Thank you, good morning, everybody. This is Roger starting here to go through fourth quarter 2016, and also, of course, conclude the year and leave that behind us. I say we do as always, we shoot straight into the presentation and go to the Q4 highlights. That's on page four. Looking at the quarter, sales were up 10%, of which organic sales growth was 5%. Worth highlighting is gross margin improvement of 2.4 percentage points. That the underlying margin is worth highlighting in a quarter where we have had some one-time costs or other things that we will explain here later. EBIT margin improvement, excluding rebranding and legal fees of some almost SEK 60 million, SEK 58 million. The margin came out at 9.6%. We had highlighted it that we would take quite some cost for this during the quarter. Came out even higher. We'll talk more about that later.
If you look at the regions, I think EMEA is to conclude as robust performance with RV and trucks and cars showing double-digit growth. Americas shows a very strong underlying earnings performance, but clearly the result is impacted by mainly legal cost. APAC, you recall quarter three, we were a little soft, but quarter four is solid performance, despite actually a rather soft RV market in Australia in the quarter. We're satisfied with Asia's result. Operating cash flow came out a little softer than last year, mainly impacted by inventory buildup that we have chosen to do. You recall that we had some supply issues during the summer, and we clearly want to avoid that this year together with, of course, all the changes and actions we have taken operationally to secure that. Improved leverage down at 1.7 now.
We concluded the sale of Atwood Seating and Chassis business, good portfolio cleanup actually in the second half of 2016. We acquired IPV in December, which was an opportunity that came up, and we took it. It will be a great complement and a great acquisition on mobile cooling, basically in EMEA. As you saw here just a few days ago, we announced the acquisition of a really well-run and fantastic company that fits extremely well into our portfolio and to our marine growth. That's the highlights of the quarter, obviously, as always, we'll come into a little bit more detail as we go. All in all, I would say an okay quarter. If you go to the next page, you see it in bars. Normally, these arrows go up, it does cash flow, as I said, a little bit weaker.
Per-Arne will come into more details around what's happening in cash flow in the quarter. Of course, we go to the markets. U.S. RV market continue strong. We must conclude the year as a great RV year for U.S., with shipments out to dealers at 15% up, 430,000 units. Rolling three was unusually strong, and always the end of the year can always be throwing extreme numbers in either direction. I think that 19% is not representative of where the market is ticking, but it was a high number. Already now I can say, what we know about next year is that, clearly the RVIA organization expects growth. I personally, with everything we see, it's a very optimistic market, we will not see these type of numbers, we will see growth during 2017. We move to the European market.
As you always know, this is registrations versus shipments. These are the top five markets. We don't have the statistics as fresh as we have in the U.S., but all in all, we can also here conclude that the full year 2016 was another good year also for the European market. I think we're going to see numbers for the full market when we have all the statistics around 170,000 units. This industry is very optimistic for next year, and 13% growth in 2016. We have no official numbers how it's going to look for next year, but the industry is very optimistic and capacity is added. If you move to trucks on next page, there's a constant upgoing curve, and the full year ends up at 11, rolling three at six.
We basically have good correlation to truck builds, and the need for comfort products into trucks is continue to also strengthen. We like this market, and I think that we're going to see also 2017 a rather decent market when it comes to trucks. Looking at powerboat sales in the U.S., little bit weaker than what has been hovering around in the past quarters, but full year 2016 ended up at 6%. The larger vessels were in December down, but these are big projects businesses. It did actually reflect a little bit also the impact on our marine business in the U.S. All in all, we are optimistic about powerboat sales in the U.S. This will continue to hovering around these type of growth rates with what we see and what we know. Changing gears and talking about the regional performances. Go to Americas.
All in all, maybe Americas is the area, the region where we are not 100% satisfied. All in all, anyway, it's an okay quarter. You see that our RV OE sales are up 7%, but you always, of course, draw the conclusion and compare that to shipments, which was much stronger than that, and that the RV market is strong. I'll come back to that soon. Improved underlying margins from 8.3% to 11.5%, if you exclude the rebranding and the legal cost that hits Americas quite hard. Important to take with you is that we have even strengthened margins, seen underlying. We divested the low-margin Seating and Chassis business in October, our portfolio management has been active in Americas during the year, and I feel extremely comfortable now with moving into 2017 with a clean portfolio and having management attention on the right businesses for this region.
More can be added. The RV sales for us were affected by a mix of things. First of all, market mix. Travel trailers, small travel trailers are growing mostly, where we have, from a value standpoint and actually unit standpoint, a lower content in these units. We have lost some market share, and we have talked about that throughout 2016. We've lost share and some price on awnings, but that trend is changing. We have lost some share on refrigerators. The only thing that I can tell you is that we're going to take back share in the areas where we have lost during the year. We will do that during 2017. We have an action plan on all areas, and we're going to be quite aggressive in the Americas market in 2017.
Also impacting the quarter a little bit for us was actually that after some very cold weather in December, some of our main customers choose to shut down production and extend the shutdown around Christmas. That actually affected our sales, and that is worth mentioning here. Scott is on board since December 1, and he's taken a strong grip around the region and looking at a lot of things with new eyes, and it's going to be a great ride going forward to have him on board. Regarding the RV OE sales, it's also worth mentioning that we have the same diff versus the market shipments as we had in Q3. It's not changing in terms of relation to market shipments. If we move to EMEA. I think all in all, a good quarter. You remember last year when we talked about quarter four.
Quarter four for EMEA is, maybe it's the wrong word, but it can be messy because it's a very small quarter in terms of revenues, and we are sitting on quite some fixed cost. All in all, I think they managed the quarter well. You see that we had good sales of 17% up, of which RV OE was 16% up, where we outpaced the market. Net sales in constant was up 12%. Even more good is to say that after market growth 14%. We have a lot of initiatives going on in the countries, and we are clearly improving our distribution capability. It's really encouraging to see in such a quarter that after market is growing, and we're excited here going forward for the spring here for EMEA. You should be aware that the quarter includes rebranding cost of some SEK 13 million for EMEA.
AC service stations we have talked about. We had foreseen that that would also taper out faster here, but we still sell our units very strongly. It's the best unit in the market, and the demand is still keeping up actually, which is great. We had encouraging progress in the marine business. Good positions here. The marine business, we don't have stats on that to the same extent that in the U.S., but it's good momentum in the marine business in Europe right now. We've done two small, I mentioned it, two small, but still very suitable bolt-on acquisitions here, both great complements to our businesses, and we think we can do even greater things with them in the family here going forward. If you look on Asia was a little bit the low light in Q3. They were hit hard by hedges and dynamics around FX.
I think that we see that reversing here in the quarter. Net sales increased 14% overall sales improvement quarter-over-quarter. Improved underlying margins, also worth mentioning, from 24.7 to 25.2, if you take away currency effects and hedges. You cannot do that, but at the same time, it's worth mentioning that the underlying businesses continue to improve. Also here, we're actually outpacing a rather soft RV market in Australia. It's always high interest around RV in Australia, but you can see whether it's ups or downs. I think that the quarter four was, from build standpoint, was rather soft. We had a good quarter versus the rest of the industry. Also worth mentioning is retail growth of 18%. These are our stars when it comes to retail growth, and they're just continuing. It's clearly in Australia where we see this happening.
We have a great young team down there that are very excited, and we have good products. I think we're going to see that continue throughout next year. All in all, a rather good quarter for Asia, I would say. Moving to the next, we have the two charts with just visualizing it with graphs. I think that the trends, all in all, go in the right direction. Cash flow and EBIT a little bit down. You're going to see those turning here as we move forward. Looking at it from the business area development standpoint, quite good growth rates, as you see, nine, six and 10. I think that the strength, as I always like to point out, is that the strength is that most of our businesses are improving. We have width in our improvement, which is encouraging.
I think I take a pause there and let Per-Arne take a drill down here a little bit more on the financials.
Thank you, Roger. We turn into the page we usually show at the beginning, and that's to dissect what has happened with our net sales in the quarter. We continue to show growth, this time 10%. The difference compared to previous quarter is that we have a higher impact from translation on FX. We saw the USD strengthening and also the EUR strengthening towards the SEK, especially at the end of the quarter. It has now weakened again in the beginning of this year. The impact was actually 6%. At the same time, we had divestments of minus 1. We continue to show growth, organic growth of 5%, which I think is pretty impressive if you look back on this company also during the last two years.
For the full year, you can see that we reach close to SEK 12.4 billion. This is our first year as a listed company. We actually had an organic growth of close to 7%. We also expanded our EBIT and EBIT margins from SEK 1.4 billion up to SEK 1.6 billion. Operating cash flow, somewhat down. I will come back to that later on. If you look at the cash flow for the period, everything included, we actually increased the cash flow from SEK 230 million up to SEK 750 million, i.e., roughly half a billion SEK in increased cash flow given our new capital structure. If we look at the sales during the full year of 2016, as I mentioned, we have had less impact over translation during the first three quarters, just 2%, driven by basically the USD, 3% I mentioned, and divestments.
We have been working with our portfolio. That takes out roughly 1%. At the end of the day, 7% in organic growth for the whole year of 2016. Summarizing some of the key ratios. You can see that the organic growth has been between 7%-7.7% during the last two years. I think that's a strength for this company. We have been growing together with the markets, but we have also done different initiatives to help our growth to be at this level. We have been able to increase the profitability. EBIT margins are now exceeding 13%, close to 1% unit up. We have said that that's what we should try to achieve. We have different items impacting this. I will come back to that later on. Roger has partly also mentioned that. The capital efficiency landed at 22.5%.
I think it's a bit too high. We are working to get this down, and we still have the aim to get down or closer to 20% over time. Management cash flow is somewhat lower than last year. EPS, our first year with sort of a more normalized EPS, landed at SEK 4.6. If you look at the regional results, you can see that the result of SEK 210 million is driven by two regions. It's Americas and Asia Pacific. EMEA, with an annual result of SEK 534 million, just posed SEK 11 million in result in the last quarter. Going back a couple of years, EMEA actually had losses in this quarter. We are working now to get improvements, working with better flexibility in the cost base. Also looking at production planning perhaps in a different way to sort of decrease the sensitivity of the last quarter.
However, with the rebranding cost of SEK 13 million-SEK 40 million, the underlying result has actually improved pretty much compared to previous years. The margin development continued to be seasonal. You can see that on the next slide. We are following a very seasonal pattern in all the different regions. Nothing dramatic has changed in this Q4. I think the positive thing is that we have underlying margin improvements in all regions. If you look at Americas, we have burdening the cost with class action and rebranding. The same goes for EMEA. APAC, if we take the next slide, had the dramatic downturn of the margin in Q3 with 8% units. You can see that the one off that we had in that quarter is taken away. What we have left is the hedging impact. Isolating the hedging impact, we're actually going up from 24.7%-25.4%.
The underlying business is actually doing well. We then turn into items impacting the Q4, the quarter four. We talked about the rebranding and class action costs already of the Q3. They came out a bit higher. We had higher activities both in the rebranding part. Also the class action than we had anticipated. The recognition of interest expense and carry forward was more positive than we thought. We talked about SEK 150 million-SEK 155 million. It came out as SEK 175 million. The cash effects from the divestment was the same that we mentioned. This is taken basically within sort of the normal business. We have the items affecting comparability. There we have the seating thing coming back in with SEK 25 million minus.
What we didn't talk about in the last quarter because we were not aware of that, is the close down on the manufacturing line in China. An outsourcing activity that causes roughly SEK 6 million as a one-off, but will improve profitability over time. We also closed an old insurance case that had been running since, I think, 2014, and that is now closed, and we ended up with an extra cost of SEK 5 million. All in all, SEK 37 million in items affecting comparability, slightly higher, SEK 3 million, SEK 4 million, SEK 5 million higher than we had anticipated. If you then look at the earnings per share, as this is the first time we have a, you could say, ordinary earnings per share given the new capital structure.
SEK 4.6, it's supported by the recognition of the interest cost carry forward, which means that the tax rate for the whole year has ended up at 6%. The tax paid for the whole year ended up at 7%, which is lower than we have anticipated before. If we look at this going forward, we will come back to more normal tax rate as 23%, which we said during the IPO process. Tax paid, however, will be lower. We anticipated 15%, but we now think that we will come closer to 10% and perhaps even below 10% the coming year, which is positive for our cash flow. CapEx and the product development cost, we continue to invest. Had some higher cost in the Q4 for the product development, which I think is good. We're still struggling a bit with the CapEx. Not that we are having too much.
On the contrary, I would like to invest more, but it's also a question of having the right planning in the factories to make sure that we can avoid disturbing too much of the production. We would expect the CapEx to be about 2% going forward. A bit on the lower side for 2016, but you should expect this to be 2%-2.5% going forward. Working capital, we talked about that capital was a bit affected. We had working capital of roughly 25%-26% a couple of years ago. We have taken it down to 22%, and we are aiming for going down to 20%.
It's always a balance when you are looking at the working capital to make sure that you have the right inventory levels and also that we are prepared for next season, where we took actually a decision to support the sales with increased inventory. If you then look at the next page, you can see that inventory has gone up roughly SEK 440 million. Here we also have an FX effect of close to SEK 150 million. It was a very clear and active decision for us to increase inventory, and it's especially ACs that are produced in China, that we are stocking up both in Europe and also in the U.S.
Where we have pretty long lead times given that the transportation is long, we had the Chinese New Year coming up a bit earlier now in January compared to 2015, where it was in, I think somewhere it was in February. We took this decision to increase this. It hurt cash flow, I think it will support sales going forward. If you look at the cash flow on the next page. The last two quarters, the third and fourth quarter is usually the one that are the strongest one. If we take an average in 2015, we had an average of SEK 505 million per quarter, in 2016, it went down to SEK 443 million. Still solid cash flow, we are satisfied with the cash flow we're getting into the company. We have some pacing effects here as well that affected the cash flow.
Overall, the positive cash flow has also helped us to improve our leverage. The ones that have been around for a while remember that at the end of 2014, we had 7.5 times leverage compared to EBITDA. Now we are down to 1.7, slightly higher than I had anticipated because the strengthening of both USD and the EUR made a revaluation on the loans that amount to plus SEK 120 million, roughly, in the last quarter. Independent of that, I think we have a good leverage situation, we are looking forward to having strong cash flows and an improved leverage situation for the company during 2017. If we now look at the first quarter for 2017, we will have impacts from different activities. We believe that the rebranding and the legal fee will be around SEK 40 million to SEK 50 million.
It's sometimes difficult to predict exactly because it depends on the activity level, especially in the legal case. Roughly SEK 40 million and SEK 50 million will be booked in the first quarter. The acquisition of both IPV and Oceanair will cost us close to SEK 190 million, that will affect cash flow. At the same time, IPV and Oceanair will add to our top line around SEK 300 million for the full year 2017. We have not made any phasing of that, we'll refrain from doing that at this point in time. Both these acquisitions are EPS accretive or margin accretive without giving exact details. This is a good first phase for us to now come into a number of acquisitions that will add on top line and profitability for the company. Finally, the financial targets. We have reached three out of four.
Net sales growth exceeded 5% with 7%. The net debt is below two, we have decided and will propose the AGM to go for a dividend of 40% of the net profit. EBIT margin, up closer to 1% unit, we are now striving towards our 15%, which is the target. As you might have seen in the press release and also in the interim report, the board of directors has proposed to the annual shareholders meeting that we should pay out 40% of the net profit for the period, which means a dividend of SEK 1.85 per share. Roger.
Thank you, Per-Arne. If we move to the next page, we have our class action lawsuit. This process proceeds at, in my taste, very slow pace. We stay very firm in our decision to fight this claim since we, as we always say, think it has absolutely no merit. To just summarize a little bit where we stand, if we start with the Florida case, you might recall that this case started with 14 named plaintiffs. One was taken out quite fast, then the day before yesterday here on Tuesday, we had good news and see that from 14 down to three named plaintiffs. I think we got very strengthened, me and Anna and the rest of the team here, that this just shows us that we're fighting this correctly and these cases have no merit. From 14 named plaintiffs down to three.
These three have been granted permission to amend, they have some weeks until end of February to see where that goes. We're just waiting for that, then we'll see where it takes us. In California, they have just started a request for document production, we have, let's say, put in our complaint against that. That process will take some time. We have seven named plaintiffs there, we'll see where that takes us. We're working, of course, with our lawyers, with the opposite side lawyers respecting this process. I think that we're still going to see this playing in the Florida case, maybe until the summertime, until we have a final result out of this, we're not going to talk about what we think. We're just working the process. The same for California, which will take probably longer.
For sure, as I've always said, during 2017, we need to get this off the table, that still remains. We feel strengthened based on the latest developments in Florida about our position in these two cases. I think that's enough said for these two. If we move to the next page, we summarize, first of all, maybe the quarter. 5% organic growth, to almost two and a half percentage points of gross margin improvement. Good successful portfolio management that leaves us a rather clean, nice business in the U.S. going into the year. Two nice, if small, acquisitions here. One happened in the early part of this year, but still. For the quarter, we beat last year despite almost SEK 60 million legal and rebranding costs that we basically took out in the operation results.
All in all, I think we need to be saying that it is an okay quarter. If we summarize the year, here we have to be a little bit more bold and say, good year. Strong organic growth driven by, for sure, underlying good markets, but also a lot of our teams driving good sales initiatives. The majority of the business has improved both in terms of growth and profitability. This is what I like the most, broad improvement in the company. Extra cost for rebranding and class action activities. We had logistic own cost in EMEA and Americas also during the year. We have a strengthened management team in place. We have, as I said, also pursued other portfolio managements throughout the year to make it a focus business.
Last but not least, which gave us all internally and a lot of our customer base a boost when we launched our new identity as part of the One Dometic strategy. We have been very happy about the reception of how this was taken out in our businesses and our customer bases. If we look into 2017, the outlook for global RV markets do remain positive. As I said before, the EMEA RV industry is in a very optimistic mode. A lot of things happening. The underlying growth macros are there, and several customers expand capacity. I think we can be quite optimistic about the European RV market. I think the U.S. will not show the same pace of growth, but for sure, I think you're going to see, if you ask me for a sophisticated guess, I would say around five-ish, in terms of growth.
We have been conservative there before, maybe the path is continuing. Who knows? Also there, the industry is very, let's say, optimistic for the years to come, not only 2017, but for the years to come. We expect and we will deliver top-line growth in line with our mid and long-term targets. We will continue to work on cost and price and anything that will take us towards our 15%. If you clean up some of the things that Per-Ola talked about, you see that we're getting very close. Leverage is on very healthy levels. We have a very interesting acquisition list that we continue to take on here. We go into the year, and we have started the year in good mode. I think by that, we conclude the presentation and open up for Q&A.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question for the speakers, please press 01 on your telephone keypad now. Our first question comes from the line of Erik Gunnarsson from UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Morning, everyone, thank you for taking my questions. I have two questions to start with here. Could you please elaborate a little bit around the loss of shares in the U.S. in the RV market and say a little bit why and what has happened? Is it product-wise or is it competition? My other question is basically about the aftermarket sales here and the rebranding going on. We've seen the rebranding launched, and I wanted to comment upon the different regions if you see any effects coming from the aftermarket rebranding in the U.S. as well as you can see in APAC and Europe.
Good morning, Erik. Coming back to the RV situation in the U.S., I think we have talked about it, so there's no major changes here. As I said here, there is a market mix to start with. It's a cocktail of things. There is a market mix where smaller travel trailers gain ground, where we have less value. Secondly, I've never beaten around the bush around that, we are the market leader in most, if not all of our categories, and we will always be hunted, and we are hunted. We have lost some share because we have always been selective on how we treat price levels. We have lost share on awnings, and we have defended some awnings business where we have also given up price.
We have lost share in the product area where we have always had the most, I shouldn't say the word dominant, but we have had a very strong position on fridges, and we have lost some shares there. Last but not least, we had a little bit of effect during the production days, but that's more tactical. I think the pattern we have had has been similar throughout the year. When you look at shipments, we don't follow that growth path. Nothing has really changed during the year. We have actions being taken actually on all our product areas to start to gain back share. I don't wear hats, but I think that I can guarantee you that we will take back some share during 2017. That's the story.
On the second question, Erik, I think that the rebranding has been pursued in all the world except Asia Pacific. We're actually, I'm going down to Australia here in, I think it's two weeks, where we have the Melbourne show, a really important RV show in a very important market where we're launching it also in Australia and in the rest of Asia. In EMEA and in Americas, it's launched. It's out there. We have rebranded products. We have rebranded packaging. We have done POS material for customers that are being shipped out. All in all, a very well-perceived activity. It's impossible to put numbers on it. We have never talked about this as something that will drive value.
If you ask me whether it will, I think it will, because we're sometimes in businesses that are not used to, let's say, the latest and greatest in terms of marketing. I think that we're taking a good step in the right direction. Hope that answers your questions.
Yeah, it does. Thank you.
Bye, Erik.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Olav Larshma from SEB. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Thank you very much, good morning, everyone. A couple of questions from my side. I'll take them one by one. Firstly, when your outlook for 2017, should we see that at around 5% growth as organically, or do you include effects and acquisition and divestment in that figure as well?
No, we say organic. As we have said when we discussed when we put these financial targets in place, we said that 5% we commit to without major acquisitions.
Whether it's small or not, you can say that we have been give or take. All in all, it's organic growth that we're committing to.
That's brilliant. Second question, and mainly relating to U.S. You said that you have some action in place for 2017 in order to perform better, I guess, both in terms of sales-wise versus market, and also in terms of margin. Could you please elaborate a bit on that? Second on that question relating to U.S., given the very strong market that we are seeing now, do you see potential for price increases generally within the industry?
Yeah, okay. U.S., of course, the RV OE businesses in U.S. is such a big piece of our business. For sure, we need to keep or grow our positions there, and that's what I said we will do. It's all down to product and competitive products. That's what it all nails down to. During 2016, we had availability issues, and we had some capacity issues, and those we have addressed. As Per-Arne said, we have deliberately taken a decision to really have the key products really well on stock in the U.S. I think that availability will not be an issue. Longer term, we have really interesting things going on on the car and truck side in the U.S. Temporarily, I don't think you're going to see strengthening there. Mid to long term, we have some really interesting things going on there.
Last but not least, the retail store in the U.S. has not really started. We're selling boxes there, but we're taking now a firm grip around really taking off the sales of boxes during 2017 in the U.S. Did I miss a part of your question?
Yeah, if you talk about price increase, I was thinking generally it's difficult to see large price increases. I think this market is very much a price market as such. What we need to do is down to deliver new products with new features and then keep the price and keep the margins from that perspective. From our side, work with our cost base. To expect a large price increase, I don't think that will happen in the U.S. market. More features, more innovation, and a work with the cost base, that's the medicine for improving margins. Yeah.
Yeah.
Even it's a very strong market, the customers even more expect from the supply base to deliver productivity gains over to them. We need to deliver and show productivity and competitiveness towards the customers.
Yeah. Thank you. Final from my side. FX, you're hedging quite a lot. Would it be possible for you to give some indication of what you're expecting in terms of FX tailwind in 2017?
Yeah. If you look at the hedging overall for all different regions, I think it is pretty neutral. It sort of hits differently for different regions. I think you have positive effects in EMEA. You have negative effects in APAC. Given where we are today, I think the biggest impact we have is actually from the AUD versus USD. With the level that we see today at 0.76, we will have a negative impact in the first and second quarter, and that will fade out in the third and fourth quarter.
Yeah.
Exactly how much that will be is very difficult to say because you see it is a very volatile FX market right now. We had the USD on 940 just before Christmas. Now it went down to 870.
Yeah.
Given right now, we will affect the negative in APAC Q1 and Q2. That will fade out in Q3 and Q4.
Yeah. Brilliant. I will step back in line. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Peter Reilly from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Good morning. Firstly, I wanted to start off with a probably slightly sensitive question. You've had a lot of management change in 2016 and early 2017, including the departure of your head of product management at a time when you're doing quite a lot of rebranding activities as well. Can you talk, obviously not in detail, but what it is you are trying to change, and what needs to be done, particularly on product management, where I get the impression you feel you want to accelerate progress, but maybe that's the wrong interpretation. Secondly, you talked back in September about some capacity constraints in Europe in terms of chassis availability. Is that likely to be an issue in 2017? Lastly, you had very good growth in the aftermarket in Europe, +14%.
I was wondering if you give us a bit more color in terms of what's growing more rapidly, where the strength is, and in particular, what you might be learning from Australia and Europe that could be relevant for your plans to expand the aftermarket in North America.
Morning, Peter. Okay, battery of questions there. First of all, management changes. I'll take that one, of course. I think these are not overly dramatic things. First of all, the regional heads, that's something that was very well planned, and we needed to. These were people that has been up to 40 years in the company, and they've done a great job. They were well planned, and they have settled very well, these changes. The product management change was done because Matthias had been some three years with the company now and done a great first move in, let's say, putting the right processes in place, putting the right controls in place to run the product management machine from a rather decentralized product development that we had before.
I felt, however, that now we are at a pace where we have really seen how we want to run the different businesses around the world, and we cannot run them in product development with the same recipe all around the world in all different product areas. I need to do a change in how we set that up to become even more effective and to become even faster towards customers. That's why I felt that the leadership going forward needs to be different. That's how we work and how I work. It's like a soccer coach. We need to make sure that we have the right team in place for what we want to achieve and the best players in place. You're going to see that happens all the time. You need to make sure that you have the right team in place.
That's my answer to that. Secondly, if you look on, what was it? It was capacity in EMEA.
Chassis.
Was that you mean on the suppliers of the chassis for motor homes in EMEA?
Yes. You said that, I think it was Fiat supplying something like two-thirds of the market for motor homes. There were concerns that growth was going to be restricted in 2017 because of chassis availability.
That's true. From what we have heard now from the main and the major customers, I think this will be managed, Peter. I don't think we're going to see constraints throughout the year. How exactly they have solved that, I cannot say, but I see and hear no issues around that. If we would hear them, I'll make sure that we air that to you. Okay?
Yeah.
On the growth in CPV aftermarket-
Aftermarket overall
in aftermarket overall in EMEA, clearly, let's say cars and trucks aftermarket business has been very strong. Yes, we can learn from that into other areas because EMEA is clearly the region where we have the strongest aftermarket business in terms of cars and trucks. We have also, despite it's small, marine has been strong on the aftermarket side, and also RV. It's a mix of things. They run it very well. They have had a lot of initiatives this year, and I think that if you look from a country side, Peter, in Europe, I think if not all, but I would almost say all of our markets in Europe has improved quite well this year. It's encouraging.
If I can just follow up on that, do you hope that in a year's time you'll be reporting stronger aftermarket growth in the Americas than you've had in 2016?
Yes. Definitely. We have been talking about that during the last year. One driver will be then the cooling boxes, our active cooling boxes. Yes, we could learn quite a lot from how they are working with this in Australia. We would like to try to apply that. That's one of the growth cases that we see, but that has not really started yet. This is something that we will work now with the new management and make sure that we have the right plans for the future. That's definitely a growth opportunity.
Okay. Great. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Peter.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Lucy Collier from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Hi there. Sorry, it's Peter Murdoch instead of Lucy from Morgan Stanley. Just the first question, I'll go one by one. I think we've got two or three here. First question is just on raw materials. Can you talk about the impact that's had on the business in 2016, and how you expect that to develop in 2017?
Yeah, we can. I can start. Of course, we've had lot of upside pressure on raw materials throughout for sure the second half of 2016. As you know, as we have discussed, aluminum, copper, steel, some plastic, polystyrene, some other things, basically all has had some upward pressure here. We buy some raw materials into the factories, but we buy most components into the factories. There we have different type of setups in terms of contracts with different delays. This is something that is in our DNA to work. We have a purchasing machine that makes sure that we have competitive quotes when the negotiations gets too tough. Some cases, we have indexes that hit quite fast into the P&L.
I think that we also see that most of these materials have a little bit slacked off in the beginning now in the past, let's say, weeks and a couple of months. Of course, year-over-year, the raw material, the direct material cost base is quite significantly higher than last year.
The other thing is also, we are buying a lot of refined products. If you take, for example plastic, when the oil price went down, we didn't get so much gain of that because we are working with refined products. We have not seen a sort of tremendous gain previously. That goes for this. Looking at what you have to look at the refined products and the price level of that. Of course, this has been a, especially when it comes to copper and aluminum, if you take the last 12 months, we're talking perhaps of 20%-30%. This is something that already has impacted us during 2016, and we are working with this as we speak, both when it comes to efficiencies, pricing, and also volumes.
Again, Peter, as we have said before, we will have to fight this.
Yeah.
It's going to be pressure this year on components for sure. We'll have to fight this. Yeah.
Yeah. No, that makes sense. Just two more, if I can. First is just on in the U.S., how much of your sales in the U.S. is imported from other countries? The last question is just on M&A, back to 1.5 times. What's the outlook for 2017? Do you think you can do as much as you've done in 2016, or how does the pipeline look?
We're thinking here, the imported, we have ACs is imported.
Around 20, 30% something.
25%.
Yeah.
Okay. The M&A list is, we've made these two very suitable ones. We are already working on the next one. We have a suitable balance sheet for making further acquisitions here. We'll keep you posted.
Okay.
Thank you very much, Jonas and Christian.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Carl Matheson from Bodenholm Capital. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Thank you very much. I have a question about the legal cost and rebranding. When excluding these items, the EBIT margin were not down 40 basis points year-over-year, it's rather like 170 basis points up. Do you think you can keep improving margins at that pace going forward? Was there something exceptional in that pace?
No, I think first of all, you have to remember that the fourth quarter is a very small quarter. These sort of changes, SEK 10 million means quite a lot for the margin expansion. What I think we are happy with is that even though we took this cost to improve the margin, that shows that the underlying improvement is there. I don't think that you could take the fourth quarter as a concept for the future. It is far too weak to have as a measurement. We are saying that we have to increase the margin with 1% unit or 100 basis points during the last year. I think that's the pace that we would like to continue to have and perhaps even increase a bit on an annual basis.
Okay, got it. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. We have a follow-up question from Erik Gunnarsson from UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Yeah. Hi again. Just one follow-up on the tax rate that we would expect. I see that you guide for 23% and tax paid below 10%. I guess that you still have some tax loss carry-forwards. I was just wondering how big that chunk is going forward, and if we can expect anything in 2018.
The tax losses carry forward, that we activated, the big one was actually done in 2015. They will remain until 2021 something. We will have roughly 23% until then. At least for this year, we will have the low paid taxes and difficult to see how long that will remain, but at least for this year.
All right. Thank you. That's all from me.
Thank you. As there appear to be no more audio questions, I return the conference to you.
Okay. Thank you everybody for showing interest, and we'll see you out there. Have a nice day. Thank you. Bye-bye.