Second time in this venue, second time with you, Yvonne. Now, last time you were presenting the great numbers of others mostly. Now it's also your great numbers, so feel free to present. Thank you.
Good morning together. This year, it's my second annual and press conference. One year ago, I was just 30 days in position, and we celebrated my birthday together. I remember that one. This year we advanced a little bit. And there was a management turbulences at CEWE, and still I had the opportunity to present already very good results for 2022. Now, one year later, I can reassure you the management turbulences are no longer a concern. We are focused on our business, and again, we are able to present great results, this time of 2023. You may have noticed that there are a couple of things look a bit different as well on the reportings. I will provide more details to this throughout the presentation. Please bear with me. What are we going to see today?
We look back to 2023, to the results of CEWE in 2023, and this is covering the points 1 to 4 in the agenda. Then we will move on our look forward, on our plans and the strategy, 2024 and beyond. Let's get started. Reminding us that at CEWE, everything starts around a smile. So the smile of happy people, the smile of consumers. Here you see our family Kell, who are CEWE consumers, and at the same time, our ambassadors, so you will see them in TV campaigns, brand campaigns. We are accompanying them throughout their journey since a couple of years. Every year, our consumer create more than 6 million photo books, CEWE Photo Books, countless calendars, photo gifts, and much more. Each of these products bring exactly this smile.
For this smile, 4,000 of our employees are dedicated in 21 countries, and they make sure, with passion, every day, that we create more than products. We create lasting memories. And the biggest reward we can get are, in fact, the rewards and the feedbacks of our consumer. Some of them are anecdotal. You know, they praise our products, they praise customer service, the outstanding speed, or the quality of the products. But we can also measure them in the NPS. It's a number we usually do not communicate around, but it's consistently well above 60%, in line with top brands like Apple. Christmas. You know, Christmas and the Q4 is very important for CEWE, and I can report that we had a successful Christmas and a successful Q4.
Last December, during the peak season, when you go through the production, it feels a bit like, you know, in a Christmas workshop or in a Christmas factory. You see the golden little chocolate balls falling into the Advent calendars . Countless presents are being produced, and during this special time, millions of very personal photo products are created. And then they are sent to millions of our consumers, and they make their eyes lighting up. And if everything goes well, our employees are happy as well. And I'm happy because we know if this is carried throughout, this growth and this success is carried throughout the different markets, throughout the different brands, and turns into result of more than +4% in turnover and EBIT in the Q4, I'm happy, too.
Because we are growing in turnover as well as in EBIT, and we extend step by step our market leadership. Before we go into numbers, there's one part which I would like to point out before. It's the innovations. And for the innovations, we continue to drive growth. We had innovations on our key category, and some of you who joined us for the quarterly calls have seen them already or have came across, because they are all ready for the Christmas season. We have innovations, and a brief selection of it I want to point out are everything around the photo book. We introduced the 100% recycled paper photo book version, which reconciles the consumer needs and the environmental needs. We continued our premiumization with personalized slip cases.
We extended designs and templates, and we introduced by Pixum, an example of an AI-based event recognition, where you can then choose, as a consumer, suitable add-ons, like clip arts. As well, we can see beyond photo books, some of those here. In DeinDesign, an organic, biodegradable case, renewable sources, WhiteWall fine art prints on Alu-Dibond up to 2.4-meter size... CEWE Wall Calendar, again, recycled paper, meeting the CEWE quality and the recycled material, which is a fine line. The Street Map Posters, and we introduced as well more gifts like the photo blanket and new editors for the calendar, if you check on the mobile edits. Check it out yourself. The good thing is, we are working on those things, and we get great feedbacks from the consumer, but as well, we get recognized for this innovation power by the TIPA Award.
Here are the three awards we received in 2023. Who's going to make all this happen? It is, in fact, the united team, and it is amazing how much we are focused on Christmas. So after Christmas is already before Christmas, so we are starting already to prepare this Christmas, and if you come to us across September, then everything is focused on Christmas. Everyone knows their place. Everyone knows how every piece has to be for that Christmas run, and walking through the halls, literally, you feel as well that everyone is very committed to make sure that these photo gifts will land under the Christmas tree. And it's a massive task, and if we achieve this year by year and year after year, this is a great success.
I wholeheartedly thank my precious team, each and every one of them, for making this happen again in 2023. Let's talk about numbers. 2023 was a success with highs in turnover and in earnings. We aimed for the turnover, a range of EUR 720-780 million, and we achieved EUR 780.2 million, a +6.5%. In EBIT, we aimed EUR 70-80 million, and we achieved EUR 83.9 million, which is a +11%. These results were impacted by the sales of Futalis. We finally managed and succeeded to sell off Futalis in December. There's more about when Olaf is going to explain you the segment. Having a look, how these segments, business segments contribute to this success? Photofinishing , the lion's share, is increasing with +6.9%.
Commercial online print contributed to growth in the group with +6.6%. Retail, relatively due to currency impacts, relatively slightly negative due to currency impacts, but fully in line with our strategy. This is, this chart belongs as much to CEWE. It's already like a DNA chart. I think, all of you have seen it before. It's important for us that, we can continue the long-term growth path, and we could continue it in 2023. The same picture... Look, before we go, we had a look on the seasonal distribution. So how are the sales and the EBIT spread over the quarters? And it's a quite normal seasonal distribution. Q1 and Q4 are getting stronger for us, while Q2 and Q3 are rather flat.
With this distribution and with this turnover, we could as well continue the success line of the EBIT, reaching now a height of EUR 83.9 million. This, despite and mitigating the challenging environment, all of us know that the consumers had to turn their money and their money twice before spending, the macroeconomics and as well, the cost increases. We mitigated this by premiumization, by price increases as needed, by efficiency, and by adding more valuable products into the mix, so a mix shift towards more premium. Diving into the segment of Photofinishing . Photofinishing increased significantly with +6.9%, and this is driven, and we manage this by our strong brands, but as well by marketing invests, and the marketing invest turned into top line.
So we were able to convert the high level of occasional travel activities in 2023 into our business, convincing people of creating photo images. The EBIT improved by a strong EUR 6.3 million. An important KPI for you as well is the EBIT margin, and the EBIT margin increased again, and under this challenging market environment and circumstances, for us, it's a key indicator of premiumization of our products, shift from single products to more value-added products and to more valuable products. And the margin now achieved 12.8%. Important for us, a short check on the turnover per quarter, and what we see, the seasonal distribution over 2023. And the good news, every single quarter, the quarterly targets were achieved or even better than forecasted, as you see on the green ticks on the bottom.
The same is true for the EBIT, where as well, we have the typical seasonal, distribution, and we achieved quarter by quarter on target or even beyond. An important number for us is the number of prints. Why is this important? Because, in fact, it shows how resilient we are in the market and how successful we are motivating people to come to us and to entrust us their memories, and to turn them into photo products. People around the world not only taking pictures, they are still deciding to have their most precious ones printed and preserved for all times. Despite innovations and the digitalization, the TikToks and the Instagram, there is still a value printing the photo products for the most precious moments: that trip with your best friend, that special birthday, or that marriage. We set ourselves a target of 2-2.3...
2.2-2.3 billion photos for 2023. We achieved 2.4. It's an increase of +4.8%. The value per photo increased as well, as before Corona. It was temporarily interrupted by special Corona effects. The same is true for our signature product. Our signature product, CEWE Photo Book. It continues to sell most of them in the group under the brand of CEWE, but Pixum and Cheerz and WhiteWall, with their coffee table book, contribute very well already. In 2023, we aimed 5.7-6 million photo books, and we sold 6.05. And 6.05, again, for us, it's a number, but it's not just a number if we think behind, because with the 6.05 million photo books, we made 6.5 million families happy.
It was the grandparents, the aunts, the uncles, the friends, or whoever has received it. And I think if some of you have presented already one to your loved ones or have received one, you know what I'm talking about. What's also worth noting is that, consumers increasingly order more premium products with us. They literally buy in into the promise of delivering them an extra special experience. That can be panorama, with edit designs, with embossing or the slip case, or larger formats or more pages. So in fact, with this demand, it's on track with our strategy for premiumization. Coming to commercial online print. As you all know, commercial online print, we work with three brands: Viaprinto, Saxoprint, and Laserline, with Saxoprint being the biggest one.
It's great that we can present as well for commercial online print, good growth, a very good growth with 6.6%. This is through to the best price strategy which we have implemented, and the commercial online print can as well improve its EBIT by a strong EUR 1.9 million, reaching EUR 4.2 million. And this is thanks to the strict cost efficiency, which enables us to build that profitability. Coming to retail, reminding that retail, in this segment, the numbers you find are the numbers of the hardware sold, so the cameras, the photo albums, this type of things, which we sell in our retail. So these numbers, you will see, we work with 100 stores across Scandinavia, Central Eastern Europe.
These stores, along our strategy, become more and more as well an experience store and a window for our Photofinishing . And, this is our strategy, and so, yes, the hardware, we hold, and we expect as well that it's going to slight increase. The Photofinishing numbers you will find is in the big Photofinishing segment. So let's look at the hardware. There you see the -3.4, and I can, tell you that these -3.4 are triggered by, currency impacts. So we had negative currency effects. Without these effects, retail would slightly grow, which was with +1.4%. And despite these currency impacts, we could improve our, EBIT up to EUR 0.5 million.
For the others, when it's becoming very complicated, as well as the financial details, Olaf will guide you through.
Thank you very much, Yvonne. It's becoming very complicated. I hope not. Right. So, I heard you mentioning that, and thank you very much for, for reminding me, sort of putting out this question. We have, we have a camera here in the front.
... and we are streaming that to the outside world, and I'm pretty sure that somewhere in the internet, there's somebody speaking English only, or many other languages, but not German. And therefore, we are switching or we are sticking to English here for now. Yes, before moving back up to the level of the group, let's talk about the segment other for a second, and Yvonne had mentioned already that in other, there's typically the costs of the whole group level. There's the real estate management that we have with a few real estates we own for our own premises.
And there used to be, I have to say now, there used to be Futalis in there as well. Futalis was the only revenue, and so that's why the increase you see on top there is purely accountable to Futalis. That will be down to zero now going forward, because as Yvonne mentioned, we had sold Futalis end of last year. Now, the impact of that, you can see on the EBIT level. On the EBIT level, you see that, in contrast to the typical -1, roughly, we had there over the last years, always, there was now a -3.1, and if you look into the details here, you can see that Futalis contributed EUR 2.3 million to this minus 3.1 we are seeing there.
That being an operational loss of EUR 1 million, some depreciation of the machines, and a deconsolidation effect. So, all in all, that is the final tick behind Futalis. And if you take that out of the EUR 3.1 million, you can see that, Sorry, the EUR 2.3 million is -EUR 0.8 million, compared to the -EUR 0.6 million of last year, and that is pretty much on the same level, the difference being attributed to changes we had on the real estate management. Somewhat more cost there, and that is what we had mentioned down there. So, tick mark behind Futalis, that is done, and we had been talking to you about that, selling Futalis, over quite some years now.
The Corona pandemic came into the way, and now we have finally ticked that box. If we're adding then all the numbers back up to the group level, we had seen already the EUR 780 million revenue that Yvonne was explaining to you, being split to the different, to the different segments that you see there. You can see just by looking at the colors, that obviously Photofinishing is contributing the biggest part of that, yeah? And not only to revenue, but Photofinishing is our main business. Photofinishing has contributed the biggest part to our EBIT as well. You're not surprised by that.
You have seen the EUR 80 million we had seen in Photofinishing last year, which is the lion's share, obviously, of the EUR 83.9 million we were looking at as an EBIT of last year. So back on group level, let's look from a group perspective into the details of, as we always do, P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, and the other numbers. If we look at the consolidated income statement, P&L first, yes, you have seen the increase in revenue we are seeing on top there. And you know, that is mainly Photofinishing and commercial online print driving that, but Photofinishing being by far number one. Let's walk down the big changes we are seeing there, and the next one is in the capitalized own works.
It's not a big change, actually, but just to remind you, we have been taking over the supplier Hertz mid last year, meaning mid 2022. And now it's part of our numbers, it's part of our group for fully 12 months, and that is why the own work capitalized there's increased a little bit, but obviously it's not a big change for us. That's just to remind you, Hertz is part in there. Other operating income is decreased by EUR 3.7 million. That is due to there was less income from reversal of provisions, which we always have in this position, obviously. There's less income from recyclable material we were taking out of production there.
Not important, but it means that some EUR 3.7 million that used to be as a profit in the P&L had not been there because that was the way it happened to be. But nevertheless, the P&L is strong enough to just cope with this and still develop into the right direction. That's quite neat. Looking at the next three lines here, they are obviously the operationally very important cost of materials, personnel expenses, and other operating expenses. You know, following our company for a long time, that we had a substantial change in this structure over the last years. As we were reducing the retail business and increasing Photofinishing over time, and within Photofinishing, moving away from single product into more value-added products.
We used to have less material costs structurally as a percent of revenue. We used to have more personnel expenses in order to generate the value added we were generating in Photofinishing , and because Photofinishing structurally has a higher personnel expense ratio, and because of all the marketing and logistics needed, we had other operating expenses increasing as a percent of revenue as well. And this, at least to a large degree, you can see this year as well. Cost of materials, yes, obviously, there's the increase in cost of materials just million-wise by EUR 6.8 million, because revenue is growing and we need to spend more money there. Okay, that's the way it is.
But if you look at percent of revenue, you can see that it's down 0.6% from 24.6% to 24.0%, and this is due to the fact that, yes, we are growing, but we have the, we have the share of retail revenue declining, but more Photofinishing revenue. And we have more value-added products in Photofinishing , and we have increased, obviously, revenue by prices as well. All these factors are leading to cost of materials being reduced as a percent of revenue there. So there's a tick mark to this structural trend there. The same is true for our next layer. Personnel expenses.
You can see personnel expenses; we have an increase in millions of EUR 16.3 million, which is because we are growing, because we have more personnel, because we have had wage increases, at least, not structurally anywhere, but at least, we had the inflation premium in most of the countries, and this is the development that was driving up the cost in personnel in terms of million there. But nevertheless, it also grew in terms of percent of revenue. You can see that we are up from 27.6% to 28.1% of revenue, which is this structural change that we had been looking at in the last years already. It continued this year.
The change did not quite continue for other operating expenses, and we are not sad about that, because yes, we are spending more in terms of million, but we are spending less in terms of percent of revenue, which is fine. So yes, logistics costs, marketing, and these things did increase in total by EUR 13.3 million. But overall, in terms of percent of revenue, we have been decreasing that share slightly due to that. So all in all, if you take a step back, the structural change in the structure of the P&L is as it was in the last year, leading to an EBITDA which is EUR 8.9 million higher, and we're now on an EBITDA level of EUR 137.7 billion. Quite substantial.
The changes underneath in depreciation not a big change. The only thing worth mentioning is perhaps the financial income, and you will see that again in cash flow. There's some EUR 5.2 million here in terms of financial income. The main driver in there is a EUR 5.4 million of income we had seen from our financial investments. And to make it very specific, we know that we are invested in two different VC funds to learn from what they are doing and to learn how the startup mechanics are working and so on. And it happened to be that, yes, we are invested in Capnamic, and you know that one of the Capnamic funds did have the LeanIX in their portfolio.
LeanIX, as most of you probably know, was bought by Lufthansa, by, sorry, by SAP last year for a substantial number, and, that drove us EUR 5.4 million in cash in our balance sheet. And the part of the EUR 5.4 million in terms of financial income is something you can see here. So that is one-off, we have to very openly say, but it's a nice one-off, and we take those things. If they come in, it's fine. Right. So we talked about long-term trend of P&L is still visible. The P&L, the development is as it used to be. We have a nice one-off in there, and now let's look at the balance sheet, what has happened there. Right. So how long is our balance sheet?
It's increased, obviously, by EUR 33.3 million, as you can see here on top. We just saw the revenue increase on the P&L by 6.5%. This year, it's an increase of 5.3%, so the balance sheet increased pretty much on the same level as the revenue grew, so it's all fine. It means the efficiency, just ballpark thinking, is on the same level as before. Makes sense. Tick that. Then the only thing I want to look at here on the normal balance sheet is the equity ratio. You can see there on the right-hand top, and we used to be at 57.3%, and we are now at 58.4%. Rock solid, CEWE is stable. Don't worry about CEWE.
We have a balance sheet that is something you can rely on. Now, if we move over from the perspective of the normal balance sheet into the management balance sheet, and looking at capital employed and capital invested, the increase we see there is EUR 26.7 million. You can see here on top. Twenty-six point seven is a 5.9% increase here. Looking again at the P&L increase of 6.5%, makes sense.... even less, same, same, same ballpark number as the revenue increases. So, the company grows here with the assets and anything that's in there on the same level as the revenue or not quite, which is fine. So gaining a little bit of efficiency, but makes sense.
If we look at where the numbers come from, there's not big change in the non-current assets. There are some EUR 4 million here, and it's, in the end of the day, it's not a big deal. The biggest number comes from the biggest change is from the cash position we have been looking at. Now, looking at the cash position, I could say this is purely due to the success of CEWE in 2023, and we leave it there. But to be honest, it's yes, it's success in some kinds, but it's not success we can repeat every year, because there's also some changes in working capital in there, and obviously, working capital decreases you can't do every year.
And that's why it's worth looking at in a second, and we are going to do that on the next charts. And some of that you can see already down here. You see that net working capital has decreased from -2.8 to -24.3. So there is more than EUR 20 million already. You can see just looking at the changes purely on the balance sheet. You see there, and when you look at the details, why these changes were made, it's tax refunds. We had a very successful year, 2020. That's why the tax... And we didn't have to pay much taxes because in the pandemic, the financial authorities were very, very helpful and were deferring taxes for many companies to see how they could help them to survive.
Now, we paid taxes afterwards because they said, "Obviously, you were successful in 2020, so please pay taxes," and we did it. "And please pay even more taxes as advanced taxes, because obviously you seem to continue to be successful." So we paid taxes, advanced payments, quite a bit over the last two years. Now they realized, "Okay, yeah, you are successful, but not on the level of 2020." So, they paid back some of the prepayments, we had been delivering to them. Now we are moving already... If you look at the numbers of 2023, we are, we are moving up to the same level of profitability again, and you could see that, probably in the, in the next years, we will move up with the prepayments again.
I mean, this is just the cyclical life of tax prepayments, which are always behind the actual profitability development of the company, and this is, this is what we have seen last year. They, they had, paid—they had received a lot of prepayments, the tax authorities, and then said, "Okay, yes, we need your tax payments, but not on that level. Please take it back." And there is some, some EUR 14 million that were derived from there. And the other thing is, there's a change in the trade receivables that I'm going to mention in a second later. So all working capital has been driving some changes in the cash position on the balance sheet. Now, that is on the capital employed side.
If we look on the capital invested on the right-hand side here, I mean, you can see the changes we have made to the EBIT level. The whole change of the whole capital invested is driven by equity only. The drive up, it's interesting to see that, yes, some EUR 50 million here, but we have paid dividend again, a record dividend for our company since many years. In addition to that, we have acquired shares. We have bought back shares. We have treasury shares on our balance sheet.
We continue to buy back right now, and if you look all in all last year, more than 50% of dividends, value-wise, more than 50% of the value of the dividend payment has been redistributed to shareholders by buying back shares there. So that is something we are doing on top of the very continuous dividend we have been increasing for 14 times, and if the decision is taken by the AGM this year, then it will be the 15th time in this year that we are increasing dividend. We manage this closely, and we like that, there's this, this very steady development in there. And on top of that, if the cash position allows for it, and we consider the share price worth paying, then we like to pay...
to buy back shares, and that was quite some substantial EUR 9 million last year. Right. Looking at the other changes down here, I think it's not worth mentioning. The changes are minimal, and you know that pensions increase also due to changes in discount rate. I mean, you're seeing the same things in all the other companies, too. Let's look at the cash flow, and I mentioned already that there's quite some changes in the cash flow due to a working capital effects. So, you can see this here by looking at a longer-term perspective on the operational cash flow.
You see there is really top numbers there, like in 2020, EUR 140 million or EUR 130 million now, and then there's really pretty much low numbers, given our company there, like EUR 60 million or even EUR 90 million there. If you look at why is that the case, I mean, the upper ones are too high, and the lower ones are too low, and the big difference there is not the profit as such, but you know that this, and Yvonne showed it before, that was increasing quite steadily over time. But the ups and downs you see there are generated by changes in working capital that just happened, and they just happened to us, because we can't influence most of them.
This is true in this year as well. So the big increase here from 93.4 to 130.8, the EUR 37.4 million increase, is due to, yes, somewhat more EBITDA. You see here EUR 8.8 million, including everything, and you just realize I presented to you the EBITDA increase itself was exactly EUR 8.9 million. So yes, there is some increase in EBITDA. Everything fine, that's the way it is. But there's also changes in more decrease in operating working capital, contributing EUR 14 million, and there's less tax payments, contributing EUR 10 million, or 11 even. And these two are obviously driving the big change there.
So that is something we always need to bear in mind when we compare the year-on-year numbers, and there's a lot of one-off impacts in pretty much all the years in there. Moving on to investment activities, they are fluctuating a little bit. And we have mentioned the big, big drivers here. So acquisition of WhiteWall was the last real M&A we have been doing here, so that was driving down the 2019 numbers. Acquisition of Hertz a little bit, driving down the 2020 numbers. And this year there was no acquisition.
There was no big investment into any real estate, and there was even this payment for the LeanIX exit that reached our balance sheet, too, and that is actually visible here in the investment cash flow, as well as a sort of plus investment decreasing the investment number. Those are the main drivers why we end up only at an increase at an investment of EUR 47.9 million here. Adding the two up, operating and investment, we get to a free cash flow of EUR 82.8 million here, which is obviously a really nice number. It's an increase by EUR 51.4 million, which is quite a bit.
These changes and the importance of the free cash flow lead us to, since quite a few years already, do something like a normalized free cash flow for, for you. So we take the free cash flow number, and we try to normalize that as far as we can see into what should the number actually be. Now, these are the changes that needed to be made to the 2022 numbers. These are the changes that needed to be made to the 2023 numbers, as far as the cash flow needs to be calculated on the page before, just IFRS-wise.
So the first line is important, the advance payments of some, of some, or late payments of some, trade partners, some retail partners. As mentioned already in the communication of 2002, this number EUR 9 million, you can see there exactly in our communication of 2002, we had said that actually, there was a partner who paid late and who did not pay. The EUR 9 million were in the accounts receivable, and they shouldn't have been anymore, so he paid late. So the 2022 cash flow needed to be increased by EUR 9 million. Now, the EUR 9 million came in beginning of 2023. Now, obviously, those were not allocatable to 2023, so the number of 2023 needs to be decreased by EUR 9 million.
A similar situation for the tax payments, which were in 2020 actually exceeding tax expense, so the real cash flow could be increased again. Whereas, this year, the tax payments were clearly less than tax expenses that would actually be calculated. So the real cash flow needs to be decreased by EUR 11.5 million, which means we have a normalization change there in 2022, and the cash flow of operating business by EUR 12.9 million, which is exactly the 12.9 you can see there on the left-hand side. So we are increasing back the cash flow from operating activities in 2022 to a normal level of EUR 106 million. And here we're doing exactly the other opposite direction. We are taking the EUR 130 million we had been looking at.
We are decreasing them by EUR 20.5 million, and a more normal operating cash flow in 2023 would have been EUR 110 million. Now, so it's EUR 106 million compared to EUR 110 million here for the two years. And the same kind of changes are true for the operating investment cash flow. You see that last year we had special acquisition of Hertz. We had special investment in real estate, and that adds up to EUR 17 million that could be deducted from the investment cash flow. So the EUR 60.9 million changed into a EUR 44 million, and whereas this year as well, there was some special investment in real estate. There's the special influx in terms of money from the LeanIX thing.
So there is some seven million, yeah, EUR 7.4 million to be corrected this year and some EUR 17 million to be corrected last year. Adding that all up, it means the EUR 31.5 million free cash flow that was officially IFRS-wise calculated last year in 2022, and we communicated that number already in 2022, was more like a EUR 61.4 million. Whereas the EUR 82.8 million that we had to communicate this year, IFRS-wise, if we make the changes for one-off effects, is more like a EUR 69.7 million. Nevertheless, a nice increase by EUR 8.3 million, and this is the development that makes sense given the development we have seen operationally in our company through our last year. Long story to cash flow. I hope you could follow. If not, happy to take questions later, also in one-on-ones.
Right, and because we have been doing this normalization since quite, quite some time, you can see here how this, what this looks like over many years. In 2019, we said 35 is not 35, it's more like close to 60. In 2020, we said, "Don't get sort of hooked on the EUR 100 million free cash flow. If at all, it's at EUR 76.9 million." And so we corrected the free cash flow that we had been communicating to you every year to make sure we get a normalized perspective jointly on what's really happening there. And if you look at the trend of this normalized perspective here, you can see there's a steady increase in free cash flow, normalized free cash flow, and that is obviously exactly the development that CEWE loves to take. In numbers, we are showing steady development upward.
You see an increase of roughly EUR 10 billion in free cash flow, normalized free cash flow from 2019 to 2023, and this is what we love: steady development trend upward. The same is true for ROCE, and this, all in all, leads to great ROCE numbers. You can see that the EBIT increases. You know that. You see that we have increased the average capital employed. The number we just looked at was the capital employed at the end of the year. This is now the average for the three quarters, but in the end of the day, it doesn't really change the world. What we get to is a ROCE of 18.8%, which is a great numbers we like. We...
Talking to you and talking to other investors, we always get a feedback of, like, 15% is a great benchmark. If you meet or exceed 15%, it's perfect. If you look at the numbers of CEWE, and even if you would go back further, we are pretty much on the same level, pretty much in every year. I think 18.8 is really a number that clearly delivers the message CEWE is generating value. 18.8, whatever is happening out there, is more than our cost of capital. That is a consumer page, so I'm out. Yvonne, that's yours again. See you later.
Thank you so much. Concluding on 2023, we come back to where we started from, to our consumer. So we succeeded to make consumers happy in 2023, and we delivered great numbers, and so Olaf, I think, is happy as well with these ones we could present. And if we take the next one, I think you, our precious investors, are happy as well, because we can as well contribute and increase our dividends, the 15th year in a row, as Olaf has already mentioned. So let's pause a little while, because looking back at a successful year and as well, looking back on a successful history, because these successes have been built along decades. So if you go, what we managed during this time is a lot of transformation.
We went from private label to a house of, to a, I would say, from private label to a printed approach. We went from one print to a house of prints. We went from analog to digital. We went from B2B to B2B and B2C. We went from Germany to Europe, and from film development towards printing more value products and services, and from the photo specialist onto the commercial online printing as a print expert. So this made us a number one. The question is, how we can stay there or extend this? So the target is clear, extending the leadership in Photofinishing , and there are some things what we continue to do. And this is one thing, which is the statement: inspiring people to create and share personalized photo and print products of the highest quality.
And how do we achieve this? By providing an outstanding user experience along the entire customer journey. Innovation is key. This is how we stay ahead and build our position as market leader. For this, we defined five principles, and these are common principles, and we start in the center with the consumer... And the consumer, it does not matter if our teams are working, in which location they work, in which business segment they work, we serve the consumer, and only if the consumers are happy, we will be successful. A critical role is the second principle, which is the innovation, and this is key. It helped us for the transitions in the past, and it will help us as well to be prepared for future transition. It will help us not only to take on the trends, but to shape them and to drive them.
This is only possible if this is embedded in the company culture. Here we can say, yes, this is at CEWE; we have embedded this one. We have embedded it because when we talk about our employees, we talk about 4,000 employees with a mindset, 4,000 innovators with an ideation mindset, supported by excellent tools. Here, the picture of this year's Innovation Days . For 2 days, we welcomed more than 1,000 of our team members in Oldenburg for exchanging on future ideas. Some of them presented, other ones gave feedback, and of course, we had as well a series of sessions planned for them.
So this is a strong bottom-up approach, and this bottom-up approach is as well supported by the leadership team, who ensures that the innovations are alongside the strategic focus, and by our MAIC team, which is the Mobile Artificial Intelligence Campus, who are investing and searching for the longer-term innovations. One of the longer-term topics, which is, you know, which is in focus for us, is the AI. AI, we are convinced that it will change the way we work, we live, and we learn, and we consume, beyond even the Photofinishing . For us, for CEWE, we estimate that it will concern and impact our whole value chain, starting from the personalized targeting, advertising. I think all of us know that, you know, the one-to-one targeting is a dream of marketing.
And AI presents opportunities to bring us a little bit closer to this, and it's bridging the gap between generalized personas and personalized interactions. AI will as well, if you go down the stream, it will as well empower consumers to engage more in personalized creation. I will come to this in a second. Omnichannel. For omnichannel, you see today that, you know, with this integrated approach, and the consumer is more and more expecting this, whenever, wherever they are contacting us, they are coming to our platforms, they expect a consistent and seamless experience. So there are a lot of potentials in sight. The technology behind for the consumer will, in fact, not be seen anymore. It will be blended in. On the innovation side, it is a topic which is going to emerge.
We had one of the focus areas, the future zone of the Innovation Days was based and built for AI future models, and it can as well bring new business models, so bear with us, we are working on that. In the production, as well, it can help us because there is, like, things, efficiency, but as well, if you take the pictures, the quality of the pictures, the check of the pictures, these things can be done and, done by and supported by AI. Customer service, everyone talks about bots, and so we do. As well, AI for both us, will impact our stakeholders. So we see it as a co-creator for our consumer. What does it mean? I think, you know, today, some consumers feel confident with creating and working with technology to get their photo products, turned into memories.
Others are less confident. So with AI, there are technologies behind that we can enable and that the consumer can be assisted in a much better way. And so if you think a little bit ahead, then as well, this means that there might be no, how to say, bad, in brackets speaking, photo book, because everyone will expect as well to have this perfect piece, whether he is talented or interested or investing a lot of time or not. For us as a company, we see AI as a co-pilot. What does it mean? We see it driving efficiency and especially there, everything which is concerning around data, and we have a lot of them. So the data management and the business intelligence are target areas for AI for us.
So it's reporting, but as well, it's increasing efficiency and creativity in terms of, if you think of marketing, how you shoot photos, how you translate texts, all these type of things we will be able to attack. We increase efficiencies and thinking of new business models. As well, what we notice, AI helps us for our employer branding, because we are a company combination of marketing and tech. This is important as well to recruit the best ones to go on for tech. Here we come to the third dimension or the third stakeholder, which are our employees. Here we see it as a coworker. The idea is there that we find ways that we can, that the employees can focus...
on value creation, and value creating processes. The routine tasks, we would like to enable and support by AI. This will not happen from one day to the other. We have expert teams, like the MAIC, like the Forschung und Entwicklung , development and research. We have it there, but we would like to make it a movement across the whole company, and the team members have to experience. We have just launched, beginning of the year, the CEWE GPT as one way that people can experience. To show you a bit of the future, and some of what we are doing already, I brought one film, and I will guide you through in a minute. This is an example of Pixum, and what you can see, what AI could do.
In fact, we could create still our photo books, but enriched with AI. How could this be? First, you could recognize the events, and these events can propose you texts and embossings, as well as it can automatically optimize your pictures by cutting parts off, or as well extending pictures. And here you see as well landmarks, recognizing where this picture has been taken. Here you see the example of how you could extend the picture, which has not been taken in a good quality or too small, and how you can add on things like pictograms and things you would like to have. So these are some examples in which direction it can go here on the example of Pixum. The good thing is, not everything is new for us, because we have already. We are using already AI.
But at the same moment, we are happy that we are on this journey, and we invest on this journey, that we as well will be able to shape this in the future. Coming to the next principle, the efficiency. Efficiency in our production, it's important because it enables us to lower our costs, the faster and the high quality of our products, and the better print experience. So I brought two examples how you can imagine this. This is our so-called bag sorter. It's a unique system we have introduced within the Photofinishing as a first mover. And what you can imagine is, in fact, that this is a process, and it's an enormous hall, which is automating mixed orders.
And that means if you can automatize mixed orders, you can be more efficient, especially when you have the peak season, so you can serve the consumer longer before Christmas. And all of us know that we are Amazonized and the orders come later in every year. The second example is we extend and still expand our production. Here, the example of Koszalin in Poland, where we have insourced the production of photo gifts, which we bought in before. And there is, for example, the, you know, the blanket and the thing we have introduced, but there are a couple of other things which we do in-house. So this means now we do 99% of the products we sell, we produce in-house, which makes us special as well as in the photofinishing industry . And we expanded for this.
You see the second hall. This is the new build in Koszalin. Coming to the next principle: sustainability. Sustainability, it's a passion, but as well, a responsibility, especially as market leader. We have been already very active on this one and, if we compare as well, we have managed already to achieve the 2025 targets of reducing the CO2 emissions by 2022. So again, last year, we could reduce further from 5.2 to 4.4 million tons in the year. The portfolio itself, you know, you have some good things about it because we don't produce on stock. And if you think of the duration the photo books are used as well, it's not a product which you which you throw away quite quickly.
You hold it sometimes even for generations. We reduce the plastics. So here the example, the insert of the Advent calendar is no plastic anymore. As well, we are supporting community projects in each of our places. In Oldenburg, for instance, there are some things which we do neighborhood support, but as well, we support things like the EWE Baskets. And as much as we do the sustainability for the consumer and for us, we do it for the planet because we have only one. And here you will receive as well, it's published today as well, the sustainability report, and it's the fourteenth in a row. You can check it already on CEWE....
And this is important for us as we are taking responsibility for photo culture, which is the base of our business, but which is as well the inspiration for our consumers, continuing to take pictures and inspiring them. And we managed in 2023, the biggest photo award worldwide, and this is something we are going on and continue to do in the future. The next principle are the brands. We talk about strong brands, distinct brands, and a house of brands. And the house of brands, we are going to support. Why? Because the brands give the consumer the trust, the orientation, and as well a way of creating value. And if they trust us, as well, they will be able to pay a little more for the USPs they are getting with us.
And bringing all this together, we come to the last principle, that we do all this as a united team, as one team. And with this one team, we have one common goal. We have a common set of principles, what you have seen. We have a house of distinct brands, where each of the brands play a special role, and we are reuniting this in a big platform, which we call the group, and this is what you are seeing around the CEWE Group. So this is the platform for all our brands and the common ground for all our teams. And each of the brands or the consumer will not notice. The consumer of Pixum will see the Pixum world. The consumer of CEWE will see the CEWE world.
But for us as a group, when we are representing the group, we have a platform. For this platform and for our team, we have defined eight strategic priorities we are going on, and going forward. Let's have a look in terms of those things. We have, first of all, what you see, that we are expanding the brands then in the middle or in the beginning. We have the brands, and we want to develop those brands, strengthen each of them, make them love brands, and very important, to differentiate them very well, that we can target the right consumer group. The second point is innovation stays as one of our priorities, and here, for Photofinishing , very much on products, innovation, and technologies. We would like to grow internationally with a focus on Europe. I think the question would have come afterwards.
The focus is Europe. As we see, there still is so much potential, where we can become market leader in areas where we are not yet there. The fourth point is developing the strengths of B2C and B2B. We have started with B2B, we went to B2C, and for most of the brands, B2C is the priority. For CEWE, the mix of the two is something we really treasure, and we will continue to develop going forward. This comes as well to the next point, which is a multi-channel approach we are having already. We want to turn this towards omni-channel, and this is going to be a big topic in-house. Connecting the dots, connecting the channels, and having the seamless experience for our consumer. The sixth part is that our consumer can entrance our brand by C...
If you take a CEWE Print by different angles. You can go to the CEWE Photostation in the trade, you can go mobile, you can go on the HOS as a software on the desktop, and all of those are staying very important. Some might ask the question, you know, that possibly the desktop is a declining one. No, we still grow with desktop, and it is still one of the most important sectors we have. We see that the mobile is going to create the biggest growth in percentage in the future, so the mobile acceleration is a focus. Retail, we have talked, so it's going more this direction of vertical integration, so becoming a sales channel for the Photofinishing and an experience store for our consumers.
And last but not least, to operations at the very heart of our company. So we vertically integrate the quality and efficiency as a target. So that means behind there is customer service and, of course, production. And if we do all this well, these are some topics which are going beyond 2024. But for 2024, we set ourselves a target of EUR 770 million-EUR 820 million as a turnover. And the lower range, as in the past years, we have set in order to be, you know, flexible as well with certain major macro developments, but we are targeting the upper end of it. And the same thing is true for the EBIT.
So we jump off the 83.9, and the range we would like to achieve is EUR 77 million-EUR 87 million, as well, targeting the upper part of it. And this brings us to the end. Concluding where we started, with the consumer, if we are continuing with those directions to make the consumer happy, to inspire them, to turn their photos into experiences, then we will be able as well to be successful and to celebrate these successes, as in the future, as we did now for the past. With this, I come to the end, and I thank you very much, and we will open the Q&A.
Thank you. Morning?