up before we open up for questions here, that we saw, I would say, a very strong growth, pretty much according to plan. Even so, we are growing by 33%. We have organic growth 34%, EBITDA organic growth 123%.
We are growing quite quickly and according to plan in terms of revenue. The profitability is coming in very nicely with the 8.2% as reported. Also in terms of acquisitions, we are quite active in the market. I would say we have a healthy pipeline, meaning that we are in discussions with several companies, and we are staying prudent in terms of which company that we do acquire. It should be high quality companies.
We take some time in order to meet with entrepreneurs and get to know them in a good way so we have a cultural fit with the entrepreneurs and making sure that they will stay on board for a long time with the company. That's pretty much we have a strong quarter, and we are happy to report the financial data. By that, I believe we open up for questions.
Thank you. If you do wish to ask a question, please press zero and one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you might do so by pressing zero and two to cancel. The first question comes from Dan Johansson, SEB. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Thank you so much. Good morning, Johan and Carl-Fredrik.
Good morning.
Three questions from my side, if I may. I'll take them one by one. First question, you experienced quite a serious improvement in profitability here compared to last year. Would you characterize this as an exceptional Q1, or is this sort of the new normal for you guys now in this quarter? And if possibly, could you also walk us through the main drivers here? What is the mix from your latest acquisition? And what is sort of your efforts of reducing seasonality and also improving the business? Could you elaborate a bit on that?
Yeah. It's a fairly big question that you're coming with. If you recall going back to 2020, for the first quarter where we had clearly difficulties given that we had a very warm weather. We have ever since that time period, when we looked upon companies to acquire, we have actively sought out companies who have a strong performance in the fourth and the first quarter to balance the company, so to say, so we don't start on a negative note. In particular, companies like road maintenance companies, they have the mainstay of their revenue during the winter season. That's one effect that we see for this quarter, and I do expect that to continue moving into the future, of course, because that's the setup of those companies.
We have had a discussion for a long time, ever since we acquired Svensk Markservice and integrated and decentralized those companies. As I believe we mentioned in the fourth quarter, that we now more or less have finalized the decentralization and incorporated those entities to legal entities. We can now see, as you can see as well, that in Region Stockholm, for instance, where we haven't made any acquisitions, we can see a strong improvement in profitability in the first quarter. That is a result of the activities we have done with the companies who are not showing that good profitability historically. Now we see that some of them have turned the page and improved their business.
I hope I didn't catch most of your question there.
Roughly 50% of the improvement coming from legacy groups, I'd say, and 50% from newly acquired companies.
Okay. Thank you for the color. It answered my question. You talked a bit about Stockholm there, and just a more specific question on that. Revenues are lower, as you say, due to the contract terminations, but margins clearly better for the third quarter in a row now. My question is really, will you remain cautious on growing revenues in Stockholm now going forward until you have a few more third quarters with good earnings under the belt? Have the Stockholm operations earned the trust to start growing going forward?
We've seen some growth. This is not like a fast-moving business, even though there's a huge market, and you can grow quickly if you choose to put out a bidding price. That is not really our strategy. Our strategy is to be a profitable company and not just gaining market shares or growing the revenue. We are growing in Region Stockholm, but I'm still very careful that we have to grow in a controlled way, making sure that we continue the trend of increased profitability in the region.
I do expect, not to say this is a forecast, but I do expect the improvements to take place in most of the companies who have not met our internal profitability target, and we're working actively with those entities. Of course, during that process, we are careful with gaining too much or winning too much new contracts. It's a bit early to say that we have started to increase revenue in parallel with the profitability improvement in those entities.
They still have to show most of them still have to show that they are in a stable environment, and they are in a good projection in terms of taking care of the customers and our employees and such before I would see any major growth for those companies. It does not mean we are shrinking, but I just want to make sure that they are in control. To some extent, this is a seasonal business, and that means that right now we are starting out our high season, and that's when you have temporary workers coming in and that type of things. We need to focus on just making sure that we are continue the trend on increased profitability in those entities.
I mean, Dan, we're still at the 2.7% in margin last 12 months in Stockholm, so it's too low.
Yeah.
Perfect. Thanks. Makes total sense. Perhaps a final question, if I may, on fixed and increasing costs, cost inflation, input costs, et cetera. Was that something that happened to you, not throughout the year one? Perhaps if you can share some thoughts on how it will potentially impact on that factor there over the coming quarters of this year.
Yeah. This is a big question because we have had to deal with, I would say, the negative impacts from COVID-19 ever since the beginning of the disease back in 2020, I believe. The side effects or the negative effects have, of course, been that our employees have been home sick. We have had customers who have been home sick, and that means that we cannot execute the projects as we intended, that we could not get the supply of parts that we have been dealing with because we do actually buy plants from China and stuff. When China is closing down, we can't get the plants. You have to source locally.
There's price increase you have to deal with, and you have to talk to the customers, and you have to reschedule. There's a lot of activities going on. Right now it's a big focus on the diesel price have come up, and we have a higher inflation. For our CEOs who are running their own subsidiaries, it's not that big change. We are bidding on new contracts, and if the cost goes up, then when we do the bidding, we have to calculate with a higher cost. For the long contracts that we have with the public sector, there we have index clauses. It's a bit complicated how they are structured, but in the majority of the cases, we are covered given that it's long contracts with index clauses.
We are in negotiations with the customers on how to interpret it and how to deal with the cost increases. Also, most of our fixed contracts are not that long. They typically are, I would say, three months from bid to end of project. Should we have had a price increase during that timeframe, then that's something we have to talk with the customers and see if we can get some type of reimbursement. They will roll out, and you will have new bids and new contracts coming in. It's a continuous process. We, of course, will have a negative impact of inflation, but it's not a major difficulty for us. We are dealing with it on a day-to-day basis, and it's not a new problem.
It's an environment we have had for the last, I would say, one and a half years.
Thank you so much, Johan and Fredrik, for answering my questions. I'll jump back in the line for now. Thank you.
Thank you, Dan, for the questions.
The next question comes from Alexander Siljeström, Pareto Securities. The line is now open. Please go ahead.
Thank you, good morning, everyone. First off, very nice to see you exceeding that 8% margin target that you set a few years back. Just hoping you could discuss your thoughts about potentially raising that target going forward. I mean, you have a number of acquisitions still coming through your numbers and if I'm not mistaken, all of those are margin-accretive. There's also opportunities you have within the legacy structure to continue to improve margins there. Why not raise the targets for the coming years?
Good morning, Fredrik. Thank you for the question there. Of course, we are thinking about what is the so to say the next level here. As you know, we are not officially communicating any forecast. Of course, as we see now that we have met the 8% target, then we will do the analysis. I need, or we need, I would say, one or two more quarters to see how stable is the trend, how will the new companies perform. Because when we're growing at such a high pace as we are, we are being joined by several new companies, basically every quarter.
We just need some more time to just make sure that how should we deal with the target we have, and this is something that, of course, will be discussed with our board of directors. Should we choose to change the financial target? It's a bit too early to comment on that one in reality. Of course, we are happy to see that we meet the target that we have promised to the market.
Okay.
I mean, we see a positive trend, and we try to do the best we can every day and every quarter.
Yeah.
Let's see where that takes us.
Yeah. Independent of the target, we are clearly moving in the right direction.
Mm-hmm.
Sure. That's fair enough. A second question. With Stockholm, and I appreciate what you're saying with margins still being subpar, but Stockholm broadly improving and I guess it takes less of your time now than it did one and a half years ago. All business units now turned into separate legal entities. What is the next main structural project that you guys will be conducting from headquarters outside of additional M&A?
Now, we don't have that big corporate office to begin with. It's only a handful of employees. Of course, when a company is growing at the pace at which we are growing, we have to stay ahead of the curve, making sure that we have the right structure, that we can take care of both the legacy companies, but also the newly acquired companies, that we have stable processes internally on how we govern the companies, how we motivate them, how we communicate. Basically, how do we take care of all the businesses we have.
Given that we have been growing at the growth that we grew by 9 companies last year, and we are up to four or five companies so far this year, then that is something that we are occupying ourselves with. We are also changing or making changes to how we deal with sustainability, how we deal with digitalization, and how we deal with the green team, making sure that we can support the businesses given that we're a decentralized company to stay true to the strategy and just improving areas where we can see that we can improve the collaboration between the companies, synergies, if you like. Also, as I did mention about the green team, sustainability and digitalization, and the governance of the companies that we have in our group.
That is pretty much a big focus we have above and beyond keeping the pipeline of new companies coming in intact and growing that one. We are also to some extent. It's a bit too early to talk about geographical expansion. Of course, we did enter Norway a couple of years ago. We did enter Finland roughly a year ago. Of course, we are seeking to see what type of opportunities do we have elsewhere. I believe that taking care of the business and also see if additional geographical expansion, if you want to sum it down to two easy bullets, that's what we are doing.
All right. Very good. When it comes to geographical expansion, without naming any specific countries, are there any specific market characteristics that you're looking for? Sort of how different are potential additional markets from Norway, Finland, and Sweden in terms of structural competition and so on?
Yeah. We have been looking into, obviously, several countries in Europe in particular. Of course, that's close to home. We clearly see that we have a strategy that we will stay true to, and that is the decentralized model, being number one on the money, not being a subcontractor to the construction companies and such. That strategy will pretty much stay the same. When we have looked upon what's going on in Denmark, Germany, France, England, and so on, or in the UK, we see that there are similarities in the market, which meaning that we do not have to change the strategy should we choose to enter one of those markets. That's the upshot. We believe that we are having a very good strategy.
We believe the strategy is working in our favor, and we can actually expand into new geography, keeping the strategy intact. It's, of course, very positively looked upon it, like, do they have the same common definition of the market? Do we have a public sector that outsources work and such? The answer to those questions are basically yes. It looks pretty much the same in the countries that we have been looking at.
All right. Great. Thank you very much for those answers.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for the questions, Alexander Siljeström.
There are no further questions. I hand back to you, speakers.
Okay. If there are no further questions, we thank you for participating and wish everybody a good day. Thank you very much.