Hello, and welcome to the BioSyent Inc. Q1 2024 results presentation. My name is René Goehrum, and I'm the President and CEO of the company. I want to bring your attention to our forward-looking statements disclaimer, as I will likely be making a few in this presentation, and I'm going to power through our brand wall and start today's presentation with a look at our by unit and by brand revenues in the first quarter and compare that to the trailing twelve months. So this is Q1 2024, ending March 31, compared to the year ago, ending March 31 of 2023. And then we are showing you on the right-hand side of this slide, the trailing twelve-month period, same ending March 31.
So you can see our brands across the Canadian pharmaceutical business have performed well in the first quarter, up strongly, overall, resulting in an 18% growth for the Canadian pharmaceutical business, measured on a trailing 12 months, up 16%. I would say that this performance on a Canadian pharma basis has largely been done without any significant contribution yet from Gelclair and Inofolic. We did benefit in the quarter from some low comps in the year ago quarter, but nevertheless, we've seen a unit and dollar growth across the portfolio of products. You can see here that we did not ship any international pharma business. That is essentially our FeraMAX brand to customers outside of Canada.
If you've been following us for a while, you'll know that I comment often about that being a very lumpy business and certainly not to be looked at on a quarter-over-quarter basis. You can see in the analysis or the look at it, rolling 12 or 12 months, ending March 31st, you can see a fairly strong performance there. We have been filling our order book, so the no shipments in Q1 compares to no shipments in the Q1 of the year ago, but we are filling our order book, and we will be shipping against that business as the year progresses. Our legacy business performed well. It's a smaller part of our overall company, and we had some early orders. So I wouldn't read too much into that at this stage, but nevertheless, a good start to the year.
So overall, the company delivered 19% revenue growth on the quarter and 20% looking at trailing twelve months. So how does that performance then flow through to earnings? Obviously, that CAD 7.7 million in revenue for the quarter resulted in EBITDA of CAD 2.2 million. That's up 45% to the year ago, and CAD 1.8 million dollars of net income after tax, that was up 50% to the year ago. I'd just like to point out the ratios as well were strong in the quarter, and that's essentially driven by growth and managing our investment in promotion as well, so that we can continue to run a profitable business as we go forward. So the first quarter of 2024 was our 55th consecutive profitable quarter, consistent performance on a profit basis.
We delivered CAD 0.15 per diluted share. On a trailing twelve-month basis, that sums up to CAD 0.59 per share of earnings, and compares quite favorably to CAD 0.41 in the prior twelve-month period of time. So a couple things to point out in terms of highlights, both for the quarter and the year to date. You're likely well aware that we've increased our dividend. We announced that in February, paid it in March. That was a 12.5% increase to our quarterly dividend. Also in February, we were named to the TSX Venture 50 top-performing companies for 2023, essentially. We were recognized in the life sciences and clean tech category. In April, FeraMAX was named the No. 1 recommended iron supplement in Canada for the ninth consecutive year by both doctors and pharmacists.
So we're going from strength to strength on that brand. We also announced in April that we've extended the RepaGyn and Proktis licensing and distribution agreement out to 2032. So that's been a good relationship for us and a significant contributor both to revenue and profit. And then, of course, we've just declared our second quarter dividend of CAD 0.045 a share, and that'll be paid in the month of June. So as I mentioned, FeraMAX continues to move from strength to strength. We're now nine years in a row, number one. We've been investing in that brand, both in terms of marketing and promotion, but also in innovation. And our most recent innovation was the launch of FeraMAX Pd Maintenance 45. That was about a year ago.
That product is now solidly contributing to our business and to the FeraMAX brand and give us, an additional option to healthcare professionals and patients, and in this case, on maintaining iron health. We are developing as part of our life cycle strategy, developing further products. There is one certainly that's coming through the process, and we expect it to see market, inside of, certainly inside of two years from May, so, somewhat, short of two years from now. So I won't go in detail on the new product launches of 2023, FeraMAX 45, Inofolic, which is a women's health product, and PCOS, Gelclair for oncology supportive care. I will say that, if you want more information on those products, they all have product websites, and you can also find links to that on our corporate website....
So I mentioned that we've been working hard on innovation. So the Gelclair launch last November was a capstone on a very busy period of time for BioSyent. Over a period of about three and a half years, we introduced and launched innovations and new products, eight of them. So you can see them here on this slide, and together, these products make up a big piece of what we expect our growth portfolio looks like as we move forward. We're expecting Inofolic, Gelclair, our FeraMAX lifecycle strategy, and Tibella all to be contributing strongly to growth, not just this year, but next year and into the future. We are also very active both on in-licensing initiatives and acquisition and, you know, no details on that forthcoming.
As you know, there's nothing to say until there is something to say, but I can tell you that, we've beefed up our team in that area, and we have a number of very active later-stage discussions underway right now, and we expect to be talking to you or announcing something, as the year progresses. So how is this business performance manifested on our balance sheet, cash position? As you know, we carry no debt. I would say, I'll reiterate that we have no debt on the balance sheet at this stage. We have a strong cash position. On March 31st, that was just short of CAD 28 million. You can see here the cash position over the last couple of years. That's not an accident. It's actively managed.
We had our best quarter of cash generation in the first quarter of this year, so CAD 7.1 million from operations, and we've also been returning capital to shareholders. I think if you're following this presentation, you're aware that we've been buying back shares. I've got some more comments on that in a moment, but in the 12 months ending March thirty-first, we've bought back over 500,000 shares to the tune of CAD 4 million. We've also, in that same period of time, 12 months ending March thirty-first, paid about CAD 2 million of dividends. So of the CAD 7 million in cash generation in the trailing 12 months, I should say that that was not CAD 7.1 million in cash generation from the quarter. It was on a trailing 12-month basis.
CAD 6 million of that has been returned to shareholders because we feel we've got a strong cash position, with which to execute against our strategy. One of the metrics that we follow closely is return on equity, and you can see the bounce up from the year ago, a trailing 12 months from 15%-21%, which is where we were a couple of years ago. So to proactively answer the, "Okay, René, what are you going to do with the cash on your balance sheet?" We link it to our strategy. The first dollar goes to growing the top line and growing our profit over time. We also are very focused on diversifying our portfolio. As I mentioned earlier, 8 initiatives around new products and innovation over a 3.5-year period.
So you can see that we are investing in, selling and promotion primarily. You can see that, if you dig into our MD&A and our financial statements. So we're making significant, investments in growth and diversification, but of course, we run a capital-light business model, and we're cash generating. So we've been buying back shares now since, the fourth quarter of 2018. We've repurchased 2.8 million shares, since the end of 2018, which represents a 23% earnings enhancement on a per-share basis. So if you were a shareholder when we started, and you're a shareholder today, that's an improvement of 23% or 23% more ownership on a per, share basis. But nevertheless, we've been pretty consistent on this strategy as we go through, and, we've been buying back shares actively over that period of time.
We also initiated a dividend in the fourth quarter of 2022, and with the dividend that we have just declared that we will be paying in June, we will have paid CAD 3.4 million in dividends, for a total return of capital to shareholders of CAD 22.1 million. I'd like to land on this slide just to point out that we stopped using share options, stock options, as equity compensation for management in the business and directors about five years ago. So no new options have been issued since, I believe, March of 2019. So it's been over five years. We replaced that with restricted share units, RSUs. The thing that I'd like to point out that I think it's been missed by some, is the way we manage our RSU program is non-dilutive.
So essentially, we use a strong balance sheet, go into the market, we buy shares in the open market, we hold them in trust for our future RSU obligations. So in this case, you can see that we are holding approximately 200,000 shares in trust, in treasury, and we have just slightly more than 200,000 RSUs outstanding. So essentially, we're balancing those two. You could follow that in our quarterly and annual financial statements. So it's a very non-dilutive approach to how we're managing the incentive compensation, equity compensation in our business. I think that would set us aside from the way it's done in many other businesses. So as we're buying back shares, we're not leaking them out in the form of equity compensation to management and insiders.
We're feeling as optimistic and strong about our business as we have ever. We've got a profitable business, which clearly our results demonstrate. We're well-capitalized. We've got growth assets, and they are contributing to growth, revenue growth in the company and profit growth in the company. We, as a management team and a board of directors, are focused on the long-term growth of the business, both revenue and profit, and total shareholder return. We look forward to reporting our progress as the year moves on. Thank you.