Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Wayside Technology Group's conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. Please note that all callers are limited to one question each. If anyone should require assistance during the conference call, please press star then zero on your touchtone telephone. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Melanie Caponigro. Ms. Caponigro, you may begin your conference at this time.
Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to Wayside Technology's first quarter 2015 earnings call. Before turning the call over to Simon Nynens, the company's Chairman and CEO, I will dispense with the customary cautionary language and comment about the webcast for this earnings call. We have released earnings for the first quarter at approximately 5:00 P.M. Eastern Time, Thursday, April 30th, 2015. The earnings release is available at the company's investor relations website at waysidetechnology.com. Today's call, including all questions and answers, is being webcast live, and a rebroadcast will be available at www.waysidetechnology.com/earnings-call. This conference call and the associated webcast contain time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of today, May 1st, 2015. A detailed discussions of risks and uncertainties are discussed in our Forms 10-Q and also in greater detail in our Forms 10-K. Wayside Technology Group Inc.
sees no obligation to update and does not intend to update any forward-looking statements. Now I would like to turn the call over to Simon Nynens.
Thank you, Melanie, and good morning to everyone. We had an outstanding quarter. Revenue increased 29% to a first quarter record of $92.7 million, gross profit increased 15%, and income from operations increased 27%. Our Lifeboat division represented 89% of our revenue and 87% of segment income in the first quarter. Cash and long-term receivables were $26.7 million and represented a very healthy 71% of equity at the end of March 2015. Working capital amounted to $32 million, representing 84% of our equity. Regarding cash flow and capital, we are very fortunate to be in a position to continue to return capital to our shareholders. We believe strongly that repurchasing our shares represents an attractive use of our capital. In this quarter, we bought back approximately 156,000 shares for a total of $2.5 million and paid out dividends totaling $0.8 million.
Looking at the future, we continue to invest in the growth of our business. On March 17, we announced that we hired and appointed Justin Current as Director of Professional Services. Justin has been a professional and technical service leader for both distribution and software vendor companies. Most recently, before Veeam Software, Justin launched the global Veeam Certified Engineer and now authorized education provider programs, and also established professional services offerings for Veeam resellers to provide around Veeam backup and replication software. Just last week, we announced the addition of Brian Gilbertson as Senior Director, New Vendor Business Development. Brian has many excellent reseller and vendor relationships in our industry, and his expertise will be a tremendous asset in accelerating the strategic expansion of solutions we offer to our resellers, as well as in driving growth within the new vendor lines.
Regarding offices, we are reviewing several options for our new headquarters. We expect to move next year. Our European office will relocate to Amsterdam this summer. We will open up offices this summer as well in Arizona to better serve our Mountain and Pacific Time Zone customers. We do not expect significant cost increases due to these planned moves. We were also selected again as one of the Best Places to Work in New Jersey by NJBiz. This is the third straight year and a testament to the strong and positive culture here at Wayside Technology Group. We are excited about the prospect of more software publishers joining us, and customer and vendor feedback confirms that we are on the right track. Our customer service is outstanding. We care, and our customers notice. We look forward to growing our business.
I would like to hand it over to Bill Botti, our Executive Vice President. Bill?
Thank you, Simon. As noted in our release, we had a good quarter overall with revenue up 29%, income from operations up 27% year-over-year. Our Lifeboat business grew a robust 40% Q1 while our TechXtend segment retracted 22% when compared to the same period last year due to a continued decrease in our extended payment term transactions. Gross profit for our Lifeboat segment in the first quarter was up 27% to $5.2 million versus $4.1 million for the same period last year due to an increase in sales volume. The TechXtend segment had a higher percentage of GP compared to last year, but declined 21% due to the lower volumes. We announced the addition of two new products in the Lifeboat portfolio during Q1 with OpenDNS and CoreSite. These additions will continue to build on our solution sets for our partners.
Also announced was a key addition to the Lifeboat staff as Justin Current joined as Director of Professional Services with the assignment to build out a services portfolio that is sold through our reseller partners to improve the availability and margins for both parties. Like other resellers, TechXtend will use the Lifeboat services for their engineering projects. Our plans continue to be executed effectively by the organization. I expect several new lines to be brought aboard, led by Brian Gilbertson and other staff additions in both organizations. As Simon Nynens indicated, in order to better serve our Mountain and Pacific Time Zone customers, we're expanding our inside sales team by adding a remote office in Phoenix area for this additional staff, who will be assigned to the five territories in these two time zones and will augment their teammates in New Jersey already covering these areas.
We also added some lines and additional staff in our TechXtend team. TechXtend's overall business remains solid, except for the extended payment term business, which are traditionally large transactions. As stated previously, we're focusing our efforts for TechXtend in New Jersey and the Northeast. Are beginning to see more solution opportunities that include higher margin opportunities as seen by the slightly higher GP % for TechXtend. We continue to manage our expenses and build our product portfolio to help achieve our continued growth targets. Simon, thank you. Back to you.
Thank you, Bill. Kevin Scull will now report on the financial numbers. Kevin?
Thank you, Simon. Good morning to our investors, analysts, and employees. I will discuss our first quarter financial results both on a consolidated basis as well as by business segment. Net sales for the quarter were $92.7 million. This is compared to $71.7 million in Q1 last year, representing a 29% increase on a consolidated basis. Sales for our Lifeboat Distribution segment were $82.9 million and represent 89% of total revenue during the quarter. Lifeboat sales reflect a 40% increase compared to Q1 last year. The increase in sales in the Lifeboat segment was mainly a result of the addition of several key product lines and strengthening of our account penetration. Sales for our TechXtend segment were $9.7 million compared to $12.5 million in the prior year, representing a 22% decrease.
The decrease in sales in the TechXtend segment was primarily due to a decrease in extended payment term transactions and larger transactions as compared to the prior year. On a consolidated basis, our gross profit was $6.4 million compared to $5.5 million for the first quarter of 2014, representing a 15% increase. Our gross profit margin percent for the quarter was 6.9% compared to 7.7% in the prior year. Lifeboat Distribution's gross profit for the quarter was $5.2 million. This compared to $4.1 million in the prior year, and this represents a 27% increase. This increase was primarily due to the higher sales volume in the current year. Our TechXtend segment's gross profit was $1.1 million and decreased by 21% compared to the prior year. The decrease in margin for our TechXtend segment was due to lower sales volume.
Total selling general administrative expenses were $4.5 million compared to $4 million in the prior year. This increase is primarily the result of an increase in Lifeboat Distribution's employee and employee-related expenses, salaries, commissions, bonus, and benefits in 2015 compared to 2014. We plan to continue to invest to grow our Lifeboat segment. Our net income for the quarter was $1.3 million compared to $1.1 million in the prior year. Earnings per share on a fully diluted basis were $0.28 per share compared to $0.23 in the prior year. Moving on to the balance sheet. Compared to our year-end balance sheet, the following accounts had fluctuations. Cash was a healthy $21.4 million at quarter end compared to $23.1 million at year-end. This decrease is comprised primarily of stock purchases of $2.5 million and dividend payments of $800,000, offset by cash flow from operations of $1.5 million.
Accounts receivable, current and long-term, decreased by 8%. The decrease is primarily due to a lower level of sales as compared to the fourth quarter of 2014. Accounts payable and accrued expenses decreased by 8% also due to the lower sales volume and an increase in early payment discounts taken by the company in the current year. The company has no debt. We do, however, have a $10 million revolving credit facility that can be used for working capital, including financing of larger extended payment term sales transactions. As of March 31st, we have no outstanding balance under the facility. Working capital at the end of the quarter was $31.6 million. During the quarter, we've repurchased approximately 156,000 shares of our stock. We still have board authorization to buy back approximately 555,000 shares. Our stockholders' equity now stands at $37.6 million.
At our April 29th board of directors meeting, the board declared a dividend of $0.17 per share for its common stock payable May 20th to shareholders of record on May 13th, 2015. In conclusion, the company continues to have solid operating results, a strong balance sheet, and is adequately capitalized to support our continued growth plans. Simon, I turn it back to you.
Thank you, Kevin. Operator, we can now start the Q&A session.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, if you have a question, please press star then one on your touchtone telephone. If your questions have been answered and you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up the handset before asking a question. Once again, if you have a question, please press star then one. One moment for our first question. Our first question comes from Jeffrey Geygan from Milwaukee Private Wealth Management. Your line's open, please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. Gentlemen, I appreciate you taking my call this morning.
Oh, you're welcome.
Bill, can you please elaborate on the services portfolio that Justin will be heading up, how that really fits into your overall business strategy, and how that potentially affects your margin?
Yes, I'm happy to do so. The program we're building is to provide a combination of vendor-oriented specific services as seen by the recent release of Veeam services for health checks and implementation services on a SKU basis that allows our reseller partners to add a SKU to their quotes and sales processes that allow the product to get installed by an engineer remotely and ensure a competent install and good customer experience. Our intention is to expand that type of service to other vendors like Sophos and Unitrends and more, creating for the resellers of those product lines an ability to capture service revenue that they might not currently be doing, depending upon the reseller. Some do, some do not, Now we provide that expansion.
We were working with our vendor partners directly to provide an expanded capability for their service organizations and capabilities to do the similar type of thing for them, actually taking on some of their implementation services for their professional services organization. This is another route to market that we're exploring with our suppliers. Thirdly, there's a custom support implementation capability that allows for custom statement of work development for project-based orientation and project management. This whole process we had done previously when Justin worked as part of my organization at Alternative Technology and Arrow, and our partners found that they were able to use our engineers to augment the peaks in their service requirements while they staffed directly for their valleys.
We could take some of that load off of them, yet our engineers would be spread across multiple resellers, so their utilization always remained high, and were driven directly by profits, offsetting their costs, and improving the profits for us. It creates an overall improvement in our gross profit % as we drive this forward during 2015 and 2016, which should have a positive impact on our OI for both our partners and for us directly. While the revenue needle won't move significantly as compared to our larger distribution revenue, the profit number should be driven in a positive fashion, disproportional to that revenue.
Thank you. At this time, there are no further questions. Please continue with any closing remarks.
We want to thank our investors, our employees, and our partners and our customers for their interest in our company. We look forward to reporting our second quarter results at the end of July 2015. Thank you.
This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect at this time. Thank you for your participation.