About our company. Dear shareholders, ladies and gentlemen, 2017 was a year of changes and important developments both within your company and in our economic and competitive environment. The results achieved in 2017 once again make your company one of the best performing in its industry. Although below our target, our organic growth continues to be among the best in our sector. I would particularly like to highlight our strong volume growth, which puts Nestle ahead of its direct competitors and makes it an industry leader.
Trading operating profit margin improved significantly in 2017. Your company has become more efficient and reduced its structural costs. It has taken clear decisions in terms of portfolio management and simplification of its organization and operations. These measures have already had positive effects in 2017 and put the Nestle Group in a good position to achieve its future goals. These results confirm the resilience of your company and its ability to seize various opportunities and adapt to the requirements of a competitive environment.
Allow me to pay tribute to the good work of the management team here with me today. Their determination to make the necessary changes and continue to invest in Nestle's development is fully supported by the Board of Directors. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the 320 3,000 Nestle employees around the world. It is on their work, dedication and commitment often in challenging circumstances that the success of your company is built. I'd like to thank them all on behalf of the Board of Directors and I am sure on behalf of every one of you.
Thank you. Dear shareholders, in 2017, your Board of Directors reconfirmed your company's nutrition, health and wellness strategy. This is a differentiated strategy that meets and reflects the changing needs of the society and consumers both today and in the future. Your Board of Directors has approved the growth and profitability targets by 2020. It has confirmed the central role of innovation and growth in value creation, improving our margins, streamlining our portfolio of activities and pursuing prudent capital allocation and acquisition strategies will enable us to achieve our objectives.
Moreover, last year, your Board of Directors approved a new CHF 20,000,000,000 share buyback program to be carried out by 2020. Your Board of Directors also ensured a smooth transition at the helm of the company in 2017 with a new CEO and a new Chairman. The Board continued with its refreshment policy by ensuring that its new members, including the 3 candidates proposed to you today, bring to Nestle the complementary skills and experience necessary to face the future with ambition and to ensure Nestle's long term success. Throughout 2017, the Board of Directors also listened to you, our shareholders. We listened to your concerns, questions and suggestions.
Both the Board of Directors and Executive Board of Nestle value your trust, your loyalty and your long term orientation. With a view to continuing our long term policy, the Board of Directors is proposing a further dividend increase, once again, to CHF2.35 per share. If you accept this proposal, If you accept this proposal, the total amount of the dividend paid to you will be CHF 7,100,000,000. This will also be the 23rd consecutive year that the dividend increases. Now I would like to hand you over to your CEO, Mark Schneider, who's going to talk to you about your company's performance in 2017.
Mark, you have the floor. Thank you, Paul. Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, good afternoon. Last year, I told you that improving my French was one of my priorities. It is therefore my pleasure to deliver my speech in French today.
I will do my very best. However, if you will be so kind, I would like to answer your questions in English, if I may. Industry is going through fundamental and unprecedented change. In this kind of environment, the way forward for our company is continuity and change. Continuity through implementing our nutrition, health and wellness strategy always driven by our purpose and guided by our values change by adapting our product portfolio to changing consumer demands and lifestyles and by improving efficiency and simplifying the way we work.
2017 was another intense and challenging year of transformation to prepare Nestle for the future. I would like to sincerely thank our 323,000 employees around the world for their dedication, their ability to innovate and the great resilience they demonstrated throughout the year. I have personally witnessed their tireless commitment to position Nestle well for the future. Let me now walk you through our financial performance in 2017. Group sales reached CHF 89,800,000,000 with an organic growth of 2.4%.
While this is below our expectations, I would like to highlight a strong point of our 2017 results. With real internal growth of 1.6%, our volume growth is at the high end of our industry. Importantly, our 3 geographic areas and all our product categories contributed to this growth. This demonstrates the strength of our portfolio, which is the foundation of our success. The underlying trading operating profit before restructuring costs and other items was CHF14.7 billion.
This represents a margin of 16.5%, up 50 basis points in constant currencies. This improvement puts us firmly on track to meet our 2020 margin improvement target. We have improved operating efficiency and carried out restructuring initiatives. This has helped us to improve margins and largely offset higher commodity costs of around CHF900 1,000,000. To reflect the current prospects of our Nestle Skin Health business, we took a goodwill impairment of CHF2.8 billion.
This was the main reason why our 2017 net profit decreased by 15.8 percent to CHF 7,200,000,000. This corresponds to earnings per share of CHF 2 32.32. Let me now give you some additional perspectives on last year and provide you with an outlook on the next few years. For over 150 years, Nestle a constantly changing marketplace. This remains true today.
I have already mentioned the pace at which our industry is changing. Consumers are looking for practical and healthy options. They also want to know where their food and beverages come from and how they've been made. Nestle is meeting these expectations through innovation and renovation. We aim to offer the tastiest and healthiest products in each of our categories.
We also strive to ensure that our products are made in a way that protects the environment for future generations. And that also has a positive impact on society. We are acting with a great sense of urgency, but also with prudence and always in line with our nutrition, health and wellness strategy. With this approach, we target faster growth and greater profitability, creating value in the long term for you, our shareholders. In 2017, we gave good progress in adjusting our portfolio towards high growth, high margin categories.
We acquired Atrium Innovations, a global leader in nutritional health products. We also invested in rapidly growing companies such as Blue Bottle Coffee, Sweet Earth, Chameleon Cold Brew and Freshly. All these brands provide Nestle with a fresh perspective and expertise in terms of new consumer trends. We also completed strategic divestments, including selling our confectionery business in the United States for $2,800,000,000 It's important to remember that these kind of changes always come with a time lag. We therefore expect to see the first results of these investments in 12 to 18 months.
Another focus is improving our efficiency and costs. Our objective is to finance profitable and sustainable growth for the future. Nestle's capacity for growth will be the source of long term value creation for you, our shareholders. As announced in September 2017, we will further reduce structural costs in areas such as production, procurement and general administration. We have already defined projects in these areas to deliver total savings of CHF2 to CHF2.5 billion by 2020.
We've already saved CHF500 1,000,000 in 2017. We know that this process has an impact on our employees. We understand that it creates uncertainty. In such situations, what makes the difference is how we treat people. We treat them with utmost respect and are always committed to exploring all possible options for colleagues that are affected.
These cost saving programs allow us to continue investing for the future in Switzerland and globally. Over the last 10 years, we have invested CHF3.8 billion in our home country. We have created 4,800 jobs here. This once again underlines our commitment to Switzerland, which has always given us the environment we needed to develop and succeed. Ladies and gentlemen, before concluding, I'd like to assure you that Nestle has a solid foundation and a clear path forward.
We have many strengths that keep us at the top of our industry: great brands that people love, a unique global 1,000 of employees committed in the whole world and the capacity to invest for the long term, we are committed to preparing Nestle for the future while remaining true to our raison d'etre, our purpose of enhancing quality of life and contributing to healthier future and to our values rooted in respect. Our fundamental belief is that a company that wants to ensure its long term success and create value for its shareholders, but at the same time, create value for society as a whole. And that is how we have conducted our business for over 150 years. And this is how we will continue to conduct our business in the future. I thank you, dear shareholders, for your commitment and your continued trust in our company and our people.
Thank you for listening.
My compliments, Marc. Your French is fantastic. Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, the success of a company like Neste with more than 150 years of history and success is built on solid foundations. Allow me to state a few of the convictions held by your Board of Directors that enable it to ensure the health of your company, its future and its long term success. First, your company is clearly focused on the long term.
This is a state of mind rather than a timescale. This long term focus is anchored in the belief that we should constantly anticipate, adapt and invest to prepare for the future as others have done successfully before us. It is by investing for the future that Nestle continues to grow in a sustainable and profitable manner, investing to continuously reinvent our brands so that they deserve the trust of our consumers investing in research and development to further improve our ability to innovate, investing in new technologies across all our activities from the origin of our raw materials through to the personalized relationship with our consumers investing in the development of our employees to nurture up and coming talent because they will be the ones to achieve our future successes. Innovation touches absolutely every aspect of Nestle. This ability to constantly innovate propels Nestle into the future.
With its nutrition, health and wellness strategy, your company has a roadmap that enables it to take the right decisions and execute these in a disciplined way. Implementing this strategy over the long term forms the basis of creating value for you, our shareholders. Our results in recent years and the total value created for shareholders confirms the strength of our strategy and the ability of your company to implement it. One key element of long term success is Nestle's ability to generate growth. Reducing costs is a way to improve margins.
But most importantly, it is also a way of having the means to invest in innovation and brand development. Sooner or later, companies that focus primarily on radical cost cutting driven by short term profit maximization show signs of fatigue and weakness. At Nestle, we stress the central role of innovation and growth in creating value. We will not compromise on this. 2nd, we firmly believe in creating shared value.
This is the fundamental principle for how Nestle does business. It is based on the belief that to generate long term value for you, our shareholders, we must, at the same time, create value for society at large. Creating shared value, a concept devised by Nestle and which Nestle has applied since it was founded, is now recognized globally, recognized by advocates of sustainable development, multilateral organizations and academia, Creating shared value is also now recognized and even required in the financial sector and by investors in particular. It is absolutely clear that a company like ours cannot solely focus on maximizing short term profit at the expense of its potential and long term health. Ladies and gentlemen, creating shared value does not happen in meeting rooms or in the corridors of parliament or in the courts as some would have us believe.
Creating shared value happens on the ground through the responsible commitment day after day of thousands of men and women who work at our company who identify with Nestle's purpose and share the same values. It is their commitment and their work on the ground with our partners and suppliers which enable us to make a difference. It requires conviction, enthusiasm and hard work to move things forward, to manufacture and offer healthy, delicious, high quality products, for example, to improve working conditions, to support children's education, to provide access to clean drinking water or to reduce deforestation, amongst other things. As a responsible company, Nestle will always choose to engage in dialogue and look for solutions transparently even when this is challenging. I would even go so far as to say particularly when it is challenging.
We engage with and involve the parties concerned in good faith to work with us to improve things on the ground. It is on the ground that we are part of the solution through conviction. A popular initiative that is currently being debated here in the Swiss Parliament or even a similar counter proposal, if accepted by the people, would not only jeopardize our way of creating shared value, but also discourage many other companies from adopting this approach. To find out more about how Nestle commits and assumes its responsibilities, please do read our annual report and our report on creating shared value. Finally, your company is driven by its purpose, its purpose which is to enhance the quality of life and contribute
to a healthier future.
For our consumers, for the communities in which we are present, for the environment and the natural resources on which we depend. Through this purpose, we aim to generate sustainable industry leading financial performance. Your company guided by values rooted in respect: self respect, 1st of all, respect for others respect for diversity worldwide and respect for the future. This also means respect for the environment in which Nestle operates. I would like to emphasize here that Nestle is firmly rooted in Switzerland, its country of origin.
The relationship between Nestle and Switzerland is a deep and mutually beneficial one. We invest, innovate, manufacture in Switzerland and export from Switzerland. We are also a corporate citizen engaged in community and cultural life at national, regional and local level. To remain a leading company, Nestle has to stay competitive. Nestle therefore ensures a good balance between its economic and citizen dimensions.
Ladies and gentlemen, shareholders, in an era in which change is accelerating, it is our duty and responsibility to evolve and change even faster to continue to progress and stay ahead of competitors. It is the responsibility of your Board of Directors to ensure that the Executive Board of Nestle is equipped and fully supported in the development and transformation of your company. We would therefore like to assure you that you have a Board of Directors with the most advanced and relevant skills, experiences and perspectives in our industry. On behalf of the Board of Directors and Executive Board, I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, our shareholders, for your trust in and commitment to Nestle. Thank you very much for your attention.