Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Nilörn Q4 presentation. I will share my screen, and I'm really happy to have so many on board, especially now as it is a really intense reporting period. A lot of reports released this week. I will go through the numbers as usual, and also a little bit of an update on what's going on within Nilörn and the group, and the market, and so on. Just looking at the Q4, the order intake was down 7%. As most of you hopefully remember, we had a packaging order that came in in Q3 this year and Q4 last year. If you could adjust for that packaging order, it was actually an increase of 1% for the order intake. Sales was up 14% to SEK 232 million. Adjusted for carousel effect, it was almost the same, up 13%.
Operating profit for the quarter is SEK 19.5 million versus SEK 9.2 million last year. Of course, volume matters here, and we'll also see that later on in other slides that we will present. Just looking in the quarter, December was strong. It was a strong month. We all know that also Chinese New Year has an impact. Chinese New Year is early this year. 2025 was already in the end of January, beginning of February. What impact that has and how much, and so on, it's difficult to predict. I think that might have some impact on the December numbers. Looking at the accumulated numbers, we had a cyber attack in Q3 that we managed to handle quite well. Looking at the carousel effect, we have a minor carousel effect that is quite well balanced, even because we are in many different countries.
We have, like in Turkey, where we had a very, very weak Turkish lira. We are also in countries where we have Hong Kong dollars, where it is connected to U.S. dollars, which has been strong, and also euros. Even though we are in many different countries, most outside Sweden, the carousel effect totally was very minor. Operating profit of SEK 82.9 million in the quarter, which is SEK 8.8 million. Sorry, so 8.4% of the sales. Operating margin is 8.4%. Outdoor segment has come back as predicted. In the beginning of the year, as you remember, there was a very strong during COVID period, and then we had a weak period 2023. We predicted outdoor come back in 2024, which has done, especially in the last year, now is back as normal, I would say. Luxury segment still slow.
We were spoiled after the COVID and during COVID there with a very, very strong luxury segment, and that has also been a bit slower now. We will see what happens with that. Just looking into the market, what's going on. As you also can read in the newspapers, quite many brands go into reconstruction or into bankruptcies. Nilörn has been lucky here. We have not had any major clients going into bankruptcies, so we are lucky in that sense. There is also a consolidation going on in the market where companies are bigger, playing by the niche players. A lot of things going on in the market currently. Yeah, the profit and loss, we'll not go through this in detail, but as you can see, volume matters.
We have here a tax rate for the quarter of 27.9%, which is higher than the average for the year of 24.5%. The reason for the higher tax rate in the quarter is due to payment of dividend from Bangladesh, where we need to pay out the tax on the dividend that we receive. Also, volume matters in terms of personal cost and other external costs. The higher volume, the more dilution we can have on that. That is an important factor. Split per product group. You can see here that the RIS product has gone up from 25% to 29%. That is, and also in the RIS product, we also have this Nilörn Connect. I will also present that a little more in detail later on here in the presentation. Label in percentage of the total sales is slightly lower, and the other remains quite stable.
Packaging is something that we will focus on even further, so I will come back on that. Here, the gross margin is also depending on what kind of product group we are selling and to clients. It's not obvious that big clients have lower margin, small clients have bigger margin. It's also depending very much on the product group that we are selling. Packaging has normally lower margin versus labels, but also in packaging, there are also bigger volumes. The gross margin is very much depending on the product group. Also, our sourcing team, since 2020, during COVID, we started to build up a central sourcing organization. That has also had an impact on the gross margin because they're doing a good job here, negotiating, concentrating on suppliers, and so on.
That is also an impact of the strong gross margin that we have seen here. Operating margin. We were spoiled here in the COVID. Historically, for you who remember Nilörn, we used to be around 10%-12%. During COVID, we were up here to 16%-17%, extremely high. Then we had slightly low in 2023, and now we're working us back again. The goal is to be around the 10%, even though we're not there yet. As I mentioned earlier, volume matters here. The Nilörn you see today is slightly different compared to the Nilörn in the past. Now also going into other segments, like much more technical and support and compliance and so on to the client. Quarter comparison, that is the same as the numbers, but here is more a graph showing that Q4 was strong in sales.
That is also better on the operating profit, as you can see here. Volume matters. Balance sheet, strong balance sheet. Of them, we have an equity of SEK 350 million, an equity ratio of 58.6%, and the net cash position now adjusted for IFRS 16 of SEK 60 million. We have cash in Nilörng ruppen and in countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and that is not so easy to take back to Europe on a daily basis that we take back through dividends. That happens maybe like once a year. That is more rigid in that sense, giving us not that flexibility as it would be in other European countries. We take out dividends, and we normally do that once a year from those countries.
We are also going here, building up cash for the coming investment that we will do here in the group, but more about that slightly soon. Oops. The number of employees has increased. We are now 660 employees. Countries where we increased the number of employees is in Asia, mainly. I would say it's India, it's in Pakistan, it's in Vietnam, where we built up a new office, new production, where we now in Vietnam, we are around 20 employees. We continue to increase in Bangladesh, where we now also set up a new factory. Some comments here. Strong Q4, as you see here. Also predicted from the strong Q ordering count we had in Q3. This has been affected by Chinese New Year or not. We are not sure. We will see that here, what's happening in Q1.
With operating margin of 8.4 in the quarter and 8.8 accumulated, or the accumulated number is 9.3%. If we adjust for the SEK 4.4 million in cost we had for the cyber attack. The goal, as I mentioned, is between 10%-12%. Question regarding the cyber attack, I would say we are fully back now and no effect at all, I would say. We have strengthened our security a lot since then. In that sense, it was a tough period for Nilörn, but we came out even stronger from that. Proposed dividend by the board to the share meeting is SEK 1.50. The total amount is SEK 17.1 million Swedish, and that is 29% of the net profit. For you who remember, the goal is to have 60%-90% of the net profit to pay out the dividend. This time is slightly less.
That is also to continue to have a strong balance sheet. At the same time, we will build a factory both in Bangladesh and also in Portugal. Outdoor segment I mentioned, luxury segment I mentioned about. We can see good development in these countries, which is good because they're relatively small, Spain, Switzerland, and U.S. from the Nilörn perspective. U.K. is a big country for us, but it's really good to see that they have been strong and coming back well. There is more to take here, I would say. We are investing even more now in the U.S., employing more people here. Yeah, the market and the consolidation I mentioned about already. The Bangladesh factory, we have now in the middle of going through a contract to sign off for land. We will continue to have our old existing factory that will continue to remain.
We're building a brand new factory besides the other one. This will be in a zone called economical zone, which is the duty-free zone, which is different to the other factory we have, which is outside or inside the country. This will be a project, and I think it will take approximately two years until we are up and running with the factory. We have established a project team, and once the contract has been signed, we will buy the land, and from there, there will be a big project. The goal is, as I said, to be end of 2026 to have that up and running with production. Nilörn, Portugal, we mentioned earlier that we should build a new factory here. We will not build a new factory. We will rebuild the existing factory to make it more compliant and more nice.
We will move out the warehouse to get space in the factory to have that externally. I think by this, we reduce the risk to have two big projects going on at the same time. At the same time, we can take steps further here in Portugal. In Vietnam, we are now up and running. Clients are moving over, and that is mainly a transition of clients from Hong Kong, China, into Vietnam. Here we have a lot of outdoor clients that want to be in Vietnam. They have a lot of production there. Instead of shipping the labels and the goods from China, Hong Kong, to Vietnam, we now supply them internally. We will set up a company also in Sri Lanka that will not be with our production. That will only be sourcing an office and warehouse delivery.
That is not that big, quite a small operation. We continue to be a big interest in the Nilörn Connect, and that is the main focus for us that we will continue to invest and be strong on that. Production is a strong development in the group. We see it has continued to develop well. That is something that we will, that is also what we are focusing on now, increasing the capacity with new factories. Packaging is an area where we have around 20% of the sales. We will, and we think there is much more potential here. We focus on that and just employed a packaging technical manager starting here on Monday this week. That will support sales among the client, but also be the link between the sourcing in the group and the sales team.
Here, I think that person can have a lot to contribute within the group, also making our sales team more secure when they are out there meeting clients. Yes, we're doing a lot of investments here. As you can see, both in production, but also in Nilörn Connect and also going into packaging. I'm sure then we are well equipped to meet both the challenges and opportunities that come in the market here. Just a few slides about Nilörn Connect. We talked about that earlier, but for you just to remind you, what is Nilörn Connect? It's a concept, I would say, more than a product. Starting off with a QR code where we can feed this with information for you as an end consumer.
When you scan this on your garment, you can get information about the garment, about where it's produced, and so on. As you know, there's a lot of legal compliance in Europe where the Digital Product Passport is to come, and where our client currently has a lot of headache. Through this and through the information carrier, which is the label, and through our system, we will connect data from different sources and provide to the brand owners, and they can provide different information to the owner of the garment with repay, resell, recycle, and engage customers, engagement, drive sales, create loyalty with the client, and acquire new customers. Even though it started here with the compliance side, very much compliance behind it, we see that they can build in so much more in this area.
Nilörn will not go and build all these different things, but we will be, the goal is to be in the center, in the network. We have the labels with the information carrier, and through that, we will have cooperation with the suppliers and of different systems and so on. We will be in the center, supporting our client with the information. Yes, this is our target, is to have a growth without exceeding 7%, an operating margin exceeding 10%, and a net debt should not exceed two times EBITDA. For 2024, we had a growth of 9% and operating margin of 8%. We did not reach the operating margin of 8%, and the dividend of the group, as I mentioned earlier, should be around, the goal is to be 60%-90% this year.
We increased the dividend to SEK 1.50 from one krona, though it's slightly lower than the goal we had set up, but that is due to continue to be a strong, healthy company and still be able to do the investment we are seeing in front of us. Yes, thank you. That was all regarding the presentation. Maria, time is running, but do we have any questions?
Yes, we have received questions from two persons, so we can take those. The first one is about the potential in the U.S. and a bit about that.
Yes, yes, good, good. Just by the history, we started off in Europe, and when I was starting in Nilörn 17 years ago, I've been there quite long now. We were very, very Nordic, very weak out in Europe.
We built up now in Europe, so we've been stronger and stronger in, so we cover most countries in Europe and quite strong there. In 2020, we started off in the U.S. We started very quietly. We just have one employee there, and we have, and there was quite, took some time until we had the breakthrough, which we have had now, and we are profitable. What we're aiming for now is to build up a small organization there to have a sales assistant and one or two more salespeople and build from there. We will continue not to do a big, big thing, but continue to build and make sure we are profitable and keep on that. Right on the way we have now, where we are profitable and build up a local organization.
The way we're doing now is that we have one salesperson in the U.S. that is served from the sales assistant in Europe and Asia. Now we've built up that in the U.S. as well. Coming back to the question regarding potential, I think the potential is definitely there. We can see that our competitors are there, but we will take it step by step.
Yeah, good, thank you. We also got two questions about the investments. When do you expect the new Bangladesh factory to be running at normal capacity? That is, how long would it take from factory completion to business as usual? Also, when can we expect the Portugal upgrade to be finished?
Yeah, starting off with Bangladesh first.
Once the factory is running, we will invest, I mean, we feel this factory that will, this factory will be much bigger in the number of square meters compared to the old one, I would say in double size. We will not fill up this one with machineries completely at start. We will take it step gradually as well. Once we see the volume comes, we will invest in machineries and so on. I think the factory will be ready in Q4, Q3 next year, 2026. From then until the factory is up and running completely, I would say another year. Yes, and.
Portugal.
Yes, Portugal as well, yes. I would say end of 2025, 2026, I would say that that is finalized. That is my best guess at the moment. We have not started, we have not come so far in the project.
We just made a project plan there. What happens now is that we just employed a new production manager that will be very into this project as well in Portugal. It will take some time before this person is up and running. I would expect, but the big change is not that big change in Portugal as it is in Bangladesh, of course. We will just change the layout of the factory and we will implement lean in this factory. That will take some time. Of course, during this period, we will not stop the production. We will continue at the same time we do the restructuring.
Thank you. Yes, as we are running out of time, I think we unfortunately have to stop there.
Very good. Thank you very much for listening and taking your time.
Looking forward to meet you again in the next Q1. Thank you. Bye.