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Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Lagercrantz presentation of our Q4 and fiscal full year report of our fiscal year ending end of March. Me speaking is Jörgen Wigh, CEO. And together with me here today this morning, we have also Peter, our CFO, and we would try to guide you through the -- and give a presentation of what we have announced this morning.
The report is available on our website and also the presentation. You can gather the information there if you'd like. We -- I would try to -- as we normally have done this, we will do it in English, and we will try to guide you through the presentation available on the website page-by-page really, so that we can feel that you are fully up-to-date for -- what we have in the presentation.
As normal, we have divided the presentation into all 3 sections. We would like to sort of start off with some introduction for those obvious that are new to the group. And after that, we will jump right into the numbers and the Q4 report. And we will then, at the end, look a little bit ahead and also to have some year-end extra reporting in terms of numbers for the full year in some aspects with the customer dependencies and stuff like that, we would like to go over with you this morning.
So welcome, everyone, and we will start on Page #2 with the introduction to the groups then. Well, it is very good this morning to be CEO of Lagercrantz, as we've had a tremendous year behind us. And we will -- and we also feel that the market has kept up very well with us and that we also see the expected downturn that we sort of as a bit of a fear of earlier. I think it hasn't hit us this quarter, and it looks very good also for the coming quarters, yes. So it's holding up very well for us, we think.
Looking at Page #2 is an overview of the group. We could see the 5 divisions that we have and all the companies adding up to the 70 companies approximately that we have within the group. We have revenues now exceeding SEK 7.3 billion and 2.4 -- yes, 2,400 employees. You can see where we have our needles over to the right. And you can see that our most important markets are the Nordics with Sweden and primarily in Denmark. But we also have some new ambitions in Central Europe, and we can see especially that in the U.K. that we have added a few more needles here lately, where we have made some more acquisitions. So that's great to see some development here as well.
You can see all the way over to the right, I mean we are becoming more and more export-oriented with all the companies that we have, the B2B tech group -- yes, tech type companies that we're adding to our group. And you can see that we are also have some strong export ambitions, but also putting up some hubs and some initiatives all around the world really for our companies to sell into foreign markets like China, India and the U.S., especially you can see all the way over to the right there. So we definitely have some growth ambitions when we go abroad as well.
Looking at Page #3, we have our revenues and profits our -- over many years. We could still -- we see that we have had a tremendous sort of growth path here in the last sort of year or 2. We put together the ambition of reaching the SEK 1 billion, and we are very close to reaching that goal here, as you can see all the way to the right. You can also see that the top line has picked up with the bars behind there. And you can see that the top line growth has been picking up very nicely here in the last couple of years as well and adding -- and of course, this is both organic and M&A. But I think those sort of things have been turning out very well for us, we -- both from a good organic growth in the last couple of years and then some really good acquisitions adding to the numbers as well, and very good -- very nice growth from us from -- on both sides, really and closed a very strong -- another very strong quarter with really following the trend that we've had here recently. So that's great to see.
Our comments regarding the business conditions on Page #4, you can see a little bit of that. We felt that the market situation was generally -- continued to be very stable and remained good for most of the businesses during the Q4. I think looking back 6 to 9 months ago, I feel that we -- most of us, maybe was expecting more of a downturn. But we have seen very little of that. We have seen it in a couple of a handful of our companies, where we also initiated some cost reduction programs. But other than that, I think all is holding up very nicely. We have seen that the order intake has been in line with the previous year here in Q4, where we saw the strongest amount within the electrification, which is part of the Electrify division or half of it. or more than half of it, really and also for the TecSec International divisions. From a profit side, we also have the Niche Products division doing very well, but I'll come back to that.
Nevertheless, we saw a little bit of a slower growth rate during the quarter, slightly about 5 percentage points. So it's not dramatic or anything, but we see a couple of companies that are affected by some signs of a downturn. But we also feel that I think the order books have been very, very strong for us and also for our customers. And that means that when we see lead times coming down from our suppliers and Far East Asia and freights are being normalized, the freight rates and price conditions are being normalized along the way.
We also feel that it's very sort of obvious that we also don't need to put orders so much in advance, and that is, I think, a stronger sort of component in why we see the growth rate going down a little bit. I think that's -- the general economy has been very limited effect on the companies, generally speaking, in the group. And we also feel that -- I mean, we have a very broad focus. We are in many geographies. We are in many sort of niches. And we -- I think we have a very broad view on what's going on. And we see that most of it is holding up very, very nice, and that we see that the emphasis that we have on electrification, the infrastructure, security and the specialized products in niches provide good resilience and continued good growth opportunities as we're stating here.
So, so far, so good. It's holding up very nice for us. And we also can see over time that we -- I will come back to the proprietary products here to the left that we have another graph of, but we also see that we are becoming more and more international over the years. And you can see that Sweden is currently 33%, Denmark is 13%. And you can see then that the other parts and the international part of our business or sort of -- more other export-related markets are becoming an increasingly important part of what we're doing in large accounts, so that's obviously the right in the slide -- yes, on the graph down to the right on Page 4.
Looking more straight to the numbers on Page #5, we can see that we closed yet another good quarter with net revenues increased by 30% to slightly above SEK 2 billion then. And organic growth was then 9%. It's been 9%, 10-ish here for the last year or so, and that held up very nicely here, and the acquisitions then was -- that part coming from there was 17%, and then we have a positive currency effect of 3%.
The EBITA then increased by 29%. So with reaching the 343 for the quarter as opposed to 265 the same quarter last year. The EBITDA margin was then at 16.8% on a very good level, the same as last year, and organic part of the EBITDA growth was 9%. So that also corresponded to the organic growth in the net revenues. And we especially saw international TecSec and Niche Products contribute the most in terms of EBITDA growth in the quarter.
We're also very satisfied with the cash flows. So the cash flows from the operations was SEK 418 million in the quarter. We could see throughout the year -- last year that we built some safety stocks in the couple of first quarters of the year. But here in the last couple of 2 quarters, the last half year, really, it's been very much stronger, and we had a very good cash conversion here in Q4 as well. So that's really great. And we also see that the balance sheet is very strong now and that we have a lot of dry powder to more acquisitions and continue to grow the group.
The profit after financial items, then reached, increased by 27% to the SEK 272 million, which I think is -- yes, it's an all-time high in terms of the quarter, but that's a strong one for us as well. Profit after tax has increased by 26% and return on equity, we have the goal there of 25%, but it reached the 29% here, and it was 20 -- last year, and the strong equity range at 27% at the end of the quarter.
And to sum up the full year then on Page 6, we can see that the numbers are really corresponding. We had a net revenues increasing by 32% and organic growth in that was 10%, so as opposed to the 30% and 9% here in the last quarter. So slightly lower, but very, very limited sort of change really. The EBITA then increased by 35% for the year, reaching SEK 1.2 billion during the year. And the EBITA margin for the full year then increased from 16.6% -- to 16.6% from 16.3%. So that's good as well. Organic growth was 14%.
Cash flows from operations for the full year was slightly above SEK 1 billion then. So up from SEK 594 million last year. So a very strong cash flows for the year as well, even though most of it came from the last couple of quarters during the year. And the -- the financial items that increased by 31%. And we can see also this year that we added some 8 acquisitions.
I think 6 of them are companies, right, and 2 are more asset deals. But adding to the sort of new businesses that came into the group. The PcP is the major one, is the biggest acquisition we made, aiming very nicely the first year, their first year within the group. And then we have a number of others here and they are going to do [indiscernible] all the asset deals that we are also have presented in our separate press releases. So the earnings per share reached an all-time high of SEK 3.70 and as opposed SEK 2.80 for the previous fiscal year. And again, the return on equity that I already commented on in the quarter, it's the same for the full year, and that's the full year number, really. So that's a good one as well.
Looking a little bit at the outcome by division, we have that on Page 7. We could see that we have 5 really strong divisions. We see that we have EBITA margins on all of them that are exceeding the 14%. The lowest is international. The international is the division that has been lagging behind. If you look a little bit further back, we were at 8%, 9-ish or so, but we have been driving that margin quite a lot and are currently at the 14.7% or has been at 16% as well. It's a bit of seasonality there. But otherwise, it's -- otherwise, the other ones are well above that, and Niche Product is now ahead with 20.4% here during the quarter. So 5 very strong divisions.
In terms of growth, we could see that we have 3 divisions that are slightly bigger than the rest, and that is the Electrify, TecSec and Niche Products, and especially the TecSec has been doing quite a lot of acquisition here in the last year. So we see very impressive growth rate in terms of the TecSec. The TecSec division has done it very well for us with the safety and security type products in different markets and with the niches, doing it very well for us along the way. The Niche Products has been doing it very well for us for many years and continue to do very well here in the quarter.
We had some comments by division on Page 8 and 9, and especially within the Electrify, closed a strong quarter with EBITA growing 13% here during the quarter and a strong EBITA margin of almost 17%, as you can see there. And especially good to see that the electrification type businesses, the Elpress, Elkapsling and Norwesco doing very well. We also see some -- several of the Finnish companies doing it very well and also the cable harnesses businesses, with the exception of Elfac in Denmark, which have a dependency upon the wind power industry.
And that industry has been struggling a bit here in the last year or so. And we -- but we expect it to come back here in the near term or for next year. You could see from other players in that market that is picking up better along the way.
We also commented on the Cue Dee. Cue Dee, I mean, they have their installation materials for the deployment of 5G telecom infrastructure. And a lot of that deployment is being done here in the Nordics right now. and then that is adding good volumes to Cue Dee along the way. They also have a strong business in Poland and Central Europe and also abroad. But it's good to see that Cue Dee posted a very strong year, second year in a row really the Cue Dee did very well. and that's good to see. Also Tykoflex, the newcomer, we acquired that company in December, and it's been coming in very nicely for us in the group.
Looking at the Control division, I think most divisions are doing it very well, maybe with a slight exceptional control. I think it's holding up very nicely with the SEK 39 million versus SEK 41 million last year and a strong EBITA margin of 19.2%. But we have seen some challenging market situation in some couple of specific instances. I'm not sure it's that business cycle-related, but we see some component shortages that is affecting some of the companies. So it's more that, I would say.
But we also see companies doing it very well Precimeter and Excidor are a couple of examples of that and Radonova, which is a very important business unit within the Control division had a good year, even though it was on the same level as the year before. So we had expected some growth there, but it's been being more flattish in terms of growth. So it continues to do it very well. And that also has a seasonality towards the winner. So that's also behind some of the numbers that has been delivered here by the Control division.
The TecSec division then. Here, we have some comments. That is the fastest-growing division. Revenues were up 100% and EBITA as well, as you can see here and a good EBITA margin of 18.4%. I think the market situation remains favorable for most businesses. We saw a strong organic growth of 25% in the Q4. And we see the larger units, the CW Lundberg, the R-Con, the ISG Nordic and Frictape did it very well. And also COGS, which is a smaller unit, has been struggling a bit, but we delivered a very good profit improvement during the quarter here than the last 6 months, really. And that's really good to see that we have a bit of a turnaround within the COGS unit. That's good to see. The recent acquisition, the PcP, especially the big one, are delivering according to plan. And also Door & Joinery is producing good contribution basically above our expectations. So that's also good to see.
Within the Niche Products division, we see revenues growing 16%. The EBITA was up 29%, so very strong profit growth there, and we see a particular strong development in a couple of units there where toolmaker is very important for us and continue to do it very well, but we also see Sajas, Asept and Truxor and Kondator and PST doing it very well during the quarter here. Tormek has been doing it very well. The other ones are picking up really. So improving along the way. And the Waterproof also came in very nicely.
Last but not least, is the International division. I already commented back on that, but that's growing quite nicely. It's growing, we see some good development in our older businesses within value-adding distribution. But other than that, we also see good contributions coming from acquisitions, the Libra, especially ISIC, but also Tebul has been coming very nicely here during the first 6 months. The E-tech in the U.K., an older business also has been growing quite nicely during the year, and that has also been picking up. So international is definitely on the right track to reach new high streaming.
So that was comments by division. Anything you'd like to add there Peter or...
No, I think I agree -- these are quite in line with previous quarters and very stable. And maybe that the -- we have a very particularly strong cash flow in the last quarter.
So we also added another sort of set of information around the outcome by division here on Page 10, that is new from us, that we also have now in the port provided you with some numbers around the profit over working capital, [indiscernible] in Swedish. And we have sort of announced that or disclosed that on a group level before, but now we can also see how it's developed on the divisional level. And I think it's great to see that we have a very broad-based set of companies within the group doing it very well.
And this is another sign of that, that you can see that is really good numbers. You know that the targets for all of these companies is the 45%. That is where we should be. But we see that we exceed that quite significantly in all of our divisions really. And especially the TecSec division has been very good at keeping working capital at a good level, and thereby, you can see the whole division exceeding the 100% there very well, and that's really satisfying to see. We will -- we've announced those numbers the first time here now and hope that's helpful to you guys.
Then we have the longer -- coming back a little bit on where we're heading now and it's a long accounts towards the SEK 1 billion. I mean we are now at the 968, right? So we are approaching the SEK 1 billion. And I think it's well sort of been very appreciated, both internally and externally that we've had this goal.
And now of course, when we reach this, we need to push it and find something new to talk about, but I think it's been great for us. What we did here was that we decided to clarify the strategies and financial goals with the new reorganization into the 5 divisions. We increased our capacity within M&A, also increasing geographical scope of the M&A ambitions that we have. And we also set some clear ambitions in terms of sustainability. That was fully did. This we announced now some 2 years ago or exactly 2 years ago, we had ambition to reach SEK 1 billion in 5 years, and now we are almost there in just 2 years that I think a very strong point from us.
What we decided to do then, you can see from Page 12 then is then that we -- I mean the ambition is to build a very strong tech group with a lot of nice companies sort of represented by the arrows here in the kruger where we have a very strong group of several companies. And by building a very strong group there, we should grow our annual profits by 15%. and then double in every 5 years. And we also highlighted that at least 1/3 should come organically and the rest to 5 to 8 acquisitions per year. And return on equity then should exceed 25% over the year. So we have some sort of -- we have been above that here in the last couple of years.
We then organized ourselves into the 5 divisions. You can see on Page 13. I think you've seen this before, so I won't cover that. But what we tried to do here with the ambition on finding areas where we see some underlying structural growth and also some connection to sustainability in all the key areas we would like to be in. And that has surely affected how we work within the group and made it clear with where we would like to go with the different divisions and has been definitely helpful.
We've also provided here some new sets of data. Looking at Page #14, you can see we have decided that we would like to be a little bit more detail on how we have our dependence in terms of market segments. And therefore, we have released some new numbers here today, and that's sort of alterations or we have done a more diligent work towards the subsidiaries and looking into where we have our dependencies.
And you can see here that it's good -- I think it's very satisfying to see that our biggest segment is the power and electricity, 21% and also a high dependency up on infrastructure. Previously, we had infrastructure included in the building and construction, but we have decided to separate that in order for -- to make it more representative really.
Then we have transportation 14% that especially within the Niche Products division, we have a couple of companies working there. And then we have the building and construction sector, which is adding up to the 11%, 12% then of the fall. But the private sector is quite small, you can see from 1%. And then we have electronic services and a couple of others there as well. So you can probably better analyze where we have our dependency in Telecom a little bit at that.
For your convenience, we've also included on Page 15, the breakdown by division of those numbers. And you can see where we have our dependencies in the different divisions, and I hope that's helpful for the understanding of where we -- how the group looks really along the way.
We have, over the years, also on Page 16, you can see how we have our distribution of our companies. also to highlight where we are heading and where we have our sort of dependencies. And again, that we are a very broad-based group in terms of where we have our return on sales. This is the internal benchmark we're doing. And I hope -- I think most of you have seen this before.
And just to highlight where we are over to the right, you can see that about 20% return on sales, very high margin businesses in 19 as opposed to 14 a year ago. And you can see that the 15 to 20 is 12 as opposed to 14 last year. I think most of them have climbed up then to the 19%.
And then we have the 10% to 15% with 16 as opposed to 17 units last year. So you can see how it looks. We will always have -- when we rank our companies, well, of course, we will always have someone in the bottom and something to work with. And currently, we have 4 companies on red, i.e., a return on sales less than 3%. There are smaller companies. Unfortunately, they are smaller all of them, and 2 of them are currently on sort of rolling 12 months loss making on an EBITA level. and we're dealing definitely with both those companies. So in order to keep this very sort of -- yes, a very sort of a strong portfolio companies, yes, getting even stronger along the way.
I think in our report, we've also discussed on Page 17, we've also discussed that we're meeting some of our long-term targets as well now. And one has been the proprietary products. For those of you that have been following us, you know that we were discussing this for many years, that we have the aim for 75% for 5G products. We started out by acquiring Elpress in 2006. And since then, the share of proprietary products has been growing steadily along the way. You can see that here. And now it's good to see that we have reached the 75% proprietary products.
We will continue to buy proprietary products, and I think we will exceed the 75% and probably push our goal a bit here along the way as well. We feel that doing proprietary products, we see that the margins are higher, and that means that we also have some opportunities to also invest a little bit more in the business and especially on exports going for exports in the niches that we are working in. So this has been a very strong strategic ambition from us and we are now delivering on 75% here of this quarter, which is very satisfying.
Last but not least, we have the acquisitions. During the -- on Page 18, you can see how that's been working. And again, we have been growing with some additional resources, especially in the U.K. So we have some new ambitions here as well. And you can see here that we have closed now some 3 acquisitions in the last year in the U.K. The 8 acquisitions there that are in the bubble there, those are the ones that we concluded during the fiscal year of '22, '23. So that's -- yes, you can see the brackets and that is adding SEK 1 billion then. Here in the first part of the new fiscal year, we have added 3 more acquisitions, adding some SEK 260 million in new sales force. So we have been active in the M&A space here lately as well.
Looking at the last acquisition, we have that on Page 19. That is the Glova Rail. Glova Rail is a Danish company with -- working with providing components and products and solutions within the niche area of vacuum toilets for trains. You can see a very nice company with good EBITA margins down to the right there, in addition to the International division and the active group in Denmark, which already have some businesses on to the rail and the transportation sector and this will be a good add-on to that company as well. So that's really satisfying to see the Glova Rail coming into the group.
Then the next one is the Fireco. Fireco is an English company then providing these door guards and located in Brighton with GBP 7 million of turnover approximately. And they had a slightly slow year last year, but had been doing it very well along the way. And based on what we see in the company, we have a good expectations for 2023 as well. So that will be a good acquisition coming into the TecSec division as of April 2023. We also have another one, which is the Supply Plus that we have announced, that is contingent up on a authority approval before we can close that. So we're expecting that to happen in May, and then we will also have the numbers for that.
I have also included here in the deck, that Tykoflex and PcP and Door & Joinery. All of these companies have come in very nicely. The Water Proof [indiscernible]. I won't comment on them here and now. But if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask if you have something you'd like to ask. But the acquisitions, the 8 we made last year are coming very nicely for us. That's, I think, been very satisfying to see.
I round off with a financial overview on Page 26. You can see that we closed another strong year. You could see that we've had a very good trend in our net sales, in our EBITA, and our EBITA margin is picking up every year. The EBT has been growing quite nicely. There we have the goal of at least 15% per year. You could see that we've been at that or above that most of the years. But that's very satisfying.
And the second financial target we have is the return on equity, where we should be above 25%. And you can see that we have been there most of the years as well. And the earnings per share has been growing quite nicely. And also, we included now the dividend per share, and you see that also growing quite nicely. We had 1 year where we lowered the dividend, which was the pandemic year. But otherwise, it's been growing quite nicely with the dividend growth as well. So a very strong sort of long-term track that we have been delivering here. That was all, I think.
I would like then to open up for questions.
[Operator Instructions]
Victor Hansen.
Yes, Victor.
Nordea Equity Research. So my first question here, there was a large increase in central costs in the quarter. Are there any one-offs here perhaps related to M&A? Or what's driving this increase? Is it sustainable?
That was the SEK 25 million. Is that the one you're talking about?
Yes. Exactly, yes.
Well, I think the easiest way to explain is that it's the end of the fiscal year, and we have a lot of assessments related to that, actually.
So it's not sustainable?
No, it's not sustainable. It's more related to the end of the fiscal year.
Okay. Okay. Yes. So it should be similar to last year and then some personnel stuff increases. Okay. Okay. Yes, that's good. And then my next question here, are there any areas where you find it harder to raise prices in line with costs, are you able to offset all the cost inflation in all areas?
I think we have been doing a good job at raising prices depending on pushing prices over to the customers. I think that we've seen along the year that we have seen an increase in the gross margin. And I think we saw a higher volatility in terms of raw material prices and interest and currency rates and stuff like that a year ago. And then we were struggling a couple of quarters to really get the gross margins at the right level.
But I think along the way that we see attendance with the stronger gross margins and that we have been able to compensate ourselves broadly speaking. I think it might be -- yes, we are definitely on the track to keep it that way. But I think to some extent, there might be more of where we are a little bit closer to consumers that it might be a bit more difficult. And we also see within the electronics area that the margins have been very nice for a while. But I think that some -- when we see supply shortages coming down, and then I think we also see -- we would see a sort of a slight spread of margins there as well.
That's helpful. Another question and then perhaps I can go back to line to listen and follow-up for my colleagues here. Your balance sheet is looking strong despite some recent M&A here. And I'm wondering what you can tell us about your M&A pipeline. Is it still strong in areas where it's extra strong?
Yes. I think we see a strong pipeline. We are -- I mean, we normally look at the 7 to 15 sort of cases that we feel are relevant to and we try to drive 3 to 5 similar processes simultaneously. And I think that, that has been the case for the last 6 to 9 months or so or even a year. And I think they continue to be on that sort of level going forward as well. So no change there, really. We've seen in the last year or so that prices of companies have come slightly but maybe a point or 2, I would say, but not broadly or not significant, really.
I think we have been acquiring companies basically at the same price levels or multiples all along. And I think we are basically in that range and neighborhood along the way as well. When we see bigger deals or we see deals that are more growth related, then we have higher multiples, while others are lower when we are looking at more stable sort of -- yes, more of cash type companies.
Yes. Understood. Just a follow-up here. You mentioned 3 to 5 processes simultaneously for M&A in the last months. How many processes could you run simultaneously before?
Yes, I think that we probably can run 2 to 3 previously and now it's more 3 to 5. It depends on the resources. It comes with a new organization. It comes with that. We have resources more on the divisional level and that we also have some resources in Finland. We also have some resources in the U.K. as we have -- yes, both comes in new people. It's not huge, but it's still significant. It's still important to us.
[Operator Instructions]
Okay. It's Karl Bokvist here at ABG. I hope you can hear me okay.
So we'll do Karl first and then Aline [indiscernible].
Okay. So my -- just first one is on the illustration with profitability and underlying units there and we kind of shift over time. I understand that some increases in the certain units are due to just the fact that you have been good at acquiring high-margin units. But are there any other ones worth highlighting towards the low end that have been moving upwards based on efforts while being part of [indiscernible]?
Definitely so. I think that's one thing that we really work with. And I think we have -- we have tried to highlight that on our web page and also in our annual report that what we have been doing, working with the companies. Normally, we put together a very strong Board, and we try to drive things with putting some structure in the companies, but also a lot of energy with some greater ambitions in all the companies that we acquired.
And I think we have around 10 cases or so where you can see. Here lately, I think one company I'd like to highlight is the R-Con [indiscernible] shopping. They have been pushing quite a lot to, yes, to really get everything in order and building also we've made some add-on acquisitions, but also driving it through a lot of strategy work within the group and also some pricing work there. And therefore, R-Con has been really picking up here in the last 6 months or so. So that's one example.
Another example is the Radonova within the Control division. That is also where we put in some both export ambition, but also some initiatives in the go-to-market strategy is changing things. And along the way that, that company has really been performing much better. A couple of others, the ISG Nordic and the Tormek is a couple of other examples of companies that we have really been driving things in and with that where we see some significant improvements along the way.
Understood. And then the -- as you highlighted, the cash flow improvement compared to perhaps a slightly weaker start to the year that you have 2 quarters now in a row with very strong cash flow. Do you feel that you are kind of at a fairly normalized level? If we look at in relation to sales, yes, it's a couple of percentage points above what you used to a couple of years ago, but just how you feel about kind of catch up and the efforts you have made in terms of improving collection terms, et cetera?
Yes. I think in terms of collecting customer credits, I think that, that work is probably done. We -- I think we need to continue on a good level there, but we are on a good level. I think that we will see cash flows good from operations. But of course, the working capital cannot be sort of reduced every quarter. That's a difficult one.
I think in this quarter, we managed to sort of work very well with our supply debt. That was a strong one for us. But we are not satisfied. We still were not with the inventory levels. They're still at a high -- too high level. So I think we will continue the very strong sort of effort we are doing in terms of bringing stock to a more lower level. And hopefully, that will generate some more cash flows along the way. But it's hard to -- difficult to say we will have a new supply debt. That is -- that was very strong during that quarter, and that might be sort of offsetting the improvement in terms of stock.
Understood. And my final one is more of a technical financial question. When you talk about the remeasurement of earn-outs and just looking back to the prior quarters, I believe it was a plus SEK 3 million number for the fiscal periods for like the first 3 quarters. And now in this quarter, you say on a rolling 12 months, it went from a plus SEK 3 million to a negative SEK 4 million. So I just wanted to make some clarification here. Is that kind of delta or something you booked now this quarter because you also had a comment where you say it was recognized in the first quarter? So are you referring to like the calendar first, i.e., this reporting quarter?
No. I think it was recognized most of this in the first quarter of this fiscal -- of the fiscal year '22, '23. We are not referring to the first quarter of '23, '24.
Okay. Because at that point in time, you reported a number which was -- I understand it's small numbers, but I mean you reported plus SEK 3 million. So now you say it was negative SEK 4 million. so is it a restatement? If you want to, we can just revert back with an e-mail separately, but it was just a curiosity.
Yes, maybe we should do that. I think we need to look into that because I haven't really realized it myself. So it's something that we need to look into them.
Okay. Yes, that's perfectly fine. That's all for me.
So we'll let Aline come in then.
Aline from Carnegie here. I just have one quick question that has already been asked. So of the organic growth, would you say that it's mainly related to price increases? Or are you also seeing volume growth?
Since we don't measure that, it's very hard to give sort of a very correct answer. But I would say that 60%, 70% is price related of the 9%. I think we still have some slight organic growth, and that has to do with most of what we did in pricing we did more than a year ago. So the comparables are coming up a bit.
Are you still doing price increases?
Yes. In some companies, we are still doing price increases. And the gross margin in a couple of quarters was also affected by the high electricity prices that we saw in some of the areas. I think that has been more normalized here in the last quarter as well. So that is also affecting the gross margin level a little bit upwards here in the last quarter.
Is there any units where you see that volume growth are declining or something like volume growth returning?
Sorry, I didn't catch you.
Is there any units where you see that volume growth are going down in some division or market?
We see sort of -- when we talk about sales, not necessarily, no. We see a very sort of stable and good market. But we also see that sort of the whole value chain is affected by the shorter lead times. And that means that we are to some -- I think many companies are, to some extent, order book to some extent now. But that's, I think, which is normal. We're coming down to more of a normalized sort of level of delivery times and level of order book. So it's hard to say really. But we don't see any sort of business cycle related really declined anywhere. That's hard to say really. It's holding up very nice.
It's Anna here from Handelsbanken. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Just 3 short questions from my side. Firstly, do you notice any geographic differences?
Not really. We feel that it's holding up in the markets we're in. We feel that we have some companies in Norway lagging behind a little bit. But I think it has to do more with ourselves really than general market. So it's hard to sort of make sort of a judgment on where we see the different markets. We feel it's holding up generally very good, and we see very middle of any downturn.
Okay. Great. And do you see any shift in trends during your fourth quarter?
Not really either. I think it's been holding up very nice throughout the quarter.
Okay. Great. My final question is regarding the comments on the supply chain challenges for the Control companies, generally, we get the comments that supply chain issues are easing up. Do you have any comments on what specific component is challenging for the companies within Control?
I think sort of when we talk about semiconductors and that type of thing, that has been generally been hit very hard, very, very long lead times. We usually back in the days, you used to get those supplies, say, in 6 weeks delivery time, usually.
Here, a couple of years back when we saw things really deteriorate. It went from 6 weeks up to a year. And after a year, they won't even give us any type of notice on whether they have the plans to deliver. They couldn't give us any delivery time at all. Now that we see it's coming back, we see it's coming back generally speaking, but not on all components. So we still have a couple of companies, but it's electronics-related. It's usually Far East Asia sort of supplies. But we still see some suppliers that are lagging behind in terms of deliveries. But generally speaking, it's improving.
Do we have some more?
I could go again.
Yes. Feel free.
Yes. So I noted here on one of your slides, the profit and working capital that it was lower in 3 divisions this fiscal year compared to last. And I'm wondering if you could talk some about the instance and also if you expect this to improve?
I think that has to do with some of the safety stock buildup that we've seen. All of the divisions have improved their numbers. And you can see that's improved versus 2 years ago. So it's -- but I think on this level, it depends on how sort of things are affected at the year-end and sort of also those type of sort of circumstances. So I think you should generally look at it, and we feel very confident and feel very proud of really what the levels we are at here even though we see some slight declines in a couple of numbers here.
Yes, understood. And then I noticed on the end market split that you gave here that the power and electricity distribution was down a lot in Control and then slightly down in Electrify. And I'm wondering is this only due to M&A in other areas within these business areas? Or is it also related to, for example, component shortages? And should we expect the share to bounce back because I know you want to grow in power and then electricity.
Yes. I think you're into the 2 main reasons there, right? We see some changes in this slide due to the acquisition, so the mix changes when we do larger acquisitions, and we made 8 acquisitions during this period, right? And especially the PcP then is significant. And of course, that affects the numbers when you see the total revenue up there to the right, right? Where you see it's [ 7.2 ] this year versus [ 5.4 ] last year, [ 0.5 ] last year, right. So of course, that affect the percentages here.
But we can also see the -- as you mentioned in here, the component shortages might affect or the mix might be affected by some company being affected by shortages or, yes, a loss of sales or gain in sales so the mix will change over time. I think it's important to highlight that the power and electricity distribution and the power electricity is very important to us. And then our main sort of segment and the infrastructure is the second biggest. The infrastructure, we see in many aspects have increased. But we also see, especially within TecSec, there we see a change and that, I think, has to do with the PcP acquisition coming in affecting that number. So I think we -- I hope this is helpful, but rather than confusing, but I think there are good sort of good signs in most of these numbers.
Yes. Great. And then maybe just a clarification as well. So when you write building and construction private, is that residential or was it privately?
Yes.
It's residential. Okay.
Yes.
Okay. Good. Good. And my final question, I'm wondering if you have started adjusting your organic headcount downwards in any company, so is that still to come this [ SEK 10 billion ], et cetera?
I think we've been talking about that for the last couple of 2 or 3 quarters that we have initiated the Plan B work, where we sort of expect a continuous plans in our companies. We have that in all our companies, but we have not implemented them more than maybe in 3 to 5 companies or so, and that number has been unchanged here in the last quarter. So it's sort of we are dealing with it in 3 to 5 companies maybe. And then, yes, we were -- so it's been holding up very nice.
Great. Those were all my follow-ups.
Okay. Any final one or we call it -- me and Peter are available here for any sort of one-on-ones over phone. So if you'd like to call us, please do. Otherwise, I'm looking forward to talk to you soon. Thank you very much for listening in, and thank you -- thank you, have a good day. Bye-bye.