What was the revenue growth rate for Xylem's emerging markets team in the first quarter of 2021 
ow please turn to Slide 9, and I'll turn the call back over to Patrick.
Patrick Decker -- Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Sandy. I'd like to revisit the three focus areas we highlighted coming into the year: the performance of our growth platforms, the team's operational discipline and our progress on sustainability. Turning first to our growth platforms. You've already heard about our emerging markets team's exceptional first-quarter performance with revenue and orders up 33% and 21%, respectively.
Up until now, China and India have taken the spotlight. In both countries, our investments in capabilities and localization have created strong engines for sustainable growth. But of course, other areas of the emerging markets also represent great opportunity for us. Many countries in Eastern Europe, for example, continue to modernize their economies and represent a long runway of investment in water infrastructure.
And in Africa, there are clearly big water challenges to solve as the higher-growth nations continue to urbanize. We expect emerging markets, overall, will continue to be a source of healthy, sustainable growth for the foreseeable future. The second platform that continues to underpin sustainable growth is our digital strategy. Our broad portfolio enables us to combine multiple digital technologies into integrated offers, including AI-enabled software platforms, advanced communications networks and automated end points.
Those capabilities have been key to our commercial momentum over the last several quarters with customer adoption of digital solutions accelerating through the pandemic. We've spoken previously about our headline wins in Texas and Ohio. In Q1, we added a large transformation project in Greensboro, North Carolina, and we have just signed another exciting deal to be announced in the next few weeks. All of these projects deliver network as a service, software as a service and advanced analytics.
In each case, Xylem's ability to bring a suite of transformational capabilities distinguished us and was essential to winning. And just last week, we further extended the digital capabilities we can offer our customers by partnering with Esri. Esri is the global leader in geographic information systems, GIS for short. These systems are an essential component of utility's operating environment.
By integrating their technology with our advanced digital solutions, water operators achieved unprecedented network visibility and a clear path to increased operational efficiency and sustainability. And with last week's agreement, Xylem and Esri are bringing that powerful combination to the water sector together. Our partnership includes developing joint solution road maps and joint selling to water utilities around the world. We are very excited about this partnership and about the value we can deliver to customers together.
Turning next to operating discipline. Our operational capabilities were absolutely key to coming through 2020 on strong foundations. As you know, last year, we made difficult but essential decisions on structural cost. And we're now clearly seeing the benefit of those actions.
In addition, the team drove strong productivity gains in the first quarter, which offset the early impact of rising inflation. The result was solid margin expansion with incremental margins coming in at 55%. Over the last year, we've learned that we can do more with less, and we will remain absolutely vigilant on cost as economies reopen and demand continues to recover. That said, we are expecting some impact from the broad-based inflation and component supply challenges that are affecting the industrial and tech sectors.
Now we've already taken action by strategically investing in inventory to support areas of strong demand, and we will continue driving productivity and pricing to mitigate inflation. Still, the supply environment is likely to remain challenging for some time. The third focus area we highlighted coming into the year was sustainability. I think many of us worried that the cause of sustainability might suffer s
ow please turn to Slide 9, and I'll turn the call back over to Patrick.
Patrick Decker -- Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Sandy. I'd like to revisit the three focus areas we highlighted coming into the year: the performance of our growth platforms, the team's operational discipline and our progress on sustainability. Turning first to our growth platforms. You've already heard about our emerging markets team's exceptional first-quarter performance with revenue and orders up 33% and 21%, respectively.
Up until now, China and India have taken the spotlight. In both countries, our investments in capabilities and localization have created strong engines for sustainable growth. But of course, other areas of the emerging markets also represent great opportunity for us. Many countries in Eastern Europe, for example, continue to modernize their economies and represent a long runway of investment in water infrastructure.
And in Africa, there are clearly big water challenges to solve as the higher-growth nations continue to urbanize. We expect emerging markets, overall, will continue to be a source of healthy, sustainable growth for the foreseeable future. The second platform that continues to underpin sustainable growth is our digital strategy. Our broad portfolio enables us to combine multiple digital technologies into integrated offers, including AI-enabled software platforms, advanced communications networks and automated end points.
Those capabilities have been key to our commercial momentum over the last several quarters with customer adoption of digital solutions accelerating through the pandemic. We've spoken previously about our headline wins in Texas and Ohio. In Q1, we added a large transformation project in Greensboro, North Carolina, and we have just signed another exciting deal to be announced in the next few weeks. All of these projects deliver network as a service, software as a service and advanced analytics.
In each case, Xylem's ability to bring a suite of transformational capabilities distinguished us and was essential to winning. And just last week, we further extended the digital capabilities we can offer our customers by partnering with Esri. Esri is the global leader in geographic information systems, GIS for short. These systems are an essential component of utility's operating environment.
 By integrating their technology with our advanced digital solutions, water operators achieved unprecedented network visibility and a clear path to increased operational efficiency and sustainability. And with last week's agreement, Xylem and Esri are bringing that powerful combination to the water sector together. Our partnership includes developing joint solution road maps and joint selling to water utilities around the world. We are very excited about this partnership and about the value we can deliver to customers together.
Turning next to operating discipline. Our operational capabilities were absolutely key to coming through 2020 on strong foundations. As you know, last year, we made difficult but essential decisions on structural cost. And we're now clearly seeing the benefit of those actions.
In addition, the team drove strong productivity gains in the first quarter, which offset the early impact of rising inflation. The result was solid margin expansion with incremental margins coming in at 55%. Over the last year, we've learned that we can do more with less, and we will remain absolutely vigilant on cost as economies reopen and demand continues to recover. That said, we are expecting some impact from the broad-based inflation and component supply challenges that are affecting the industrial and tech sectors.
Now we've already taken action by strategically investing in inventory to support areas of strong demand, and we will continue driving productivity and pricing to mitigate inflation. Still, the supply environment is likely to remain challenging for some time. The third focus area we highlighted coming into the year was sustainability. I think many of us worried that the cause of sustainability might suffer s