Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dear shareholders, dear board members, dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure on behalf of the company's management to give you today an update on the company, on our strategy, and on our business performance. As our chair of the board of directors was saying, our company has more than 100 years of Finnish heritage, and today we are a global company serving customers around the world and consumers around the world in all continents. As you know, we are specialized in nowadays, over the last 15 years, we have specialized in packaging for food and everyday necessities, and I should even say we are specializing in sustainable packaging for food and everyday necessities.
We do that by serving customers, local customers, as well as global customers, in the different sectors in which we operate: the food service sector, the FMCG, as well as retail in some geographies and healthcare industries. We do that thanks to our three complementary technologies: the paperboard conversion, which is at the roots of our company, the molded fiber, and then the flexible packaging. Those are three complementary technologies. I'll come back to this about our strategy. There is one thing that makes us really proud, but at the same time, extremely responsible about our business. Actually, two things. One is driving sustainability for the future, for the future of the planet, for the next generations.
But the other one is that when we work every day, we realize and think about the fact that our products are touching billions of people every day in their home, out of home, in their office, in the stores, everywhere in the daily consumption. And that's giving us a privilege, but also a real responsibility when it comes to, for instance, quality, food safety, and convenience. Without further, I would like to... If I get the technical now, too much. Sorry.
I would like to introduce the executive team of the company that is supporting our businesses across the world, and I will start with Thomas Geust, Financial Officer; Fredrik Davidsson, who is the President of the segment Fiber Foodservice, Europe, Asia, Oceania; Marco Hilty, President of the segment Flexible Packaging; Ann O’Hara, President, North America; Salla Ahonen, who is Executive Vice President, Sustainability and Communications; Marina Madanat , Executive Vice President, Strategy and Business Development; Sami Pauni, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Legal, General Counsel of the company; Johan Rabe, Executive Vice President, Digital and Process Performance; and Ingolf Thom, Executive Vice President, Human Resources and Safety. I want to thank you, the whole team, for being so engaged along the year, together with our teams across the world, supporting our business and our customers.
A year ago, when we had the AGM, it was a month before, at the end of March 2023, we had released and presented our new strategy for 2030, our 2030 strategy, strategy for the decade, that we started in 2020, but we refined it in 2023. We explained at the time that what we are driving is an ambitious transformation. An ambitious transformation, leading our business through technology leadership for sustainable packaging solution. This is the essence of what we want to do, and we do that from the legacy of the company, founded on the strong foundation that we have with our core competencies in our businesses, core competencies as a packaging converter.
When we listen to our customers, what they see as the strength of the company as a packaging converter over the years, has been the reliability of how we deal with them, the fact that we have a global footprint, and therefore we are able to serve them where they are located and where they want to grow in the world, but also because we have been accompanying our customers in their incremental innovation, throughout the years in our history. Now, I said that the word, the key word in our packaging portfolio, is about sustainability now, and this is what we have recognized back in the early days of the decade.
In 2020, we said there is no other choice for the packaging industry to have the responsibility and also the opportunity to transform the packaging into sustainable solutions for the future, for protecting the future generations, and for lowering the impact it has on the environment. I'm used to say that, and I'm a strong believer of the fact that packaging, particularly food packaging, has a greater impact or greater value than its impact on the environment. And I may come back to that, but the essence of this is because packaging is protecting, is making products, particularly food available, it makes products safe, and it also reduces the waste in the world, which is the main contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions.
Food, when we are talking about the food system, which is the core of our packaging, in the food system, 30% of the food is wasted in the world throughout the chain, not just at consumer place, throughout the value chain, 30%, and that represents 10% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. The best solution to reduce food waste is the right packaging. But packaging has a responsibility as well because it has an impact on the environment, and therefore, the need to drive not less packaging, but better packaging. We believe that the debate of more or less packaging is not the right, the right debate. The right debate is better packaging because the world is growing. And that is where we believe that our strategy is a growth strategy, because the world is growing.
And therefore, we want to associate this opportunity of growth, of the demography, of the living standards, together with the need of innovating for better packaging, therefore, for sustainable packaging. And we do that through proprietary technology, particularly around the molded fiber, which is in the core competence of the company, as well, and I'll come to some examples, obviously, and with the flexible packaging, where we are transforming our entire portfolio from being non-recyclable five years ago to becoming, by 2030, fully recyclable. So this represents a huge opportunity for the company, thanks to the complementary technologies that I was mentioning before. But also because, as I said, the world is growing. The demography is there supporting our business, but not only the demography, also the living standards are increasing. And third, the aspiration of consumers for more sustainable convenience.
Towards more sustainable, but more convenience also. And all of this, with our global footprint and our three complementary, complementary technologies, positions us very well in the opportunity of innovating and of growing our business. This is why when we presented our 2030 renewed strategy last year, we decided to have an even more ambitious economic development towards the future. And we said that our long-term target would be, as presented on the slide, on the right-hand side of the slide, to grow 5%-6% organically each year across the coming years. Second, reaching on the long run, five years, an Adjusted EBIT margin between 10%-12% EBIT.
Third, increasing our return on investment to a ratio of 13%-15%, and keeping a healthy balance sheet management with a leverage between 2x and 3 x the Adjusted EBITDA in terms of net debt over Adjusted EBITDA. And all this for what? Because if we deliver all this, we will continue to deliver or even accelerate the delivery of EPS growth, and that, in the end, means also in terms of shareholder, shareholder return, continuing with our policy of dividend payout between 40%-50%. The chair of the board of directors explained already about our dividend policy and our dividend track record, but I will come back to this in a couple of minutes. This drives me to say now, so this was the what and what is our ambition in the context, but how do we get there?
How do we make the company successful in this ambition of becoming the first choice in sustainable packaging, growing at fast pace and with good profitability, higher profitability in the future? Three business priorities. Three. Number one, we want to scale globally. We want to scale our profitable core businesses. Second, we want to innovate, develop innovation, but also deploy innovation globally at scale for sustainable solutions. And three, being competitive, reaching world-class competitiveness in our way of doing the business. And I'll pause on this point a couple of one minute before I go back to the core, the essence of investing in the core and in the innovation. Driving competitiveness, we drive it continuously since years through a continuous improvement program across all our factories.
And we do that with a method that Huhtamäki has not invented, obviously, which has been demonstrated as successful in, for instance, the automotive industry already in the '80s. That's the TPM methodology, the Total Productive Maintenance, and you do that across all factories in the world, and it's a long-term journey in order to drive better equipment efficiency, reduce the material waste, increase the labor productivity. In other words, in summarizing in one sentence—improving the manufacturing practices towards the benchmark, the best practices in, in the world. That we do on a continuous basis. But what we have decided, and this was highlighted in the introduction of the meeting, we have decided at the end of 2023 to accelerate our competitiveness strategy. And to accelerate it, we have decided to commit to a plan of EUR 100 million savings over three years, starting 2024.
This is covering all the areas of costs in the company, starting with, obviously, material costs, which, as you can understand, in our industry, is the number one, the number one cost. So material cost, but also material efficiency in our factories, labor productivity, and footprint optimization. Footprint optimization, when we're talking about footprint optimization, we're not talking about reducing capacity when we close a factory. We are talking about consolidating, optimizing our footprint. We've done so in 2023 with a small factory in Czech Republic, in Prague, which is, the closure is now completed, transferred to our bigger factories in Germany and in Turkey. We've done this as well in India during the year 2023.
Then, in the first quarter, continuing with this accelerated plan of competitiveness, we've done it by consolidating 2 out of our 4 factories in China, and the transfer of equipment is ongoing as we speak. This was announced in March. And then 2 days ago, on April 23rd, we announced the closure of the factory that we have in Malaysia, the factory in Klang in Malaysia. This is to give a quick overview about the fact that we are taking competitiveness extremely seriously. Why? Because if we are competitive and innovating, and dealing with the best customer service with our customers, then we will grow and differentiate ourselves and grow this business profitably for our customers. Now, all this can happen only if we have the right capabilities, the right competencies in the company.
So one thing is to say what are our priorities, the other thing is to give the means, the tools in the company to do it. So we have identified six areas of strategy competencies where we want to build or reinforce our capabilities. And I'll start with safety. We have a very comprehensive safety program in our company. This is one of the things I'm actually personally obsessed about, that during my mandate, I want that we become a world-class company in safety, and we've not been. And we are doing a lot with our comprehensive program on safety, and the reason we are very confident is the results are showing up. But not only this, because safety is like quality, it's never a status. We are never good, because every day is a new day, and every day you need to be excellent.
But the reason we are confident is that we are working with this comprehensive plan from management to shop floor, with a very consistent improvement plan. Second, sustainability. We talked about it last year already. We are progressing. If we draw from 2020, when we started, to 2030, where we put our targets, and we draw a trajectory to 2030, from index 100 to index 200, we are today at index 153. Lots of numbers, but just to say, and we have many KPIs behind, obviously, that we follow on a quarterly basis, that we communicate to investors every six months, we are progressing well. Third, innovation, and I'll come back with some examples. Digitalization, number four. And then, about competitiveness, it's really about how do we work with customers and how do we work in our operations?
I have already commented on this. So these are the six strategic competencies, capabilities, where we want to make the company strong. Now, the examples, because I mentioned three strategic priorities, I emphasize competitiveness. Now, about the two others: scaling the core business and innovating. On the slide, from the left to the right, you see examples which are going from the scaling the core business to the more transformative innovation. And I'm limiting myself to only those five examples for now. First, increasing our capacity for egg packaging. Egg consumption in the world is growing, and in addition, there is conversion of certain packaging alternatives, like if I take the U.S., in the U.S., there is a conversion by legislation in many states of polystyrene packaging to fiber or other plastic, but mainly to fiber.
Therefore, our investment in the factory in Hammond, which started commercial production in September 2023, is very timely. Second example, again, in the U.S., but I should have said that in egg packaging, it was not only in the U.S., we invested in France as well, in, in the line, in South Africa, and we continue investing in this core competence. Second, in the U.S., we are- we have a food service business that is growing and being profitable, and therefore, we want to scale it in order to gain market share. And we're doing this by this year installing or expanding our Paris, Texas factory to duplicate the capacity, and that will come to commercial production in the first quarter of 2025.
Third example, which is in between scaling and much more towards the innovation, it's what I said at the beginning, transforming completely our flexible packaging portfolio into becoming, by 2030, fully recyclable. For that, we have developed a technology that we believe is ahead of competition in terms of developing mono-material structures for flexible packaging, using three types of material. So it's mono-material structures, but three types: paper, polypropylene, and polyethylene, most of the portfolio being in polyethylene, but also with some conversion to paper. We announced that at the end, the launch, we announced the launch of these technologies and first commercial deals at the end of April 2023, exactly a year ago, and we are now in the deployment for the next couple of years.
Number four, now really much more transformative even, it has been about converting in the market and becoming the new reference in the food service market, converting plastic solutions, like the plastic lids on paper cups, into fiber lids. And we produce this, that's the beauty of the transformation. We produce it in a factory that would have been closed because it was a plastic production factory. We are producing it in a factory in Alf, in Germany, which is fully utilized today, and where we're even looking for more capacity linked to the demand from customers.
And last, the most transformative has been stretching the molded fiber competence and technology from the egg packaging, transforming into a high-precision molded fiber technology that gives us the possibility to have developed, over the last couple of years, with our partner, Nespresso, the new paper-based, home-compostable coffee capsules that they are using now in pilot markets, in France and Switzerland, since September 2023, and plan to further deploy. So these are examples, tangible examples, of how do we convert our strategy into reality in the market. Now, looking backwards to our business performance over the last couple of years, and taking 2019 as the baseline, in the last four years compared to 2019, we have grown our sales by an average of 5% per year in a very disrupted market.
No need to remind: pandemic, which took us for two years before recovering from the, from the pandemic in terms of consumption, geopolitical aspects with the war in Ukraine, obviously, and now new geopolitical disruptions, the disruption of the high inflation across the world. All of these have been disruptive matters in, in the market. During that time, we've been able to grow 5% on average per year, and this 5% average is comparable, meaning we have made some acquisitions, particularly Elif in Turkey, so flexible packaging, Elif in Turkey and Egypt. At the same time, we had the divestment of our operations in Russia, and then the currency didn't help us during this time, which makes the 5% a fairly comparable number. Over the time, it's 23% increase.
During that same time, we increased the profit EBIT at Adjusted EBIT level by 34%, from 8.1% in 2018 to 9.4% in 2023. I'm not lucky with the device. Okay. This translated also into our balance sheet management. The chart is conveying the message about our leverage, which is the ratio of our net debt versus our Adjusted EBITDA. You see that we have a peak in 2021. This is after the acquisition of Elif. Since then, with a good cash flow management, we have been able to reduce, and no acquisition in the last two years, we have been able to reduce this leverage from 3.1x- 2.2 x at the end of 2023.
All of this put together is now back to the point about the dividends, and I believe it is a unique case in Finland. The company is, with the proposal made by the board of directors of a dividend of EUR 1.05 per share this year, for the year 2023, it would be the 15th year in a row, 15 consecutive years of increasing dividends to shareholders, and this increase is an average. Over 15 years, this increase is an average of 8% per year. Now, a couple of words on the first quarter 2024, which results we released this morning. This is marked by improved operational profitability.
In line with the quarter four, we came already in quarter four with significantly improved profitability again in 2024 first quarter, and this is reflected in our Adjusted EBIT margin growing from 8.8% a year ago to 9.8% this quarter, 2024 with a sales level which is impacted by currency again 2%, and which is impacted as well by higher pricing pressure in the value chain, whilst the volume have been relatively flat to slightly negative, but let's say flattish in the first quarter. While we are seeing at the same time, when we compare to the latter part of 2023, some signs of increasing demand, and especially when we're looking towards what we're seeing now in the beginning of the second quarter.
Profitability is strong and cash flow also positive, enabling the leverage that I mentioned being 2.2 x the Adjusted EBITDA at the end of 2023, now 2.1 at the end of this quarter. In summary, we are striving to deliver value and to increase value delivery to all our stakeholders, and I used to say our stakeholders are four: our customers, our employees, our shareholders, and the planet also. Couple of words. How we are increasing our value to customers, and how do we measure it? We are measuring now, for the second year. In 2023, we have measured our customer satisfaction and customer loyalty through the well-known KPI, NPS, which means Net Promoter Score, and it has been increasing in 2023, close to the industry standard. Employees.
I mentioned earlier the drive for safety. Our employees are extremely sensitive to the care that we show to them and the responsibility that we show in driving safety very strongly. This has reflected; it's not the only criteria, obviously, but this has reflected a lot in the employee engagement, which we measure on an annual basis. When we measured it in 2023, there was a significant. In the context of a disrupted market, it was a significant employee engagement, leadership index, diversity index, inclusion index; all have been increasing significantly, and we are well above on this, the industry benchmark. Third, value creation for shareholders. We mentioned it. It's about increasing or accelerating the growth. We want to accelerate more the growth than we have done in the past.
We want to drive more profitability, and we want to continue delivering good dividends to shareholders. And then the planet, I mentioned it already. I don't want to repeat myself. We are measuring. We are extremely serious about our targets that we have set for the company, and we measure it in our 76 sites on a monthly basis, quarterly reporting, and it's improving. And, as the chair of the board of directors said, it's even embedded into not only the incentive of management, but it is embedded into all employees who have an incentive in the company. They have safety and sustainability today in their incentive. And we do all this in order to reach our 2030 North Star, which is to become the first choice in sustainable packaging solution through innovation and operational performance. Thank you very much for your attention.
Thank you for your interest, and thank you for your trust.