Dear guests, welcome to the Thule Group Capital Markets Day 2022. We are here live in Hillerstorp, Sweden. It's been a long time waiting, but we really wanted to show you the fantastic roof rack manufacturing site and the world-leading Thule Test Center and the development center that we've constructed over the last few years. You're welcome to where it was all founded 80 years ago. Join me inside as we soon will start.
Very welcome. It's great to have you here, and as I said in that little movie clip, it is extra nice to have all of you that have taken the time out to come and visit us here in Hillerstorp. We are not forgetting you that are connecting from your kitchen table or your office table to connect via digital download and streaming and seeing what we have to talk about today.
Of course, we have lots of interesting to talk about because we always do at Thule. Especially now, it's been a few years since we have a Capital Markets Day. Since it's been a few years since we had a Capital Markets Day, I need to go through some of the formalities, some of the rules. They are behind me. Now you've read them, now we can move on. When we look at it from a Capital Markets Day perspective, it's of course a chance for a company to share what we are intending to do in the future. When you've been around for 80 years, which we are celebrating this year, it's also a key to always go back to the classical thing. To know where you're going, you need to know where you come from.
We're gonna talk a bit about the past, the present, to be able to also talk about the future. We will do that today with a very simple program. We're gonna do a presentation of roughly 1 hour 15, and then there will be some questions, I'm sure. Then after that, we will split up in two parts. The digital participants will get some great movies showing what you wish you would have traveled to Sweden to see, the fantastic roof rack manufacturing facility and the world-leading Thule Test Center.
Then the participants here who will do the tour, after the tour, they will also be getting the chance to see the product expo outside, as well as getting a nice lunch before you go drive home again. Very welcome to this Capital Markets Day, and I think it's always nice to kick it off with something that is moving on the screen.
Going where we have never been. Off to see the edge of the world. Step by step, getting closer now. Almost there, just around the bend. Don't look down, don't look down. Hold my hand, hold me closer now. A leap of faith, no proof, but still I'm certain. Shed all your fears, be free, although it's hurting. They say no pain, no gain. We were bent, but we won't break. Step into the void, unafraid. There are no rules, unless we fail. Maybe we'll live to tell the tale. As our feet lift off the ground. It keeps us falling. Look at us now. For a second, we were going down. Like we were falling. Look at us, look at us now. Just look at us now.
Products is what we do best, and we've had 80 years of product-driven growth. When you have that, it's of course always important to remember that history and what you've been doing and what has made you a special company. Because we actually believe we are a special company. We should all do that if you work for a company. Otherwise, how do you get excited? In our case, we build it on some very strong pillars. It's about a long-standing culture, and that's why it's so exciting to have you back here on our home street, and it truly is the home street. It's the same street as the company was founded 80 years ago.
Because that culture that we'll come back to, and the Swedes in the audience know what this area has as a culture, but we'll talk about that also for the international guests. The way we look at our business is of course key. We've always been a sustainable company. We've always looked to make high-quality products that are built to last. That's our strongest commitment to sustainability. It is brilliant for us that we can see roof boxes that are 30 years old on a brand spanking new electric vehicle up in the Swedish mountains, for example. It shows that the way we have done products have always been with a long-term sustainability approach. Product is king. You will hear that, and you will see that when you talk to everybody in the company.
There's a lot of jokes internally that my job is actually product manager, and I just fake the CEO title, so I could work with all the categories. It's not fully true, but of course, in any product-driven company, all of us are very engaged in product, and you will see that throughout the day. It's not enough to do great products. You actually need to deliver those products to the market in an efficient way so you can be profitable when you sell those products. You need to be handling that supply chain in a flexible way as the world moves on. There has never, ever been greater tests for that than the last two and a half years.
We did not perform as well as we did historically, but I can assure you, we outperformed the vast majority of companies by having trained our organization to be an efficient and flexible supply chain organization. You also want to have a strong brand because product is one thing, but if you combine that with the stronger promise that a brand gives to you have a higher likelihood of being able to enter into new things. Of course, that work of building on the Thule brand is a crucial component in what we do.
We believe today that we do have a very strong lifestyle brand, and we're convinced that it will be stronger in the years to come. You have to help retailers. It's not enough that you make a great product, you have a great brand, you pull in people into the stores.
You also have to help them by training the kids on the floor, providing great digital assets, providing fantastic POS material, et cetera. That retail support and push is a key part. We have proven that gives us a strong growth that is a profitable growth that generates a lot of cash. That's a great foundation to start on. We have also the opportunity, thanks to that, to potentially add some smart strategic M&A, some bolt-on acquisitions and some other things, and therefore, we are convinced over time we will deliver great shareholder returns.
When we look at what we do as a company, therefore, in how we do these things, it's a lot about the business of a heritage, as I said. The heritage is this Gnosjöland. You're in the Gnosjö region. It's known for the Swedes. It's this slightly stingy, as we say, from the south of Sweden when we joke with them. It is this. You want to do things in a cost-efficient way, you want to do things in a smart way, and you have a true entrepreneurial spirit.
A lot of people have started their own companies in their own backyard, like Thule was started once upon a time. That also creates a grit attitude. It's never going to be easy. You're gonna have to grit it out. You need to work it. It's rarely the first prototype that is the brilliant prototype. You need to work on it all the time. I can assure you this company has a lot of people with a fantastic grit attitude. We then combine that with this approach of great products, make great products, and we will be successful over time.
If you do all of those things and then combine that with owning and living your own brand, which a lot of our employees are doing, you have a chance to be successful over time, not just for a quarter, not just for a year, but over a long period of time. That builds on the brand promise that we have. We have safe products. They are made of high quality. They're easy to use, they're sustainably made, and they're trustworthy. We are trustworthy as a company, as a partner. The future is uncertain. There are things happening all the time.
If we can show flexibility and dare to constantly evolve and not just rest on our laurels and believing that just because we've been the best in roof racks for many years, that's the only thing we should do. That's the challenge, and that's what we are working on as a company all the time. Another thing that I think is key in all of that is delivering results. I know you guys are clearly liking Thule for all the cool stuff we offer because I see you out there when we have a product expo. I know it's also very easy to say you wouldn't like us if we didn't deliver great results.
Growing sales is a way to survive as a company. If you don't grow sales, you will struggle to survive. Growing sales is something we've done for a very long time. Since we became stock exchange-listed, we in fact had a CAGR of 11%. We clearly admit that we have been boosted during the pandemic.
We've been helped by the staycation trends, and you can see that on our numbers, that our growth rate has been higher the last two years. A lot of the analysts, and I'm sure a lot of the investors, will be asking the question of the long-term sustainable growth. We are very confident in our long-term sustainable growth, and that's what we will be talking most of this meeting about. We clearly also have a point of that growth making money. It is very easy to talk about growth, but profitable growth is what makes companies great. We have shown that growth that we generated of an 11% CAGR has been generating an EBIT growth of 19% CAGR since the stock listing.
We have quite a few investors that have been with us since we became listed. You remember that we first presented that we would have an EBIT margin of above 15%. We reached that 2015. We then set a new target to reach 17%, which we did 2017. We then in 2017 raised the target to 20%, which we hit 2020. When you now look at it, I have a lot of expectations that people said, "Then you must have an EBIT margin target of 30% by 2030." I will disappoint you early on in the meeting. That's not the case.
We will, though, keep our EBIT margin target of above 20% with very strong growth as we will come back to. We are at a high profit level, and we will continue to deliver great profits. The way we do it, mentioned many times, is about where we're sitting. In fact, for the people that are participating live, for you that are digital, you don't know it, but we're actually sitting smack bang middle of the Thule Test Center. Where we are is a foundation on what we do.
We develop and test the products in all the ways in this core development center here in Hillerstorp, Sweden, where we have, over the two last years, done fantastic investments to give all the great team we have here even better equipment, even better opportunity to deliver future fantastic products.
We then have four niche development facilities specializing in categories, two in the U.S., one in Longmont, Colorado, and one in Seymour, Connecticut. We have one focusing on the RV product in Menen, in Belgium. We are also actually now in Malmö, opening up a new development satellite at Nextin where we have the head office.
That means that we have more than 300 people in-house in product development, and they cover all the competencies, and I mean truly all the competencies. From cutting and sewing, fabrics, simulations, testing, hard goods, soft goods, product design, fantastic. If we mention product design, you're investors, many of you are analysts, you might not be loving the product design world, but if you're into product design, there are like the Oscars and the Grammys.
It's the iF Product Design Gold Award and the Red Dot: Best of the Best award. Our team has won more than any Scandinavian company in the last 10 years. We have won four for our children's product. New category win, four iF Product Gold Awards, which is very rare and difficult to get. It shows that we can go into new categories and set our design language and our product approach even in new categories. As I said, it's not enough about. I hope to see if the clicker works. Maybe not. Maybe, yes. It's not only about doing the product and developing it is also about getting the products out there.
That has been a struggle the last two and a half years. Difficulty in getting components, difficulty in getting staff. You've had waves of Omicron, you've had situations happening. What we have had to do is really work harder than ever on that. Luckily, we were training for decades because our business historically has been seasonal. When you have a seasonal business, you have two approaches. You either manufacture a lot all the time and sit on tremendous stocks, or you ramp up and ramp down.
We chose to ramp up and ramp down approach, which then was a fantastic training grounds for what would come in a much more extreme way with the pandemic. As I said, we didn't deliver on all the aspects during the pandemic, but we truly did better than most.
When we look at how we manufacture our products and how we source and how we send them around the world, we truly try to look as much as we can on all the sustainability aspect, and Kajsa will talk more about that later on. We do look at the full breadth of our sustainable manufacturing. When you have a broad portfolio, which we do, that we have some products we sell very vast quantities, and some we sell relatively few of because we are a broad-based offerer in the outdoor arena.
When you do that, you need to realize that your retail customers and the consumers have higher and higher expectations all the time in terms of flexibility, next day delivery, late order booking times, et cetera. You need to set your business up in different ways.
For the high volume products, like you will see here in Hillerstorp, where we have roof racks, which is high volume, you will see great amounts of automation. Automation for two reasons. It is the easiest way to secure high quality with the consistency, but also we clearly say it's a more cost-efficient way when you mass manufacture.
We have then other product categories where we have much more manual labor because we have to play on that full arena. If you look at it, what we're doing, and you've been seeing that in the quarterly reports that I've been doing, that over the last year in 2021 and in this year and in next year, we're dialing up the CapEx spend, which historically has been around 2.5%. We're gonna be around 5% these three years, and the logic is simply twofold.
Actually even three, because some of you have already looked through the press release and know that we're launching new products that we will manufacture in our own in-house facilities, but I'll come back to that. The first two is actually for the existing categories. Number one is that during the last few years, our sales growth was above and beyond what we planned for. We have therefore anticipated some of those CapExes needed to cost efficiently mass manufacture those products. We were able to meet a lot of the demand during the pandemic, but it wasn't in a way that you ideally would want to run factories. It was three shifts, it was nighttime, you had to have trucks coming in.
Those things are actually not the most cost efficient when you work with manpower and assembly and a lot of products. They work well when you have a processing plant that you wanna run all the time. In our type of business, it's actually smarter if you can to work on a more logical shift level throughout the weeks. One reason is to be able to have the capacity that we needed already. The second one is we are automating more. Strangely enough, people don't realize that always, but automation takes a lot more space because you need to have automated guided vehicles that are not obstructed by things. You create space to enable to invest in robotic assembly.
The robotic assembly as an initial investment is higher, but you do get a lower running cost over time. We are, for the current business, doing both those two things, expanding capacity for the current volumes and the future growth, and increasing our automation levels.
Those are driving up. Then as we are going into new product categories, and as we have decided to final assemble those in our new Polish facility, we've expanded our facilities to produce those products as well. There's been a lot of questions on the quarterly reports about our higher inventory levels than historic. This is a very conscious choice. As we've heard, and I was talking to somebody just before we started, they were visiting a semiconductor plant, and I said, "You were asking them how they can ramp up production, I assume on all your other customers' behavior, or behalf." It's not only semiconductors. It is very difficult to get access on a consistent basis of most things at the moment.
If you then wanna run an efficient production and at the same time deliver a high on time in full next day delivery to your retail customers, there is only one way to do it. It doesn't matter how flexible you are if there is constant disruption. The logic is you, for a period of time, until you are confident that there is more calmness in the global supply chain and more consistency in it, the best way is to ramp up your inventory levels slightly higher.
We are lucky in a sense, and I mean lucky, that's not about smartness. We are lucky that we don't have products that become stale after a few months or out of fashion the next summer. We have products that you can sell for a long period of time, which makes us extremely comfortable.
Even our CFO, Jonas, who's slightly more nervous than me normally, is extremely calm in terms of our inventory holdings. We are definitely not seeing any risks whatsoever, and it's the smart way of ensuring that we can deliver that type of service level that we wanna deliver. When we do this, we, as I said, always want to do it with sustainability in mind. Therefore, I want to invite up on the stage Kajsa von Geijer. Kajsa is our Senior VP, HR, and Sustainability, and has an excellent judgment of character because she was the person that hired me 17 years ago.
Thank you, Magnus. It's great to be here, and it's great to talk about sustainability because I think if you look at our history, what we do now, and what we are promising going forward, you will find that sustainability is every step of the way. We usually call sustainability, because it's a very wide area, the big elephant. No matter if we talk about product development, our supply chain, how we report ESG, how we communicate about it, there are some things that are in common with everything we do in this company.
You can trust us because remember, we are an engineering company. We like figures, we like to measure things, we like to know that we are in control of what we do. We like to be diligent in our reporting, even not only financially, but also when it comes to sustainability. Trust is very, very important, and our employees want to build trust in what they see, what we do, because all our employees, they have chosen to work for us because we have the values that they are looking for. We say alignment. Once we have decided something, we go for it. You know, there are no half measures.
We are determined to deliver what we promise, and I think that is something that goes all along the organization. Consistency. We apply the same consistency of methods that we do throughout product development, supply chain, or whatever we do. Every step of the way, we think of sustainability. The big elephant we try to divide in three pieces.
When we talk about our passion, you know, we start with caring about nature. Nature is extremely important for us because we bring equipment, or we sell equipment that brings people's passion out to the forest or the lake or the mountain or whatever you care dearly about. We also say that we care about people and society and engaging with the community. There are three parts that we want to divide. It makes it easier for us to explain our ambition within this area. We are all about product.
As I said, if we don't care about nature, we have no offset of our products. If there is no forest, a river, or if you take your child commuting in the urban environment, if we don't keep that clean, if we are not careful, and use the resources that we have in a conscious way, well, then we don't sell any products. One of the things or three things that we need to really make a difference in the future, and we have. If you look at it between 2014 and 2020, we reduced 68% of our CO2 in Scope 1 and 2.
Using 2019 as a base year, we set out new targets for 2030, where we committed to science-based target, where we want to say, well, we want to continue to reduce the CO2 in Scope 1 and 2, but also adding more focus on Scope 3. 28% reduction of our CO2 will be made until 2030. Remember, we have a product portfolio that change, you know, 2030, we have changed all our products. When we come to, like in Sweden, we talk about net zero or climate neutral until 2040, then we have turned around our product portfolio twice.
We are smart. Let's say that. We don't want to make same mistakes or use the same bad materials. Materials is definitely the key, but also using ecodesign. We can measure wherever we have the CO2, and that's where we, no matter if it's in the products, in the material, in the transportation or wherever we have it in our LCA, life cycle analysis. We have long-lasting products. Many people, they ask us about recycling or the recycling business model. We say we have a great opportunity to design our products modular design, which you can exchange spare parts within your products.
So the carbon footprint is definitely here. We are going to talk about that the coming years. We launch new products or we talk about start up new product. This is high on the agenda. I know that I get this question from a lot of you.
We have a bonus system that incentivize that where sustainability is a big part of our incentive programs. Caring about people. We sell products in 140 markets. We have people employed in more than 20 countries, and we have production sites in five countries. We know that people share more commonalities than differences. We know that people laugh the same, cry the same, love the same, and has the same desire. It's natural for us to care about people, but it's not only our own employees. We also must see that, like, employees of our suppliers, that they are taken care of, that they are getting paid to a minimum level at least, that they have good conditions, health and safety. We need to reassure. We do that with our auditing system.
We use Intertek to audit ourselves because we cannot put more demand on our suppliers. We need to live up to the same standard with the same quality. We are really working very hard to have this inclusion. We know about people. We know what people engage around. This is something that we have a high standard of. One of the more important things is that we align with the laws and the lawful system in countries where we operate in. We don't do any unethical business, or we make sure that we have a high ethical standard.
Engaging with the community. We love children, and we love nature. If we can combine both of them in our engagement in the community, we are more than happy. This picture, I think it sums up everything that we stand for.
This is the great surfer, Garrett McNamara. He has been an ambassador for us more than 10 years. This is in Nazaré, Portugal, where he, in his project, community project, where we support him, it's about clean water, it's about children. In this case, this is an children from an orphanage where he support them. He brings them to the sea to build trust. They might not have anyone in their environment that care for them, but he, as a role model, he brings them down to the sea and teach them how to, with one another, build trust.
That's what we love to see. We are engaging in children with our community involvement locally, where we have our sites, but also on a broader scale, like cleaning the trails, because if we use nature, we need to maintain and respect. If you teach a child to respect nature, then you preserve it. Now, Magnus, you will talk more about our products.
Thank you, Kajsa. We have four product categories today. We have a strong product portfolio in those categories, and I'm gonna go through them quite quickly in talking about what they are. 67% of sales in sport and cargo carriers, as we call it, so these are the roof racks, the kayak carriers, the bike carriers, the roof boxes, all those things that enable that active lifestyle and bringing all your gear with you. If you're going for a family weekend or for a long trip going somewhere, you have all that gear. 14% is in what we call RV products. That's products and accessories that sit on the outside of motor homes and caravans. There we are the market leader in our niches in Europe.
12% in Active with Kids, a category we went into in 2011, and that is now starting to be a sizable part of our business, and 7% in Packs, Bags & Luggage. If you look at a regional perspective, North America and Latin America, called Region Americas for us, is 28%, and the rest of the world is 72% of sales. We are a truly global company, and as I said, with a broad product portfolio. If we look a little bit of what differs in the two regions, because there are some differences. If you take the biggest category, no differences. We are the market leader in the world. We are the market leader in both regions in sport and cargo carriers, clearly the market leader in all the places. No major differences.
There are some differences within the portfolio in choices due to the types of vehicles, the types of bikes or other things that they might use, but we are still in that same strong position. If you take recreational vehicle products or RV products, there is a big difference. Many years ago, we decided to shy away from the North American market for those same products because margins were simply not good enough. We don't wanna play in categories where for some reason competitors have pulled down the margins. We chose to focus on the European market on those niche categories with awnings, tents, and bike carriers and other things on the RVs. Big difference in sales.
You're seeing some very rapid growth numbers as of late, but from a tiny starting point in Region Americas for RV products, and that's because some of those niche segments with much smaller, more European style of vans are finally starting to take off in North America, and there we can be profitable. Those categories we are interested in. If you look at the Active with Kids, there is one big difference, and that is seen in how parents are using the product differently around the globe.
We love countries where people bike commute with their children because we are the number one in the world with bike commuting tools for parents that bike with their children. If you travel the world, that is very much Central Europe. You have the DACH region, you have the Benelux, and it's the Nordics.
That's where you bike commute every day back and forth with your children and where our type of premium, really great bike-related juvenile products do well, which is why we're bigger in Active with Kids in Europe and rest of the world. In North America, for example, or Latin America, or if you go to Australia and New Zealand, it's a recreational thing. It's more the super-duper triathlete or the people wanting to have a great weekend thing in the park, which means less volume for those type of products. Strollers, similar more on a global basis.
Then Packs, Bags & Luggage is more of a historical heritage. Once upon a time, Case Logic, which we own as a brand, was founded in the U.S. and became a very strong brand with a very well-established base of retail customers and a broad portfolio.
That means that there's a long history of doing various backpacks, bags, and luggage things. We have in Europe focused on the Thule-branded and growing into the category in those niches we've acted. That's why there is a bigger share of the business in Region Americas. In the way we run the business, it is a global business. You will see Thule as a company where we do this. Sales is local, but the rest is global. Brand, product development, supply chain setup is a globally run approach to business. Yes, there will be some differences in portfolios due to the type of consumer, due to the type of interest, but the way we run it is on a truly global basis.
If you look at sport and cargo carriers, as I said, two-thirds of our business today, we are number one in the world. There are strong local players. I think one of the most interesting things when we have internal discussions about our categories is actually it's often more complicated to fight the fight against a very strong local niche player that maybe only makes one product and only sells it in one country. Often a family-run company, they're okay with pretty low margins. They're very aggressive. Their dependency is on this one product. You should never underestimate those competitors, and I can assure you we don't.
We have lots of strong but small competitors in that category. We are the only truly global player, which gives us some advantage. Fantastic economies of scale advantage, fantastic competence advantage, but still never underestimate those local competitors. If you look at what's going on in the world, and probably the most hotly debated subject, if you would ask all the analysts the constant question that will come back. Will now the world of this type of product continue to grow from the platform it has? Our belief is that it will.
It's not only our belief, there are others that are believing it in terms of people looking at the trends for this type of activities, but it is to be proven. We will have to see in the coming two, three, four years. You shouldn't be judging anything on a monthly basis, if you say about a long-term trend, but this long-term trend was existing before the pandemic. Clearly a growth of this type of category amplified during the pandemic.
I don't know you guys, but if you ask around your friends that were a little bit forced to do their local vacations, you're playing it maybe in a league where they travel to very fancy places. But even so, when they were then forced to go home on a vacationing closer to your home, then one common thread when I talk to my friends and when my daughters talk to their friends is, "That was actually nicer than I thought it would be. It was a great weekend, that mountain biking weekend close by home. I didn't need to go to Barcelona to have a great weekend." Although you will be seeing, and you see constantly on the news that travel is picking up, yes, that's going to be the case.
We have a strong belief that local stationing for many reasons, not least the sustainability reasons that Kajsa talked about, will continue to grow from that platform. We have a very simple remit here. We're gonna strengthen our global number one position, and that attitude is crucial to what we do in this company. It's easy to think that we will get infatuated with the new categories because it's always fun with new, right? But I can tell you, when you look at the team here and in the plants and in the sales organization, we had 225 international sales people here last week. When we were looking at it is of course key to drive this category because it's the bread and butter category for us and two-thirds of our sales.
If we look at RV products, where, as I said, we have a very clear number one position in our niche in Europe, where the team has done a fantastic job to take that position. It's a different business, and we've said that from day one. When we became stock listed, 2014, we made it clear that there is a major difference on how these products are being sold. The main reason is simply this. If you take sport and cargo carriers, the consumer trust themselves to put it on the vehicle. You can put it on the tow bar or put it on the roof rack yourself.
When you're buying a motor home or a product for a motor home, you just simply, or unless you are a German engineer, because some of them do, but most common consumers will not trust themselves to drill a hole in that flimsy RV wall that they spend EUR 50,000 for, because they might be drilling straight into the back to a fridge or a toilet from Dometic or something like that, and you don't wanna do that. They will ask the dealership or the manufacturer to do it, which means it's not a retail sale channel. It's not an aftermarket. It is a different type of business. The majority of it is dealership, but there is a lot of OEM business. There's a slightly different business method.
The other part, since the consumer does not want to do this at the time themselves, they will often actually do the acquisition of our product at the time when they acquire the vehicle. That means it's a significant ticket outlay. Let's be clear about that. It's EUR 30,000, EUR 40,000, EUR 50,000, plus our little extra for the accessory they added for us. Differently therefore, you have an association which is one of those questions that will come now with what about financial strength all out there. From a consumer desire point of view, the market has never been hotter. The market from a wanting to own a small vehicle, wanting to go on RVing, cool weekends, bring that gear with you, do those things, have never been higher.
You can see that in all the stock-listed companies in the sector, they have fantastic order books, and they have order books long out. There's always a challenge when you have order books long out and you're struggling to get the vehicles out because they are truly struggling. They are not getting enough chassis, and when they can't get chassis, they can't build the motor home. The biggest challenge in the RV industry at the moment in Europe, where we do 95% of our business, is with those manufacturers struggling to get enough chassis. The order books are fantastic. There's a lot of consumers waiting, the finance world is happening in the meantime. Inflation is happening. What will and how will that impact? That is something that we'll come to see.
What you can say is that a few years ago, when the industry had less of financing solutions in place, there were some of the less well off. A younger couple wanting to buy a small motor home, for example, didn't get the loan from the bank to do that. Here, the manufacturer's been smart. They've created financing solutions and all of that, but there's still maybe that interest rate question that you will ask yourself. I think here is gonna be key to look at what happens of how the industry picks up with manufacturing capacity versus what goes on with inflation. What we know is we've always outpaced the market. When the market was weakening, the team did a fantastic job and we didn't grow, but we did not decline nearly as much as everybody else.
In the 12 years since then, we have been beating the market by far, and I'm 100% convinced that we will continue to do that. If we look at the next category then, Active with Kids. Active with Kids was the category, as I said, we established ourselves actually via an acquisition, which sounds almost weird considering how few acquisitions we've done and how many times I've repeated I'm an organic growth first person. We had an idea of wanting to go into the juvenile product category, and sometimes when you go into a new category, you want something that kicks it off and you get the momentum. It was obvious for us that you wanted to do it in a logical way.
If you are a brand associated with very much activity outdoors, and if you have a fantastic distribution network already for all the bike channel in the entire world, a very tactical entry into juvenile was, of course, something related to bikes. We acquired the world's best bike trailer company called Chariot, and we have since then done updates and completely revamped the portfolio and have had fantastic growth of our bike trailer since then, and are now undisputed global market leader in bike trailers. We went in ourselves and did organically bike seats, and after a while, we actually acquired also a small company doing bike seats to further bolster the size of our bike category. We went into strollers, and we did that also in a tactical way.
As an active brand that had been doing these fantastic multi-sport bike trailers where people were doing triathlons with them, you could sneak into the category with the credibility as a brand doing the world's best jogging stroller, which we did. We could add an all-terrain stroller that was very easy to drive around, and now this month, we're launching our fourth stroller model and are becoming a serious stroller brand around the world.
Here our remit is looking at a category that actually is, in terms of bike commuting, clearly helped with what we've seen in the last two years. I am sure you've all read about how any major city in the world is fighting about the pride on who has done most infrastructure investments in bike commuting in the last two years. Paris is winning at the moment.
Paris has gone from one of the worst to, in the two years, have done as much investments as they were planning to do in 15 years. They did over two years in bike infrastructure. If you've been biking with children, you know you wanna be feeling safe on those bike commuting lanes, et cetera. That is one key way of getting more people to bike commute.
We feel very comfortable of the long-term trend of bike commuting. In strollers, it's pretty straightforward. We want to grow market share by having a broader portfolio and being more and more recognized by more parents around the world. We also, by the way, do the world's best child carrier backpacks. If you're going out hiking, you should definitely have a Thule Sapling because it's winning every test and every award.
We have a very strong portfolio in our Active with Kids. If you look at Packs, Bags & Luggage, there we are a very small niche player. I mean, we're really playing with the 800-pound gorillas, as my American colleagues like to call it. There are some fantastic huge players in Packs, Bags & Luggage. That means we need to be smart at how we play in this category. We have to admit, we weren't smart when we timed our entry into luggage because it happened just before everybody stopped traveling. We were maybe more unlucky than unsmart, but that was terrible timing.
I often say the saying, we timed the purchase of the rooftop tent company brilliantly because that was the opposite. Clearly, an entry into luggage at the time was a very mistimed entry. The market just crumbled down to 30% of what it used to be. It is not near where it used to be yet, and it will take a long time. What we are playing at here is we are, of course, targeting to be a strong niche player in certain types of packs.
For the more active people, the bike hydration packs, duffel bags, but also in the right bike commuting, everyday commuting packs, et cetera. We're trying to place in a smart way. We also see clearly some opportunities here, because when the market is incredibly tough on the incumbent brands that were solo doing Packs, Bags & Luggage, some of them aren't around anymore, and some won't be around in the future.
That gives opportunity for players that have a strength in the right way, not buying the share, because then you're not making any money, but earning the share of that growth that will come. That's what we're focusing on, winning that market share in those niche categories where we think we can be a profitable player and make good sense. All of that then leading into what one of the big announcements then at this Capital Markets Day. We have been teasing you so long, so that it was time. Daniel is so upset with me in front row. I mean, come on, how long can you talk about new categories? We've talked about it a long time.
I mentioned a few times that one of the reasons we had to talk about it longer is we decided to postpone, actually, with everything going on in the supply chain complexities, there would be nothing worse than launching into a category, pushing, convincing retailers to push out an incumbent brand, and then immediately start having serious delivery issues. It was bad enough to do that if you were a category player that was number one that had proven for many, many years that you had fantastic delivery performance, because then they would forgive you, as most people have in retail over the last two years.
To do that in a new would have been very dangerous. We, with development projects and everything going on, we decided to slow down. That meant we might as well announce two of them at the same time because the other one was moving on as we spoke. Now we're into new categories. When we talk about new categories, there has to be some remits of what you do in a new category, what you offer and what you decide to tick if you are a company. What should be ideally possible to say, "Yep, tick on that, tick on that, let's go for this category." In an ideal world, it's a big market.
Big market by default is too loose definition on big market. We are not talking about sneakers size of markets or a T-shirts market, but in our type of business, a relatively sizable market. It's worth the efforts of investing over a few years before we go into it. Secondly, it should be a global market, because one of our fantastic strengths is because we played in relatively small product niches, we early on, already in the fifties and sixties, went global, and we became good at cost efficiently serving the world. If it's a category, therefore, that is owned by one market, only the U.S., a local, very strong U.S. brand could do as well as us.
We want to use our advantage of cost efficiently reaching the globe. Ideally a type of product used on a global or at least in many countries. Third, it's always easier to sail with the wind than against the wind. Generally you want positive market trend in the category you enter. Fourth, it needs to have high gross margin for the best players.
It is incredibly presumptuous to believe that you as a new player will be able to have significantly better gross margins than incumbents that have done a fantastic job for many years in a category. You need to be one of those truly revolutionary company, and we have to admit that we've mostly been an evolutionary company. We haven't revolutionized anything. We've evolutionary developed great products with great margins. We need to enter something where not all the players, because there's always lots of mediocre brands that don't make a lot of money, but where the strong brands are truly profitable with high gross margin.
Due to where we position the Thule brand, it is the case that you can have fantastic margins at low-end price points, right? Because you run your business that way, you run it very custom, very lean, and you sell semi-crappy product and all of that. We are not that. We need that a sizable part of this global market is in what we would define as a premium price point segment, because that's where the Thule brand fits. If it's a product where it's not just about visual design, because if it's just about visual design, we lose out on one of our biggest strengths.
We have a fantastic team. You will meet many of them when you walk around. A fantastic team in taking consumer insights and with the ease of use, turning that into great products. We want design and function to be part of that new product category.
Therefore, we can say it should fit the brand and it should fit our competencies as a company. Also competencies ideally in manufacturing. If it's combining plastic pieces with aluminum extrusions in a very smart way with an automation and some assembly, we're gonna be good at it. That's a category that is more appetizing than others if it plays in that way.
As you've heard about what we did in the juvenile category when we started with Active with Kids, it's ideal if we see that there are maybe some smart, right little players that have something but don't have economies of scale, don't have our machinery behind it, where we could add on to speed on the journey, on the new entry. That's always a nice. As I've told every investor, even before the IPO, never put that into your models.
Always take that as cream on top of what we do because we don't put it into our financial models. We see it as cream on top of what we do. If we do all those things, it should, in our view, as a new category, provide great shareholder returns. Now, Daniel, time to finally talk about the new categories then, and for the rest of you as well, by the way. I think it's always good to visualize it. Let's look at our first next new product category.
We can follow the river wherever it takes us. Moving on to see what's there to find. We could be like a river, come on troubled waters, and we'll leave it all behind. Wherever it takes us. Moving on to see what's there to find. Oh, we could be like a river leave it all behind.
Welcome all dog owners to the world of Thule. What we're doing is simply, and it was a very timely question I got outside. I wish we had you had something. Yes, we are entering the world of dogs. It's not only because my older sister, who's a veterinarian and a kennel owner, has been on my neck for the last 15 years about it, or that loads and loads of employees have been saying, "We're so good at that, and there are not so many good products out there. Why don't we do it?" It is because we clearly see a very good market opportunity.
There are two main reasons for this. One is, we can quick show of hands how many dog owners in the group here. Good to see, because you will understand me, the rest of you might not. If you look at it, the dog owners are seeing the dog more and more as a family member. When you see somebody more and more as a family member, what you're going to do is you will be prepared to spend for quality, if it's quality pet food or if it's quality products, and you're gonna be wanting to bring them along and do things with them.
That is an ideal combination for us. If you then look at what the other trend is, the pandemic also didn't just make people do a lot more staycations. The dog industry has seen a boom. Some of you maybe bought a dog during the pandemic, and then you paid twice as much for your Labradoodle as you would have done before. But generally, you can say the dog ownership is actually very high.
Sweden is one of the lowest, at 16% of households. There are countries where 40%, 50% of the households own at least one dog. There is a sizable market out there. The type of products that we do are already being seen around the world. These are just four images from Instagram where somebody hashtagged Thule, and it happened to be with their family and dogs doing things. What we're wanting to do, clearly, is to enter into a category.
We will do that entering into a category in two types: car transport of your dog and bike transport of your dogs. We've already sneak entered in a very sneaky way because we just launched our Thule Courier bike trailer a month ago. The Thule Courier bike trailer actually already has a dog trailer kit to it.
It is a children's bike trailer, but that children's bike trailer, you can also transform into a cargo bike trailer, and with buying an extra kit, you can transform it into a dog trailer. It is car and bike. We know both. We know a lot about car transport. We know a lot about dog transport in bike transport as well. If you look at car transport, there are many modes of transporting your dog. The most common one, the dog is just walking around. That's clear. That's the fact today still. The dog is doing everything wherever it wants to be or just sitting on the seat.
What has been growing very fast as the dogs became more and more family members and as various laws and regulations are quickly stepping up around the world is an expectation of safety, not only for the dog, but for the rest of the passengers as well. What is happening? It could be how you transport in the back of an SUV or a hatchback or a station wagon or on a pickup truck or in the back seat with a harness or many other solutions, and we will be a full service provider in this category. The category is today dominated by small niche players. They do a great job, so it's the same as in sport and cargo carriers. Just because they're small local niche players, we will not underestimate them.
They've done a great job in establishing themselves, but there is no strong global brand. We are convinced with our design skill, our competence, and our manufacturing capabilities, because we will be manufacturing these products in our facility in Poland, that we will be able to become very quickly a very significant player in this industry. It's a very difficult industry. I'm going to get follow-up questions later on in the quarters to come from the analyst about how do you define the size of this market. Trust us, that is going to be difficult.
If you do a judgment from many different sources, our expectations is that in the premium segment, which is the only one we care about, the market is around SEK 1.5 billion today and fast-growing. If you take bike transport, it's a smaller market.
We estimate that it's half a billion SEK of bike transport. We are the world leader in bringing your bike with a bike trailer, so of course, we will be bringing a breadth of fantastic products to bring your dog with your bike. There are also other solutions around the bike that will be coming. Clearly stepping into this category, fully becoming over time, as we always do, in logical steps. First product then being a crash-tested world's best dog cage for the back of an SUV, station wagon, or a smaller hatchback. That's category one.
We've been holding it so long, we'll, we might as well then rush on and make sure we talk about category two as well. Once again, I think the best way to do that is to show a small clip. Yes, you were all right in your guesses because that must have been one of the least surprising new category entries. We are getting into the car seat category. There is a lot of logic for that as clearly is the case, because we know lots about car safety, and we nowadays know lots about children, and that combination is what we will attack then now.
It is an extremely safety-focused, very technical category with very high demands. That sounds scary, but that's actually what we love. We like those aspects of it. There are many usage modes, and no, you're not supposed to be able to read every little font on there. What the logic is, if you take an infant seat, it is used in your home when the kid is there.
It's used on your stroller, especially in North America, where a lot of people do not buy bassinets at all. They go with the car seat and click it into the stroller only. It's used in that strolling mode and of course, in the car to be safe. There is a lot of modes to consider and a lot of safety aspects, and therefore you have to be extremely stringent. This is children's lives. I mean, we all go. When the music goes up there, you go like, "Oh," it's a knot in your stomach, right? If you look at it, we have to be very, very conscious about the various regulations around the world and the various consumer expectations of this. You can say that the regulations are extremely different, actually.
In Europe, it's defined by what is called the i-Size R129 rules, which are very modern and very stringent. In North America, a little bit more old style, security standards in there. We will be going about this on a region by region perspective with a global mindset that the product portfolio must meet up to the requirements and the desires of the parents in different ways. There are some common key points, though, truly crucial in this. A product proposition in car seats for children has to be foolproof. It has to be tested endlessly, it has to be followed up, and it needs to be truly foolproof. It also needs to be reassuring for the parent that it is going to work.
It is scary to look at how many cases of people not having put their car seat in correctly and how worried you are that you haven't. This constant tactile, visual, audible confirmation that you've done the right thing, it is safe, is a very key thing. Do not underestimate that it needs to be desirable. If it looks too clunky, too technical, too safe, it is a little bit like a company where I happen to be the chairman, where we could discuss helmet design, where the best helmet is a huge thing, but nobody would wear it. You need to be also having something desirable that people actually want to use.
You need to combine all those things. That's the type of categories we love. We're very excited to get into this category. As I said, we're gonna enter it in steps. We're entering Europe first, and we're entering Europe next autumn. In next autumn, we will come with a common base where an infant seat and a toddler seat can be applied on the same common base. We will then, the year after, come into North America, where due to the regulations and expectations of children's sizes, et cetera, we will come with a base and an infant seat and another base and a toddler seat for the North American market.
Also next 2024 autumn, we will then have a booster seat for both regions as well when the child gets bigger. We are then consistently evaluating entry into other geographical regions with other regulations, and those will be fully defined and coming in the future. We have a very strong portfolio coming then in 2023 and 2024.
If you look at the market and differences, and this is more for the printed later on, you don't need to look at everything that is written there. There's a lot of expectation that the car seat market is somewhere around SEK 85 billion-SEK 95 billion, if you ask most people. Very difficult to define as well. Why are we then saying that our target market is only SEK 14 billion? Seven and a half billion SEK in Europe and six and a half billion SEK. It's because we look at premium.
We're only interested in really high-end premium solutions with all the bells and whistles. That's where the Thule brand will be. There's lots of cheaper price points that we will never play at. The true target market potential is a SEK 14 billion market with these launches.
As I said, there are very strong incumbent brands that have been in this category forever. We do not underestimate them. What we know that with our fantastic experience of what goes on with a car in various situations and our fantastic experience on what parents want to do with their kids, we are convinced with all the efforts we have put into this organic development that we will come with great products that will win market share. When we then look at winning market share and ticking things, that sounds all good, but we also need to make sure that we actually deliver on all the aspects we set from the beginning.
We said we wanna tick a lot of things. Maybe a question mark on dog transport market size, if you don't think SEK 2 billion is big enough. We do in Thule, so we tick that. What is really nice with these categories, it ticks all across. It fits our competencies, it fits our brand, it fits the size of the market, the global market and all that. We feel very comfortable that we cannot blame anybody else if we, in 10 years time, are not successful in this. This is up to us now to deliver in this. As I say to the team all the time, it's not gonna be quick journey. It will take years.
If we do the right things, there are all the potentials that these will be sizable legs to stand on in the future for the Thule Group. From a pure reporting point of view, I therefore also want to update to you that the way we will report going forward as of Q2 is that actually with kids category of today, which is then bike trailers, bike seats. It was also strollers and child carrier backpacks. We will add the dog transport product and the car seats into a new bigger category called Juvenile & Pet Products. That's gonna be the new name for that category moving forward.
When we enter into this world of these emotional things, you see the cuddly little one. I'm closer to the grandchildren. I hope my daughters didn't listen to that, but I am closer to the grandchildren than my own. You remember that feeling. I remember when you placed it in that stroller or car seat. There's a lot of emotions in that. When we talk about emotions, there is, of course, a connection not just to the product but to the brand of Thule. To speak more about what we do and how we work with the brand, Thule, please welcome up on the stage our global brand responsible for the Thule brand, Tina Liselius.
Thank you, Magnus. It's always a pleasure to get to talk about our fantastic brand, Thule, the biggest brand in Thule Group. You can build a brand in many ways, but it always comes down to some basics. For us, the basics is built on three pillars. Our brand positioning, our brand promise, and our brand connection. Our brand positioning is all about our tagline, Bring Your Life. Because Bring Your Life is our logic. If it's our product categories or every single product, Bring Your Life is the glue. It makes sense. It's the explanation.
No matter if you bring your board, or you bring your bike, or you bring your gear, you bring your kids, you bring your skis, you bring your love, you bring your passion, you bring your dreams. It's up to you what that life means to you.
Our second pillar is our brand promise, deeply and genuinely founded in our values. We focus on being authentic and honest when inspiring our consumers to live that active outdoor life in the cities and in the nature. Our third pillar, our brand connection, is based upon the importance in keeping it real and relatable. We create content that triggers our emotions because we believe that our consumers are inspired by the same stories as we are.
These three pillars rest upon a foundation of consistency. We want you to get the same impression of our brand and our products, no matter where you meet us, if it's on thule.com, if it's on our social media channels, if it's in any store. If we produce a film today, we want it to be just as relevant five years from now.
When I got the responsibility to of the Thule brand, we had already started to work with how we wanted to communicate with our brand. Since then, we have worked hard to fill the space with our heart, our soul, and our values, our logic, our credibility, and our emotions. To know where you're going, you need to know where you come from, right? To tell that story, how we the Thule journey has been, there is no better way than showing this film.
We have four core values. We mentioned it before today. We produce safe, quality products that are easy to use and with an attractive design. We stick to this now, and we will always stick to that. Just like how we have worked with our ambassadors. We started to work with ambassadors a long time ago, back in the seventies and eighties.
It was Ingemar Stenmark in Sweden, and it was Robin Esch in the US. Today, some of the brands that we work with, we've worked with them for more than 10 years. They are a big part of our life, daily life. They are part of our production of film and photo. They share their values in their channels. They have used our products before we even got started working with them. They use them today in a natural way, and they will continue to work and use our products. But there is nothing that inspires me more than to see our end consumers share their love and their passion for our products.
Going forward, we will continue to work exactly the same with our different values, with the logic, with the credibility, with the emotions, and we will tune up that emotions part even more. Before I hand over to Magnus again, we will look at some of the images with that emotional content.
I hear the mountains a-callin' rain. When the wind cries, it's like they say. Don't bust no babies holding me. I only want you because I'm free.
Summarizing, it's very easy to look back and think that it can never be better than this. It's the opposite. The future is bright out there, and we're very convinced that we will have a fantastic journey. When we look at what we build on, 80 years of fantastic legacy. That is a strength that creates the optimism that we can continue to grow. That's why we also, when we look at it, actually stick to the same strategy we've had a number of years. We're not changing anything. We're still driving that cultural, entrepreneurial, working grit with some daring to do new things, but then having the grit to carry them out. We're still thinking long-term sustainability. We're still infatuated with products. We need to be efficient and smart and more automated in our factories.
We are shoring up and driving the energy into the lifestyle brand of Thule. We are supporting our retail partners, and we are definitely pushing out. That will continue to create strong growth also in the future, both top line and profits and cash generation. It will enable the possibility to further bolster that growth with the right acquisitions, and hopefully, depending on what the market defines it, should create also shareholder returns.
When we then look at that, we are supported by five macro trends that we think are very key for us. One is the bike commuting macro trend. It is extremely strong. With all the infrastructure investments that have been made, it will be continuing. A second one is as vehicles, electric vehicles are getting smaller and smaller, there will be this sustainable mindset.
The times I need it to add more stuff, to bring more stuff. A product from Thule enables you to have that small little electric vehicle for the everyday. When you want to have the weekend and get away, you can add that with transport solutions on the back of the car and other things to it as well. The staycationing trend wasn't a fad, wasn't just during the pandemic. There is a long-term trend that people will do short weekends, long weekends, and more traveling close to their homes, and that will support our type of categories.
My own generation, as I have to point out too often nowadays, as the 55-plus generation, I am healthier than my father's generation at the same age. We are definitely more active. It's not only middle-aged men in Lycra. There's a lot of general activity in the 55-plus.
That healthy, active generation wanting to do things is growing, and it fits our brand perfectly. Then finally, what we've been talking about, both the sustainability aspects, but also the brand aspects that consumers in the future will more and more judge that they want to align with the brands that they buy products from. We are positioned with our long-term sustainable quality approach in exactly the way that those consumers will do. That makes us comfortable also then to dial up our ambitions. What we are doing is basing it on these trends, that there will be things going on, there will be more outdoor and urban activities, there will be more staycationing, there will be a healthy, active community that wants high-quality brands. We've decided to up the ante on our goals.
We quickly updated that goal. We presented a year ago a goal to double our 2020 sales by 2030. Since we did SEK 7.8 billion, that would have meant that we needed to deliver SEK 15.6 billion. Now, a year later, hindsight is easy. We were not aggressive enough. We are now convinced that our SEK 20 billion goal is the right goal for 2030. We're basing that on two factors why we're updating the goal and adding SEK 4.4 billion more in the ambition, and one is the fact that we grew so much more in 2021 than was expected. We've already caught up with about half of that with the growth that we did in 2021.
Second part is that we can now be more open about the new categories we're going in and the size of those categories and what it will be for us in achieving also growth in those categories. A new updated sales target of SEK 20 billion by 2030. We're maintaining an EBIT margin over 20% throughout the period, and we're also maintaining a minimum 75% of annual net income, which was updated a year ago. We are continuing with the very ambitious targets we've already set according to the science-based targets initiative. We are generally amping up on the sales volume, but the rest of the goals are remaining the same. With that, I feel it is time for questions and answers.
To simplify it, we've made the logic that if people want to pose a question, they say who they are and the question. I probably then need to repeat it so people can, on the digital, hear it. If I struggle to be able to answer it, I might pass it on to one of my colleagues. With that, thank you all for listening in. Now we open the floor for questions and answers. Daniel Schmidt from Danske Bank, please.
I think you mentioned, maybe nine months ago or something like that you saw these two categories that we didn't know what it was, the sales potential needed to be sort of, EUR 1 billion or EUR 100 million in a five to ten-year period to be called a new category. When you show the two categories and the size of the sort of the premium market, of course, the one that we didn't know about is a little bit smaller.
Does that mean that you still expect to take half of that market in five to ten years' time, or should we sort of just shift the numbers around? How do you see the entry into car seats, given that you've been now in eight years in strollers? Do you feel that you can hit the ground running a little bit more in that category?
Two separate questions. I'll take the first one. The size of the market is not big enough to become a SEK 1 billion, which is what we've defined. It is a very fast-growing category. By 2030, that category, we are convinced, will be significantly more sizable than SEK 2 billion. By that time, it will be a much bigger market than SEK 2 billion. But yes, due to the position of many small niche players, we are very convinced that we will be the global leading brand in that category. That's the ambition we have. Yes, it still matches our expectation by the end of that period to be a SEK 1 billion category.
If you take the second question, which was about then car seats, and would we be able to, having now been in stroller for a while, quicker get revenue growing? Clearly, there is a huge advantage if you have a relationship with juvenile stores around the world where you have now been supplying them and you do know them and they do sell your product, than knocking on the door for the first time. We are not underestimating, even within the car seats field, it is still convincing the retailer to move another brand away from their homepage or from their shelf.
It's not a given, but it's significantly easier when you have a relationship, of course, and a well-established relationship. Secondly, there is also a logic of if you look at our strength of knowing and being able to communicate that we know cars and safety of cars, we have two credibility plays at one go. One, the ongoing relationship with juvenile retailers because we sell strollers there, and two, because we are convincing as somebody who actually understands what happens in a car. Yes, should be a quicker start than stroller was, definitely.
Adding to Daniel Schmidt's question, since you haven't had the car seat category for children, has that sort of hampered your growth, you think, for strollers? Typically, they go together, they match together, so I mean, there's connectivity.
The question for the digital crowd, if you didn't hear it, was that has the fact of not having car seats hampered our opportunities or growth rate in strollers? In North America, definitely. Due to the different way of using bassinets or infant solutions, clearly the case of not having a car seat associated with our own brand has held back from birth stroller sales in North America because most parents in North America go with a car seat and a car seat adapter. Partly also in Europe, not to the same extent, though, because in Europe, it is much more of a bassinet or cocoon type of approach, and quite a few parents still do choose a different car seat brand.
Clearly, as you have seen by brands like Bugaboo, who does partnerships with a brand called Nuna, just to have a car seat, so to speak, because it does strengthen you. I think it will help in both regions, but it will be a more significant help in North America.
Thank you. Can I just follow up on the car seats? From what I gather, there are a few very powerful sort of component providers to car seats that provide a lot of the features that is sort of standard today. Have you managed to sort of get commitment from one or two of these players so that you feel good about the contents? You're actually competitive but and would you intend to do more internally than perhaps some of your peers?
Gustav is correct. There is a lot of specific component manufacturers that are very strong to supply to a lot of brands in the car seat category. We are always smart about not innovating something that doesn't need to be innovated. We will combine actually some partnerships with some of the very trusted component suppliers that supply the leading brands of today, but with some strong in-house development, in-house manufacturing capabilities, combining the both. There is a bit of both. Yes, some of the most well-known brands are our suppliers and of components, and at the same time we have innovated with a lot of patents and will be doing some of the things ourselves. Kari?
Yeah, maybe one more on car seats. It's 10 years since you launched strollers. For us to understand what's the trajectory during car seats, can you share your current market share roughly in strollers, and you need to reach the same or higher in car seats to be at the SEK 1 billion
Seven years ago, we launched strollers. In those seven years, we can say that we are clearly still one of the smaller players, but we're now on the top 10 list. There are two behemoths in strollers. It's Bugaboo in Europe, and it's UPPAbaby in North America. Then there is some relatively sizable brand, and now we're starting to be one of those relatively sizable brands. To the question, can we reach SEK 1 billion in sales by 2030 in car seats with the same market share? Yes, is the answer. With the same market share as we have in strollers and gained over those seven years, we would definitely be above SEK 1 billion in car seats by 2030. Yes.
Maybe a more philosophical question about the new categories, because it seems that you are going for these every day, every week type of products, and yet you are showing these aspirational pictures about once a year. Is it a conscious choice that you stick to these products that you use more often rather than those that you use once a year on your annual camping trips?
There is a logic in saying that the more you can embrace a broader community doing activity, there is a higher likelihood that you can find more consumers wanting to do it. The way you tempt and taste it for them is of course to show that aspirational usage more than, "Oh, I need to bike to the kindergarten." Even the parents that love our Thule Chariot because they're biking every day, no matter rain or shine, what's going on, they actually prefer to see the image when they're biking on the beach with their children. What we will do from a purely emotional build-up point of view, there is an attractiveness in that more refined outdoorsy feel. You're absolutely right.
By us being able to offer a broader everyday use, where the stroller is a brilliant example, that is of course a way of finding more connection points where we can build that brand trust because you used it all the time. Some of the facts, I have the new Thule Aion collection luggage, and one of the cool things when I came with a duffel bag is when you then meet your now adult girls at university and their friends and, "Ooh, that's a nice bag." I don't get that reaction when I come rocking up with my car with a roof rack on it, I have to admit. Of course, clearly by broadening the portfolio to more everyday use product, we do get a brand strengthening as well. Yes.
Back to car seats. Can you consider M&A to accelerate the growth when you enter those categories?
Yes. The question, would we in these new categories, and specifically the larger one, car seats, potentially evaluate an M&A to accelerate? We highlighted that the most logical entry of an M&A is to speed up a journey you're otherwise gonna do anyway. We are selective. We're not gonna change. I didn't wake up last night and became an M&A person, nor is the company. The right M&A that potentially could speed up that journey and would match so that after the M&A, the company would perform significantly better. Never for a quick win, never for an arbitrage, always for what would be done after that company in that case was acquired. Yes, in the back. Very bright lights.
From the dog products, it's a very different sales channel from the category you normally play in. Could you just discuss the main challenges in getting into that channel and or how it's different from the categories that you know and have been in?
Yes, it's correct. The dog cage, for example, is in a partly not as much as you would think, because if you look at the dog product, you can say there's three main channels. One is a clear juvenile pet store channel, one is the classical large onliners, which is by far the biggest, by the way, where we already have fantastic, well-established relationships. The third one are the small pet specialists, that are slightly different. If you look at it, we feel very confident that we, for the majority, will immediately have access to where the majority of those type of products are being sold.
For the bike-related, we're 100% sure, but even for the car-related dog product, for the vast majority of business today, it goes more to mainstream online channels rather than specialists. There is the specialist channel. Of course, as this is the first day we've announced it, my sales colleagues were very upset when we didn't tell them last week. They thought they would be told what the new categories were. Now they are. If you look at it, first thing hitting the ground as of next week, we will start knocking on those doors. What we have proven, I think in an even more challenged category like juvenile, we are capable of getting into a new channel because we are a believable company in terms of high on time in full delivery performance.
If you do that and offer a great product, because if it isn't a great product, why would they bring us in and not the incumbent, so to speak? I feel very comfortable that we will be able to establish ourselves in that part of the business channel as well. The majority is actually going in a more generalist reality. This is Daniel Schmidt again, by the way.
If you compare the launch when it came to strollers seven, eight years ago, and you look at these two categories, the number of people behind it and the amount of money behind it in the past couple of years, and what are your sort of projections in terms of profitability a couple of years out?
We, as we as a company, we always put on a P&L our spend. All the money we've been spending for these categories, you've already seen in our annual reports, right, so far. We have not anything in the balance sheet. All those people are already in the cost structures. It is a huge sizable team for car seats, I can tell you. Soon we will unveil what we needed to do in our test center to be able to go into car seats. Clearly we are spending a lot of money into this, but we're already spending it.
That's not going to be dialed up going future. It is already spent and being spent in the comparable numbers. If you take the dog-related product, they are smaller than strollers. Size-wise, car seats bigger, strollers there, and the dog-related, slightly smaller. Andrea?
Two questions. One, related to the product categories, which one was worth launching when you made?
The first question was, which one should you have done earlier and which one? We won't tell you is the answer. It's nice to have it there, but we won't tell you.
The second question is the pet category. Is there an OE angle to it?
The question is, since especially on the car-related pet products, is there a connection to an OE reality? Because some of the car manufacturing brands are offering various type of dog cages, dog doors, et cetera. Yes, clearly. Here we have a fantastic team with the fantastic insights of what is being developed in the car industry, and we have the relationships. We are honest, we are pushing the Thule brand and retail consumer product. That's our main mantra here. It's not to become an OE provider. It is Thule-branded, retail-focused entry into pet. Anna?
Hi. Maybe just to carry on the pet adaptation theme. How will you deal with the complexity, your insights on that of the different shapes and sizes?
Trust us, you have to have several versions to be able to fit a cage, because of course, it's gonna be adjustable. It's a crash-tested, adjustable, but still you need different sizes for different small hatchback versus a large SUV, et cetera, and different types of dogs. Clearly it will be a model scenario. One of the things that we are very good at is, as you will see when you talk about a roof rack, there is many different cars to attach to.
Some basic components are exactly the same that you can mass manufacture. Some are very individual by model. Same applies here. Adjustability in the product themselves, but also a fantastic knowledge of how you measure out and what's going on in the car industry. It helps us to be very much at the forefront of that.
Cognizant of time and some people having trains to catch after this fantastic tour that we will have, I therefore propose the following, that we thank all the participants that have been listening in to the digital event. You will now be seeing two fantastic films, one showing the roof rack facility in Hillerstorp and the automation investments we've done there, and the other one showing the place where we're sitting in the midst of our fantastic expanded Thule test center. I ask the participants here to remain as I wave goodbye to the digital participants for watching the screen. Thank you for your attention.
At the Thule Group, we are passionate about designing great products that make living active lives easier. For more than half a century, our products have been used in tough environments, mounted on cars and motor homes, driven at high speeds on bumpy roads with the consumer's favorite gear attached to them. Since entering the Packs, Bags & Luggage category and the juvenile category more than a decade ago, we have taken that same rigorous approach to how we test our packs and our juvenile products.
That is why we have developed the unique Thule Test Program™ and built the state-of-the-art Thule Test Center next to our main development center in Hillerstorp, Sweden, where we were founded in 1942. The real world is a trying place. It's important that there are no surprises, whatever happens on the road.
That's why we evaluate strong turns, evasions, speed and brake behavior with maximum load or even overload on vehicles. We evaluate how parents can feel assured that they have followed the right steps for the safety of their child. Rigorous safety testing demands competence and the right equipment to ensure repeatability and accuracy. At the Thule Test Center, our team of experts combines the use of state-of-the-art testing equipment with decades of insights following the demanding Thule Test Program.
We test the products to their limits, exceeding regulatory standards by far. We test the product's durability corresponding to an estimated lifetime use in extreme climates by performing shaking rig tests, tipping tests, brake tests, drop tests, and environmental tests. We also test what happens in crashes in our new in-house crash test facility that we opened in April 2022.
All of the tests done in a controlled environment mean nothing if the products do not perform in real life. That is why we always perform extensive further tests in the field. During the real-life testing, we ask questions like, "Which are the pain points?" "Where could we make life easier?" "How could we make it even more safe and enjoyable to use our products?" At Thule, we are passionate about designing great quality products that are safe and easy to use, and that make living active lives easier. That's why we put all our products through the demanding Thule Test Program. That way, we can ensure that you can use any Thule product with confidence. It will withstand whatever life throws at it.
Here in Hillerstorp, Sweden, where the company was founded 80 years ago, the Thule Group operates the world's largest and most modern roof rack manufacturing facility. It's also where our advanced stamped steel components are manufactured for a range of products like bike carriers that are assembled in Thule Group plants around the world. Roof rack production has been a key focus for the Thule Group site in Hillerstorp for more than 60 years, and the best way to efficiently produce these very safety-focused products has constantly evolved as new products have been launched, resulting in the modern, flexible, automation-oriented production approach that we use today.
Our skilled designers, developers, manufacturing experts, and product managers combine simulated performance to capture early insights with actual prototype manufacturing for a deeper understanding until finalized tools are constructed in our in-house facilities or external suppliers. We manufacture the most crucial steel components from a safety-related perspective in our own facility in Hillerstorp for roof racks, as well as many of our bike carriers and several other products. Safety is always core to what we do, and by keeping this competence in-house, we can constantly develop the next generation of products and manufacture them in the most efficient way at the highest quality.
Material flows in the plant are constantly moving to more automated handling steps with automated picking and packing and automated guided vehicles. Automated assembly lines for high runners enable high levels of quality control and production efficiencies. Components to be used in the manufacturing of Thule products, like bike carriers, are shipped from Hillerstorp to some of the other eight manufacturing plants around the world.
While the roof racks assembled in the Hillerstorp plant are shipped to Thule Group distribution centers for further distribution to consumers around the world.