All right, we'll go through this. For those of you who do not know us, we'll do a quick introduction to the company. We'll give you a quick update of the market situation, and then go into the actual meat of today's presentation, the key developments and financial results of the fourth quarter of 2021. It'll be a bit of a tag between myself and Linda here during the presentation. Again, for those of you who do not know us, we are a Sweden-based IT company. We provide IT infrastructure to large and mid-size enterprises across Europe.
We serve about 4,000 customers across our footprint, which you can see here on the map, turning over a little bit more than EUR 350 million per year, and we are now 1,100 employees, which has increased in the quarter through the acquisition in Germany that we'll come back to here in the presentation. Obviously, we're operating on a very fast-moving market. It's very much driven by our customers' transformation journeys. Practically all our customers are going through what we call a digital transformation. They try to improve their business operations through IT and technology. We believe that the vast majority of that transformation is driven by the value of data.
That could be anything from making better decisions through analysis of data, automating processes, improving manufacturing flows, increasing customer satisfaction, whatever it may be that our customers want to achieve, speed up their application development pace. A lot of that is based on getting value out of all the data they have in the house. This is obviously an area of expertise for Proact, and it has been since our start almost 30 years ago. The business driver in the marketplace is very much the digital transformation and drive business innovation through IT. There's a technology trend which is probably equally important, which is what we call multi-cloud, meaning that our customers wants to use modern cloud architectures to achieve the transformation.
That doesn't necessarily mean what we usually call the public cloud, meaning large, worldwide hyperscaler providers like Microsoft or Amazon. It could be cloud solutions that they manage in their own data centers, designed in a modern way with scalable and flexible and high-performing architectures. Then the third trend, which is maybe a little bit less positive, this is obviously the increasing threat of cybercrime and cyberattacks. All these three trends are important for us and very important for our strategy and very much what we design our strategy around. We believe Corona has definitely had an impact on our business.
Hopefully and seemingly it's fading away finally, but clearly has had some impact in terms of changing IT infrastructure to enable different kinds or different ways of working, a lot of remote working, definitely managing security more actively, both because of increased threat, but also the change in how people work. That's another trend that may have been accelerated a little bit here through the pandemic. We are specialists. It's very important to us. We wanna be extremely good at what we do, which means we do not do everything for our customers. We do the things where we really can add value in being experts. We are focusing our expertise around data and information management. Obviously, that means a lot of things, and it's a broad spectrum.
We help our customers with their data strategy. We help them store their data in a secure and accessible way. Connectivity, of course, becomes super important. We wanna connect users and processes and different sites to where the data is stored. Protection, as we touched on, making sure that the data is protected. It can be restored in case of failures. Protection is important and ultimately getting value out of that data wherever it is, AI, automation, rapid application development. The actual services we provide are listed here in the four bars at the bottom here. Consulting services, everything from strategic consulting on how to design infrastructures, how to transform the business to installation, implementation, training, and even operations of infrastructure. Managed services, so actually delivering IT function as a service.
Rather than customers owning and managing their own infrastructure, we manage it on their behalf, or we sell them to them as a service. Super important and growing area, of course. Third revenue stream, if you will, or product line is the reselling of hardware and software, our traditional business, if you will. Selling equipment that our customers own and manage. Last but not least, supporting the infrastructure. Making sure that it's always operational and up-to-date and functioning as expected. These are the four areas of offerings and also the four revenue stream that we are reporting. Clearly, we have a pretty broad value proposition. I'm not gonna go through it here.
It's very much geared around our customers, of course, and make sure that they are delivering value to our customers and are geared to driving business value to our customers. It ranges from everything from storage solutions, networking, workspace backup, recovery, security, artificial intelligence solutions. One important piece here that I think I can't stress enough is that we can deliver this in a number of different ways. I think there is a, let's say, perception that we resell equipment, and that is definitely true, but we can also deliver this in a number of different ways, definitely depending on what the customer prefers. If they wanna run their infrastructure in a public cloud environment, we can handle that. If they want us to run it for them, we could do it, or if they wanna manage it themselves, we can do it.
This is what we mean by multi-cloud. That there's a variety of ways to deliver the technology and manage the technology. Most of our customer will live in what we call a hybrid world. They would definitely use Microsoft for their Office suite and their desktop solutions, but they may still wanna store their data in their own data centers to make sure it's in their control and is safe. All these different variants needs to work together, of course. This is an important part of our value proposition. Good. That's a little bit about the company. If we're then switching gears to the quarter, I think most of you know this already. It was a quarter that was largely impacted by the semiconductor shortages, which means that our revenues went down. There are some positives here.
We had a good positive decline in our services revenue.
Increase.
Thank you for the clarification. A good increase in our services revenue, which is obviously very important and a key part of our strategy to increase the mix towards services. We did have a record quarter in terms of the signing new contracts for managed cloud solutions, what we here call TCV, Total Contract Value. It reached SEK 177 million in the quarter, so that's the value over the contract period for all the new contracts, which is great. We did an acquisition, as I mentioned here in the beginning, in Germany, the company called AHD, which we'll come back to. A very strong managed cloud service provider in the Cologne part of Germany.
Systems were down and mostly then impacted by the fact that towards the middle and second half of Q4, delivery times increased quite drastically from our core vendors. We have been spared, quite frankly, from impact of the semiconductor shortages during a long period of time, but it caught up also in our space here in the fourth quarter. That also, of course, had an impact on our EBITDA, which as a follow-on from the volume decrease also decreased. EBITDA is down as a consequence of the shortage of semiconductor and the volume decrease. Just wanna talk a little bit more about the semiconductor shortages, just to give you a little bit of background, and you know this already. It's a global phenomenon. It's been going on since almost two years now.
A lot of different root causes to it. Definitely the pandemic have had impact. Trade conflicts, in particular between the U.S. and China, has had some impact. The big container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal had an impact. Severe weather has had impact. There's been foundries and factories in Texas, in Taiwan, and other places that have been closed down due to weather impact. All of this has then created a huge backlog of semiconductors. Large industries have been impacted, some of them definitely long before we did. The automotive industry has obviously been one of the ones that have been talked about the most. There's now some light in the tunnel. We'll see how long this will take. Major manufacturers, including U.S.-based Intel and Taiwan-based TSMC, are expecting incremental here during...
Incremental improvements during 2022, which is good. Our impact was, as we announced already in December, quite significant in Q4, but very little up until then. Our estimate here is that we had a revenue impact of about SEK 200 million that was then shifted as backlog into 2022. We believe that the situation is the same here in the beginning of 2022. It's not worsened, but it hasn't improved, so it's the same. Hopefully then, as mentioned here, incrementally improve during the year. Just give a little bit of an update or insight into the acquisition. This was done right after we announced the Q3 report in October. AHD is a fantastic company based out of Cologne. Sorry, no, I said Cologne. It's in the Dortmund area. Apologies.
Dortmund area in Germany, which is great. It's a region which is very important, of course, from a business and financial perspective in Germany, and a region where we don't have a significant footprint from before. We're bringing in about 120 people, and they are really good in managed cloud services. They are doing almost half or more than half of their revenue already as managed cloud services. Very strong capabilities here. Complementary. Targeting the same type of customers, but very small customer overlaps. There's a good opportunity for cross-sell and upsell. Their processes, I mean, the way they deliver the services is quite mature and we're bringing in a company that we can learn from and leverage from in terms of improving our own operations, which is great.
Obviously, they will have a positive contribution to both our revenue and our margins. These numbers here have been announced before. The purchase price of about EUR 26 million was a multiple of 9x on their EBITDA results. They will be adding roughly EUR 30 million on a yearly basis to our revenue with a EBITDA margin of 10%. That's a very good contribution to our business, and we're particularly happy that we're making acquisition in Germany, which is one of, if not the largest IT market in Europe and where we're now effectively doubling our footprint and doubling our market share through this acquisition. Again, a very good strategic fit regionally in the German market. A couple of other good things or developments in the quarter. Good progress on previous acquisitions.
The Cetus acquisition that we did in the U.K., a year before has now been fully integrated and rebranded, so they're now a fully integrated part of the Proact operations in the U.K. We acquired Conoa here in Stockholm in spring of last year. Also very good integration of that company and in particular, good progress in both of these businesses in terms of the commercial synergies. We've actually done customer engagements and business deals during the year that we wouldn't have been able to do without these companies. It's great to see that we're actually getting the commercial benefits and the strengthening in our offerings through these two companies. Good progress. We've announced or we delivered a very exciting infrastructure to Region Västra Götaland.
One of the biggest healthcare public sector organizations in Sweden. It's a collection of municipalities in the western part of Sweden. A great showcase of our strengthening of our portfolio into the AI space. A number of awards were received in the end of the last year from our core vendors, in particular, Dell. We also received a few from NetApp that was announced earlier. Some good recognitions also in terms of our people efforts, in terms of being a caring company of the year here in Sweden for the coming year, which is great. Obviously, we are a people company and put a lot of effort in making sure that we can attract and retain very strong talent. Good achievement also in some other areas.
Just a very quick glance on Region Västra Götaland or VGR as they shorten themselves. It's a healthcare provider and one of the largest employers in Sweden. It's a public sector provider of healthcare in the region, and are now running AI infrastructure to improve their service and healthcare services. They're running this on top of a platform that we provided together with some our core partners, NetApp and NVIDIA. Very potent computing platform that enables AI or processing of their healthcare initiatives. Jump into something completely different. Cybersecurity, as I mentioned, is an increasing threat, but it's also an area where we have some very skilled capabilities that are rarely visible.
Obviously, this is maybe a set of services that mostly talked about in a negative way. There was a big incident, a global incident in the quarter of last year, the fourth quarter of last year, which is called the Log4j. It's a utility, an open source utility provided by Apache, an open source organization that is used in hundreds of products and thousands, if not millions, of systems across the globe. This is not Proact specific, but a hugely global used utility. It turns out it had a pretty significant vulnerability in it, which was then announced, if you will, as a zero-day vulnerability, meaning that the actual providers of the utility didn't know until it was exploited.
It means that everybody had to react after hackers started to exploit. The security hole allowed remote hackers to run code in the systems, including ransomware, relatively easily. Millions of systems probably affected by this. Since we are managing a lot of our own systems, and in particular the customer systems, of course, this was a big incident. We are providing security services to our customers, and we managed to handle this in a very good way. We applied a large number of technicians to secure the systems that we are either running on behalf of our customers or our customers' own systems. This is obviously a race against time. Because it's a zero-day vulnerability, we had to fix and patch and upgrade systems in parallel with attackers exploiting them.
I'm happy to say that we were successful and the severity of this vulnerability on a global basis has now been downgraded significantly, and risks are managed both globally, but of course also for Proact and our customers. A good example, I think, of the security services that we provide to our services and that we maybe speak a little bit too little of considering the importance of it and the increasing threats. That's a couple of examples and highlights from the quarter in terms of what has happened, including customers and services and otherwise. I'm gonna hand over to you, Linda, for the financials.
Thank you, Jonas. If we start with the first slide. Thank you. Highlights for Q4, revenue growth or revenue decline of 4% to SEK 942 million, whereas systems was declining by 16%, whereas services growing by 17%. This then led to the decrease in adjusted EBITA of 14% and a margin of 6%, and the corresponding decrease in the profit before tax, 26% down, to a margin of 4%. Into a little bit of details then. We click again. Thank you.
The revenue growth, 14% decline organically, where the acquisitions contributed by 9%, and the acquisitions here they include then both, AHD, the latest one, that has been consolidated for two months, and then Conoa and Cetus, where we had two months of revenues last year and three months this year. No significant currency effects in the quarter. As Jonas mentioned, the TCV or the new cloud services contracts that we closed was SEK 177 million compared to SEK 142 million same quarter last year. Fourth quarter has been good several years in a row, actually, but also really, really good this year.
If we go more specifically to the services growth, we're really happy that that is growing and also growing organically with the growth in all of our three services streams. Cloud revenue increase of 60%. Here, the majority of the impact is from the acquisition of AHD, but organically, it's a small growth. Support services growth 8%. The majority of that is organic. We're really happy that our core support is appreciated by customers and that we're able to have good rates of support services despite systems not performing. Consulting services 31% growth. Here, the acquisition of Conoa that we did earlier in the year, and that is focused on consulting, provided a large part of the growth.
Also organically, we've seen good demand over the later part of this year for the types of competencies we have. In most places also a strong growth there. We started in this quarter to talk a little bit more about recurring revenues, just to clarify and be more specific about what parts of our revenues are recurring. When we talk about recurring revenues here, we add the support services and the cloud services, the managed cloud services. Those are both typically three-year contracts up to five-year contracts with a large proportion of contracted revenues. That's the new graph you see to the right-hand side is the recurring revenues quarterly, individual quarters, as well as the 12 months rolling.
If we looked at that in the fourth quarter, the combination here grew by 13%, 3% organically to an annualized level of SEK 1.3 million . Systems, the decreases we've talked about, we see 16% down, of which 24% organically across the board, because it was several of our main products affected. It's not a single country, but rather the majority of our systems products. Organic declines by, you can see it, from 33%-17% in individual business units. As Jonas was saying, we estimate the overall impact to be around SEK 200 million, as we communicated earlier. If we then look at the profitability, of course, impacted by the revenue decline, the gross margin in the quarter was unchanged compared to last year.
We did have some declines in systems margins, which can be a little bit volatile. We get different types of incentives and different types of larger deals that impact between different quarters. Whereas the services part, we saw an increase in the gross margins. Also, the effect of larger services shares that favorable mix had a positive impact. SG&A costs remain low. They were low last year as a result of COVID and cost-cutting measures, even lower this year. We continue with the strong cost control. Also, we saw that with lower revenues, we have lower commissions and lower sales. That also impacted the SG&A costs in this quarter.
Then on the bottom line, earnings per share went down due to the decline in EBIT, basically. If we move to the different business units, we'll go through them quickly. Nordics and Baltics. Here we have Conoa that we acquired in Sweden impacting. The revenue growth or decline was 2%, but organically 14%. In the fourth quarter, they did actually contribute also, and Systems had a quite large system sales, relatively. Here we see then the main impact of the decline is the semiconductor shortage, where we saw Systems revenues declining in all of the countries here, and the EBIT margin decreasing a little bit and the EBIT as well, and that's a pure result of the lower revenues. If we move to next business unit, U.K.
Here, going down by 19%, 16% organically. Systems down 42%. Hopefully more than the organic decline due to a lot of delays also for Cetus that we had for part of the quarter last year. Services, on the other hand, up 8%, of which 4% organically. So that's good. Here we see strong consulting revenues, in particular related to some of the both managed cloud services deals we've taken here, as well as some of the previous systems deals. We do see in the U.K. the impact also of semiconductor shortages, but also during this year, we've continued to see quite long decision cycles, so we've had lower system sales here for a few quarters.
EBITDA margin here also going down, but here as well, it is a result of the lower revenues. If we go to West, it's a similar story for all of the business units. Here systems decline also of 18%. Here, we haven't acquired anything, so the difference between revenue decline, absolute and organic is purely currency effects, the small currency effects. We also see a decline in services where we've had low volume of new cloud service contracts during the year that is impacting as well. EBITDA here is increasing.
For those of you who have followed us, we started to have some issues with profitability here in both due to lower system sales, but also in the services business in Q4 and Q1, initiated an action program there where we saw results starting in Q2, now we're seeing full results of that. The margin has come back significantly. We're really happy about that. We have both better gross margins and lower SG&A now than previously. Move to Central. Here, AHD that we acquired is, of course, a huge contributor to revenues. It's about the same size as our current German business, so contributing significantly. We see revenue growth here of 23%, whereas organically, it's declining by 16%.
Since AHD is particularly strong in services, it's there where we see the big growth of 76%, they contributed by SEK 39 million in revenues. The EBITDA margin is decreasing a little bit, and EBITDA in absolute terms is flat. AHD is contributing positively. SG&A costs are also down, so also contributing positively, but the reduction in revenues is impacting negatively as well as the gross margins that are actually going down a little bit here. Okay, so if we move to next slide, cash flow, positive cash flow in the quarter. We will have the full year in the next slide. We typically would have positive cash flow from current operations before working capital.
For those of you who follow us, it's the change in working capital that fluctuates a lot between the quarters, depending on when we get paid for certain big deals and when we pay our suppliers. Positive here, so increase in accounts payables, but also partly offset by an increase in accounts receivables is the major impact. Not that much investments in fixed assets. The acquisition here, of course, of AHD is one of our big cash outflows, and offset by an increase in our bank loans, so of SEK 222 million, that affects in the other way round. Then the other major cash outflow is the repayments on leasing liabilities. We end the year at a strong cash position of SEK 464 million. Just quickly, the full year.
Here we can see that the change in working capital for the full year is -SEK 50 million, so a little bit negative. We ended, as you know, last year on really, really strong levels as well. Here, acquisition of subsidiaries is both AHD and Conoa then. Yeah, I think that's what we need to talk about here. Then we go to the balance sheet remaining on a equity ratio of 21%. Net debt, when we include leasing liabilities, is SEK 261 million, whereas it was slightly negative or a net cash position last year. Of course, the main reason for that difference is the acquisitions that we've been doing.
We still have unutilized overdraft facilities of SEK 158 million and an unutilized portion of our updated three-year revolving credit facility of SEK 160 million, plus a strong cash position. We've added, I believe, which is in the next slide, one slide now that we have the full year on where we ended the full year. I can talk about the financials, and then Jonas, you can mention the other highlights. A little bit of a decline on full year revenues as well, 8% organically, 3% overall. Of course, it's the systems revenues here that has the big impact, and in particular Q4. We also had earlier in the year, we've continued to see impacts of long decision cycles.
Services revenues, on the other hand, did grow over the year by 6% in total, with recurring revenues showing 3% growth. This is the consulting revenues, the strong growth there, 16%. EBITDA was going down, and that's purely through the impact of the revenue decline. We did see improving gross margins and organically reducing SG&A. Overall, yes, we have been hit pretty hard from these revenue shortages, would be the main conclusion. Underlying profitability, we think is developing well.
I think that's a good summary. Thank you, Linda. There's other things, of course, that have been going on which are important to us, and I've only summarized, or we have only summarized a few of them here on this slide. First and foremost, we put customers front and center what we do, and it's been great to see that we continue to have a good and high customer satisfaction. We measure it as NPS or Net Promoter Score with a result of 44. That's a strong and positive sign that we're doing the right things for our customers. We made two acquisitions during the year, as you know, Conoa in Sweden in April of last year, and then, AHD in Germany in October of last year.
We are now, I think, running roughly over the past two years, we've done four acquisitions, which is a good pace for us. Good recognition among both partners, but also other type of, let's say, research institutes that are rating Proact highly in a number of our key markets. We receive awards from Dell, NetApp, and other institutions that are rating us as high quality providers of IT services and IT solutions. Launched a couple of products during the year, including an important disaster recovery product in what we call a multi-cloud environment.
Going back a little bit to what we opened up with here, the importance of being able to protect the data and being able to protect data regardless of whether you have it stored in a public cloud or in your own data centers or with Proact. We're making sure that our portfolio is capable of handling that typical environment that we see in our customers, meaning they use a number of different cloud options and we can support all of that. We've upgraded our internal operations. We've talked about that a little bit here in the calls that one of the important piece for our long-term strategy is internal process and efficiencies and tooling to just deliver better quality to our customers, but also being able to do it faster and more efficient.
During the year, we moved into a monitoring platform that's based on what's called AIOps or artificial intelligence operations, really, really being able to monitor and run our systems with high degree of intelligence and automation. Sort of a couple of milestones during the 2021 that has been driving us in the right direction that we wanted to highlight here today. Look at our goals. Obviously, this year will come out a little bit tougher, and there's no secret that we have had, I think, a net negative impact of the pandemic, unfortunately. Growth is declining, as we've talked about here. EBITDA margin is still a couple of points away from our target, and it's very much volume-driven, as we mentioned.
Net debt over EBITDA, still very strong as we walk through our balance sheet here. Also the return on capital employed is below target. Here we're both impacted by some of the accounting rules, but obviously the acquisitions are keeping us below the target here a little bit and will do for some time to come as we continue our acquisition journey. Last but not least, again, apologies for the incorrect statement here in the beginning of the morning. The correct dividend is SEK 1.5, which is unchanged from last year, and we're right in the upper end of that dividend target that we've communicated a couple of years back, that we should have dividends in the 25%-35% of profits after tax.
Still a strong statement, I think, in terms of our view of the future and our financial position. Just to summarize, definitely a tough quarter with the delivery situation, but still some good things that we're very happy with and proud of. Record sales of cloud contracts is one of those very good underlying demand, and we're going into 2022 with a backlog that's significantly higher than a normal year. And again, last but not least, strengthening our position in the German market. I think these are a couple of highlights from the quarter to summarize the presentation. Thank you very much for listening. We'll be opening up for questions. Anna here is helping us. We'll unmute you all, and you can either just start asking questions or raise your team's hand, whichever you prefer.
Fredrik, you have a question. Go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. Fredrik Nilsson from Redeye here. I was a bit late into the meeting, unfortunately, so I apologize if you already touched upon this. I mean, as you mentioned, the cloud intake was very strong. However, you mentioned a big order in the U.K. Could you tell us a bit about the underlying development as well?
The underlying development has been good, and we see good, I think, general market activity and demand and customer activity around cloud deals. Definitely the U.K. deal helped. It is a significant one, but it's not the only one driving the success in the quarter.
Okay. Also the sales and marketing was quite low, according to me, at least. You mentioned lower commissions, but are there anything else affecting the number as well? I suppose the traveling expenses were still quite limited.
Obviously, general SG&A is low, as it was last year, same quarter because of the pandemic. Very little travel, very, very little entertainment, those kinds of things. SG&A or commissions and sales cost low because of the lower volume. Those are the main drivers for us. Anything else, Linda?
Seasonally, we did have some sort of vacation-positive vacation effects hitting Q4 versus sort of earlier in the year. A little bit of sort of seasonal shift there, of course.
Mm-hmm.
Okay. One last question from me. I mean, you mentioned that the backlog is strong. What about the components? What's the outlook right now?
We did mention this, and apologies that you had some troubles coming in to the meeting, Fredrik. Our view right now is that the situation in terms of components and in particular deliveries from our most important vendors is unchanged compared to Q4 or compared to the second half of Q4, meaning still longer delivery times than normal but not worsened, equally bad as the end of Q4. We did speak a little bit here in the call on the general trends in the global situation, and if we look at people like Intel and TSMC, they communicate that they will expect to see incremental improvements during 2022.
I think that's roughly the same view we have, that this will improve during the year, not get worsened, but improve during the year. Whether we'll see that already in the first half or whether we'll see the effects in second half, we don't have a strong view on that currently.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
No more questions.
Okay. We're always available if you want to set up a one-on-one or have any other questions.
Absolutely. Thanks for calling in, and feel free to reach out to me or Linda if you have any further questions. With that, we wish you a good Thursday. Thanks again, and see you next quarter.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye.