What excites me is that this is just the beginning of an extraordinary opportunity for our industry. This will truly transform the telecom industry. This is an entirely new opportunity that we’re creating and developing together with leading CSPs. The winners will be the ones who scale their platform first. The time is now to seize on this opportunity, and we are very excited about our position. But now over to Carl for a review of the numbers for Q3.
Carl Mellander: Thank you, Borje, and very good morning to everyone. Thanks for joining us here. So, well, as you saw already last week, our Q3 results are in line with the guidance we issued, back in the Q2 report. But I want to address some of the key items around the financials in the quarter. Before commenting on the underlying result, I just want to refer again to the impairment related to Vonage goodwill that we announced also last week. And just to add to what Borje already mentioned, this impairment of SEK31.9 billion corresponds to 50% of the total amount of goodwill and other intangible assets attributed to Vonage, and the total goodwill in the group now post this impairment amounts to SEK56.7 billion, and I can also mention that we have done rigorous impairment testing of all of that and that did not indicate any other impairment needs other than Vonage.
Now turning to the underlying business results, and first of all, if we have a look at the market and our top line then, I would say much of the market development, the financial development we saw the first and the second quarter continued into the third quarter. And as Borje outlined before, the telecom market outlook remains uncertain but is expected to recover to more normalized levels over time. And we base this on the fundamentals I mean the operators need to continue to invest to manage data traffic growth, cost energy usage, network quality for their customer experience. But what we see now, the sales mix shift in the networks particularly that we have discussed many times where sales decrease in North America and increase in India with large rollout projects that continued in a similar manner in the third quarter.
And I would say we have worked a lot on our resiliency to limit the sensitivity to geographical mix changes, but of course, we see an impact on group numbers from this mix change both on sales, gross margin, EBITDA and cash flow. So, on top line and group organic sales declined by 10%, and I would say, primarily driven by a 60% drop in North America in the networks business, where we continue to see operators adjust inventory. We’ve talked about this many times, but also slower deployment pace. I think it’s important though to note that Q3 last year in 2022 was an absolute record quarter in North America with very large volumes of radios shipped and deployed. So that year-over-year comparison is very tough, but nevertheless a 60% drop. The drop then in North America was partly offset by continued rollout in India which continued at full speed, incredible speed, and our sales quadrupled actually year-over-year to almost SEK10 billion in the quarter.
And we are talking here about large rollout projects and therefore working capital builds up and that’s quite significant. We’ll come back to that in a minute. We also saw, that, some front run their customers on 5G resumed investments. This is a bit of a second wave of 5G investments. It is encouraging. But I would say, it is too early to see this as a trend, but nevertheless, a positive sign. We closed another IPR Licensing agreement in the quarter, that’s been announced earlier that positions as well to land additional agreements with previously unlicensed vendors and IPR now net sales landed at SEK2.8 billion in the quarter, and we are on-track to reach the levels that we have discussed before for the longer-term. So that was top-line. Secondly, gross margin then, we came in at 39.2%, excluding restructuring.
