As we recently announced, the Board has appointed Marcelo Benitez to be Millicom’s next CEO starting June 1st. Marcelo’s journey at Millicom has been nothing short of incredible. Marcelo joined the company about 30 years ago, starting at one of our call centers in Paraguay. Since then, he has held leadership roles in multiple countries touching just about every part of the organization. He’s currently the General Manager of our Panama operation where he successfully integrated the acquisitions and has executed our investment plan which I alluded to just a few seconds ago. A very warm welcome to Marcelo, an in-house leader with so, so much Sangre TIGO. I also want to publicly thank our Board for the time and the effort that every member devoted to the discussions, analysis, and interviews with many internal and external candidates.
Our decision to appoint Marcelo was indeed thoughtful and unanimous and that could have not been achieved without the months of work that the Board put into this very important task. And we also recently announced that Maxime will remain our President and COO until year-end and he will join our board as of this May. Maxime’s contribution has already been very positively impactful to the company and I personally immensely look forward to continuing partnering with Maxime now in the Board room. As you can see, Maxime and I will stick around to help Marcelo whenever and for whatever he needs us. Marcelo will have our full support, that of the full Board and that of all his TIGO colleagues who know him so well and who have enjoyed his strong leadership for decades.
And also subject to shareholder approval, we will be joined by Justine Dimovic as our new Board Member. Justine is with L’Oreal now but she was our very own former Treasurer and Head of IR some years ago at Millicom. So she will bring back tremendous knowledge of the company along with her experience and financial acumen. Welcome back, Justine. Thanks to Michael Golan for sitting on our Board for the last year with meaningful insights and contributions. And also thank you to Pernille Erenbjerg for her many, many important contributions to the Board over the last five years and also for her insightful challenge and continuous support to the team. A few weeks ago, we also announced the appointment of Bart Vanhaeren as our new Chief Financial Officer.
Like Marcelo, Bart is a Millicom veteran who has held several leadership roles during his 14 years with the company, most recently overseeing corporate finance which encompasses the company’s treasury, tax, mergers and acquisitions and corporate administration activities. As you know, I’ve worked closely with Bart over the years and think highly of him. Before I turn the call over to Bart to go over the financials, I want to reconfirm that we continue to work on monetizing our regional toward portfolio. We launched the monetization process externally in Q4 and we’re now very actively, in the middle of the M&A process. Of course, precisely because of that, that’s all that we can say at this time. With that introduction, let me turn the call over to Bart for his debut moment.
Bart Vanhaeren: Thank you, Mauricio and hi, everyone. Many of you know me already from my various roles in the past or from investor conferences. Those who don’t, I encourage you to reach out to me through Michel as I definitely want to engage with our broader investor base to hear what is top of your mind. This being said, let’s now have a look at our financial performance beginning on Slide 12. Mauricio indicated this already. A lot of work has been done over the last few months and now results start to show. At the same time, we still have significant challenges ahead. Service revenue was $1.38 billion in the quarter. This is up 8.8% year on year from $1.26 billion a year ago. Excluding the impact of exchange rates, organic growth was 3.8% in the fourth quarter driven by, one, our mobile business which is up mid-single digits, thanks to ARPU growth from recent price increases and pre-to-postpaid migrations.
Two, met in growth in B2B coming from large contracts in Panama that Mauricio already talked about. These contracts should continue to generate revenue and EBITDA for several more quarters but we anticipate a much smaller contribution from these contracts going forward and beginning in Q2. Three, this revenue growth is offset a bit by decline in the Home business where we focus on return and profitability in a competitive environment. Our EBITDA which we will discuss in more detail later, was up 24.5% year on year to $632 million despite $30 million of restructuring costs incurred in the period. The very strong growth reflects the combined effect of the service revenue growth that I just discussed as well as the cost savings for Project Everest that are now visible and recurring.
Then the operating cash flow rose 61% to $519 million, reflecting both the robust EBITDA growth and the 38.9% reduction in CapEx. This CapEx reduction is in part, due to the efficiency measures taken during 2023 and not materializing in the run rate but a bigger portion is due to the slower phasing of investments in this quarter of 2024. So please don’t annualize Q1 CapEx as an indication for full year investment. Drilling down further to the service revenue by country on Slide 13, Guatemala increased by 2%. This was the first positive quarterly growth in five quarters and is fueled by mobile growth where recent price increases are driving ARPU growth. As Mauricio mentioned, we are happy with the improved performance in Q1 but competition remains very intense here.
Colombia service revenue was flat in local currency. Here our mobile business continues to grow very nicely and was up high single digits but this was offset by a decline in our Home business where we continued to prioritize price discipline and profitability over growth in a market that remains very competitive. As Mauricio already discussed, we’ve been willing to sacrifice some customer growth but the good news here is that Home ARPU is up strongly and we have also seen a significant improvement in churn and net adds in the last couple of months. In Panama, service revenue grew 17.8% fueled by the two large B2B contracts as well as a strong growth in Mobile. Excluding these large contracts, service revenue would have been flat. Bolivia service revenue was flat as well with growth in Mobile and B2B offset by a decline in Home where we continue to prioritize price discipline especially given a more challenging macroeconomic outlook and the longer payback terms in this side of the business.
Paraguay service revenue grew 4.3% in local currency with every business unit continuing to perform well. Service revenue in our Other segments increased 5.4%. As a reminder, the other segments is comprised of our operations in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica which in aggregate, account for just over 15% of our service revenue and EBITDA. Now turning to EBITDA on Slide 14. As I mentioned before, EBITDA in Q1 was $632 million. That’s up 24.5% year on year from $507 million. As you can see, foreign exchange was a tailwind this quarter and contributed about $21 million of growth to the quarter. This doesn’t happen very often so we are happy to tell you. Excluding this FX benefit, EBITDA increased 20% organically year-on-year. Noteworthy is that about $30 million of further severance costs are included in our Q1 EBITDA.
On Slide 15, you can see our EBITDA by country. It’s quite clear that the cost savings initiatives we’ve been implementing over the past year or so are having a very positive impact across all our operations with nearly all countries up double digits. Guatemala EBITDA improved very significantly and increased 7.9% in local currency terms largely thanks to better ARPU growth in Mobile. Colombia EBITDA local currency growth was more than 24% due to both mobile service revenue growth and continued price discipline in our Home business as well as all savings from Project Everest. The EBITDA margin of 36.5% was a new record. Noteworthy is that during Q1, our Colombia operation incurred almost $18 million of restructuring costs related to the voluntary retirement plan that we implemented early in the year.
Excluding this charge, the margin would have been 41.4%, that’s up 10 percentage points over the past year and this is one of the reasons why we expect equity free cash flow to be positive in 2024, as Mauricio indicated previously. Now turning to Panama where EBITDA grew 26.1%, the B2B projects contributed more than half of this growth and as I’ve just told you, we expect much smaller contributions from these projects going forward. Bolivia EBITDA increased 12.7% and this is largely due to the savings from Project Everest and to our reduced commercial activity in Home. As a reminder, the macroeconomic situation in Bolivia has become more challenging because there is a shortage of U.S. dollars in the economy. Up until now, this hasn’t had any noticeable impact on consumer demand but it has become a lot harder for us to convert bolivianos to dollars to pay some of our vendors and to upstream cash from the country.
