Welcome, everybody, to our Q3 presentation today. Thank you for joining us for that. For today, we planned to give you an update about some soft topics and then turn quickly to the financial figures, of course, to give an outlook at the end of my presentation and have time for questions and answers, of course, at the end. So you're well aware of our equity story and as well about our ESG profile, so I will skip those, although they are shown in our new presentation design, as you see. A quick update also about our RT. I wanna quickly mention that we are good in the way of our serial production. We started in May.
I told you already in our Q2 call, and we see further interest on the market. The last order intakes were from Brampton in the United States. The Royal Dutch Air Force also decided for two units, and also Miami was going for an RT now. So concerning our project, our turnaround project, Refocus, Restart, we are working on it successfully. As you see on the right-hand side, I will speak a bit about it. Yeah. We have these four levers in the project, which is on the one side, the price negotiations with our customers, which is certainly important but very difficult due to the nature of our business, with public constitutions and customers.
However, we made some progress there, and about EUR 4-5 million out of the EUR 31 target comes from that. The main three levers are, however, the value analysis we did on our products, which is to simplify the products, to leave away some items of our products without sacrificing the quality, of course, and to make things easier in terms of engineering and in terms of production. And these effects have the longest time to materialize. However, we see some effects already this year, and we'll see full year effects next year as well. The second important lever is the production efficiency. So this is being faster in production, and it's possible because supply chains are much better and improved since last year.
We have, for example, in our main production site here, a target of 10% being faster in production on the PANTHER line, on the AT line, which are the two most quantity lines, and therefore, we seem to be on track on that. These effects materialize, of course, very fast, actually, when we ship the trucks, which we have then produced. The fourth lever, which is important, and we also have some tailwind on that, is actually the price negotiations with our suppliers. We see the general economic situation very difficult, and so suppliers are happy again about orders and also ready to negotiate prices. Also, the material prices went down. For example, where we had price increases of 37% on aluminum sheets.
Last year, we see a price reduction of 27% of those aluminum sheets within 2023, compared to last year. So we're still on a high level, but saw major reductions in prices from our suppliers, which is also important here. Yeah, you see on the right-hand side the blue line, which is what we identified and successfully implemented, and then you see on the green line what we have achieved in terms of what is visible on our P&L. So we... You see we are a bit behind the target, simply because with Q3 we should be slightly higher. However, we have now the time until the end of the year, and there is also a major part of our top lines, of our turnover to be expected in Q4.
I will come back to that later. We plan 36% of our turnover in Q4, so the probability we reach the target of EUR 31 million out of this project is still given. Yeah, I also want to give you an update on the chassis situation being the most important example of supply chain issues we were facing over the last two years. It is important for me to give you an update on that, because this is, of course, a major and important supply issue we were facing over those last years. So you see chassis lead times, and especially the reliability of delivery times from our OEMs, from MAN, Scania, Volvo, Scania, for example, in Europe, have been improved.
That means a better possibility for our production to be more efficient, simply because the chassis are there on time, more than they have been over the last two years. It's still on a worse level in both lead times and reliability of delivery times than two years before, but the situation is majorly improving. So you see, for example, MAN saw lead times, or we had lead times and delivery times of up to 18 months, and at the moment, we see delivery times of 10-12 months, which is a major improvement. Also, some improvements at Daimler, so Mercedes chassis, as you see here, and also Volvo. Scania was always on a good level.
So if you remember, times before the war in Ukraine, we had and also the COVID-related supply chain bottlenecks with the semiconductors and so on. We had these lead times of 4-5 months, and now we saw them up to 18 months, so a major disruption of our supply chain and a big problem for our people in the production and us as a whole company. Also, with an outlook to 2024, we have around 60%-90%, very much dependent on the individual product of chassis needed, already confirmed by the chassis manufacturers. So if we order a chassis, we have not 100% always a feedback in terms of a confirmation.
As I said before, the confirmation also did not always turn out to be true, or was not always fulfilled by the OEMs in the last years. So we see that improving as well, as I said. But to give you a feeling also on the year 2024 already, and that is very important for us in the current budget process, to have a high, a high probability of chassis being available when we need them for the so-called marriage with the body. Yeah, we expect what you see here. We expect no significant further improvement, going down the year 2024. We hope for it, but it is not built into our budget and our expectations for next year. And, this is... We learned to manage this new situation.
As I, I said also in previous calls, we tried to set up our production plan for next year on a very conservative basis, simply to be able to have everything we need in terms of material. And it is not only the chassis, it is also, for example, for the PANTHER, it would be the axles, it would be the brakes, it would be the frames. For example, for the RT, it would be the battery packs, the electric engines we receive from Volvo Penta. As major parts, we need to have to produce those trucks. Okay, so let's turn to the Q3 figures. In Q3, we made almost EUR 700 million of turnover, which is about 10% above the previous year.
I will show you that this comes almost to fully from price increases. I will show you that on the next slides. The main reason for our improvements are, of course, the Refocus Restart program, as I mentioned before, and the price situation, which was increased simply because of the higher input factor costs, be it material, be it labor costs. So these effects of the price increases also fade in gradually, like we say here, also, because we still have some price increases which are not shown on our P&L yet. The higher gross profit comes from, on the one side, an improved gross profit.
Like you see on our P&L, we increased our gross profit from 11.4% last year to 15.2%, in the first three quarters of 2023. In addition to that, you see a reduction in structural costs, R&D, sales, and administrative expenses of, in total, more than EUR 9 million. That together, we have improved our EBITDA to EUR 33.7 million and our EBIT figure to EUR 11.2 million between these first three quarters of 2023. That means an improvement of EUR 43 million compared to the previous year's three quarters, and that is possible with an EBIT of EUR 10.4 million, which was coming out of Q3, as we will see on the next slides as well.
On the demand side, we are still very strong with order intake increasing by 24% compared year-on-year. I will elaborate on that on a later slide as well. The downside of the Q3 figures is for sure the net debt, which increased to EUR 484 million, which is due to the working capital requirements. As I said, with our current guidance of EUR 1.1 billion, we plan another EUR 400 million of turnover in the Q4, which is 36% of our total turnover, planned turnover. So that is a substantial figure, and we have built up stock levels and also work in progress to make that happen.
We also brought up our EBIT margin, that was actually on the 20th of October, when we sent out an ad hoc message, where we brought up both the turnover top line from EUR 1 billion to EUR 1.1 billion, and the EBIT figure from 3% to 3.5%, simply because we saw in our forecast calculation that we will achieve those figures. I mentioned most of the key financial figures already. I want to point out, of course, that the EBT figure, which is unfortunately still negative, due to very high financial results, very negative financial results, simply because interest rates increased and the working capital requirements were higher than last year.
So we see a financial result of EUR 20.5 million compared to EUR 7.2 million last year, which is 3x what we had last year, and this is hurting us in our EBT, obviously. Also, the tax result, which was positive last year, due to losses, or mainly due to losses, is slightly negative this year, as we are doing profits again, and that brings down the net profit for the period to EUR -12 million. With our guidance, we obviously expect a positive figure at the end of the year, this year. Here you see the quarterly results and turnover figures of the last years.
So as I mentioned, we expect about EUR 400 million in Q4 2023, which is clearly above what we see here for Q4 2020, 2021 and 2022. So this is why we, as I said, also had to bring up those stock levels to have that done in Q4. Q3 2023 is clearly much better than 2022, obviously, as I mentioned before, but also better than 2021, and still under the level of 2020, which shows actually what we can do and need to do also next year. So further improvement in 2024 will be necessary for us. So here you see the comparison of the EBIT figures on the right-hand side.
Left-hand side, you see, the figures of last year, both our turnover and the profits, the EBIT figures we did. So you see, we are coming from a very deep hole, if I may say so, in the year 2022, which we always said was the deepest point we went through now, 2023, with clear improvements to what we saw 2022, also on a quarterly basis. And as I said before, in total, we are on the EBIT, on the operational performance, EUR 43 million above what we saw last year.
So speaking again about the turnover, and I will speak about the prices on the next slide, but speaking about the regions first, I want to point out here that actually we had an improvement of our top line in four out of five of our segments. Only the Middle East segment is still below what we had last year, and we will also have an improvement here at the end of the year. So you see also on that slide that four out of five segments managed to achieve order intakes above the revenues. It's just actually the Preventive Fire Protection, which is on a very similar level. But as I said before, and we will speak about it more, order intake is very strong.
So this, 9.8% top-line growth really come from, and you see it here, it's, it's really the same figure, finally, come from the price increases we saw in our top line of vehicles. 9.8% is the average price of a fire truck we sold in the first three quarters of 2023, and the average price is EUR 405,000, which was EUR 369,000 the year before. So the price increases we did gradually flow into our top line and into our revenues. And you see also in the small figures here, that actually the number of fire trucks we shipped actually was reduced even from 1,283 fire trucks last year to 1,203 fire trucks this year.
In the red column, you see the body part of that vehicle, so that is without the chassis, which is actually our value addition, if you may say so. And here the price increase is even higher, simply because we have to catch up on our price levels here stronger. For example, aluminum prices, I mentioned, are more important or are only in the body of a fire truck, not in the chassis. So please remember those average prices. We will come back to that when we speak about the order level and the order intake. So next, I'd like to quickly catch up on the EBIT figure by region. You see that we have a strong improvement of the EBIT of our operational performance in all the regions.
Three out of the five managed to be in the positive again, and of course, all of those will be positive at the end of the year in the EBIT figure. Actually, that is what, what I can say here. Of course, Europe and America are already positive because of the higher top lines, and some of our group costs and overhead costs are also equally distributed, and that is one of the main reasons MEA and Asia Pacific are still negative here. On the CapEx side, we remain on the saving we did over the last year as well. So, we did a few CapEx, like I mentioned here. Purchase of a real estate in Germany.
We have some demonstration vehicles, which we are trying to sell, of course, again, over this last quarter now. We are continuing with our rollout of SAP and went live beginning of October in the first production entity, which is Rosenbauer Slovenia. So we are now working with SAP in the financial area since already many years, but fully fledged in Rosenbauer Switzerland and Rosenbauer Slovenia. Next step is to move to SAP and the headquarter here in Austria, which will be a big step, which will be the next thing on the roadmap of our SAP project. So speaking about the balance sheet I mentioned before, this is still to be improved, of course. We are working on that.
And there will be a huge output through the fourth quarter, which will improve figures substantially, obviously, like that is always the case, but this year it's even more extreme. So we see assets of almost EUR 1.2 billion, which is a bad record level we reached here, and equity ratio went down to 14.3%, 1.5 percentage points lower than we had last year. So this is for sure top of our agenda at the moment. We see the return on capital employed positive again, and we see the net income is still negative. This is why the return on equity is still negative as well, and the poor equity ratio is also reflected in a higher net debt.
I will explain with the working capital on the next slide. Actually, please remember those 9%, and this is exactly where it comes from. You see here on the right-hand side, our total working capital or trade working capital, which is 10% higher. That is why our net debt is 10% higher. So that is all used for our working capital. Where do we use it? In the inventories and in the sales outstanding, so in the accounts receivable. And there we should be back on year-end levels towards the end of the year. So for example, we were at 184 days at the beginning of the year and should be going down with our inventories now in Q4 to that level or lower. The DSO is also quite high.
Year-end 2022 was, for example, 55 days, so we should see an improvement here as well in Q4. We are good on the down payments with 74 days, and also on the payables outstanding with 36 days, which was only 30 days beginning of the year. So... And you see with our improved guidance of EUR 1.1 billion, actually, the Cash Conversion Cycle goes even is even reduced compared to the previous year. But the absolute figure, of course, of EUR 516 million, has to be financed. You see that also on the graph here. Actually, with EUR 1.1 billion, the working capital in percentage of the turnover goes back to 47%. However, the absolute figure is unfavorably high.
That is also the reason, as I said, for the high net debt of EUR 484 million. So advanced payments with 20% should be increased. So, we are really focusing on that, for example, but on the full working capital management, we wanna see a 30% here, which is really hard work to get our customers convinced to do so. I tried, or we tried to convince them, because actually it's a win-win situation, as the financing costs of public institutions are, of course, lower than ours are. And it is also very important to mention, we are still in the process of the market sounding for our hybrid bond, and we will use-...
The Q4, Q3 figures, so we still plan to issue that hybrid bond based on the Q3 figures, which is possible after today, because we published the figures today. So positive again, and to give more detail or more light on our order situation. On the demand side, I was mentioning before already, we have increased our order intake by 24%. Order Backlog, because of the conservative planning due to the supply chain risks, went up even by 29%. So we stay conservative on our top line to ensure efficiency in production and deliveries, at least from our part, on time. So where does the order intake come from? You see it on the right-hand side.
Actually, it's again, four out of five segments, which increase their order intake. It's only the Preventive Fire protection, which is slightly smaller. Especially our home markets, America and Europe, remain very strong, with an increase of 23% in Europe, of 19% in America. And, the very high increase comes from Asia Pacific, which is 84% above year level, above 2022 level, which is due to the comeback of the aviation industry. In the Middle East, we still expect some order inflow due to some good projects. We are still in the decision phase. Our customers are still in the decision phase, so we remain with a small increase here already, but hope for some more within Q4.
I mentioned before, and I asked you to remember the average price level of a truck we shipped in the first three quarters of 2023, which was EUR 405,000. You see on the order intake, the price level is about EUR 500,000. So that means compared to the order inflow from last year, year-on-year, an improvement of 12%, increased pricing. That should show that we are tracking that price levels very carefully. Of course, it is an oversimplification to calculate an overall average, but it gives you a bit of an information on how we are standing on that. On the outlook, the global growth is very much reduced, and there is a slowdown.
We see from the IMF, which is from 3.5%, they reduced their outlook for the current year to 3%, with a perspective of only 2.9%, economic growth next year. Growth rates in the developing economies are even lower, whereas the developing countries with higher growth rate. So we have the advantage to be with our product everywhere, so we hope to be able to balance that. However, we're following that of course very carefully, because we know we are late follower in terms of the economic development, and therefore, we have also to expect some reductions in the year 2026, maybe with the order book we have at the moment, but there's a big question mark on that.
So we see a growth potential in 2025 and also for 2024, of course. 2026 is very hard to predict, but this is why we are following that global economic developments very carefully. The firefighting industry, as we, has full order books, so we expect some further growth here in the year 2023, and as well in the year 2024, as I said. And we see a general trend for our products. Of course, this is unbroken or continuing because actually alternative drives, equipment, components, service business, and also innovative digital products will further have a strong demand as we believe and see on the market.
Yeah, based on the growth impact of our efficiency program and Refocus Restart, as I said, we see we brought up our guidance from EUR 1 billion to EUR 1.1 billion, from 3% to 3.5%. And of course, we will see full year effects of that program next year, so there is a further improvement to be expected for 2024 as well. That is very obvious. So thank you very much for your attention.