Hello and welcome to the presentation of Mycronic's Q1 report. My name is Sven Chetkovich. I'm the Director Investor Relations at Mycronic. With me, I have Mycronic's CEO and President, Anders Lindqvist, and CFO and Senior Vice President Corporate Development, Pierre Brorsson, who will be presenting today. We have made a change to the Q&A session later in the presentation. There are no phone numbers to dial this time. If you want to ask questions during the Q&A, please click a Request to Speak button that will be visible during the Q&A in order to enter the queue. Ask your question when introduced by me. We will only be broadcasting your voice. With that, I hand over to Anders. Please go ahead and present Mycronic's Q1 report.
Okay. Thank you very much, Sven. This is what we will present today. We will start with the Q1 in short summary of that, then also the divisional development. Pierre Brorsson, CFO, will go through the financials, talk a little bit on our progress on sustainability, and then, as Sven said, we will end with the question and answer session. At the end, in the material in the presentation, you will also find an appendix that we will not present, which is the market update with all the statistics from the market where we operate in. When it comes to the Q1, the highlight of the quarter is that we have had a continuous very high and good order intake.
We had an increase of 12% compared to the same quarter last year, up to a little bit above SEK 1.6 billion. It's driven by the order intake in Pattern Generators. Yeah, you can put that in relation also to last year revenue, which was SEK 5.1 billion. You see that the SEK 1.6 billion level is a really strong order intake number for the quarter. At the same time, we also had an increase in sales by 7% to SEK 1.2 billion. Quite a lot of that was driven by currency, so 2% organic growth in that number. EBIT ended at SEK 182 million compared to SEK 206 million.
For comparison reasons, we have also, as we say here, that we had the divestment, we had AEi in the business, same quarter last year. If we adjust for that, it's a flat development of EBIT, and corresponding to a margin of 15%. We have had also good order intake, previous quarters as you have seen, hopefully. We have a record high now backlog of close to SEK four billion, at the end of the quarter. At the end of the quarter, we have 30 systems in the backlog. Then as an additional highlight, we had also two more orders after the quarter of two pieces of SLX mask writer. Backlog is extremely strong as you can understand.
If we go a little bit more in details on the different divisions, starting with Pattern Generators, we can see that we still have a very good market for photomask in semiconductors. To say here that it's in the mature design nodes that remains strong. The mature design nodes are the ones which we address with our SLX mask writer. It's a good place to be at. Also display has been good. We had, if you look on the order intake, we had eight systems for the quarter. Prexision eight Evo is a display writer, and then also an FPS 6100 and six mask writers for the semicon industry SLX. Very strong order intake, 113% up compared to the same quarter last year.
We also delivered some systems, we had an increase of sales of 10%, reaching SEK 351 million. In the delivery, we delivered three pieces of equipment, one Prexision Lite 8 Evo, FPS 6100 and 1 SLX. We should have delivered 1 more SLX in the quarter, which was moved from Q 1 to Q 2, it will be delivered this quarter instead. Gross margin was okay at 62%, EBIT reached SEK 150. Backlog of close to SEK three billion in this one, at the end of the quarter, we had 30 systems, as said. If we move on to the other division, another division, High Flex, where we had, we call it a decent start to 2023.
We have seen that we have very good demand in Europe and also in North America, a lower level in China. A lower level in China you will see in the other divisions as well, actually. It's a kind of a common theme here. In the beginning of the quarter, in January, there is an annual trade show in San Diego, which is the one of the big one in the electronics assembly industry, which had a lot of visitors, a lot of interest and a lot of activity, which is really showing that there is a good demand and a good interest from the especially then the North American market, including Mexico as well. Sorry for that. Skip that back. Yeah, excuse me. Sorry for that.
We continue. On the High Flex division, we had an order decline of 3%, and also an increase of sales with 11% up to SEK 322 million. Gross margin, quite stable and good gross margin of 40%. EBIT under SEK 23 million, which is a little bit up compared to last year, and a backlog of SEK 180 million. It's kind of a as expected start to the year. In the High Volume division, we had, we can see that we have a little bit of slow pace of investments when it comes to consumer electronics manufacturing.
Even though the COVID restrictions in China have been lifted, we have seen that this industry has not yet really recovered when it come to investments. It's still hesitating a little bit, but we expect that to come. You can see that in the order intake, we had a decline of 41%. To compensate, we focus on new areas. One of them is electrical vehicle industry, which is very strong, especially in China. Also looking at the more aggressive geographic expansion outside of China, we have got an initial order from a production facility outside of China, but belonging to a Chinese manufacturer of electrical vehicles. Sales were flat, SEK 367 million, same as last year, and we have an increase in gross margin.
This is that we have a better mix. We have a better delivery, better gross margin in the deliveries we have had. Also we have worked with efficiency improvement in this division, resulting in that EBIT improved to SEK 64 million. In that SEK 64, we also had a negative impact that we have bad debt provisions of SEK seven million in that. Backlog at the end of the quarter, a little bit more than SEK 600 million. When it comes to Global Technologies, we have two lines of business here. One is electrical testing of PCBs and substrates, and the other one is die bonding, addressing the mainly the telecommunication market.
We have seen a little bit of slowdown in both of these markets, both related to the Chinese market as a whole, but also that in the market of data and telecom, a little bit of decline, resulting in that our order intake decreased by 27%. If you make a fair comparison, because we had this AEi business in the quarter last year, it's a decline of 25%, so almost the same. A little bit an increase in sales, mainly related to the currency exchange effect here. Gross margin flat at 35%, EBIT down to SEK 3 million. Also here we have a comparison effect with the AEi business that we had in the business last year.
We'd had an impact of SEK 25 million of the previous quarter, last year, or the same quarter last year, previous year. Backlog ending at SEK 236 million. Comes to our outlook. We have made no change here. We still believe that we will reach a sales of SEK 5.5 billion at the end of the year. Nothing to update there. By that, I will hand over to Pierre, CFO, to explain the numbers a little bit more in detail.
Good morning, everyone, from my side as well. We will go a little bit deeper in some of the numbers here. If we look at it, we continue to have a fourth quarter in a row of continued growth on the revenue side, and we are now at SEK 5.2 billion rolling twelve months. The margin is at 17% on a rolling twelve months basis and relatively flat development lately. The aftermarket revenue continue to increase since two years, quarter-on-quarter when looking at the rolling twelve months numbers. This is of course a good thing for us. Moving a little bit into the quarter-on-quarter comparisons. We have now six quarters in a row above SEK one billion in revenue.
We are establishing a good level, this is the fourth quarter on SEK 1.2 billion. Also there is good. Even if the organic growth in the quarter was modest with only 2%. We had a little bit weaker EBIT margin than the last couple of quarters. If we compare year-over-year, it's affected by the AEi divestment we had last year, which gave a gain of SEK 25 million in the Q1 numbers of 2022 have higher costs on what we call group functions and sometimes referred to group functions, etcetera, where we have also eliminations. This is largely driven by our high activity in business development projects at the moment.
This made us end the quarter at an EBIT margin of 15%. If we look at a bridge of where the components make up the difference between the quarter one last year and the quarter one this year, we had in volume and gross margin effect a positive development, largely driven from PG, where we had a little bit of volume and a little bit of improved margin. We had also improved margins in the High Volume division in particular. If we look at the R&D, we are investing in the organic opportunities that we see. We had slight increase across in R&D, but in particular in division High Flex in the quarter compared to the same quarter last year. On the marketing and sales side, there we have the increased business development projects.
We have also the provision for bad debt in division HV that Anders mentioned earlier. This is a provision, which we make as a calculation on the based on the aging of receivables, and it's not attributable to a specific loss. We haven't basically had any concluded losses on the receivables, but we do see a delay in payments, particularly related into the High Volume division. G&A, some small increases, and in this other position, the main difference on last year is the SEK 25 million related to the AEi divestment last year we have spoken about a few times already. If we then move into the other dimension and look at it division by division, you can see that we have improvements in the Pattern Generators related to volume and gross margin as mentioned.
We have in High Flex a little bit increase in volume in the month, sorry, in the quarter. On the negative side here, we had a little bit higher R&D spend. In High Volume, we have improved the gross margin in particular, and in the Global Technologies then the sales of the AEi is recorded. Finally, in the group functions, et cetera, largely the business development. I should also mention a very low comparative number for the same quarter of last year. The average for the year, the difference is about SEK 10 million less than the SEK 34 million noted here. If we look at the cash flow, we have strong cash flow, both from the result and from improved working capital.
Positive development of the receivables compared to end of the year, also a little bit higher payables than we had at that point. On the investing activities, we had last year in the comparative number, the sale of AEi, which generated SEK 215 million. This is a normal level of our investments, you could say. Apart from that, no other big differences in the financing activities and the exchange rates. We have a strong cash position, the cash as such was SEK 1.6 billion almost, adjusted for the IFRS, et cetera, we have a net cash position of SEK 1.3 billion at the end of the quarter. With that, I hand the word back to Anders.
Thank you very much, Pierre. The last picture from my side about sustainability. We continue to improve our work around sustainability, not at least to meet our targets that we also added last year along our financial targets. We have established sustainability goals for 2023, broken down, and also connected that to the annual strategy process to implement that in all of our divisions and in line with the long-term action plan. We also, when we announced the new financial targets last year together with our sustainability target, we also said that we have joined the Science Based Targets initiative. We have started a working group there to preparing the proposals that we need to submit to this organization.
Our target is to be ready by the end of this year with this, so we are included in that initiative. All right, that was the part of the formal presentation. Hand over to Sven now.
Thank you, Anders. Thank you, Pierre. Now we will move over to the Q&A session. As you can see, there is a Request to Speak button that you can press if you want to ask a question. First in line, we have Fredrik Lithell from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead, Fredrik. Yes, Fredrik, please go ahead and ask your question.
Fredrik Lithell, Handelsbanken, please go ahead and ask your question. Okay. There seems to be a technical glitch. Fredrik, please try again, and in the meantime, we will let Mikael Laséen from Carnegie ask his question. Please go ahead, Mikael. Okay. Mikael Laséen, Carnegie, please go ahead and ask your question.
Can you hear me?
Now we can hear you. Sorry about the technical glitch here.
Okay. All right.
Mikael, please go ahead and ask your question.
Okay. Thank you very much. Yeah, I'm a bit curious here about the guidance of SEK 5.5 billion. You have a really strong order book in the PG segment and service revenue in that part is also relatively predictable and High Flex also starting off with a good order intake. I'm just curious if you can maybe elaborate a bit on the outlook for High Volume and Global Technologies, how we should think about that.
I mean, we are not making an outlook on divisional level. We do see the up so far this year has been the strong order intake on the PG side, the strong order book we have there. The down has so far been the time it takes to recover in China, which affects basically all divisions, even if we have had the strong development from PG there. This means that we maintain the outlook of SEK 5.5 billion.
Okay. If I'm correct, it applies significantly lower sales for High Volume in the coming quarters. That must be the implied effect of the start of 2023 and the unchanged guidance, just to be clear here so we understand the dynamics.
I will not guide on divisional level. We maintain the guidance of SEK 5.5 billion for now.
Okay. Yeah. Fair enough. Can you also, then maybe comment a bit more in detail what you see in China, primarily for the High Volume segment, how the quarter developed and the market activity, and maybe also say something about the end market exposure for the High Volume segment, which type of customers and end markets that they are exposed to? Thank you.
If I start and then maybe Anders can continue. I think we do expect the Chinese market to recover. It's very hard to predict exactly the point when this will happen. We have seen that it takes a little bit longer than what we had hoped and maybe thought as well. Our High Volume division has then put more efforts on other segments than the traditionally strong consumer electronic segment, which has been the slowest to recover from our point of view.
Present in many different segments with the High Volume division. The consumer electronic has traditionally been the largest one, but also in. We're also now quite active in automotive as well as semiconductor with that division. We have refocused more into automotive because of the enormous development of electrical vehicle that we see in that segment, so to compensate. Just to add to Pierre's comment that I think we among many others also believe that after the COVID restrictions, we should see a faster increase of investment activities. There is longer than what we believed hesitation here. The market is very active and the number of requests are very high. Long term, we still believe in this.
Okay. My final question is on the PG segment, if you can say something more about the demand for your different type of systems, SLX, replacement possibilities ahead, and also the market situation in total, if you can elaborate a bit more on that?
It's quite unchanged, I would say. We see a continued very strong demand from the semicon industry, and especially in the technology segment which we address with the SLX writer. No change from before. We have a similar interest on the display side as well. Compared to before, I think we see a similar situation. It's of course difficult to say how this is translating into equipment sales, of course. On the photomask side, we see that there is a good demand and a good market in all of our segments.
Okay. Thank you. I'll get back in line.
Okay. Thank you, Mikael. Now over to Fredrik Lithell. Let's hope it works this time. Go ahead, Fredrik. We have some trouble hearing Fredrik. Okay. Fredrik, please go ahead and ask your question. Okay. Okay. We are having some trouble, unfortunately, getting Fredrik Lithell online. But please, if there is anybody else wanting to ask a question, go ahead and click the Request to Speak button. With that, we have reached the end of today's presentation of Mycronic's Q1 report. Thank you very much for attending.