Report this morning and introducing the significant events and financial information for the first quarter. We have NYAB CEO Johan Larsson and CFO Aku Väliaho, and I am NYAB's Director of Investor Relations Marko Peltonen. If you have any questions for our management, please write them in the chat during the presentation and we will answer them at the end. Now, without further introduction, I hand over to Johan who will start with describing our start for the year.
Hi everyone and welcome. This is Johan speaking. So our Q1, we ended up with a revenue exceeding EUR 59 million, which gives a growth of 51.1% in relation to the comparison period. EBIT, on the positive side, improvement with EUR 2.5 million, and in percent it's 5.9% units. And the cash flow grows significantly, EUR 13.5 million. This gives us a R12 cash flow of close to EUR 35 million. And our order backlog amounted to EUR 286.3 million. And that's an improvement with close to 22% in relation to the comparison period. So revenue, for the first time, although it was low season, our strong growth in revenue that doesn't have too much effect on full year, makes us past the EUR 300 million mark for the first time. Hopefully, we will keep ourselves north of EUR 300 million going forward.
Our EBIT, R12, has an improvement as well as EBIT margin. The EBIT margin improves 0.5%. And the free cash flow, as mentioned, that's a 56.4% improvement from Q4 2023. And our order backlog only decreased by 2.9%, which is quite strong. If you take seasonality into consideration, in Q1 we always have a lot of activities in tenders, bids, that seldom materialize into contracts during the first quarter. And having this high level of revenue, and only decreasing order backlog in Q1 with 2.9% is really strong. We are more than pleased with that. The bigger picture, we aim to build a better and stronger company, always ongoing. Some important steps for the future have been taken. The cross-border conversion plan was approved by the extraordinary general meeting on April 29th, meaning that we transferred NYAB's registered office to Luleå, Sweden. And related to that, a listing transfer.
We also signed a letter of intent with Dyk & Anläggning, who is a marine contracting company who works in a niche that we see a lot of growth potential in. So, we expect to have a closing in that acquisition within the coming weeks. We have clearly improved our workways further. Selection of new projects. A few of them signed during Q1, Trafikverket, in a long series of Opto 2.0. We signed a new contract with Trafikverket for Åby–Järna, which is in Södermanland. We agreed on a contract with LKAB for the renovation of previously moved culture buildings, as they are called, in their transformation of society, which enables future mining in Gällivare. In Luleå, we are pleased that Duroc Rail shows us to construct a new industrial building.
The construction site is on a real hotspot, Luleå Industrial Park, where loads of green transition investments are taking place, and are expected to take place. With Trafikverket, we signed a replacement of railway tracks in Katrineholm. So, the underlying market growth is expected to remain at high levels. Enough much has happened, since Q4. What has happened is all slightly in a positive direction. The three megatrends that drive investments in our addressable markets are green transition, deglobalization, and urbanization. To break it down in our addressable markets, you see that if we exclude housing, we have a soft growth of our markets in Sweden. In Norrbotten, we have a significant growth. Finland moved sideways. Here we are, of course, very happy to have strong clients both in public sector and private sector. We have a really favorable position.
Key in this matter going forward is, of course, having inflation under control, and that interest rates are at least at a stable level. Swedish Riksbanken announced today that they lowered their interest for the first time in close to a decade or something. That is, of course, very positive. With our strong financial position, the positivity, of course, comes from, it improves for our clients, doing their investments, and it's favorable for many of our subcontractors as well, meaning that when there are higher interests, we to some extent get, like, pushed from both directions. So, that that's really, really positive news. Makes an optimistic CEO even more optimistic. So here I'll hand over to Aku.
Thanks, Johan. Good day to all listeners from me as well. My name is Aku Väliaho. Then let's take a bit more deep dive into our Q1 financials. So as stated already earlier, our revenue grew by over 51%. Good progress in energy projects, especially, was the main contributor in Q1 revenue growth. Our revenue from Sweden amounted to 75%. Revenue from public sector amounted to 59% in Q1. Those figures represent a small uptick from the rolling figures, which we are pleased. We have a good balanced and strong set of clients, both in public and private sectors. Then continuing on the country level, so Sweden grew reportedly by over 83% year-over-year. That's, of course, an indication of an improving local market conditions, which is good for NYAB and due to our position in Sweden.
Good to notice, though, that still the cold winter conditions in northern Sweden caused some delayed progress in some of the projects. So taking that into consideration as well, we can be pleased with our revenue development during the Q1. Even though Q1 is seasonally our weakest quarter, we still managed to push on the black figures. So EBIT landed at approximately EUR 400,000, illustrating a 0.7% margin where there is an improvement of 5.9 percentage points. Higher volumes with favorable project mix enabled the good performance improvement. Operational leverage is visible in the P&L, as the share of fixed costs from total costs decreased during the quarter one. For the rolling 12 months, even though this is a small volume quarter, we managed to make an uptick in the EBIT percentage so that it was 5.9%.
So we are moving toward a better situation and toward normalized market conditions. Order backlog grew by almost 22% year-over-year. We have seen that volumes that were postponed last year, have started to materialize, especially in Sweden. We are pleased with the order book composition. It is well balanced between countries, customer groups, and maturities. And what creates confidence for the short-term future is also that the level of projects at the tendering stage is higher currently than for the comparison period. And we continued our strong cash flow generation. So Q1 free cash flow was over EUR 13 million, which was impacted by a EUR 2.4 million investment to our joint venture, Skarta Energy. In Skarta Energy, there were financing rounds conducted during the Q1, which diluted our current ownership from 40%-34%. We ended up the quarter in a heavy cash position.
So net cash was almost EUR 20 million when in the comparison period we had a EUR 10 million net debt position. This, of course, means that we have a strong balance sheet. Net debt to EBITDA was -0.8%, an equity ratio of over 74%, and our return on capital employed continued to improve and was now 8%. So now I hand back over to Johan. Thank you.
Thank you, Aku. Yeah. If you see first here down to the right, the importance of this slide, where we are trying to position ourselves as favorable as possible, building a better and stronger company. Constantly ongoing work, to get another decade, with rising staples. To narrow it down to how we perform against our long-term financial targets. Annual revenue growth. We have the target to exceed 10% on annual basis. With the outcome of this Q1, which is the seasonally weakest quarter, we must state that it's a remarkable growth that we in two. With the comparison period, the earlier R12, it is remarkable to almost reach the annual revenue growth target, in this quarter. Our EBIT margin improved with 0.5% units. Also remarkable. Taking into consideration our strong seasonality. Our net debt is negative. So we are on a very steady level there, of course.
Dividend can't be measured for now, but with a very high and nice cash conversion, that, of course, stems from the performance of our company. We feel quite confident that we will be able to reach our target. Not much to add on Q1 in relation to long-term targets. If we try to summarize this, most are more or less obvious, but it feels good that we proved and utilized our favorable position. It's also of great importance for now and for the future that we are able to smoothen out the seasonality of our operations. That stems extra from that we have such a high presence in the north. Of course, the north is a very attractive market with big industrial investments coming up, defense investments, etc.
But it's still of great value that we see the outcome we have for a couple of years been struggling very hard to smoothen out seasonality. So we are so, so much on the right track. Our operations are developing in line with our strategic plan. I'm very happy to see that. Strategy is one thing. Execution is another. Thanks to our skilled employees and great managers. The execution is really good in both Sweden and Finland. I don't feel that there is a glitch. So we have implemented and are executing on our strategic plan to a very satisfying level. And the transition to a Swedish company. It supports our position. Of course, in my role as a CEO, I think mainly from an operative perspective, and I knew it will be favorable in many ways.
So, I'm very happy with the decision that was made in April at our EGM, and of course, all of this makes us well- positioned to both reach and exceed last year's outcome, and execute toward our long-term financial targets. That's it. Thank you.
Thank you, Johan and Aku. Let's move on to the questions we have received. First question, NYAB had a very strong start to the year considering the seasonality in our business. How much growth was supported by the postponement of projects from last year to the current year?
Yeah. That is quite easy. Slim to none, because when you postpone projects due to cold weather, we had an extremely early winter, extreme weather conditions, where we lost like 6 weeks of higher production. The thing is that in Q1 you have even more winter.
So the postponements on those projects will materialize starting like from May to August, September.
Okay. Then order backlog also grew 22% compared to the comparison period. Can you disclose roughly what the structure of the current order backlog is and how much from it you are expecting to be produced this year?
Yeah. I would say that, the structure we are very selective, trying to cherry-pick, our project, that is suitable for us. And, what we see is although we have this order backlog, we have room for a lot more. That is of quite good, great importance since the markets are, developing. There are expected NATO investments, defense-related investments and so on.
But, we, of course, see that if we have a revenue growth of 51% in Q1 and with the order backlog that we have that is on a level that is 22% higher, the amount that is executed during this year is pretty much the same as previous year. From this point, I hope that was clarifying.
Okay. Now it looks like we have gone through all questions that have been asked during the presentation. So we thank everyone for participating and see you next time.
Thank you.
Thank you.