Welcome to the Mentice 2022 Q1 interim report. The results will be presented by CEO Göran Malmberg, and CFO Gunilla Andersson. My name is Stacy Hammar, and I will be moderating this webcast. After the presentation, you will be given the opportunity to ask questions to both Göran and Gunilla. Until then, all participants are in listen-only mode. For questions, please insert them in the question pane on the right-hand side of your dashboard. This meeting will be recorded and available with the report on mentice.com, shortly after the webcast. I will now leave the word to CEO Göran Malmberg.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this webcast and the presentation of our first quarter. We will move into the presentation. First, we're really excited to present a really strong first quarter. As we say in the report, following up with a strong end of last year, and overall strong last year. It's really nice to be able to present a strong first quarter as well, with over 60%, 64% growth year-over-year for net sales for the quarter, SEK 52.1. We also are significantly better on EBITDA compared to last year, where we are just minor negative, SEK -1.3 compared to SEK -8.4 for last year.
We also see that with the strong net sales, we're also adding to the order intake. The order book actually increases, significantly year-over-year, but also increases compared to the fourth quarter. The order intake is 36% growth compared to last quarter, so as well in line with our financial targets to grow about 30%. What's really especially nice to see is, as you know, we had two years of pandemic that have impacted the hospital market. We can see that the first quarter here is the first one in two years where we see the hospital markets coming back to some sort of normal.
It's a really significant improvement from last year, but also stronger compared to first quarter in 2019. Overall, this quarter is our strongest first quarter ever, which is really nice. As most of you've seen, we did announce the order for strategic alliances in China for Corindus, the first 10 systems sold to China. We talked about that a bit more. This is on the highest level, really positive quarter, and a good start for the year. Moving into a little bit more details. First talk about order intake and order book. As you say, 54.4, 36% in growth year-over-year.
If we break it down a bit to the business areas where we have the medical device industry, healthcare system, and strategic alliances, we can see that, the medical device industry is on par with last year, which obviously we have fluctuations in quarters, so it's a really strong quarter again. We see that we're building pipeline for the year. As we said, healthcare system really sticks out here, almost three times compared to last year, and as I said, back to the levels before the pandemic. Really nice. I say in the report that obviously there's no warranty, no guarantee that this will continue, but I believe this is a clear trend.
From an order point of view, the strategic alliances here also include the Chinese order for Corindus. It's a nice start. We'll talk about that later on the net sales, that this is not reflected in the sales number. Going down to the lower section of this slide, we see the order intake per region, where both EMEA and APAC has really strong quarters. EMEA is up 80% and change, and APAC is up 50%. APAC is up due to the Corindus order, but also removing that order, still APAC performs really strong. EMEA, a fantastic result in the quarter.
Americas is about the same as last year, which is understandable given they had a really strong fourth quarter, and Americas, U.S. is typically a little bit slower in the first quarter. You can see to the left here, we're breaking down the order book a bit. As I said on the first slide, good solid growth on the order book. We're building the, annual recurring revenue components in a nice way. We'll talk about that further back in the presentation. Really we see that we're building something for the future here. All in all, very nice performance here, I think.
Looking a little bit longer term, longer historical perspective on this, just making a note, if you go back 10 years, we can see now that we have generated about 3x overall increase. We have a CAGR across this period of time, of about just short of 20%, 17% or so. You can see the trend here for order intake. We can see a nice trend from early part of 2020, and then going, showing a nice trend upwards. Obviously, in the last two years, that's been driven by the medical device industry. Hopefully we can get some more support from the healthcare side in 2022.
We look at the net sales here. Again, this is obviously, to a larger extent based on orders we received in the end of last year. You can see that Medical Device is performing extremely strong, double the performance compared to the same quarter last year. Healthcare on par, but obviously the healthcare business we received in the quarter will affect in Q2 here rather. Strategic Alliances is on par with last year. Really you can see here this is really a result of a strong end of last year. 53% is, historically by far our strongest quarter here as well for the first quarter, sorry.
The distribution here between the different business areas, you see here 75% for medical device, healthcare 17%, and strategic alliances 8%. I expect that to be more normalized, so in the order delivery from the previous slide, that we go down slightly on medical device or actually the healthcare is increasing. I expect that over a year that we will be still a little bit less dependent on the medical device side. Regions from a net sales perspective, obviously really good development in Americas, 4% increase year-over-year. Fantastic performance in EMEA, Europe, Middle East, Africa.
Obviously, with a first quarter last year very much affected by the pandemic on all counts. EMEA has a really strong quarter. In APAC, we had a really strong first quarter last year. That's on par with last year. I will let Gunilla talk about this slide actually.
Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. I think you have all noticed, I hope, that we have from this quarter and onwards, defined our business segments in accordance with IFRS 8. The model here then will be into the sort of products that we are selling, and then those products based on if it's a capital expenditure sale, or if it's an OPEX or recurring sale. The first graph that you see here in front of you is the rolling 12 quarters, for the recurring revenue inside the business segments. It's the system sales, and it's the software licenses recurring sales. We see a really strong growth, actually quarter-on-quarter, it's 108%. We took ourselves from 26%-32% on a rolling timescale for 2022 Q1.
Defining a little bit more what we define as our business segments. We have three of them. It's system sales, it's software licenses, and it's service. Inside system sales, we have two important components. It's the systems themselves, and then it's the accessories and spare parts that we sell that belongs to those systems. So that is then divided into two different categories that you can then look at the sales perspective from. We see sales then on capital expenditure, where it's a SEK 10 million growth on the system sales in the quarter. There is a doubling of the accessories and spare parts side. We see the recurring revenue, which is then rentals when it comes to systems, which has a very strong growth in the period, 315% actually. Then the software licenses.
Here we have then the sale of software as we sell the system. That's what's on the CapEx line. Then when we sell software as a license, which is then the recurring revenue part, and you see that a 68% growth in the quarter 2022 over 2021. Overall, this is the explanation of the very nice 108% year-on-year quarterly growth for recurring out of our business segments. Further into the report, you can also look at gross profit for those business segments. Yeah, let's then conclude that, we really had a nice quarter. We were growing a lot, 64% on the net sales. We were close to be positive on our first quarter.
The ones of you that follow us a bit, you know that we have quite some problems in our first quarters, lower sales normally and high costs. To be able to show a result that is this close to zero, I think is a really good achievement. Of course, it's really based on the high sales, and that we are able to deliver 80.1% gross margin on that sale. This gives us SEK 17 million more in gross profit in amount, compared to last year. The increase in cost is SEK 10 million. Overall, EBITDA is increasing with SEK 7 million. What is important to note, of course, is that the first part of 2021 was still pandemic.
Both from travel cost perspective, but also our marketing and communication activities was really halted. The main part of this cost increase is in there. Add to that we have a variable part of our salaries which is commission, which then of course, increase as sales increase, and that we are 112 in total compared to 98 in quarter one last year. Then you have all the explanations you need to understand the SEK 10 million increase. Also, what I think is most important to me is that we generate positive cash flow. We do. In this quarter, we generate SEK 7.4 million overall. We had negative outflow of SEK 21.3 million in the same quarter last year.
At end of the period, we were at SEK 19.3 in cash and bank positions, which then was higher last year. I think you all remember that we ended year-end 2021 at SEK 12.7. A really strong quarter for Mentice.
Thanks, Gunilla. Just as a common thing, we are obviously adding people from 98 to 112, and that's obviously continue building the organization for what we need in the future. That's not what we need to bring in the business in first or second quarter. That's really building the organization for next year and the time on. This is really demonstrating how we perceive the future here. Yeah. I think it's nice to be able to grow an organization like that, grow for what you need in the future, but still generate short-term results. Right. Let's see. Yeah. Oops. Just a slide on the overall perspective here.
I mean, obviously we had, an interesting period over two years, which we're still obviously partly in a pandemic. So we talked about that a bit, but I just want to establish that we really see that our positioning, our Mentice, our discussion about the Vascular Twin, the idea of the model of the patient in the center, and the tools we have to support physician and the healthcare professionals to make better decisions, really expanding in that vertical. I think that is a really solid path for us, that we really get validated in the market, I would say every day. Our ambition is obviously to expand that footprint.
We talked before about our activities for M&A and similar, which is continuing obviously. Our ambition is really to continue this expansion in a nice way. I think we can do that in a very good way on the back of the results we have from our core business. Just as a high-level summary of what we talked about, I mean, just reiterating that, I mean, it's another quarter of growth. It's also a historical high for a first quarter, which is really nice to see. It's also really encouraging to see the comeback of the hospital-related business, even if there's no guarantee that it will continue.
But, we believe we see a change of trend definitely in Europe. I believe so also in the North America or in the Americas. Obviously, we have still question mark on the APAC side. Sorry, I should bring this up. Obviously the underlying political situation with Russia and Ukraine situation, will most definitely have impact, even if we don't have any direct impacts from that, since we don't do any business in the regions. That also relates to supply-related issues, things like that. This will have effect.
We see now in the last couple of days, that the further lockdowns and similar in China, will obviously have a potential impact on our business in APAC. Overall, we really see that we have an opportunity to really perform, on a more normal level for the healthcare system and hospital sales this year. This strategic alliance side is really starting off well with the current deal still in China. We have a lot of activities there that I hope that will help us for the year. Medical device here is a strong quarter, obviously not growth in the quarter, but we have obviously, as I said before, fluctuations between quarters.
We see we build a lot of opportunities. Our position there is very strong. I also think actually the pandemic has helped us from a medical device point of view, where medical devices have really realized the importance of simulation and the solutions that Mentice provide. Overall here, I think a very solid structure where we have these three business areas really complement each other, and helping us to build a future. Yeah, that was really it. We're open for some questions if we have that.
No questions.
What do we have here?
We will keep them clear. No questions.
No problem.
Yeah.
I mean, I got a question on the healthcare market, and I sort of mentioned that. I mean, again, it's three times last year. It's above 2019, so about before the pandemic. We really saw six or seven significant deals in Europe, multiple deals in U.S., but also deals in Asia and the rest of Asia. We generally see that the Asian market will come back. We see a continuation in Europe. Again, there's no guarantees in any way.
I think the first quarter is just not the first quarter here, and we see that the opportunities are building. All right. I guess if we don't have any more questions.
Sorry.
I think we will end that. You have our contact information if you have any other questions. Please reach out if you need to. Otherwise, thanks a lot and see you again in a quarter. Thank you, Stacy Hammar.
Thank you.