Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is John Manley, Chair of CAE's Board of Directors. On behalf of the Board and CAE's management team, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the 2020 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. As you know, we took the initiative to move the meeting to a virtual format this year in response to the global COVID-nineteen pandemic. At the end of our last fiscal year, the world and global economy was disrupted in a way that no one had anticipated.
CAE's foremost priority, that is the safety and well-being of our employees, contractors, customers, communities and stakeholders became even more crucial. Safety is one of the reasons we are conducting this meeting virtually via live webcast. This format allows shareholders and appointed proxy holders, regardless of their geographic location, to attend, participate in real time and vote at the meeting online through a web based platform. Guests are also welcome to attend and listen to the meeting. The meeting will be conducted in both French and English.
You can listen to the webcast and view the presentation slides in either French or English. If you wish to change languages, click on the language icon showed on the top right side of your screen. Making the world a safer place is at the core of CAE's missions, and the Board applauds CAE's company wide efforts to do its part in the fight against COVID-nineteen. Through these challenging times, CAE's leadership and employees have demonstrated responsiveness, adaptability, compassion and resilience. It is an honor to chair an iconic company like CAE, which has such great purpose and social impact.
I have every confidence in the company's ability to navigate through the current challenges and to continue to prosper over the long term. I'm joining you from Ottawa, Ontario. And joining us from Montreal, Quebec are also some members of our executive management team, Marc Perrin, our President, Chief Executive Officer and Director Sonia Branco, Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer as well, Mark Counsell, General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer and Corporate Sector Secretary, who will be acting as the Secretary of this meeting, Helene Vigano, Vice President, Public Affairs and Global Communications, who will be acting as moderator with respect to any questions that you might have. And of course, our shareholders and guests are calling in from across the country and the world.
Introduce you to the 9 board members standing for reelection and one new nominee. I've already introduced our CEO, Mark Perron, and the other Margaret Bilson from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The honorable Michael Forte from Montreal. Mary Anne Harrison from Boston, Massachusetts, Alan McKibben, Francois Olivier from Montreal. Michael Roche from Montreal.
Andrew Stevens from Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom. And General David Perkins from Jackson, New Hampshire who is standing for reelection for the first time today. Perkins served over 40 years in the US Army, culminating as the commander of the United States Army Training and Doctor and Command which is responsible for designing, acquiring, building, and constantly improving the US Army, which is one of the largest and most complex organizations in the world. Daryl Perkins is an excellent addition to the CAE board, offering invaluable strategic counsel as the company navigates
As outlined in the agenda, we have a few business items to cover today. In addition to tabling our financial statements, there are 3 motions for consideration. Once all three motions have been voted on, we will announce our preliminary voting results. Immediately following the formal agenda, the President's report will be presented by Marc Perron and Sonia Branco, our Chief Financial Officer, will provide a financial update. An opportunity will then be provided at the end of their presentation for shareholders to raise general questions.
Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's remarks, including answers to questions, contain forward looking statements. These forward looking statements represent our expectations as of today, August 12, 2020, and accordingly are subject to change. Such forward looking statements are based on certain assumptions that may not materialize and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from these statements, and listeners are cautioned not to place undue reliance on those forward looking statements. I would now like to proceed with the formal portion of today's meeting.
So I now declare a call to order the annual meeting of the corporation's shareholders. Mr. Mark Hansel will act as secretary of the meeting. Our Corporate Secretary has received a certificate of our transfer agent, Computershare Trust Company of Canada indicating that proper notice of the meeting has been given in accordance with the Canada Business Corporations Act and the bylaws of the corporation. I direct that a copy of the notice with proof of service be kept by the secretary with the records of this meeting.
With the consent of the meeting, I point Mark Thompson, representative of Computershare, escrow tenure for this meeting. Let us now turn to the meeting procedures. CAE's bylaws provide that a quorum of shareholders is present at a meeting of shareholders if 2 or more persons holding not less than 25% of the shares entitled to vote at the meeting are present or represented by proxy. The scrutineer has advised that we have the necessary quorum present.
This meeting is regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business. I would now ask the corporate secretary to explain the basic features of our virtual meeting platform and how you can vote at our meeting. Mark?
Thank you, Mr. Chair. When you are logged in as a shareholder or as a guest, you can see the info screen display. Here you can read information about CAE and you can ask questions. To see the slide presentation while you are listening to our webcast simply click the broadcast icon or the arrow.
When you wish to ask a question, please select the messaging icon and type your question in the message box at the bottom of the screen. Click the Send button and you should receive a confirmation that your message has been received. You may ask your questions in French or in English. Note that only registered shareholders or validly appointed proxy holders are permitted to ask questions. Ms.
Helene Gagnon will be monitoring all questions being submitted and will relay them to the chair or the relevant executive team member. If there are many similar questions on the same topic, Helene may pick one question or summarize the nature of the questions. I'd like to remind you that questions should be of interest to all shareholders and not of a personal nature. If your question is related to a personal matter, a CAE representative will contact you after the meeting.
Voting on the 3 resolutions will be conducted by an online poll. Only registered shareholders or validly appointed proxy holders may vote on the 3 items of business. You will see a voting icon on your screen and the resolution wording will be displayed. To vote, select 1 of the voting options. Your response will be highlighted.
A confirmation message will appear to show that your vote has been received. To change your vote, simply select the other option. In order for your vote to be properly recorded, it is important that you remain connected to the Internet at all times. If you are not connected, your vote will not be recorded. The polls are now open on all three items of business.
This will give you ample time to vote while we introduce each resolution. The chair will remind you of your choice for each item. After the last item of business, the chair will close the poll and provide a reminder to input your vote if you had not have not already done so. You should know that while each of the ballots cast today will be accounted for in the final results, proxies lodged with our registrar and transfer agent before this meeting allow the chair as proxy holder to determine the outcome of each of the motions that will go to a vote today. When each item of business is completed and the ballots have been completed as a result of the proxies received in advance of the meeting, the chair intends to declare the motion carried or defeated even though all of the votes may not have been counted or a final report may not yet be available.
In order to facilitate the flow of the meeting, since the meeting is conducted in a virtual format only this year, the chair has asked me as a registered shareholder to move all motions. The chair will call on me at the appropriate time. Mr. Chairman? Thank you, Mark.
I hereby table the minutes of the Annual Meeting of Shareholders held on August 14, 2019, which will be inserted in the minute book of the corporation. Copies of the minutes will be made available upon request. The next matter is to place before the meeting the financial statements and an auditor's report thereon for the year ended March 31, 2020, copies of which were made available to shareholders in May. I will entertain questions with respect to the financial statements of the corporation in the general question period. We will now turn to the first item of business for which shareholders are asked to vote, The Election of Directors.
The management proxy circular contains a list and the biographical profile of the 10 nominees recommended for election as Director. The nominees to be elected as Directors are Margaret Bilson, the Honorable Michael Fortier, Marianne Harrison, Alan McGibbon, the Honorable John Manley, Francois Olivier, Marc Baron, General David Perkins, Michael Roche and Andrew J. Stephens. Pursuant to resolution adopted by the Board of Directors, the number of directors has been set at 10.10 eligible candidates have been nominated. Mark, may I ask you to move to elect each of the 10 nominees as Directors?
I move the motion.
You will see the names of all 10 nominees. Please scroll down to make sure your vote you voted on all 10 nominees. To cast your vote for a nominee, please select 4. And to withhold your vote for a nominee, please select withhold. If you do know, if you do not press either for or withhold as applicable when voting is open, your vote will not be recorded and you will be regarded as having abstained from voting.
Preliminary results will be announced later today and final results website. And pause for a moment while you complete your voting. The next item on the agenda is the appointment of auditors. I'll ask Mark counsel to introduce a motion to appoint PricewaterhouseCoopers as auditors of the corporate. Hold office until the close of the next annual meeting of shareholders and for authorization for the directors to fix their
I so move.
For the appointment of the auditors to cast your vote in, please select 4. And to withhold your vote, please select withhold. The final motion is the motion to approve an adviser on an advisory basis, our approach to management compensation. CAE's management compensation is fully disclosed in the proxy circular made available to all shareholders in advance of this AGM. The CAE Board of Directors believes that the company's compensation system is appropriate and that it is directly linked to personal and corporate performance.
We value your direct feedback on competitive approach, and the board will consider the results of this vote when evaluating future compensation policies, procedures, and decisions. We will now vote on the fault. Resolve that the shareholders accept the approach to executive compensation disclosed in the management proxy circular. I understand just to propose a motion.
I so move.
Station, system, please select 4 And to to vote against this resolution, please select against. Continue with the voting. If you're not already done so, please vote on all three items of business. I'll give you some additional time now to finalize your voting selection. If you've already voted or sent in a prop, need for you to do anything unless you would like to change your vote.
I now declare the polls closed on all three items of business. Thank you very much. The corporate secretary will provide the preliminary report of voting results.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The scrutineers preliminary reports indicates that 76 percent of the eligible shares have been voted at this meeting. The results with respect to the election of directors are A substantial majority of the votes cast at the meeting were voted in favor of the 10 nominees named in the management proxy circular, with each nominee receiving an excess of 98% in favor. The result with respect to the appointment of auditors is 95% voted in favor of PricewaterhouseCoopers. The result with respect to the advisory vote on the approach to the executive compensation is 95% voted in favor of the resolution. Final detailed results will be publicly available on sedar.com in the coming days.
Mr. Chairman? Thank you, Mark. The next item on the agenda is the President's address to shareholders. Before I turn the floor over to our CEO, Mr.
Marc Perron, let's watch a short video produced to give you a glimpse of the past year before the pandemic, but also how it changed CAE and how the team maintained a one CAE spirit through it all. CIA is
And if we work together to fight racial disparity and racism, we'll bring about significant change. Again, this is unprecedented. The world has never seen this. Follow procedures and tend to protect yourself, protect your families, protect our customers in this challenging period. We're going to get through this.
We're going to get through this and we'll be stronger. Working with Thornhill Medical, CAE, ventilators for Canadians to produce up to 30,000 made in Canada ventilate.
Thank you, John. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to CAE's 1st virtual Annual General Meeting. We appreciate everyone joining us and adapting to this new format. None of us would have ever imagined how much our world has changed since COVID-nineteen. Lives and jobs have been impacted, and many of us have grappled with anxiety and stress.
Everyday heroes became more visible than ever. And on behalf of CAE, we'd like to thank frontline workers for their lifesaving work. To all of you with us today, we sincerely hope to find you in good health with a renewed sense of resilience and a deep sense of community. As you saw in the video, we demonstrated once again what we can do as one CAE. As one team, we answered adversity with innovation, diversity, human values, agility and resilience.
We were leading CAE towards what would have been yet another record year when the COVID-nineteen pandemic impacted us during our Q4, which is normally our strongest quarter of the year. But true to our mission of safety, our first response was to take decisive action in order to protect the health and safety of our employees and customers. And this continues to be our foremost priority today. I'm exceptionally proud of how our CA employees responded worldwide. Throughout the past few months of this pandemic, amid lockdowns, closed borders and many other complex challenges, our employees have taken initiative and ownership, finding ways to ensure the continuity of our customers' most critical operations and ensure we continue to earn the privilege of being our customer's partner of choice.
And when they did this, while facing their own difficult situations at home, we could not stand idly by while fellow citizens of the world infected by COVID-nineteen-nineteen struggled even to breathe. While hospitals became overwhelmed, confronted by increased needs for critical medical safety equipment, especially ventilators and personal protective equipment. We felt that it was our responsibility to find ways to apply our strengths of innovation and speed in a meaningful way to support hospitals and frontline healthcare workers fighting to save lives on the front lines. And they were fighting to save the lives of our fellow citizens. As an example of CAE's culture of innovation and our ability to adapt quickly in a crisis, our employees came together to use their engineering and scientific skills to design a critical care ventilator.
It started with 12 engineers developing a prototype and it took just 2 months to design and manufacture this ventilator starting literally from scratch, which is a true testament to our agility. And today, close to 500 CA employees are working together to deliver on a contract with the Government of Canada to manufacture 10,000 made in Canada ventilators. And I'm extremely proud of our team for rising to this humanitarian challenge and strengthening Canada's self sufficiency in the medical field during these exceptional times. Such an accomplishment speaks volumes about who we are at CAE. So although we had a momentum for an even greater year with even better results, the pandemic and the new business complexities that followed confirmed what we are capable of.
And we look back on this past year with a proud sense of achievement.
The impact of COVID-nineteen, the headwinds that had on what is typically the best quarter of our year, we achieved strong performance overall in fiscal 2020. Let's have a look at what we accomplished in our different segments over the past year. In Civil Aviation, which is the largest of our 3 business units, we exceeded our annual outlook and continue to make a valuable contribution in shaping the future of training by delivering innovative and full service cadet to captain training solutions. We signed additional contracts with airlines outsourcing their training to CAE, sold 49 full flight simulators and delivered once again more than 1,000,000 hours of training this year, underscoring CAE's position as the largest civil aviation training company in the world. Among the contracts we signed were long term training agreements with airlines, including JetSmart Airlines and Sunwing Airlines.
And in Business Aviation, we won long term training contracts with customers worldwide, including TAG Aviation Holdings, JetSuite, Solaris Aviation and FlightWorks. Taking care of our customers who were heavily impacted by the crisis is more important than ever, and we supported them in different ways while ensuring their safety and that of our employees and their families by working on virtual training solutions. Our performance would have been even better, but as the pandemic set in, CAE saw a significant decrease in our civil training services in terms of demand following a reduction of airline and business aircraft operations globally and the disruption of the global air transportation environment. Several of our civil aviation training centers closed temporarily due to travel restrictions and local self isolation measures worldwide. In defense and security, our training is an essential service.
It's essential service to Allied Defense Forces and it remains crucial during a pandemic. But this part of our business was also affected by the pandemic in the last quarter of the year. A range of programs and contract awards with defense and original equipment manufacturer customers encountered delays in terms of awards with defense and OEM customers due to travel bans, client access restrictions and supply chain disruptions. In the Middle East, the combined effects of the pandemic and lower oil prices resulted in work on certain programs to be halted and new contract awards to be materially delayed. Despite those headwinds, key wins included contracts to provide KC-one hundred and thirty five Air Crew Training Services contracts and similar upgrades for the United States Air Force, multiple contracts with Lockheed Martin Corporation for the C-130J simulators and upgrades, a contract to provide the German Navy with a comprehensive training solution for the NH90 Sea Lion helicopter and a contract to provide the French Air Force with another Pilatus PC-twenty one full mission simulator and the first sale of the Sea Medallion MRE Series Visual Systems to BA systems for Eurofighter Typhoon Fighter simulators.
In Healthcare, while CA Health Care's performance was also impacted by the pandemic in the Q4, we continue to elevate our position in the market with digital solutions. We won the EMS World Innovation contract for CA ARRIS AR, the Microsoft HoloLens application for our emergency care mannequin. We also launched innovative solutions, including new anesthesia Simstat simulation modules, multiple custom simulators for OEMs and medical device companies such as Bayless Medical and Edwards Life Sciences. CA Healthcare was also behind the key humanitarian contributions that we made in the fight against COVID-nineteen. Early in the pandemic, it launched simulation based training solutions to prepare healthcare workers to fight the pandemic and train personnel in the safe practice of ventilation and intubation, which is absolutely key to saving lives.
Additionally, CA leverages global supply chain to source scarce N95 masks in support of frontline workers in Quebec and Manitoba doing its part to keep health care workers safe. The value that CAE creates goes well beyond financial results. In November, we announced our commitment for CAE to become carbon neutral and next month we will become the 1st Canadian aerospace company to achieve such an important milestone. We also created a climate change committee to oversee the integration of climate related issues into CA's business strategy. For the first time this year, we aligned our reporting to the task force on climate related financial disclosure.
We also strengthened our diversity inclusion initiative, strengthening our stance against discrimination and investing in women development. And I'm proud to say that I personally could count on 4 strong women leaders out of the 10 members of my own executive team. We launched 3 employee resource groups selected by our employees to foster a sense of belonging and inclusivity, one for parents of children with special needs, one for LGBTQ plus employees and one for women in aviation and technology. A 4th group based on race and ethnic background will be open for members in the coming weeks. I personally signed the BlackNorth pledge along with 200 Canadian CEOs to fight anti Black systemic racism in Corporate Canada.
And most importantly, we pulled together as 1 CE to face COVID-nineteen and put safety first as always. As a worldwide company with sites and activities in more than 35 countries, we approach the situation with the same mind set that guides us in all that we do with a worldwide perspective. We rally to address and overcome challenges
in
a global situation that involve literally on a daily basis. I really strongly invite you to read our interactive online annual activity and corporate social responsibility report to find out more about everything that was done by your great company. Now I'll ask Sonia Branco, our Chief Financial Officer, to provide you with an overview of our financial results. Sonia?
Thank you, Mark. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. As Mark mentioned, CAE delivered a strong annual performance despite the COVID-nineteen impact during its Q4 of fiscal year 2020. Annual revenue was up 10% to $3,600,000,000 and annual net income before specific items was $359,700,000 or $1.34 per share, which is up 7% compared to the previous year. We had $3,800,000,000 in annual orders and $9,500,000,000 in backlog, which underlines CA's positive momentum as the world leader in aviation training.
For fiscal 2021, we saw the full brunt of the COVID-nineteen pandemic hit us during the Q1 with sharply lower demand and major disruptions to our global operations. Our revenue was down 33% versus last year. Segment operating loss was $110,300,000 including non operational costs of $108,200,000 relating to impairment charges as a result of the continued negative impacts of the COVID-nineteen pandemic. Excluding these costs, segment operating loss before specific items was $2,100,000 this quarter compared to a segment operating income before specific items of $113,300,000 last year. Earnings per share was negative $0.11 before specific items compared to $0.24 last year.
On the order front, we booked over $417,100,000 of order for a solid backlog of $8,600,000,000 As the pandemic began to spread, the impact was abrupt and acute. In response, we acted quickly to ensure the health and safety of our employees and customers. We asked all of our employees who are not performing essential services to work from home. As the number of commercial flights started to decline, we proactively took decisive yet flexible actions to protect our operations, safeguard our financial position and mitigate the impact on our employees. We implemented extensive cost containment measures, including temporary layoffs, salary freezes, reduced work weeks and temporary salary reductions, significantly reduced capital expenditures and certain R and D investments, and temporarily suspended our common share dividend and share repurchase plan.
We also secured additional lines of credit for greater liquidity. At the same time, we work to access government emergency relief measures and wage subsidy programs in countries where we operate to mitigate the impact on our employees. Our employees have always been at the core of CAE's success. And while we regretted the hardship these temporary measures had on those affected, especially during these difficult times, they allowed us to significantly mitigate the impact of the pandemic and maintain a solid financial base during the worst time of our industry's history. And as a result of these decisive actions, we were able to mitigate our loss and secure a cash performance in the quarter that was better than the quarter of last year.
In civil, mandatory temporary facility closures and travel restrictions presented our customers and us with considerable challenges. We were also required to temporarily suspend substantially all manufacturing in our main facility. Nevertheless, we still delivered 2 simulators during the quarter and averaged 33% utilization of our training network. At the worst point during the Q1 of FY 'twenty one, utilization touched down in the low 20% range with more than half of global training network either closed or on reduced operations. Since then, we have seen training center utilization increase to upwards of 40% as our facilities have reopened and flight crews have resumed some of their critical training activity.
In defense, the pandemic contribute to delays in execution of programs from backlog and in order intake. A range of global defence programs involving government and OEM customers experienced delays due to travel bans, border restrictions, client access restrictions and supply chain disruptions. And in healthcare, the market for simulation products are academic institutions and nursing schools that were under lockdown protocols, which negatively impacted Health Care's ability to conclude contracts and to deliver on existing orders.
Subsequent to the end of the Q1, we announced that we will be taking additional measures to serve to best serve the market by optimizing our global app base and footprint, adapting our global workforce and adjusting our businesses correspond with the expected lower level of demand for certain of our products and services. These measures also include the introduction and acceleration of new digitally enhanced processes. As a result of these measures, CAE expects to record restructuring expenses of approximately $100,000,000 over the next 12 months, consisting mainly of real estate costs, asset relocations and other direct costs related to the optimization of our footprint and employee termination benefits. Taken together, these measures are expected to enable CAE to emerge from the current period from a position of strength and the company expects to fully realize cost reductions of approximately $50,000,000 annually from fiscal 'twenty 2. In the short term, CAE expects to generate negative free cash flow in the first half of the fiscal year, resulting from the acute pandemic impacts on demand and operations and a seasonally higher level of investment in non cash working capital accounts.
We expect positive free cash flow in the second half of the fiscal year. The extended term outlook for the company remains compelling, with potential for compound growth and superior returns over the long term. Led with a culture of innovation, empowerment, excellence and integrity, CAE expects to emerge even stronger as a result of its optimization initiatives and acceleration of enhanced processes. Thank you very much for your attention. And then I'll turn the podium over to our CEO, Mr.
Marc Paron. Thank you, Sonia. Let's now look at the way forward. The COVID-nineteen pandemic disrupted the world with exceptional speed and magnitude. Global air transportation and air passenger travel were especially hard hit.
Let's have a look at this animation. This is what a typical day look like for commercial air travel before we felt the effect of the pandemic. Over 100,000 aircraft carrying 8,600,000 passengers every single day. This is our market. Look at it.
A few days later, at the height of the pandemic, less than a quarter of the aircraft are flying. And in some countries like Canada, there were hardly any flights at all. You remember these images from March, deserted, eerie airports, thousands of planes grounded? Although things are not as dreary now, IATA is still forecasting, which brings together 93% of aircraft companies in the world, is still forecasting commercial passenger traffic to be down by 50% to 60% this year and a recovery that could take up to 3 years before getting back to pre COVID levels. And looking ahead, we're planning to see its future from position of resilience and strength because we have a global leading market position.
We have recurring revenue streams, attractive end markets in civil, defense and health care as well as a solid financial position. It may take some time before things get back to normal or there may be a new normal, But we are preparing for it. We have identified opportunities for cost savings. We have launched programs focused on improving efficiency. And we have adjusted our workforce to increase CAE's resiliency and remain competitive.
We are redoubling our efforts to seek out more business in all areas, offering airlines to outsource their training activities to CAE, focusing on growing our defense and health care businesses and putting a strategy in place to sell our CAE Air 1 ventilators around the world wherever there's a need. We will also invest more in areas that will position us for the future, such as digital and data solutions. We are also embarking on a transformation to drive efficiency. We know the current downturn is temporary, but COVID-nineteen will have fundamentally changed the world and the way we all work and live. This is an opportunity for us to rethink the way that we operate, transform our processes, our policies and our approaches, and to create structural and recurrent savings, which will make us even more competitive when we return to normal times.
As our core end market recovers, our customers' challenges could translate into new opportunities. For example, in Civil Aviation, Global Airlines cite the return to service for pilots as one of their top concerns. Being close to our customers positions us well to proactively address this need. Pilots were deeply impacted by COVID-nineteen. And to support them, we launched Airside, a digital platform which brings the pilot community together and provides them with career and training resources to prepare them to fly again.
We also created a new online courses to train pilots and maintenance technicians remotely. In defense, we're maintaining our leading position as a training and mission support partner. Thanks to our leading edge capabilities in translating the physical world into a synthetic world where we are world leaders. We're also expanding beyond training to become a leader in digital immersion. Our expertise in the integration of live, virtual and constructive training is providing attractive inroads into that market.
We have a large backlog of contracts with government customers to provide and we did obtain them in order to provide training solutions and operational support services that are considered essential to national security. And looking ahead, while we're expecting fiscal pressures as lower oil prices are affecting, for example, in the Middle East are affecting some of our customers, the long term outlook for defense continues nevertheless to be supported by a large addressable market for our company. And we just announced this week the nomination of Dan Gelston as our new Group President for Defense and Security. Dan is a proven leader, well known and with more than 20 years of experience in the U. S.
Military, the intelligence community and the global defense industry. And I'm confident that his industry experience and his proven leadership will propel our defense business to reach its full potential. In healthcare, our purpose, mission and passion is to make health care safer. And looking forward, the secular shifts ahead appear promising. We continue to believe that CAE Health Care is well positioned to capitalize on this change and the appreciation of the critical role of health care simulation and training to improve safety and to help save lives.
And not only during a health care crisis, but also during normal times. With its innovative products and demonstrated agility, we expect that health care will become a more material part of the company over the long term.
Require new thinking. This crisis and our response as shown by the CAE Air 1 ventilator has made us look beyond. CAE is undoubtedly a Canadian high-tech powerhouse that excels at the nexus of 3 strategic areas: knowledge leadership, industrial infrastructure and Advanced Technologies. And the pandemic has highlighted our capabilities, and we're ready to support high-tech solutions in many sectors for Canada and internationally. And we believe that certain trends will arise in greater force post COVID-nineteen such as e learning, remote work, the imperative on safety and the digital transformation and virtualization of the physical world.
Our core capabilities at CAE align very well with these future needs and we'll make use of the current period to further reinforce our technological expertise. And to better seize on those new opportunities, we strengthen our executive team by welcoming Heidi Wood to my leadership team as Executive Vice President, Business Development and Growth Initiatives. Heidi is playing a key role in maximizing opportunities that provide cross business unit growth, enable business units to better share ideas and knowledge, capture exciting opportunities faster and leverage them into new exciting markets. So in summary, we're confronting a challenging period in Sea's history due to COVID-nineteen and we immediately took action to secure the safety and the well-being of our employees, their customers and their families and to safeguard the best interests of our company and shareholders. We drove ourselves to innovate rapidly in response to an urgent need for ventilators, safety masks and better medical training.
We wasted no time and we're proud, very proud of our own agility in the process. But 1 year doesn't convey the whole story. And Perspectives really gets richer when you look farther out. We've been building revenue, earnings per share and backlog steadily year upon year with an expectation to deliver consistency, reliability and excellence. CAE has consistently outperformed Toronto Stock Exchange even with COVID-nineteen.
And in the last 11 years, CAE stock is up 200% versus the Toronto Stock Exchange 70% move. So clearly, while some years we'll have volatility, including managing through a global pandemic, when you examine us over the long term, we've shown and we'll continue to demonstrate a willingness to make the right decisions to support a broader long term vision. CA's fundamentals remain solid and the ability to respond with to challenges with agility is at the very core of why CA excels as a global market leader and an innovator. We're going to forge ahead in applying leading edge technology to significantly improve our customers' experience. And as the industry thought leader, we're paving the way to transform the very fundamentals of training and operational support in civil defense and health care.
CA is and will remain a highly innovative company with over 7 decades of industry firts under its belt. COVID-nineteen has temporarily disrupted our markets, but it certainly hasn't derailed our growth story. The fundamental drivers for Civil Aviation are intact. People are going to continue to fly. We're going to seize the opportunity to grow our business throughout this pandemics as airlines look to outsource more.
Defense has proven to be essential. Critical service it's an essential critical service, especially in times of crisis. And our health care business is more relevant than ever. We're going to continue to invest in CAE, strategically positioning ourselves and making sure that not only our core training business remains intact, but also seeking out new opportunities and growth in adjacent areas and continue to invest in those technologies that will be propelling the world post COVID-nineteen, like digital. We're going to invest in that R and D.
And I'm absolutely confident that we will weather the storm and come out of this crisis better and stronger. I commend CAE employees for their dedication, their excellence during this pandemic and I thank them for their contributions. I'm proud to lead this great company, an industry leader playing a key role in making the world a safer place. I'd also like to thank members of our Board for their advice and their support and of course to you, our shareholders, for your trust in this great company. Thank you.
Thank you, Mark and Sonia for your presentations. Now at this time, I invite shareholders of record and proxy holders to submit your questions online, if not done already. As noted earlier, you can select the messaging icon on the bottom of your screen and type your question or comment in the chat box at the bottom left of your screen. Helene, do we have any questions from shareholders?
Cannot ask questions. Only shareholders can type their question in the text box at the bottom left of the screen, and you need to press send to ask your question. So I don't see any questions right now on the platform, but maybe we give a few seconds to our shareholders to type in a question. So we'll just wait maybe 10 seconds, and then I'll confirm whether I have some questions. Okay.
Mr. Chairman, I don't see any questions on our platform.
Okay. Merci, Helene.
Thank you, Helene. With the consent of the meeting, I now declare the meeting terminated. This officially concludes the meeting. On behalf of CAE, thank you all for participating in our first virtual meeting and for your ongoing commitment to CAE. Until we meet again, we wish good health to you, your families and your communities.
This meeting is now terminated. Thank you.