Good morning and welcome to MSAB's interim report for Q1. Presenting today will be our CEO, Peter Gille, and our CFO, Tony Forsgren. If you have any questions, so please put those into the chat, and we will answer all questions at the end of the presentation. Without any further ado, I'm gonna hand over to Peter Gille.
Good morning, everybody. Let's go to the first slide. I think we had a good first quarter. It was solid. The currency-adjusted growth was almost 15%. We still have good high margins. The operating profit EBIT was, of course, hurt by the currency effect with almost SEK 7 million. It's not where we want it to be. On the other hand, we have increased the cost during the year, and we had really low cost in quarter one last year. The comparison quarter one over quarter one really isn't, you know, adequate in this setting. Maybe better look at quarter four last year and compare with the cost now. It's a slight increase in cost. We have also introduced a new metric, the annual contract value, to give investors a better view of where the business is going.
Tony will talk more about that, but it's a good number, I think. We are really growing our contract value compared to last year. If you look on the strategy side, we have worked hard with strategy now for over 18 months, and we are really where we want to be. We continue, of course, to work with the different challenges we have. We have a good foundation now for going forward based on what we are doing, but we need to continue to invest in our products because that is the key to growing the business. We feel that the market position we have has really been strengthened during this year, and we hope that we will see the results in the numbers this year. We have also strengthened the organization.
Our recent leadership team is now fully equipped, and we have Mårten Blixt on board as our new sales manager. We continue to professionalize how we work within the company, and that is an ongoing work all the time. If you look on the product side, as I said, we continue to invest in our products, and we have increased the timing of our product releases. We release much faster now, and we re-release a lot more features within the products. With XRY Pro, we have a momentum, and we continue to keep that momentum by also, you know, releasing new things. Like for instance, support for GPS devices, which we are the first vendor to deliver to the market. We have also delivered something for the frontline, which is the XRY Pro Express.
It's only aimed towards very educated user and a limited number of users that has the need of having more advanced extraction possibilities in the frontline. But it's a really useful tool, and we think it will be very appreciated by our customers. It's been a signal we got from the customers that they want to have this also advanced tool in the frontline. We have also enhanced our workflow capabilities across the whole product portfolio. XAMN, Pro, and XEC, they are all now involved in different workflows. We just continue to work with the workflow and expanding it towards the products. We have also continued to invest in the products across the portfolio. That's something we continue to do. We are a lot more people today in the development department than we were, you know, this time last year.
That means that we continue to invest in all the products. If you look on the regions, EMEA had a good quarter, I would say. A stable quarter. We continue, you know, to sell mostly XRY Pro, and we can see good movement in all the markets, basically. We also have a strong belief that we have opportunities within the defense segment. We are the only European supplier among the top vendors in this space, and we think that the European defense segment should really invest in our solutions because it's very useful also in the battlefield. In APAC, we had a slightly weaker quarter, mainly due to that, you know, some of the procurements didn't come in. It's a sensitive business. We're still a small business. We don't see any risk for not fulfilling the year in a good growth.
It's just that the deals didn't come in the numbers this quarter. XRY Pro is also there being, you know, the most wanted product. That's really what we see that the customers are buying. It's a good demand across the board, and we have had good development also in New Zealand during this quarter. In the Americas, yeah, it's been a tricky year, I would say last year, but it starts to see the light in the tunnel now. There's still, you know, uncertainties around budgeting and so forth, and also with people and processes and all that stuff. It starts to clear out. We see that America will come back this year. We grow the business organically in U.S. also in currency adjusted numbers last year. This year we think the growth will increase even more.
We also have some good wins in Latin America and Canada during this quarter, which is good to see. Also there, the growth is really driven by mainly XRY Pro and also new sales stuff. With that, I leave the word to Tony to explain the financials.
Oh, thank you, Peter. Let's run through the financials for the quarter. We continue to see a growth, and actually we did a record sales in isolated Q1. The first time we are reaching three-digit numbers for a quarter one. As mentioned, the net growth is 7.6%, but FX adjusted, it's 14.7% in the quarter. We are losing SEK 7 million in the net sales compared with last year. Looking at the rolling 12 numbers, we actually gained some further sales, so we reached up to SEK 469 million, compared with 462 the last quarter. A net growth of 15.7% in Q1 versus the same period last year. FX adjusted, we keep on growing, so we are at 23.5% FX adjusted for the rolling 12 months. As mentioned, we have a strong momentum in EMEA.
We are seeing new customers, which you can see on the diagrams to the right, and we are also approving a lot with the product XRY Pro. It's cautious in Americas, which also shows in the numbers, and there are some delayed transactions in APAC. We have not lost them, but they are delayed in the momentum. Our new sales are growing. That's good for the contract base, which I'm going to present later in this presentation. Last year we reached exceeding that one and filling the contract base with new sets of 60%. It's primarily driven by XRY Pro. Approximately 70%-75% of the growth is XRY Pro. Next slide, please. We are keeping on investing in the company, and that is also showing slightly in the OpEx, but we are designed to establish a foundation for scalability, which we are improving as well.
Starting with the gross margin, we had the gross margin of 95.4% in the period. Rolling 12, we are still about 93%, ending at 93.4. As you can see on the yellow line in the table to the left, we have a stable gross margin now looking back 2.5 years. We are not doing any isolated hardware sales as we did previously. We are investing, as I mentioned. Looking at the OpEx, you can see a shift between other external costs and personnel costs. The other external cost was inflated by consultants last year. On the vice versa, the personnel costs were very low because layoffs, and we took the cost in Q4 the year before that. The comparison number is not to be compared with this Q1 number. It's better to look at the Q4 number for last year, as Peter mentioned.
We had a personnel cost of SEK 71 in Q4, and now it's SEK 74. It's mainly driven by the salary increase which affects from January. All according to plan with OpEx, but a shift between other external costs and personnel costs then. Also, we did some investment in external exploits, which we balanced last year to the balance sheet. Now we have signed a service and support contract with the same vendor for one year, ending in December this year. It cost us close to SEK 5 million a quarter, and that is recognized in other external costs. Yes, we have moved. We have a new office. It's really nice. We are sitting at Sveavägen. It's really appreciated, but it's also affecting our costs and our balances. But we are gaining a lower rent, all according to IFRS then, so it's balanced and taken over depreciation.
So we are saving, like, SEK 2 million a year on a yearly basis for the Sveavägen office now. Now I can see the next slide. Sorry for that. Balance sheet. Normally, there are not so many changes in the balance sheet. There has been now. I'm going to explain them a little bit further, but we still have a stable platform for continued growth, and we still have a debt, net debt free, a debt-free balance sheet, so no debts is taken. We activated intangibles. You can see a big shift there. We haven't activated anything in 2026, but it's down 2025. We are gaining some tangible fixed assets due to the office move. It's installations with IT, furniture and infrastructure in the new one then. Leased assets. We moved out the Hornstull office agreement, and we moved in a new seven-year agreement for Sveavägen.
That's why you see the big change in leased fixed assets. Cash, we have a good cash situation, so we're gaining cash, and we have good momentum in converting EBIT to cash, still. A strong cash flow, however, in Q1 is what affected by the investments balanced and some, we have higher accounts receivable, but no customer loss receivables. Looking at the debt side, you can see we are also moving up the other short-term non-interest-bearing liabilities, and that is due mainly to the good sales in Q3 and Q4. The 16% of the revenue that we balance and split over the contract period is brought to the debt side and moved in as revenues on a monthly basis when fulfilling the contracts. Final slide, please. Let's run through our new KPI, which we have followed internally for a while and decided to release to the market this quarter.
The KPI is active, is showing the active contract software base as it is. I'm going to try to explain what is the difference between recognizing revenue and this measurement. As you know, the quarterly result is subject to volatility due to the way that we report revenue. The new KPI is to present the underlying trend in the current software base. Let's have a look at the table up in the right corner then, and the circle to the left. The way we recognize the revenue today is that day one, we take 84% revenue, and we move 16% on a monthly basis split over the contract length. Meaning we have a big revenue the first day, and if we sign, as in this example, a 12-month contract, we split the 16% over 12 months. The first month is a big revenue, second month, not so big.
That's the way we recognize the revenue. Looking at the circle to the right then, so what do we do to measure this in another way? In this example, we still have a one-year contract and a base of, let's say, 100%. We split the revenues evenly over the contract period. Each and every contract is split over the contract length. All the contract lengths in even parts over the contract value then. Looking at the table below that to explain this in a theoretical example. Let's say we have all contracts, we have seven contracts, and the contract value is SEK 100 for all of them. It's different length on these contracts. The first contract is one year, so we split the 8.3% over one year. The second contract is two years. We split the 100 over two years, gaining 4.2 evenly every month for 24 months.
We do that with each and every contract that is active and that we have. Then we do a snapshot in a period, as we have done now in March 2026. We take the value of each and every active contract and summarize that. What is the active contract base? Then we multiply it by 12 to get the number which we are presenting in the report. SEK 436 in the report, in this example, SEK 467. We take that number and compare a snapshot from March last year, the year before, in March 2025, and see what is the value of the active contract base. As we have reported, we see a really good growth of 38%. As mentioned before, that is mainly driven by XRY Pro. The growth is also driven by a product mix, pricing, and the new sales versus renewals, et cetera.
We don't leave out the churn number, but the churn is very low. Now you're thinking, "How can I bridge this towards our recognized revenues?" I can tell you that is going to be hard because there are so many factors in this. In the way we recognize revenue, we have the FX factor. We don't have that when we split this evenly over the contract base. We have the product mix, we have different pricings, we have contract length, et cetera, et cetera. Even though we have all the numbers, we cannot do a bridge. Please challenge me in doing that. That is it from me. Thank you.
Thank you. Okay, to sum this up, my view is really that we are in a good place with the company. Right now, we have a good management team in place. We have a good strategy that we have executed on, and it seems to be working well. We still, of course, need to continue to work with you know, improving our processes, improving everything we can in the company, and it's continuous work that we do, and also to continue to invest in the products. What we also will do is according to our strategy to intensify the efforts we have in the military segment. We think that is a good segment for growth for us, and we hope to see some results now already in 2026 on that.
Our focus is on emerging markets where the competition has not established itself so well yet, but also on increasing the market share in the mature markets like EMEA, which we see we really are doing right now, and expand our existing customers' engagement. To sum it up, I think we are in a good place. We have a lot of challenges in the market and outside the market, but I think we're handling them in a good way, and I'm looking forward to present our next quarter. Thank you. Don't forget to visit our Capital Markets Day on May 7 in Epicenter in Stockholm. We will present 9:00 A.M. to 12:00 P.M., and then we'll have a small lunch where you can, you know, ask the staff questions and so forth. Don't miss this fantastic event.
We really will have a lot more insight into our strategy, our products, and also get a presentation from our customer base. Looking forward to meet you all there. Thank you.
Okay. If you have any questions, there don't appear to be any questions at the moment in the chat. With that, I think we round off, and thank you all very much for.
You can take them from there.
Take from there? Okay. Here we have a follow there, a question here. You flag for increased investments to weigh on profitability temporarily. However, also say that you want to maintain stable level of profitability for the remainder of 2026. How does one square those two comments? Do you expect just a small negative effect on EBIT this year versus in 2025? Should we take that one first?
Yeah, absolutely. It's a good question. What we really mean, I would say, you know, we have a fantastic scalability in MSAB, but we will not get the full effect of the scalability this year because we need to continue to do some investments. Over the short term, you will see the scalability going forward again. We don't expect, you know, to reduce the EBIT. We expect the EBIT, but it will not grow with the scalability that I really like with MSAB, the full scalability. Do you wanna add something?
No, that's correct. That's it. 2026 is an investment year, and we're looking forward to scalability after that.
Yeah. Let's move on to the next question then, which is the service and support costs for the third-party iOS product now run as an OpEx until December 2026. Do you expect to extend this for the next couple of years as well in OpEx, or will it see another upfront CapEx investment such as that seen in 2025?
I think we will expect it to continue, I would say. That is the kind of nature of the agreement done. It will, of course, depend on what will happen in the market. We don't expect it to be. We expect it to continue.
A question on the product mix. Do we still expect 92%-93% gross margin looking ahead?
Yes. That's the expectation.
The final question that we have here is, what was the organic growth of the a...
In the annual contract value, we don't have any FX effects at the number that we are presenting. Why? Because when we enter a contract, we do it with a fixed amount and a fixed FX entering the full month and the full period with the same amounts. If we sign, for example, 24 months contract 12 months ago, it's going to be the same value in that. It's no FX effect in the annual contract value then presented.
Okay. Thank you, Tony. That appears to be all of the questions we have for now. Again, thank you very much for joining this presentation, and we hope very much to see you at the Capital Markets Day on May 7. Thank you.
Thank you.