It is the nature of human beings to strive for progress and also the desire to provide shelter and a home. That is why humans build. To advance their progress and their dreams, they have always needed building materials. For 1.5 centuries, our building materials have been an enabler for human progress. These materials have helped people to be mobile and to connect the world, providing them a home for living, learning, working and protection.
Now it's time for the next step, to lay the foundation for our future, to achieve our goals, we have to rethink our ways of working. We have evolve our organization and work more closely together to develop sustainable solutions for our customers and the environment. Our future needs teamwork. We perform at our best when we combine our forces across all regions and build in our global strength. We are stronger together.
Our future needs strong players. We want to become even better partners for our customers because their success is our success. We solve their problems even before they arise. Our future needs creativity. We use our freedom to go in new directions.
Inventiveness knows no hierarchy. We unleash innovation to find new answers and deliver new solutions. There's one concern that drives us all across all countries all over the world. We must protect our planet. We think and act long term.
Our future needs solutions that last. That's what we offer, reliable and sustainable materials. We want to be the leader that turns our industry CO2 neutral once and for all. That is what we can be and how we will be material to build our future. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you on behalf of the Supervisory Board and the Executive Board to our 2nd Virtual Annual General Meeting.
Now ladies and gentlemen, due to an audio problem, I will repeat myself. I'd like to welcome you very warmly to our 130 second Ordinary Annual General Meeting, it's the 2nd virtual Annual General Meeting at 10:06. My name is Fridze Jurgen Heckmann, the Chairman of the Civil Rights Report. I'll take over the chairmanship of this meeting, I'd like to welcome the shareholders of our company, and I'm very happy and appreciate that many business partners and former and current employees our accompanying asset light to welcome the guests and the media and those to listen and watching the publicly available live stream. Ladies and gentlemen, today's meeting consists of 4 parts, the first part will deal with the description of the formalities.
Afterwards, I'll present the items on the agenda, and then we'll start with dealing those questions that we received until May 4 midnight. And the 4th part will deal with the voting on items to 12 on the agenda, because of the continuing corona situation, we cannot have an in person AGM because of this. This will be a virtual AGM. The background of this is that we want to take the necessary decisions in due time and because of this, we're using the legal provisions available. The executive the managing board with the agreement of advisory board decided, according to Section 1, paragraph 1 and paragraph 2 of the COVID-nineteen law to hold this meeting with the physical presence of the shareholders with the exception of the proxies of the company and to convened this meeting in a virtual way, and we decided to ask the shareholders to hand in their questions until the 4th May at the latest.
Now not all of the managing board members or advisory board members are here in person. Because of the restrictions due to the pandemic, we have reduced the attendance to a minimum to avoid any health risks. Present in this room are Doctor. Dominik von Achten as the CEO and Chairman of the Managing Board Doctor. Lawrence Mr.
Lawrence Neger as the advice of CEO and CFO and the notary public from Heidelberg, Ms. Anna Geric, who will take the minutes and myself as the Chairman of the Supervisory Board. Ms. Geric will notarize the minutes of today's general assembly. And I'd like to welcome you very warmly as well as the 2 colleagues from the managing board, and we have the 2 proxies of the company.
We are meeting in the dome hall of the headquarters at Berlinerstrasse 6 in Heidelberg, all members of the Board and the Supervisory Board not present are linked virtually, and they are in contact with us. For you, our shareholders, we are live streaming this event on the Internet. My introductory words and the speech of the CEO can be followed by everybody interested on the Internet and their simultaneous translation into English, too. As I said before, questions were submitted via the investor portal. We were able to process these questions and pursuant to the law and at our dutiful discretion, we will answer these questions.
Voting rights can only be exercised through absentee ballots or through giving a power of attorney to the company's proxies. Your absentee ballots or your instructions to the proxies of the company may be submitted via our investor portal until the beginning of the voting, you can also change your earlier votes. Shortly before the start of the voting, I will point this out to again, nevertheless, I'd like to ask you to vote quickly because in the livestream, there can always be delays. If you want to exercise your right to vote, our investor portal gives you the chance to launch objections against the decisions, if you want to file an objection, this is only possible until the end of the AGM, it cannot be done after the AGM. In the investor portal, you have A button that says, launching an objection.
And if you click on that, you can refer to an item on the agenda and logic objection that will then be presented to the non republic. And I'd like to ask you in the interest of an orderly proceeding not to wait until the very last minute if you want to declare your objection because there may be delays in the live stream due to a technical glitch. As usual, we will provide the list of participants right here in the meeting. And later, I'll give you the figures for the attendance, you must not record the meeting, that a recording of the official of the publicly available part of the AGM will be available on the Internet. Now I'd like to ask you to hold a minute of silence.
We mourn those active and former employees who died last year, all of them made a contribution to the existence and success of our company. We remember them in gratitude. Ladies and gentlemen, in 2020, there were no changes in the composition of the supervisory board. Now the changes to the composition of the managing board effective February 1, 2020, especially the takeover of the chairmanship by Doctor. Van Achten have been explained last year or were explained last year during last year's AGM.
Now the invitation to today's AGM happened with a complete agenda in the Federal Gazette on March 2021 and a printout of the Federal Gazette is for the officiating republics, this can be added as a document to the minutes. So this event has been called according to the law and in due time, we have not received any motions for an addition to the agenda and the information to banks and other intermediaries and shareholder associations, shareholders on the convening of the AGM happened in due time. All of the reports and documents for today's AGM were available on the Internet since the 23rd March, and they were sent out to people on request. Report of the Supervisory Board and the Corporate Governance report can be found in the annual report, Pages 8 through 13 and following Page 80. And the documents can also be found on the webpage of our company under the section Investor Relations and Dates and Publications, Annual General Meeting.
Since this is an AGM without the physical presence of the shareholders, communication cannot happen through requests to take the floor or motions in the context of a general debate. Rather, we will answer the questions submitted to us earlier, counter motions and nominations and procedural motions are not possible during the AGM today. On the basis of the legal profession, the company has give the shareholders the possibility to submit kind of proposals and nominations and to the extent that these happened within the deadline, they were published on the web page. Those making the proposal or those who have made the proposal or submitted the nomination, all of these proposals and nominations will be treated during the AGM as if they have been voiced during the AGM. This the right of the Chairman of the meeting to have a vote first on the proposal of the managing board remains unaffected.
Now the company on the 21st April of this year, we received 3 counter motions of the Umbrella Association of Critical Shareholders, EV Cologne, items of the Agenda 2, 3 and 4 under Section 1 and 26 Stock Operation Law and the counterproportion of Westpath Institutional Investors USA on item 3 of the agenda. All of the counter proposals were published on the Internet page immediately. The kind of proposal of the DACH VERBANT, the Brand Organization, rejects item 2, the proposal of the administration on the appropriation of profits, they reject this appropriation because in 2021, the company received the funds for short time working and this money of the federal employment agency should be repaid before paying a dividend. The counter proposal against item 3 rejects the proposal of the Board to give discharge to the members of the managing Board, pointing out the disregard for duty of care in terms of human rights due diligence in Indonesia, Togo, the Western Sahara and Westbank and the kind of proposal against item 4 moves to reject this charge of this advisory board, the justification is the alleged inadequate supervision of the managing board. And since the company emits to many greenhouse gases and the sustainability goals of the company are not sufficient.
The kind of proposal of Westpath, the institutional response refers to item 3 and rejects the proposal of the managing board of the administration to give discharge to the managing board because of insufficient information of the shareholders on complying with human rights due diligence and violation of this duty in Western Sahara, the West Bank and Indonesia, so the Managing Board and Subvisory Board will later comment on these kind of proposals.
The voting procedure is such. We'll first vote on proposals, resolution proposals on item 2, the dividend on item 3, that is the approval of the act of members of the managing board and we'll vote separately on everybody. And then there's also item 4 where we will vote individually on the approval of the acts of the supervisory board. And should these resolutions on items 1, 2, 3 be passed And should all the members of the managing board and supervisory board be discharged, that will automatically mean that the counter motions are rejected. The contra motions will only be voted on should the draft resolutions fail to find a sufficient majority.
We'll now get down to business. Item 1, That is the submission of the adopted financial statements, the approved consolidated financial statements of the group, The combined management support report of Heidelberg Cement AG and the Heidelberg Cement Group as well as the report on the Supervisory Board 2020 financial year. As I said, those documents have been available on the website of our company. And you will also have the chance to look into the remuneration Also the explanatory notes on Section 289315 of the Commercial Code Enter the corporate governance statement as well as the corporate governance report for financial year 2020. Under Item 1, as before, we will not have a resolution since the supervisory board has already adopted The annual financial statement as well as the consolidated financial statements, and they are thus official.
Now the details of the supervisory report, you will find all the details on Pages 8 to 13 of the annual report. And There's also the report of the CEO who will give you more details in a moment. Let me give you a summary and tell you on behalf of the supervisory board to be a part of the year 2020 was dominated by the coronavirus pandemic, Heidelberg's immense focus has remains on protecting the health of all our employees and business partners as effectively as possible. However, The corona pandemic also presented us with numerous challenges from a business perspective. There was a significant drop in sales volumes as a result of lockdowns in many countries in the Q2 of 2020.
And this is why in the AGM last year, we had proposed a major reduction in the dividends. Fortunately, in the 3rd and 4th quarters of the last year, there were considerable catch up effects. The company has shown first rate adaptability and has used the changing circumstances and was thus able to reduce costs within a very short period of time and to satisfy demand. And this led to a situation where despite a decline in revenue of about €18,900,000,000 to EUR 17,600,000,000 where that's a considerable sum. Despite of that, The result from current operations resulted in an increase in from €2,200,000,000 to €2,400,000,000 Also, at the same time, we were able to reduce net debt by €1,500,000,000 to €6,900,000,000 EUR 5,000,000,000 to EUR 6,900,000,000.
All of this was only possible because the managing board We did swiftly and resolutely and because all of our employees were outstandingly committed. The supervisory board thanks the managing board and all employees for this achievement, which should by no means be taken for granted. And this robust development allows us to look into the future with confidence. And that is reflected in this year's dividend proposal. In 2020, there was a generation change in our Managing Board.
The previous Deputy Chairman of the Managing Board, Doctor. Dominik von Achten, They took over as Chairman of the Managing Board from Doctor. Bernd Scheifele on the 1st February 2020. Despite the challenges by the corona pandemic, Doctor. Van Aften and his colleagues on the Managing Board to manage to make the company successful.
And as planned, in September 2020, The Managing Board presented a very convincing new group strategy beyond 2020. Needless to say that the strategy was viewed by the supervisory board and was approved. The company is ready to face the challenges that lie ahead and will invest even more Into the future oriented fields of digitization and sustainability. We will thus make a contribution to the global responsibility to limit the rise of worldwide temperature to below 2 degrees. And we are also accelerating our already ambitious goals to achieve a carbon neutral concrete.
At the same time, we retain a focus on the company's professionality and financial profitability. Ladies and gentlemen, we at Heidelberg Cement define success not only in terms of financial targets, But also in terms of how we get there. Sustainability plays a central role in our thinking and in our action. Our high scores in leading sustainability ratings are both a distinction and an incentive. The supervisory board explicitly supports the managing board's new strategy and is convinced Ladies and gentlemen, in implementing the strategy, last year, the supervisory board paid close attention to the actions of the managing board.
We did not only monitor the business policy, but also the strategic orientation and major business transactions. The Board of Managing agreed the company's new strategy with the supervisory board. Any deviations of actual business development from the plans were explained in detail by the managing board. Such deviations, of course, were in no small part due to the coronavirus pandemic and its effects. In view of the dynamic nature of developments and in order to ensure that the supervisory board was kept informed in a timely manner, extraordinary meetings were held between the regular meetings of the supervisory board and its committees.
The Supervisory Board did not only meet, as I said, in plenary, but there were also meetings of committees and there were also meetings outside, direct outside the meetings to play with the managing board and the supervisory board was directly involved in all decisions of fundamental importance for the group. The supervisory board is set of that the managing board has installed an effective risk management system, and that was certified by the auditor after They had convinced themselves of that fact. Furthermore, the supervisory board is satisfied as to the effectiveness of the compliance program. And once more, The audit committee had reviewed the situation effectively beforehand. Outside the scheduled meetings and without the participation of the managing board, the Chairman of the Supervisory Board as well as the Chairman and the Deputy Chairman of the Audit Committee also discussed topics relating to the audit in detail with the auditor.
And outside the meetings, I, as the Chairman of the Supervisory Board, was in regular contract with the Chairman of the Managing Board. The average attendance of Supervisory Board members was 99%. Participation rate At the committee meetings was 100%. There were no conflicts of interest of any supervisory board member when dealing with topics within the supervisory board, and there were also no consulting or other contracts for services or work between any member of the Supervisory Board and the group in the 2020 reporting year. The employee representatives, of course, have regular employment contracts with your company.
Now after the onset of the pandemic last year, the supervisory board and the audit committee dealt regularly and in detail with its impact on the company. This And a major impact on volumes and revenues affected the business situation and the development, but there to be a very strong leader in working practices and there are certainly longer term consequences for the markets of hydrobrack cement. The supervisory board placed particular emphasis on closely accompanying and supporting Annual Strategy Meeting in September, but was also dealt with in an extraordinary meeting in August. And that was necessary when the strategy was only incipient. There were other meetings, There were several meetings when the supervisory board discussed with the managing board the major investments, divestments and portfolio optimizations effecting the strategic goals of profitable growth of Heidelberg Cement and a further improvement of the balance sheet structure.
Sustainability was always on our minds, and there was also the subject of digitization. I mentioned the audit committee before. And in the reporting here, the audit committee dealt extensively with the further development to the company's corporate governance and the risk management as well as with the effectiveness of the compliance management system. In addition, the Managing Board regularly reported to the Supervisory Board and the Audit Committee on the company's measure measures to achieve an even more sustainable business model. One focus here was on other ways of reducing carbon emissions ore where this was not economically feasible on the capture and subsequent use and storage of the carbon dioxide produced.
In addition, the supervisory board and the audit committee addressed other funding matters. And the supervisory board approved the issuance of a bond under the EMTN program. It was created in the 1990s and allows the company to issue bonds to the capital market. The bond amount is EUR 650,000,000 with a term that runs until October 2024. The terms are good, but that also helps to smooth our maturity profile.
The prospectus underlying the EMTN program was updated in April 2020, and of course, we've updated it once more this year. And we can report to ensure that the funding of the company in the short, mid and long term is definitely secure. The supervisory board welcomes and encourages the concern of the managing board to refinance expiring financial current favorable interest conditions, thereby continuing to improve the financial result. We looked closely into the maturity profile and have Noted that it is, as usual, balanced and the company is earning a premium on its capital costs. The supervisory board has encouraged the managing board in its efforts to keep the leverage ratio in the investment grade range and of course, to continuously reduce it further.
The audit committee in its meetings also dealt with the 2019 financial statements and consolidated financial statements as Well as the points of focus for the audit, the reports regarding internal risk, risk management and compliance, The half year financial report and quarterly statements for the 2020 financial year, the preparation of the supervisory board's proposal for the 2020 annual meeting for the appointment of our new auditors, PwC. And after they were appointed, the then the audit committee also monitored the awarding of the audit contract to PricewaterhouseCoopers. And in this context, it's also you find the points of focus for the 2020 audit. And as Mr. Ulrich meetings and also reported to the full supervisory board.
The audit committee also monitored the non audit services offered by the company's auditor and has received reports from the managing board on the nature and scope of the non audit services performed by PwC. The Chairman of the Audit Committee is Mr. Luka Mucic. Mr. Mucic is the Chief Financial Officer of SAP, And he is not a financial expert pursuant to Section 100 of the German Stock Corporation Act.
He has the expertise in the areas of accounting and auditing. The personnel committee also met to in order to discuss and recommend to the supervisory board the variable managing board remuneration for 2019 as well as the definition of parameters It assured itself that all members of the managing board have carried out the required individual investment in Heidelberg Cement Shares as part of their remuneration system. On corporate governance, we have the current declaration of compliance, And you can find it on Page 81 of the corporate governance of the annual report. Also, We follow the diversity goals. We pursue them, and that's both true for the supervisory board.
While we take into Counter the specific requirements of the construction industry, health and safety, in particular, the goals defined for the management board and the terms and conditions are of great important as is sustainability and the sparing use of annual resources.
Now the compensation system for the members of the management board was adapted. In the future, the CO2 efficiency of the company will move into the foreground of the variable remuneration of the managing board will have a greater role to play. You can read up on the details under Item 7 of the AGM where this is described, the remuneration structure for the board can be found on Pages 86 2019 of the annual report that describes the remuneration of South American Board effective 1st January 2019 and the changes as of 1st January 2021, the different bodies dealt with the annual financial statement also to and the annual report also in the presence of the auditors, the supervisor report took into account the results of the auditors and results of the pre audit of the audit committee and the results of our own order in keeping was a result of the final audit. So advisory board, therefore, agreed with the annual statement of accounts and the group accounts. And there was also audit of the non financial declaration for fiscal 2020 by the Supervisory Board and the Audit committee, there were no objections and you find the non financial declaration on Pages 47 of our annual report.
As I said before, we also dealt with the dividend and with the underlying parameters. The supervisory board to take into account all parameters, followed the proposal of the managing board to appropriate the balance sheet profit, including the payment of a dividend of €2.20 after €0.60 in previous year due to the special conditions that I described. Ladies and gentlemen, now I'd like to give the floor to Doctor. Dominik van Aghten, who will now to talk about the annual financial statement and the annual result, and we'll give you some explanations. The outlook on the current fiscal 2021, you will describe other items on the agenda and you will report according to Section 289A paragraph 1, Section 315A paragraph 1 of Commercial Court.
Thank you very much for your attention so far. Now I'll give the floor to Doctor. Van Afton. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Hickman.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome also from my side, also on behalf of my 6 colleagues on the Managing Board, one of them is present here, Doctor. Nager, you will hear from later. The others will follow our deliberations on their screens, and I'd like to greet of those colleagues following our deliberations on screen, what a year, 2021. This has been a roller coaster for all of us. And this is a great opportunity for us on the occasion of this Annual General Meeting to look back on what happened.
I'd like to start out as last year with a thank you to 4 of those stakeholders, as we say today, who are very important to the company, dear shareholders. First of all, I'd like to thank you. Thank you for your loyalty. Even during a period of time where you were not so happy about some decisions last year that to Mr. Heckmann pointed out to you, and we are happy that in the last few months, we've been able to to offer you a contribution in terms of a better share price, and I hope that you will stay loyal to us in the future and that you will remain interested in what is happening to Heidelberg Cement.
My second thanks go out to our customers. For our customers, 2020 was a crazy year. And without their hard work to keep the job sites running and to maintain operations without that commitment, we wouldn't have been able to sell our products. To invest. And during these times, the innovation comes from us, but in many cases also from you, our customers, and because of this, we are very happy to continue working with you.
Our third thanks go to our suppliers and service providers. We hope that we have made progress in designing interaction with you even better and more efficient. And we would like to thank you for your support during the many winter repairs, which are very important for the company's success. And during these times, due to COVID-nineteen, these repairs were a particular challenge. And last but not least, I'd like to thank our employees all over the world.
First of all, we should like to thank of our colleagues in India. Many of you will have seen on television how dramatic the COVID-nineteen situation is in India, and our employees are also impacted by that, and we hope that the situation will quickly improve. All of our 50,000 employees did a sterling job last year, as Doctor. Heckman said, and our thanks go out to of all of our employees all over the world for their great commitment and their great work that they did. Before I referred to the results of 2020 and the further development and the 2020 strategy.
The Beyond 2020 strategy, I would like to take you on a visit of some of our construction sites that we are working on right now. Some of them have been finished or they were finished in 2020. I'll start with the biggest one. The biggest construction site, this is Terminal 3 of Frankfurt Airport. You may be wondering, oh my god, are they building a new terminal in Frankfurt, yes, because Fraport thinks in the long term, we help people and companies with our products in order to come together in Terminal 3 in Frankfurt is a great example of this.
Almost 250,000 cubic meters of concrete made by Heidelberg Cement are paved there, are installed there and up to 4,000 people work on that job site, and Fraport is making a major effort to improve to clearly improve the energy efficiency compared to Terminal 12. The energy footprint will be reduced by 50% on Terminal 3. So this is a construction site where we like to make our contribution and we are bringing people together by, for example, having some people with Indian roots that can fly home to India, which is also important and possible in these days during these days. And there's another construction site that I will address later, and this has to do with our innovative power. Now we put an exclamation mark behind this, this is the development of the first 3 d printed house in Beckham in Northumbrys failure, and later I'll address this innovation.
And number 3, those of you who have been following us for a longer period of time as shareholders, for instance, you know that even before and in particular now, we are trying to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity and the Art Museum, Bouff du Commerce in Paris is a great example. Originally, this was a stock market, and now this is an art collection. The Pinault collection uses this building at this great architecture, as we think, was built by Japanese architect, Tadao Ando, and he is well known for working a lot with concrete and wood, and he built great buildings before. And in recent years, he has been very committed to the environmental topic in Japan, so we find a great connection between tradition and new innovative ideas on the other hand. So with these three impressions of our job sites, I'd like to take you to the key messages the past year.
Mr. Heckmann mentioned some of the key items, so I can keep my summary short, we really managed, in spite of this roller coaster ride, to achieve record results with our team for our shareholders, and we are very happy about this. And this gave us the chance to return to a progressive dividend payout earlier than expected, so after we had to reduce the dividend to €0.60 last year, we have been able to increase the dividend to €2.20 a little higher compared to 2019, so an increase of 5%, and we hope that this is a clear contribution to our shareholders. Now 2021 started off very nicely, very strongly. Normally, it's a small quarter as far as the total result is concern at the beginning of the year was characterized by a very difficult 2 months.
The winter returned during those 2 months. And in March, we got off to a great start and everything worked well, and we to get momentum into April, and we had a good start into the year. Zachmann pointed out that our first goal of the Beyond 2020 strategy is that we wanted to build up on a solid concrete foundation as far as our financial power is concerned, and we managed to do so last year, we were able to significantly reduce net debt, and I'll come back to that point later. What is very important for our future is the topic of sustainability and CO2. And I will also address these subject matters in detail.
We have made major strides in implementing our CO2 road map. Now personally, I do not just want to set ambitious goals in this area, but we want but I want to achieve these goals and even exceed these goals in the best of cases. So generally, our outlook for 2021 is fairly optimistic, and we published a guidance on this. So this year, our we want to make sure that our results for NAFTA depreciation will be increased slightly. And it looks like it this looks very likely after this good start into the year.
Now I'll take you on a journey in terms of what we promised and what result was and as a member of the managing board, we want to create trust and reliability. Through our reliability, we want to convince you and ask for your trust in us. Last year, we announced a result be for depreciation of over €3,500,000,000 and we achieved €3,700,000,000 so that's plus 6.1 percent like for like, we wanted to push net debt below €7,000,000,000 and we reached €6,900,000,000 We announced to bring the leverage ratio below a multiple of 2x EBITDA and what we achieved was leverage ratio of 1.86. And after the pandemic, we announced the savings program of €1,000,000,000 and we achieved savings of €1,300,000,000 So announcing something is one thing, reaching the goal is another. And we are very ambitious.
And now you can see from our point of view the most important key figures, which we set for our 2020, beyond 2020 strategy, we're not happy with the sales development, I'm quite honest about this. Revenues declined by 7%, by 5% were due to a strategic decision to reduce the HC Trading business to an area yes, from we took this away from an area where we didn't like the risk profile, so this was a strategic decision. The organic decline was minus 2% and the results before depreciation of current operation was 3 point €1,000,000,000 and the revenue from current operation was €2,400,000,000 plus 8 percent, adjusted earnings per share of €6.90 plus 8 percent and very important, of course, is the return on invested capital. This increased to 7.9 percent plus 1.4 percentage points. So I believe it's fair to say that together we did a very good job.
We will not keep from you, but there were a couple of things that 1 or the other shareholder discussions in the Q2 of last year, that is after We had seen earnings and volume drop by some 90%. Well, at that point, we decided to change our midterm forecast, and we think this is what you need to do. It is absolutely the duty of a managing board With business mind, and this is why we needed to Reevaluate our portfolio, and this is how we came up with an impairment of EUR 3,400,000,000 And it's the goodwill impairment and a write down on assets. And now here, you see the distribution of the impairment. It's mainly the U.
Okay. It's Western and Southern Europe. And at the end of the day, this did not have an influence on the operating performance of the company and it did not have an influence on the cash flow. And well, I like to do that personally. I like to see That it has a positive effect on the return on the invested capital.
Let me now turn to net debt, and I mentioned that initially. Here, we have reached a record high with EUR 2,200,000,000, Almost EUR 500,000,000 up or almost 30%. And we've reduced net debt to EUR 6,900,000,000. That is a reduction by EUR 1,500,000,000, which is quite a step down. And that brought the leverage ratio to EUR 1 important fact, of course, for our institutional investors and all others, both rating agencies, that is Standard and Poor's and Moody's, have upgraded us.
And so we have already reached one of the milestones in our Beyond 2020 strategy. Let me now turn to the dividend. You can see here the development since 2,009. And Yes, this is where the chart starts. And as I said last year, with the EUR0.60 I No, that we were quite tough on you.
It was quite a sacrifice for you. So but since you gave Made a major contribution last year. We want to pay you back. And this is why this year, we decided to increase the dividend to 2020 again and would ask the AGM for its approval. And that means that we will continue Our progressive dividend policy.
Well, for you, the dividend is important for you since you are our shareholders, but the share price will also matter to you. And for a while, I must say that we were not really fully satisfied, and we'll have to to measure ourselves against what the market generally does in the last couple of months, We have become more confident again, but I'm telling you quite clearly that we are not satisfied with what we have reached. We could do better, And that's what we'll keep working on. Right then briefly, an outlook. Q1 of 2021, you may have been wondering.
The figures, Since they were much better than market expectations, we published them as soon as we could. And our revenue had reached EUR 4,000,000,000, a minor increase that his revenues have picked up once more in 2020. As I said, we were still negative. And that means that the RCOBD and the current RCOBD is much better. And almost EUR 440,000,000 EUR540,000,000 EUR520,000,000 EUR320,000,000 EUR320,000,000 that is The profits from current operations, the percentages, don't pay too much attention to them.
It's just a Harmless first quarter, the quarter that's never very good, and so let's enjoy it while we can. And let's just hope that the business will continue As well in the next quarters, but we'll certainly do our very best. So the underlying trend is certainly okay. The construction industry is Still in flow, there is still the population growth in emerging markets, And there's also a trend towards globalization. And in the more developed markets, in the mature markets, there's a trend away from urbanization.
People seem to love green, seem to love gardening even more than in the past. And so in many metropolitan areas in the more mature markets, we see a trend for the rural life, And that is a market dynamic that we'll certainly keep an eye on and where our products can be Make use of an important driver for 2021 and beyond is infrastructure. You know that gigantic sums are being spend in the EU and the United States, a lot of money is being paid out to drive the infrastructure development and as an industry and as a company, we do benefit. Social trends, society trends, Mr. Heckmann has made mention of them, They're pretty straightforward and everybody is aware of them.
And we are leaders of the pack here. We need solutions for sustainable construction. For Ant, we need to review and adapt our business model. This is why digitization and sustainability, including innovation, have come into our focus, and I'll give you more details in a moment. Now Mr.
Heckmann mentioned our strategy, And we had a detailed discussion in the company with the supervisory board, and we presented our strategy last Yes. In simple terms, we have 2 big blocks. We do not want to throw out what we used to have because it's not bad. We'll keep a lot of it, but we will improve it where we can. So our first goal is to simplify what we have and to improve it.
And the second very important block is innovation. And so within those two blocks or parts of the strategy, We have a couple of sub items that I explained. So under simplify and improve of the existing, we want to improve things In sales, logistics and production, we really wanted to have business excellence. We are there already in some But if we look very closely through the magnifying glass, there may be one or the other thing that could very much improved. And this is something that we do in our countries and in the central functions.
Mr. Heckmann already mentioned Portfolio Management. In absolute terms, portfolio management is something that drives us in 60 countries. And after a detailed analysis, We felt we better streamline that and focus on core countries. We need to have a better focus, and this is why it's so important.
And last but not least, we want to help develop our people and simplify our business processes. The second block or part of the strategy contains the subjects of sustainability and digital transformation, you saw that in our purpose film. It's very important for us to be champions in the field of carbon neutrality, we want to be net 0, and this is what we are fully focused on. At the same time And apart from sustainability, this is one of my personal hobby horses, I'd be open about that, is digital transformation. Now this industry may not have had a 40 in this field.
Well, we may I wouldn't talk about revolutionizing it. But what we want is to drive things forward here, push things here and to work closely with our customers and our suppliers to make things more efficient. And well, we can hope to make business much more attractive that way. But all of that can only work if we do a decent reasonable Capital allocation because at the end of the day, ladies and gentlemen, why we're here is to create value By being sustainable. Deliver sustainable shareholder value is the modern wording for that.
Now we have set ourselves ambitious targets, which you can see here, and we want to be there by 2025. This is about structural profitability of the company, the RCOBD margin, the margin of earnings for depreciation, and we want to bring that up by 3 percentage point or 300 basis points. Then there is the return on invested capital, ROIC. And We want to raise it to much more than 8%. Leverage ratio is to be in the corridor That is and sustainability, well, we really pulled our ambitious goal forward and by 2025, the 30% reduction is what we want to have achieved compared to 1990.
And digital, last but not least, 75% of our sales volume is to be done with digital products. So what have we achieved so far? And well, this is a great day to show you. We are working on a portfolio tweaking it in many 3 things have already been done. Egypt, a majority participation in Egypt was delisted in order to streamline the structure in Egypt and give us more clout.
Then a majority participation in Hilal Cement in Kuwait was sold. Just yesterday, you may have learned about that in the press, the aggregates business and already mixed business in Greece was sold off and will focus on cement Only in Greece. We work on other portfolio adjustments, and the press has speculated about that. Yes, it's True, we are working on a couple of points. And in the course of the year, you will probably hear from us again.
We made hand way with regard to carbon reductions, Carbon dioxide emission reduction, we could always say, yes, you could do better, and we wouldn't contradict here. But we've accelerated our goals, and we did not only focus more on those goals. And even though We needed to readjust our activities. We are right on track. Until 2019, We had a reduction of some 21%.
And then last year, 2.3% reduction is what we achieved. That's the 13 kilograms of difference that you see between the EUR 589,000,000 and EUR 576,000,000. You can calculate that for yourselves. Compared to the last 29 years, that is quite a bit increase. So We had a reduction of 8, 8.5 kilograms per year, and now we increased that to 13.
Clearly, we are on track here, and we need to take the next steps now in order to reach our ambitious goals. And we all need to be on the same page there. And that's why We decided and we think we really have become some kind of champion here, if I look left and right. Now our original purely financial goals complemented by a Carbon dioxide multiplier, you may wonder why what that means. Well, the financial goal For the variable remuneration is paid is multiplied with a carbon multiplier, Which can be between EUR 700,000,000 EUR 100,000,000 EUR 100,000,000.
And below that line, that means if we miss our carbon targets, Our people, and that includes the managing board, may lose up to 30% of their variable compensation, if we exceed our targets, the variable compensation will not necessarily grow by much, budget might compensate a lower financial performance, might offset a loss So if we don't make our climate goals, the full bonus cannot be paid. Personally, that's very important, and the managing board finds that's really very important. I can assure you, In the company, well, that caused, well, some kind of shock, yes? And we No, really on the same page and are on track. We feel this was quite a poor thing to do.
But in the 1st weeks months, it has shown That was the right thing to do.
Now talking about innovation, it's not possible without new technologies. And because of this, we are looking intensively at CO2 capture in several projects all over the world and where we want to use and we are using different technologies for this. Amin washing has been developed further in Oxyfuel and Linelac. These are all unfamiliar terms for most view, and I don't have the time to address them in detail, but we're working on 5 or 6 different processes with microalgae and sunlight in our sites in Morocco, so we're using different processes that we want to use in order to see which possibility or which path allows us to make the greatest headway, but processes are only as good as they can be scales in their industrial use. And when it comes to scaling these processes, we must be ahead.
So we're proud that together with the Norwegian government or partner in Northern Europe, we are we will Breequip or Brevik works. And by 2020, we will save we'll capture 400,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions, and we will store these in the oil and gas fields on the coast of Norway, CO2 storage, of course, can only be a temporary solution. It's a valid solution, mind you, but it's not just about storage, CO2 storage, it's also about usage of this CO2 and this usage will ideally lead to a circular economy. When you look at the product development that we are planning for, then you can see that in 4 areas, we have made major strides. On the one hand, in the field of low carbon concrete products, we have achieved progress in England and in Norway to bring down our CO2 footprint and our Italian colleagues are also doing well, our colleagues at Itau Cementi with the Regenera and 3 d printing, which was co developed in Italy, and they have very innovative solutions for low carbon building.
Then when it comes to the circular economy, there is the Ecocrete product in Holland, in the Netherlands, where we use 100% recycled aggregates. And on the right hand side, in our administration, we have the topics of TOSM and PowerCrete. This is about a better energy balance of the products and a contribution to even cleaner air. So these are just a few small examples. And in every country, we're intensively working on further developing these products together with our customers.
My name is Georgios Tylkos. I'm from Greece. I have been living in Beckham for 24 years now, and it was just by coincidence 2 years ago, I saw a video on the Internet that billings can be printed, I got the permission of the mayor and I started implementing this project. And with this project, with the 3 d printing process, we're dealing with a residential housing, 2 storey house, per storey 80 square meters and the plans have been finished a long time ago and now we're building this. The differences in building in such a way are that we do not place one stone on top of the other, but we put one layer of cement on top of another layer, and this is done by a machine, and this is a very special feature.
To do such a thing as for the first time as a planar architect is very special we need a special mortar from Heilberg Cement and Itau Cimenti. And what's special about this mortar is that it is extruded via the printer, one layer is put on the next and needs to achieve a stable form very quickly. It needs to queue very quickly, but not too quickly because otherwise the layers will not connect to each other because of this, this is a very special mortar.
About the backroom project, we wanted to be the first ones doing this in Germany for the 3 d printing method. There are no regulations in Germany at the moment. We don't have any standards. So we needed special commitments By the authorities for this project, they wanted us to show them that the walls will bear the lot, This is a safe material and safe method for building walls. And together with our Italian colleagues from Bergamo to And our other partners like PERIF or the Technical University of Munich, by using lots of experiments and knowledge, we could show that this is An absolutely safe method.
So we did use only mineral materials. We did not need any steel to rebar the walls. And this is quite special. We were looking at a really low CO2 footprint. And because you place the material only Where it is needed, you can save up to 50% of the material.
We deeply care about the sustainability value of our products. Heidelberg Cement, we aim to provide the most sustainable building materials.
What this means for me is that I'm building the 1st printed house in Germany and Europe, and I'm very proud that I implemented my idea. Well, my special thanks go out to Jennifer Scheidt. You saw her in the video, including her team and they were very committed to this project, they made it possible in the first place. And now there is a follow-up project in Bavaria. And what may be interesting to you is that Jennifer Scheid mentioned that this reduces the material needed.
This means that the footprint will be much less and you saw the footprint where the building owner can really do what he likes. To the developer can do what he likes. And between the first and second project, the first project took 4 months to build the building in the 2nd project, the square meter, there were more square meters involved, but it only took 2 months. So the speed inherent in these innovations is enormous, and we expect to move ahead with this kind of speed, not just with regards to this innovation but with other innovations, too. When it comes to digital transformation, we're also making great progress.
It is our claim to be the 1st industrial digital company in the building materials industry, this is a very high claim, but we are doing well, and this is based on 3 foundations. H Connect, this is about the efficient interaction with our customers per month all over the world, we have a very loyal user base. More than 70% of customers use our products every month. And you may remember the order of magnitude I mentioned, greater 70% is the goal for 2025. Today, we are above 30% of group sales, which are covered by these products in the different countries, the second foundation is H Produce.
This regards to digitization of our production. And here, we are focusing on 4 digital tools in the field of cement production. One important tool is the optimization of production planning also with regards to an optimized mill operation, especially with regards to the use of energy and after our first pilot 2 years ago, we have started rolling out, and it's being used in 12 plants already, and we will accelerate this rollout. And last but not least, a topic called edge service, where we are trying hard to use artificial intelligence and robotics in order to improve accounting processes and to digitize our supply chain, too. So where are we right now?
What is the status quo? You may remember, this is the same slide, but now with a few markers as to what we achieved in 2020 as far as the RCO 3D margin, we improved it by 206 basis points. When it comes to return on invested capital, we achieved an increase of 1.4 percentage points to 7.9 send 2020 and with the leverage ratio, we have reached the corridor in the range of 1.5% to 2%. CO2 emissions have being reduced, as I showed you, by 2.3% in only 1 year. And in terms of the digital transformation, 30% have been achieved, and we will continue making quick progress.
And now on to my forecast for 2021. As I said before, there will be a slight increase in revenue, ACHOBD and RCO on a like for like basis. Our net investments in property, plant and equipment will be kept at €1,200,000,000 last year. We were below €1,000,000,000 This cannot be done in a sustainable way if we want to further develop the company. So the net investment in tangible asset will be used before acquisitions, and ROIC should rise above 8% if we want to keep the leverage ratio within the corridor between 1.20 1.520 rather.
And I'll to finalize with a summary of my core messages that you can see on the left, and there's one more comment that I would like to make political developments, you have first seen and heard that the federal constitutional court decided in recent days to give the next generation a right to climate protection. And politics has responded very quickly. They you may have noticed that yesterday, the climate goals of the federal government have been titan drastically, 65% reduction by 2,030, 88% reduction to continue to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow and grow. We, as a company, we, as Heidelberg Cement, accept this challenge with joy, and we will work hard on achieving this and on making a contribution to achieving this political goal. We owe this to society and to our future generations.
For this, we need the legal framework conditions. There is no question about this, but for us one thing is important. We work for ambitious goals. But most of all, we work for achieving these goals and for implementing these goals and along these lines, I look forward to the next year. We will be there, and we hope that 20 21 will also turn out to be a successful year for Hydroxyzmann.
Thank you very much. Well, thank you very much, Doctor. Tim, for the report the previous year, and thank you for this positive outlook in spite of all challenges, both with regards to this year and the future. Ladies and gentlemen, with this, we have reached the public part the publicly available part of our live streaming of this year's Annual General Meeting, the further course of the meeting cannot be observed by the shareholders and their proxies. Because of this, if view were in the live stream and if you are shareholders, please register for the internal live stream with your password.
And as to the external listeners who cannot take part now because they're not shareholders, now I'd to invite you to become shareholders, then next year, we will look forward to seeing you in an in person meeting and hopefully not in another virtual meeting