Good afternoon, everybody, to our annual results 2022 analyst call. Sorry for the delay in the afternoon. Usually we are in the morning. I have been on a business trip, and it was good that we reserved some time in between, because as usual, the flight was delayed again. Sorry for that. Next time, I hope we can manage to be in the morning again. Coming to the 2022 results in the year, and some information around it. Again, after several other years, also this year was massively demanding, with all impacts that are still overlapping from Dieselgate and subsequent electrification of the powertrain, significant price increases on all raw materials and energy, chip shortages and shortages on other material. All of this created a high volatility of demands and therefore additional challenges in our production.
That's not different to the years before. As a result of all of this, the European car production, which is the major impact on our volumes, the car production is still roughly 25% lower than before the crisis, 2020. 25% below a normal year pre-crisis is the significant shortfall of volume. The unpredictable development during the last years and the resulting on and off production in our plants means now a massive shortage of labor. We always had to contract new people, train the people on the machinery, had to release them when the volumes went down or the customer plants were shut down for short-term work.
We, we needed new people, train them again, release them again and ultimately some other industries were constantly performing, where it got more and more difficult to get new people from temporary working agencies, as the predictability is very low in the automotive sector. All of this created impacts on productivity and quality, but also this is not significantly new to the years before. However, we positively need to say the predictability in quarter four improved strongly. The short-term reduction of call-offs since late autumn improved far better than it was before. Volumes improved slightly in quarter four, but still far below pre-crisis. Honestly, I see no recovery or no short-term recovery to a level it was 2029 or before. Stepwise recovery is said should come, but not on a short term.
Alongside with this first improvement, it was the first time that POLYTEC is directly hit by chip and electronic shortages in Q4. Not directly in terms of supplies to our product, but we were impacted as for the volume increases necessary machinery was not able to be supplied, because essential control units, Siemens control, mainly are not able to deliver, and therefore we received not the urgently needed machines. The supplies could be kept upright, but at extensive extra cost, and it impacted our Q4 results negatively to what would have been possible on the recovery. We also need to say that this machinery usually has delivery times of one to three months. Currently we are faced with 12-18 months, but still this is uncertain.
However, we achieved by a strong management that we step by step get one or the other machine a bit earlier, but time will tell how we are really able to get all capacity up within the next months. It will definitely also impact our first months results in 2023. However, it is not a broad issue. It's very specific in a certain plant on a certain type of machinery. Only bad news for the industry and for POLYTEC? Not really, to be honest, and that's the good side of it. The major question for us was: Is POLYTEC able to realize the opportunities out of this multiple crisis and of the transformation of mobility in the broader way?
The massive good news and promising news for us is, yes, we could confirm that our market position, which we started the transformation in 2020, called the POLYTEC SOLUTION FORCE, is a major success. This success is underpinned by an all-time high order intake during 2022, and not only an all-time high order intake, but also with products that are absolute future-proof. If it is in terms of battery electric cars, if it is in non-automotive areas, like energy storage or infrastructure, or if it is also in new mobility aspects where we have more and more development projects, as we have also released a collaboration with FlyNow, a personal, fully automated flight drone. Third wave than the serial parts, but still.
Moreover, we also achieved two major awards, which we are very proud of, and which confirms that position as POLYTEC SOLUTION FORCE, and the continuous innovation is valued by our customers. The one is a Silver Style award for Jaguar Land Rover, for the development of a massive important product for JLR. The other one is a technical award given by JEC, the most important composite fair, which we received together with Audi for underbody solution shielding the battery pack of Audi e-tron. Altogether, we managed to forward the essential cost increases to balance the results even at low volume.
Moreover, we managed to achieve a positive free cash flow by a focused working capital management, resulting in EUR 55 million cash reserve, after EUR 27 million, which we only had at Q3, 2022. Not less important, but most important, we managed to remain all major customer relationships with significant order intake and the confirmation of our market positioning. The latter is the most promising. Nonetheless, the actual results are for sure not satisfying yet. The sales was roughly EUR 600 million, after EUR 555 million the year before, mainly resulting, of course, to forward. The volume is slightly lower than it was the year before. The EBT was 5.5%, and the EBIT of close to zero, black zero, after 2.2% in last year.
We still remain at a very solid equity ratio of 43%. Based on this balance sheet and on the outlook of the order intake, we also propose to do a dividend proposal of EUR 0.10 per share. I want to mention on the result that there are special one-off expenses included. Aside from what I mentioned, the operational issue around capacity, we have additional EUR 4.6 million paid, which are mainly attributable to the introduction of a software solution and in two major POLYTEC location and something, some payment around pension scheme. 2022 shows less volatility. Sorry, not 2022. 2023 shows less volatility. Here, there are some volume shortfalls, but specific shortfalls, not in the body area as it was the years before.
Very individual products, so all able to be managed. Depending on the availability of the machines, the current extra cost will reduce during the first half of the year. Together with all the other impacts, where none of those has disappeared, this leads us to our expectation of an improvement on results in the full year, based on a turnover of EUR 650 million-EUR 700 million. Far, the most important facts around the annual results. Thanks for listening.