Okay. Now I think we're connected. I hope everyone can see us. In that case, welcome very much to the presentation of our first quarter results and the targets and the strategy for the coming four years, as announced. We will start with comments on the quarterly report, which was released this morning, as you probably have seen. After that, we will go through market per market, the forecasts and the plans for the coming years up until 2025. That's the plan for today, and we think it will take about an hour, maybe less. Let's see. Okay. Let's start with the first quarter 2021. Can we make it bigger? Okay, fine. Good. As it says in the report, the performance and the result did exceed our expectations. As we say, the first quarter is normally a pretty slow quarter.
January is almost a half a month, and in many telecom companies, the big installation projects don't start until February. From that point of view, it was surprisingly good. The revenue was a bit higher than EUR 2 million in March. On a monthly basis, a bit above EUR 2 million, which is high compared to the last couple of years. That's also very promising. Out of that, 18% now is IoT revenue, and that's obviously thanks to Home Solutions or Nordic PropTech. That also contributes very much to that. Those two together make almost 20% of our total revenue now. Both companies made profit in the first quarter, which is also very positive. Haiti, as you know, one of our biggest and most important markets, had challenges last year because of the currency changes.
The government there made a kind of artificial strengthening of the local gourde, which hit us pretty badly. That recovered very good. In January, February, it was still difficult, in March, they were reasonably back on track again. The acquisition of Home Solutions was already mentioned. We've been talking about that for a while. It was a long process from the first contact till the formal closing in March. On the 5th of March, it was signed and finally closed. After that, the investment fund, Sacculus, invested in Nordic PropTech and bought 35% of the shares from us. I will come back to that later. We did have quite high costs for the acquisition and for the due diligence and all activities around the merger and so on and so forth. You see that on the net result.
Even if the situation around COVID is improving in most countries, we still suffer quite a lot in the Middle East and Pakistan from the lockdowns and from very low activity levels from the customer side. There are very little big negotiations going on, and a lot of things are postponed. Another final thing was the closure of the NIoT network divestment to Netmore. If we look at the numbers, the total revenue in the quarter was almost EUR 5.7 million, which is better than last year's first quarter, as you see in brackets to the right. Partly thanks to Home Solutions, obviously, but also organic growth is in there. The gross profit was 22.5%, a bit lower than the end of last year, but clearly better than the first quarter in 2020 as well.
EBITDA was just EUR 50,000, partly because of the cost that I mentioned before, nevertheless, better than last year and also positive, if only with 1%. EBIT though, after cost and the write-downs was unfortunately as much negative as the EBITDA was positive. We had around EUR 50,000 negative EBIT. Net was EUR 340,000, almost negative, which was expected from our side something around that because we went into the year from a pretty low position. It wasn't completely unexpected. We were hoping for a bit improvement of that. Because of the costs and also from the COVID situation, as I said, we were pretty much on budget. As you see, compared to last year, it's a clear improvement.
If we look at the markets, just to give you an understanding of the relations between the markets and roughly the size of each market. The first bar is Haiti and partly also direct markets being invoiced from TalkPool AB, which is a small part of that. Most of it is Haiti. You see it's a little bit over EUR 1.5 million from the Haitian market, from the operation and maintenance project we've been running there for 15 years. Pakistan is second with EUR 1.25 million revenue. Sweden now, which is Home Solutions and TalkPool AB together make a bit above EUR 1 million, which is just below 20% of the total, as I said before. Netherlands, fourth with almost EUR 1 million.
Tanzania, Germany still a bit lower revenue than expected on the other hand, very good profitability from Germany, they're coming strong now in April and May. Belgium is next, pretty flat compared to earlier periods, Saudi is still in the growing, let's put it like that. Next one. If we look at the business development side of it, sales. We come back to Home Solutions. We mentioned it before, it's worth to mention again. We did spend quite a lot of time both in the management team from Home Solutions, also TalkPool to integrate the companies, to do a handover, and also prepare the company for the new cooperation and for the scaling of our common business.
Home Solutions, as we said before, makes TalkPool a real smart buildings company now and moving the positioning from a network services company clearly into IoT and smart buildings. Sacculus' idea is, of course, to support this growth. They believe a lot in Home Solutions and in TalkPool, and together we will make sure that we can scale the business as much as possible. Sacculus is well-connected in the business, so they will contribute a lot to that. We also signed an agreement with SmartFront, part of Fasadgruppen in Sweden, a building company, real estate company focusing on the facades of buildings. With our equipment and our solutions, they will measure humidity in the walls of the building and other smart building parameters. On top of that, we had a bunch of orders for sensors from B METERS.
One of our water meter partners from the AI company, Myrspoven, which is one of our most important partners, and also from Senseair, who's a sensor partner of ours. Another interesting thing which we told you about already last time is this COVID detection and also measurement solution basically based on our carbon dioxide sensors measuring the air quality. Our partner in Spain who installed this in public buildings already end of last year. That continued now in Q1 with installation in public buses and public transport in Spain. In May, they also equipped 65 polling stations in Madrid during the elections with this solution to measure and control the spread of COVID. I will tell you a little bit more about those things in the next slides. In the network services side, Germany was very successful on the sales side.
Deutsche Telekom, who's our biggest and most important account, the key account in Germany, opened up and centralized their procurement, which means that we have now been invited to all their tender processes in the whole country. This has really multiplied our prospect list and our sales funnel in Germany. This is also a result of our increased sales efforts in Germany with, among others, Aurelius Wosylus, who will do a presentation later. The Netherlands continued their success story with what we call Sandy Grounds Tower Foundation concept. Some of you have heard about this, some not, but I will show you a short video about that later. They also signed the first 5G orders and the camouflage piece of the legacy and the core business from before for TalkPool Netherlands also starting to kick in in Q1.
Tanzania won a contract with Ericsson for a rollout on the Seychelles network modernization project. Last but not least, in Pakistan, we also won the managed services contract for what's called Safe City. It's basically 500 sites installed in Punjab and Lahore there, where supervision equipment and panic buttons and what have you in the whole city. We did installation of all this equipment last year, and now we take over the maintenance and management of all the network. Three success stories. This one you know, it's very valid and very relevant right now. We're in the middle of the merging process of those two companies, which is Home Solutions on one hand, or Nordic PropTech, which is the formal name of the company we bought, which is very well established in the metering arena in Sweden.
TalkPool on the other side, with TalkPool AB, with our own products and sensors and solutions. When we merge those two companies, we will get a strong company with a critical mass in the Swedish market with a very good footprint, with 50,000 in apartments with the whole suite, as you know. A strong sales team and our own products. This company is basically running on around EUR 50 million revenue this year. Next one. Bit short about this, what we call Sandy Grounds Tower Foundation. It's something new. It seems very hardcore or very hands-on engineering, but it's actually to facilitate the expansion of the 5G network.
5G will require a lot of new towers, a lot of new sites as we call them, and this is a new invention from TalkPool, how we can build and erect a tower for 5G, also for other technologies, in a very short time and very cost efficient. We can erect the tower in just two days, compared to 20 to 30 days normally for a normal tower where you have to mold the foundation first and wait for it to dry and so on and so forth. This is a very efficient method. As the name says, it's not perfect for rocky grounds, but for sandy grounds and for playgrounds, it's perfect. You basically push down a 40-meter pipe in the ground. On top of that, you can erect the 40-meter towers in a very short time.
Our customers save up to 25% compared to a normal tower construction, and also thanks to the short process and the small need for concrete and for a lot of machinery, we save up to 50% of carbon dioxide emissions. We've already built 25 towers last year and this year, five towers, and next year, it will continue. We expect 30 to 40 towers to be built this year. If we look at the video quickly, it's a one-minute video, and you will see exactly how it works. Okay. Yeah. It's coming up. I was going to wait a minute. I hope you could see the whole video and maybe you didn't hear the music, but I think it's okay without.
Success story, which is also something that was mentioned last time, as I said, was our partner, Redytel, in Spain that bought sensors from TalkPool to build this COVID prevention solution for public spaces to start with. Then as a next step, they have now installed this in all buses in a city called Ponferrada in the northwestern Spain. It's the same concept as before. We measure the carbon dioxide level in the buses, and the passengers can, with the help of this QR code, they can look and the app, they can see the level of carbon dioxide and they can act upon it. Also the bus drivers can act upon this and make longer stops, and make sure that the level of carbon dioxide, which is an indicator of the air quality, they can see how good or bad it is and control it that way.
It's a pretty simple application, but it's been very successful. Now, as I mentioned before, during the elections in Madrid, in a lot of those poll stations, the solution was implemented just to make sure that we kept an acceptable level of COVID spread risk. Let's put it like that. We can look at that quickly as well. Next video challenge. Okay. It's a pretty cool thing. It's obviously also very important. You may think that COVID is over, there's no use of this anymore, but of course, this is not just a COVID thing. I think the general awareness of the importance of air quality in buildings, and also maybe public transport has rised a lot the last year. This will continue to be important also in working spaces and apartments for the future. We believe a lot in this.
That's the end of the Q1 presentation. We will now go over to the strategy, the four-year strategy that was also published probably half an hour ago. We will now tell a little bit more about what we're up to the coming years and also give you some numbers, what our new targets are for 2025. First, short introduction from me, and then we will go market by market. We have grouped the markets in some regions like Benelux, for example. We have eight daughter companies now. As you see, we're divided into five regions. After that, the financial targets and our strategy, a summary of the strategy, which we call grand master plan. Also some ideas about our mergers and acquisitions that we are planning the coming years. I think if we pull up the whole picture there. You've seen it before.
This is where we are now. On one hand, what we call networks, our legacy business, but also an area where we digitize. We'll talk about smart network services, managed services. This is because we will apply solutions, IoT solutions partly, on this business area as well to improve the quality of our work, the value for the customer and also to save costs to a certain extent. Right now, we're around EUR 20 million revenue from this business area. We will continue to grow here, but mainly organically from now on. You know that we have acquired a couple of companies in this area now. We are looking forward to organic growth. You will see how much later. As I said, more digitization in this area as well. This is a picture of a typical cellular site.
You see solar panels, diesel generators, connection to the grid, and you have what you call a shelter with all the radio equipment in there. This is also a small building that needs to be very well controlled, more than an apartment building or an office building, actually, because this is, of course, really vital equipment standing there. The temperature and the conditions must be perfect. We have the complete competence for everything from planning to maintenance, all this kind of equipment. We also have solutions to digitize the services that we offer to our customers. We believe in a substantial market improvement in this area now with 5G coming and also that the role of the Chinese vendors is not as dominant as before, as you know. On the building side, smart buildings, if you want, we're now bigger.
We're one of the bigger players in Sweden at least, and we have EUR 5 million revenue in this area right now. The plan there is to continue to acquire companies of different sizes, niche companies, or companies that fit well into our strategy similar to Home Solutions, not only Sweden, obviously, but also in other countries. We have our own products, as you know. We have developed solutions that are packaged and sold all around the world already. Small scale outside of Sweden, obviously, but that is something we will scale from the coming years. Sustainable health technology, this is driving the whole business, the digitization on one hand, but also the green wave, the sustainability wave is of course important and the quality of air, water, and also saving energy is obviously core values that drive this whole development.
We have partners and distributors integrated all over the world already selling our sensors as Redytel, for example. This is where we are now, and we plan to take it to a new level in the coming four years, and my colleagues will tell you more about this trip. Over to you, Aurelius.
Hello to everybody. I'm happy to talk this afternoon about the individual markets. On this slide, you see a little bit the locations TalkPool offices are located, and in light blue, the markets we're addressing directly are having active projects in. On the next slide, deep diving into Sweden, let's say the competence center of our IoT means smart building business. Coming from, let's say, the sensor hardware, the system competence, and adding with Home Solutions 50,000 homes to the market, we're able to upsell our IoT solutions into this existing customer base. Also, we're strengthening that, let's say, through HVAC, which is climate optimization, water management, and energy consumption measuring, air quality improvement, and mold detection into one bucket of, let's say, solutions we're offering to the market. Not only to private homes, also to B2B markets, office buildings to improve energy consumption and similar.
The optimal situation is that this kind of business is recurring business, so there are long-term contracts in place which ensure revenues over a longer period. The revenue will go from EUR 5 million this year to planned EUR 11 million in 2025, with an EBITDA of 7% up to 14% in 2025 again. Good. Next slide will be Germany. In Germany, we have a pretty strong relationship with the big telco, with Deutsche Telekom, as mentioned. In this we can leverage, of course, with the network planning for base stations, which is driven by the home office usage nowadays, plus the 5G rollout. All connecting buildings, homes, and 5G base stations with high-speed broadband. There is a big push in the country, I think all over Europe at the moment.
We're also starting selling smart building technologies. First contacts, first opportunities in the building companies, improving heating systems, which is, let's say, solutions coming and provided from our Swedish colleagues. The growth on revenue is EUR 2.1 million-EUR 7.2 million in 2025. EBITDA margin goes from 28% down to 25%. This is to enlarge the market a little bit more in aggressive pricing. Next. On the Benelux side, here we do have these camouflage telecom antennas, which are getting, let's say, camouflaged or hidden in buildings, on rocks, on mountains, so they are not so visible. We're the market leader in doing that and extending that business, let's say, outside Benelux, of course.
In addition, we have an entity which is focusing on repair and refurbish and upgrade communication equipment, which is highly efficient through, let's say, updating, especially in these days, when you see all the allocation and shortage of semiconductors and equipment in the world at the moment. This is what the automotive companies are lacking on. Refurbishment, repair will get more and more important also in saving CO2 and production capabilities. We're maintaining and improving telecom networks for the operations in Benelux. Of course, the plan is to grow our nice new invention, Sandy Grounds, to build up, let's say, telecom infrastructure base station more quickly and more cost-efficient and save CO2 emissions also on that. Smart building sales, we wanted to start driving out there in 2022, in the year. That will have a stable growth from EUR 4 million to EUR 5.7 million in 2025.
EBITDA will stay something stable. We think it'll be at 2% from today, also in 2025. Next slide. The other markets, including the Americas, Africa. We have our headquarter for telecom project management in Africa with our hub in Tanzania. Very efficient. We run a in Haiti, the maintenance contract with Digicel for over 15 years, of course, this is ongoing. Also, what we see, what is becoming more and more important is the consulting business to go into accounts, explaining projects, explaining technology solutions, use cases, to get out the highest return of invest for the customers of course, having a footprint within the customer already before their original project will start.
This is an initiative which is very positive and also using, let's say, academic resources to address the sales channels with different thinking, different way of approaching, running from, let's say, managed from the headquarter. On the revenue and margin side, we want to go from EUR 7 million to EUR 13.5 million and from 9% to 12% in 2025. In Middle East, which is next slide, including Pakistan and Saudi. We are at the moment, of course, we are the market leader in network services in Pakistan. We have locally 815 employees widespread over the country, maintaining the telecom sites and also solar farms.
Here, let's say, the task or the upcoming business or running business also is optimizing the energy consumption and a kind of energy switching on what kind of energy is in best use on pricing or cost efficiency and on CO2 efficiency for the individual site, which is widespread over the country. We have a small technology consulting business, which is down there in Saudi, going in consulting a couple of local companies there with our competencies. Pakistan, as we're market leader, let's say we're continuing stabilizing as a market leader there. Of course, we want to bring new technology, extended technology and consulting, and to grow this in the Saudi market. The revenue growth is planned from EUR 6.9 million to EUR 10.6 million in these regions and going from margin wise, 11%-15%. Good. Next slide, I'll let Erik conclude and summarize. Thank you.
Yes. Hello, my name is Magnus Sparrholm. My name is also Erik, actually. Erik Magnus Sparrholm. When we accumulate all this, we get to a total of EUR 48 million and an EBITDA range of between 11% and 14% for 2025, taking all the markets that Aurelius from Bayern in Germany told us. I can't really see the remaining, but we are focusing much more on sales now compared to previously, we were more of an engineering company and more reactive. Now we're becoming more proactive and that's just starting now. We started, Aurelius is with us shortly, since a few months, but we also have several other sales-focused employees and other investments in sales going forward.
We're seeing fast growth in Europe, having more than half of our revenues in Europe from approximately next year, continuing to increase in this phase. The profit margin, partly due to the improved market or industry improved situation. We also, along with other companies in our industries, improve margins. We also, from ourselves, we may take measures that we believe will substantially, in this phase, increase our profitability. If we're looking at the two different business units that we have, buildings on one side and networks on the other, we believe buildings is going to grow faster, partly due to more acquisitions, but also due to good organic growth. Networks, which is now 80% of our business, will still be more than half of our revenues throughout 2025.
We can take onto next slide. That's our strategy in three steps. It takes us basically from 2016 until 2030. We're in the second phase now. We call this our grand master plan. We're in the second phase of this grand master plan. For me, it's the most interesting phase that we entered at the beginning of this year because now we're still relatively small. We do have some interesting visions. Five years from now, we will know much more of how we're going to continue. If it works out, as I'm convinced that it will, we're set out for a fantastic future in the third phase , 2025-2030. Focusing now on this phase taking us until the next four years, we're digitizing telecom sites, networks, and also buildings. We can take the next slide.
It's pretty wordy, but I'll actually read it out loud because it is important to us and explains a bit how we're thinking and what we want to do. The second phase now explains how we'll grow until 2025, how we'll develop into a technology provider of solutions and services for sustainable buildings and telecom sites. The network services provided by us, they're required for connecting and managing things, all kinds of things. Not just phones and computers as in the past, but also sensors and integrated all kinds of infrastructure. We'll continue to do this network services basic building block that we need to step up, and then we'll add on the smarter services on top of that. The TalkPool IoT solutions, they make real estate infrastructure smarter and more sustainable.
The efforts are focused on buildings and network sites. The technologies they include artificial intelligence and other upcoming emerging technologies that during this phase, the next few years, is going to make a big difference. We believe that the requirement for measuring natural resources such as water, energy, and even air that we breathe, especially indoors, that's especially expected to grow quickly. We'll increase the metering so that measuring consumptions, especially in households, will increase from 50,000 now to about a few hundred thousand in 2025. We'll focus it on three, as mentioned, air, energy, and water. That's our focus. Air. We're creating healthier, more sustainable indoor climate. There are new, very interesting technologies making air much healthier. Indoor air can be more healthy than outdoor air in the end.
The energy, there's several ways of creating local power and managing power in smarter ways. We're part of that, and we want to focus on that further. Creating local energy and managing that. Measuring, we have several initiatives that it's required if you put, for example, solar panels on a building to be able to distribute that to who's using that local energy is then a big thing. You require our individual metering for doing that. The water is also very important, both quality and there's all kind of leaks and losses of water in different places to measure and manage that technology-wise. Our clients, they will have benefit from using our services. Word of mouth, we hope, will then become a factor going forward that our technology is more advanced than our competitors, being a technology-driven company.
They will want to have our metering and have our solutions for indoor air and water and so on. A bit to summarize, we'll make buildings and networks greener, healthier, and more efficient by using internet technology. Secondly, we'll strengthen existing markets, mainly Europe, by upselling proven products. Not guinea pigs, no test, but really commercialized solutions that work well for us and a very commercialized sales business development focus in this phase. This will give us rapid growth, increased transparency, and we'll be in the sweet spot of sustainable technology and environmental solutions. Also our profit margins and growth is, we expect that both will be picking up. We believe in being a different company and challenging the status quo. We have been doing that in the past.
Now we're transforming into more of a green organization that will help our clients to make better decisions and use the real-time data in a healthy way. Onto the mergers and acquisitions strategy. We have then a strategy of doing more acquisitions similar to the one we made earlier this year, the Home Solutions acquisition, where we acquired a metering company. That's more of a geographic expansion. We'll look for similar companies of individual metering in our existing markets, such as the Benelux, Germany, and so on. We also have technology acquisitions, and that's air, energy, water, coming back to those three important resources. We're looking for companies that are matching very well with our technology and that our clients will very much like using. Again, it's not early stage technology, but something that really is proven to work for us.
We want to grow substantially our client base and push more technology for indoor air quality, local energy management, and water solutions. Yeah. That's all. That's all for today. Thank you, Erik Strömstedt, our CEO, that presented the first part. Aurelius Wosylus, that had the markets part. I think we had a technical glitch there. You didn't see all the markets, but we solved it halfway through. Finally, I was trying to summarize our strategy. That's all from TalkPool today. Thank you and have a good day.