Good morning and welcome to this presentation of Polygiene Group's first quarter. I am Ulrika Björk and I am the CEO of the group.
I'm Niklas Blomstedt and I am the CFO.
Yes. I would like to summarize the quarter. I'm very happy with this result. Coming out from 2024 with a growth of almost 40%, we were not expecting that we can continue to grow on these high numbers. With 18% growth, I'm really confident that this year will continue to be successful as 2024. We saw continuous growth compared to last year. As I said, that was really, really good to see that we can continue to grow. We know that the first quarter is always a smaller quarter because of the Chinese New Year. The period was impacted by one-time expenses that Niklas will explain later on. We also introduced new technologies both in Polygiene and in Admaster.
We also had some discussions around the import tariffs and the volatile currency markets that I will just talk a little bit about in the end. The board has proposed to pay out a dividend to the shareholders for the first time in Polygiene's history. The proposed policy is that we will pay back 40% of the result after tax. That resulted in SEK 0.05 per share for 2024. However, the board also decided to propose an additional one-time dividend payout of EUR 0.22, SEK 0.22, which amounts to SEK 0.27 per share. This will be decided on the AGM in two weeks. We have been out on the first investor road trip in Europe. It was the first part of two. We think that this year will be a year where we will continue to approach the investors.
We need to attract more shareholders. We have planned another leg later in August this year.
If we then take a look on the Q1 financials on a pretty high level, as Ulrika said, we had a growth of 18% from SEK 35.1 million to SEK 41.5 million. We have a gross margin of 67.4% versus 68.7%. We have operating cost of SEK 22.4 million versus SEK 18.1 million. I think it's important to note that Q1 last year was really low. If you would take an average quarterly cost for the full year, that will be SEK 21.3 million. EBITDA was SEK 3.1 million versus SEK 4.8 million. In this year, we have an FX impact of minus SEK 1.4 million. EBIT was SEK 1.6 million versus SEK 3.3 million. The cash flow was negative with minus SEK 4.1 million versus a positive of SEK 2.5 million in last quarter, last year's first quarter. In this year, we had a bonus payout of SEK 3 million. Also, we had some sales end of the quarter due to the early Chinese year with air flights.
We have shorter payment terms. In a normal case, those would have fallen into Q1 and not been in Q4. Q4 was extremely strong, but it should have been in normal cases that would have fallen into Q1. At the end of the quarter, we had a cash of SEK 61.9 million versus SEK 48.9 million. If we then look a little bit more in detail on the sales side, as we said, we are up 18%. In that increase, we see a positive FX impact of 2%. If we look at the shares of the sales, Polygiene increased with almost 42%, while Admaster was flat. That will have an effect that the Polygiene share of the total will increase then from 45%- 54%. This will also reflect in the sales per region.
As Admaster is really strong and has a big part of their sales are in EMEA, the increase in EMEA was fairly small, even if we saw a big increase in EMEA for Polygiene. At the same time, if you look at Americas and APAC, we saw a bigger increase there because it's very much related to the sales of Polygiene products. Some details. As we said, gross margin 67.4% versus 68.7% is driven by sales mix and FX impact versus last year. As we said, the cost has gone up. If you compare quarters to quarters, it's not so much if you compare the average. If you look at this year versus last year, we have a cost per company meeting that in 2024 was the second half. This year is going to be the first half.
We have much more customer testing and customer product development. We had some legal costs for setting up agreements. As Ulrika said, we have spent quite a lot and invested a lot in the IR activities. Versus Q1 last year, we have five more people. EBITDA, as we said, SEK 3.1 million versus SEK 4.8 million, but this year we have a negative FX impact of SEK 1.4 million. EBIT of SEK 1.6 million versus SEK 3.3 million. The cash flow, the negative part was then explained by the bonus and the payments. We had a strong cash of SEK 61.9 million. As we said earlier in the presentation, we are proposing a dividend of EUR 0.27 or SEK 9.8 million. That is proposed for the annual meeting 8th of May. The payments will be done in two installments, one in May and one in Q3.
Great. Thank you, Niklas. Now we just go into more details what happened in Polygiene and what happened in Admaster during the quarter. Starting with Polygiene, we had a great momentum in 2024, and I would say it continues into 2025. As Niklas said, strong growth, 42% in this area. As I also mentioned, the Q1 is historically a lower quarter due to the Chinese New Year, where we lose around three weeks of production. I checked back 10 years in the history to see how much the Q1 normal is of the full year. Around 21%-22% is normally the share of the Q1 in the full year. Polygiene's share of sales is now 54%, while it was last year around 50-50. As Polygiene had a great momentum now, it has increased the total share of the sales.
Sales are mainly driven from EMEA, who had really strong growth this quarter. APAC also showed growth. APAC is the biggest region on the textile side. If you go back two years, it has always been EMEA, but APAC, driven by China activities, has been in the lead now for being the biggest region on the textile side. The growth was mainly driven by existing customers, but we also signed up some new brand partners. We saw a new customer in Turkey with a quite big order. We have also seen some new brands onboarded in Europe this period. We also saw a lot of successful brand campaigns during this period. For instance, we have Cube, which is a German market leader in the bike industry, who launched this protection gear for mountain biking.
That launch was made together with Cube and had a really, really successful reach. This is the strength of working with Polygiene that we can support in these sell-through activities. We also are onboarding a new sales agent in China. We have seen the great success what the agents have been doing in the US the last six months. Now we actually onboarded a sales agent from the same group as the one we have in the US. They will start here in Q2. Of course, the biggest news from the Polygiene side was the successful launch of the highly demanded technology, Stay Cool. I will just explain a little bit what this technology is and what we see potentially what this could lead to in the business. Stay Cool is the moisture-activated cooling technology.
It can lower the temperature up to three degrees on a fabric, which gives you a cooling sensation while wearing these garments. We made a global launch in March, April. We had the introduction at big trade shows in Munich and in Portland, US, and in Shanghai in China. There has been a massive interest from both new and existing customers. This is a technology that exists already out there. Many of our brand partners already use this. It is a very easy switch from another supplier to Polygiene since we are already working with these customers on the Stay Fresh. Good test results. We are working on the certificates, the GOTS approval, the Bluesign, the Oeko-Tex, all these necessary certificates. It is in the process.
This is a non-regulated technology, which means that we do not have to follow any special regulations for these kinds of technologies, which makes it much, much faster and also easy for the brand partner to accept. We have products shipped out to our distributors, and trials are already starting as we speak. We expect that this could generate sales already in 2025, depending on which customers and which collections they choose. This is really exciting. We believe that this could be a very, very big part of our sales moving forward the coming years. I also would just give a short update on Shed Guard. I have promised before that we will have results ready by now, but it is delayed. I do not have any results from phase two today. It is expected any day.
As soon as we know more, we will let you know. The Shed Guard is an innovation project that we started in 2024. It is a technology that can reduce microfiber shedding and protect clothes from peeling, which can prolong the lifetime. This fits perfectly with the Polygiene portfolio. There are some small updates on the project. We had the fabrics treated from phase one. We have sent it back to the partners who are trialing with us. They have approved the hand feel, which is a very good hurdle to overcome because we were a little bit afraid that the hand feel could be a deal breaker for some brands. They have actually accepted that the hand feel is not changing that much. As I said, we are waiting for the phase two results. Any day, we will have them ready.
We also need to find out what is the good results because we know we had really good results in previous trials, but we need to have those results consistently good. That is the challenge here. Why do we get so different results? We also need to find out what the brands believe is a good result. Is 15% less shedding okay to launch, or do they want to have 30%? This is something we find out with the partners we are working on this project with. Good news is that we have new brands coming to us and say, "We would like to trial." We say, "It's not ready yet," but they say, "It doesn't matter. We would like to trial. We know it's an innovation project.
We know it could fail, but we would love to try. This is customers in both Europe and in Japan. We actually think it's a good idea to let them try because if they are convinced, it's much faster than going through the mills and the distributors. We are going to go into new trials with specific brands that are not in the initial phase one and two. We are going to have Manchester University visiting us in Malmö. The project is absolutely still alive. I don't expect any sales in 2025, but I'm sure we will get something ready to present to you latest in the Q2 report. Moving into Admaster for the first quarter. As Niklas said before, it's flat versus last year. That could be alarming, but it's not. This is according to planned sales.
It is because some of the call-off orders we have, we know that they will hit later this year instead of Q1, like they did last year. We are still confident that Admaster will continue to grow in 2025. We saw a slow start, but a very strong recovery in March. March was actually the same amount of sales that we had both in January and February together. We also know that there is a challenge in the construction sector, which is one of the biggest segments in Admaster. We have a lot of flooring companies, and they have been struggling a little bit with the repeating orders. We are following that very closely. EMEA is the largest region, 67%. Last year, we had 70%.
It is still the biggest region, but we are continuing to try to develop business in China and in the US even more in the future because we believe there is a big potential in this market. Biomaster US, the distributor we acquired a couple of years ago, is continuing to show strong growth. Even if the numbers are still small, we saw almost a double sales in Q1 this year. It is positive, and we hope that it will continue to grow. Admaster also expanded the product portfolio with two new technologies. One is a medical grade for PVC, which we did not have before. This could open new doors in this healthcare sector. The other one is enhanced and better performance of the Verimaster technology, where we now can apply new surfaces that we could not do before.
This is also very positive. The new website that we launched last year is continuing to generate leads. We also see a lot of other interest coming in. To handle this in an efficient way, we have onboarded a new internal sales support in the office in Stanford. This is because we want to free the time from the sales guys to be out there visiting customers, to go to trade shows, to generate sales for us. We think this is a good setup to free time because we know when we visit the customers and work closely with them, we know that business will come. It's a good example. We were in Portugal visiting the distributor there and key customers, and they brought orders with them back home. It is key to be close to them.
This is why we decided to take on this internal sales support role. Of course, we have the 25-year celebration of Admaster this year. We had a ceremony in the office where the founder, Paul Morris, the Lord Lieutenant from the Royal Family, the staff, the board, and other invited people were there. It was very nice and, yeah, a very positive event. Last, I would just like to comment on the import tariffs and how this could affect or if there is a risk that this could affect the Polygiene Group. As you know, there is still no definitive decision made. It is still very uncertain how this is going to end. What we could say today is that there is no direct impact on the proposed tariff today because Polygiene Group is not exporting to the US.
It's very limited. It's less than 5%. This means that there are not a lot of production in the US. Even if we have a lot of US customers, they are producing overseas, mainly in Asia and China. Directly, there is no impact on our business. Of course, indirectly, there could be a risk if our customers are decreasing their production volumes. As an ingredient brand, we can't survive without our partners' products. If they decrease their production volumes that they treat today, our volumes will go down if that happens. However, we have a global distribution setup, and that could mitigate the risk because we can easily move with the customer. If they are moving production to a country with lower tariffs, we move with them. We have a global setup. We have availability all over the world.
That is the good thing with Polygiene Group's business setup, that we have this flexibility. Our strategy for now is to follow the development very closely and also, of course, stay in very, very tight dialogue with our customers to know what their next move is. What we experienced so far by talking to a lot of customers, there are no changes. There is no impact in the short term. There is nobody who has canceled orders or alerted us that they will decrease their volume for the coming period. We will update you when we know more. For now, we are quite confident at this stage that this will not impact 2025 so much. I still believe that the Polygiene Group will continue to grow this year and to show the scalability that we have in the business model.
Just a short slide for the new investors I know are listening now. Very short, we have main owners that are strong and long-term. As I said, the model is scalable. We know that the Q1 now, we had some extra costs that we had planned for. If we take the full year, I believe we can keep the level of cost base that we had last year and still grow the sales quite a lot. Asset light, we do not have any production in-house. We are not fixed to special countries or products. We are very flexible how we operate. This is a very good benefit these days. We have high margins, and that enables that we have a profitable business. We have positive cash flow. Even if Q1 was not a positive cash flow, for the full year, we expect positive cash flow as last year.
This, of course, limits the financial risk. It limits that we have to raise money. It gives us a safety to operate this business in a good way, in a healthy way. We still do not have any debts. We have a very strong financial position. The balance sheet is looking very excellent. As Niklas said before, we still have good, strong cash. That is also one reason why the board decided to start to pay out dividends. That is the first time in Polygiene's history that that happens. I think that was all. Thank you. Do we have any questions, Niklas? Yes, if there have been any questions that were raised during the presentation. No, we did a very full. No questions. We had a little bit of a question about Shed Guard before the meeting. I mentioned about that.
I also people ask about StayFresh Bio. It's still there. It's ready to go. We have customers interested in this. We're also waiting for permission to be able to treat fabrics in Europe. That will take another six months, but that's ongoing. Yeah. Also in Polygiene, I mentioned in the report that we also launched a wash-in technology together with Storm. Polygiene is delivering chemistry to Storm Aftercare, who are selling a wash-in to end consumers that you can treat with OdoCrunch in your washing machine at home. This is a great complement, but it's not under Polygiene's business. We are just delivering the chemistry. We have a very good partnership with Storm Aftercare, which are doing a really, really good job. Okay. We're done. See you in July next time. Thank you.
Thank you.
Bye.