[Non-English content] 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-19 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 shown 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-19. 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 Parent, our President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director. Sonya Branco, Vice President, Finance, and Chief Financial Officer. As well, Mark Hounsell, General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, and Corporate Secretary, who will be acting as the secretary of this meeting. Hélène V. Gagnon, Vice President, Public Affairs and Global Communications, who will be acting as moderator with respect to any questions that you might have. Of course, our shareholders and guests are calling in from across the country and the world.
Introduced you to the nine board members standing for re-election and one new nominee. I've already introduced our CEO, Marc Parent, and the other Margaret Billson from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Honorable Michael Fortier from Montreal. Marianne Harrison from Boston, Massachusetts. Alan MacGibbon. François Olivier from Montreal. Michael Roach from Montreal. Andrew Stevens from Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom, and General David Perkins from Jackson, New Hampshire, who is standing for re-election for the first time today. Perkins served over 40 years in the U.S. Army, culminating as the commander of the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, which is responsible for designing, acquiring, building, and constantly improving the U.S. Army. Which is one of the largest and most complex organizations in the world. General Perkins is an excellent addition to the CAE board, offering invaluable strategic counsel as the company navigates. [Non-English content]
As outlined in the agenda, we have a few business items to cover today. In addition to tabling our financial statements, there are three 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 Parent, and Sonya 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. I now declare a call to order the annual meeting of the corporation shareholders. Mr. Mark Hounsell 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 a 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 appoint Mark Thompson, representative of Computershare, as scrutineer 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 two 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 will 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. Hélène 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, Hélène 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 three resolutions will be conducted by an online poll. Only registered shareholders or validly appointed proxy holders may vote on the three items of business. You will see a voting icon on your screen, and the resolution wording will be displayed. To vote, select one 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 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 14th, 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 31st, 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 Billson, the Honorable Michael Fortier, Marianne Harrison, Alan MacGibbon, the Honorable John Manley, François Olivier, Marc Parent, General David Perkins, Michael Roach, and Andrew J. Stevens. Pursuant to resolution adopted by the board of directors, the number of directors has been set at 10, and 10 eligible candidates have been nominated. Marc, 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 you voted on all 10 nominees. To cast your vote for a nominee, please select for. To withhold your vote for a nominee, please select withhold. 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. The preliminary results will be announced later today, and final results will be on the website. I pause for a moment while you complete your voting. The next item on the agenda is the appointment of auditors. I'll ask Mark Hounsell to introduce a motion to appoint PricewaterhouseCoopers as auditors of the corporation to 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 for. To withhold your vote, please select withhold. The final motion is the motion to approve 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 the compensation executive approach, and the board will consider the results of this vote when evaluating future compensation policies, procedures, and decisions. We will now vote on 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.
To [audio distortion] compensation system, please select For. 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, and I'll give you some additional time now to finalize your voting selection. If you've already voted or sent in a proxy, no 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 scrutineer's preliminary reports indicates that 76% 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 in 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 Parent, 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. CAE is committed to be carbon neutral everywhere in the world by next year.
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 intended to protect yourself, protect your families, protect our customers in this challenging period. We're gonna get through this. We're gonna 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 ventilators.
Thank you, John. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to CAE's first 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-19. Lives and jobs have been impacted, and many of us have grappled with anxiety and stress. Everyday heroes became more visible than ever. On behalf of CAE, we'd like to thank frontline workers for their life-saving 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-19 pandemic impacted us during our fourth quarter, which is normally our strongest quarter of the year. 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. This continues to be our foremost priority today. I'm exceptionally proud of how our CAE 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 customers' partner of choice. 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-19 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 frontlines. 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. It took just two months to design and manufacture this ventilator, starting literally from scratch, which is a true testament to our agility. Today, close to 500 CAE employees are working together to deliver on a contract with the government of Canada to manufacture 10,000 made-in-Canada ventilators. 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. 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. We look back on this past year with a proud sense of achievement.
The impact of COVID-19, the headwinds that it 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 three business units, we exceeded our annual outlook and continued 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 million 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.
In business aviation, we won long-term training contracts with customers worldwide, including TAG Aviation Holdings, JSX, Solairus Aviation, and FlightWorks. Taking care of our customers who were heavily impacted by the crisis is more important than ever. 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. 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 an essential service to allied defense forces, and it remains crucial during a pandemic. 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-135 aircrew training services contracts and simulator 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-21 full mission simulator, and the first sale of the CAE Medallion MR e-Series visual systems to BAE Systems for Eurofighter Typhoon fighter simulators. In healthcare, while CAE Healthcare's performance was also impacted by the pandemic in the fourth quarter, we continued to elevate our position in the market with digital solutions. We won the EMS World Innovation Award for CAE AresAR, the Microsoft HoloLens application for our emergency care manikin.
We also launched innovative solutions, including new Anesthesia SimSTAT simulation modules, multiple custom simulators for OEMs and medical device companies such as Baylis Medical and Edwards Lifesciences. CAE Healthcare was also behind the key humanitarian contributions that we made in the fight against COVID-19. 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, CAE leveraged its global supply chain to source scarce N95 masks in support of frontline workers in Quebec and Manitoba, doing its part to keep healthcare 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 first 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 CAE's business strategy. For the first time this year, we aligned our reporting to the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures. We also strengthened our diversity and inclusion initiative, strengthening our stance against discrimination and investing in women development. I'm proud to say that I personally could count on four strong women leaders out of the 10 members of my own executive team. We launched three 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+ employees, and one for women in aviation and technology. A fourth 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. Most importantly, we pulled together as one CAE to face COVID-19 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 mindset that guides us in all that we do with a worldwide perspective. We rallied to address and overcome challenges in a global situation that evolved 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 Sonya Branco, our Chief Financial Officer, to provide you with an overview of our financial results. Sonya?
Thank you, Marc. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. As Marc mentioned, CAE delivered a strong annual performance despite the COVID-19 impact during its fourth quarter of fiscal year 2020. Annual revenue was up 10% to CAD 3.6 billion, and annual net income before specific items was CAD 359.7 million, or CAD 1.34 per share, which is up 7% compared to the previous year. We had CAD 3.8 billion in annual orders and CAD 9.5 billion in backlog, which underlines CAE's positive momentum as the world leader in aviation training.
For fiscal 2021, we saw the full brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic hit us during the first quarter, with sharply lower demand and major disruptions to our global operations. Our revenue was down 33% versus last year. Segment operating loss was CAD 110.3 million, including non-operational costs of CAD 108.2 million relating to impairment charges as a result of the continued negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Excluding these costs, segment operating loss before specific items was CAD 2.1 million this quarter, compared to segment operating income before specific items of CAD 113.3 million last year. Earnings per share was negative CAD 0.11 before specific items, compared to CAD 0.24 last year. On the order front, we booked over CAD 417.1 million of order for a solid backlog of CAD 8.6 billion.
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 were 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&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 worked 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.
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 two simulators during the quarter, an average 33% utilization of our training network. At the worst point during the first quarter of FY 2021, utilization touched down in the low 20% range, with more than half of our 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 contributed to delays in execution of programs from backlog and in order intake. A range of global defense programs involving government and OEM customers experienced delays due to travel bans, border restrictions, client access restrictions, and supply chain disruptions. In healthcare, the market for simulation products are academic institutions and nursing schools that were under lockdown protocols, which negatively impacted healthcare's ability to conclude contracts and to deliver on existing orders.
Subsequent to the end of the first quarter, we announced that we will be taking additional measures to best serve the market by optimizing our global asset base and footprint, adapting our global workforce, and adjusting our business to 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 CAD 100 million 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 CAD 50 million annually from fiscal 2022.
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 I'll now turn the podium over to our CEO, Mr. Marc Parent.
Thank you, Sonya. Let's now look at the way forward. The COVID-19 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 looked like for commercial air travel before we felt the effect of the pandemic. Over 100,000 aircraft carrying 8.6 million 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. 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, which brings together 93% of aircraft companies in the world, is still forecasting commercial passenger traffic to be down by 50%-60% this year, and a recovery that could take up to three years before getting back to pre-COVID levels. Looking ahead, we're planning CAE's 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 healthcare, 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're 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 healthcare businesses, and putting a strategy in place to sell our CAE Air1 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. COVID-19 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-19, 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 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, and we did obtain them in order to provide training solutions and operational support services that are considered essential to national security. Looking ahead, while we're expecting fiscal pressures as lower oil prices, 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.
Now, we just announced this week the nomination of Dan Gelston as our new Group President for Defence & 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, our mission, and passion is to make healthcare safer, and looking forward, the secular shifts ahead appear promising.
We continue to believe that CAE Healthcare is well-positioned to capitalize on this change in the appreciation of the critical role of healthcare simulation and training to improve safety and to help save lives, and not only during a healthcare crisis, but also during normal times. With its innovative products and demonstrated agility, we expect that healthcare 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 Air1 ventilator, has made us look beyond. CAE is undoubtedly a Canadian high-tech powerhouse that excels at the nexus of three strategic areas, knowledge leadership, industrial infrastructure, and advanced technologies. The pandemic has highlighted our capabilities, and we're ready to support high-tech solutions in many sectors for Canada and internationally. We believe that certain trends will arise in greater force post-COVID-19, 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.
To better seize on those new opportunities, we strengthened 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. In summary, we're confronting a challenging period in CAE's history due to COVID-19, and we immediately took action to secure the safety and the well-being of our employees, our customers, and our 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.
One 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-19, and in the last 11 years, CAE stock is up 200% versus the Toronto Stock Exchange 70% move. Clearly, while some years will have volatility, including managing through a global pandemic, when you examine us over the long term, we've shown and will continue to demonstrate a willingness to make the right decisions to support a broader long-term vision. CAE's fundamentals remain solid, and the ability to respond to challenges with agility is at the very core of why CAE 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. As the industry thought leader, we're paving the way to transform the very fundamentals of training and operational support in civil, defense, and healthcare. CAE is and will remain a highly innovative company with over seven decades of industry firsts under its belt. COVID-19 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 pandemic as airlines look to outsource more. Defence has proven to be essential. It's an essential critical service, especially in times of crisis, and our Healthcare 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-19, like digital. We're going to invest in that R&D. 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.
[Non-English content] Thank you, Mark and Sonya, for your presentations. 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. Hélène, 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. 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. We'll just wait maybe 10 seconds, and then I'll confirm whether I have some questions.
Okay.
Okay. Mr. Chairman, I don't see any questions on our platform.
[Non-English content] Thank you, Hélène. 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.