Thank you. Welcome to this presentation of the Q4 and full year report that was released earlier today. My name is Susanna Zethelius, and I'm CFO of Pricer. I will share some comments about market trends, Pricer's smart retail solutions and our market presence, as well as some key takeaways regarding the figures in the report. Next slide, please. As we have concluded before, the retail industry is in a very interesting phase of transformation. The highly optimized workflows are being challenged by an increasing competition from digital channels and new store formats. Following the pandemic, and because of the convenience of e-commerce, many brick-and-mortar retailers are struggling to attract customers back to the stores. There's an identified need to invest in the phygital store environment to improve the customer experience, and in-store technology is an important aspect of this.
With the attempt to provide a better shopping experience and a more personalized shopping journey, retailers are collecting more and more data and investing in various forms of analytic capabilities to provide insights. There are also other macro trends such as labor shortages, labor costs, and increased inflation that all drive increased automation and the need for system support to improve efficiency. There is also a global sustainability movement for retailers to respond to. Shoppers today expect retailers to be responsible in their impact on the climate and provide good alternatives with locally produced products, eco-friendly packaging, et cetera, to enable shoppers to make better decisions. Overall, Pricer solution benefits from all of these trends.
While the challenges facing a retailer now are different from what they were 30 years ago when Pricer was founded, our technology with an in-store digital communication platform and the position of digital labels at the shelf edge is very much part of the solution going forward. Next slide, please. Just like the retail industry, Pricer has been on a transformation journey during the past few years. In order to respond to the new challenges facing retailers, our focus has been to broaden our solution portfolio and to provide more value-adding use cases on top of our in-store digital communication platform. It's a fact that Pricer provides the most robust, reliable, and high-performing ESL system in the industry. With an infrared communication technology, we enable real-time communication and interaction with our digital labels on the shelf edge.
Until a few years ago, the use cases was to automate updating on prices and product information to ensure accuracy and reduce the manual work. Since then, we have invested significant time and money to build additional solutions and capabilities on top of this core ESL system. The ambition has been to increase our recurring revenue streams from software solutions and services, which increases the stability and the revenue flow as a balance to the more cyclic hardware revenues. Today, we have 1,500 stores signed up as software as a service customers on our cloud-based platform, Pricer Plaza. Pricer Plaza offers a hosted solution to manage our ESL system, which means the lower maintenance cost for the store and the ability to instantly provide new features and functionality to all our connected customers without the need to visit the stores.
The ambition is to have 3,500 stores signed up for Pricer Plaza at the end of 2022. We expect this growth to come from a mix of migrating existing customers from on-premise solutions to the cloud, but also to deploy new customers directly on Pricer Plaza. The intention with Pricer Plaza is to continue the development and making it the backbone of our offering, not only for the management of the ESL system, but where data is collected and analyzed and to support integration with third-party systems. In addition to adding a cloud platform to our solution, we have also invested in the development of a shelf-mounted camera. By introducing cameras in the store that can monitor the actual status on the shelf, we can collect highly valuable data that can be analyzed to generate insights.
Pricer holds a patent to utilize the digital shelf labels to identify products. This is a highly cost-efficient method compared with AI-driven image recognition and provide a higher accuracy for several of the use cases. Today, our Pricer ShelfVision solutions can alert retailers when products are out of shelves, as well as provide a true planogram of a store. Together with our customers, we will continue to define and introduce new use cases. Next slide, please. Then next slide again. The one showing full year 2021. Slide five. For the full year 2021, we've seen stability in revenue and order intake versus our previous record year, 2020, and this has been achieved through a broadened customer base and more widespread geographical presence.
The decrease in operating profit versus 2020 is primarily a result of the temporary COVID-related increase in cost of raw material and freight. Moving on to slide 6. In addition to the transformation in our product offering, we have also expanded our market presence by investing in existing markets and opening new ones. This has led to a broadening of our customer base and a reduced dependence on larger customers. While the global net sales number 2021 was in line with 2020, the expanded customer base meant we saw growth in most markets. In particular, we saw a strong growth in Canada, with it being our largest market for the first time ever. For EMEA, we've seen a strong recovery with notable contributions from Italy, Norway, and France.
Despite the decrease in revenue in the Americas, if we adjust for the large U.S. customer rollout in 2020, the regional growth has been over 200%, largely driven by Canada. We've seen an acceleration in the deployment pace at Canadian Tire, which we expect to continue also in 2022. Also, the Asia-Pacific region has bounced back after the strict COVID-19 related lockdowns, resulting in 130% revenue growth year-over-year. Moving to the next slide. Looking at the fourth quarter, starting with order intake. We've seen a strong order inflow in line with Q4 2020, the strongest contributors being Canada, France, and Italy.
We had an order backlog of 383 million SEK at the end of December 2021, and the majority of this expected to be delivered in the first half of the year. If we look at net sales, we were down 28% compared to Q4 2020, and this was due to our single largest customer rollout peaking in 2020. Despite this, it was the top fourth quarter ever, and also despite logistics challenges should be mentioned. For the operating profit, we're seeing the pandemic-related pressure on gross margin continue in Q4. There has been several months of delay before component cost increases impact profitability due to the extended lead times. However, we expect the situation to stabilize and eventually improve. In order to counter this development, we're also taking various actions to improve the profitability.
If talking about cash flow, the logistics situation continues to be challenging, and this is causing increased lead times and inventory tie-up. We need to carry enough inventory to enable fast enough customer delivery. At the same time, we face longer lead times in every part of the logistics cycle, which puts a pressure on cash flow. During the year, we've expanded our credit facility to manage these temporary effects. The vast majority of the inventory has designated end customers and is expected to be shipped out and inventory reduced in the coming quarters. The board proposes a dividend for 2021 of 1 SEK per share with a postponed payment date to November 2022 in order to give time for improved lead time following the pandemic. To summarize, the retail industry is in a very interesting phase of transformation.
As I mentioned previously, the highly optimized workflows are being challenged by an increase in competition from digital channels and new store formats. Also, because of the convenience of e-commerce, physical stores are struggling to attract customers back to the stores. There is a real need to invest in the physical store environment to improve the customer experience, and in-store technology is an important aspect of this. Customer satisfaction and innovation are our primary drivers. In combination with the underlying forces such as rising inflation, labor shortage, and increasingly competitive retail trade, this is driving greater store automation and efficiency. What is exciting is the customer satisfaction that we see from customers coming back to us year after year. Together with the macro trends impacting retail, this means we can look forward to an exciting and eventful 2022. Thank you.
Thank you. This now concludes the conference. Thank you all very much for attending. If you have any questions, please direct these to the email address ir@pricer.com. Once again, thank you very much for your participation, and you can now disconnect your lines.