Hi. I'm Magnus Wallander, CEO of the Tulli Group. Very welcome to Art Capital Markets Day 2017. Today, we will talk about 2 major items. 1, the fact that we're raising our profitability target to a 20% EBIT target in the long term.
And secondly, that we going forward will be presenting our business in 4 product categories. Products, where we are a leading player in the European market and packs, bags and luggage and active with kids. Within these two last categories, we are also presenting some ambitious long term growth objectives with actually trying to become a serious contender in the luggage category within Pax Pipes and Luggage and within the stroller category in Act with kids. So stay tuned and hear more about how we will achieve those long term objectives. Welcome to the Tula Group Capital Markets Day 2017.
When you talk about a company like ours, it is very important to realize if you're a lifestyle type of company like we are, sometimes images are better than words. So I thought we would start with a short movie just showing a little bit who we are as a company. So this is what we do. We make it easier for people all over the world. We sell in 140 countries to live those active lives.
It might be that mountain, that might be the big thing to go skiing in or it could be just taking a leisurely jog in the park with your kids. Today, we're going to talk about the following things. I will take the first part talking about our path forward and also a bit why we are launching our new financial targets. Then I'm going to talk more about the Thule brand and what it stands for today and the journey we've had in recent years and, more importantly, as investors, the journey we intend to continue to bring with the Thule brand. I'm going to talk about what we do about sustainability, which is a crucial thing in today's world and which we take very seriously.
Then we'll have a short break. And after the break, we'll have a number of presenters coming up on stage talking about the 4 new product categories that we will be actually following the company going forward. So we'll talk about sporting cargo carriers, what is the classical most people recognize Tesla as the new category of packs, bags and luggage, active with kids and RV products. And then Lennart will wrap up with some financials, and then we'll open up for Q and A. So our path forward.
Yes, it's a path if you want to go forward, you need to know where you're coming from first. So I'm going to do one slide on history and just high level remind you that we've been around for 75 years. We intend to be around for at least 75 more. And as a company, we've been global for more than 50 years. So with early on, this company realized to have any chance to be a serious contender, it could not stay in Sweden.
So already in the '80s '90s, it was all over the world, and that is, of course, one of the strengths we have today when we add new products and new things that we already have a global footprint. And as we grew, sometimes things happen. And during a period in the mid 2000s, we grew a lot via acquisitions, acquiring companies, which were related to the car industry. Some of those were not the core of what we were good at. So when the financial crisis hit and some of the underperforming parts were there, I got the fantastic opportunity to become the CEO of this company.
And I have said that a number of times to several of you when I met. I personally think I have the most fun job in Sweden. I mean, it's a great company to be a CEO over. And what we did then as a company and as a management and the people you see here presenting have all part of that journey is we've really focused on what we are great at, which is designing fantastic products for consumers. And that journey then led us to a stock listing.
It has led us to now after 2 divestments after the SARS listing and several divestments before the stock listing and a very big focus on organic growth that it's time today to talk about the path going forward from 2018 and beyond and our ambitions. But it's also good to remind you that consistency is great. The same great investment case that we traveled around and presented in 2013 is actually still valid. We are in an attractive market. Consumers are active.
Health and lifestyle is important for people. So we have a number of favorable megatrends. Not all trends are great for not all product categories, and we'll talk more about that after the break. But generally, the underlying trends are all positive on a macro scale for us. Secondly, and a bit cocky maybe, we think we're a pretty darn good company to take advantage of those good market Thule brand that I will talk more about.
We have, thanks to going global many, many years ago, become very good to have a global go to market strategy. We do have a strong position in the value chain without having a clear dependency on a few limited customers, and we have always had and have turned up the dial on a true sustainable business approach, all parts of building for the future. The lifestyle part of this brand was my most roof box company. And some parents say you're a bike carrier company. And I had to tell them the story that we actually already then were more.
But what more importantly has happened over the last 5 years, we've truly become even more lifestyle. This is an image from the big outdoor fair. And here are some of the magazines in the last 6 months that have written articles or have had products from Tule in it. Those are magazines that 5 years ago would not have had images of Thule products or articles about Thule because we were great in RV magazines and in bike magazine and Automotive and Sport and those magazines in the past. But today, we are in Cosmopolitan.
We are in Luna. We are in completely different sectors. And it could be anything from a Vanity Fair article from last month where they follow a family that is biking around Europe with their kids. Of course, naturally then with Thule Chariot and Thule Up Next, baby back seats. And it can be a story about you need to be stylish when you're traveling and here's a collection from Thule that makes you a stylish business traveler.
So we are moving more and more. That also means that in terms of retail presence, this is, as you saw out in the room before, this is from the Malmo store that we have. The way we present ourselves in retail, online or physical, is also much more into a branded consumer goods reality. But most importantly, consumers talk about us already as a lifestyle company. They talk about the brand in connection with the things they love to do.
It might be just traveling wildly around the world. It might be running a half marathon as the guy down on the left in 1 hour and 11 minutes with his daughter. That's a pretty nifty time to do. And it is all those connections with hundreds of thousands of posts with Instagram posts, with referencing Tula Tula lifestyle. Our Scandinavian sales team just showed me one of those posts, a Swedish famous celebrity, I won't give her the name, posted on her Facebook, I'm having a daughter now.
I want to keep fit. Which running stroller should I have? 112 posts out of 112 answers. Out of 112, 95 mentioned the Thule product. So that gives you a feeling that we are in this being talked about in the right way among the consumers.
What is good, though, is it's not only that we're a cool brand. We've actually delivered the financials because in the end, you have to do that. We came to market saying we want to grow stable growth year over year, every year with at least 5%. Here, you can see that the 2 year last years, the 16, for a part of the year, we also had the acquisition of YEP, and I will talk to you about what the true organic growth was 5.0. And if you would take the rolling 12, which says 6.3, in a true organic, it's 5.6, but we have been beating our growth target.
And we actually had to raise HETSU sounds bad, but we did decide to raise our EBIT target after a while on the stock exchange from 15%, as it initially was, to 17%. And those that are quick readers of the press release realize that, that's one of the news today that we're now raising that EBIT target to 20%. So what we will continue to do as a company is really the number one mantra in this company is continue to drive profitable organic growth. That's our bread and butter. If you look at us all in this team, what we wake up in the morning is that hunger of continuing every morning, everything we think about driving that profitable organic growth.
But we're doing it also to build a platform for future. So what we will be talking more about when we talk about some of the new categories that are relatively small today, we see them as pillar categories when we look at a longer time horizon, 5 to 10 years out. And what we are going to do, while still investing heavy money to really become players in those category, we are very confident that we will still be strong cash generators and being able to give a really strong shareholder return. And the classical question I've always been getting, why aren't you doing with all the cash you have more M and A? And we've had to admit in some of the meetings, we've been slightly busy divesting companies, and we've been slightly busy doing IPOs and getting ready to be the company we're in.
We will now have and already have more time to potentially dedicate to the right M and A. We're not going to be an M and A driven company, but the strategic right M and As, like the small ones we've done very successfully in the Active With Kids field, will be a part of the toolbox also going forward. So what will this deliver? Yes, financial targets as they were, we have delivered, and these are the true organic sales growth targets, just above that target of 5%. We now, on a rolling 12 month basis, are at 18.1% underlying EBIT, which is above the goal.
We have a 2x leverage, and we have been doing dividends above the 50% in terms of ordinary dividends. And as you all know, we did a large extraordinary dividend this year on top of that. So the new financial targets is to continue every year organic constant currency growth of at least 5%. We are raising our financial goal in terms of profits to at least 20% in the long term. And we're saying that our leverage target will now be between 1.5x to 2.5x.
We will continue with the same ordinary dividend goal. So here, we're going to talk about today how are we going to drive that profitable growth and ensuring that it gets more and more profitable as we drive it while still building a platform for continued cash generation so we can do those dividends. And the key of building for that growth and creating also platform in the future is not only to rely on what we've always done because then we would be limiting ourselves. We needed to do more. And what we've been doing over the last few years, not being able to tell investors too much about it because several of these projects takes years to develop, but it only gets interesting for investors when we finally start selling it.
So we haven't wanted to talk too much about it. But if you look over the last few years, we have truly created a starting platform in what we call active with kids or juvenile products. But we've also created a true platform of growth opportunity in what we've called sport and travel bags, and we will talk more about these categories after the break. But what we've decided to do, we have reported in the way of the business, and we will continue to report into sales regions. But then we've talked about the product categories.
And don't you all investors, and I can assure you, Stellan and other analysts, they hate the other category, right? What's other? There's so much in other. We know that we got a lot of complaints that other is pretty big, what's in it? And we were not hiding what was in it.
We were talking about ROE products. We talked about our juvenile products. We talked about our bags product. But in reality, it was a very small part of our business when we came to the market. It has grown.
And it's now time since we have ambitious growth targets in some of these categories to actually then share with you and the market going forward. And what we're doing is this. So bags for electronic devices is now combined in with all the other bags we're doing because there's a lot of similarities in terms of materials, supply base, etcetera, to what we call packs, bags and luggage, everything around those different types of bags. We are breaking out as a separate subset now what we call active with kids, and we're breaking out as a separate subset the RV products. And the logic for this is because their realities are different in terms of market trend realities, cyclicalities or not and also our ambition levels are different.
Going forward. But more about that will definitely come also in after the break. But to start then is to start where we stand financially on these different sectors. Still, twothree of our business, sport and cargo carriers, the old heritage 15% in packs, bags and luggage 8% in activewear kits and 12% in RV product. There are some regional differences.
And the big differences is here how big packs, bags and luggage is in the region Americas due to our underperforming old legacy business of Case Logic. And Fred will talk more about that later on in the packs, bags and luggage part. And the big difference of we have focused our RV business to Europe simply because European consumers are prepared to pay for quality in a way in our niches, they are not in the U. S. That's why we focused on Europe.
So that's the difference. Those differences, you've heard me in quarterly reports saying those are the real underlying differences of why we have performed differently in the regions, the exposure to different product categories. So what has happened is year to date, the 1st 6 months of this year, we have grown 7% in Sport and Cargo Carriers, 7% in Europe and 6% in Americas, very similar pattern. As we've said, this is bread and butter business. We're 50% of the global market.
We always grow at this type of pace and very similar across the world. What we have said all along very clearly is that we are doing better in Europe in the packs, bags and luggage than we are doing in region Americas. And the reason is we are more exposed to the better, newer product categories within packs, bags and luggage in Europe than we've been in Americas. I've then told you about the fantastic growth we've seen year to date in Juvenile, mostly thanks to the fantastic launch of the Thule Chariot new generation of multi sport trailers, which is a type of product mostly used in Europe because you bike to kindergarten, you drop off your kid and you bike to work. In the U.
S, that category is more like a weekend thing. That's why the numbers are bigger in region Europe and Rest of the World than Americas, but you see some very nice growth number also in Americas. And then I've told you that it is a hot RV market out there, and Philip will talk more about that. And I've told you that we're doing much better than the market, which is true. So we've grown RV 31% year to date.
So those are the realities we start from. And then after the break, we'll talk much more about these. But let's give you a headline already so you're perking up the ears when my colleagues are presenting the categories after the break. So what will happen? Yes, pretty boring, you might think, but it is stable growth.
In Sport and Cargo Carriers, 2 parts twothree of our business, let's be realistic, we've said this all along, we are the market driver. The whole growth of the market is driven by us pumping out products, by us growing in emerging markets, by us pushing the envelope. We are the ones driving the market. It is not going to change. We will continue to be our number 1.
We will continue to be the driver of the category. It will be a solid growth part of the company. What will happen in packs, packs and luggage? Very pedagogical arrows here, right? Generally, we see in the market, there are a lot of stable growth categories.
Luggage is growing around the world. Daypacks are growing around the world. Tech packs and sport packs are growing around the world. But we are also exposed to some really dying categories like CD, DVD, wallets and some others and some very weak performing categories like camera bags. That's why there are some subsets.
You see a slightly more ambitious green arrow down there. I can tell you that's, of course, because we're about to enter some of the biggest categories juvenile products is a We see the market for the juvenile products is a stable growing market with a few percent every year. And here, we have some very ambitious long term targets as well to grow in the single biggest category, strollers. And that will surely drive our growth to be above and beyond what the expected market growth is. And then we have the most quizzical and conundrum of all, RV products.
We have said, as long as we've been around, that it's cyclical. It's long cycles. It's not cyclical on a yearly basis. There has been some fantastic parts and some not so great parts in RV. At the moment, it's positive.
It's a very strong trend at the moment, but we do put a question mark in terms of what will happen in the long run, and we do put a question mark on what will happen for us. The only thing that Filip and team has assured me, and I feel very confident because they've done it for 8 years in a row, is that whatever happens in the market, we will beat the market. So if it grows, we'll grow more. If it declines, we'll decline less. I feel very confident about that.
But since we don't really know what will happen in the market, there has to be a little bit of a question mark to that subcategory. So with that, we go into what we are building on, and we are building mostly on one brand. We have to be honest about this. When I came into the company, the Thule brand was 30% of sales. It is now last year 71%.
I can tell you without telling too much that it will be even more percent by the end of this year. So this is the brand. The Tallulah brand is what we're focusing on. And we invented a tagline. We had a tagline actually, but I didn't understand it.
I consider myself average intellectual, and I couldn't get it, and I was working in the company. So it was time to change it. We had 1st in sports utility transportation as the catchy tagline, we changed that to bring your life because the tactical subset we had was we knew we would do more products to bringing your life with you, bringing your kids with you, bringing your sporting gear with you, bringing your daily working gear with you, right? With that mental game of changing the way we internally looked at the brand and in a very consistent way working on it. We have now, as I said last year, 71% Thule, 86% sales of our own brands.
So we do, do some OE business, and we're going to talk more about that. We do some very limited private label business in some very select cases, but we are a brand driven company with the Thule brand as the key. When you build a brand, and that's just no rocket science as there's loads of branding companies that have done the same, it's a journey of being genuine. I hate it when people talk about, Ah, we got this agency and then they did some great graphics for us. Then that company hasn't understood long term building of brands because first, you have to learn from your past, knowing what you're good at.
Then you should focus on your strengths. In our case, it is product. We are fantastic at delivering great new products, so we should really build the brand from that starting point. Then you should be yourself. If you think you are something else and you're tempted to try to be a Nike, be an Under Armour, and you're not, it's going to look fake.
And if you say, Oh, they do something cool with the packaging, we will copy it. That's stupid. Be yourself. Be inspired, but be yourself. Then of course, a key anytime when you want to build a brand is you need to protect it.
You need to protect it with IP, but more importantly, you need to guide. You need to tell everybody all the time, no, that's the wrong way you applied the logo. No, your homepage shouldn't look like that. Here's how it should look. No, you shouldn't dress like that at the fair.
No. So there's a lot of policemen in the beginning, but you need to have the carrot as well. If it's only stick, it's boring, right? So you need to have the carrot. So instead of saying wrong picture, you show them a beautiful picture.
Oh, next time I will use that one. Brilliant. So that guide and lead by example. Brands are visual. Brands have to be visual.
Nobody remembers there is a few taglines around the world that people just do with Nike, etcetera. So it's not the verbal part, you remember. It's the visual, how and we, of course, have tried to set some visual engagement by you seeing how we look with our products in the rooms today, right? It's the visual engagement you want to do. And then the risk giving, especially if you're a stock listed company and you're a bit focused on your quarterly reports, you need to dare to play the long game.
And the long game is, for example, at the moment, we're spending more money than ever. And over the next 12 months, we will peak in product development spend. I don't think we'll ever, in my time, be spending as much percent on sales as we will over the next 12 months. And that everybody gets nervous, you shouldn't be. It's the well money, well invested for the future, right?
So you need to dare to play that long game of saying, if we want to build this brand, we need to build it for the long run, 75 more years. Then we need to be consistent and protect ourselves, and we need to be results focused. If it's all gloss, right? Oh, I've got a great brand, but nobody is buying it. That's the definition of a great brand.
People are prepared to pay more money to pay your product if it's your brand on it, right? So you need to be able to track it and then you do the whole loop again. I think we have done a very good job of that. This is an enormously high focus for us going forward, especially as we broaden our assortment. Product is king.
Product is king in this in And for us now, entering into some new product categories, I've got the question by many of you investors, oh, are you sure you want to enter into luggage? There's Samsonite and there's Tumi and there's Rimowa. Or are you sure you want to do strollers? There's Bugaboo and there's Stokke. Or we could say, yes, let's stay where we are 50% of the market that everybody knows we have the best products.
But that would be limiting ourselves. And what we've been able to prove fantastically, I would say, is we can develop great product also in new categories. I don't know how in you are into product design. I'm very happy. My daughter just started at the Royal Institute of Technology as a master of science in product design, so I've geared something up in her mind.
But if you're into that category, you know that this is the Oscars. The IFF Gold Award is given to around 50 products every year, 50 only, so not the red if, which is about 2,000, the goal, 50 products each year. Over the last few years, we won 3 of those Oscars in a category we never were. So the Thule Charities Multisport, our own Thule Ride Along Mini and the Thule Up Next have all won. So we get up there on the stage which everybody would want to be.
And we're winning tests, and we're winning things. We are proving also in the new categories that we have what it takes when it comes to product escape. Then of course, if we are to be successful in these categories that are more emotionally connected, we need to play the emotional game. It's not enough with a factual game of saying best in test, etcetera. We need to play.
So if you have tractors, and I know some of you do, and you say, you've changed a little bit in how you look on your social media and how it looks at the fairs, it's natural because we're building on the emotional aspects. So our Facebook account, our Instagram account, the way we look at the fares, the way we do special events, this was when we launched our new tool, Subterra Luggage. We did it together with a headphone brand headset brand, yes, and in Holland. And we invited all the key bloggers for travel on an ultra cool event at the coolest hotel where there was a drinks mixologist, as they're called nowadays. They're not called bartenders anymore.
And we do things like that around it because we need to be emotionally engaging, not just winning with great products. One way we have decided to do many years ago to be emotionally engaging was as engaging as I hope I am to you investors, probably I'm not that engaging to the consumer out there. So it's not us internally only. We need to have some other people, some ambassadors. And like many brands, we therefore have some sponsored athletes and sponsored members.
We call them the Tulli Crew. I think what we have done, and if you ask them, that's the nice thing they confirm that, differently from many others, we are building for the long term. It's not just about them being great athletes. Many of them are even at the ending of their career or have already ended their career. Some aren't even the best in their sports.
But what we like about these people that we've handpicked is that they are truly engaged in the community, and they are spoken well about among their peers. And we then engage with them in having them involved in our product development, having them involved at our events. And so I'm going to show you a little bit here. But to give you an idea, here's the only man that has been 21x on the top of Mount Everest, Apa Sherpa. Here's the guy sitting down there, Garrett McNamara, that has surfed the biggest wave ever surfed.
There is the guy here, Pedro Liva, who has done the biggest whitewater rafting waterfall, 42 meters in a kayak. So they are pretty extreme. But when you meet them, which we do a lot, this is the gathering we had this summer, 75 year birthday gathering in Malmo, you feel the energy with them. So I'm going to share you a little movie that we did about a year ago with 1 of the athletes we sponsored for several years, actually for more than 5 years, who became very famous last summer when she won an Olympic gold medal in mountain biking, but who also on this or this Sunday had a big thing in Swedish media when she admitted that she had a life crisis afterward. And she talked about her sponsors as part of her extended family, and we feel that that's nice to be not just sponsoring them because they're athletes.
So if we show that little movie.
There are so many things going on around me during the race season. And sometimes I feel like I'm losing myself a little bit. All right. So for your Instagram followers, Nava. Hey.
You ride with my brother reminds me of why I started riding. Pure happiness. Such a nice contrast to come here and ride just for fun. This is an inspiration for me to keep on pushing my limits.
To give you an idea, Jenny Rysvetz here. She had a small short clip on her Instagram account showing her out driving with a car and biking, and then she posted the question to her followers, do you like 4 wheels or 2 wheels more? 32,000 views within 1 week. So what you do get is that reality is if you work right with these people, you have an extended engagement. But one of the things we do mostly with also these crew members is they are part of our bigger sustainability approach.
As a company of today, it's not only something you feel you have to do. You actually need to want to do it because then you truly can work with sustainability. So if you look at the company, the number one thing is, of course, we do products that inspire to a healthy and active lifestyle. In itself, that gives a good trigger to a sustainable approach. Then we work very diligently to make sure we have sustainable and reliable manufacturing, that we have climate smart logistics.
And then as you would expect of any big global company, we need to, of course, have responsible business policies.
All right. Like Magnus mentioned, my name is Johan Hedberg. I'm the Head of Sales for Europe Rest of the World for Sport and Cargo Carriers, packs, packs and luggage and activewear kits. And what I'm going to take you through today is the biggest product category that we have, which is sport and cargo carriers. This accounts for about 2 thirds of the Tula Group sales.
So this is by far the biggest category and the most important one. When we look at this category, we divide it into 4 different subsets. We got bike racks, we got roof racks, boxes and baskets, and these 3 are really the lion's share of the business. And then we also have some sport, some winter sport and water sport carriers as well. This is a category where we year on year, we've had a very stable growth, and we are the clear number 1 in the world.
And why am I then so confident that we're going to continue to be number 1 in the world? Well, we are more than 50% of the market, and that is a great feeling, let me tell you, that half of all the people that spend their money on these products, they trust us and our brand. And we have everything in place to continue to be successful like Magnus has been talking about. We have the right products. We have great brands that we pour more money into, and we have a very, very good supply chain.
Now as you've seen out there and some of the questions that I got in the break as well is, well, with all of these exciting categories that we're getting into, one question that I get, are we really going to focus on this category as much? And I can assure you, with 65% of the company, we will continue to focus on this. This is the biggest and the most important category. Every day when I wake up and the rest of the sales force with me, this is what we start by thinking about. One of the things that make it a little bit easier to be number 1 is that we clearly have the best products in the market.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind about this. We're outperforming in the ease of use. We test the products harder. We have more tougher test criteria and safety criteria of our products than our competitors. And that creates in itself, as we sell in 140 markets, barrier sentry for our competitors, it's not easy to pass all these tests in all these markets like TUV test, like the Citycrest test and so forth.
So we feel very, very good here. Another thing to keep in mind that we are a group of very, very competitive individuals. And as you can see here, I just have a few of those tests that we have been winning in the last 12 months. We count winning these tests, being number 2 and number 3 or an honorable mention. That is just a huge disappointment to us.
We want to win. We're in it to win every single time. Whether that is a trade show test, is an end consumer test or a magazine, we're in it to win. When we develop these products, we have global criterias. We have a global design concept.
When we talk about safety, we have a global standard for that. But one thing that we have to think local is, of course, in sales. We sell in 140 countries, and you really have to understand these markets. Otherwise you're not going to be number 1 like we are. So we really understand the purchase patterns, trends, what people want to do in their spare time, and we really have to get in there in every single market of these to be the clear number one, and that's what we have been doing for years.
When we're looking at some the different channels of distribution that we sell our products, we see some differences there. In the Americas team, for example, we come more from the outdoor. If you've had a chance to be in an REI store in the U. S, this is by far the biggest and the best outdoor retailer in the world. If you take an XXL in the Nordic countries, you take a Beaversport in Holland and you take a Globetrotter in Germany, you kind of fuse those together, then you dial it up a couple of notches and you have an REI.
And we've been winning the vendor of the year war there a few times there. So we are very, very strong in the outdoor trade in the Americas. In Europe, we come a little bit more from the automotive side, and there is some logic to that. Some of these products or all of them where they buy, for example, their bike. So we are going more into the bike where they buy, for example, their bike.
So we are going more into the bike channel. We also see that people want to buy their ski rack where they buy their skis. It all makes sense. So we are seeing trends and opening up some other channels in Europe as well. Another thing that we're doing to maintain and to expand this number one position is really to help the trade to be more successful.
And you've seen some tidbits on this out here in the break room. This is the new merchandising retail concept that we're launching. We've been doing this for a number of years, but now we take it up a notch to be even more competitive. This is a global concept, but it's executed locally, of course. One thing that we see is that as a global leader that we have to embrace the omnichannel of reality.
And as the market leader, we have been doing this for a number of years. This is nothing new to us. We're selling very well both with brick and mortars in the omnichannel and also to Pure Online. So up here, if you look at the Tula Partners, for example, this happens to be one of the best shops in Europe, in Prague, in the Czech Republic. There, in this type of store, like a Thule partner, we go in with a great display program.
We educate the floor personnel. We come in with structured planograms so that the consumers to have a great selection of products to choose from.
So I'm Lennart Mauritson, CFO of the group since 2011. And I think as Magnus said, I probably have the best CFO job in Sweden because to be able to present financials for this group is great. So let's start with the slide you have seen, but it's really to reiterate our historical financial performance over the years and showing that we have delivered according to our plans and ambitions on sales and on EBIT. But not just that, cash flow is, of course, important. And if we look at our operational cash flow, the last 3 years, you see that it has been strong.
We have been averaging 86% in cash conversion over EBITDA in average those 3 years. Actually, last year, we were above 90% in cash conversion. But good thing to see is also that it's very predictable. As you can see, between the years, the quarters look similar, and it also reflects how the business is done today, where we have our lower sales quarters in Q4 and Q1 every year, meaning also that that's the time when we prepare for the higher quarters of sales, Q2 and Q3. So we are building up working capital and those things end of the year, beginning of the year.
So really, it's a good pattern that we also can predict and we can plan accordingly. And CapEx, of course, we have our own manufacturing assembly units and we are stable at 2% to 3% of our turnover in terms of CapEx. So I would say still quite asset light. We are a global company. We are selling in 140 countries.
So of course, we are exposed to many currencies. So looking at my colleagues, they're sometimes wondering how do we handle all these currencies. But this is the actual 2016 flows in terms of currency for sales and for our EBIT. And as you can see, it's one currency that stands out that is making the big difference driver for the company, and that is euro. So of course, in many of those countries, we sell in euro.
We don't have that big cost structure in euro. So therefore, we bring in a lot of money to bottom line in euro. Notable, I think, is to mention the U. S. Dollar, which is 1 third of sales.
But look at the EBIT impact, hardly none and that is because we have a big U. S. Operations in over there and many of the products that we are buying either finished products or components into euro, for example, is bought in U. S. Dollar or in some way pegged to U.
S. Dollar. So euro is the big one that you should think about when you think about TELUS. Working capital. One thing I am very proud of the team, but actually because during this presentation and those of the follow of you, you know that we are not shy to driving changes.
We have done a lot of things in order to drive sales, to better serve our customers. And many times, that hits back to the back end of your business. There is a supply chain organization with the people, the structure, the systems, processes, whatever, they need to cope with all these changes. And many times, you can see quarterly reports and there is some error or fault in the company blaming distribution setups changes, building a factory that didn't open up in time or whatever. I'm proud to say that with all these changes, in spite of that, we have managed the working capital.
Also, the fact that we have started with the new categories entries, which we source more 3rd party, primarily from Asia. There will be longer lead times on the inventory to get it in where we will sell it. So most importantly, we have done all this without influencing the on time in full performance, which means that we have been able to actually sell. So sales, they can't complain that they didn't have the products. That's good for me.
So I can anticipate one question because most times when I get questions, this is one of the questions, can you do more efficiently on the working capital because I know a company, they have 15.7% in relation to sales. And yes, we could. But to be very honest, this is not the priority to drive that one and jeopardize the sales and with a connected good contribution margin in the sales. So by that, weighing risk versus reward. This is something that we should die on.
And of course, we don't worry. But I'm very happy with this. Product is king. I don't I think every presenter has said that today. So that is, of course, that is the DNA of this company.
We have mentioned also one of the reasons for our good EBIT improvement has been the economies of scales. So by launching new products, more products, rolling into new categories, we have been able to do that with a quite maintained SG and A structure, where we have the things in place to be able to handle more sales. Then you have a nice fall through to the EBIT line. Except product development, where we actually have allowed and said that this is so strategically important, but here we will spend more money. So like in 2010, we spent around 3% of our sales on product development.
Since 2012, we have been above 4%. We're actually right now around 5%. And as Magnus mentioned, and I think you should be happy, we are aiming to spend even more. So for the next 12 months, we'll probably be around 6% because of the headwind entering into these new exciting categories. But because that has been both I would say mostly internally, people are afraid of that.
If we're going into those categories, what does that mean for sport and cargo carriers, for RV products? And I would say that we are bold to say that, as you have seen, we should push there as well, and we can manage it. So this is more just to have a heads up that, yes, we will continue to spend. It will be even a little more and then go back to probably slightly more normal levels. But this is exciting.
And we have generated a lot of cash and we are convinced that we will continue to do that. So since the IPO in November 2014, we have brought in more than SEK2 1,000,000,000 in cash. We have been able and allowed to invest a lot on all these strategic and organic initiatives you have seen. That is the foundation also going forward to secure the long term profitable growth that we are seeing. In the meantime, during the same time, we have distributed close to SEK1.4 billion in dividends to our shareholders, split it in the ordinary and the extra that we did this year.
That actually, if you would count our accumulated net profit of those years, this dividend is actually more than what we have done as a net profit. So I think that's good for shareholders. And then we have done 2 divestments of the non core businesses, the volatile snow chain business and this year, the U. S. Toolbox businesses to really make sure that now we are clean, we are the branded consumer goods company that we wanted to be and added 1 small but strategic acquisitions like Magnus mentioned.
So of course, now I will leave over to Magnus. And actually next agenda point is M and A. So
Magnus, could there be an M and A is coming?
Yes, Lennart. Thank you. It's obvious that if you are ambitious, we are. If you want to grow in new categories, as we intend to do, that M and A is a part of the toolbox and it should always be. But it is important to remind you, we are not changing guises.
We're not lifting one mask and becoming a new management team. We're still going to be, as the main driver, organic growth. But we've always said tactical, right strategic acquisitions we like. And as I mentioned before, we actually, in a small scale, have very tactically used this. The 2 acquisitions within Active With Kids have been key components for driving that opportunity.
So we are continuing to scan the field. And I would say that after having a pretty busy time, as I mentioned before, with Leonard and the team have had more opportunity to really look into those opportunities. We will be very selective. We're not going to change our approach. There has to be some true upside of what we can do, what we bring in.
But we are looking at more. And hopefully, we will continue to add a few acquisitions as we go as well. But do not start to think of us as an M and A engine. We will not be as long as this management in this place. It has to be the right fit.
So with that, if we summarize this company, you know and you can see on us that we're proud. We've delivered a lot of things. But most importantly, we are hungry to deliver more. So if you look at what we do, 75 years is a great year to have, right? So 75 year birthday we've celebrated this year.
It gives you the chance to say been a lot of good things done. We've become global. It also forces you to think about the next 75. We've also delivered to what we promised to the market over the last few years with strong sales growth and even stronger EBIT growth and generating a lot of returns to shareholders. We have overarching market trends that are positive.
We have a fantastic brand that we are emotionally loading with more values. So with all of that and then on top of it, those 2 large categories, luggage, behemoth category Stroleus, very large category and with some ongoing development work that has already been happening and playing for the long game, not for next quarter, how much it is for the next 5 to 10 years we have to play for these categories. But if we take those and combine with a true sustainability approach in how we run the business, it was time to raise the EBIT margin targets because we will continue to have economies of scale. We are convinced about that. We are a team who likes to run it lean in terms of back office functions and staff functions.
We don't have a lot of those. We are taking in all those right people, the people from Tulumid, the people from Bugaboo. We're beefing up the team for the new driving revenue generating part of the businesses, but we will not become a big corporate office. And then driving profitable sales growth will deliver EBIT growth as we see it. So with that, hopefully, we've sent a message to you that we're competitive and that we're hungry.
So thank you for taking the time to join us on this Capital Markets Day. Thank you.