Daniel L. Florness
President and Chief Executive Officer at Fastenal
Thank you, Ellen, and good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining our Q1 earnings call. Before I start, I thought I'd just share a few tidbits from a conversation I had this morning with our regional business unit leaders, our regional vice presidents and our VPs of the business. And I started that by sharing last evening or late yesterday afternoon, my wife and daughter returned from a week long band trip to Florida, marching band. And as with most high school trips, it involved a -- well, if you're coming from Winona that is, it involved a 26-hour bus ride down last Wednesday and a 26-hour bus ride back.
And I saw a bunch of haggard kids and a handful of haggard adults to get off the bus yesterday about 4 o'clock. And when we got home that evening, I was watching the video, I don't like to watch myself on video, but it's a necessary evil to make sure you present as good a message you can and present it in a style that isn't too painful to watch. And my wife commented on it, and I think she probably was commenting partly, in fact, she was kind of tired from the bus ride. She thought it was a pretty under-inspiring video. And she had no problem telling me that. And she said, for the last two years, you come home, you talk about things that people are doing at Fastenal, things you see from the leaders and everybody within the organization and how impressed you are.
And in your video, you just had a great quarter and your video doesn't speak to that at all. It sounds like you're in the middle of COVID, it's kind of disappointing. And after brushing my pride off, I got in this morning and I led our regional -- our leadership now, just how damn proud I am of the quarter they just put out. But more important than that of what they've done in the last two years and all the hard work as we transition from tariffs to COVID and worrying about our own human safety and the safety of others to the surge in demand for products, that pivoted into a supply chain globally that completely fell apart and how did we manage through that to support our customers and their needs, and more recently, managing through the chaos that is inflation.
Frankly, the first bullet on the flip book says that has the statement good execution, there's a typo there. That should say great execution. I think the Fastenal Blue Team did an unbelievable job in the last two years, and I think that extended into this quarter, and I'm really proud to be associated with them. Even yesterday in our Audit Committee call, we were picking on Holden a little bit, but he's been kind of crabby lately. And it's kind of refreshing you have a really good quarter and your CFO was kind of crabby and he was talking about our cash flow. And he wasn't pleased with it, and I said to him, I said, Holden, take a look at the last six years, and look at our growth and look at what our operating cash flow to earnings was in our strongest year, I think it was at 93%.
I think that was first quarter of 2018 might have been '17. And it costs money to grow a distribution business, and that money is spent in working capital. And that gets amplified when you have heavy inflation like we're seeing right now. So I'm glad you're irritated and irritable. I can't imagine being right now when you come home from work. But thanks to what you're doing, but don't be too hard on everybody.
So flipping to the book here. The net sales grew 20.3% in the first quarter. Our pretax profit grew 28%. There was some amplifying effects. Last year's weather in the Texas and Oklahoma area in February hurt our sales, hurt the economy, quite frankly. And then we had a mass write-down. And -- but adjusting for those, this is our strongest top and bottom line growth that we've experienced in a decade. It's really been since we were recovering from the '08, '09 in the 2011, 2012 time frame that we saw the growth that we're seeing right now. So really pleased with the performance.
And in the last two years, so since the pandemic started, we've put in a lot of energy to deploy technologies and strategies to just improve our efficiency. And that served us really well because the environment has restrained our ability to add labor, add energy into the organization, but it hasn't hurt our ability to grow sales and also to continue the branch consolidation process that we started 6, 7, 8 years ago. So very strong performance there. The supply chains in little markets remain tight. However, conditions have stabilized. We're getting more product on the shelf to support the needs, which makes the business less chaotic. And we are seeing an uptick in applications coming in.
And I'm hearing it mostly anecdotally from our regional leaders, but they're seeing more and more people willing to come back and do the workforce and apply for jobs. Part of that is probably a function of our number one recruiting area is four-year state colleges and two-year tech colleges as they have come back in full force, that group of people are looking for opportunities for their future. Our international business reached a milestone. In the month of March, we broke -- we exceeded $100 million in sales for the first time. And next week marks two steps towards normalcy in our world. One is our customer expo, our selling event is returning to an in-person format after two years of not occurring in person. And that will be Tuesday, Wednesday of next week. And then next Saturday, we'll hold our annual meeting in person after two years of the sanitized video or on air version, which is, frankly, less than satisfying in a community like this where we get a good local turnout at the event.
Flipping to Page 4 of the book to comparison to the 2020 to 2022 period, and this will be the last quarter that we put this table in because, obviously, as we exit this quarter and enter the new quarter, our two-year comparison falls square into the COVID period, so it becomes less than meaningful. But we thought we'd continue it as we've done the last three quarters. I think the only thing that should jump out on here is at least jumps out for me is the fact that our operating and administrative expenses have dropped from 26.7% of sales two years ago to 25.5% of sales today as we've worked to make the organization more efficient.
And I'm really probably we were able to accomplish this during the distraction of the last two years. One item that's probably a little bit misleading in here, it shows our gross profit is actually flat in that two-year period. It's actually down slightly. January and February of 2020 were a bit higher. And as we entered the COVID period in March of 2020, we started selling bulk quantities of masks and things like that at a lower margin and it actually pulled our margin down to 46.6%, just trying to express full disclosure there.
Flipping to Page 5. When people get more confident of where we are today and there's less chaos in the world, and you're more comfortable engaging with others, we always felt that our growth drivers would see an uptick and we had to just get through this COVID period. Well, our on-site saw that uptick. We signed 106 in the quarter, finishing with 1,440. So we're up 12% from the number of active sites we had a year ago. And we continue to do the healthy business thing, and that is, just like we've done with our branches over the last decade, you challenge every business unit is that on-site performing to what you need it to be for both our customer and for us.
Sometimes, we run into situations where we take a customer that was doing $25,000 or $30,000 a month of sales in a branch and we double that, and maybe we even triple that. But we get to the point where we kind of get stuck at a number, let's say it's $70,000, $80,000 a month. We always have to evaluate what is the best solution there for the customer and for our ability to serve that business. And sometimes it's pulling it back into the brand. Sometimes it's the case, the customer runs out of space for us. Sometimes, and we've seen this in the last six months, particularly, we have some customers that are consolidating some of their operations, and we've had a few on-sites that have closed but we pick it up somewhere else or consolidates with an onsite we have somewhere else. And -- but we think it's a great business, and we're really pleased at what we saw in the first quarter with signings, and we're excited about that customer event next week and what it means to keep this thing going.
FMI technology, it's about bringing better visualization and service ability to the point of use. It started with vending a decade plus ago, and we've expanded with a bunch of other technologies. A year ago, we were signing 74 a day. This quarter, we signed 83 a day. We ended the quarter stronger than we started the quarter. And for Onsite and for FMI, our plans, our goals for the year remain unchanged. So the FMI technology now represents 35.5% of sales. A year ago, it was 28.7% and two years ago, it was 26.4%. We're going to keep driving that.
E-commerce, 55.6% growth in the first quarter of '22. And like our international group, our e-commerce team also hit a milestone. In March, we exceeded $100 million in revenue for the first time. It's not too many years ago, I think it was 2011, when we pointed out the fact that international was now 10% of the company but still a relatively small piece. And e-commerce was something we dabbled in, but it really wasn't a thing. Times have changed in the last decade and now both of them are $100 million a month businesses.
Finally, if you roll up our FMI technology in our e-commerce, we talk about our digital footprint, we hit 47% of sales in the quarter, 39.1% a year ago, 34.9% two years ago. Our goal is to hit 55% of sales at some point later in the year. And we still believe that long term, that has the potential to be 85% of sales, and we're gearing our supply chain and have been gearing our supply chains to support that kind of business in the future.
With that, I'll turn it over to Holden.