Welcome to this short presentation at the Thule Group annual general meeting. I'm Magnus Welander, the CEO, I'm going to walk you through, very briefly, some key conclusions of this very strange year and this challenging reality that we've all had in a pandemic year. If you look at it's easy to think that everything has been digital, everything has been virtual. Luckily for the Thule Group, since we do products for people that want to be active and live an active outdoors life, it was a year that actually had a lot of that as well. Starting with sales, you can truly say that this was the most challenging year I've ever had in working for more than 25 years, in terms of differences between months and quarters.
We saw a year where everything started well, up to February, mid-March, and then as of mid-March, when lockdowns took place and the world went into a little bit of hibernation in the measures to try to contain the pandemic, it was clear that we saw a significant reduction in sales. In fact, from mid-March until mid-May, it looked gloomy indeed. Luckily, when people were allowed to go outside again and to pursue activities and to keep fit and well out in the nature and in the cities, we saw a fantastic second half where we not only caught up with what had been left on the table, so to speak, in what is our normal peak season, which is in the spring and early summer, but also on top of that, saw a fantastic momentum.
That extremely strong second half of the year meant that we, as a company for the year in total, had a growth of 13% in sales in constant currency. A fantastic result. Of course, being able to achieve that high second half of the year demand was a key proof of how strong our supply chain team has been performing. I'm extremely thankful and proud of what they did. The sales growth was also followed on by a fantastic EBIT performance. As you may remember, in 2017, we set a new EBIT margin target that we should reach in the midterm at minimum 20%, we passed that target already now in 2020 with 20.3% EBIT margin. As I said, a proof that we could handle, with all those restrictions and all those complications that were out there, a fantastic fall through on the sales growth.
I'm extremely proud that we could deliver a 27% in constant currency increase of EBIT, and as I said, passing the long-term growth target or EBIT margin target of at least 20%. If you look at the sustainability measures, it was a challenging year from one big aspect. As you can imagine, when you normally plan your business, we always have a setup that is flexible, and we've definitely had to prove that in 2020 with the huge swings in demand. When you normally then work, you try to be as both cost-efficient and as environmentally focused as possible in the way you distribute, which means a lot of costs, and you try to do it in different ways as you ship around the world. As we sell in 140 countries, that is a significant part for our business.
As the demand came so specific and so peaking in the second half of the year, we could not, and I'm sure you've followed the general challenges in the whole world in logistics, we could not continue to distribute and ship in the normal ways. We therefore did see an increased greenhouse gas emission due to the logistics of shipping our product. We took that conscious choice that we actually, although having a long-term ambition to continuously decrease, we needed to take those additional logistics situations in order to be able to capture the upside that was there and to satisfy those consumers that had a demand for our products to live active lives in the outdoors during 2020.
I can assure you that we keep on focusing on sustainability and in fact, on many of the measures within our Scope 1 and 2, so within our own plants, you can see that we continued to deliver really well on the long-term targets that we had set in 2014, both by greenhouse gas emission reductions above and beyond what we had targeted in our own plants, high recycling rates, reduced water consumption. We could not offset the increase in logistics. Overall, when you look at it and look at our targets, you can see that we are meeting all our long-term targets. We grew with 13% on sales. We had an EBIT margin of 20.3%. We have now a very low leverage of 0.2X .
In the specific situation that happened, the board of directors, as you may remember in the spring of 2020, decided not to propose a dividend in all the uncertainty that was there for the pandemic, instead now are proposing for the AGM a double dividend, you could say then, the dividend that was planned for 2019's year and the dividend now for 2020 as well. If you look at that, also a high dividend in line with our targets, which is also why I am happy to announce that we today, at the same day as the annual general meeting, are presenting some new long-term ambitions that there is a separate presentation available on thulegroup.com that I truly hope that you take in.
Thank you for your patience with us and your belief in us, and I especially want to thank all the team involved in the Thule Group for a fantastic result in 2020. I am 100% sure we will do another fantastic year in 2021 and set ourselves on the journey of meeting our new long-term ambitions that we are presenting today. Thank you