Bonjour et bienvenue à la conférence téléphonique sur les résultats financiers du deuxième trimestre de l'année fiscale 2023 de Velan Inc. Greetings and welcome to the Velan Inc. Q2 2023 financial results conference call. Pendant la présentation, tous les participants seront en mode d'écoute seulement. Une période de questions suivra la présentation. Si vous souhaitez poser une question, appuyez sur le one suivi du four sur votre téléphone. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question and answer session. At that time, if you have a question, please press the one followed by the four on your telephone. Si lors de la conférence, vous avez besoin de parler à un téléphoniste, s'il vous plaît appuyez sur l'étoile suivie de zero. If at any time during the conference you need to reach an operator, please press star zero.
Nous vous rappelons que la conférence téléphonique d'aujourd'hui est enregistrée vendredi le quatorze octobre deux mille vingt-deux. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Friday, October fourteenth, twenty twenty-two. Je cède maintenant la parole. I would like to now turn the conference over to Bruno Carbonaro, chef de la direction et président. La parole est à vous. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining our conference call today. Let's start by presenting the usual disclaimers. Now, let's proceed with the first section of this disclaimer, provides an analysis of our consolidated results for the quarter ended August 23rd, 2022 . The board has approved these results today, October 14th, 2022 . The second paragraph refers to non-IFRS and supplementary financial results, which are reconciled at the last stage of this presentation. Finally, the last paragraph refers to forward-looking information, which are subject to risks and uncertainty and are not guaranteed. The forward-looking statements contained in this presentation are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. Now let's proceed with the call. Welcome to our second quarter fiscal year 2023 conference call. I am joined today by Rishi Sharma, our CFO.
This presentation will be made available following the call on our website in the investor relations section. I will start with a brief summary of our results for Q2, followed by a closing comment. We will then open the line to your questions. As usual, we summarize the key highlights for Q2 in one slide. That's the first item is on sales, CAD 85.1 million sales, which is an improvement of CAD 10 million above Q1, but a decrease of CAD 16.8 million versus Q2 last year. The two main explanations are, A, the impact of the exchange rate variations between the dollar and the euro, because a lot of our sales are recorded in euro and translated back into US dollar.
The second fact is that last year we enjoyed very strong shipments in the Q2 in some of our European operations that were not repeated this year. These CAD 85.1 million sales translated into a CAD 1.4 million EBITDA, which is better than the CAD 2.9 million losses posted in the previous quarter, but lower than the CAD 10.7 million achieved last year. We'll show you a bridge to explain to you the variation between last year and this year. This translates into a CAD 3.7 million net loss for the quarter. On the more positive side, the size of the backlog is still extremely healthy, and we will expand on that in the next slide. Our cash position remains strong at CAD 29.7 million.
Let's now comment the backlog, and you see that it has decreased slightly from a little above CAD 500 million to CAD 477 million. This is mainly due to the translation in USD of our backlog in euros for our French and Italian operations. What is interesting, and you comment that on the right-hand side of the slide, is that the shippable backlog in the next 12 months has increased from CAD 325 million to CAD 347 million, which means that we enjoy a very strong visibility on the next 12 months. On the book-to-bill ratio, if I start from the beginning of the fiscal year, so on the first half of the year, we still have a book-to-bill ratio above one.
The bookings for the quarter stood at CAD 73.5 million, which is a decrease of 10% versus the same period last year. That's mostly being impacted by the geopolitical uncertainties, which creates some sluggishness in the award of different projects by our customers. We continue to observe a very strong activity in terms of quotation that should translate into favorable bookings for the second half of the year. I now hand over the mic to Rishi that will show you more details about the accounts of the Q2.
Thank you, Bruno, and good afternoon, everyone. Sorry. First comment, I would really like to stress the importance of the recovery on the performance versus Q1, where we saw an increase of CAD 10.1 million or 13.4% across the globe and all of our divisions over the Q1 performance that we reported just a few weeks ago. Noteworthy to mention that we also did suffer from some shipping and logistical delays in which a CAD 11 million order was shipped in the month of August, but not recorded in our revenues for Q2. If we look at our comparatives to Q2 of the prior year, there was a decrease of CAD 16.8 million or 16.5% compared to the same quarter last year.
The negative effect on the weakening of the euro average rate against the US dollars for the quarter amounted 6 million for the second quarter of last fiscal year. This total was about 10.5 million for the first half of 2023 versus the first half of 2022. As mentioned by Bruno, we also saw some lighter activity than the previous year in our European operations, mostly in Italy, destined for the upstream oil and gas sector as we compare that to the prior year performance. The decrease is also attributable to the timing of delivery dates on open orders caused by lower bookings recorded in the second half of full year 2022. On EBITDA, a similar story.
I'd like to mention that it was a good recovery from Q1 that we are happy to report, going from a loss of CAD 2.9 million in Q1 to a profit, a positive EBITDA of CAD 1.4 million, which is in line really with our historical trend of a slower start to the year. We also mentioned that we did not record the profit on certain large contracts shipped during the month of August, but not recognized in the quarter. If we look at the EBITDA of CAD 1.4 million for the quarter compared to the EBITDA of CAD 10.7 million last year, the decrease is primarily attributable to the gross profit on the volume reduction, along with an increase in administration costs for the quarter.
Although our gross profit increased by 80 basis points over Q1, our gross profit did decrease by 320 basis points compared to last year's second quarter. The decrease in gross profit percentage for the quarter is primarily attributable to the lower sales volume, as we mentioned on a previous slide, which impacted the absorption of our fixed production overhead. The decrease in profit was also due to the unfavorable effect of the product mix that we delivered in Q2 of this year. Administration costs for the quarter amounted to CAD 24.7 million, an increase of CAD 0.7 million or 2.9%. The increase was mainly driven by an increase in our reassessment of our long-term asbestos liability, for which we will discuss shortly. The increase is also due to higher outbound freight costs as we saw in Q1.
However, it's noteworthy that we see a rebalancing and a normalized trend in our freight costs for the current quarter as compared to what we saw in Q1. The increase for the quarter was also offset by lower commissions on the lower sales activity as a result of larger sales orders that we delivered in the prior year. If we move to net cash, our net cash amounted to CAD 29.7 million for the end of the quarter, which is a decrease of CAD 23.7 million since the beginning of the fiscal year. The decrease here is purely temporary in timing relating to non-cash working capital items, and we expect these items to be recovered during Q3 and Q4 of the current year.
The overall availability for the company remains strong at over CAD 110 million dollars for available cash on hand and facilities available to the company. It's important to note that the increase in our AR is due primarily to the strong proportion of its Q2 revenues being recorded at the tail end of the quarter in line with the collection terms that we have with our customers. We do expect and have seen these amounts collected in the early part of Q3. I'll turn it back over to Bruno now for the closing comments on Q2, sorry.
Thanks, Rishi. I think my comments are as follows. First is that we still have a global macro environment which is not very favorable and it remains challenging because the uncertainty is high. We need to protect against any, you know, downside that we can see. The good news for us is we enjoy a very strong visibility thanks to our very solid backlog and the strong pipeline of opportunities we are seeing on the market right now. Here, what we need to do is to focus on execution. That's my top priority. Most of our destiny is in our hands, and we actually need just to execute our projects on time and at cost to deliver the value we expect from them.
We are extremely confident in delivering a strong second half of the year, thanks to this very solid backlog. The key objective for the team is to maintain the strong liquid position we have and to do that, to better manage our working cap, which mostly is one of the big disappointments of Q2. This being said, I open the line for questions.
Merci. Thank you. If you would like to register a question, please press the one followed by the four on your telephone. You will hear a three-tone prompt to acknowledge that request. If your question has been answered and you would like to withdraw your registration, please press the one followed by the three. One moment, please. As a reminder, to register for a question, it is one followed by four on your telephone.
Okay. If there are no questions, I suggest we can adjourn.
There are no questions.
I suggest we stop if there are no questions. We're more than happy just to answer any question in private if you may have, you know, which is going in your mind.
That does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you very much for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your line.