Gentlemen, this year, the 3 co CEOs, Robert Gens, David Schneider and Ruben Ritter, will again report jointly on the past financial year 2018. Ruben Ritter will then say a few words in conclusion about the additional legally required information.
More than 400,000 items, 27,000,000 customers in 17 markets, A decade of fashion, a journey that took us further than we ever thought possible. Blazing a trail where we double down, deepen customer relationships, partner with brands, empower employees to think like founders, go bigger, act faster, own their journey, where our passion is fashion, brands, tech convenience, the customer, Zalando, the starting point for fashion. Well, we would also like to welcome you very quarterly on behalf of today's AGM. We are happy that you have all come to jointly look back with us on the year 2018 because 20 18 was an important year for us because it was our 10th anniversary as a company. And we I believe, were quite surprised about this 10th anniversary ourselves because we thought we haven't been doing it for such a long time, so time flew by.
But then again, we were also happy, grateful and also slightly proud with regard to what has happened over this course of time. We have more than 15,000 employees. We have a brand that is almost familiar to everybody. In Europe, we have more than 26,000,000 customers per year, and they receive their fashion products from us. We did look back a lot, but we also knew that we had to look ahead.
We discussed a lot what it is we need to do, what it is we want to do so that the next 10 years will be equally successful as the 1st 10 years, and this is what we want to talk about with you today as well. In 2018, our business has developed very quickly. We serve 2 more countries, Ireland and Czech Republic. We have a new category, cosmetic product. So we offer an even broader range of products to our customers.
We have the Zalando Plus program, which focuses on our very best customers that was developed from a pilot to a rollout. We had a lot of new achievements and records. Last year's Black Friday, we succeeded in gaining 220,000 new customers in one day only. And during peak times, we had more than 4 1,000 orders in just one minute. But what was most important, we worked on our long term goals.
We continue to work on implementing the platform strategy. 2018 was the 1st year where the partner program made up more than 10% of our overall business. We'd like to take the opportunity at the very beginning of this presentation to thank all of our employees. We're extremely proud of the Zalando team. We're always impressed and grateful for the passion that everybody is putting into the company day in, day out.
So we'd like to say thank you very much for the past 10 years and particularly for the work done in 2018. When we look back on the financial figures of the past year, the first thing I'd like to say is 2018 also had some difficult moments, 1st and foremost, the Q3, where we weren't able to perform as well as expected. There were a number of reasons for this. First, the difficult season, which made life difficult for us, but also for many of our competitors as we later on found out. The impact of the transformation that we were going through from a wholesale model towards a platform model and some short term wrong developments in the business that we were able to quickly rectify.
But we believe that we found the right answer to this situation. We had a very good final sprint and an excellent 4th quarter and again, a very good new first quarter. And during that time, we always try to think back to what the long term growth targets of the company by 20%. So still very strong growth despite the difficult Q3. Towards the end of the year, we had more than 26,000,000 active customers.
We had enormous scope, more than 3,000,000,000 site visits. So this is tremendous and is of strategic importance as well. And we had an adjusted EBIT of €371,000,000 Let me also say something with regard to the balance sheet profit of 2018. For 2018, we had 163,000,000,670 €775.42 As you know from the agenda, we propose carry forward the entire balance sheet profit to new account. This proposal is in line with our strategy that you are familiar with of investing available resources into further growth.
Well, as Ruben has already mentioned, we have made significant strategic advances last year, especially in 3 areas, which I would like to speak about in particular now. It's digital experience, convenience and assortments. First of all, let's speak about digital experience. As you know, we continue working towards providing the best possible customer experience on the Landau. And in order to do that, we invest in areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and providing customers with more customized services.
Maybe one example for your new product we launched last year is the algorithmic fashion companion that you learned about in the video. It's an algorithm with a sense for fashion. It learns from previous orders which colors and articles fit together, and it makes outfit suggestions based on past orders, which is great for customers because we offer them inspiration. And it's also great for us because through the outfit suggestions, we can increase the basket size. Let's come to convenience now.
We further expanded our logistics network in 2018. We started new warehouses, which is we laid the cornerstone for them in Poland and Italy, and we opened a logistics center near Stockholm. We successfully launched Zalando Plus as a red carpet we roll out for our customers to pay an annual fee and we offer them a whole range of additional services like quick delivery. Zalando Plus has been increasing customer satisfaction and profitability with customers, which is why we're very excited and very positive with regard to the potential Zalando Plus will hold in the future. It's a very important project.
We attribute a lot of potential to Zalando Plus has now been rolled out in most parts of Germany in the meantime. And this type of deep customer relations is precisely what we believe is holding great potential for the future. Let's come to assortment now, the 3rd area. We were able to add numerous new brands to both the wholesale and the partner program. Let me state a couple of examples.
From H and M Group, we've added the 3rd brand with Monkey, and we've got Bershka and Euterki, the 6 Inditex brand on our partner program. And then we've got Missoni from an end and BOSS business in our premium assortment, which has also grown. We've achieved a significant expansion of our assortment through the beauty category. In March 2018, we started in Germany, and we've expanded our business to 7 additional markets in the course of the year. In the meantime, customers can now access more than 10,000 beauty products from 250 Brands.
So you can see that year on year, we create and have a better, wider assortment for our customers to enhance their experience.
Another very interesting area is sustainability. Sustainability is becoming a lot more than just a to do aspect. It's an important driver for our business success. We want to enable our customers to live up to their values when they choose their products, and that's why we do our part to become a more sustainable platform. While doing that, we focus on 3 areas.
First, we want to have eco friendly e commerce. Secondly, we want to provide the best sustainable selection of sustainable fashions, which really provide customers with an alternative. And thirdly, we create transparency so that customers can really make a determined choice. And in 2018, we were able to make further progress. We reduced our CO2 footprint per order by 16%.
We provide better navigation filter product solutions for sustainable products. And we have demands for improving the supply chain, our ZEP Impact program, for example. In February, we presented our strategy. We are becoming the starting point for fashion. And that's why I'd like to briefly summarize what this means for us.
We see a very clear customer trend to purchase pieces that are relevant for their lives, and we want to give them this one access point. For example, when listening to music, the first access point is Spotify. When I want to have entertainment, I look at what's new on Netflix. And when I want to travel, I might get my travel offers somewhere for social contacts elsewhere. But at the same time, we know that customers only use a very limited amount of apps.
How many apps do you download? How many make it to your home screen? And how many do you actually use? And Zalando has expressed a clear objective of becoming such a starting point. We want to be the app that customers click on whenever they think of fashion.
And we see this in the behavior of our customers. We know that customers want to have their favorite brands in one place. Usually, they don't know what piece, what brand they are looking for when they come onto our website. We see this. Every second order in our shop contains more than one brand, and we also see that customers buy about 13 different brands per year on Zalando.
It doesn't make sense for each brand or each occasion to go and use a different app. And secondly, we also see that our customers very clearly gravitate towards mobile devices. In just 2 years, our GMV via mobile devices has increased from 22% to 44%. And the advantage is that the customers access us directly. They then come via Google.
They spend more time and look at more products. And at the end of the day, they also buy more. And thirdly, we also see that we're in a very good starting positions. Ruben mentioned the 3,000,000,000 site visits. So we are the fashion destination with the most visits in all of Europe.
And if we add all of this up, we see the general trend towards aggregated offers, trends towards mobile devices and apps, customer behavior, fashion behavior and our starting point. So we see that we are on the very best path of becoming this starting point for fashion, and Robert can tell you how to get there.
Well, the most important question for us is how do we get there being the starting point for fashion for our customers? Our answer to that mainly is that our platform strategy we're pursuing is the key lever to get there. So it's an interaction between us, our customers and our brand partners. That's key. Customers want a broad and an updated assortment for themselves, and we can only offer this if we have the right product and the right size on the platform.
So what we ultimately want is to give our customers a feeling that if something cannot be found in Zalando, it probably doesn't even exist. So assortment is only one part of the equation. The other part is convenient ordering and returns process and an all around carefree experience
for our customers.
In the comparison, we always want to offer the most convenient way of experiencing and purchasing fashion. And some examples of that are free delivery and returns options, but also our sizing recommendations. Brands benefit when they join our platform massively. The €3,000,000,000 site visits in 2018 were already the gateway to European digital fashion consumers for the brands. And for this reason, brands can concentrate on their core competencies through the collaboration with us, which actually is to develop their own brands and products.
So in 2019, too, we will work on further moving forward the platform strategy. Well, the core of the platform is the partner program. And currently, the partner program amounts to 10% of our GMV. And until 2024, we're planning to increase the share to 40%. With the partner program, we enable our partners to present their brands to customers on the Zalando platform and and that they can successfully advance their own businesses in the digital space.
Brands on the Partner Program get offered the Zalando Fulfillment Solution, and we offer them our logistics expertise through that. So they benefit from our logistics network and can thus concentrate more on their own core business. ZFS has been growing very successfully. Meanwhile, around 30% of the Partner Program articles are dispatched successfully via the Land of Fulfillment Solutions. And we assume that in the future, about 70% of the articles from the partner program will be dispatched this way.
In addition, we offer our partners support in addressing the target group with a framework of ZMS, Zalando Media Solutions. We see strong growth in that, more support for their brands and their products under Zalando platform. Here, we can see strong growth again. It's 60% year on
year.
So these and other services help our partners reach their customers online and be digitally successful through the investment into the Zalando platform strategies. So how this will be reflected in figures, we'll hear from Ruben.
Fjero, Regel Castelara, AGM. You might have seen this slide in a similar form before. We believe it's a very important slide because it shows that there is a huge growth potential for us. I think there are 2 ways of looking at Zalando. One is by saying if you take into account the fact that it's just a 10 year old company, it's already very big.
And the second way of looking at the company is saying if you think of how big Zalando could be, it is still very small. We ourselves prefer the second way of looking at it because we know that despite all of the growth, we currently only hold 1.5% of the European market. And we believe that in 5 to 10 years, the European fashion market will grow to a volume of 4 €50,000,000,000 And we also believe that 25% and over of this market will be online then. And we have the goal of servicing more than 5% of this market. So for us, it's clear that we continue to focus on growth and gaining market shares.
Robert just explained how important the partner program is in using the scalability. And one indicator is becoming increasingly important, the gross merchandise volume, GMV. It measures the overall spend of customers on the Zalando partner program. In contrast, revenue is wholesale plus commission from the partner program in 2018. Our GMV was €6,600,000,000 A couple of years ago, we already said that by 2020, we want to achieve a GMV of €10,000,000,000 And we are on a good path towards achieving this.
In the beginning of this year, at our Capital Markets Day, we said that until 20 24, we want to achieve a GMV of €20,000,000,000 which would correspond to a market share of about 4 point 5%. So we continue to focus on growth. I can tell you with regard to the Q1 of 2019 that we started the year very successfully and that we are developing consistently according to our strategy. We, at the beginning of the quarter, had more than 27,000,000 active customers, almost 1,000,000,000 site visits. And at the same time, we had new record levels of customer satisfaction.
The feedback of our customers with regard to our service has never been as good as during the Q1 of 2019. GMV grew by 23%, and we were very profitable in the Q1. So this corresponds to our overall financial year forecast. We want to achieve a GMP growth of 20% to 25%. We are aiming at revenue growth at low end of this range, so somewhere around 20% and adjusted EBIT between €175,000,000 €225,000,000 €300,000,000 are the forecast investment volume.
But we hope that in 2019, we will be able to make another important step ahead, namely becoming the starting point for fashion in Europe.