Dear shareholders, dear board of directors, dear chairman, dear colleagues. It's great to be here a year after I was standing in front of you last year to report 2024 numbers. Today, it's all about 2025. As the chairman said, we can't miss the opportunity to also talk about Q1 2026 to you today. Last year, we were presenting all-time high numbers for Huhtamäki in then 105 years history. Today, we are here to talk about 106 years history of Huhtamäki, and we are super proud as a team to report to you that the 17,500 coworkers achieved another amazing year. In fact, we outperformed in a number of very important areas our record year 2024 last year in 2025. First and foremost, we had best ever safety records in the company, which is so important to all of us at Huhtamäki.
Our goal to zero accident is important, and it's where we are striving towards, and we are making good progress, and I'll have some numbers for you later on in the presentation. Secondly, we had a target which we draw down many years back, and some of the old directors, but I'm sure all of you will remember, we always wanted to reach a 10% EBIT margin. That was our hurdle, and it took us a long time to get there. We achieved it last year, the first time. We repeated it in 2025, the second time, and I'm very proud of that achievement of all of my coworkers. You will see, even if we compare our results, our adjusted EBIT numbers on the same FX lines, we are at par with the record year in 2025 as well.
In fact, our margin, we improved in 2025, so it really goes in the right direction. The chairman talked about the value drivers. One of the very important value drivers is also capital discipline. For us, delivering very strong cash flow is of highest importance. In fact, we delivered. We outperformed our best year in 2024 by another EUR 100 million, so more than EUR 300 million of free cash flow was delivered to the company, which is in those days, even more important than ever before. All of that in an area where geopolitical volatility seems to get the norm. In fact, when I was standing here last year, I was thinking, "Now we will get the war in Europe behind us, and that will give us a lot of tailwind." That did not happen. The war in Ukraine is still going on as we speak.
We didn't know then that there would be a war in Southeast Asia between Thailand and Cambodia. That came, and it was a surprise to us, so we had to manage that one in 2025 as well. We certainly didn't know anything about Liberation Day, if you remember, and what happened with tariffs afterward. Another dynamic which we clearly weren't aware, and we had to manage that one, and so on. When I talk later on about the first quarter, you will hear me talking about the latest developments in the Middle East. What does all of that mean? It means that the management team and all of us have to be more agile. It won't go away. There will always be something. It's part of, unfortunately, what this world nowadays is all about.
For us, rather than finding excuses, it's about finding the opportunities and finding ways to manage the business to be closer to the markets, closer to our customers, so that we can not only react, but in fact we can be very proactive in taking all of that towards the good for Huhtamäki. If I move on to the agenda of the day, as said by the chairman, I will of course present today what we did on the strategy, how we updated, fine-tuned the strategy. He took a part of that already. I will dive, as mentioned, more into those details. I talk quite a bit about the performance in 2025. Of course, I will not leave the room without talking about how we started 2026, which I'm sure all of you are very keen to hear.
None of that would be possible without the team which is leading this company, which is our global executive team. I'm really proud of this team. I got this team together. Those are people who are leaders in packaging, veterans in packaging, who has done packaging for many years, functional experts who know their function in and out, who know how the world works, and who can support the businesses to its best. Let me present one after the other to you. I would kindly ask my colleagues to stand up when they hear their name. Let me start with Axel Glade. Axel Glade is the President of our global Flexible Packaging business. Thank you, Axel. Let me introduce you Fredrik Davidsson, who is the President of our Foodservice Packaging business. Then I come to North America.
I have Sara Engber here with me today. Sara can actually stand again because she's the Interim President also of our Fiber business. Remember last year as my very first activity, I changed the organization. I separated Foodservice and Fiber. Sara joined the global executive team then as the President of Fiber. Now she took over North America. We are, as we speak, searching for her replacement into Fiber. We come to Changsheng Wu, who joined us also last year, and he's the global EVP for Procurement. We come to Thomas Geust, 12-year CFO of the company. Katariina Kravi, our EVP of Human Resources, Safety, and Communications, who joined us 1st of January. Let me introduce Riikka Tieaho to you, who will join us early May. It's a month from now. We are counting the days before you join us.
She will be our EVP, Sustainability, Corporate Affairs, and Legal. We are so happy that we have Aino Kyytsönen, who is currently taking the path, which, of course, Riikka will take over then in 1st of May. Thank you so much for supporting the global executive team, Aino. Great to have you with us. This team is running this company. We are really lucky. I'm very lucky to have my colleagues with me today. All of them are here today. We are running a global business. Of course, all of you know this. We are in a business which is truly in all continents of this world. More than 100 locations we have. You see them on the map. You see that in this map, every area is covered. That is important to us because it enables us to serve our customers globally.
It also balance really nicely on how we do business. We are one of the very few companies who have an almost even split between North America, Europe, and what we call rest of the world. A really nice balance in our portfolio, which is very important in times like this where you have many geopolitical issues coming up. We are doing this because we want to serve our customers to our best. Our customers, clearly many of those names are very well known to you. These are customers who are either very strong in their country, in their markets, in their regions, or even globally.
Again, you see many names here, to us at Huhtamäki, it is very important that we never forget what our products are used for, by whom are they used for, and for us, the question is really, what are our customers and frankly, also the consumer trying to achieve? How can we help them to achieve the best what they need to make their life easier? That's our job, here you see them, I'm sure many of those are very well known to you. By the way, you also see in this picture that this is covering all geographies, all our segments. Truly global again. As I mentioned, 2025 was a year of many geopolitical issues, many surprises which came up, which we had to deal with. We were coming from an area where we had elevated CapEx for many years.
In fact, two years before I started, we had Capital Expenditure of more than EUR 300 million, which is one and a half times of our depreciation a year. They were clearly elevated, we needed to be much more disciplined on them. The chairman talked about an investment committee which was formed. That investment committee, together with our very disciplined approach, enabled us to look at CapEx from a very different perspective. Where are we really creating value? Where are we really doing something with regards to safety, sustainability? What do we really need to do to maintain our assets in a proper standard? Where can we gain efficiencies? Also, where can we grow? That's the way we are looking at our CapEx, that's something which needed to have more focus in when we talked to you last year.
That was a very big change to the company and a very important one. With these geopolitical issues, we also realized that we need to be much more agile, much closer to our customers. We looked at our operating model, we said that we want to have the operating model very close to where it actually happens. The people in the factories, the people in the countries, they know best. They know better than us here in Helsinki. We got to listen to them, we need to empower them to do what they need to do. We changed the operating model, we brought accountability where we believe as an executive team it needs to be, where the people are the closest to what's happening out there. That was a big change, it clearly followed us through the year.
That was the big change in our strategy. You see the strategy house, which was presented by my predecessor, Charles. It was a strategy which is very true. It's very true today, and it's really today guiding us towards our North Star. There is no change in purpose, there is no change in North Star, there is no change in value. The changes you see is in the middle on how we are going to deliver value to shareholders. That is the change we made. It's a very important change, but it's also important for you to realize that there is a lot of consistency. There is a lot about clarity for who we are and what we want to do in the future with regards to protecting food, beverage, and other essentials from a daily perspective for the consumer at the end of the day.
Chairman talked about the middle block, the value, and I would like to talk about that as well and give you some more flavor of what really was done here. Three points: profitable growth, and we call it profitable growth with all levers, organic and inorganic. Capital discipline, a lot about CapEx, but not only CapEx, also other elements which are driving capital discipline, like working capital, just to give you one more very important example. Then finally, the operating model. We call it accountability to enable speed of execution. Examples are that we were very strong with our global customers. We did create, because of our footprint over many, many years, this very strong link. That very strong link needs to be maintained, and we need to really make sure that we serve those global customers in the best ever way.
Innovate for them. Deliver them on time, in full, all the time. Super important to that. Have the relation. Listen to them. But never forget about the local and the regional customers. That's something where we could clearly make a step change, and we are starting to see those improvements. They take time, we realize that. Believe me, I'm German, I'm very impatient, so I would rather like to have this happening yesterday than today. But I know that my team, who is the closest, are working every day and getting closer, listening to them and making sure we get a chance. When we get a chance to serve them, then we need to use that chance and deliver to them great products. Make it, that's our language, hassle-free, easy for them to work with Huhtamäki. Very important.
With that one, we will get organic growth back to Huhtamäki. Inorganic growth, it's a world which is more volatile. It's a world which offers more opportunities to look also at the inorganic side of the business. We did pretty much exactly one year ago announce an acquisition in the U.S., Zellwin Farms. Very happy to report to you that a year after, this was an acquisition which was best ever done from an integration perspective. We over-delivered on the financial promise which we did. More importantly, the teams in the U.S. came really nicely together. It's a cultural fit. It's a management fit. It's a technology fit. Investment Committee would always ask me, "How does it fit? How does it work? How are the financials?" In that case, it's a tick, and tick, so we are super happy. But we are very disciplined.
Even though there are many opportunities and we are coming to investment committee and frankly the board very often with idea on what we could do, we will remain very disciplined. We will not get into any sort of deal fever. If a deal is not ticking all the boxes, we will pass, we will move on and wait for the next deal to come. Because the worst thing we can do for you shareholders is to do a deal which is not going to go well. You can trust us that we are going to be very diligent on the inorganic side going forward. It is important. We have a strong balance sheet, so it's clearly very important to us. I talked about capital discipline and CapEx. Just to show you some numbers here. I said we were over EUR 300 million.
In fact, we were at EUR 318 million twice in a row. 2022 and 2023, we spent more than one and a half times on depreciation. A lot of investments going into the company, but not growth coming towards us. We needed to level set that and to say we need to grow, and then we need to support it also with investments. But if we don't grow, we not have got the investment right to put behind. We brought it down in 2024 already to what we call the magical number of EUR 250 million. Magical number because very close to depreciation, this number. Just slightly above. It's a split which is one third going into growth, one third going into efficiencies, one third going into maintenance, and then we have our license to operate, EUR 10 million plus or minus for safety and sustainability.
That's our magical EUR 250. If we have a year where we don't see the growth, we are going to be below that number. You have seen this last year. We did not as a company produce volume growth, so we were below. We are not shy of being below and getting more cash, which gives us other advantages, of course. It's a really important value driver for us. Value driver number two, capital discipline. Value driver number three is our operating model, our accountability model, which will enable speed of execution. That sounds easy, but that is frankly the toughest one because you have to bring 17,500 coworkers, team members behind you. You have to explain on why we are making this change. Change is never easy. Change is never easy. It's easy to describe it, but it's not easy to implement it.
I'm standing here today, a year after we started that journey, being so proud of all of those coworkers who are with us, who are saying, "We understand why we are doing this. We understand why we need to be closer to the market, why we got to be more agile in the market." We are at a very good point with the implementation, and I would like to again, I have the global Executive Team here, thank them in the name of all their team members. Thank you for going strongly on that direction. It will be the right thing for Huhtamäki going forward. Value drivers are enabling us in a very resilient and very strong business to continue to produce very strong profits. Those strong profits will generate very strong cash flows.
Those cash flows can be used to either reinvest into the business and continue our growth journey or can be used to give it back to you, the shareholders. Of course, chairman talked about if approved today, we will have 17 years in a row with increased dividends. If you approve this today, which would be an amazing outcome. I think from a listed company perspective in Finland, this is the best track record. Proud, very proud of that one. It also enables other means of giving capital back to shareholders if need be. Of course, as management, we always have great ideas how we can invest that money to create even more shareholder value. This is our model.
That's the way we are thinking about it, and it's an important one to share with you all the time we see each other. Where are we on the promise we have given to the capital markets? It's now three-plus years back. If given those promises, I decided last year not to go away from them, but to really understand the business and to drive the business to fulfill it. It's easy to take them down. It's easy to take them down, and it's not easy to stick with those in a volatile market. We as a team, we want to stick to them for the time being, and we are seeing that we are getting more and more green ticks. Getting a green tick, as I mentioned before, now twice in a row on our EBIT margin. In packaging, that's an extremely important measurement.
Above 10%, that's where you need to be, and we are now twice in a row. We look at our leverage, and we said we want to be between two and three times. We are below the two. We are at the lower end of our range. In fact, we are below the two at 1.95 as we speak today. Very strong balance sheet. We continue to pay out very strong dividends if you approve this today. Our ratio is between 40%-50%. That's something which we will continue to be committed towards doing. There are two areas where we need to do a better job, and we understand and realize that. We are at around 12% adjusted return of investment. We need to be between 13%-15%.
That is something where we are, as a team, committed to working towards to, and get this one also with a green tick to you guys, hopefully getting closer going forward. We see the growth number. I'm standing here to tell you, yes, we didn't have the growth number as Huhtamäki last year as a whole, and we had two segments who did grow. We had our Fiber business and our North American business who did achieve growth. We can do it, and we are confident that we will have more segments going forward who can achieve that number, because it's another very important driver of our profits. Sustainability is super important to us. We showed it in our strategy house before to you. We are not going away from our commitment to Sustainability.
In fact, we want to be the first choice of sustainable packaging solutions. That's who we want to be. We are strongly striving in that direction. Even though, and you know this, our customers and the consumers are looking at many other things in parallel. We as a company, we are committed, and we are doing it in a number of different areas. Just listed 9 here on that slide for you to look at. I will jump into 1 specifically in a second. Let me give you a highlight here on a few of the others. We got an SBTi, so a Science Based Targets initiative approval last year, which means that we are now monitored by an external body, in fact, the most well-known body, on how we are going along with regards to our commitment to achieve the 1.5%. That's extremely important.
That's not just for Scope 1 and 2, which is only up to us. It's also about Scope 3, which has a lot to do what other third parties are doing, which is much more difficult for us to influence, of course, what the customer, for example, is doing or what the supplier is doing. We are committed of working together with our partners to get this 1. As a company which is here in Finland based and a company which is doing a lot on the fiber side, it's extremely important for us to also be 100% on the virgin fiber side. We are already at 99%, so we're getting very close to achieving this well ahead of what our commitment is. I could go on and on, because we are tracking in all those 9 elements in the right direction.
The 1 I started talking about today, and the 1 which is so close to the management team, is safety. I just wanted to show you the last 4 years, our safety track record, where we see that we are improving year over year over year. In fact, we are improving since 6 years year over year, and that is so important. We start talking about this with everybody at Huhtamäki always, with regards to first and foremost important is that we are not getting anybody seriously hurt or even having a fatality at Huhtamäki. Very important. Target number 1. Target number 2 is we don't want any accident. We want people to go home very safe without any, not even the smallest accident in the evening.
That's why we are looking at from what we call a top-down aspect, no serious injury or even fatality, but also from a bottom-up perspective, not even a small injury is acceptable to us. That's how we are tracking. We are committed to be a zero-accident company, and that's really focus number 1. Everything we do, even at the board level, every board meeting, we start with safety. Every management team meeting, we start with safety. It's very much in the blood of every coworker which we have. Let me come to financials, and let me start with net sales. If you start on the right side of the slide, where you see the EUR 3,960,000,000 and you add back the EUR 125 million of currency impact, which, like it or not, even for Huhtamäki, impossible to change currency.
What happens with the US dollar, which, of course, is the largest impact. It is what it is. We have to translate it back into EUR. We are a EUR company. That's, of course, a huge impact which we have had last year and which we are having also in the first quarter this year. You see that the rest of the company did not achieve organic growth. In fact, we did shrink by 1%. Even though we had two segments which did grow, we had a 1% or so decline on the top line. The EUR 53 million, which you see next to the EUR 4.1 billion of 2024. It's a different picture on the EBIT side.
If you look at adjusted EBIT, where we had the EUR 417 million a year ago, we are ending up this year above 10%, we increased to 10.2% margin, and we achieved EUR 405 million. Doing the same thing on the currencies side, US dollar back into EUR to make it easy, it's a EUR 9 million add, you see that we are pretty much at par between 2024 and 2025. As a reminder, those are the two best ever years in Huhtamäki's history. We never ever achieved in 106 years more than EUR 400 million or 10% EBIT margin. It's an extremely strong achievement in a very volatile market. It is true for most of our segments. Let me point out the two best performers here, which of course, we have celebrated very much. Clearly, Fiber was the outstanding achiever last year.
Fiber did come in very strongly. They did grow 8%, and they did come in with an adjusted EBIT margin of over 13%. 13.3%, in fact. It was a very strong performance in all aspects. Organic side, very strong, both volume and pricing. Cost side, very strong. An amazing management by the Fiber team. They really deserve a lot of kudos for what they have achieved. We were standing here for many, many years and we were talking about Flexible Packaging, on how amazing that business is and how many opportunities we have in that business, and we never achieved any great results in Flexible Packaging. That was changed last year. It was a year where the management team very much focused on getting the margin right in this business, and it was needed. It was needed because we were underperforming also compared to peers in this market.
They achieved a very strong outcome. They achieved more than 9% on the EBIT side, which was 2% plus compared to the prior year and years before that. They did this by looking at the portfolio they are managing and the customers they are serving, and they said, "We are strong in five different segments within Flexible Packaging, and those are the ones we do best, and those are the ones where we can perform. If we can't serve the others profitable, we shouldn't serve them." I think it was a wise decision on how they are managing their business, and they were very strong in driving their operating model and taking costs out of the system. A very strong result from all our colleagues in Flexible Packaging.
I would also like to highlight that in our Foodservice business, we got a lot of pressure on the top line. Top line was a very tough one to manage. The team, under Fredrik's leadership, did an excellent job, an excellent job in taking cost out and driving pricing so that they came in with a very strong 9-plus % EBIT margin, which in the environment our friends in Foodservice are operating is an outstanding result. Really proud of the Foodservice team. As I am on our North American friends. It's an environment where they had volume growth, but they had a lot of pressure on the pricing side. In fact, I could make the argument that we were too greedy on pricing for a few years before that.
We needed to adjust pricing to make sure that we listen to our customers, that we enable our customers to grow. Overall, you see a net zero, but we had volume growth in this market, which is very important. With the inflation we have seen also in North America, and if you compare us to peers on the volume side, clearly an outstanding result in North America there as well. I mentioned it a couple of times, so you can see I'm really, really happy to report on the cash side. Capital discipline, which was so important, did allow us to drive more than EUR 300 million operating cash flow. We ended up the year with EUR 311 million, almost EUR 100 million more than the year before, with all the initiatives which we took, clearly an amazing outcome.
All of that, of course, then ended up that our leverage, our balance sheet got stronger and stronger. We ended up below 2 at 1.9 on the balance sheet side. Reminder to everybody, and I know you're all shareholders, so you're looking at our peers, that is best-in-class and when you look at packaging peers in our industry. That gives us a strong position for our future. Chairman said it, I repeat it, you are going to vote on this. If you are voting in favor, we will have the 17th year in a row where we will increase dividends to you. Let's cross fingers that we get a vote in favor on that one. 2025 is behind us, right? Some people tell me, "We don't want to talk 2025 anymore. Can you please start talking 2026?" Here we are.
This morning, we reported on the first quarter of 2026. As I mentioned in my opening, it did not end with geopolitical volatility in 2025. It continues. All of what I mentioned before continued. The war in Europe continues. The borders between Thailand and Cambodia are still closed. The tariff situation is still not solved. It went up and down and up and down, and who knows what's happening next. Then on the 28th of February, a new war started in the Middle East, Africa. Of course, it's something which, and I'll have a slide for you in a second, it's something we got to manage very carefully, very diligently, and we are. What we see here in Q1, that we have a very strong outcome.
We did have, as a company, after 2022, where we had a full year growth. Then we didn't have it in 2023, we didn't have it in 2024, we didn't have it in 2025. In the first quarter, we are seeing comparable growth. It's 1%. It's not a lot, but we are seeing comparable growth. We are, of course, very proud of that achievement in our very volatile market. We are seeing a very strong margin again. We are increasing the margin compared to Q1 last year, where we were at 9.8%. We are at 10% in the first quarter this year. There is an improvement in margin, which is very important for us to see another 10%. We are starting to come closer to a trend here.
If you add back currency, which again, we have had compared to last year Q1, where we had a very strong US dollar compared to the euro. Yet, we have another EUR 5 million impact there. You add this back to our EUR 94.5 million, we are even improving on that side, on the EBIT side, which shows that we are able to transport top line into bottom line. Very important. We continue our capital discipline. CapEx side, similar number, EUR 27 million versus EUR 30 million last year. We continue to be very disciplined on that side. Again, that enabled us to have positive cash flow in Q1. Go back in history of Huhtamäki and, in fact, in packaging companies, typically Q4, very strong cash contributor. Typically, the opposite happens in Q1 the year after. This year, we reversed it. This year, we are positive in the quarter one already.
This focus continues. Very important for us, and we continue to have a very strong balance sheet leverage of, again, below two at 1.9 for the quarter. I cannot stand here and not talk about the Middle East, Africa, as it is, of course, in the news all the time, and it is so important for our industry. Let me give you some facts first. First and foremost important, we have a number of operations. In fact, we have six operations in the area. We have three factories in Egypt. We have two factories in the UAE, in Dubai, in fact. We have a factory in Saudi Arabia. I'm not even counting factories which we have in Turkey. Just in that area, six factories, hundreds of coworkers in that area. Okay? What was our number one priority?
If you go to our action side, the safety of our coworkers. Making sure with a war, with alarms. Many of you have heard it, some of us from my team has actually lived it through because they were there when it happened. When you have an alarm which is ringing on your phone, which is ringing in the city, and you have to go down into the bunker, you start understanding what war is all about and how dangerous it is. Our first action was to ensure that we get our coworkers safe. We did, and we are very happy that nobody got hurt, no coworker of Huhtamäki got hurt during that period up to today.
We are having Katariina and myself with the management team and the people in the factories, we are having twice a week a call because we continue, even though there's a ceasefire today, to be very close to them and making sure that their safety continues to be our highest priority. Very important to us, as you can very well imagine. Next thing which happened is, of course, that people realized that a lot of the oil is coming from that area. Many people did not realize that the straits are the main part of transport from oil into either the east or the west. In fact, many of us didn't realize that fact or how important that is. With that closure, pretty much overnight, oil prices jumped.
Today, if you compare today, the oil price versus the oil price of the 27th of February, the day before the war, we are 75% up. If you think about our business, and especially, but not only, but especially our Flexible Packaging business, it's a business where we have a lot of resin, a lot of chemicals, a lot of solvents, a lot of adhesives. All of those substrates went up significantly. That's, of course, something which we have to deal with, and that is a fact, as it is a fact that transport logistics went up. What are we doing? Number one priority for us is to make sure that we serve our customer. We need to make sure that our customer have products, they can continue to serve consumers, and we can continue to have business. Priority number one. Okay? Make sure we get the allocations.
Priority number two is we realize that there is a significant cost impact. Imagine oil goes up 75% and all the substrates I mentioned to you before are going up according to that. We need to make sure that we are not sitting there with significant cost increases, and we are not passing them on. We immediately started having task force in place from both the procurement side as well as the sales side and the business side to make sure that we are calling our customers, explaining the situation, and making sure that we can pass on additional costs to them immediately and not just waiting until contractually we can do it. We don't have the luxury of a three or six months lag.
We needed to act immediately, and I can give you with confident the statement that the team is on it, and we are working very hard on this very important topic. Last but not least, all of that might trigger inflation. All of that might trigger that Consumers will be more careful on how they are spending their money, and it might have an impact on the demand. Hence, it's even more important to think about our value drivers, which I described before and the chairman described before. If we want to have organic growth, we need to be close to our customers. We need to be close not just to multinationals, but we need to be close to our local and regional customers as well.
What we started a year ago is even more important in a time where we might see more demand drops, more inflation. People are getting more cautious, getting close to customers, very important. That is something which we will see how it plays out. Clearly, our operating model and our focus on growth will help us, as will our capital discipline. Guess what? With prices going up, our working capital will go up just as a logical impact. Having the focus on capital is very important to enable us to deliver cash, to enable us to give money back to you shareholders. Look, let me close by making the statement that we are absolutely there to drive shareholder value. I've given you our shareholder value model, which is the way we are thinking about this all the time.
We have set ourselves up for success with a new operating model, with a very easy way of how to drive value for you. We have started the year clearly with more geopolitical pressure, and we are seeing more opportunities for Huhtamäki going forward. I'm very humbled. I'm honored. I'm so happy that the board appointed me a year ago as your CEO. I know it's something which is a very important task. I know this every day. You can count on myself and my team to take this company forward, which is there 106 years, in the right direction. Thank you for your attention. Thanks for being our shareholders, and I'm looking forward to your questions.