Bonjour et bienvenue à la Journée des Investisseurs de Gildan. [/French] Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Gildan's 2022 Investor Day. I am Elisabeth Hamaoui, Director of Investor Communications. Unfortunately, Sophie Argiriou, our Vice President of IR could not be present in person with us today as we follow COVID safety protocols. [French] Veuillez noter que la conférence se tiendra en anglais seulement, mais nous vous invitons à communiquer avec nous pour toute question. [/French] On to our agenda.
This morning, we are all very excited for the opportunity to share with you Gildan's sustainable growth strategy. We have members of our senior team with us today here in studio and some joining us remotely. In our first segment, Glenn Chamandy, our CEO, will present an overview of the strategy. Chuck Ward, President of Sales, Marketing, and Distribution will discuss market opportunities and strategic initiatives to drive our next phase of growth.
Israel Salinas, heading Supply Chain and Product Development, will present our global manufacturing system and discuss our capacity expansion plans. After a short break, we will kick off our second segment on Gildan's next generation ESG strategy and future targets with Peter Iliopoulos, our Senior Vice-President of Taxation, Sustainability, and Governmental Affairs, and Claudia Sandoval, Vice-President, Corporate Citizenship. Next, on human capital management, you will be hearing from our Executive Vice-President, Chief HRO, and Legal Affairs, Arun Bajaj. Rhodri Harries, our CFO, will wrap up the segment with a financial review. We will then take a short break before beginning the Q&A session. We encourage you to send your questions throughout the formal presentations using the chat function of the webcast, and we will also be taking live questions from our analyst group.
Please note the presentations made here today are available on our corporate website. I will now draw your attention to the current slide and advise everyone that certain of the comments you will hear today are forward-looking statements that involve assumptions, risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. We also refer to the risks and uncertainties contained in the company's MD&A for the year ended January 2, 2022, which is available on SEDAR, EDGAR, and Gildan's corporate website. Now it gives me great pleasure to give the floor to Glenn Chamandy, Gildan's President and CEO. Over to you, Glenn.
Thank you, Elisabeth. Thank you for joining us this morning. Before I start, I would like to thank the Gildan team that spent hours putting together this conference, including Sophie, that could not attend. We have members of our senior management team with us today, some in the studio and others remotely in Barbados and Honduras. We're very excited to share with you today our Gildan sustainable growth strategy. Before we do, let's take a look and take a step back to what our accomplishments were in 2021. Our strong performance in 2021 is truly a testament of our back to basic strategy. We had record sales above pre-pandemic levels and ahead of the full market recovery of demand. Our operating margins of 20% were above our 18% target.
We had record sales and operating margins, which translated into record earnings of $2.72 a share. We had free cash flow $594 million, driven by earnings growth and improvement in working capital. 2021 was a great year, but it highlights the true potential of our earnings power in the future as we implement our GSG strategy. Looking back at our historical sales growth, we divide it into four phases. Phase I was high organic sales in the North American imprints market from 1999 to 2009, where we had a large market share. We had a large market share and needed growth. Phase II, we expanded in international markets. We made our entry into retail through acquisitions, and we created a separate retail operating division. Phase III , we grew by acquisition.
We acquired brands, products, distribution assets, and we added complexity. In 2017, the company's SG&A was 13.7%. In our fourth phase, in 2018, we launched back to basics. We consolidated our sales organization, we rationalize our product lines, and we optimize our supply chain. In 2021, our SG&A reduced to 10.7% of sales, down 300 basis points, or roughly $100 million of cost-saving initiatives. The first phase of our back-to-basic strategy was to remove complexity and focus growth to wholesale customers on a B2B basis. We rationalized our product portfolio, and we reduced our SKU count by 60%. We consolidated our manufacturing assets, and we exited Mexico and repurposed that equipment into Central America and lowered our cost structure.
We exited ship-to-the-piece distribution that services direct to consumers, and we rightsized our SG&A and infrastructure and organizational effectiveness. Our GSG strategy has three pillars: add capacity growth, innovation, and ESG. The capacity to support our 7%-10% CAGR is well on its way of being ramped up. We will support sales growth with product and manufacturing innovation and ESG initiatives, which Israel, Peter, and Claudia will do an in-depth review. Executing on these three pillars will deliver strong revenue growth of 7%-10% CAGR, and with operating margins in the 18%-20% range, and a RONA which will be 20% or better. This slide sums up our back-to-basic strategy. We increased our operating margins 500 basis points from 2017, with operating margins of 20% well above our 18% target.
Looking forward, we set operating margins between 18%-20%, allowing us the flexibility to leverage our sales growth. Our RONA improved 800 basis points. The improvement in RONA was driven by our earnings growth and our working capital management. Our working capital reduced from 35% of sales down to 27.5% of sales. We see four key factors that will drive performance in our business, everyday low price but while achieving high rates of return, strong availability but maintaining low levels of working capital, superior product innovation while maintaining our manufacturing advantage, and leading in ESG at the same time as lowering our cost structure. Our go-to-market strategy focuses on B2B customers with limited product complexity, large sales volume, and with quick replenishment requirements. The majority of all of our activewear products get embellished.
Our customers fall into two categories. Distributors that buy bulk product from us and redistribute it to small end users, and our national accounts, which are large decorators or mass market retailers. Our capital allocation priority is to drive organic sales growth and return capital to shareholders. Our targeted CapEx, which was previously 5%, has moved up to 6%-8%. The capital will be supporting the completion of our Bangladesh phase one, further vertical integration, and support our sales capacity growth past 2024. We will continue to maintain our dividend and increase it annually, and we intend to continue our share buyback program, and we announced recently that our program has been increased from 5% to 10%, but always maintaining our capital structure framework of one to two times leverage. We're currently not focused on M&A to drive growth.
We will consider M&A opportunities that would support and enhance our manufacturing capabilities. As one of the leading world's largest vertically integrated manufacturing, large scale, low cost, and responsible manufacturing companies with a seasoned management team, a strong capital structure to support growth, we are in a clear path for long-term value creation. The fundamentals in the market have changed over the last two years. There's been a big shift to casualization. There's been huge amounts of supply chain disruption, and nearshoring and political instability is changing the world the way we see it. These factors, combined with our investment in capital expansion, will deliver strong shareholder returns. With sales growth of 7%-10% CAGR, adjusted operating margins in the range of 18%-20%, and a return on net assets of 20% or better. This concludes my part of the presentation.
It was a brief overview of our GSG strategy. Our management team will cover our strategy in depth with lots of details.
Thank you, Glenn, and good morning, everyone. My name is Chuck Ward, and I lead Gildan's sales, marketing, and distribution organization, or as we call it, our S&D operations. I've been with the company now for 11 years after I joined the company through the acquisition by Gildan. I've spoken with many of you in the past while I was serving in my previous role, where I headed the development, the building, and the operations of our yarn manufacturing before I moved into S&D in late 2020.
I'm really excited about Gildan's future, and what I wanna do today is to give you a good overview of the opportunities that we're seeing for our business and what we're gonna do under the Gildan sustainable growth strategy from an S&D perspective that's gonna enable us to capitalize on these opportunities and drive our strong top-line performance as we move forward. First, let's start with the opportunities. The global apparel market's a sizable market. We estimate it at about $480 billion in total, and it's split 75% activewear and 25% of it is hosiery and underwear. What we've identified as the space we're gonna play in, at least initially, it's about 5% of the total or about $22 billion is what our addressable market is in 2022.
The market's grown about $2 billion from what we assessed back in 2019 at our last investor day. It went from $20 billion to $22 billion, and this growth has really been in the activewear category. This $22 billion represents the areas that we're very focused on in the near term and where we think we're strong positioned and really where our core competencies lie. As we break down our addressable market by product and geography, you're gonna see over on the left-hand side of the screen that the addressable market for activewear has grown to represent about 75% or $16 billion of the $22 billion market opportunity. While about $6 billion or 25% of that represents the hosiery and underwear addressable opportunity, which has remained fairly stable.
Looking at it by geography, we estimate about 80% or $17 billion of the addressable opportunity is in North America and leaving about $5 billion of the addressable market in the international markets. Overall, if you take our sales base at the end of 2021, which was just over $2.9 billion, our market share is about 14% of what we call our addressable market opportunity. We definitely see lots of runway so we can drive top-line growth as we pursue further market share penetration. On top of a sizable addressable market to go after, if you look at certain market dynamics that have been playing out over the last while, many of which have been amplified as a result of the pandemic, we see a number of shifts in the market that are working in our favor.
First, I'm talking about casualization trend. It's been driven by people that are turning to a healthier lifestyle or active living. Also, the significant rise in the number of people that work from home as a result of restrictions from COVID, which is likely to continue as many employers are adopting hybrid models for their employment. There's also been a recent explosion of new players that are contributing to the market expansion, and we've seen this creator economy. Creators of all kinds, they have the ability to decorate product much faster with the growth of direct-to-garment printing and Cricut machines. Creators no longer have to buy large quantities, go through a lot of red tape to get the business set up or so forth. They're turning to online distributors like Jiffy Shirts or others for competitive pricing and quick delivery.
The new creators expanded beyond the traditional screen printer or shop. Youth that have some cool story to tell or maybe somebody that was creating for a hobby but then pivoted to full-time creator or decorator during the pandemic, they're always looking for ways to get multiple ideas out at a really rapid pace. They're selling their new creations via Facebook Marketplace or Instagram Shop or Amazon or personal pages or many more. We also see private brands continue to gain traction as retailers push forward with their own private brands to drive differentiation and also drive margin performance. With all the supply chain disruption that we've seen in the last year or so, retailers and brands, they're favoring nearshore suppliers and are increasingly looking to at least rebalance their sourcing supplier base to make their supply chain more resilient. They wanna improve cycle times.
They wanna carry less inventory. They wanna source closer to the markets they service, and ultimately, they're just trying to mitigate their supply chain risk. I'd also highlight that we sell blanks that ultimately get embellished. Our customers want these blanks closer to where they're gonna be decorated, screen printed or embellished. Last, but certainly not least, ESG factors are increasingly becoming a key consideration in the purchase decisions of our customers, of consumers, and really all stakeholders for that matter. We're well positioned to gain from these trends, 'cause as a low-cost, vertically integrated supplier, we control all aspects of our manufacturing from the moment we take the raw material all the way to the final product we produce and distribute to our customers.
We have a large manufacturing system in the Western Hemisphere and has a strong track record for progressive employment practices, for strong social and environmental practices on which we continue to build, and we're close to the market. We offer quick replenishment cycles, approximately four times faster than Asian imports, and we're producing garments that are gaining demand. Overall, I'll tell you, we're well positioned to capitalize on these trends. Now let me get a little more granular. I'll break out the addressable market in North America for activewear, which is what we really see as our key top line driver. The North American addressable market's at $11 billion. Our research points to a three-year CAGR that's in the 5%-7% range, and this is talking about overall dollars.
60% of that market is composed of T-shirts, which essentially breaks out 50/50 in terms of open-end product and on the other half being the higher end, softer ring-spun shirts. The open-end T-shirt category has typically grown in the low single digit range, but now we're seeing that edge up just a bit as pricing goes up. We expect it to grow in the low- to mid-single-digit range. Ring-spun shirts are growing a little bit faster. They're growing in the mid-single digit range.
When you look at the volume growth, I'd still like to highlight, open-end continues to remain a big piece of the market because it accounts for 2/3 of the T-shirt volume as the price points are lower than the ring-spun tees, but the open-end shirts account for the higher overall volume, so it's gonna continue to remain an important category. We have fleece, which I'm really not sure that a lot of people appreciate how big this opportunity has become. It accounts for about 40% or $4 billion of the opportunity, which has been growing nicely these past few years, and we expect will continue to grow in the mid- to high-single-digit range, outpacing the T-shirt category. In addition, fleece sells at a much higher price point, so it delivers attractive margins.
Overall, the trends that I recently highlighted, particularly the casualization trend, is supporting continued growth in the activewear category as activewear becomes a wardrobe staple. Given our positioning, the trends are playing out and our ability to support it with significant capacity that we'll be bringing on, we expect we can grow faster than the market. This is why it'll drive the top line of 7%-10% growth that we envision. On this next slide, you'll see how our goods flow through the value chain all the way to the end consumer or the end user, who ultimately buys the garments through various purchase occasions, which I'll speak about a little later. Essentially, we as the manufacturer will sell our blanks in large scale to distributors or to go-to-market channels.
Most of what we sell ends up getting embellished before it reaches the end consumer who wears the product. Distributors, they service the smaller or larger customers in the go-to-market channels, who then take the products, they decorate them, and then they go to the venues which service the end user. Alternatively, if a go-to-market channel player deals in sufficient scale, they'll often go directly to the manufacturer, us in this case. These are what we call our national accounts. They include big box retailers, online retailers that either sell blanks or sell customized decorated garments, brands, craft stores, and so forth. If we were to simplify it a little bit further, as a B2B supplier, there's really two channels we sell, distributors, and then what we'll call all other go-to-market players or non-distributors that we're calling national accounts.
We see both these channels growing at a similar pace, the 5%-7% range that I talked about earlier. With this 5%-7% annual growth rate, we expect the $11 billion market from 2022 is gonna grow to about $15 billion by 2027 or over the next five years. By channel, it splits out almost evenly. Distributors account for a little more than half. The distributor channel is about $6 billion, growing to $8 billion in 2027, and national accounts are about $5 billion, and they're gonna grow to about $7 billion over the next five years. Overall, our $11 billion North American addressable activewear market is gonna grow to $15 billion in the next five years. This gives us a lot of runway to capitalize on growth for our activewear business.
With this next slide, I'll cover the purchase occasions that give rise to the end users accessing the garments that they wear, either by buying them through a go-to-market channel or receiving them at a venue or event wherever they're distributed. These occasions, events or venues, they're all driven by different market dynamics. First, corporate promotional uses. It accounts for about 26% of the market. Essentially, the garments are used as a promotional item or corporate swag, as some call it, and they're given out to users for free, or maybe they're used as a uniform. We have brick-and-mortar and online retailers, and it accounts for about 21% of the market. In these outlets, activewear is either in blank form or more often than not, it's been embellished where the consumers are purchasing the goods directly.
We see good economic growth in this area, which is driven by the trends I talked about earlier, casualization, nearshoring, greater economy, private brands, and so forth. Digital printing is another one. Here we're talking about decorated apparel purchased from a small line of businesses or social media shops for personal events. The evolution of digital printing technology is making it easier for embellishers to supply smaller scale orders or for consumers to access small, personalized quantities of a decorated, customized shirt just for their event. Events, merchandising, and tourism, that counts for another 14%. These are venues or occasions where decorated apparel is purchased, say, at a concert or a festival, or maybe at a gift shop, or maybe you're traveling and they get it on vacation at a tour shop or an airport. Sports, well, that represents professional and non-professional events where decorated apparel is purchased.
It accounts for about 13%. To finish off, you have the collegiate category. It comes in at just over 10%. Here we're talking about embellished activewear that's purchased through a university or at a university or through an education affiliate organization. I would highlight that the last three categories, combined with the corporate promotional area, they're well positioned to benefit from a tailwind recovery since we really hadn't seen the full return to historical levels. As travel fully comes back, concerts and large sporting events fill the stadiums, and we annualize this and the returns of in-person schooling, these occasions should see growth and have a tailwind through 2022 and early into 2023. Now I'd like to cover the brands that we market and sell our products. Essentially, there are four brand areas. First, our largest brand by far is Gildan brand.
It's positioned as a value leader. Our product ranging from open-end to higher value ring-spun products like our 64,000 and our 67,000, all in cotton and blends, and comes in large color and size assortments. Comfort Colors, that's more of a lifestyle brand. It's our garment-dyed offering where we have vintage, a weathered look. We use sustainable pigment dye process and a 100% cotton offering. Third, we have the American Apparel brand, which is our premium offer. I'd like to highlight that as we drove our back-to-basics strategy, we did a lot of work around right-sizing our offering and getting to really the optimized SKU base to go forward. American Apparel is an area where we did a lot of work. We had quite a bit of SKU proliferation, and particularly in inclusion of the retail-specific SKUs.
It was bringing a lot of complexity. We rationalized a lot of SKUs and the product line, and we're now refocused on what is critical to take share in the premium ring-spun market, has a refocused line of iconic American Apparel styles, which we're complementing with what we'll call our new conscious core offerings, grounded in sustainable fabrics, trend right colors, and supported by our ESG award-winning Gildan manufacturer. Finally, the last brand category is really third-party brands, which includes select leading sporting and lifestyle brand partners, where we supply them goods like Adidas, Nike, and Fanatics, who markets activewear under sports licenses like the NFL, the MLB, the NBA, and the NCAA. Also, we have retailers. They're using our shirts that are labeled with either their private or exclusive brands that are sold directly to consumers.
As I mentioned, this trend continues to be part of the retailer strategy. They wanna use private brands as a means of differentiation and a way really to drive margin performance with their own brands. Moving into pricing, earlier Glenn mentioned there's four key success factors in the markets we compete in. The key drivers are everyday low pricing, service and availability, innovative and quality products, and ESG, all of which we believe we're well positioned to provide. On the pricing front, historically, we've leveraged our low-cost competitive advantage to sustain everyday low pricing. It's a key driver of our market share penetration over the years. With the SKU proliferation over the years, we may have strayed a bit, but we tested various market points and various price points with different brands and products and SKUs. with back to basics, we took a step back.
We analyzed our SKU base, and we looked at the price positioning of our products. We decided to go back to our roots. We wanna be the price leader, the most competitive option, no matter what the product or the SKU is. It's a factor that will continue to drive our success in the market for open-end and ring-spun everyday activewear products. We want to maintain a certain discipline in our pricing strategy. We'll use the benefits that we have as a low-cost producer to drive volume and market share growth, and that's why we wanna be the price leader in each category or to set and maintain parity in areas where maybe there's less competition. When we look at our ring-spun offerings, you can see here that we've established a healthy pricing gap compared to our competitors in the ring-spun T-shirt space.
As you can see with our ring-spun products, like our 64,000, our 67,000 style today, if you look at where the leading distributors are able to sell our products, our T-shirts are 40%-50% below the competition. What's important is while ring-spun is considered higher end softer products, great deal of volume comes from these styles. For customers wanting to spend a little bit more on a premium style, you'll see that for American Apparel, we're choosing to still maintain a pricing gap, so it'll allow our customers to sell them below the price points of our competitors. For each style offered, we wanna be the lowest priced option for the T-shirts. When you look at fleece, here it's a little bit different.
While we still set the price, our pricing is aligned with the marketplace 'cause we don't feel we have to be quite as aggressive in this area. There's less competition. Our ring-spun competitors are not in fleece in a big way, and those suppliers, they're just not quite as penetrated as we are. When you look at our fleece style 18500 here, for example, pricing is aligned across the board. Our goal is to drive growth through better availability, better service, especially as we allocate more capacity to fleece production. Given that we're one of the few manufacturers in the apparel industry that's driving capacity expansion in this area. I'll talk a little bit more about fleece in a couple slides.
Overall, pricing, our goal is to continue to maintain our everyday low price strategy, drive volume growth, and the low-cost structure achieved through our vertical integration is gonna let us do so. That's why you heard Glenn say on many occasions, although we've taken some price to mitigate inflationary pressure, we probably could take some more. We believe maintaining a more aggressive stance on pricing by using and driving our cost advantages as we drive capacity expansion is gonna allow us to continue to put pressure on our competition and really ultimately gain further market share penetration. The other success factor for us in activewear is product innovation. Under our sustainable growth plan, we're executing on a number of product initiatives, which I'll talk about. I'd emphasize that we're driving innovation across all facets of the organization, which will further solidify our cost advantage.
You're gonna get to hear Israel talk a little bit more about that in a bit. Some of the key product initiatives, we're reinvigorating our basic line across the board. We're gonna modernize the construction, modernize the fit and the branding. We're moving from the promotional tee aesthetic to more of a retail-ready look that printers and the consumers want. We're gonna take off the two needle top stitch around the neck. We're gonna move to a more refined razor label and a more modern classic fit. With the growth of direct-to-garment printing, customers want a T-shirt that's customizable. They want their one-of-a-kind embellishments. They want it shipped to their door in as fast as 24 hours. We're developing innovative fabric treatments and solutions, such as biopolishing or enzyming. It'll create the best fabric surface to print on, and it'll be the sharp, softest shirt to wear by far.
Gildan will be the future decorator's brand of choice. We're also expanding our ring spun tee offering. We'll continue to track on the macro and micro trends in the marketplace. While lightweight ring spun market is still dominant, we're seeing an emerging trend towards customers wanting softer shirts at different weight options. We're adding a new soft style mid-weight ring tee offering that'll complement our lightweight and our hammer heavyweight offering. We're gonna have a three-weight fabric strategy that makes our ring spun offering easy to shop. We'll have our soft style, our lightweight, our largest of the ring spun offerings with cotton and cotton blends. Our hammer, our heavyweight tee, where we'll say workwear meets streetwear. It's heavy, it's soft, it's ring spun, fabric's built to last, but it has somewhat of a streetwear appeal.
We've got the mid-weight, the everyday tee. That's for those that don't wanna wear a really lightweight ring spun fabric or something that's quite too heavy. This ring spun fabric's starting to trend in retail. This positions us to capitalize on any trend shifts in the marketplace. It offers consumers options in case they wanna trade up from what is our Gildan core OE basic offering into a softer shirt. Now let me revisit with you the fleece opportunity, and I'll give you a little color on what product innovations we're bringing in our fleece line. As I mentioned, the fleece market's about $4 billion or 40% of the $11 billion 2022 addressable North American market. Fleece has been growing at a good pace now for several years, and we're actually growing faster in this area.
When you look at our how our fleece sales have trended over the last five years, we've grown at a CAGR in the double-digit range. It's been our top performing activewear category. We believe we're well positioned to capitalize on the continued growth in the category, particularly, as I mentioned before, as we drive growth through capacity expansion. Fleece is somewhat different than tees in terms of what's required to compete in the space. First, we're well positioned from a yarn perspective. We use MVS yarn as the yarn inputs for this category, which it pills less than open-end and ring spun. MVS yarn is not as widely available as open-end. We have our own internal MVS yarn capacity, and the other player was Frontier before we acquired them. On top of that, we're continuing to invest to increase our MVS capacity.
The other factors I'd highlight is fleece production requires more investment from a working capital perspective. It costs more to produce, it's cumbersome, you need more warehouse space, and higher cost to transport, et cetera. Not all of our competitors have the same supply or the financial capabilities to appropriately support this growth area. We're meeting market demand by developing soft, premium fleece fabrics at scale that are ready for really any decoration technique or occasion where you want it to screen print it, direct to garment print, embroider, discharge, garment dye, tie dye, et cetera. These premium fleece products, our innovative and vertical manufacturing, our global distribution, all these combined will drive our future fleece opportunity. This sums up what I wanted to cover on North American activewear category.
Overall, it's the driver of our top-line growth expectations within North America being the key geography. Let me turn a bit to our international markets. Overall, our sales in international markets in 2021 totaled $275 million, out of what we currently estimate to be an addressable market of about $5 billion. Keep in mind, the recovery in these international markets and sales are lagging the pace of recovery that we've seen in North America. Of course, more recently, with the geopolitical situations, we're likely to see a continued impact in that recovery. However, we don't have any exposure to Russia or Ukraine. Nonetheless, at this point, we do not see any structural changes that we expect, you know. We expect this market to come back in time. Our biggest market from international perspectives are Europe and Asia.
In Europe, with the capacity expansion that we're bringing on in Bangladesh, we see good opportunity over the next few years to leverage Bangladesh. We'll improve our cost competitiveness, but we'll also improve our service on core styles that we'll be able to ship directly from our manufacturing hubs instead of through some third-party logistics providers. We're also looking at improving availability by aligning our product line from the region, from the U.S. product and the European product will make the goods more interchangeable for the markets. Down the line, we'll also explore the opportunity to develop national account business in Europe, much as we have in the U.S.. In Asia, for this market, we're just simplifying our product offering to reduce complexity. That way, we can improve planning and we can improve the interchangeability of our inventory. We've also recently started to strengthen certain key distributor relationships there.
We're starting to offer region exclusivity to them, which we think can help drive more growth with these players. Moving to hosiery and underwear. Based on the work we've done in assessing the addressable market opportunity for these products that we wanna supply, we estimate the size to be around $6 billion, and that breaks out relatively evenly between socks and underwear. Just when we talk underwear, to make it clear, we talk about underwear bottoms such as briefs and boxer briefs, but we're also talking about tops, mainly A shirts or lighter weight tees that are worn as undershirts. By the end of 2021, our sales in basics and socks and underwear was just over $550 million. This really reflects the headway that we've made in the underwear category, which is primarily driven by market share penetration, primarily in mass, supporting private branded underwear.
I would also highlight that we've seen good growth in the last couple of years in Gildan branded underwear, sold primarily through Amazon. On the hosiery side, this business has declined some over the years as we exited programs and we rationalized our SKU base significantly. Today, we carry about 20% of the SKUs that we started off with, and that's brought the margin profile of our sock business much closer to that of the activewear business. When you look at overall how these categories are growing more broadly, industry growth is in the low single-digit range, growing 1%-2%. While we've included conservative growth assumptions in our three-year plan, we think we can continue to compete and grow above these industry growth rates in these categories, particularly as retailers and brands look to near shore.
They wanna rebalance their supplier base closer to North America, given quicker speed to market, mitigate supply chain risk, and to be able based on the replenishable nature of these categories. Further, we see that retailers are continuing to focus on exclusive or private brands, where we think we're well-positioned as a large scale vertical manufacturer to provide steady, reliable supply at competitive prices, which will allow them to meet their margin targets as well. Finally, the other factor in our advantage is our ESG standing, which we continue to build on. ESG is increasingly becoming an important purchase consideration for both the retailers and for our consumers. In the hosiery area, we market our products primarily under three brand areas. Two are company-owned. First, our GOLDTOE brand. It comes with a premium long-standing heritage. It's known for durability, it's known for style, it's known for innovation.
Peds, it's an iconic woman's brand with the heritage of no-show socks design tied perfectly inside the latest shoe, which we've pivoted this brand somewhat to cover athleisure. The third brand area really encompasses brands we don't own, but where we act as a strategic supplier to the brands, where they're looking for large scale supply from a reliable, responsible supplier. These include sports brands like Under Armour and Nike and Athletic Works. We also have the exclusive sock license for Under Armour socks that are sold in North America. We see nearshoring as a favorable trend to support growth within supplying these brands. Industry players are anticipating a step change in nearshoring, where Asia's low status as a low cost manufacturer leader will start to diminish. We're also starting to see some traction in this regard.
We're having a lot of positive discussions with these customers, and they're asking for more and more supply. Third-party brands also include supplying retailers with socks for their own private or exclusive brands, where we see retailers continuing to use their private brand strategy and in some cases, introduce their own exclusive brands. To sum up on the hosiery and underwear, we think we've normalized our sock business. Although the industry growth for this category is not robust, we think our positioning and the trends that we're seeing, in fact, through many of our conversations with our customers, we see the potential to grow faster than the industry. The brands in which we market our underwear is really simple. We have the Gildan brand, which stands for quality ring-spun product at a value price.
Gildan underwear has been growing quite nicely on Amazon and actually ranks among their best-selling tops and bottoms. The other brand area for underwear is private label brands. As many of you know, we've made significant headway with private brand underwear offering and at the largest, national retailer. We believe we can continue to drive our growth with our Gildan brand and our private brands as we expand our ring spun cotton assortment with premium offerings with the launch of our cotton stretch platform. We plan to continue to expand relationships with retailers, where we hope to continue to capture share of the underwear market by targeting high volume, low complexity programs. This brings me to my final item, which is how we're moving forward on the marketing side.
You may have seen last week we announced the launch of the Gildan Respects campaign, which is our campaign on our global positioning of our ESG program. We are joining all of our ESG communications and marketing under one global message: Gildan Respects. The Gildan Respects campaign will further bring the company's rigorous ESG approach to life. We're gonna surface stories behind the company's ESG initiatives and our progress. It'll highlight our long-standing commitment to manufacturing our product with respect to environment, with circularity, with respect to people, with respect to communities, and respect to transparency. The new branding and creative campaign will be activated through content on various platforms, including the release of an anthem video and a documentary series, social media marketing, display advertising, and a renewed digital experience on websites and social platforms across Gildan's global communication and marketing efforts. We're very excited about it.
This concludes what I wanna share with you today, and I look forward to taking your questions later in the Q&A session. Before our next speaker, Israel, takes the stage to talk about Gildan's manufacturing capabilities, let me leave you with a short video which essentially captures the essence of our Made with Respect campaign.
The style we want can have unwanted impact. That's why, since our beginning, we've been reimagining the future of apparel making. We go beyond the status quo. We see the big picture. Have we solved all the industry-wide problems? No. We own the majority of our supply chain, allowing us to make apparel with respect for natural resources. Like the water we use for dyeing, which we treat till it's clean enough to return to nature. We make our apparel with respect for the climate, reusing agricultural waste to produce steam for power, reducing the need for fossil fuels on a planet already in crisis. We make it with respect for accountability, setting goals, tracking progress, partnering with the U.S. Cotton Trust Protocol, setting standards for sustainably grown cotton and respect for our global employees, their health, safety and well-being, their career growth, their prosperity.
We make apparel with respect for Earth's resources and creatures, the ones we hope to protect and the ones we've never met.
Thank you, Chuck, and good morning to everyone. Great to join you today. My name is Israel Salinas, and I'm responsible for leading the supply chain and product innovation teams. I've been in the company now for over 19 years in different roles, starting in the quality area. I moved into operations, started a few facilities, then went into product development, and now leading the global supply chain team.
As we heard during the S&D review, Gildan's future is exciting, and today I'd like to give you an overview of how we've set up our global manufacturing footprint, share our plans for capacity expansion, and give you some color around the innovation we bring forward from a manufacturing perspective that not only supports our continuous focus on driving efficiencies and our low cost structure, but also supports bringing innovation in our product offerings and operating in a sustainable manner. All of which ultimately enables us to capitalize on the opportunities that Chuck just laid out. Moving on. It's important now to explain how we have developed and allocated our investments in manufacturing. Our journey in building a world-class manufacturing platform has been in the making for quite a while now.
For over two decades, Gildan has invested over $2 billion in developing a unique world-class manufacturing model, which has allowed us to develop a strong vertically integrated supply chain. The timeline you have in front of you gives you an idea of the evolution of our manufacturing build. All this to say, we've grown our capacity, increased our vertical integration, and diversified our manufacturing base geographically. Starting in 1997 with our first offshore sewing facility to breaking ground in Rio Nance in Honduras in early 2002, where we have our largest hub. We also decided early on to expand and diversify our footprint by opening up other regions such as DR and Bangladesh, both textile and sewing hubs.
Moving on the timeline in 2013, we made our first major push to expand our vertical model by investing in yarn spinning capabilities through acquisitions and greenfield facilities. All of which has further strengthened our supply chain control. Most recently, to further support our sales growth, we added to our yarn capabilities with the acquisition of Frontier Spinning Mills, which I will cover more in depth in a few slides. We, in 2019, acquired a large parcel of land for the development of a multi-phase manufacturing complex in Bangladesh to build the first greenfield, large scale, vertically integrated textile and sewing facility. Now, having said that, this timeline represents a high level view of the past 20 years from a manufacturing perspective.
However, this has also taken us to grow from a little bit shy of 1,000 employees in 1997 to now 50,000 skilled workforce across North and Central America, the Caribbean and Bangladesh. To better understand how our vertically integrated model, this next slide gives you a good overview on how our supply chain works and efficiently services the market we compete in. Gonna divide it in two sections. The Western Hemisphere, where we make over 90% of our manufacturing volume. It all starts with our cotton supply in the U.S., which then feeds into our spinning facilities, where we transform cotton and yarn. Then when that's ready, we move it from the U.S. into our D.R. and Central American textile hubs, following the free trade agreements rule of origin.
Once it arrives in Central America and the DR, after our textile operations, we then move cut goods into our diversified sewing footprint in Honduras, Nicaragua, contractors through Central America, and in DR specifically, fabric is sewn both in the DR and in Haiti. Once product is sewn, we then ship back into the U.S. Now, an important fact to share that at any given time, we have over 2,000 containers in the main transportation loop. From start to finish, our cycle time is less than six to eight weeks. This is really a speed to market advantage for our customers looking to nearshore and diversifying their supply chain from Asia, as Chuck just referred to a while back. Now, on the eastern hemisphere, our vertical integration in Bangladesh is even more unique.
Our yarn is in closer proximity to our textile, just miles apart, and our sewing teams are integrated in the same premises as our textiles. The manufacturing cycle time here is even shorter than our Central American hubs. For us, Bangladesh geography really enables us to serve international markets duty-free through an agile response time. In addition, we also see a very attractive competitive cost structure to bring in certain ring-spun products into the North American market. Given the global supply chain tightness worldwide, being vertically integrated allows us to be well-positioned, and it also gives us more control over the full supply chain across all hubs and regions where we operate. In addition, this diversified manufacturing footprint really allows us to minimize the supply chain disruptions throughout the past years. It strengthens our position as a low cost, resilient and transparent supply chain globally.
The final point I'd like to make on this slide is that we've never shied away from investing in manufacturing. As discussed earlier, a 20-year journey has led us to build 29 factories, deliver over 1.6 billion units of apparel and socks on an annualized basis, and growing, of which 95% of it is internally made. As we execute our expansion plans, which I will cover momentarily, which includes adding incremental capacity and further strengthening our vertical integration, we expect to invest roughly between $600 million-$900 million over the next three years. Now let's move on to what sets us apart from most companies and where our competitive advantage truly lies. I'd like to walk through four key areas which drive our competitive manufacturing. Let's start on the top left side, our vertical integration.
From our raw materials all the way to our distribution, controlling and operating our own facilities at every stage of the production has really allowed us to exercise strong oversight over how we operate. It has also allowed us to develop a strong skill set in the manufacturing over the years, standardize our processes, and ultimately drive manufacturing efficiencies and consistent quality. For us, really controlling our manufacturing destiny, if you will, has allowed us to mitigate supply chain disruptions, particularly due to very minimal reliance on third-party sourcing. It's also important to call out that everything mentioned here is done under a transparent supply chain, strong social and environmental governance. Now let's move to the large scale manufacturing capabilities. The scale of our manufacturing capabilities is really another source of our competitive advantage.
When you look at the magnitude of the garments that we produce every year, it gives you a sense of our scale, which allows us to leverage our fixed costs. Over the past few years, with our back to basics strategy, as Glenn mentioned earlier, the complexity that we have removed out of our manufacturing through SKU rationalization and also some additional cost initiatives, has really driven operational efficiencies as reflected by the operating margin performance and improved product availability we have. As I mentioned earlier, when you look at how we are set up geographically, where we have our spinning, our textiles and so forth, our manufacturing platform really gives us flexibility and has proven us to be resilient, even in the times where we have to navigate through various challenges in one region or the other. Now let's discuss a strong balance sheet.
With the scale that we have also comes the need for financial strength to support the operations we have and the programs we service. This strength provides the working capital required to service large programs. It also has enabled us to do investments in industry-leading technologies, capacity expansion, drive digital transformation, introduce shop floor automation technologies for process control and supply chain planning. It also has allowed us, and all of this has been allowed because of our strong balance sheet. Now, finally, this brings us to our human capital. This is a strategic pillar of our success. We are really proud of our people. Building a strong workforce and a culture has been fundamental to our long-term success in the operations.
We've also established strong management infrastructure in all the regions where we operate with local management who really understand the culture and have grown with the company. We respect our employees by ensuring they have a safe work environment, running with progressive labor practices, and operating with a skilled workforce of thousands of employees globally. In addition, and regardless of the region, we always try to establish ties with the communities and make positive contributions to their economic development. Peter and Claudia will be covering this later. When we explain and tell everyone what really sets us apart, it's our talented workforce. 50,000 employees across the globe. They are the ones who really make the difference. Their dedication, their engagement, and their drive is what makes us who we are.
As Benito always says, "Make sure you always surround yourself by a great team." Overall, we believe that these key elements are the source of our strong positioning and strong competitive advantage in manufacturing. Now, on this overview, let me cover more in detail regarding our yarn operations and how we leverage our state-of-the-art asset base. It's very straightforward, as I mentioned earlier. Our big push in spinning really started in early 2013 when we really started to drive our vertical integration in our system. Over the past nine years, we've invested in excess of $600 million to develop efficient yarn operations, which includes, most recently, the Frontier acquisitions. We now have a network of 10 spinning facilities in the southeastern United States.
Our yarn operations are in close proximity to the U.S. cotton sources, a really important factor for our supply chain, given that we predominantly use U.S. cotton for our production, consuming approximately 40%-45% of the entire U.S. cotton produced for domestic consumption. Because of this footprint, our own yarn capabilities are able to satisfy the majority of our yarn requirements through internal production and supplement the balance through third-party U.S. yarn suppliers mainly. Now, in December of last year, we completed the acquisition of Frontier Yarns. The main rationale for this transaction was to further integrate the yarn into our operations, reducing our dependency on third parties. It also served to solidify and secure our yarn supply for the Western Hemisphere expansion and to further support our growth into 2022 and beyond.
As we continue to internalize our yarn production from Frontier, this is gonna leave us in a position to satisfy approximately 90% of our yarn requirements in this hemisphere. Now, more specifically on the yarn type, Frontier's production includes both MVS and OE capacity. If you recall, the MVS capacity is extremely important for our fleece production, as Chuck mentioned. While we have our own existing MVS, this adds to our capabilities, as Frontier was the other major MVS U.S. yarn producer, and it positioned us well to capitalize on the growing fleece opportunities that Chuck earlier talked about. Now, going forward, we plan for some additional investments to upgrade Frontier's capacity, which is part of our 6%-8% CapEx strategy. This is just gonna further improve our cost structure for the yarn production and drive synergies.
Now, this brings us to a critical part of our plans, our next wave of our manufacturing initiatives. This strategy is gonna lay out what's next to support our growth, the markets, the opportunities that Chuck just laid out, and preparing sustainable growth expansions in the coming years. Now let me talk about the committed expansion initiatives that are currently underway to support about $1 billion in sales. In the Western Hemisphere, Glenn had mentioned earlier, we've expanded our Central American DR capacity by about 1 million kilos a week within our existing footprint, using equipment that we relocated and reinstalled from our Mexican operation and from additional investments. Essentially adding incremental capacity more cost effectively in our existing infrastructure, and this is all to support about $500 million of incremental sales, further supporting our basics, fleece, and ring spun production.
Most recently, our Bangladesh team just initiated the construction process of Kohinoor 1, the first phase of two large-scale plants we plan to build. This first phase of greenfield expansion is gonna set to support another $500 million in sales for ring spun programs over the next three years through 2024. Looking beyond 2024, we've identified some future expansion projects. One of these projects, as we just mentioned, is to support future waves of expansion beyond 2024, and this is Kohinoor 2 or phase II, which provides capacity for another $500 million in sales. Additionally, we're exploring some options to further vertically integrate our yarn supply in Bangladesh. This is gonna give us more control over our requirements in the region.
Finally, we have some optionality for a greenfield facility in Central America or the Caribbean to add an additional $500 million to sales beyond 2024. In summary, this slide, and what I can tell you is that our manufacturing team is working hard to execute these plans and expand our capabilities to support $1 billion in sales through 2024 and another $1 billion in the years to follow after that. Now, let me take you deeper into our Bangladesh initiatives. As you may recall, we first began operating in Bangladesh in 2010 with the acquisition of a smaller facility relative when you compare it to our Honduras large-scale facilities. We Gildanized it, these operations, in terms of bringing manufacturing process perspective. We expanded and applied our ESG practices, the same we employ, all of our network.
After more than 10 years operating in the country, we've gained the comfort and expertise to move forward with significant capacity expansion in this region. In addition, we've developed a strong local management who understand the culture and have built good relationships with the community. Now, it's important to call out that our unique vertical model in Bangladesh, which includes the sewing operations in the textile site, and this really helps us streamline further our process, and it actually reduces our working process and shortens the lead times. Overall, our Bangladesh expansion is really gonna be providing a good manufacturing diversification platform. It's going to significantly expand our ring-spun capabilities, and it will further strengthen our low-cost competitive advantages. Now, to finalize, it's important that we share our commitment to manufacturing innovation and sustainable growth.
For more than 20 years, our senior leadership has driven a culture of innovation, which has also supported our focus in caring for the environment and acting responsibly. This has driven us to develop and implement process and fabric-related innovations. Now, I wanna mention a few of these process-related innovations, which have helped us deliver energy, water, and cycle time savings, such as the biomass steam producing facility, which has reduced fossil fuel usage and our carbon footprint. Peter and Claudia will expand on this subject briefly. We also focused on energy conservation projects such as our heat recovery system, saving over 4 million kilowatts a year. Also, early on in Honduras and D.R., we implemented our biological water treatment, which consumes no energy, no emissions, and does not use chemicals, so it's very environmentally friendly.
Additionally, we've spent time and energy on our continuous improvement developments to reduce water consumption through our dyeing optimization, new technology introductions such as our CPD in garment dyeing, which uses no salt, 50% less water, and is a fully degradable product. Equally important to mention also our strategy on digitalization through virtual 3D product modeling, which has reduced development lead times, sampling costs, and allowed us quick designs for product modernization concepts, as discussed earlier. On a fabric-related innovation, we've introduced new product lines such as Softstyle fleece, 3-end fleece offerings, and underwear products to mention just a few. Some of these products we've also enhanced through our capabilities in our chemical processing unit known as CPU in Honduras, which has also delivered products to service the DTG market, such as our new EZ Print, which is an enzyme wash treatment.
We also introduced new environmentally friendly softeners, which we continue to develop also in colors, process automations, specialty chemistry for value-added and sustainable apparel. Now going forward, a lot of our fabric innovations are gonna be geared towards supporting sustainable raw materials and packaging, which will be further covered in the ESG overview momentarily. This brings me to the conclusion of my presentation, and I just want to say that as a manufacturing guy, my career in Gildan has been an exciting one. Given that manufacturing is core to what Gildan is. I'm equally excited about our future. With the manufacturing plans we are currently implementing and the solid position we are moving forward with, we wanna continue making apparel better through a vertical, low cost, social, and environmentally responsible manufacturing platform. Appreciate everybody's time for allowing me to share this manufacturing overview.
I leave you with a short video before we break, which gives you a visual appreciation of what I'm proud to call our manufacturing operations. Looking forward to all of your questions in Q&A, and thank you very much.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Peter Iliopoulos, and I have been part of Gildan for 20 years, and it is a pleasure to be here today to speak to you about our ever-evolving ESG program and practices. As you can see from the first slide of our presentation, our ESG journey is not something that we have recently embarked on, but rather represents the buildup of a strong foundation which has evolved significantly and strengthened over the last 20 years. Indeed, this is something that will continue to evolve as we continue to push forward our industry-leading practices in this important area. In 2001, when we embarked on setting up our operations in Central America, we did so keeping in mind the environmental and social impacts, and with a focus on how we can achieve a win-win, both from a cost and sustainability perspective.
At Gildan, we do not see the two as being on opposite sides. I do not intend on covering all the achievements which have been highlighted on this slide, but would like to point out a few examples of the investments and initiatives we have made over the years with respect to ESG. In 2001, as we began the development of our first Rio Nance textile manufacturing facility, we installed our first Biotop wastewater treatment system and continued to roll that out throughout our manufacturing network in Central America and the Caribbean. Our natural Biotop treats wastewater through a series of interconnected lagoons that contain bacteria, which eliminate virtually all dyes and chemicals, and uses no incrmental energy to process the water, resulting in the natural return of clean water to the environment.
Other sustainable technologies we introduced in our operations include the biomass, which we began in 2009. Under this ope ration, we use biomass for steam generation to power several processes within our textile operations. By transitioning to biomass, we significantly reduced our reliance on bunker fuel, which is what we previously used to run these processes. The biomass operation process is considered carbon neutral as it prevents organic materials from entering landfills and emitting greenhouse gas emissions as they decompose. From a social perspective, we recognize that human rights is a critical issue, particularly in our case, where the vast majority of our employees work in low and lower middle-income countries where the infrastructure and support systems are not as robust as in other countries.
At Gildan, we are committed to going beyond what is required to provide our employees with good wages, healthcare and benefits, and also a safe workplace. We have always recognized that our people are our most valuable asset and are key to the success we have achieved as a company. You will notice that we joined the Fair Labor Association in 2003. The FLA is a leading NGO based in Washington, D.C., which is focused on protecting workers' rights and improving working conditions globally. In 2007, we became the first vertically integrated apparel manufacturer to have its social compliance program accredited by the FLA.
From a governance perspective, we have continuously put a focus on structure, discipline, and transparency with respect to our ESG practices by adopting formal codes and policies over the years and reporting on our ESG initiatives and performance, starting with our first CSR report more than 15 years ago. As early as 2002 and 2005 respectively, we established our code of ethics and code of conduct, and we have also obtained WRAP certification for all our sewing facilities, as well as our integrated manufacturing facility in Bangladesh. Indeed, throughout this timeline, you can see that we have continued to evolve by developing and implementing robust formal policies on social, environmental, and governance matters.
Moving on, in 2021, with the collaboration and contribution of key senior management stakeholders throughout the organization, including representations from all business units, the corporate head office, and our board of directors, we completed our next generation ESG strategy, which we disclosed publicly in January of this year. As an initial step towards the development of the strategy, we conducted a materiality assessment, which included interviews with a number of internal and external stakeholders, which serves as a critical input in the development of the strategy. Our next generation ESG strategy is composed of five key pillars, namely Climate, Energy, and Water, Circularity, Long-term Value Creation, Human Capital Management, and Transparency and Disclosure.
Each of these pillars is supported with key targets and initiatives, which I would like to spend a few minutes on to provide you with a better perspective of how we are approaching our ESG strategy. First, our goal was to address Gildan's climate, energy, and water impacts and develop targets that seek to reduce our impact while increasing our ability to adapt to climate change conditions. To this effect, we have chosen to align with the Science Based Targets initiative, which is also aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Accordingly, we have set a target to reduce Scope 1 and Scope 2 GHG emissions by 30% by 2030.
As water represents the single largest natural resource that we consume in our manufacturing operations, we also put a significant emphasis on initiatives with respect to water, including a focus on reducing the impacts on water-stressed areas and enhancing water quality. Our water target is focused on reducing water intensity by 20% by 2030. Moving on, our circularity targets are focused around the increased utilization of sustainable raw materials, including sustainable cotton and recycled polyester, the incorporation of more sustainable packaging and trims, and driving zero manufacturing waste. The latter of which is to be achieved by incorporating initiatives that eliminate waste by diverting from sending products to landfill, by recovering and reusing materials, and by designing products that can be reused and broken down safely.
The primary focus from a human capital management perspective was setting clear goals to improve Gildan's health and safety performance across the organization and achieve gender parity, which Arun will cover during his presentation. We are also committed to playing an important role in the various communities in which we operate, fully recognizing the strategic advantage this provides the company in positioning itself as an employer of choice in our various operating regions. Our goals are focused on building up to a best in class standard of allocating 1% of our pre-tax income by 2026 towards community investment and long-term value creation initiatives. In the past year, we made significant strides forward with respect to our ESG reporting by incorporating full alignment with SASB in our 2020 ESG report, which was also prepared under the GRI standards.
We also began our initial disclosure to TCFD, and later this year we will be publishing our first standalone TCFD report and expect to be fully aligned to TCFD by 2025. Overall, we are confident that our plan addresses the key concerns over climate change, significantly incorporates sustainability into our products and packaging, which we can leverage into increased demand for our products, and includes significant improvements and advancements both from an employee well-being and community perspective, all of which is underpinned by a commitment to robust transparency and disclosure. I thank you for your time and would now like to pass the presentation over to Claudia Sandoval, our VP, Corporate Citizenship, who can provide you with some additional insights and specifics with respect to our ESG focus and performance.
Thank you, Peter, and I'm very happy to be with you today. I would like to reiterate that we believe that the long-term sustainability of our company depends on our ability to pursue our strategies and business policies in a responsible and ethical way. We recognize our responsibilities to society, which go beyond compliance with the law and voluntary measures. We demonstrate this commitment by actively supporting initiatives in the communities where we live and work, as well as by supporting initiatives that are aligned with our renewed areas of focus, as mentioned by Peter previously. Over the past 20 years, we have been dedicated to respecting and protecting human rights, protecting our environment by using natural resources more consciously, and to contributing to the positive development of our communities. Undoubtedly, our next generation ESG targets are taking us to new heights, and let me show you how.
Our employees are at the heart of our business, and with approximately 50,000 employees throughout North and Central America, the Caribbean, and Bangladesh, we are dedicated to promoting and respecting their fundamental rights. We have aligned to the conventions of the International Labour Organization and other human rights frameworks. We are proud to report that at each facility, our workers have access to independent, internal, and external grievance mechanisms, but they also present their issues through their local internal committees or their unions where they exist. Gildan's most impactful ESG programs are those that enhance the lives of our employees. We provide our people with benefits that go beyond basic employment rights. We are proud to offer subsidized meals, free transportation, and free medical attention at our on-site clinics.
As an example, in 2020, Gildan employ 56 full-time doctors and 80 nurses to our on-site clinics across 23 of our facilities. Our spending on medication and vaccinations for employees reached $1.2 million. We are also pleased to see how the communities around our facilities have made social and economic progress, given the value generated through our job creation and capital investments. As an example, we are the biggest private employer in many of the countries where we operate, which help us strengthen good work opportunities and direct and indirect economic growth. Our spending with the local suppliers in Bangladesh, Central America, and the Caribbean amounted to $250 million in 2020.
Our presence in these countries also promotes technology transfer, skill development, encourages entrepreneurship and improvements in education, all of which contribute to creating a sustainable impact for our employees, their families, local communities, and society at large. As an example, in 2020, we invested more than $2.1 million in our communities and have supported more than 350 schools in Central America and the Dominican Republic in programs ranging between environmental education, infrastructure improvements, and curriculum strengthening. We have made great strides in reducing our environmental footprint by committing to minimize the impact of our operations and business practices by improving our energy efficiency, minimizing waste, and reducing emissions.
Our sustainability initiatives have achieved a 33% usage of renewable energy in our operations, an 11% reduction of our wastewater use intensity, and 100% of our fabric cotton scraps are recycled or repurposed. Our work is far from complete, but we are leading through transparency and innovation. When it comes to responsible apparel making, we don't just meet the standards, we meet and respect them with the utmost priority. From providing competitive wages to using renewable energy, we make apparel better by respecting how we make it, who we make it with, and what we use to make it. Thank you for your attention, and before Arun takes the stage, I will leave you with the following video.
Hello, my name is Arun Bajaj. I am the Chief Human Resources Officer of Gildan and responsible for legal affairs. I've been with the company for approximately 2.5 years, and I have over 25 years of experience in manufacturing organizations in the legal and HR functions. I'm happy to be presenting to you today Gildan's human capital strategies. Our CEO always says, "Anyone can buy equipment, but it's our team that makes the difference." Gildan's biggest strength, our 50,000 employees, are present in 13 countries throughout our value chain. We are proud to be a truly diverse organization representing 29 different nationalities. Another strength within Gildan is the depth of local leadership talent. 90% of our executives that are VP level and above are from the markets we operate in.
This gives us an incredible depth of local experience, knowledge, and understanding that enables strong performance. Our human capital management strategy is aligned with the business by making apparel better through our people. We have six strategic pillars that propel Gildan's culture and employee experience. These pillars are attract and grow, strategic partnership, diversity, equity and inclusion, talent management, employee wellbeing, and employer of choice. As we are looking into the future and to our capacity growth plan, we are consistently adjusting our human capital management approaches and strategies. Out of the pillars I've mentioned, aligning organizational structures to the business needs is part of our added value. Just in the past year, we have strengthened our leadership team and created critical roles to support the business strategy. We are continually working to ensure we have strong succession planning processes.
When we reach a place where we need to bench strength the organization to do effective knowledge transfer or to fill existing gaps to safeguard the future, we have attracted new talents and appointed our talents to new locations on mobility assignments. Demonstrating our commitment to talent development, 60% of all available leadership and management opportunities at Gildan were filled with internal talent. 40% came from the market, ensuring we have a good internal, external talent balance within the company and adding depth to the team as we grow. Of course, adapting and improving our employee value proposition is crucial in this current war for talent. We offer a flexible work environment when feasible, and we benchmark external labor markets to remain well-positioned as an employer of choice.
We continue to build leadership development programs for all levels, leveraging executive coaching for our senior leaders, Leading the Gildan Way program for our mid-management. Various programs such as School of Leadership are designed for our frontline leaders. At Gildan, we are committed to creating a safe and healthy work environment for our employees, contractors throughout our entire supply chain. Our vision focuses on embracing a prevention and zero harm culture, and working conditions are among the best in the industry. Gildan is pushing health and safety performance to new standards by working to improve employee safety and reduce workplace risks across its operations. In order to continue our journey, we recently committed to attain ISO 45001 certification in all our company-owned facilities by 2028.
We are transitioning from a mindset of prevention towards a more advanced culture of safety by boosting engagement and awareness at all levels of the business through improved self-assessment, leadership training, and performance indicators. During the year, we delivered 121 training sessions representing 2,300 training hours, standardized processes, and started ISO 45001-based audits. During 2021, I'm proud to say we had outstanding performance in terms of accident frequency, achieving our lowest work-related injury rate in the last eight years, despite the expansion of our factories, extraordinary circumstances such as hurricanes of late 2020 and, of course, the global pandemic. We are proud that four of our factories finished the year with no recordable events. Combined altogether, these four factories represent 21% of our operations, direct and indirect population.
The company successfully navigated the global pandemic with minimal operational disruptions by conducting rigorous biosafety protocols, extensive in-house COVID-19 testing, and in-house vaccination programs. Up to this date, we have three-quarters of our employees fully vaccinated around the world. Since 2017, Gildan has formally worked on creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace where all employees are valued for their uniqueness, where they develop, maintain, and promote a sense of belonging. The company is grounded in the strengths and skills of its people and the communities they reside in, and therefore provides equal opportunities to all employees as well as support to the local communities through various programs. As you can see in the chart on this slide, we are proud to have reached gender parity in the number of employees globally. We also have gender parity in our mid-management level positions.
Where we still have work to do is that the group made up of our director level and above. We have recently publicly committed as part of our ESG strategy to achieve gender parity for this group in 2027. This will be achieved through leveraging our strategy and new policies. In fact, we are engaging in specific diversity initiatives such as awareness and training programs, talent acquisition diversity strategies, and succession planning strategies. As an example, we recently launched our first cohort, Women in Leadership – Ignite Your Impact program, sponsored by myself and our Compensation and Human Resources Committee Chair, Shirley Cunningham. This program aims to develop women at the senior level of the organization. Finally, we are committed to driving our progress through careful monitoring. In our latest engagement survey, we included inclusion drivers, allowing us to measure inclusivity across the entire organization.
I wanna thank you for your time and attention today, and it gives me great pleasure to pass the presentation over to Rhodri Harries.
Good morning, everyone. It's great to join you today. Many of you know me, but for those who don't, I'm Rhodri Harries, the Chief Financial and Administrative Officer of Gildan, and I've been with the company for almost seven years. This morning, you've heard a lot about Gildan's sustainable growth strategy and how we are building on the principles of back-to-basics to derive sustainable growth over the long term. What I'd like to do now to conclude the presentation portion of this event is to summarize what all this means in financial terms, particularly over the next three years. First, let's start by looking at our financial performance over the last five years to set the stage. The high level takeaway as you look at this slide is that we have significantly enhanced the economics of our business since we launched our Back to Basics strategy.
Looking at the sales graph in the upper left-hand side, you will see that over the last few years, as we focused on Back to Basics, our top line growth rate has only been approximately 2%. Now of course, this includes two years of the pandemic, and you would naturally expect a lower growth rate during this period. Back to Basics was never really a top-line story. It's been much more about focusing on the right type of sales and improving our margin profile and our asset utilization performance and basically cleaning up our business to support growth.
A good example of this is our SKU base, where we reduced the overall number of SKUs by 60%, and we were able to replace sales of less profitable or low-performing SKUs, which we chose to forgo, with sales of more profitable SKUs that are better aligned with our manufacturing capability. The reduced, more focused SKU base will help us drive availability. In 2021, you can see it allowed us to deliver record sales in excess of $2.9 billion, above pre-pandemic sales levels in an environment where we had not yet really seen a full recovery. If we move to the operating income graph on the top right-hand side of the slide, this is where you see the real success of the strategy. Record sales with improved margins translated to record operating income of $591 million in 2021.
If you compare 2021 to 2019, our operating profit grew more than 50%, and our compound annual growth rate versus 2017 before the launch of Back to Basics was 9%. If you look at the lower left-hand side of the slide from an EPS perspective, you can see that over the last five years, we have grown our EPS at a CAGR of approximately 12%, ending 2021 at a record level of $2.72 a share on an adjusted basis and above $3 on a GAAP fully diluted basis. Finally, and importantly, I would say, we've been able to consistently generate free cash flow over the last five years, regardless of the environment.
This definitely was a highlight in 2021, as strong earnings and improved working capital management, supported by the benefits of our Back to Basic strategy, allowed us to generate a new record level of $594 million free cash flow for the year. Overall, I think you can say we've delivered strong financial performance, particularly in 2021, which has provided an excellent foundation to support our strategy going forward. As we move to the next slide, let's look more specifically at our revenue breakdown. You can see on the left-hand side of this slide, the sales by product category, and that activewear has been the key sales driver of our business. This is due to the size of our blanks business with both distributors and national accounts, as Chuck discussed.
As we go forward, we expect activewear to continue to be a key driver of top-line growth because of our competitive position, the momentum we have in key products, a larger addressable market, and the various trends we are seeing in the marketplace, which are working in our favor. From a hosiery and underwear perspective, although we have made significant headway on underwear sales and have grown at double-digit rates since 2017, performance in this category has been masked by our hosiery business, which has declined since 2017. Hosiery is an area where we've done a lot of work, particularly right-sizing the SKU base, getting these sales to the right margin profile where we can now look to grow from. In fact, looking at the SKU rationalization that we did on the retail side, more than 80% of the SKUs we eliminated were in hosiery.
We believe our sock business has now stabilized, and we are starting to see some wins in growth, as Chuck mentioned, with our GOLDTOE, Peds, Under Armour, and other lifestyle and private brands. As we move forward and grow our top line over the next three years, we expect our hosiery and underwear category to continue to turn from what has been a headwind to a tailwind for growth, which will complement our activewear category, which will remain our strongest growth driver. Now, if we look geographically on the right-hand side of the slide, you can see that 90% of our sales are derived in North America. We continue to see significant opportunity to grow in North America, given, as Chuck highlighted, the size of the market and the favorable dynamics playing out.
Sales in the rest of the world, namely Europe, Asia, and Latin America, are still a relatively small part of our overall sales base. Unlike in North America, when you look at 2021, you can see that the rest of the world's sales are still lagging pre-pandemic levels because these countries have not seen the same rate of recovery we have seen in the U.S. Longer term, we don't see anything structurally different here, and we expect good growth will unfold over time. Moving to our margin performance, what I'd first like to highlight is that we ultimately manage our business at the operating margin level. As we have consistently stated over the last few years, our focus has been to deliver on a target of at least 18%.
Back to Basics has allowed us to deliver on this target with our operating margin coming in at just over 20% in 2021, up approximately 500 basis points since we started the strategy. This improvement has come from both SG&A and gross margin performance. Let's start with SG&A, where we first started with Back to Basics in 2018, consolidating the front end of our business into one organization, driving sales and marketing benefits and improvements in distribution, particularly as we moved away from shipping to the piece. Initially, we targeted getting our SG&A margin to 12% of sales, and we continue to work at it, getting our SG&A just below 11% in 2021. As we continue to grow our top line, we fully expect to see the benefit of further potential operating leverage in this area going forward.
Gross margin performance has also progressed well, particularly when we exclude the impact of the pandemic in 2020. We started to execute on initiatives to drive gross margin expansion towards the end of 2018 and into 2019, with many initiatives across our manufacturing organization in yarns and textile and sewing. You really see the benefit of this coming through in 2021, when we started to move towards a more normalized environment and when we delivered gross margin of 30%. Now, as we move forward from here, what you may see is some variation in gross margin from this level on a year-to-year basis as we use gross margin to drive volume growth.
Put another way, ultimately, we're willing to sacrifice some gross margin performance to drive volume and market share growth as long as we're able to deliver operating margin in our 18%-20% target range consistently going forward. This next slide is one I really like to talk about because it captures an area where we as a company are very focused, and that is the efficient use of capital. Because ultimately, we know that strong earnings growth combined with efficient use of capital translates to strong value creation for our shareholders. Here you can again see the benefit of our back to basics initiatives of removing complexity out of our business, particularly with our SKU rationalization initiative, if you look at the working capital graph at the top of the slide.
Specifically, we are now turning our finished goods inventory much faster every three to four months, and our working capital as a percentage of sales has come down from the mid-30% to 40% range to 27.5% at the end of last year. Now, some of that was due to production stoppages, both as we navigated through COVID and the impact of the hurricanes at the end of 2020, as well as due to yarn constraints, which have been limiting our ability to rebuild inventory to higher levels than where it sits today.
With an improved labor situation and the Frontier acquisition, we should see inventory levels start to edge back up through 2022, which means our working capital will probably move back towards a more normalized range of approximately 30%, where you might expect the business will run that on a go-forward basis, especially as we ramp up operations in Bangladesh. At this level of working capital, we will be higher than where we were in 2021, but still a significant improvement from our historical trend over the last five years. If we look at CapEx in the middle of the slide, you can see we've continued to invest over the years, except for the pause we took in 2020 to protect liquidity as we navigated through the pandemic.
Going forward, we'll be stepping up our CapEx spend to the 6%-8% of sales level as we continue to bring on incremental capacity and strengthen our vertical integration, which will support sales growth not only between 2022 and 2024, but also beyond this period as we think about longer-term expansion plans. Finally, the bottom graph on this slide shows our return on net asset performance, which is very important for us as a vertically integrated manufacturer. If we go back to our last Investor Day, I remember highlighting how we had taken a step back in our performance in this metric and how we were working towards a longer-term goal of 20%. We were very pleased in 2021 when we generated a RONA of 23%, bearing strong evidence of the success of back to basics.
Importantly, I would note going forward, we remain committed to sustaining a RONA level of at least 20% or better as we move forward with our expansion plans and the Gildan sustainable growth strategy. Moving on to the next chart, which covers our strong record of capital returns, let me start with our dividend, which we first established 10 years ago. We've been growing our dividend on a per share basis pretty well every year and concurrent with our fourth quarter earnings release, we increased our dividend by 10% to $0.68 for 2022. During the pandemic, we did halt our dividend for a number of quarters to protect the balance sheet and to make sure we had good flexibility to do the things that we needed to do to support the recovery.
Following our strong bounce back in 2021, we were very pleased to resume payouts in the second quarter of last year and to increase the dividend this year. Overall, I would say we have a good dividend, our shareholders like the dividend, and as we move forward, our goal is to increase our dividend on an annual basis. The next area of capital return is share repurchases. We established our share repurchase program alongside our target leverage framework back in 2016, and we have been working within this framework with share buybacks on average of about 5% annually. In 2020, we took a short pause as a prudent measure while we were managing through the pandemic, and we reinstated with a 5% buyback program in the third quarter of 2021.
At the end of February this year, we effectively put another 5% program in place for 2022 by increasing our NCIB from 5%-10% of our outstanding float. If you look on a cumulative basis over the last five years through dividends and share buybacks, we have returned more than $1.6 billion to our shareholders. In 2021, we returned more than $335 million of capital. I think you can call this a good track record and strong evidence that we have been committed to enhancing overall returns through returning capital, which we intend to do going forward. This brings me to leverage on the next slide. As I mentioned to you, we first put our leverage framework in place back in 2016, and we have run with a one to two times EBITDA target framework ever since.
Effectively, we feel that by managing to this framework, this gives us the ability to operate with an appropriate balance sheet, providing good flexibility to continue to invest in our business, return capital to our shareholders, and to take advantage of M&A opportunities should they arise. Now on M&A, we have not been active on this front since we launched our back to basics strategy, except for more recently with the Frontier acquisition, which Israel covered. Basically, this is because we believe we have the foundation in place, including the brands and the product portfolio, to drive towards our growth targets organically. Our current thinking when it comes to M&A is to only look at opportunities that could further solidify our existing foundation by strengthening our vertical integration, accelerating manufacturing plans, or adding to our existing manufacturing capabilities. Frontier Yarns is a perfect example.
It's increasing our vertical integration as we further internalize yarn production, and it's supporting incremental yarn requirements as we expand our textile capacity. To sum up on our leverage, I would say that we're pleased with our strong balance sheet and the flexibility our target framework provides. We believe it gives us the ability to address all of our capital allocation priorities going forward in pretty well all environments. Now, finally, having addressed the various financial elements of our sustainable growth strategy, this slide is simply a recap of the three-year outlook that we provided recently when we reported our fourth quarter results in February. Over the next three years, assuming a continued global recovery, we are working towards achieving sales growth at a compound annual growth rate in the 7%-10% range.
This will take our revenue between $3.6 billion-$3.9 billion by 2024, driven by solid volume growth over the three-year time horizon. Recognizing that commodity prices, including cotton, are currently at elevated levels, the lower end of our sales growth range incorporates assumptions on lower pricing should commodity costs move down significantly by 2024. We'll also be seeking to maintain operating margins in the 18%-20% range with a view that at higher volume growth levels, we might be running at the lower end of the margin range to support the growth with competitive pricing, but nonetheless delivering strong levels of operating income. To support growth and vertical integration, we're expecting investments in CapEx as a percentage of sales to be in the range of 6%-8% over this period.
Finally, at the same time as we're investing in our business, we're also planning to continue to return capital to shareholders through dividends and through share repurchases in line with our one to two times leverage framework. Overall, we think we have a complete plan to grow our business and deliver strong shareholder value and ESG performance, assuming a relatively stable environment. Finally, moving to my last slide, let me briefly summarize the key takeaways for today's investor event. First, we're moving forward on a strong foundation that we've built over decades, which has been reinforced by back to basics, which has made us less complex, more agile, and has provided us with a stronger margin profile. Second, we see favorable market dynamics. Our overall addressable market is growing and has expanded the product categories where we are well-positioned and where we can take market share.
Post-pandemic trends, including the ongoing impact of casualization, nearshoring, and other trends highlighted today, are further working in our favor. Third, while back to basics will always remain at our core, we have now turned our efforts towards our Gildan sustainable growth strategy with well-defined initiatives to drive organic top and bottom line growth, both over the near term and the longer term. By effectively leveraging and expanding our core competitive advantage as a low-cost, vertically integrated manufacturer and executing on projected capacity expansion plans, focusing on innovation and leading ESG practices, we can drive strong organic growth of 7%-10% over the next three years, profitability, effective asset utilization, and capital return, which we believe will deliver compelling shareholder value. Thank you for listening to our presentations. After a short five minute break, we will resume with the Q&A portion of the event.
Welcome back. We hope you found the presentations informative, and we are ready to kick off our Q&A period. To make it more dynamic, our coverage analysts have kindly accepted to take part in our virtual session. We understand some of you have experienced some connection issues earlier this morning, and we apologize for that, but we invite you to listen to our replay, which will be available a little bit later today on our website. Let's begin with our first question. I believe our first question comes from Patricia Baker at Scotiabank. Go ahead, Patricia.
Oh, yeah. Good afternoon or good morning, everyone. I haven't looked at my watch, so I don't know what time it is. One of the key messages today is that, you know, you really have identified a significant sales opportunity for Gildan, $2 billion plus over the next 4+ years, and you seem certainly very confident that you're going to be able to get there, so much so that you're investing, you know, stepping up the capital intensity to be able to address that opportunity. I was going to ask about, you know, what is driving that confidence, but I think Rhod's last slide probably addressed that. I'm gonna ask you two related things. Number one, what would get in the way of you being able to achieve that sales goal?
Secondly, one of the things that has advantaged Gildan over the years vis-à-vis the competition is just how much you've distanced yourself from the competition with the low cost manufacturing base, et cetera, et cetera, with the manufacturing footprint. I'm just curious if you could quantify it or speak to if we look out to 2024 and compare that to 2018, how much broader is the gap between you and your nearest competitor in addressing sales opportunities?
Well, I'll start with the first part of the question. Look, I think what can go wrong, I think we're pretty confident in our outlook. I think we're well-positioned. You know, we can't control the overall political, geopolitical you know, market. I think we can't really control the economics in the world. As far as what we can see, we're very confident that our plans are in place with all the opportunities we have of the casualization, nearshoring, and growth in the activewear segment in general, I think we're well-positioned. Combining that with our vertical integration that we think we've set ourselves apart, to the second part of your question, we're the only company that's really investing.
You know, from day one, if you wind back the clock in Gildan, that's been our DNA. We invested, you know, $ billions in vertically integrated manufacturing, and we're widening the gap. If you look in today's market, you know, there's really been a big change in the supply chain and I think, just supply chain disruption, mainly because of this displacement of capacity globally. We're probably in the market that's the tightest manufacturing supplied market in the last 30 years, ever since I've been working at Gildan. The market is extremely tight. There's a shortage of equipment, capacity, workforce. Gildan being vertically integrated allows us to take advantage of that opportunity.
We're pretty confident, and we are confident to not only apply ourselves by putting in the capacity that we've established to support the first $1 billion, but we're gonna make incremental investments to support the next wave of capital and sales.
Great. Thank you, Patricia. We're gonna move on to our next question. I believe our next question will come from Luke Hannan. No. Apologies. I believe it's Jim Duffy over at Stifel. Go ahead. Good morning, Jim.
Thank you. Good morning. I first wanna thank you for the thoughtful presentation and sharing insights about your business. I have some questions to try to get more clarity on your third-party branded business. What's the current size of the global lifestyle branded business, and how does that split between activewear and hosiery? Where do you see the opportunities for that? I'm also curious, current size of the private label business and opportunities that you see beyond underwear in the mass channel with private label. Then finally, and I suppose related, your commentary suggests sustainability is at an inflection point for consideration of choice of suppliers. Do you guys have any numbers or anecdotes to support this? Can you point to businesses that you've won based on your sustainability differentiation? Thanks.
Do you wanna answer this?
Morning, Jim. Great to see you. With respect to the size of our GLB business and our private brands business, we don't specifically break that out, but I would say we're very pleased with both of those businesses. It's now part of what we call national accounts, and we are very definitely growing with our global lifestyle brand partners. We can see it on the activewear side, we can see it on the hosiery side. Particularly if you think about nearshoring. Nearshoring is having a big impact, I think, on the way that people think about their supply chains, where they wanna manufacture, who they wanna manufacture with. Our GLB business is a very good business within our national accounts business, and it's growing.
On the private label side, also, that is a good business as well. We have a big underwear program, which you're aware of. Very pleased with that. Our underwear business has been very strong over the last few years, as we talked about. These are our drivers within our national accounts that we think on a go-forward basis are going to allow us to drive the growth rates that we've talked about. Overall, we don't break it out, but again, we're very pleased with this business.
Maybe you look at the overall market, which is, you know, $11 billion split in half. I would say today we have a little larger share in the distributor side of the market versus the national account, and that's really a growth area as we go forward into the future. Then maybe, Peter, you wanna answer the other question?
Well, on the sustainability side, given our Western Hemisphere supply chain setup that we've had for a number of years, we, you know, we think that's a great growth opportunity for us, an additional opportunity, especially now as you're seeing more nearshoring and more of concerns in terms of, for example, like forced labor coming from China, et cetera. I think it's another opportunity that we can leverage and continue to grow our business with.
Peter, have you seen any instances where you've won business based on your sustainability differentiation or that has been the differentiating factor that's tipped the balance in your favor?
Well, you know what it is, maybe you have to look at it as a long-term strategy, right? I mean, today, you know, sustainability may not be at the top of the mind for a 65-year-old, but you leave your lights on with an eight year-old, and they'll give you shit , really, at the end of the day. Excuse the expression. You know, I think that as we go into the future and we look at building our platform, we're here to build something that's longer term. Part of our whole brand and DNA and value creation is gonna be built into the DNA of the company.
Thank you.
Thank you, Glenn. Thank you, Jim. We're gonna turn now to Luke Hannan with a question from Canaccord Genuity. Good morning, Luke. Go ahead with your question.
Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Hope you can hear me okay. I just wanted a little bit more clarity on what exactly is meant by increasing control over the yarn supply chain in Bangladesh. Does that mean the development of yarn spinning facilities similar to what you have in Central America right now? I guess related to that, is the longer-term view of what your Bangladesh footprint will look like. Is it supposed to be similar in nature to what you have in Central America? Are you looking to sort of take a different approach with how these facilities will eventually be set up and interconnected down the road?
Well, our objective in Bangladesh is similar to our same objective we've set forth in North America, is to be vertically integrated. We think that that's a significant cost advantage, and also allows us to control our own destiny. I mean, those are the two main reasons. Just putting back the clock today, if you look at what I said earlier, is that today you cannot buy yarn on the market. I mean, this is the tightest yarn supply market in history that I've been around for 40 years. You know, making sure that as we build our supply chain and manage our own control of our supply, I think is relatively important and also ultimately reduces our overall cost structure.
We plan in part of our capital investment of the 6%-8%, you know, we plan to invest in vertically integrated yarn in Bangladesh. As far as the overall complexity of our supply chain, you know, we're gonna have a very good diversification of how we look at our supply chain. We have, you know, we're gonna have really three geographical textile hubs. We have Central America, which is mainly in Honduras. We have the Dominican Republic, and we have Bangladesh. As we move forward, we're gonna be well diversified in our product portfolio between what we make open end, ring spin, and fleece to have a geographical split between 50% of the volumes of each one of those categories being produced in other geographical countries.
To answer the question, there's really gonna be no differentiation between Bangladesh and how we look at it to support our overall supply chain.
Thanks, Glenn.
Great. Thanks for your question, Luke. Back to our chat question, we're getting some interest on the nearshoring opportunity. Can you give us a bit more detail on the impact of nearshoring on your sales growth target, and how significant of a tailwind is nearshoring, and have you already seen new contracts as a result of the 2021 supply chain disruption?
We'll let Chuck handle that, please.
Okay. Thank you, Glenn, and thank you for the question. I mean, we're having a lot of positive conversations that I mentioned during the presentation. We really don't wanna be specific to any particular company, but overall, we're getting interest from many of our national accounts. You know, research is showing about two-thirds of organizations are actively investing in trying to regionalize their supplier base, try to reduce risk and get closer to their customers. Over 85% of fashion companies are saying they're gonna actively explore new sourcing opportunities throughout 2023. You know, particularly where we could serve maybe as an alternative to China or other Asian countries. You know, nearshoring's attractive, but also sourcing companies that can look to have diversified geographies.
You know, between us having DR, Honduras, and also having Bangladesh, we can provide speed and vertical integration, low cost scale, but still reduce the risk and that comes with supply chain.
Great. Thank you, Chuck. One more question from our chat, this time on our product categories. On the fleece business, can you add additional color, such as what are the key bottlenecks to MVS yarn supply? What's your market share in fleece, as well, as a sub-question?
Well, for us, there's really today no real big bottleneck in MVS. I think that. You know, we have the largest MVS spinning plant in North America. The second largest facility was owned by Frontier, which we just purchased. So we have ample capacity to be able to support our fleece initiatives as we go forward. You know, fleece basically is a large market. We've been growing at a steady rate, you know, double digit basically over the last couple of years. I think we're well-poised to continue growth in fleece as the market trends continue to support casual lifestyle. We're well positioned to support it in our textile capacities.
I think that's also one of the big benefits, I think, that we bring to the table, is that, you know, fleece is not like T-shirts because it takes a lot more capacity in your textile operations to support fleece sales. You know, with our initial capacity we got coming online as well as our future capacity, we're well positioned to continue to take opportunity and drive fleece market share.
Great. Turning back to our virtual room again, we have Sabahat Khan from RBC Capital Markets, who's with us. Good morning, Saba.
Hey, good morning. Just a question, I guess, on the fashion basic side. I think that was a category you were quite focused on before the pandemic. Can you maybe provide some color on what the growth rate in that market is? How you're doing in that market, and then maybe your market share, where it stands today, in that category?
Okay. I'll let Chuck take that one.
You know, it's a good question. I mean, we are focused on the opportunities in our ring spun garments, and fleece are probably the two biggest opportunities. As I mentioned before, you know, through the presentation, we think open-end's gonna continue, you know, to be a lot of volume, and the volume's gonna grow, especially with pricing where it is. But we definitely are focusing on that ring spun product, and we've launched, you know, new products along the way. And ring spun now represents about 50% of the market in dollars. As I mentioned before, it's not quite there in volume, but it is 50% of the market from a dollars perspective. So, you know, we're coming out with more and more ring spun product.
We're kinda using our large scale, you know, assortment of colors and sizes to try to attack that market. We think we can continue to grow there. With the capacity expansions we've talked about, that Glenn and Israel and the other rest of the team have talked about, we're gonna be able to continue to grow in that area, especially bringing on Bangladesh. We mentioned that's gonna be a profitable area for us to be able to make additional ring spun products. We're attractively priced. As I talked, we're priced anywhere from 40% or so below our competition. We think we're gonna continue to gain share in the market.
Maybe just add something to that, is that in terms of where we're going, you know, we're gonna run phase one of Bangladesh and then phase two of Bangladesh. All of our products in Bangladesh are gonna be geared to make ring spun products. In other words, we're bringing on $1 billion worth of sales opportunity, which will all be relevant to support our ring spun sales. You know, that's where we're growing our capacity. At the same time, you know, fleece is a growing product line as well. We're to concentrate our North American facilities to support our fleece growth, and we're to concentrate our Bangladeshi facilities to support our ring spun growth. Both areas we have, we'll be able to support substantially as we go forward in the future.
Thanks, Chuck and Dan.
Thank you.
Thank you, Saba. Next up in our virtual room, we have Paul Lejuez. Good morning, Paul. You may go ahead with your question.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for the time, guys. I just wanted a couple questions just to connect a couple of dots from things that were said during the presentation. You put up a slide that showed some of your price gaps looking pretty wide relative to some of your competitors. First question is, I guess, you know, what is it that would drive someone to go to a competitor as opposed to you guys. Just given that those price gaps did seem pretty wide. You know, Rhod also mentioned, you know, perhaps being willing to sacrifice some gross margin to drive top line. I'm curious if when you make that comment, if that means to go above and beyond the price gaps that you've, you know, kind of established today.
Would you look to take further price? I'm just trying to connect the dots between your already you know, existing large price gaps and the comments that you'd be willing to maybe sacrifice some gross margin to take further top line share. Again, the other question is just what would make someone go to one of your competitors, just given that the price gaps do seem wide? Thanks.
Maybe one thing to understand a little bit about price is that, you know, we sell an open-end T-shirt for $2.25. We sell a ring spun shirt for $2.90. Just throwing that out there. When the consumer buys one of our products, they pay $25. Along the way, it goes from us to the distributor to printer, to printer to a third party, then ultimately gets sold to a consumer. Along the way, what happens when there's price pressure and people move up price, like you see today in a lot of the fashion shirts are moving up, you know, quite high, in price points. People don't necessarily change the end user price, so they look basically for alternatives.
You look either to buy a less expensive ring-spun shirt, or maybe they look to go back to an open-end shirt because it's a more popular price. I mean, price is a big factor, I think, in the overall scheme of the dynamics of the market. I think that's the first point. I think we're well positioned in all those fronts to gain market share. It's one of the reasons why we're pretty excited. We've got, you know, the lowest priced open-end shirts. We've got the lowest priced ring-spun shirts, and at the same time we're delivering pretty good returns on capital. I think we're well positioned. Then on the other side of the curve, I think that the competitors in the marketplace aren't vertically integrated.
They don't have the type of cost structure we have, and they're having huge problems with their supply chain. I think we're in a unique position to sort of drive share as we go forward. Price is a balancing act for us, right? I mean, we need to make sure that we deliver the returns, and that's why we set, you know, target margins basically of 18%-20%. You know, obviously our goal is to create shareholder value, so if we can get at the higher end of that range or better, we'll do that, but we'll make sure that at the same time we hit our top line sales objectives between 7% and 10%.
Balancing all these things with price as we move forward into the future, will really drive what we think is the best long-term shareholder value.
Great. Thanks for your question, Paul. Did you wanna follow up on that? Go ahead.
I'm just gonna ask what you're seeing in terms of others moving price at this point. You know, obviously everybody's got some pressures out there from a supply chain, raw materials perspective. Are you already seeing competitors make moves on the pricing side?
Look, we've seen significant price increases in the market. I mean, the gap, you know, fashion, basic T-shirts we're selling or open-end T-shirts we're selling at $2 and ring spun shirts we're selling at $3. You know, our open end today is $2.25, and, you know, the ring spun shirts are $4.25 from our competitors. The gap is completely widened tremendously. I think that as we go forward into the future, there's a lot more cost pressure in the market than there was in the last six months that's going to be in the next twelve months.
I mean, there's a huge wave of inflation happening from obviously cotton, you can see the price of cotton today, to the supply disruption, freight, oil, all these things are creating huge inflation, which is creating really, to be honest with you, opportunity for us. We'll continue to navigate, which we've done fantastically, to manage our cost structure and navigate through any type of inflationary environment. We'll use this time to gain market share and really develop our growth strategy. That's why we're so confident in our Gildan Sustainable Growth Plan.
Thank you.
Thanks, Paul. Next in line, we have Chris Li at Desjardins. Good morning, Chris.
Good morning, everyone, and thanks for putting this together. It's very helpful. I guess the first question is, you know, obviously the world has changed a lot since your Q4 earnings call a month ago. Glenn, can you give us just an update on what you're seeing just quarter to date, trends in terms of POS demand and distributor inventory position? Are you seeing any notable impact from the high inflation and from what and all the geopolitical uncertainties?
Well, I mean, you know, it was only a month ago, so not a lot has changed. I mean, I think our POS is still chugging along like it was, you know, at that quarter end or during our announcement at the end of February. You know, market is still very tight. I mean, there's still a shortage of supply. You know, there's definitely, like I said earlier, there's definitely a wave of inflation coming. I mean, you know, there is price, you know, forecasted in our sales revenues this year. As we go forward, if, you know, things continue to escalate, I mean, there's definitely gonna be continued, you know, inflation. I think that's gonna make us more relevant in the overall market and create opportunities for us.
We're pretty agnostic of that. Nevertheless, we need to manage through as we go forward.
Maybe one thing I'd just also add, Chris, just to help with a little bit of the color. I mean, we talked about the differentiation between the international markets and the North American market, and the North American market really has been the, you know, the core driver, and we see continuing to be the core driver. International has been weak, we've talked about that and remains weak. You know, I think what's interesting about our story is that we have a lot of focus in North America, and North America clearly is the engine, you know, going forward for, you know, whatever time frame you're thinking about. You know, we really clearly are working hard to take full advantage of that. I think that's.
There definitely is uncertainty out there, but I think what we're very happy about is our positioning, where we sell into, where our capacity is, you know, our whole focus, I would say, over the next, whatever you wanna call it, 12, 18, 24 months, I think we're in a great spot.
That's helpful. Maybe if we do get into economic slowdown in the U.S. later this year, do you expect the impact to be perhaps less significant than previous cycles because of the pent-up demand that's gonna mitigate whatever softness you may see in the corporate promotion channels or other traditional channels?
I think we'll be less impacted because of our competitive positioning, to be honest with you. You know, that's gonna drive, I think, our opportunity. I think that, you know, nearshoring is gonna be a big factor still. People are gonna, you know, if they're worried about their economics, they're gonna continue to move product closer to home, which we'll again be a beneficiary of that. You know, look, we can never tell the future, but I think that we're well positioned. You know, if there is a downturn, I mean, you know, our cost structure is right, our pricing is right, and we have the capacity in the right place. I mean, all those things I think are gonna give us a competitive advantage.
Great. Thank you, and all the best.
Thank you.
Great. Thanks for your question, Chris. Circling back to our chat, we have a question on our customer base. Our customer base, it's broken down between distributors and national accounts. Can you talk about the difference in doing business between these two groups? What do they have in common? And maybe some color in terms of how margin profiles compare.
I'll let Chuck talk about the customers, and then Rhod will discuss the margin profile.
Sounds good. Chuck?
Okay. All right. Thank you. Yeah, from an account perspective, as I talked a little bit about how they go to market, I mean, you know, the distributors we're out of pick to the piece, as Glenn talked before. When we went back to basics, you know, we're out of the pick to the piece. Somewhat from a perspective of we ship all cases, it's not a big difference. They're both B2B businesses, from that perspective, and it's just a little bit of how it goes to market. Distributors will service small and large accounts versus the, you know, national accounts being more directly to servicing, you know, directly to that retailer or directly to a large printer that then services a retailer.
Again, they're both B2B accounts, and have very similar way that we go to the account.
On the margin side, I would say also there's no difference, right? When you look at effectively, you know, how we're set up, what our business model is, how we produce goods, the type of goods that go into distributor channel, national account. I mean, we may have underwear, we may have hosiery going into the national account, but we have activewear going into this channel. Effectively, we're set up so everything delivers similar gross margin overall and similar SG&A, right? Because you know, we're trying to work one very good, very strong business model into these end markets and these end channels.
On a go-forward basis, we don't expect overall to see different margin profile for national accounts versus distributors, same margin profile, and obviously we'll be running forward against our 18%-20% operating margin target.
Maybe just add one more thing. It's the same product portfolio as well. The same item that we'd sell to a distributor, we sell to a national account, sometimes with our label, but also even if we apply somebody else's label, it's our product just with their label. Even the products are consistent within the different channels in which we sell.
Okay. Taking one more question from our chat, on again, on circling back on fleece and our pricing. Could you envision down the road needing to price your fleece at a discount similar to your T-shirts in order to grow volumes and take share? Glenn?
Well, I think that we're well-positioned in fleece, you know, with the capacity that we have coming on. Fleece is not a product like T-shirts. It takes a lot more capital, infrastructure, to be able to support the growth of fleece. There's very few people in our industry today that actually are able to really add a significant amount of capital in this hemisphere to capitalize on the opportunity. You know, we're well-positioned, you know, with the acquisition of Frontier, we've now secured all of our yarn supply to more than add about 50% revenue to our fleece sales. We're feeling very confident that we can fill that capacity in the foreseeable future.
Okay. Turning again to our virtual room. Next up, we have Stephen MacLeod from BMO. Good morning, Stephen. Oh. Okay.
I'm just gonna-
I'm afraid we don't have audio. We'll give it a second, and if not, we'll go on to Brian. Stephen, can you hear us? We unfortunately can't hear your feed. We're gonna circle back to you in a moment, and let's try to move on to Brian Morrison at TD Securities. Good morning, Brian.
Yeah, good morning. Can you hear me all right?
Go ahead. Yes. Very good.
All right. Great. Yeah. Thank you very much for the presentation. Just in terms of Bangladesh, I understand the $1 billion ring-spun opportunity. You talked about previous presentations. It could be private label, it could go into fashion basics, it could go into international. You've got the capacity coming online beginning of 2023. What will be the initial products? What will be the initial target markets? And maybe just explain in detail what is the cost advantage of Bangladesh relative to your current Central American facility?
Well, Bangladesh is gonna support all aspects of our business. I mean, obviously, it's gonna support our international sales. We can ship from Bangladesh, you know, duty-free into China, India, Japan, Australia, Europe, Canada. There are duties going back into the United States on products. Bangladesh has a unique cost structure in terms of being able to produce ring-spun products, I think at a much more competitive. The thing is, it's also a question of the scale and size of the facilities you put in, too. I think the average size plant in Bangladesh today is relatively small. I mean, we're building, you know, Rio Nance type facilities there that are gonna be vertically integrated from yarn to sewn product out the door.
If you take into account, you know, the energy costs in Bangladesh, the labor costs in Bangladesh, and you combine all those, we think it's a viable opportunity for us to bring product not only to our international markets, but also back into this hemisphere at a very competitive cost structure. The other thing I think which is really important is that the reason why, you know, there hasn't been ring-spun yarn spinning in this hemisphere is because it's very labor intensive. The difference between open-end spinning and ring-spun spinning is that open-end is very automated, doesn't have a lot of labor, and ring-spun is much more labor-intensive product. Where labor becomes a factor, you know, ring-spun in lower cost countries in terms of labor becomes an advantage.
Bangladesh is a viable opportunity for us. It's gonna support not just our international sales, but as well it will support the next wave of our growth in ring-spun T-shirts.
Okay. Thank you. Glenn, Brian, did you wanna follow up on that or?
I guess if I can have a follow-up question.
Sure.
Just on fleece. I didn't really realize the competitive environment and the pricing dynamic in fleece. Are you able to give us any sense of what your current market share is of that $4 billion market? I guess the reason why I ask is because you've got such a big advantage now with the acquisition of Frontier and the MVS market. What would be your target market share? Any detail on that front would be helpful.
Well, we don't give out our market share, but I can tell you we've grown double digits in fleece now for the last three, four years. I mean, it's really been the engine driving. It's the fastest growing category in our product line. Obviously, with the acquisition of Frontier and the capacity that we have going on, because another thing is not just the yarn capacity, but we also significantly increased our textile capacity in Central America, and a lot of that capacity will be utilized to support the fleece initiative we have, which we're currently in the process of ramping up. We're making a lot of fleece today. It's a big opportunity. You know, it's a big part of our business.
Thanks very much, Glenn.
Yeah.
Thanks. Okay, so we're moving on to Mark Petrie from CIBC. I believe he's next in our virtual room. Good morning, Mark.
Hey, good morning. I just wanna follow up, I guess, on the topic of Bangladesh. Glenn, maybe you could just help me understand maybe a little bit better the actual customer mix that you expect out of that facility, how much of it will be into Asia versus Europe, and then what does the customer base actually look like versus your North America business?
Well, I think you have to look at it as one cohesive capacity globally for us, and that's how we're treating it. We're diagnostic really from that perspective. I mean, we ship products from Bangladesh, and we have a, you know, big distribution center there today, which we're in the process of expanding. We can ship goods to China, India, Japan, Australia, U.S., Europe. Regardless of where they go, I mean, we're just gonna use the platform as part of our whole manufacturing organization and, you know, decide where we need product and where it's best suited at the time.
Okay. Thanks. Yeah, understood. I guess my main question is just with regards to your SKU base. Sounds like you are, you know, going about adding a fair number of additional SKUs. Just wondering if you can help sort of quantify that and put it into context. Obviously, understanding that one of the key levers of back to basics was SKU simplification. Just help us sort of put that into context and kinda square that up.
Well, I'll let Chuck answer that, but he's got a mandate. For every one he adds, he's gotta take one out, but he can go from there.
Yeah. Thanks, Mark, for the question. Yeah, no, we're staying very focused. I mean, you know, we're trying to look within the line consistently and say, "Okay, you know, where do we need to add? Where do we need to round things out?" Also at the same time, where do things need to come out? I don't see us, you know, growing back into the SKU proliferation we had before. A lot of that I mentioned in my comments before was in socks or retail or customer specific items, which we've gone completely away from.
We're gonna be able to focus, for example, on American Apparel and a few conscious core items we talked about, a few iconic styles, but really staying focused and making sure that that SKU count doesn't leak back in and we don't create that complexity again. The discipline to bring it out now is the discipline to keep it out, but still launch products that we need to service the market. I don't think we anticipate a large growth in the SKU base, especially also we're taking the line and making it kind of global. As I mentioned, we've had some SKUs in Europe that we didn't have in the States or vice versa, and now saying, "Okay, we don't need duplicate in different places.
We're gonna make this interchangeable, and we'll have the ability to move it around, so we really can live in that SKU base and still launch the products I think we need to launch.
That's very helpful. Thanks very much.
Thank you, Mark. Okay, taking a question from our chat on manufacturing. Prior to your acquisition of Frontier, what proportion of their manufacturing capacity was used to service non-Gildan textile customers? Do you expect to repatriate that capacity for exclusive use by Gildan?
Well, I think when we announced the acquisition back in February or January now, we were basically purchasing about a third of the overall capacity of Frontier. What we said then was that we are working through the commitments that they had for the first half of the year. Then as we move into the second half of this year, all the yarn from Frontier will be available for our use and will help us to ramp up during the course of this year, and we will continue to build our own textile facilities utilizing that yarn, and put in place that $500 million worth of capacity we had in Central America will be fully ramped up by the end of 2022 with the utilization of the Frontier yarn.
Okay. Thank you, Glenn. We're going back to our virtual room with Vishal Shreedhar from National Bank Financial. Good morning, Vishal.
Hi, Gildan, Team Gildan. Thanks for taking my questions, and thank you for preparing this event for all of us. You know, I know management has made a case that it believes it has strong tailwinds for growth, and that's certainly been the case over the last several quarters. The world is uncertain and seemingly you know there's geopolitical events coming out from all angles. With respect to these growth plans and the substantial capacity investment and dollars, even percentage-wise, dollar-wise, that Gildan aims to fill over the next few years, let's say that there's a scenario where you can't fill that to capacity. What happens to margins?
What happens to Gildan with respect to its actions on what it has to do? Would it reduce price? Would it shutter the capacity? Also, do you have line of sight when you put on these new facilities with customers indicating that they've pre-bought or that they're going to be there, maybe retail customers, in terms of that capacity? Any color is appreciated. Thank you.
Okay. Well, maybe Rhodri will answer part of the question. I'll just tell you, look it, we've been through many recessions and instability between. I mean, just take last year, how we navigated through COVID, two hurricanes. I mean, you can throw anything at us, and we're good to go, right? I mean, look, we feel that our company is well-positioned. You know, our cost structure is such that, we can afford to shutter capacity if we need be, and still get returns. I mean, if we took two plants out, for example, you know, the other plants are still gonna be operating obviously at a reasonable cost structure.
We won't have SG&A leverage, et cetera, but you know, I think that we're well-positioned, you know, to weather any type of, I think, major financial instability, as we've proven through the whole COVID situation. You wanna add anything to that?
No, I very much agree with that. If you look at Gildan, we have a very, I would say, flexible cost structure. If you look at the, you know, the amount of fixed versus variable, we do have a lot of variable. I think the thing you have to remember about capacity is, if you don't have the capacity, you don't have the product, you don't have the availability. The actual returns you get for having the product in the marketplace when it's required effectively are high. When you look at the potential downside scenario, where you do get into a situation where you don't need the capacity, we can adjust our cost structure to deal with that because, again, this is a, this is really a very flexible business.
We don't have take or pay input contracts effectively that we have to deal with, and we've proven that we can adjust it. I think what's most important really is just staying focused, running the supply chain very efficiently, having that capacity there to take advantage of the availability. While, yes, there's uncertainty and there could be hiccups as we go forward, we're obviously optimistic over the long term, and we feel very definitely we have the management team, the people, the experience to be able to run through this and take full advantage of the way that things turn out.
Okay, am I permitted a follow-up?
Yeah, you may. Go ahead, Vishal. No problem.
Yeah. Thank you. With respect to this substantial capacity coming online, does Gildan have to reduce its prices lower than it otherwise would have had to and perhaps leave money on the table for a little bit in order to fill that capacity? It's such a large number that's coming online over the next few years, and then you have line of sight after this plan as well. Just wondering what management has to do to get that capacity filled.
Okay. Well, you know, I think two things. I think one is that it seems like a lot of capacity, but a lot of it, you know, is gonna be the opportunities, not necessarily just taking share. You know, the market's growing. I mean, I think that's the point you need to look at. You know, we've got pretty conservative estimates of the market growth, but, you know, to be honest with you, I think that the market's gonna grow even quicker. You know, onshoring is becoming a major factor. I mean, it hasn't even started yet. I mean, if you look at the wave of people looking to produce goods in this hemisphere, it's unbelievable. I think that, you know, we're well-positioned, and I think that, you know, as the market grows, we need, you know, the market will grow.
We may take a little bit of share. Ultimately, the market growth will help drive and utilize the capacity that we've got coming online. Don't forget, part of that capacity will ultimately be shifted towards our international markets as well. Although they're not performing today, you know, as we move on to the future, Bangladesh One, Bangladesh Two, we know some of that will be deviated to international growth. We feel comfortable. Look it, we have the capability of, you know, lowering prices and taking share, but our objective, which we stated, is deliver top line growth and bottom line growth. Operating margins of 18%-20% and top line of, you know, 7%-10% on and as we go forward. You know, we're gonna balance those two things.
You know, we'll use price where we need to, but keeping in mind that we're gonna maintain the levels of return and create shareholder value along the way. I think it's all this will work together as we move into the future.
Thank you.
Thank you, Vishal. Our next question comes from David Swartz at Morningstar. Good morning, David.
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question, and thanks for the presentation this morning. When you look out further in time past 2024, after you have completed your Bangladesh build-out and the other supply chain improvements that you discussed today, what gives you a confidence that you can maintain the pricing that you will need to get to those 18%-20% operating margins that you've discussed? You know, right now, you showed the pricing gaps that you have in the slide in the discussion after Paul's question. What gives you confidence that you can maintain, you know, those pricing gaps over competition, rather than passing on the cost savings in your production to the consumer?
Well, it's obviously our choice, right? You know, I think if you look into the future, we're widening the gap on our cost structure. We're making the investments. We're investing in vertical integration, capacity expansion. I mean, there's nobody in our universe that's spending capital to support the low-cost manufacturing. You know, our gap is widening. Now the question is that, you know, can we actually widen the gap? Does the 18%-20% become larger? I think that's maybe a different way of looking at it versus, I think, you know, having to give up on our operating margin. Maybe.
No, I would agree with that very definitely. If you look at, effectively, as Glenn said, you really have to look very hard and far to find somebody who has the same business, is as focused on the same business model, as we are. We're not making the investments, are not as vertically integrated, are not as, focused on SG&A. You know, don't underestimate the, effectively the strength of our business model, because the types of products that we produce, the markets that we focus on, we can really drive that operating leverage. You know, I think a lot of the focus on the operating margin, I think, is, there's a lot of focus on the gross margin, rightly so. There's also effectively the ability for us to continue to leverage.
You know, last year, as we said, we did 10.7% of SG&A, but we're gonna continue to work it as we go forward. So it's a complete model, really. You know, I would say we're really excited about it because, again, we have the availability, we have the product. If you look at this market, people are after price, they're after availability, they're after product. All of these things drives it, and that's really what we're making sure will be in place as we go forward.
Where's the major cost savings from the new production? You know, what in your opinion is the real efficiency gain that you expect will be permanent and allow for that permanent cost savings?
Vertical integration reduces our yarn. We repurposed all of our textile equipment in Mexico to Central America and added $500 million of revenue in the same four walls. That's gonna be a reduction. You know, as we bring on our Bangladeshi facilities and the scale and size that they are will be a reduction. What Rhod said, you know, leveraging our SG&A is gonna be definitely a cost reduction for us. I mean, we've seen a huge amount of SG&A reduction, but you understand, you know, half of our SG&A is fixed and half is variable. As we continue to grow in the future, we don't need more SG&A. We need more distribution, but we don't need more people. We have SG&A leverage.
All of these things together, I think, allow us to, you know, continue building on our cost structure.
All right. Thank you very much.
Maybe one last point is that this is something that's not new to us. This is something we've done from day one. If you go back in time, you know, what made Gildan, what drew or grew our market share and what made us the company we are today was taking, you know, is always reinvesting our capital into our business and driving, you know, organic and top-line sales.
Great. Super. Thanks, Glenn, and thank you, David. I'm glad Stephen MacLeod from BMO was able to send us his question through the chat. A broader question. Of the favorable trends you've identified in the activewear market, casualization, creator economy, private brands, nearshoring, ESG, which have been most prevalent through the pandemic and which of these do you expect to be the biggest driver for you outperforming the 5%-7% industry growth rates?
Chuck?
No, thank you, Stephen, for the question. Thanks for being able to send it through chat. No, we feel good about the trends, and they have played largely in our favor, as you said. I think one of the largest tailwinds to come probably, as Glenn mentioned earlier, is probably continued to be the nearshoring where we're gonna gain beyond the market, right? You've talked about all the ones that are gaining the market, the creator economy, the customization, the casualization, all those things are growing the market. The nearshoring is not really growing the market, but that's growing our opportunity.
We think we can continue to pace the market with all those other things and the nearshoring, and that's the reason we think the market will be 5%-7%, that we'll go 7%-10% because, you know, we talked about our EZ Print technology and all the things that we're doing to make sure we're servicing that creator economy and servicing digital print. We'll service those things in the market. At the same time, we'll work on the nearshoring opportunities where many of the brands and the retailers and so forth that we're working with are coming to us looking for additional volume. I think that's the way that we think we can outpace the market.
Thank you, Chuck. We're gonna give our final. I think we have time for one more question. The final question is coming from Jay Sole at UBS. Good morning, Jay.
Can you hear me?
Yes, we can.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Super. Thanks for taking my question. I guess, you know, really terrific presentation today. A lot of interesting information shared. Glenn, I'd love to understand a little bit more about the international opportunity. You know, how do you see the market evolution there in terms of the, you know, how in North America, you work through distributors, you work through major retailers, brands. Do you see a similar structure there, or does some of it have to be created? Like, how do you evaluate the competition in international markets relative to the competition that you face here in North America?
I would say it's the same success factors as we have in international markets as in our North American market, but I'll let Chuck go through with a little bit more detail.
No, you know, pre-COVID, I would say growth in the international market was running some years double digits, but really one of the biggest things, Jay, hurting us there was capacity. As we bring on Bangladesh, that's gonna help us solve some of the capacity issues, because then we have capacity, as Glenn talked about before, that'll service international and come back to North America. That's gonna help us from that perspective. Obviously, these markets were hit by the pandemic hard and are probably lagging recovery a bit from North America. Again, we think over the time horizon coming, you know, the recovery's coming, we've gotta get past some of the geopolitical things that are happening. As that happens, I think we have a strong distributor-based business.
You know, we're gonna look also, as Glenn mentioned before, taking structurally, looking at some of the national account type business. We have some of our what I'll call our national account business in the U.S., where those partners are already talking to us about here wanting to know what is our opportunity there? What can we supply there? There's no real structural change to that market, nothing special we've gotta do. We're just gonna continue to focus on expanding it out, working with many of the similar national account partners there and kinda building out that structure as well.
Thank you, Chuck. Jay, did you wanna follow up on that?
No. I think that the only other question I wanted to ask was separately about M&A. You know, you mentioned it's an opportunity, something that would be part of the capital allocation consideration set. Can you maybe just tell us a little bit more about what kind of acquisitions you might be interested in?
You wanna go?
Well, Jay, if you look at M&A, we've done a lot of M&A over the years, right? If you go back and, you know, a lot of back to basics was about really addressing, you know, some of that M&A that we'd done in the past. But I think on a go-forward basis, when we think about M&A, we're looking at M&A that really allows us to drive organic growth on a go-forward basis. So what we talked about is potentially could help us on vertical integration. Frontier is a great example of that. Or could help us from a capacity perspective. We've done that before as well on the textile front.
The M&A that we're really focusing on is M&A that really fits within our business model, which really is to drive organic growth, driven obviously by capacity expansion, innovation, and ESG. That's the way we'll be thinking about it. As I said in the remarks of my presentation, products, brands, we don't need. You know, we're very focused on delivering this growth strategy, and M&A might be able to help us accelerate or might help a little bit here and there, but it'll all be in the manufacturing side, and it'll really build on our strengths.
Understood. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jay. We've covered a lot of territory. That concludes our event for today. On behalf of the entire Gildan team, we'd like to thank you for your interest and your support. We encourage you to reach out for any additional or outstanding questions. To everyone, enjoy your day.
Thank you.
Thank you, Glenn.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, guys. Thank you.
Bye.
Thank you.
Thank you, guys.