Morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcom e to the ordinary 2019 annual general assembly of BASF SE. I'm very happy that so many of you have joined us. As the chairman of the supervisory board, I open the annual general assembly, and in accordance with Section 18, subparagraph one of our statutes, I will assume the chairmanship. I'd like to welcome all of the shareholders and shareholder representatives, the members of the press, the press photographers, as well as our guests. Now, the convening of today's annual general assembly was published in the Federal Bulletin of March 22nd, 2019. I hereby state that the annual general assembly was duly convened. Before we start going through the individual items on the agenda of today, I'd like to ask you to rise from your seats.
We are paying tribute, as always, to all employees and retirees who passed away since the last general assembly. In our commemoration, we shall include, in particular, Professor Doctor Berthold Leibinger, Honorary Chairman of the Supervisory Board of BASF and for many years, the Supervisory Board Chairman of BASF. Thank you. As you can see, all of the members of the Executive Board and of the Supervisory Board are present. I'd like to say a few more things about the Supervisory Board because with the closing of today's AGM, the tenure of all of the members of the Supervisory Board will end, which requires a new election to the Supervisory Board. Of the current shareholder representatives on the Supervisory Board, Professor François Diederich and Mr. Michael Diekmann will no longer stand for re-election.
Professor François Diederich has been a member of the Supervisory Board since 1998 as a representative of the shareholders, and since 2008, he has been a member of the Nomination Committee. During this time, Professor François Diederich was one of the most renowned scientists in chemical research, and as such, especially in the field of organic chemistry, he was a very valuable member of the supervisory board work, and he was also an important sparring partner for our own research at BASF. I'd like to thank Professor François Diederich for his many years of service, his active contribution, and the constructive cooperation over 21 years on the Supervisory Board. This deserves a big applause. Michael Diekmann was elected to the Supervisory Board in 2003, and since 2008, he has been the Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board.
Since 2008, he has been a member of the nomination committee. Since 2009, has been a member of the staff committee, and since 2015, he has been a member of the strategic committee. With his considerable experience in the leadership of internationally-oriented large companies and with his focus on strategic challenges, Mr. Diekmann has, throughout his membership of 16 years, made decisive contributions to the further development of BASF. I'd like to thank Mr. Diekmann for his always very constructive cooperation, and I think this deserves a very big applause, too. Now, as to myself, as you know, I will stand for election to the Supervisory Board for the last time this year. If I'm re-elected, the intention is that I will chair the Supervisory Board for another year.
As to my renewed candidacy, I'd like to comment. You know that the Supervisory Board has set itself an age limit for candidates that will be proposed to the annual general meeting for election. No Supervisory Board candidate should have reached the age of 72 or exceeded the age of 72 on the day of the annual general meeting. However, I have reached this age, and if we adhered to this age limit, then I would not be proposed for re-election. The nomination committee and the Supervisory Board, however, have decided to propose me for re-election to the Supervisory Board. The nomination committee was guided by the consideration, as in the past, to provide for sufficient continuity in the Supervisory Board, because we'll be joined by two new members. At the same time, the succession to the chairmanship of the Supervisory Board is to be prepared.
Because of this, I stated my intention to stand for re-election with the clear intention, however, to resign from the Supervisory Board at the end of the next AGM in 2020. It will be up to the Annual General Meeting of 2020 to elect my successor on the Supervisory Board. Now on to the other candidates to the Supervisory Board election. I'm convinced that in addition to myself, the following five members are proposed as candidates, and these are representatives of the shareholder side that fulfill all of the requirements to technical competence, diversity, independence, integrity, and they will guarantee qualified and intensive work on the Supervisory Board, benefiting BASF and all of the stakeholders.
In addition to the well-known members of the Supervisory Board, Dame Alison J. Carnwath DBE, Mr. Franz Fehrenbach, and Ms. Anke Schäferkordt, the first-time candidates of this year include Professor Dr. Thomas Carell and Dr. Alexander C. Karp. I'd like to ask the camera to focus on Professor Dr. Carell first.
Professor Dr. Carell is the professor for organic chemistry at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Because of his work in research on the field of organic chemistry at the interface to biology, he is familiar with the chemical and biological or biochemistry sector, and he knows about the connected value chains in a special way. He will contribute international experience and extensive networks in the scientific community, as well as special knowledge in research management and digitization. Professor Carell fulfills or fills a gap created by the resignation of Professor Dr. François Diederich, and he will fill this gap in the Supervisory Board in a very excellent way.
Because of this, we're very happy about his candidacy. Now on to Dr. Alexander Karp. The camera cannot introduce him because he's still on his plane coming from the United States, and that plane is late. Once Dr. Karp is here, and he will arrive later, I will introduce him again. Dr. Karp is CEO of the big data software and service company Palantir Technologies, and as such, he has extensive experience in the strategic and operating guidance or leadership of a globally operating company. He has very strong knowledge in the fields of digitization, information technology, business models, and startups. This brings competencies to the Supervisory Board, which according to our own analysis, the Supervisory Board did not yet fully have. I will introduce him again later.
More information about any of the persons proposed for election today can be found under sub-paragraph four in the invitation to the AGM. The six employee representatives on the supervisory board have already been determined by the representative body of the employees, that is the BASF European Works Council, and they were determined according to the agreement on the codetermination of employees of 15th November 2007 .
Please include Ms. Tatjana Diether, member of the works council of Ludwigshafen, a factory of BASF SE, and the BASF European Works Council, Mr. Sinischa Horvat, chairman of the works council of the site Ludwigshafen of BASF, and member of the group works council and of the BASF European Works Council, Mr. Waldemar Helber, deputy chairman of the works council of the Ludwigshafen site of BASF, Ms. Denise Schellemans, relieved of her work duties as a trade union delegate from Antwerp, Mr. Roland Strauss, Regional District Manager of the Industrial Trade Union Mining Chemicals and Energy, and Mr. Michael Vassiliadis, Chairman of the Trade Union Mining, Chemicals and Energy, and the newly appointed employee representatives are already members of the supervisory board of BASF SE.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, let me talk about the organization of the AGM. All of the participants of today's General meeting have, at their request, received the invitation and the BASF Annual Report 2018. This is it. It's extensive. You can also download it.
You receive the invitation to the annual general meeting, and later I will address this, and everybody has their personal annual general assembly document that you need for the votes and the elections. If later you want to request the floor or issue a power of attorney, or if you want to vote or elect somebody, then you need these documents. The votes will be carried out electronically once again with tablet PCs. I will refer to these documents again in the further course of the AGM. The notary public, Ms. Seeler, is present in the room. From your point of view, she is sitting in the main hall on the right-hand side. There is signage, and Ms. Seeler will do the notarization that is mandatory under German Stock Corporation law.
Your invitation card or your entry ticket contains necessary information about the legally prescribed list of participants and the votes. All of these documents are part of the AGM document that was handed out to you. If you need more entry tickets, you need for the votes for each an entry ticket, you need a personal HV document. If you leave the assembly, please give your personal AGM document to one of the employees at the exit checkpoint, because they will then make sure that the number of attendees is changed. Each personal AGM document contains two form sheets for powers of attorney. Those shareholders who want to leave the AGM prior to the end can issue a power of attorney to be represented during further votes.
As far as the voting procedure is concerned, I would like to refer to the explanations in items one and three in the personal AGM document. I would like to ask all of the shareholders who would like to request the floor during the AGM to go to the desks where you can register your request to speak. They are found in the main hall and in front of the main hall. Please register your request to speak by presenting your personal AGM document. Please do that right away so that we know how many speakers there will be. Now, we will not tape the course of the AGM, and we would like to ask you not to tape anything either. Do not make any videos with your mobile phones.
This is simply out of respect for the personal rights of our individual. Because of this, and to prevent any disturbances or any disruptions, we would like to ask you to set your mobile phone to flight mode. Do it right now, and best of all, switch off your mobile phone right now. Thank you very much for this. Once again, this year, the list of participants will be provided to you electronically. There are two desks with monitors next to the table of the notary public. In addition to the main room, you can follow the course of the AGM in the Musensaal, in the rooms Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg on the second floor, as well as in other adjoining rooms. You can follow on the monitors.
This year, once again, you can use different rooms in the Dorint Hotel. You can reach those rooms through a bridge. That can be found on level one of the Congress Center. As always, you have the chance to take part in guided tours of the company. These tours will start at 11:00 A.M., and they will continue until 4:00 P.M. We would like to ask participants of the tour to be represented by power of attorney during the votes or to hand in their personal AGM document to the exit checkpoint, so that we can check the list of attendance. If the AGM ends before 4:00 P.M., there will be another guided tour at the end of the AGM. Much for the formal part, and now we'll continue with report of the executive committee, and I'll give the floor to Dr. Brudermüller.
Dear shareholders, welcome to the BASF Annual Shareholders Meeting. This is the 67th Annual General Meeting, and it is the first time that I am addressing you as the Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors. I took on the role of CEO one year ago, and I'm very happy to report back to you today. I have been working for BASF for 30 years. That's more than half my life. Back in 1988, I started out in the lab as a young researcher. I was excited by chemistry, and I still feel this enthusiasm today. From the very start, I wanted to discover new things to make products better and to drive innovation. Three decades on, I'm just as enthusiastic about this. I can assure you, I am passionate about this company. I am passionate about BASF. BASF is a strong company.
We have a wonderful team, and we have passion. We try to find ever better solutions for the future. Be it climate change, global nutrition or plastic waste, we will find the answers. The entire BASF team wants BASF to maintain its position as the world's leading chemical company in the future. We are working on this together, and today I would like to tell you how we are going to do it. These are my topics. First of all, a review. How did we do in 2018? How did we start in 2019? I will then present to you our new BASF strategy. After that, I will talk about how we will grow profitably while also assuming social responsibility. I will close with our outlook for 2019.
Ladies and gentlemen, 2018 was not an easy year for us. These are the key figures at a glance. We reported sales of EUR 62.7 billion. This was a slight increase of 2% compared with the previous year. Our operating results, EBIT, before special items, amounted to EUR 6.4 billion. This was down by 17% compared to 2017. Our free cash flow was EUR 4 billion compared to EUR 4.8 billion in the previous year. In a nutshell, we did not achieve the results we set out to achieve, and we are disappointed. The results are clearly below our expectations. What was the reason for this? We see three main reasons. First, two-thirds of the decline were attributable to our chemical segment. After soaring for 15 months, prices for isocyanates fell again sharply.
Isocyanates are substances that can be used in applications such as construction materials, automobiles or furniture. We produce isocyanates at several sites worldwide. Furthermore, margins for our cracker products declined more sharply than expected in all regions. Second, the weather. Never did we wish more strongly for rain than we did in the summer of 2018. This was a new experience for us. We can do many things at BASF, but this was totally beyond our scope of influence. As you know, the Rhine River caused us a great deal of trouble in the second half of the year. Here you can see what the Rhine looked like in the summer of 2018, just not enough water for far too long. At times, inland shipping came to a standstill. Raw materials could no longer be transported to our Ludwigshafen site.
Did you know that in Ludwigshafen, we receive around 40% of our raw materials by boat? It is impossible to completely make up for these volumes with trains or trucks. Therefore, we were forced to reduce capacity utilization at our plants. Furthermore, terrestrial transport is far more expensive. The low water levels of the Rhine River reduced our earnings by a total of EUR 250 million. Third, the global economy cooled noticeably in the second half of the year, especially in those markets where our most important customers are located. For example, in the automotive industry. These days, there are around 260 kilograms worth of chemicals in the mid-sized cars. Many of these chemicals are supplied by BASF. For example, every second new vehicle has at least one coating layer from BASF, and this is true worldwide.
Every car that does not get built means less business for us. In particular, our customers in China had lower demand. This is a consequence of the trade conflict between the United States and China. This conflict is leading to a slowdown in the global economy and is creating major uncertainty in the markets. All of these factors negatively impacted our earnings. The geopolitical challenges and our unsatisfactory earnings also had a negative impact on our share price. At the end of 2016, it was at EUR 60.40 per share. Compared with the closing price at the end of the previous year, this represents a decrease of 34%. To put it plainly, we have much, much higher expectations, and we can do much, much more. We know that. In this difficult environment, our results also remained weak in the first quarter of 2019.
Earnings were below the level of the previous first quarter. In the first quarter of 2019, BASF Group sales rose by 3% year-over-year to EUR 16.2 billion. Compared with the first quarter of 2018, there was a decline in income from operations before special items. It was down by EUR 549 million to EUR 1.7 billion. This result was in line with our expectations. We had already stated this at the presentation of our 2019 outlook. Ladies and gentlemen, how are we dealing with this situation? The fact is, the global economic and political situation is not providing any tailwinds for us. We are a global company. More than 120,000 employees work in 90 countries. We have a presence on every continent.
We produce at 361 sites for our customers. We are far from immune to turbulent times like these, and this is reality. It is also a fact that in the long term, we have very good opportunities for growth. Global trends such as a growing world population, new forms of mobility, and climate change require creative solutions based on chemistry. BASF offers these solutions. One thing is crucial. We have to change, and we have to change considerably, drawing on our own strength. In recent years, many of our businesses have no longer seen the growth we had envisioned for them. We must become faster and more effective and more customer-focused, not to mention bolder and more aggressive. With this in mind, we further developed our strategy in 2018.
Based on this strategy, we want to fully utilize our strengths, our experience and skills. With this strategy, we want to grow. When developing the strategy in 2018, it was important to me that we take a hard, honest look at where we stand, that we express inconvenient truths. Our previous strategy was created in 2011. It was time to align BASF to the new realities. It was also important to me that this strategy should not be drawn up by the Board of Executive Directors sitting alone in a meeting room. Many people contributed, developing ideas and most importantly, telling us where they encountered problems in their work. Our customers, the entire international leadership team and of course, our employees, all of these contributed. What does our new strategy look like? Our strategy focuses on growth.
We want BASF to grow profitably and sustainably. We invest where we see opportunities for growth. At the same time, we will reduce costs wherever it makes sense. Our aim is and will remain that we want to be the world's leading chemical company. What does leading actually mean? Leading in terms of size, in terms of sales, in terms of market capitalization? We believe these three are not enough. There's only one true benchmark. We want to be leading in the eyes of our customers. You might say, "Of course, it's always about the customer." That's true. The customer is always at the focus. Our surveys and analyses have shown that we can and must become better. That is precisely what we are doing right now.
With our strategy, we are putting our customers at the heart of everything we do, even more so than before. Ladies and gentlemen, we want to be the world's leading chemical company for our customers. To this end, we identified six strategic action areas. BASF wants to be the leader in each of these areas, and I want to present them to you now. First, we want to be the most innovative company in the chemical industry. Our research and development is the core of BASF. Again and again, I'm inspired by the creativity and wealth of ideas of our employees. We have a unique wealth of know-how, experience, and resources. This has made BASF successful for the past 154 years. We will continue to build on this innovative strength. We will focus even more intensely on sustainable solutions.
It is our goal to increase our sales of products that make a substantial contribution to sustainability from EUR 15 billion in 2018 to EUR 22 billion in 2025. To do this, we are developing new innovation strategies in our businesses. Let me be very clear about this. This is not about constantly increasing our research spending. It is about better innovation processes. Since January, many of our researchers have been working much closer to our customers. They are collaborating more closely with colleagues from marketing, production, and sales. This enables us to recognize our customers' wishes even better and earlier, and it allows us to fulfill them even more quickly. Our second strategic priority relates to sustainability. At BASF, innovation and sustainability are inextricably linked. We want to be the leader in sustainability in our industry.
Our purpose is we create chemistry for a sustainable future. We introduced it in 2011, and this will continue to apply in the future. For us, sustainability means that our innovations must fulfill all three aspects, economic, environmental, and social aspects. This is very important to us. We will only be successful in the long term if we create value for society. We are convinced of this. This also means that BASF supports the global agreement on climate change and thus all of the steps for its effective and rapid implementation. We are making our contribution, and this is why our strategy also contains non-financial goals in addition to our financial targets. What do these non-financial goals look like? We want to achieve CO₂ -neutral growth until 2030. Growth means increasing production volumes by around 50%.
CO₂ -neutral means keeping our emissions at the level of 2018. This is very ambitious because after all, we have already cut our emissions by half since 1990. Over the same period, we doubled our production. We thus reduced the emissions per metric ton of product sold by more than 70%, and we want to further reduce this figure. What makes this so difficult? We have already tapped the greatest potential for reductions in our footprint. We are now reaching the technical limits at a number of our plants. Therefore, we need new technologies. This means more climate protection and future competitiveness. We are working towards this with our Carbon Management Program. This includes a dedicated team of around 100 employees, including 70 researchers and 30 experts from such fields as patent law and marketing.
Together, they are developing these new technologies, which we plan to test in pilot plants in a few years from now. Innovation and sustainability, this requires digital technologies too. Now our third priority, we want to be the pacesetter in the digital transformation. Digitalization opens up future options for us. For example, in production, we are already working with digital technologies in our plants, and we will continue to expand this. By 2022, 350 of our plants are to be digitalized. I travel around a lot in the company. I can tell very quickly when talking to our employees in production that they are receptive to the digital technologies. Many employees appreciate that they can get real-time mobile access to important information during plant operations. With tablets, they are better able to manage processes in the plants. This facilitates their work and is safer.
Digitalization also strengthens our research. We have had our supercomputer Quriosity since 2017, and it has already proven its worth. It is the most powerful computer in the chemical industry worldwide. It can perform 1.75 quadrillion calculations per second. This is the equivalent of the power of around 50,000 notebooks. In one fell swoop, we increased our computing power tenfold. We are faster and more creative, and we can do research more systematically. Ladies and gentlemen, this brings me to our fourth priority. We want to be the safest and most reliable plant operator in the industry. You may have read about it in the newspaper. Some of our plants were not able to produce as reliably in 2018 as we had planned. This is not up to our standards. This is not representative of BASF, and we must change this.
We want to be the leading plant operator in the industry. Starting in 2019, we will therefore invest EUR 400 million annually in the optimization of our plants. This is more than ever before. We will also continue investing at this level in the years to come. We want our plants to run safely and reliably, and we are hiring skilled personnel to ensure this. In 2018, we hired around 550 experts in production technology and digitalization in Ludwigshafen. Another 250 joined us in the first quarter of 2019 alone. Innovation, sustainability, digitalization, and operational excellence. As you can see, these areas are not silos. They complement each other. We want to create more value for our customers and with the right portfolio, which brings me to our fifth priority.
We want to hold a top position in each of our businesses. To steer our portfolio more successfully, we introduced a new structure for our segments in January 2019. Instead of four, we now have six segments. In this way, we create more transparency. This makes it even easier for you, our shareholders, to compare our performance with that of our competitors. At the same time, we are taking a more systematic approach to steering our portfolio. I would like to tell you about a few projects now that were worked on in 2018. In 2018, we completed the purchase of parts of Bayer's crop protection and seeds business. We are now the world's fourth-largest producer. We are in a strong position, and we are just as ambitious as our competitors.
This business performed very well in the first quarter of 2019. In September 2018, we signed a transaction agreement with LetterOne to merge our oil and gas businesses. We closed this transaction on May 1st. The joint venture is called Wintershall Dea. We have thus created the leading independent oil and gas company in Europe. We are planning to publicly list the company via an IPO in the second half of 2020, market conditions permitting. We merge our business with paper and water chemicals with the Solenis company. As of February 1st, the businesses have been operating under the name of Solenis. In this case, two excellent teams are now working under one roof. They are stronger together. We regularly evaluate whether our businesses have greater potential in a different constellation, and this is clearly the case with Solenis.
However, this also applies to our construction chemicals business and our pigments business. We are investigating various options for our construction chemicals business. We want to divest our pigments business. Dear shareholders, the Verbund remains at the heart of our portfolio. We will continue to utilize all the advantages it offers, and we are strengthening the Verbund. How are we doing that? For one thing, with investments in Asia. In this case, it is impossible to ignore China. We want to be the globally leading company in the chemical industry, so we must also be present in the largest chemical market of the world. Today, China already holds this title with a market share of over 40%. By 2030, nearly 50% of global chemical production will take place in China.
To put this in perspective, Europe's share will be around 15% in 2030, compared with roughly 18% today. This means growth is happening in China, and we will participate in it. We are very well-positioned. BASF has been active in China for more than 130 years. We take a long-term approach. In good times and bad, we have stood by our Chinese partners. That is reliability, and this is one of the reasons why we have received approval to build a new Verbund site in China, in Zhanjiang in Southern China, and without a Chinese partner. We are the first non-Chinese company to be allowed to do so. This is a huge once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us, and we are seizing it. We estimate the total investment to complete the project will be around $10 billion by 2030.
We also want to grow in India's dynamic chemical market. In January, we signed a memorandum of understanding with the Adani Group to evaluate a major investment in the acrylics value chain. What is so special about this investment? For the first time, we want to operate a site entirely with renewable energy. This would be our first CO₂-neutral site with a solar and wind farm. It is a project gaining a lot of attention far beyond the borders of India. Allow me to ask the question: Why can something like this work in India and not in Germany? With our Carbon Management Program, we are preparing for the future with lower emission technologies, with alternative sources of raw materials. This is our contribution to climate protection. It is not only up to us. Lawmakers also have to support this.
We expect them to provide the right policy framework to allow us to remain competitive. This means supporting technologies for the future. This means supplying large volumes of renewable electricity and at competitive prices in Germany and in Europe. This is the prerequisite for technological progress through innovation for more climate protection in the chemical industry. Ladies and gentlemen, BASF's success is built by its employees. They are key to the successful implementation of our strategy, and they are the focus of our sixth and most important priority. We want to be the best organization for our employees. An organization with more flexibility, customer orientation, and personal responsibility, with fewer interfaces, with simpler processes, everything focused on the needs of our customers. This means extensive organizational changes.
Since January, 14,000 of our employees are already working closer to the customer in research and development, in engineering and maintenance, in logistics and procurement, and this is going well so far. Another 6,000 employees will follow this year. Of course, we also know that not everyone will be entirely happy about this. Our aim is to create a better working environment for all of our employees to enable greater performance, to provide greater decision-making power, and to make work more fun and to make it more motivating. This will be our benchmark. More than 80% of our employees should feel that at BASF they can thrive and perform at their best. This is a challenge we readily accept. Our values form the foundation of our work. We work together with creativity, openness, responsibility, and entrepreneurial spirit.
Our values guide our day-to-day actions in everything we do. Ladies and gentlemen, you can see that we are transforming BASF. This will require energy. It will not be easy to change established patterns. 2019 will be a year of transition to a new BASF. In doing so, we are keeping our eyes firmly on our goal, being the world's leading company in the chemical industry for our customers. To us, this means growing profitably while also taking on social responsibility. That is what BASF stands for. We want to be a partner to society. Whenever there are challenges that we can solve with chemistry, how are we doing that? Let me give you two examples. All of you have seen the pictures, plastic waste in places where it absolutely does not belong. Plastic waste in oceans and rivers.
We ask ourselves, what can we contribute to solving this problem? We joined forces with other companies to form the Alliance to End Plastic Waste. What is our objective? Together with our partners, we want to eliminate plastic waste in the environment, and with innovations, we want to unlock the value contained in plastic waste. We are convinced that a global problem such as plastic waste cannot be solved by one company alone. It can only be overcome as a team effort. Another thing that is important for us is that the initiative for this alliance did not come from the government or an association. It is companies standing side by side who are saying, "We will tackle this problem together." The member companies, including BASF, have pledged a total of $1 billion to the alliance.
We have heard a lot of positive responses from employees about the alliance. They think it is fantastic that BASF is participating and that BASF is a strong driver of the alliance. We are very happy to hear this feedback. We need a fact-based discussion about the topic of plastics. This is something we advocate. There is no questioning plastic's role as the 21st century material. In many applications, there are simply no better alternatives. It is necessary to use the material responsibly. New opportunities for recycling are also needed, and we are working on this at BASF. We are working on technologies to enable more plastics to be reutilized. One example is our ChemCycling project. The principle is simple. A process transforms plastic waste into pyrolysis oil, and we use this oil as a feedstock in our Verbund. This project runs on in our existing plants.
Once again, the strengths of our Verbund become clear. As a result, we consume fewer fossil resources, and we are creating a materials cycle for plastics. Together with customers, we have developed the first pilot products, such as refrigerator drawers and food packaging. The feedback from our customers shows that we are on the right track. We are contributing to getting the plastic waste problem under control. At BASF, sustainability and innovation are inextricably linked, also when it comes to mobility. You are all familiar with urban traffic jams and the heated issue of emissions. For cities to remain livable, some things will have to change. Ideas are required. One of these ideas is electromobility. E-mobility helps to reduce emissions, provided that the electricity comes from renewable sources. Did you know that chemistry plays a leading role in e-mobility? The battery is pure chemistry. It is a small chemical reactor.
Our materials are already contained in the electric vehicles produced by various manufacturers, and we want more. We are determined to further advance e-mobility. What is our goal? Increasing range from 300 km-600 km. With our materials, we want to double the range of a mid-sized car by 2025. That is ambitious. Not only that, our materials should be so powerful that the batteries will be half the size they are now, with a lifespan twice as long, and with a charging time of just 15 minutes. To make this a reality, we must reach the next level of efficiency of our materials. What does this mean? We want to further improve the chemical structure and the production of cathode materials. The cathode material accounts for approximately 70% of the cost of a battery cell. This is a very important research area for us.
Right now, it is the most dynamic and innovative market segment in the chemical industry, and the growth prospects are very good. Ladies and gentlemen, we are convinced that our innovations create value for clean air, for lower energy consumption, and for resource conservation. Later on, you can have a look for yourselves. In the foyer, we are showcasing some of our products and innovative approaches, and I kindly invite you to visit this presentation. Dear shareholders, with our new strategy, we have set ourselves ambitious financial targets. We want to grow faster than global chemical production, and we want to grow profitably. We want to increase the EBITDA before special items of BASF by 3%-5% per year. We want to achieve a return on capital employed above the cost of capital percentage every year.
For you, we want to deliver above average value and increase our dividend per share each year. This is a promise we want to keep even in challenging times. We stand by our ambitious dividend policy. We therefore propose a EUR 0.10 increase in the 2018 dividend to EUR 3.20 per share. Thus, the BASF share offers a dividend yield of 5.3% based on the 2018 year-end share price. In total, we want to pay out EUR 2.9 billion to you. BASF's success is built by its employees. On behalf of the Board of Executive Directors, I would like to express our heartfelt thanks for your incredible team performance, for your dedication, and for the extra mile that many of you are going. 2019 will be a very demanding year.
We anticipate a decline in global economic growth. Global chemical production, however, will most likely grow as strongly as it did in 2018. The challenges will not let up, but we have set ourselves on the right course with our strategy. We will make BASF faster, more effective, and more customer-focused so that BASF remains the leading chemical company for our customers. However, we don't want to be preoccupied with ourselves for too long. We will already have implemented most of the strategies and measures by the end of this year. 2019 is a year of renewal. We will let go of some things we have become familiar with and fond of. Yet we will maintain the right balance between the new and the proven, between cost savings and investments. If we fully utilize our potential, we as a company are unbeatable.
We have proven this again and again. We are a strong team. We are passionate. We have experience and ideas. All of this makes us a valued partner whenever there are problems that we can solve with chemistry. Ladies and gentlemen, we have the right strategy. We will emerge successfully from this year of transition of 2019, and we will then be in an excellent starting position for profitable and sustainable growth. The BASF team is devoting all of its resources to make this happen. I hope you will accompany us on this journey. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Dr. Brudermüller, for this very interesting report. Now I'd like to point out to the ladies and gentlemen of the press, you know our AGM is not a public event. Therefore, I'd like you to stop any further recordings, be they photo-