Thank you very much everyone for coming here to attend our 2016 final results announcement. Today we have our chairman, Mr. Tim Parker, as well as our CEO, Mr. Ramesh Tainwala, here in Hong Kong with us. Our CFO, Mr. Kyle Gendreau, unfortunately couldn't beat the snow storm and is stuck in Boston. However, he's also joining us by teleconference. Without further ado, I will have Mr. Tim Parker give a few opening remarks and begin the presentation. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much indeed, William, a very warm welcome to you all this morning. Today we are reporting another record set of results. Looking back over the six years since we floated the company, I think this is arguably the very best set of results that we have announced. Our net sales up 15.5% to a record $2.8 billion. 6% in organic terms, ignoring of course the significant contribution of Tumi. Our gross margin has moved up significantly from 52.6% up to 54.1%. Of course, that is very much the influence of the addition of five months of Tumi, which had higher gross margins than Samsonite, around 65%. The EBITDA of the company up to a record $486 million.
When I look back to when I joined the business in 2009, and I think we were on around $50 million, that gives you some idea of the extent of the progress of the company. Much of that I think is down to the excellent management abilities of the man on my left here. We've seen over the last year an increase in constant currency in EBITDA terms of almost 23%. That is a fantastic achievement by any stretch of the imagination. Of course, our adjusted net income pretty much following, 18.9% up, 20% up in constant currency terms. A very satisfactory set of headline numbers. We thought it might be useful, as I alluded to earlier, just to look back over the six years since Samsonite floated in 2011.
You can see that the company has achieved consistent growth, double digit growth in every single year. The CAGR at around 12.4%. We said when we floated that we would be a double digit growth company in a strong market, and we feel that we have been able to come up behind our pledge and our anticipated growth rate of the company. The next slide, I think gives you, although there's quite a lot of words on it, really just emphasizes the diversified nature of our business. The fact that we are essentially driven by the very high growth, resilient growth market of travel around the world. It wasn't so long ago that Samsonite was really just Samsonite. In other words, about 80% of our sales were around the Samsonite brand.
Today, we are a fully diversified company, we draw sales from Tumi of course, Samsonite, American Tourister, Speck, Gregory, Lipault. The company actually has a brand at each level of the market, and the company now is joined by Tumi, which of course is a very strong brand in business products. Samsonite of course has these incredibly strong positions in luggage and general products which are carried around the market. If you look at the top right-hand part of this slide, you can see that growth has been achieved throughout all of the Samsonite regions. Again, this is a source of great strength for the company. We don't rely on any single region. The company is number one in Asia, number one in America, number one in Europe, and number one in Latin America.
If you look down to the bottom right-hand part of the circle, this just reminds us again that the company is no longer simply a luggage business. We see ourselves as a bags company that does good luggage. You can see the enormous growth, thanks to Tumi, in business products, and we are becoming increasingly a business which is not dependent on luggage, so that the share of non-luggage in Samsonite sales has moved up from 31%-35%. The bottom left part of the circle, we simply describe the manner in which the company has moved in the direction of direct-to-consumer business. Excluding Tumi, we've seen a total growth of 11.8% in the direct consumer channel in retail. E-commerce, which is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our business, was up 17%.
We expect in coming years that not only to clip through 10% of our business in e-commerce, but we can see that business easily doubling in the next four to five years. Finally, I think the great strength of our company is that we have invested consistently behind our brands. Last year, we spent around 5.1% of our sales on advertising and promotion. That was slightly down as a percentage, but still up almost 9% on the year before. We intend to invest even more behind our brands. I think we'd like to see that figure slightly higher in coming years. I do believe that although we have very good products, and arguably the best products in the marketplace, what marks the company out is our consistent backing of brands which are recognized throughout the world.
The message from me is, I think these are excellent set of results. The company is built on very secure foundations, a diversified business, and we look forward, I think, with increasing confidence to the future. We saw a better second half than first half last year, and we look forward to next year, I think, with some optimism. With that, I will pass over to our CEO, Ramesh.
Thank you. I'm on slide seven. It's basically talking about how our net sales was partly offset by the currency translation. This is a bridge that we've tried to build it. 2015, our sales were about $2.4 billion. From the organic growth, which was around 6%, that means the existing brand delivered $145 million. Tumi, five-month period, delivered $274 million, and there was a translation loss of around $42 million. Net, net, the business grew by around 17.3%. As Tim said before, the growth has come about from all the regions, U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The next slide gives you the net income bridge. 2015, our adjusted net income was $217 million. The organic growth in the net income was 15.74%, which brought $34 million.
Tumi brought in $30 million as adjusted net income, which was partly set off by interest expenses on acquisition, net of tax impact, which were about $23 million. If we really put both of them together, you can see that the Tumi was already accretive to our business in the five-month period of last year. This brings us to $258 million, which is about 20.5% growth versus last year. We are 2016. We are also, since it was partly of Tumi's, we are giving you the visibility into the core business, excluding Tumi numbers. If you look at it here, the constant currency growth in terms of the sales was around 6%. The gross margin improved by 6.5%, marginally higher because of the channel mix. The advertising came down slightly from 5.4% to 4.9%.
As Tim rightly said, it is our long-term vision to bring that number up more closer to around 6%. EBITDA moved up by 6.8%, which is more or less in line with the revenue growth, and a slight improvement in the EBITDA percentage is mainly on account of slightly lower spend on advertising. As we said before, there's a strong increase in sales growth and adjusted EBITDA margin from first half to second half. The first half was definitely, the business was somewhat challenged. If you look at the number, the first half, our sales grew by around 4.1%. These are the core business excluding Tumi, where the second half we saw a growth of 7.8%, driven largely by China. In China, first half was 0.4% growth. It was -0.4%. It was almost flat versus last year. In the second half, China rebounded to 10.2% growth.
Similarly, we have seen some strong growth in North America. North America, first half was 0.5%, whereas the second half was 7.3%. There's also a further acceleration in growth in Latin America, where it was 13.6% in first half, and in second half it became 21.6%. We do see a similar momentum in the first quarter of 2017. These are Tumi results for a five-month period. The net sales grew by 9.7%, from $251 million to $276 million. Gross margin also improved from 62.7% to 64.7%. Part of it is because they start to get some benefit of sourcing from Samsonite team. I would say this is just the beginning. Our long-term objective is to see Tumi's gross margin being more closer to around 70%. We believe by 2018 we should get there.
You'll also see that we dialed up the A&P spend behind the brand Tumi from 2.8% to 6.7%. The result of that was that there's a small marginal drop in EBITDA, but if you really adjust the additional spend on the A&P, then EBITDA margin moved up from 26.7% to 26.9% for the five-month period. Tumi acquisition integration update. Integration is going largely as planned. Management structure is in place. Rob Cooper is General Manager for our North American business. Asia and Europe has been integrated with our regional teams. SAP conversion is on track for May 2017, which will allow us then to get the balance cost synergies which we had planned. Buyback of distributors progressing ahead of plan. South Korea is already completed, with effective from 1st January 2017. It's directly operated market.
We're also making very good progress in some other key markets, namely China and Hong Kong. Before end of this year, all major markets will be directly operated markets. Sourcing initiatives is also going very well. Additional gross margin improvements are anticipated in 2017 and beyond. As I said, by end of 2018, we expect that the gross margin improvement for Tumi's core business would be closer to around 1,000 basis points. Part of that we will invest back behind the brand. Our intention is, of that 1,000 basis points, probably 700 basis points will be invested back behind the brand, because the brand investment is low today, and other part of it will drop down to improve the profitability. The timing of certain cost synergies intentionally has been delayed, to be careful not to disrupt the business.
Estimated synergy savings for to date is $3.7 million, which is approximately a run rate of $9 million annual saving. We believe that the balance by end of 2018, the synergies would be running at a rate of around $25 million per year. The big chunk of the next level of synergies will be brought back home once we implement SAP, which is on track to be completed by May 2017. This gives you a little bit of a brief as how the numbers look like by region. If you look at 2016, there is a growth of around 24.2%. Part of it is also because of the consolidation of Samsonite Japan. If you peel that number away, then it's about 2.9% growth. North America grew by 6.6%, Europe by 3.9%, and corporate is just some of the deals, which is 37%.
Overall growth has been around 9.7%. The EBITDA margin has come down a little bit, but if you peel away the additional $10 million that we have spent on advertising, then EBITDA actually increased by 14.8% during the same period. The raw EBITDA margin has down from 26.7% to 23.3%. Once again, this is mainly on account of additional A&P spend. Otherwise, it would have been 26.9%. Going by region now. Asia, strong net sales and profit growth aided by addition of Tumi, of course, and supported by moderate growth in the organic business. The organic business grew by around 9.9%. Excluding Tumi, the growth has been around 4%. The EBITDA grew by around $5 million, and as a percentage of sales is more or less in line with last year, excluding Tumi.
We look at different countries, I think in the first half, three of our large markets were challenged. Korea, India, and China. We have seen in the second half is that China has recovered very strongly. It has delivered more than 10% growth in the second half. India started very well in quarter three. By the time it came into quarter four, because of certain governmental policies of demonetization, the growth got moderated. Korea still continues to feel pressures of political uncertainty and some other pressures that it has because of differences that it has with the Chinese government. We look at our outlook in quarter one, we see India coming back very strongly and in line with our Chinese growth. Both these markets are now delivering double-digit growth, whereas Korea still continues to be range bound.
All other markets are more or less the same. Our North American business grew by 26.8%. Excluding Tumi, it grew by 3.9%. Here again, when you look at it, our first half to the second half. We look at our first half, our growth was moderated. We see a strong rebound in the second half. Even our comp ratios in North America, the first half, we had negative comp 4.4%. In second half, it was positive 5.2%. That itself reflects that there has been a rebound in our business in North America in the second half, and we see similar momentum continuing in 2017. Within North America, practically all our brands delivered strong growth. Europe, we had a very strong growth. Excluding Tumi, the constant currency growth was 10.3%. Including Tumi, it was 16.1%.
The EBITDA also marginally moved up from 17% to 17.9%, which is about 100 basis points improvement over last year. Part of it is also due to slightly lower advertising spend in 2016. Most of the markets, most of the countries in Europe delivered very strong numbers. U.K. 21.3%, Germany 15.7%, Italy 11.3%, and Russia 23.3%. It was a very strong growth in direct-to-consumer channels. Retail grew by 14.6%, driven by 7.6% same-store growth and six additional stores. The direct-to-consumer e-commerce also grew very nicely by 31.3%. Wholesale, which continues to be an important channel for our European business, grew by 7.6%. We see similarly, a very strong growth across brands. Samsonite grew by 7.8%, American Tourister by 21.9%, Lipault by 27%, Gregory by 31%. We see similar all-rounded growth in different categories. Travel grew by 7.2%, business by 17.6%, and casual category grew by 37.2%.
I would say that Europe was a very satisfying performance in 2016. We see similar very strong momentum continuing in 2017, especially in the first quarter. Latin America, which continues to be our region where we continue to make investment. Investment in retail investment in team, and investment in infrastructure. It also delivered very strong growth, 17.4%, driven by a very strong growth in Mexico of 30%, Chile 6.8%. Chile is a more matured market for us in Latin America, Brazil by 25.5%. It largely came off retail channel, which is 37.8% growth. The same-store comp also were very nice, 9.4%. Wholesale channel, which is important in Mexico, grew by 17.6%. This growth is also coming as a result of growth of all our brands. Samsonite grew by 18.9%, American Tourister almost doubled to 98.5%.
American Tourister now makes up for around 40% of the revenue of the region and continues to grow. Xtrem, which is our backpack brand, also grew by 9.4%. Secret, which is our handbag brand there, grew by 17.1%. Saxoline is a low-end luggage brand, which also grew by 5.5%. Similarly, category-wise, travel grew by 22.6%, business by 25.7%, casual and accessories by 9.5% and 6.9%. I think there was an all-round strong growth in the numbers. Profitability was a little bit down by 400 basis points, which was by design because we were investing to reinforce our infrastructure there in terms of new retail expansion. We have moved to a new warehouse. We are now migrating all the countries and implementing SAP there. These are one-off costs, and we believe over a period of time, Latin America should be able to deliver similar profitability as our other regions.
Constant currency net sales growth in most key markets. Look at U.S., overall grew by 3.8%, whereas the first half, the growth was only 0.7%. So there was an acceleration from first half to second half in U.S. China, which I said before, China had a minus 0.4% in first half, which had a strong rebound with 10.2%, finishing the year with 5.3%. Korea still is minus 1%. When the first half was like that, Korea does continue to suffer because of political uncertainty and lack of Chinese tourists going there. Probably those same Chinese tourists, we are now finding them in other countries, more particularly in Europe. That is why when you look at our European numbers, they had a very strong growth. Japan 12.2%, Germany 15.7%, Italy 11.1%, Australia 21%, U.K. 21%, and likewise. India, we see here, had a flat year. It did start it.
Quarter 3 was a strong year. First half was a tough period for us. But Quarter 4, again, because of demonetization, it lost momentum. But we find that in Quarter 1 of this year, the momentum is coming back, and it is back to delivering double-digit sales growth. Some of the other emerging countries also had some very good numbers. Mexico 30%, Russia 21%, and likewise. Direct to consumer channel sales accelerated with acquisition of Tumi. When you look at last year numbers, Samsonite's non-travel, I mean, the retail or direct to consumer, which includes for us e-commerce as well as brick and mortar contribution was 23%, and wholesale was 77%. Tumi is the other way around, where they have more direct to consumer is about 60% of the business. Combined together, today, our direct to consumer business is about 30%, and 70% is wholesale.
This is taking into account five-month period of Tumi. But if you really combine the full year number of Tumi, as Tim rightly said, the direct to consumer contribution has already moved to around 35%. To give a little bit of perspective, before Tim came on board, this number for Samsonite was less than 10%. It was low single digit. So we were largely a single brand and largely a luggage company. From there, we have reinvented ourselves, where the non-luggage is now contributing to around 35% of the sales. And we had expressed our desire during IPO days that over a period of time, we would like to see our non-travel component of our business to become 50% of the business, and we are making very good progress every year. That makes the business far more resilient because the buying cycle for non-travel is shorter.
The non-travel product also are more resilient to any kind of exogenous shocks. Within this direct to consumer, e-commerce is growing very rapidly. If you look at our e-commerce growth in 2016 has been 17.2%, and e-commerce contribution to the entire sales is now up to 9.5% as compared to 8.5% last year. I have no hesitation to believe that that number will keep growing, and it could be more like 15%-20% in next handful of years. Diversified brand portfolio. Tim spoke about it. Samsonite was the brand which contributed to more than 90% of the sales. As we look at it on a full year basis, if I combine the 12-month number of Tumi, the other brands and Samsonite is already 50/50.
The contribution of non-Samsonite brands or portfolio, if I take 12-month number of Tumi, is already reaching that 50/50 kind of a mark. I think this also has been a great achievement which have been made under the leadership of Tim. If you see that all our brands have shown very strong growth, Samsonite growing by 5.9%. American Tourister I'll cover it separately, which had a little bit lower growth, Speck 15.9%. High Sierra had also a smaller growth. Gregory, Lipault, Hartmann, all of them had a strong growth. Asia, when you look at it, because there are three big markets in Asia, as I spelled before, in the first half, more particularly, these markets were challenged, which was Korea, India, and China. Because of that, we have seen a negative growth in Asia, with American Tourister of 7.3%. High visibility into the quarter one number.
Quarter one number, American Tourister in Asia has rebound to deliver high single digit growth. In spite of Korea still remaining somewhat challenged, primarily riding on good momentum of this brand now back in China and in India. North America, in any way, grew by 3.1%. Europe it grew by 21.9%. Latin America by 98.5%. I have no hesitation to say that American Tourister would be back to high single digit growth in 2017. High Sierra also have seen a small degrowth, which is mainly on account of some of the businesses that we had last year did not get repeated in 2016. I think by 2017, we will be fine. We also decided to exit High Sierra from few of the market because we wanted to prioritize few other brands which have been recently acquired by the company.
Because of that, also you see a small degrowth in High Sierra. High Sierra, going forward in 2017, would be focused, and we will put all our resource behind High Sierra to grow it in few markets. North America, it is already doing very well. Australia, it continues to do extremely well. In Asia, we will focus our efforts of High Sierra only in Korea and Philippines. Similarly, we will drop out of High Sierra in Europe for the time being. That does not mean that this is a permanent decision. We want to allocate our resource and do justice in these markets, and then in coming years, we would once again launch High Sierra in other markets as well.
Kamiliant, which is a new entry point brand, which has been just recently introduced in quarter four in Asia, more particularly in India, Middle East, Korea, and China, is off to a good start. I think that could become one of our major brands in next handful of years, especially in emerging markets. The next few slides are giving you a flavor of different products that we have under our different brands. All key categories contributed to net sales growth. Travel, the constant currency growth was around 11.4%, and without Tumi, it was 4.5%. Business grew by 38.2%, without Tumi, 3.28%. Casual, 16.4%. Accessories, 47.3%. Others is negative because there were some third-party brands which we were selling in our Rolling Luggage chain of stores. We have been cutting down some of those third-party brands. That's why you see a small degrowth there. 8.9% increase in global advertising.
As a percentage, it came down a little bit. It was partly to also allow us to navigate the tough times, but it's definitely our intention to creep up the A&P spend from 5.1% last year to more like 6%, 6.5% over the next handful of years. Target advertising. These are the few pictures of different kind of advertising, which is done by us across different parts of the world. We look for my friend Kyle on the line.
Yes. Now we will have Kyle.
I kindly request him to cover the financial highlights.
go through the financial highlights. Kyle?
Yes. Morning, everyone. William, can you hear me okay?
It is Kyle, isn't it? Yeah.
Good morning, everyone. William, can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Yes. Page 28 now.
Okay, great. Yep, we're on page 28, financial highlights. There's a lot on the page because there's a lot to talk about on financial highlights this year. At SIM, starting with sales growth of, or reported sales of $2.8 million or billion dollars, growth of 6%, or around $145 million of growth in organic business, plus $276 million of Tumi for the five months. Adjusted net income up 18.9%, despite a year-on-year increase in interest expense of 40.5%. Including the interest expense for the Tumi deal, we had adjusted net income of 18.9%. Very strong operating cash flow, $260 million, up slightly from last year, despite the increases in cash interest and $37 million of acquisition-related costs. Underlying cash generation of the business, very strong.
Our net debt position is $1.57 billion, or million dollars, I'm sorry, and $368 million of cash and cash equivalents with debt of $1.9 billion. As we know, that was to finance the Tumi acquisition. We have a revolving facility of $500 million, of which we, at year-end, only had $13 million drawn. Plenty of capacity on our revolving facility. We're in compliance with all of our debt covenants at the end of the year. Our pro forma net leverage, is at 2.84%, slightly ahead of what we probably guided in our own anticipated levels. We thought we'd be around three times levered at the end of the year, so we're running a bit better than that. We were able to reprice our debt in February of 2017, which had the effect of lowering our cash interest expense by around $16 million in the first full year.
From an interest rate perspective, what that means is on our Term Loan A, we reduced from LIBOR + 275 to LIBOR + 200. In our Term Loan B, we reduced from LIBOR 325 to LIBOR 225. We were quite happy to catch the market in this repricing, and that will go a long way in helping us deliver accretion with Tumi, in its first full year in 2017. Net working capital continues to run very strong. Even including Tumi, we're running below our targets, so we're running at 12.6%, and our targets has been around 14%. We're quite happy with that, and we'll see that improve as we fully integrate Tumi, particularly on the back of the SAP implementation.
CapEx spend for 2016 was just under $70 million, largely focused on continue to grow retail and store modifications, also some investments we're making in some of our production facilities, particularly in Hungary. In connection with the liquidation of our pension plan, this is a project we've been working on for several years. We were able to finally annuitize our U.S. pension plan. On the back of the accounting for that, we had a large deferred tax liability that was reversed in our numbers. We end up with a $56 million-$57 million deferred tax liability removed, which is a benefit to our tax expense for this year. We also had a small gain in exiting the pension plan of around $6 million.
Excluding the tax benefit for this plan liquidation, also there was a slight rate reduction in Luxembourg, and we were able to deduct a lot of the acquisition cost for Tumi. Our effective tax rate for the year on a reported basis is actually a benefit. If I adjust for these items, our effective tax rate is running around 27.8% for 2016 compared to 25.4% for 2015. I'll show you a table so you can understand our tax rate. That's roughly where we'll be on a go-forward basis, around 27%-28%. On board meeting yesterday, we approved the cash distribution to shareholders of $97 million. That's up 4.3% from what we did last year. It's a slight increase to our payout ratio.
If you adjust for the pension liquidation tax benefit, which is really a non-cash item, that payout ratio is around 48.8%, up from roughly 47% last year. Our payout yield is up slightly year-over-year as well. If I go to slide 29, what I've done here is try to break down what we view as underlying net income growth for the business, and then some of what I would label specific to 2016 or more particularly, the one-time items that we had in 2016. If you look at the left of this chart, you can see our underlying business delivered $32 million of growth.
If you look at Tumi in these three buckets, and we group them together, that would say Tumi is break even for 2016 for the five-month period, including the interest cost and the amortization, with $30 million of net income added for Tumi for those five months. To the right side of the page are the one-offs, which is the benefit from the pension liquidation, $57 million. The tax affected acquisition cost to complete the deal, which flew through our P&L, that's $26 million. There are some small fees associated with getting the Tumi deal done before we closed the deal in August. That is a helpful slide, hopefully, for you to really understand underlying growth, because we're very positive we had a net benefit for one-time items in underlying growth.
I think it's very important that you adjust those when you're looking at underlying growth for the business. On slide 30, probably more numbers than you want to see, this is a breakdown of our tax rate. I might just draw you to a couple of points. In the middle of the page, our effective tax rate, on a combined basis, including Tumi, excluding what I would label as one-time items, our tax rate's around 27.8%. We had three one-time items, the impact of Tumi acquisition costs, which gave us a 4.5% benefit to our tax rate. Luxembourg had a rate decrease, and when we apply that decrease to the deferred tax liabilities we're carrying, that had around a $9 million benefit to our taxes in the year or 3.3%.
As we said, the pension plan liquidation had a very meaningful impact to our tax rate to end up with effectively a tax benefit in 2016. For guidance for next year, I think our tax rate will be very similar to our effective tax rate on the combined group, around 28%. We're putting a range of 27%-30%. I think we'll be right in the middle of that range from an effective tax rate on a go-forward basis. Which is in line, maybe slightly better than what we anticipated when we were evaluating the Tumi transaction on a combined basis. If I go to slide 31, really just a snapshot of our balance sheet. I've covered most of this. We had cash last year of $180 million. We have $368 million of cash at the end of 2016. Tumi came in with $145 million of cash.
That's a bit of the reason for the step-up. We generated $260 million of cash, last year we spent around $70 on CapEx and $93 million on distribution to shareholders. We're in a solid cash position. From a debt perspective, as we said, our leverage ratio is running around 2.84. We have around $490 million of availability on our Revolver. From a debt perspective, we're running slightly better than our own expectations for the end of the year. As I said, continuing strong working capital efficiency of 12.6%, which is on page 32. You can see, on this page, that our working capital last year efficiency was 11.8%. That stepped up to 12.6%, largely with Tumi coming in for the five-month period. We annualize Tumi for purposes of calculating these numbers.
If you look down the page, our inventory days, 111 last year, 109. If I peel Tumi out, we've actually gone to 102 days for our core Samsonite business. Tumi has a slightly slower inventory turn, of which we will be able to tweak as we help manage their inventory and their planning. I anticipate that our inventory days will run roughly in 105 days for the full year 2017, which is where we've historically run. Trade receivable, slightly down, really off the back of the mix of the Tumi business. A little more retail, which will bring down your receivable days. Days payable, slightly down, 109 to 100 days. As we bring Tumi onto our payment terms, we will see that those payable days will step back up.
We're quite happy with the working capital level at 12.6, you should expect to see some improvement from that for the full year 2017 once we fully integrate Tumi within our systems. From a CapEx perspective, I covered this, but when you look at where we're focused, it's largely retail expansion, $34 million this year, investments in product development, R&D and supply largely in 100 facilities, around $24 million. Tumi has a CapEx spend of around $30 million-$40 million. We've guided in your results that our next year CapEx spend will be around $115 million, really reflecting the full year of Tumi plus our core business. With that, I'll turn it back to you, Ramesh.
Thank you, Kyle. Outlook and strategies for 2017. We believe that increase in disposable income and living standards in developing countries, growing popularity of outdoor and adventure sports, growth of tourism are all expected to drive growth of global luggage market at a CAGR of 6.1% through 2021. That should allow us to grow our business at a pace slightly faster than that. Continue to develop company's well-diversified, multi-brand, multi-category, multi-channel luggage and bag and accessories business that we spoke about it. As I told you that as of now, non-travel component of our business is around 40%, combined together with Tumi, we see no reason over the next handful of years it will not hit a 50% mark, which was our original strategy as spelled out by Tim during our IPO days.
Leverage the company's regional management structure, sourcing and distribution expertise and marketing engine to extend Tumi's strong brand into new market and penetrate deeper into existing channels. We all know, Tumi is a great brand, it has a very strong distribution in North America, by same definition, there is lot of opportunity to grow this brand into lesser presented markets of Asia and Europe, that would continue to be our focus in 2017 and beyond. We'll also tactfully deploy our multi-brand to operate wider price point and broader consumer demographics in each market. We spelled that we have launched this brand, Kamiliant, in India, Middle East, and some of the Southeast Asian countries to operate a price segment which is sitting below American Tourister.
It's a part of our spelled out strategy to cover all different price segments of the market, reach out to different consumer demographics in each of the categories of luggage, bags and accessories. Increase the portion of group's direct-to-consumer channel by growing direct-to-consumer e-commerce and through targeted expansion of brick-and-mortar retail presence. We spelled out before, this component is right now around 35% of our sales. Out of that 35%, around 6%-6.5% is e-commerce. We believe that this 35% can also grow to around 50%. Within that, e-commerce from currently around 5%-5.5% to grow to around 15%. Overall put together could be around 50% of our business. We will continue to invest in group's core brand with sustained R&D spending to produce lighter, stronger new material, new processes, and exciting innovative new products.
We also intend to continue to invest in marketing in 2017 and support the global expansion of Tumi, as well as drive the core brands of Samsonite, American Tourister, Lipault, and a few others. As I said before, from 5.1%, over the next handful of years, we do intend to move up our A&P spend to get closer to more like 6.5%. Execute on market opportunities to recently acquired brands for further diversify group's product offering into non-travel category.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Tim, Ramesh, and Kyle. We now open the floor to questions. Hi. Raymond from Credit Suisse.
Thank you, William. Thank you, management. First of all, congratulations on the very strong results. I have three questions. Number one is, Ramesh, you just mentioned that in 1Q17, you're seeing a similar momentum in terms of organic sales growth versus second half. Is it like on a per regional basis it is like the case or on a group basis this is like the case? Can you elaborate a little bit, and what's your any guidance for maybe first half of this year, in terms of the organic sales growth? My second questions is on the Tumi. We know that Tumi, the A&P expenses will further increase, in terms of ratio and the absolute amount. You also mentioned about there will be a additional $9 million cost saving for the full year annualized.
If net, do we expect Tumi's EBITDA margin to drop this year after spending the additional advertisements? Thirdly is on the debt level. I remember that like we do have mentioned previously, we probably mentioned that we might use the internal cash flow to gradually repay the debt. Is there any like period that is locked up, that we cannot repay? When is the schedule that we plan to gradually pay down the debt for financing Tumi? Yeah, thank you.
The first one, the Q1 momentum, as I said, we see a similar momentum continuing from second half of last year into Q1. There could be country to country variances. When we really look at everything put together, in the second half of last year, our core business grew by around mid-single digit. That's the same kind of a number we are looking at it in the quarter one. Probably same thing continuing in rest of the year. There could be some small movement between one country or another country. As I said, we do see a continual softness in Korea, but we see a strong growth in European markets. It could be movement from country to country, region to region, but overall, these are the numbers we're looking at it.
Tumi's A&P, we believe a brand like Tumi, the sustainable level of A&P spend should be more like 600, 650 basis point, which is more or less in line with what we would like to otherwise spend on our other brands. Historically, it has been a very under-invested brand. They've been investing about, let's say, 100, 150 basis point of the sales in the past, which we want to creep it up. We believe that there is, beyond cost synergies, there are also opportunities to move the gross margin up. What you would find will be that in whatever cost benefits that we can get out of synergies or through improvement on the sourcing side, all of it in the first year will go in funding the A&P of Tumi.
When you get into 2018, that means that the profitability of Tumi would remain similar level as it is now. When you get into 2018, where we will be able to secure or pocket most of the cost savings and margin improvement, at that point of time, you will see that the profitability of Tumi is starting to creep up. On the debt level. Is Kyle there?
Yes, Kyle, would you like to take the question on the debt?
Yes. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay. We started actually repaying some of the debt. We had a small amortization at the end of 2016. We have an amortization schedule that builds over time. We'll be paying required debt payments at the end of, or over the period of 2017. The way our debt facility works is excess cash flow, there'll be a portion of that that will go into repaying debt. It's not a perfect number, but we'll probably end up paying somewhere between $50 million-$100 million against the debt for 2017, which will be a small portion of required amortization and then excess cash flow that'll get applied to the debt. You'll see over the next couple of years, our leverage ratio come down.
I think we had guided in the 2-3 year period, full years following closing, we will probably get close to 2 times lever. Our view is that it will still be achievable with both debt repayment and growth in EBITDA. We had a little extra cash at the end of the year. If you look at our cash levels, some of that is the Tumi cash coming in. The other piece is we knew we were going to be buying back some of these distributors that Ramesh talked about as far as integrating the Tumi business. Right out of the gate in January, we spent some for Korea. We are working on some of these other distributors, so some of that cash will go towards buying back these distributors. These are low-ticket items.
They are not big purchases, but they are a piece of the puzzle in why we are carrying a little bit extra cash at the end of the year.
Thank you, Kyle.
Okay.
Yes. In the back first.
Thank you. This is Mariana Kou from CLSA. Thank you, management, for taking my questions. Again, congratulations, a very strong set of results. I have three questions. My first one is on the sourcing side. Could you actually help us kind of dissect or think about any possible impact from the U.S. side in terms of policy and how you might actually change your strategy on your sourcing side? Number 2 is just if you could give us a bit more background on the tax benefit, the liquidation situation of the retirement plan, and if there could be any impact on the operating expenses going forward, i.e., the EBITDA margin for North America. Number 3 is just a small question on Tumi IP. I think previously we talked about potentially moving the IP for Tumi, and there could be some tax impact.
If you could help us get an update on that'd be great. Thank you.
Okay. On the sourcing, I know that it has been covered a bit too much in the press. It's not a recent thing. We have been reevaluating our sourcing strategy for the company as a whole for the last couple of years. The result of that was that already a couple of years back, we made investment in a manufacturing plant in Hungary with two objective. At that time, our objective was that we wanted to bring manufacturing closer to the market so that we can follow the ups and downs in the market much more closely. When you source the product in the Orient, you have a six month of pipeline.
If you have a collection coming in and if a collection doesn't do well, even if you close the tap, still six months of the ship will still be flowing in, and we're to figure it out what are we going to do with that. Whereas when you are doing manufacturing closer home, whether close to the market, you can probably correct the inventory planning month to month or even week to week. That was the advantage. When the plant has got commissioned in Hungary, we were also pleasantly surprised to see that the cost of goods in Hungary is not necessarily higher than China. Because technologies have changed, a lot more automation can be done. The result of that is we are now starting to evaluate, should we not look at a similar opportunity in our North American market, which is our largest business market?
At this stage, this was never a project which is getting influenced by a presidential policy which may change from one president to another president. We are talking about cost of goods versus cost of goods. We are talking about how can we better serve the market and follow the trends in the market much more closely. At this stage, we have just done some preliminary work in terms of the studies there. This is an internal study, the conclusion of the internal study is that it does make economic sense for us. This is not based upon supposedly increased import duty or reduced import duty. This is purely based upon status quo. This is just an internal study. We are now going to start a more objective external study. Based on that, whatever will come out of it, we will take an appropriate decision.
I must tell you, manufacturing is not about taking a decision linked with one political leadership, because when you take a decision for manufacturing, it is for next couple of decades, and where many different political parties will come and go. We will take a more informed decision, but I must admit it, that we are extremely satisfied with the performance of our decision, which was taken under Timothy Parker's leadership of expanding our manufacturing in Europe. The last one was the tax benefits.
Okay. Yeah. The next question is about the tax benefits.
Yeah.
Perhaps Kyle can jump in on that.
Yes. We have two questions. Pension. If you remember on the U.S. pension plan, we had froze this plan several years back, we were just navigating towards annuitizing and removing it. The annual cost to our U.S. business was pretty low. It's probably a shade under $2 million. You're not going to see a big P&L impact with us liquidating this. What it does do is take the risk of variability in the pension liability growing over time. From a P&L perspective, a slight benefit, nothing you really notice in margins for the U.S. business. As far as moving the Tumi IP, we're in the final stages of that. I think we had guided there'd be some tax impacts to that. I think it's probably a little less than what we guided.
We're probably looking at a cash tax cost of around $15 million-$20 million. That's being finalized here over probably the next two months.
Great. Next question, please.
Okay.
Anne in front, please. Go ahead.
Hello, Anne from Deutsche Bank. Management team, I would like to check with you regarding, Ramesh, you just mentioned that for the first half, we are looking for core business, excluding Tumi, something like the run rate of mid to single digit. Given the fact that for the second half, we have a higher base than this last year. What is our realistic target for the full year? That's my first question, and also now that we have U.S. having around 35% or higher in terms of market share in terms of the total sales, a strong U.S. dollar, how would it impact in terms of our net currency impact on the GP side, and also how soon can we increase our price at the retail end? We would like to check with that question. Thirdly, regarding Tumi.
For Tumi, we mentioned, I think we have been talking about getting more of the wholesale business back to direct to consumers. We have Korea already. What about, you mentioned about by the end of this year, we'll have most of the key markets that will be done. What are these markets you're referring to? What about the updates in Hong Kong, China, and apart from that, is there other markets next in the pipeline? Thank you.
Okay. The momentum and the trading updates that we have as of now, barring unforeseen circumstances, I see no reason why we should not be able to deliver mid-single digit for the entire year as well. I'm talking about a core business. Coming back to the strong U.S. dollar. As you know that strong U.S. dollar does not affect only us, but it affects everybody else. Definitely, as we have done in the past, we do try to navigate our pricing in a manner that we protect our margins. There would be cases where we will take selective price increases, but at the same time, there would be also cases where we will go for value engineering of our products. Overall, it will be our endeavor to maintain the margins of our brand in similar range as it is now.
Except for Tumi, where we still are working to improve the margins in Tumi, but our other brands core business, the margin has to be looked at it remaining same as last year. Coming to, let's say Tumi distribution in other markets. As I said before, Korea is already back home. Japan is already a direct market. These are two big markets. There are other smaller markets like London, like U.K. is also back home. There was a small distributor in Spain that's also back, but they were rather small in nature. There are few like in Indonesia, Thailand, they all will be with us in quarter two, which includes China, which includes Hong Kong. You can take it that for quarter two, for the second half of next year, probably all the markets where we intend to operate directly will be directly operated.
There could be few smaller markets which may still continue to be operated through distributors. They're very small ones. All large markets by quarter two would be directly operated.
What about strong U.S. dollar impact regarding tourists in the U.S.?
This is move around. We do see that there is a little bit of softness in the gateway cities again. In U.S. There is less touristic arrival than what was seen in the, I would say, in the quarter three, quarter four of last year. There is a little bit of moderation now in the U.S., but we at the same time see a very strong growth in Europe. I think by now working in this industry, I tend to believe that people never cancel their holiday plans. They just choose the holiday more judiciously. Maybe the Chinese will not go to Korea because the government wants to discourage them, but they will show up somewhere else. We see very, very strong numbers in Austria, in Germany, and again, in Greece. They're small market. In Russia, the business is booming. It's like +40%.
I'm sure there are not that many new Russians who are buying it. It is just that Chinese also discover Russia now. I think as long as they don't change their habit, they choose one country or another country, we would be fine.
Great. Jeffrey, can you let me know whether there are any questions from online? Excellent. Shen in front.
Hi, guys. Morning. Shen Li, J.P. Morgan. A couple of questions. Firstly, Tumi, it's a well, it's a greater share of the business is direct to store, directly operated retail. I was wondering, can you give us a sense of what the operating leverage of that business is? In the context of 2017, where you mentioned that you don't expect any operating margin expansion, in what type of sales growth could you get where you would get operating margin expansion through operating leverage? Secondly, could you give us some guidance around depreciation? Because it seems a little bit high this year. Wanting some guidance going forward.
Tumi's core business, and when I use the word core, I mean is there that not the way we will look at it. You can looking for Tumi delivering a double-digit growth in 2017. On account of the additional investment that we are making to push the brand out, also on account of going direct in many of the markets. When you combine both of them together, I think we can very well look for Tumi to deliver like mid-teens kind of a growth in 2017. As I said, it's a combination of both we going direct as well as additional A&P spend that we are committing behind this brand. In terms of the margin expansion, there is not much operating leverage as I spelled out before. We are looking at two things. Number one, there are cost synergies at the back end of the business.
Part of it is already been pocketed. A big chunk of it will really come about when we will implement SAP. They will be working on the same platform as us, which is today targeted at May 2017. Second part of the cost synergies will start coming in at that point of time. I think it's in 2018 that entire synergies, cost synergies that we had estimated in our plan, which is about $25 million yearly, will be seen in our business, which will then in turn create some operating leverage. I think the big story for Tumi is we believe that Tumi is a strong enough brand. Combining it together with the sourcing skills of Samsonite, we should be able to move the gross margin by about 1,000 basis point.
Part of that 1,000 basis point improvement will go to fund an increase of 600 basis point on A&P. The first savings that we get, all of it will go in funding the additional A&P. As a result, we are guiding 2017. You may look at it, the margin to remain the same as last year. Come 2018, when we will get additional cost synergies coming in and also the balance 400 basis point improvement in the gross margin kicking in, you will see some margin improvements in Tumi in 2018.
Great. Other questions? In the back.
Hi. I am looking at page 34. You mentioned that the industry will grow by 6.1% CAGR through 2021. What is your current market share, and what is your targeted market share by then? The second question is regarding the statement here, growing popularity of outdoor and adventure sports. Besides the two brands that you have already, Gregory and I forget, High Sierra, are you looking for other acquisitions in this space? Thanks.
The industry is expected to grow around 6%. We see no reason why with our portfolio brand, our strength of our machine that we have, which is operating in 100 odd countries worldwide, our ability to commit more advertising dollar behind our brand, that we should not be able to grow faster than the market. It is more like a high single-digit kind of a growth, creeping up to double-digit growth, combining together with Tumi numbers is what you should be looking at it. What, as Tim said, if you look at last year, five years of CAGR, we have delivered around 12%+ growth. The similar thing should be expected out of us for next five years as well. Coming to the outdoor business, we are currently operating three brands in outdoor segment.
One is High Sierra, which is largely an American brand. We have a homegrown brand, which we created our own, called Xtrem, which is mainly today deployed in Latin America. The third brand that we have is Gregory, which is largely today a Japanese and American brand. I think outdoor, we are aware, is one of the strongest growing category. I must also say that this is one category where the distribution of this category is way different than the normal channels of distribution where our strength lies. We are also navigating and learning the distribution channel step by step. The growth of Xtrem, the growth of Gregory, both have been very, very satisfactory for us in 2016. High Sierra was a little bit disappointing. We expanded everywhere. The message we learned was that we need to operate this market step by step.
Because when you really get into a market, it's not only about the product. As I said to you before, the distribution is more different than the traditional distribution of luggage and business bags. Secondly, we also need to commit advertising dollar behind it. Our idea now is that we will expand Gregory in few other markets in Asia, more particularly in markets like Korea, Taiwan, beyond Japan. We will also expand High Sierra now beyond Australia, U.S., more seriously in Middle East and Korea. Xtrem, as I mentioned before, it has already been launched in the-- Xtrem was previously until 2015 was a brand which was limited only to one market, Chile. We launched that brand in other Latin American countries, mainly Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Panama and some of the other countries with really huge success.
I would say we are just starting in this segment. It is a big segment, but we want to learn as we walk. At this stage, there is no concrete proposal with us to acquire another brand in outdoor space. I wouldn't say that we will keep our eyes closed. If something credibly presents itself, we would not hesitate to have a look at it.
Okay. In the back? In the back.
Thank you. This is Angeline from Petra Capital. I want to ask about your distribution channels and whether there's any synergy or consolidation of distribution with Tumi and if there's any synergy involved. Also about your retail channels, what's the percentage of leased versus owned properties and how's the strategy for the retail implementation? Thank you.
There's no obvious distribution synergies between Tumi and Samsonite. We have no intention to sell Tumi in Samsonite doors or vice versa. At the same time, I must admit that Tumi has a much better and deeper understanding about retailing, much better than we at Samsonite in the past have known. We definitely intend to leverage their knowledge of retail to the benefit of our other brands. In terms of combining the two brands, it would generally not happen. That does not mean that we had acquired a retail chain in U.K. largely, U.K. and Australia, and now we will start to expand its footprint to other parts of the world called Rolling Luggage, which is a multi-brand, multi-category luggage retail outlet, which was traditionally already selling Samsonite as well as Tumi.
I think in the airports you may find sometimes that Tumi and Samsonite are being sold side by side. Beyond that, there's not much intention to combine them together. That does not mean the knowledge will not happen. As I said that Tumi does better in retail, Samsonite does better in wholesale. When we start to look at Tumi's business in Japan, I'm giving one concrete example there, we find that Tumi's presence in the departmental store in Japan, or for that matter in Korea, is far inferior to Samsonite. We have better relationship with those departmental stores and we know that part of the business much better than them. It is definitely our intention then.
We have moved few of our good people from Samsonite team who are doing that departmental store business in Japan and Korea to now operate the Tumi's distribution business. Tumi traditionally knows how to run single brand retail very well, but not necessarily how to operate in the departmental store. Departmental store in many countries are still very important like Japan, like Korea, like U.K., but probably there are many other markets where it is less important. For example, in U.S., likes of Neiman Marcus, Saks, and Bloomie's are as important as having a single brand store. I think our experience of managing those relationships could come handy, but that does not mean the shop-in-shop of Samsonite will start selling Tumi. It will be just that we will use our knowledge and relationship with those buyers to get Tumi a better presence in these doors.
Thank you, Ramesh. Two more questions before we end the. Okay. Here in front, please.
Hi. Three questions, please. First question is the length of the purchasing cycle across the various categories, i.e., travel, non-travel. Second question is, it is very positive to see the group investing in more A&P in Tumi. The question is how is Tumi able to achieve such high profitability investing only 100, 150 BPS in A&P? The third question is profitability of e-commerce at the operating profit level. Thank you.
Okay. The purchasing cycle, there are no real concrete numbers there. Generally, we would like to estimate and believe that travel luggage has a replacement cycle of around three years. It can get accelerated. When you launch a new collection, which is delivering consumer some great value or great design, we have seen consumer willing to come out and replace his luggage if he sees that something great is getting offered to him. Very important in our business now, or increasingly important in our business, is newness. In the past, I remember we used to all believe that I worked in this business for almost 18 years. During the first regime of Luke, who was the chairman of the company, in those days, I was heading Indian business. We used to say that we need to bring 20% of our collection should be new every year.
When Tim came on board, we changed that to around 33% of our collection should be new, which are based on probably once in three year kind of a replacement cycle. Now we are challenging ourselves. Now we want 50% of our collection to be less than a year within all our doors, because that accelerates consumer's willingness to buy a new product and not wait for the old product to give way. Non-travel, on other hand, the buying cycle with whatever estimates that we make it at our end is much, much shorter. Generally, a year. People tend to change their everyday use bags every year because they are also more prone to following the fashion colors, fashion designs, and things like that.
To that extent also, there was one reason why we have been so passionately under Tim's leadership of 11 years, growing the non-travel from low single digit to now coming up to almost 40% of our sales because that does help your business. A&P spend, quite honestly even I'm surprised. I met the previous CEO of the company. I said, "What the fuck?" Sorry, my language not so polite. I said, "You did good numbers without spending anything on A&P." Let me give the credit to them. I think they did an excellent job in terms of choosing the retail locations. Jerome's belief was that the retail, if you have good doors and they are well merchandised, managed by motivated staff, they themselves work as billboards.
Of course, you look at it, the current franchise of the brand is limited to people in the room here. All the bankers, investment bankers, and the consultants, it almost become like a uniform for them. If your boss is carrying it, when you get a new job, you want to be like your boss. That also help the business. We want to grow because Tumi was a great business, $500 million, but we set a target for ourselves that over the next handful of years, we see no reason it to be more than $1 billion. I cannot wait only the bankers and the consultants to buy me. I need to go beyond that. That communication cannot happen that you accidentally land up into Tumi store in Wall Street and find out a product. I give you another example.
Tumi has now great women bags. Just launched two years back. They have only one collection called Voyager, which starts to contribute to 18% of their revenue. It's a humongous number. Tumi's luggage sales have dropped like no tomorrow, but nobody in the world saw that because the luggage technology's changed. People want to looking for lighter luggage. They could not produce that, but the overall number never reflected that. The luggage contribution over Tumi's business from around 75% six year back is now down to around 30%. They kept on losing that because of the technological impediment. Hopefully, we will cover that. This women bag which they're selling it, there's been some market research which were done by them, where no women ever visits Tumi store to buy a bag for herself. This is one of the Tumi study, another consumer study they have done.
They mostly land up in the store to buy a bag for the boyfriend or for the husband or something else. Or she just accompanying her boyfriend, she then discovers, oh, Tumi has some great women bags. You cannot wait for that cycle to happen. You want to shorten that cycle by going out and communicating to the consumer. The next time when a woman wants to buy a good-looking business bag, which is also functional, she must consider Tumi as part of our brand consideration. That is what I would say that A&P can do to them. There are markets like China, Korea, and Japan, where the brand awareness of Tumi is still is very, very low. The Tumi sales in Japan is in single digit. When you look at it, their North American business will be around $300 million plus.
There's no reason. The contribution of Tumi is 4% or 5% in Japan. Therefore, any premium brand or luxury brand, the number should be more like 25%, going up to around 30%-35%. Today, the brand has not been invested in in China, so if you were to wait and follow the Tumi's way of doing the business, I'm sure I will be retired by then. I don't have that much patience.
We won't be letting you. It's all right.
We have to accelerate, the NP is the way to do it. E-commerce profitability. E-commerce, I think long term, we'd look at it, e-commerce profitability to be similar to the other channels. Today, it tends to be more profitable. I would not like to guide anybody to look at it as e-commerce contribution in our sales grow, the profitability will keep increasing. Why I say that, because the dynamics of the e-commerce is also continuously changing. Long term, you'd look at it, the e-commerce growth will not be margin dilutive, definitely, but it will not be margin accretive. Today as we speak, it's only 6% of the total revenue. It looks that it is margin accretive. Don't start spending that over longer term.
Great. Final question from Anne, here in front.
Hi, a couple follow-up question. First, in terms of the pricing propositions of your various brand, with Rimowa being acquired these days, how will you change your price propositions, especially on the high-end brand names like Tumi and also in a way Samsonite? The luxury names has been talking about price harmonization globally. We do see the difference in terms of a Samsonite product or a Tumi product in different markets. Are we going to change that? Secondly is regarding Tumi's core, let's say, excluding this inclusion of the wholesale business. If I just look at the core business, what will be the organic growth? What will it be like? I forgot about my last question.
Okay. Price harmonization. Samsonite has always been implementing what we call as a pricing index. That means, the price between one region to another region or one country to another country within the same region, we do follow kind of a price index. The price index would mean that our price could have a variance between plus to minus 10%. I think that kind of a number is reasonably well accepted in our business because that's more on account of different weighty which gets applicable in different parts of the world. Coming to the other question about Tumi's core growth. Let's say today when we look at their comp ratio, which is a good number to look at it. The mid-single digit is what we should look at it coming out of Tumi, which is very similar to the Samsonite core business.
The additional growth of Tumi that I'm saying that we will get to the double-digit with Tumi is mainly on account of trying to grow the business in less represented markets like Europe and Asia. In less represented channels, which could also be U.S., for that matter. It could be less represented category where in the past they lost market share in a very significant manner, which is in the luggage segment, which is because of the technological impediment which they suffered over last couple of years. We believe we will be able to cover that for them, and a new collection we should be able to bring to the market in quarter four, under the brand Tumi. All that put together would allow Tumi to be able to deliver double-digit growth in 2017 and next handful of years.
Yeah. My final question is on China's side. For China, we start to see a acceleration in terms of growth. Is it on the B2B side or on the B2C side or actually both?
Yeah, I would say that if you look at channel by channel. You see growth coming back in e-commerce, growth coming back in B2B business. There's also a small growth starting to come back in the department stores. Department store can broadly divide them into two kinds of department store. The department stores which are in suburban malls, you start to see the traffic coming back. The department store which are standalone in the premium city centers, they are still losing market share. I think the retail doors, which are again in the suburban malls, the department store which are in the suburban malls, starts to deliver growth. E-commerce and B2B are delivering stronger growth. Department store which are standalone still continue to lose some share.
The hypermarkets also still continue to see some loss of market share, which is actually more than made good by e-commerce.
Great. Thank you very much everyone for attending this results presentation. Thank you, Tim, Ramesh, and Kyle for the presentation today. Thanks.