Hello, and welcome to the Mentice AB Q3 2020 report. The report will be presented by CEO Göran Malmberg. For your information, the first part of this call, all participants will be in listen-only mode. Afterwards, there will be an opportunity for a question and answer session. If you do have any questions, please raise your hand and we'll send the question to Göran. Göran, I will now hand it over to you.
Thank you, Stacy. Good morning, everyone. Nice to be able to present our third quarter report for this year. I will switch to the presentation, and I will take away my video, so now you're seeing that I am moving. One second. Okay. I will move to the first slides here. This is super nice to be able to present this report. The third quarter for Mentice is typically a slower quarter since it's the vacation quarter. What we have this year is an unusually strong third quarter, where we have 40% or more increase year-over-year for the fourth quarter. We have also, I would say, regained what we have lost for the pandemic, mainly from the second quarter. Which is also unusual that the third quarter is the strongest of the first three coming quarters here.
That's super nice to be able to present that. Really pleased with that kind of performance with these difficult conditions. I've seen other companies presenting slower performance and still are pleased with what they do. This is really super nice. On a high level, I'm going to talk about a bit of the numbers, not too much. The report is out, obviously you have the details there. We'll talk about some of the other events we had during the quarter and the beginning of the fourth quarter with the two companies that we acquired. We will open up for some questions. Overall, it's obviously the medical device industry that is driving our business. If we are up 40% totally for the fourth quarter, device industry is up 70% for the year compared to the same period last year.
That's obviously very nice to see. Also, as we have presented, as I'm sure you have seen, we have presented a number of larger orders from end of the second quarter up to now. We also have a good progress with our Alliance Partners, where we obviously, as presented before, this is our ultimate growth opportunity. Our aim is obviously to place Mentice systems close to cath labs in the world, really. We are moving towards those kind of solutions where we want to bundle and embed Mentice solutions with the sales of cath labs. That's also moving in that direction in a good way. The main effect we've seen from the pandemic has been on the academic side and on the hospital side, which we also, to some extent, see with the Alliance Partners sales.
All the business that aim directly to the hospitals is down. With our own academic and hospital segment, we are about 50% of the last year's comparable intake or intake for the first nine months. We look at the net sales, we're also above. The third quarter is the strongest so far this year, and we are slightly above last year's first nine months. We have a strong order book, and that's obviously the end of Q3 order book you see here. We have added to that order book going into the fourth quarter also. Cost levels is maintained at the lower level. Just right below SEK 10 million per month. A significant decrease compared to last year, which obviously have an effect on our bottom line.
The cash flow continued to be positive from the operation. We have a SEK 10.6 million positive cash flow for the first nine months compared to the -SEK 20 million from last year. The income, EBITDA for the fourth quarter was a positive SEK 4.1 million, compared to -SEK 6.7 million. For the first nine months, we are significantly better than same period last year. All in all, very pleased with this, and I'm really pleased with how we've been able to maintain our business despite the fact that the number of physical meetings we have had, since March, really has been a handful. We've been able to conduct our business virtually almost entirely, which is fantastic. We did two acquisitions during the period that was finalized in the beginning of the fourth quarter. That's also really exciting, and this is always something we've been working with for a while.
The first one, Vascular Simulations, is the most significant one. It adds an immediate business to what we do. It's a physical model simulation where you physically simulate a procedure on a 3D printed model, basically using real clinical devices. That adds a capability for us to really work with early phase product development, conceptual design phases with medical device companies, where you want to evaluate a specific design, a specific product, which is not possible to do with a VR simulation. The combination of a physical model simulation and the VR simulation, we think is really strong. No one else can offer this, and it will allow us to engage with the large medical device companies much earlier in their product development process.
If we can, and that's our intention, synchronize or integrate those solutions to make sure you have two, as I said, two synchronized environments in VR and physical simulation, I think we can provide a much higher value to our client, but also do something that no one else can do. Vascular Simulations would add around SEK 20 million to our top line. That was about the revenue result for last year, 2019, for Vascular, slightly more. It will be slightly less this year, but our assumption is that we will be able to get it up to SEK 20 million and potentially a little bit more during next year. Leveraging our distribution, our customer network. Vascular Simulations was mainly a U.S.-focused company, and incorporating that in Mentice will make it a global company. We can sell those solutions to all our clients.
I think that's exciting addition to what we do. Clearly going to improve what we do with the clients, and we have got only positive feedback from our larger clients about this combo here. The other acquisition is a very early startup, so I think it's still very interesting and shows the direction of what we are doing. That's the MyIRlog, the company called EQIP. It's a Florida-based small startup where a group of physicians have built a cloud-based case tracking environment for doctors with the ability for doctors to track their own cases performed, so real cases performed, which is sort of a resume or a kind of credential for these doctors when they move between different jobs or but also ability for a hospital to have control over the credentials and their experience of their doctors.
This company have opened up and offered this to interventional radiologists in U.S. They have about 1,000 physicians currently that are logging their cases, adding quite a bit of cases every month. It's about 150,000 cases registered so far. Incorporating this in the Mentice Live, our cloud environment, our intention is to really link information about real cases with the kind of simulated cases. It also gives us a direct access to doctors initially in U.S., obviously, but our ambition is to expand this to also outside U.S., but also to expand this to other specialties. This is not going to generate an immediate revenue stream or a business, but I think from a conceptual Indeed, this is clearly very relevant and, as I said, showing the direction of what we are doing.
Talking about the larger orders, I'm not going to dwell on the details of this, but I think it's very nice to see the lineup of orders. These are since end of June. It's what? Two, four, six. Six orders over SEK 5 million. Well, the last one is not, obviously, but significantly, become the order four for us. Where we have Abbott, it's two orders from Abbott, and Abbott so far is our largest client this year. They will move to an all-time high for Abbott. Edwards Lifesciences, a very important client to us in such a hot space, added an order for one of the new product groups. I want to mention Stryker Neurovascular here as well. It was just an order we received early November here, where we improved our position in the vascular-- sorry, in the neurovascular space.
Stryker is really one of the most prominent player in that space. It was also a competitive account. We are increasing market share by this move, and I would say that's one of the few remaining competitive accounts we have in the U.S. and in the medical device side. Again, this is really nice to see, and I think several of these are also just the initial order for a new product group. A lot of these here will provide additional orders, some of them already for this year, but the others for 2021 and the years to come. Really nice to see. As you that have followed us for a time, we had a little bit of difficulties during last year, obviously, but this really shows a promising progress for the device side. All right. What is happening now then?
What is happening for the fourth quarter and going through to next year? It's still, obviously, hard to assess, and it's difficult to not be able to give a clear guidance for even the near future. I'm sure you understand the situation as well as everyone do in terms of the recent outbreaks of cases for the pandemic in almost all parts of the world. On the other hand, with the positive news of a vaccine being available probably in the near future. It's very hard to understand. We can see that the last couple of weeks to month of outbreaks of corona cases in U.S. and Europe, but also to parts of Asia, has obviously made the hospital market very worried. It's really hard to understand how that will impact us. Our expectation is that the industry will continue to drive this.
We have seen that the industry is sort of pushing through the issues. In my mind, they are really focusing on the time after the pandemic. We are linked very much to new product launches, and in most cases, the companies are moving forward with a plan for those product launches. That's on full speed, and we have more to do than ever on the medical device side, on the customization work we are doing. That's really pushing on hard. It's really the health system and the relation to Siemens and Philips and our partners, but where we know that the issues in the health system or hospital side are also impacting the sales for our partners. We see a positive trend as well.
Even we might not reach entirely what we wanted for these partners for 2020, we see that we have a significant increase of our business during this year and that continue to move into next year. We believe we have a good control over our cost levels. Obviously, still, we expect that travel will be minimal for the next six to nine months at least, maybe even for majority of next year. Congress participation will also be minimal. It's a lot of virtual congresses and things like that. We will probably still continue with a fairly lean cost level for the near future. We're also a little bit careful with hiring. We have opened up a bit, as I said, for the last quarter, but we're still careful in how we add cost to our bottom line. Yeah.
On the right side here, I think I have talked about our partners. Our aim is obviously to get to bundling or embedded solutions, and that's the focus there. We believe that's possible, and that's the dialogue we are having to make sure that our solution really adds value to a complete solution sold to hospitals, and that's our ambition, and we hope that's near-term. We'll be able to present something like this. That's what we are focusing on, obviously. On the technology side, as you said, we have more to do than ever. We have had a very strong rollout of new products during this year. The most significant is the new hardware platform, the G7, where we are now going into volume production. We have a large amount of system already sold for this year.
It is already impacting our sales, and even more so going into 2021. We have a lot of activities on the product development side. Obviously the medical device, and we talked about this in the previous reports, the heart valve related procedures is really pushing the envelope of what we can do from a technology perspective. It's also opening up a lot of opportunities both for training and patient-specific kind of solutions. That's very interesting, and I think we have, over the last two years, really improved our competitive position there, and we are able to do things that no one else can do, and I think that's the reason why we have been able to line up some of these orders within the last four or five months.
Lastly, the Vascular Simulations, I believe, is a very nice addition that we immediately see a revenue and orders coming, and I think we should be able to, going into next year, combine orders, combine opportunities where the combination of our two technologies would open for new kinds of businesses. Short and sweet, really happy with our performance, looking positively towards the full year and going into next year. Yeah. It's been a tough year, obviously, but I think I'm super pleased with what we have done over the first nine months. With that, I would open for some questions, I guess, Stacy. If anyone have a question, raise your hand and we will allow you to formulate your question.
Okay, we have one person with their hand up. Bear with me, and I can take you off mute. Okay, Christian Lee, feel free to present your question. Okay, Christian doesn't seem to be asking the question live. I will ask his question for him.
Can you give us an update on the integration of Vascular Simulations and how much you expect in sales contribution in quarter four?
Okay. We haven't announced that specifically, but I would say, we expect a volume of about SEK 20 million per year. It's one quarter, that would mean about SEK 5 million. I think that's a pretty accurate number. I'm not sure if supposed to give you any more details, but yeah, we think it would be something like that for the fourth quarter. Nothing significant, but still, we have a smaller stream of revenue that we acquired that was on order before we closed the transaction. Already into fourth quarter, we have received new orders, and we have integrated our product offering, obviously. We are offering vascular solutions via Mentice to end clients. Yeah, so something like that. Five-ish millions, might be a little bit more, but yeah.
There are no other questions right now. Maybe we can wait a few more minutes, Göran.
Sure. I'm not going to tell you a joke. I'm not going to sing. I don't have any other stories, so we can wait for a minute to see if anything pops up.
Absolutely.
Okay, I think we will call it there. Stacy, thanks for-
Yeah. Absolutely.
Thanks, everyone, and see you soon again, I guess.
We will. Thank you, Göran.
Thank you.