Good morning, and welcome to the IR webinar, where Polygiene will present the third quarter. Together with me today, I have Niklas Blomstedt, who is the new CFO of the company since September. As usual, we will walk you through the highlights of the quarter. We will check out the finances and also go deeper into the business in the freshness and protection categories. In the end, we will conduct our Q&A as normal. Please send in your questions in the chat. Overall, just a quick summary, high level. I will say that this is, of course, a very disappointing quarter, but it's also important to understand the mechanisms in the business model. I will show you in two slides to describe how the distributors are impacting the sales as it did this quarter. We didn't expect that they will lower their levels of stock.
We thought that they will continue to, as normal, order stocks as the normal processes. Since we see a reduction in orders coming in from the brands, they've been very cautious, and they want to lower the levels. It's of course also driven by the macroeconomic situation the world is at the moment. I will start to describe the business model and the invoicing model of the Polygiene Group. If we start to look at the protection side, this is a very straightforward model. It's traditional, and it's very effective. Basically, you have a customer, and we sell, and we ship, and we invoice, and then it's finished. In Europe, we mainly have direct customers because it's very easy to ship goods within Europe. It takes two to three days with whichever country you will send to.
When we look at in China and U.S., we can't ship orders one by one, so we use distributors to sell for us in these regions. In the Addmaster case or the old Addmaster case, the distributors can sell, so they buy, and they ship out and sell. We don't know who the customer is they ship to because the distributor is, in fact, the customer in this case. If you look at the freshness side, in the textile, it's different because here Polygiene always would like to have control of who will receive the goods in the end, so the customer is actually the end brand. As you can see here, they're all direct customers, mainly in Europe, for the same reason. We can ship easily, and we can invoice the customer directly.
Since textile production is normally overseas, it's in Asia and South America and long distance, we need to work with partners who can keep stock and ship for us, and that is the distributor. You could call it a logistic partner because they are not selling by themselves. We want to control who they ship to, who the orders they receive from. That's why we have the brand sales, and the brand sales is actually the real measurement of how Polygiene is performing because that is the brands we work with. We have direct contact with the brands, but this distribution model needs to be set up because we want to keep local stock. It's a more complex model, of course. It takes a little bit more of administration.
In the same time, we work with the brand to be able to co-brand, communicate, and also to be able to have a dialogue directly with the brand, and that's why we use this model in the textiles. This is just to explain the difference between when we sell directly and when we use this logistic partner in between. That is unfortunately what happened. It is that Polygiene this quarter didn't receive any distribution orders at all. We thought they will came back after a slow Q2, but unfortunately, they've been selling from existing stock. Now I will hand over to Niklas to walk through the performance.
To start with, I will make a short summary of the overall situation, and then we will go in more details. Overall, we saw that sales is below Q3 in 2021 with 21.7%. We have improved the margin from 64.3% to 65.6%, and we have continued to invest in people and marketing. The EBITDA margin is 12.5% versus 30% last year, and we have a positive cash flow during the quarter. Looking on the sales and the share of sales in Q3, in freshness, it was 50% of the total. Last year, at the same period, it was 55%. During the quarter, we're seeing a decrease with 28.6% versus last year for freshness. For protection, it's 50% of the total this year. It was 45% last year.
The decrease in protection versus last year is 13.5%. Overall, if you look on this total sales, the 21.7% represents a decrease with SEK 11 million. If we would include the foreign exchange impact, it would be 29.8%. As Ulrika stated, the overall global situation has created an uncertainty of the overall consumers' purchase power, and that has impacted both sales and inventories in the whole supply chain. The single largest impact for the sales decrease in freshness is driven by sales to distributors in China for production in China. Personal sales from distributors, though, to the factories has only decreased 30%, and here we can see an uptake in Asia during the quarter versus last quarter.
Now Asia in this quarter is a third, more than a third of the total sales. We also see some differences in the categories. While sport and outdoor are down versus last year, we see an uptake in fashion and workwear, even in a currency-adjusted growth versus last year. We go through the overall numbers. Apart from the drop in sales and the improved gross margin versus last year, we can see that we have a high cost base this year versus last year. It's +22%. As the world has opened up again, we started to travel, and the trade fairs are back on track. We have participated in several trade fairs during the quarter. We have also continued to work with our branding, both with rebranding and films. We have invested in more people in organization versus last year.
The EBITDA is SEK 5.1 million versus SEK 15.7 million last year, 12.5% versus 30%. The EBIT is SEK 7 million, and that's affected by FX, exchange rate differences, resulting then in a margin of 17.2%. During the quarter, we have had positive cash flow of SEK 1.9 million, and the cash situation at the end of the quarter was SEK 55.5 million.
Thank you. As you can see, we still have a quite strong financial position. We are debt-free. We have positive cash flow. We're generating positive results still, and that's really important moving forward. Even if it was a really, really disappointing month in terms of sales, we just need to see that the overall situation is quite strong for Polygiene. Going into some of the highlights, we have management changes. As I said, Niklas Blomstedt, he was appointed in September as the new CFO. Nina Forsvall, she moved to a function in HR. Now when we are growing the organization, we need to have a special resource for the human resources. We also appointed a new sales agent in France that has been starting since the beginning of this quarter.
We think that France is a key market in Europe, and we didn't have a lot of sales in Europe since before, or in France since before. We really hope that this could elevate the sales in this area. As Niklas said, we're back in the trade shows. We've been to several this year, and the two most important now recently was the London Packaging Week to sell antimicrobial protection for packaging. We really believe this is a strong category moving forward. We can, for instance, see the trends in China with take-away food packaging for internet shopping and et cetera. We have a big added value to these kind of products.
We had a presence at European Outdoor Summit, that is a summit that they hold annually for the European sport and outdoor brands, it's C-level, the CEOs, the CMOs of these companies, decision-makers. We had the possibility to present an LCA that we conducted during this event that was really, really well received by the audience. I will come back to the LCA a little bit later. We also launched the new website. It was launched the first of September. Now we can see that Polygiene and Addmaster is one company. On the same platform, we have an offering now for the full range of products and technologies. The website is fully engine optimized, and we are still working on translating to the other different languages we have.
I think we have nine languages where we will do the translation. We're also working on trying to finalize the NIO website that will be following in the same branding and look and feel. We also started the budget process for next year. It's in process, and we try to get an overview of what we can expect for 2023. This is also time to evaluate the cost structure to be able to deliver strong key figures moving forward. When that work is finalized, we should go back and revise the five-year business plan we have. There is a big setback this year. We are not on the level expected. At the same time, there are so many things in the pipeline and so many projects going on that we want to wait before we do any adjustments in this five-year business plan.
What we did this quarter, we started up to work and penetrate new markets. This is for the future. It could be more long term, but we really believe that, for instance, Africa is very interesting for the textile industry in the future. We can see that brands are moving out from China. It's getting expensive to produce in China. We can also see the political and the post-COVID situation. It's really hard to operate in China. What we see, they move out, and we can see that Africa could be one of the key markets in the future. We are in contact with the Mauritius government. It's EDB. It's an organization. It's the Economic Development Board to get business into Mauritius.
They want to profile themselves as a sustainability option to be produced there. They want to have this profile of a green, sustainable production. Many international brands are already producing there, and we think that Polygiene could add a value here. We will host a webinar in November for 100 to 150 stakeholders in the textile industry. This is a very interesting project going on. We have South America, where we identified Colombia as a big potential textile market in the future. The competition is quite low in this area, in Colombia, Peru. We have a distributor there called C- COLOR that we want to activate and really support to get in some big volume business here. We are not approaching the brands one by one.
We are going to the production side of the business, to go to the mills who produce fabrics and have them selling Polygiene to their customers. We hired a local business development manager in Colombia. His name is Harold, and he started recently in 1st October. These are two key markets for entering new markets in the future. We will follow this of course and communicate when we have some success happening down there. We also worked really hard on the product development. As you know, we are looking for alternatives. We're looking for tomorrow's technologies. We want to find antimicrobials that is non-metal based because that is a demand for some regions. We do this development both by our own, but also together with partnerships with the other suppliers.
We also started with open innovation projects together with a real customer, and that is very successful to go to somebody and co-develop together. We also see that we have a huge opportunity, and I will show you the LCA after, that Polygiene can add services to the brands we work with strong messaging. We have this refresh category that we work with Diesel, for instance, on the second life product, that we want to explore this area more for Polygiene in the future. Moving into freshness. Well, as Niklas was stated before, we are impacted by the distributor sales. We should actually been commenting on the -13%, which is the FX adjusted sales in the textile side. We have -13%, and that should be compared to the market on average.
We know that the sport industry mainly are suffering a lot. We know that they have overstocks, so that's why the new production is going down. We can see that revised orders has been reduced in volumes and that affect Polygiene of course. We also saw in the Q2 that we expected some really good partnerships to be closed in this quarter that unfortunately didn't happen. We see at least two big projects that I really hope that we could close in the coming quarter. Just to show you that October that started very strong, we have 30% up on the freshness side. Of course one month don't define the quarter, but it's really good for the confidence to have this in the bank moving into the fourth quarter.
These pictures are from a store in China. It's a Salomon store and it's the Descente store to show that the brand presence is quite big in these areas. This is how it should look like everywhere, I think. Very quickly, I will walk you through this life cycle assessment we've been investing in because this is a very, very important tool moving forward. Polygiene conducted a LCA, and it's a life cycle assessment to show the lifetime of a garment. As you know, the production is the biggest impact, but also the consumer have a huge impact on the environment for textiles and garments. What we did, we took a T-shirt, a traditional training T-shirt of polyester, and we stated that you train three times a week, all year round, and that equals 156 training sessions.
We stated that around 50 washes is the lifetime of a T-shirt. The numbers we collected is the standard numbers. All the data to produce a T-shirt is taken by a database that is not ours. We have three scenarios. The first scenario is just a treated T-shirt. You wash it every time you used it. We have scenario two where we put Polygiene in, and then we wash it every training session anyway. We have the third scenario where you skip only one wash out of two and see the impact on the environment. This is the comparison of all the data. It's the categories of impact in ecotoxicity. What you can see here is that to add Polygiene on top is basically no cost. It's less than 2% of the total impact.
The real impact or the important impact is actually in the raw materials and in the process of making the fabrics and making the garment in the end. This is a tiny cost on the environment to put Polygiene's solutions on top. If you skip one of two washes, we can actually reduce the environmental impact by 37%. You can see the added cost in scenario two is nothing, compared to what you can gain. This is really strong messaging that we would like to get out to our partners to communicate to their end users. Of course, if you skip even more washes and you use it twice before you wash it, or 3x or 4x , the reduction of course will have a bigger impact.
We know from several services that the smell and odor is the main reason to wash your garments. We think we really have a strong offering here. This was very, very short. The full study is 30 pages, and it's made by a consultant from Sweco, and it's been made by the ISO standards, and we have it verified as well by a third party. This is to show you that we're going to attend ISPO in the end of November to reconnect with the sport and outdoor industry. This show has been off for more than three years, since COVID started. We really would like to get back in to meet our customers again physically. ISPO and together with AIX will be the two biggest marketing events in the next, this year.
We have organized our own way to promote the value of the functionality of Polygiene. We do protection. In general, we can see we have -13% adjustment, and we can see that there is a delay in orders because September was really, really down. You can see in October where we have SEK 1 million of sales, we're only 35% versus last year. We see there's a shift between September and October. We didn't have any shortages up until now in Q3, also because we have been taking into consideration this before and get bigger allotments from the suppliers. We can also see that the logistics chain is slowly recovering. It's more easy to get shipment out now. It's a bit shorter to ship the goods. That is good.
The freight prices are still high if you compare to before COVID. It's still very high. We also conducted a price increase during the quarter because we got some raised price from our suppliers on the raw materials. We raised between 8%-10% to cover for this loss, so we don't lose anything on the gross margin. It's very important for us to keep the gross margin structure we have. I would like to show you some highlights. You know, NIO, when we launched with the seats, antimicrobial seats in China a couple of months ago. Now they are launching in Europe, and they had this launch in Berlin a couple of weeks ago. This is the designer who actually mentioned this antibacterial material.
Unfortunately, he don't mention Biomaster, but that is something we wish he should work on to get our brand in there. Positive is also that they have now decided to treat steering wheel. Those tested are finished, and we're also looking for other surfaces in the car. This is really nice news. We have also some other successes from AIX. We have a material partner called Muirhead who are selling leather for seats in transports. They now announce that Irish Rail, they will treat all their seats. It's 243 train wagons with 15,000 seats that will be treated with Polygiene Biomaster, and this is the biggest refurbished project in Europe, I think they said. It's. This is really interesting, and we will press release this as soon as we have more information. This is just the beginning in the transport sector.
We can also see we have successes in airlines. Malaysia Airlines and Japan Airlines, they have placed orders. We don't know the volumes yet, but we just got an indication that they placed orders. Through another partner, we also have Turkish Airlines coming in with Biomaster-treated seats. This will all be information out when we actually know the volumes and the impact on our results. I think that was the end of the presentation. Now we have a couple of minutes to walk through the questions.
Mm-hmm. We have a couple of questions, and the first one is, "Are there any plans to replace silver?
Yes. As I said in the product development, of course, we would like to complement our portfolio with another alternative for those regions like Scandinavia who are not very fond of the silver, and we're working hard on this, and we have many opportunities. We want to wait for the really good tech that is performing well, who has a cost that could be, I mean, accepted by the industry and to pass all the tests. We haven't yet found the right one, but we are working really hard on it.
We got the question about SteriTouch.
Yeah
Being removed.
SteriTouch has actually been very slow in the end. We are not on a level where we will have the earn-out paid out, so that will not happen. We know that we got some really good, strong customers in the purchase. We still think it was the right decision to acquire it, but they haven't shown the result as expected yet. Yeah, that's the short version.
We got the question about the timeline for the distribution sales, when we think it could potentially recover.
Yes. I really hope that they will fill up their stocks in the last quarter. I think they need to if nothing else happens. I think they have a security stock around six to eight months that they have as a security stock, and I think those levels need to be filled very, very soon.
Yep.
Any other questions? I think we got a question about the airlines and the transport. I, as I showed you now, we have started to get small inroads to these, this industry. It's quite new for us. It's launched this year and this category. We expect a lot from it in the future, but it's slow. It's not fast-moving consumer goods. It takes a while to get these partners start produce. I'm quite confident that we will succeed there. Is there any other questions in the chat? Okay. I would like to say thank you, and next report will be in February when we close the Q4. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.