If you participate in today's meeting and disclose personal information, you will be deemed to consent to the recording, transfer, and use of same. If you disclose personal information of another person in today's meeting, you will be deemed to represent and warrant to Computershare and the corporation that you first obtained all required consent for the disclosure, recording, transfer, and use of such personal information from all appropriate persons before your disclosure. You can submit questions or comments at any time by clicking on the Q&A icon. We'll have a question-and-answer period at the end of the meeting. It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to the Chair of the Board, Mr. Donald Berg. Acting as Chair of the meeting. Mr. Berg, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Gildan Activewear annual shareholders meeting. My name is Donald Berg, and I am Chair of the Board. I am joined today by Glenn Chamandy, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Rod Harries, our Executive Vice President, Chief Financial and Administrative Officer, and Michelle Taylor, our General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. This meeting is being held in a virtual format. We are confident that hosting a virtual meeting will enable greater participation by our shareholders. All shareholders, regardless of their geographic location, have an equal opportunity to participate in this meeting via the live audio webcast and engage with the board and management of the company. You will have the opportunity to ask questions and vote on a number of important matters, and we encourage all shareholders to participate in the meeting.
We will begin by conducting the official business of the meeting. After the official business is completed, Glenn and Rod will address shareholders concerning the company's results and business plans. After that, we will answer any questions submitted during the meeting. The business of the meeting will be conducted in English. However, this meeting is being simultaneously translated into French via the live audio webcast. You may choose between English or French on the webcast main landing page. You may, of course, ask questions in either English or French. I will now call the meeting to order, and will ask Michelle Taylor to act as secretary of the meeting and to take us through certain procedures for the meeting.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
As this meeting is being held virtually through live audio webcast, we wanted to go over a few items to ensure the orderly conduct of the meeting. Only registered holders of common shares of record as of March 8, 2022 who received a control number prior to this meeting, or their duly appointed proxy holders who registered with our transfer agent and obtained an invite code prior to this meeting, are permitted to participate, ask questions, and vote at this meeting. All other proxy holders are entitled to join the meeting as guests. Registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who have already voted are not required to vote again unless they wish to change their vote.
Registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders who wish to communicate with the members of the management team and the board or with each other or who wish to ask a question in respect of a motion may do so using the instant messaging service on the virtual meeting platform. When asking a question, we would ask that you please indicate your name, the entity you represent, if any, and confirm that you are a registered shareholder or a duly appointed proxy holder. Questions will generally be received shortly after they are submitted, but will only be addressed during the question period at the end of the meeting. Provided, however, that questions that relate to procedural matters or to motions before the meeting may be addressed during the meeting.
Questions or comments containing inappropriate language or that are otherwise disruptive to the orderly conduct of the meeting for all shareholders will not be answered. Questions which were already answered or that are redundant or repetitive will not be answered either. We would also like to advise you that today's votes are on, one, the election of the directors, two, the advisory resolution on the company's approach to executive compensation, and three, the appointment of the auditors, will be conducted by a single electronic ballot. Registered shareholders and duly appointed proxy holders will be asked to vote on each item of business after all the items of business have been presented. The chair will move all motions, and no motion will need to be seconded. When you are asked to vote, you will receive a message on the virtual meeting platform requesting you to register your vote.
You will only have a certain amount of time to do so. I would also like to draw your attention to the text on the current slide and to 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 you to the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements contained in our management discussion and analysis for the 2021 fiscal year, which is available on SEDAR, EDGAR, and the Gildan websites.
Thank you, Michelle. I now appoint Computershare Investor Services as scrutineer to report on the number of common shares represented at this meeting and later to report on the voting results. The scrutineer has already provided me with their report on attendance at the meeting, and it shows a quorum has been reached. I therefore declare the meeting regularly constituted for the transaction of such business as may properly be brought before it. I now present to the meeting the consolidated financial statements of the company for the fiscal year ended January second, two thousand twenty-two, and the auditor's report thereon. Copies of such documents have been made available through notice and access to our shareholders.
In 2021, Gildan successfully managed the continuing effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the associated supply chain disruptions by leveraging its back to basics strategy in a year that showcased the benefits of our vertically integrated manufacturing model and delivered record level of revenue, earnings, and free cash flow. Having returned the business to a position of strength, the leadership team is now implementing the Gildan sustainable growth strategy to position the company to thrive in the years ahead. We will now proceed with the election of the directors. The board has determined that 11 persons should be elected as directors of the company and has proposed 11 candidates to hold such office for the ensuing year. In addition to Glenn Chamandy and myself, nine independent and highly qualified individuals are being proposed for election as directors.
Their biographies are included in the company's management information circular made available to our shareholders. Each of the nominees has expressed a desire to serve as a director of your company. I nominate each of the following persons for election as a director of the company to hold office until the close of the next annual meeting of the shareholders, or until his or her successors are duly elected or appointed. The nominees are Glenn Chamandy, Maryse Bertrand, Dhaval Buch, Marc Caira, Shirley Cunningham, Russell Goodman, Charles M. Herington, Luc Jobin, Craig A. Leavitt, Anne Martin-Vachon, and myself, Donald C. Berg. As mentioned at the beginning of this meeting, voting today will be conducted by a single electronic ballot after all items of business have been presented.
We will therefore continue with the next item of business on the agenda, and you will be prompted to vote on the election of each director and all other matters to be voted upon shortly after that. The next item of business is an advisory vote on the company's approach to executive compensation as set forth in the management information circular. The full text of the advisory resolution is reproduced on page 45 of the management information circular. I move that the resolution on the advisory vote on executive compensation set forth in the management information circular be adopted. Again, as voting today will be conducted by a single electronic ballot, we will continue with the next item of business. The next item of business is the appointment of KPMG LLP as the company's auditors.
I move that KPMG LLP be appointed as the company's auditors and that the audit and finance committee of the board of directors of the company be authorized to fix the remuneration of the auditors. We will now proceed with the voting by single electronic ballot. As a reminder, today's items up for vote are the election of directors, the advisory resolution on the company's approach to executive compensation, and the appointment of auditors. You will now be prompted to register your vote in respect of each of the three items of business. Please register your votes by accessing the voting page when prompted and by first pressing on the for or withhold button next to the name of each proposed director. Second, pressing on the for or against button next to the advisory resolution on the company's approach to executive compensation.
Third, pressing on the For or Withhold button next to the resolution with respect to the appointment of KPMG LLP as the company's auditors. The voting page will remain open for one minute. Once the electronic balloting closes, the voting page will disappear, and your votes will automatically be submitted. While you complete your electronic ballots, I will ask Glenn and Rod to provide us a business update.
Thank you, Don, and good morning to all, and thank you for joining us today. This morning, I will provide you with a short overview of Gildan's sustainable growth strategy for GSG. Rod will provide a financial overview of 2021. Before I discuss our GSG strategy, let's review our accomplishments for 2021. Next slide, please. Okay. Our strong performance in 2021 is truly a testament of our back to basic strategy. We had record sales of $2.9 billion, above pre-pandemic levels and ahead of the full demand recovery. Operating margins of 20% were above our 18% target, driven by manufacturing efficiencies and SG&A leverage. This translated into $2.72 per share of EPS. We had $594 million of free cash flow driven by earnings growth and working capital management. Next slide, please.
We begun our back to basics strategy in 2018 by removing complexity from our system, lowering our cost structure and improving working capital, and returning to organic growth. The key elements of our back to basic strategy included focusing on a wholesale model for B2B, reducing complexity, eliminating underperforming brands and SKUs, which led to a 60% reduction in our product offering. Consolidating manufacturing capacity as we moved capacity from Mexico into Central America, and further enhanced our vertical integration with the acquisition of Frontier. We exited ship-to-the-piece high cost distribution, consolidated distribution centers, and improved our service. We realigned our organization under one single business unit, streamlining our global SG&A, and SG&A is down 300 basis points from 2018. Back to basics performance translated into improved margins.
We had a 500 basis points improvement from 2017 from 15% - 20%, and a larger improvement on our RONA from 800 basis points from 15% - 23%. Next slide, please. As we leverage our back to basic strategy and lowered our costs of our vertically integrated manufacturing advantage, we're moving to phase two, Gildan Sustainable Growth or GSG. The three pillars of our strategy. Capacity driven growth, innovation, and environment and social governance. We set targets over the next two-three years of 7%-10% sales CAGR, 18%-20% adjusted operating margins, and a RONA north of 20%. Next slide, please. We've defined our global addressable market to be about $22 billion.
The breakdown of the $22 billion by product would be about 75% activewear or $16 billion and 25% underwear and hosiery, or $6 billion. The split geographically would be 80% North America or $17 billion, and 20% international or $5 billion. We are well positioned to capitalize on the favorable market trends of casual living, active lifestyles. Our focus is North America. At the same time, we have a compelling long-term strategy in international markets as we continue to look at adding capacity in Bangladesh to support our international growth. Next slide, please. The first pillar of our GSG strategy is capacity expansion. Phase one of our capacity expansion will support $1 billion in sales, incremental $1 billion in sales.
With additional investment in Central America and the Caribbean, we'll add another $500 million in sales potential, which is currently being ramped up. We're also in process of building a large scale vertically integrated manufacturing facility in Bangladesh called Kolanur One. This plant will start operations in Q1 of 2023, and will ramped up during the 2023 period. We have an opportunity for a next phase of incremental growth for another $1 billion in sales, which will be supported by a Kolanur Two, where space is available on our existing site, that would add about a $500 million of additional revenue and further growth and expansion in our Central America and the Caribbean, which will all be beyond 2024. Next page, please. Innovation, our second pillar, is the next driver of our strategic growth.
We will innovate our products, our manufacturing, our processes, and all of this in turn will support our low cost manufacturing and our ESG strategy. Some product innovations are like our new EZ Print, which is geared to support the big move in digital printing in the market. Our NZS fleece, which is no-pill fleece. All these processes, all these innovations will continue to support the growing sales of all of our product lines. Next page, please. This brings me to our third pillar, ESG. ESG is an integrated part in all aspects of our business. We have a long track record over 20 years. It comprises of five pillars, climate, energy and water, circularity, human capital, value creation, transparency and disclosure. Each of these pillars will be supported by our targets that we set by 2030.
This concludes my formal remarks and now I'd like to pass over to Rod.
Thank you, Glenn, and good morning, everyone. What I would like to do now to conclude our business update is to summarize our financial performance closing out 2021, reiterate the financial targets we're driving to achieve over the next three years, and provide an update on our first quarter results, which we announced yesterday. When you look at our financial performance over the last five years, the high level takeaway is that we have significantly enhanced the economics of our business since we launched our back to basics strategy. Our top line or net sales growth rate has only been approximately 2% over the last five years, which includes two years of the pandemic, and you would naturally expect a lower growth rate during this period. However, 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. A good example of this is our SKU base. We reduced our SKU base by 60%, and we were able to replace sales of less profitable SKUs with more productive SKUs that align with our manufacturing competencies and simplified our operations and allowed us to improve our service and 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. Moving on 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 adjusted 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 per share on an adjusted basis and above $3 on a GAAP fully diluted basis. Finally, and importantly, I would say, we have been able to consistently generate good free cash flow over the last five years, regardless of the environment.
This definitely was a highlight in 2021, as we generated a new record level of $594 million in free cash flow for the year. Overall, we have delivered strong financial performance, particularly in 2021, which has provided an excellent foundation to support our strategy going forward. Next slide, please. Moving on to 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. In conjunction with our fourth quarter earnings release in February, we announced a 10% increase to our dividend to $0.68 for 2022. Now, 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.
During 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. We believe you, our shareholders, like the dividend. As we move forward, our goal is to increase our dividend on an annual basis. The next area of capital returns is share repurchases. We established our share repurchase program alongside our target leverage framework back in 2016, and we've 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. Next slide, please. Looking ahead, with Glenn having addressed the various elements of our sustainable growth strategy, this slide is simply a recap of what we are targeting to deliver over the next three years with the successful execution of our strategy.
Assuming a continued global recovery, we are working towards achieving sales growth at a compound annual growth rate in the 7%-10% range during this period. This will take our revenue to between $3.6 billion and $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. During this period, we will also be seeking to maintain adjusted operating margins in the 18%-20% range. To support growth and vertical integration, we are 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-two times leverage framework. Overall, we think we have a complete plan to grow our business and to deliver strong shareholder value and ESG performance, assuming a relatively stable environment. Next slide, please. Now, yesterday, we reported record first quarter results for 2022, and we were pleased to deliver strong top-line and bottom-line performance as we shift to the Gildan sustainable growth strategy. We saw strong demand in the quarter, and with solid execution from the team, we were able to capture this demand and service our customers and ultimately generate record sales of $775 million in the quarter, up more than 30% compared to last year.
Further, in an environment where all industries are facing significant inflation and other headwinds, we were able to offset these pressures working from our strong, low-cost, vertically integrated manufacturing platform. We generated adjusted operating margin of 20.4%, expanding our margin by 170 basis points compared to last year. Consequently, with strong top-line execution and strong operating performance, we generated record earnings for the quarter with adjusted EPS of $0.76, up 52% compared to the first quarter of 2021. Beyond this strong operating performance, we were also pleased about our ability to execute on our capital allocation priorities during the quarter as we repurchased 5.1 million shares of...
Three percent of our float, returning more than $200 million to shareholders while maintaining a strong balance sheet with leverage at 1x at the low end of our target range. Throughout the first quarter, we saw strong demand for our activewear products in North America. More recently, while we have seen some deceleration over the last few weeks, overall demand for activewear remains healthy. Similarly, we have also started to see some sell-through slowing for certain hosiery and underwear category products that could be related to broader economic factors. However, although it's difficult to predict how macro concerns will play out, we believe the industry dynamics that Glenn talked about earlier, as well as the continued recovery of tourism, travel, and other large events remain a tailwind to demand.
Consequently, we are pleased with the start to the year and the progress that can be made in 2022 towards our three-year objectives as we execute on our GSG strategy. Next slide, please. This brings me to our concluding remarks and the key highlights I wanna leave you with. First, we are moving forward on a strong foundation that we have built over decades, which has been reinforced by back to basics and 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 in 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 GSG 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 creation. Thank you, and I will now turn it back over to Don.
Thank you, Glenn. Thank you, Rod. I've received the scrutineer's report on the voting results, and I can confirm the following. Regarding the election of directors, I'm pleased to announce that Glenn Chamandy, Donald Berg, Maryse Bertrand, Dhaval Buch, Marc Caira, Shirley Cunningham, Russell Goodman, Charles M. Herington, Luc Jobin, Craig A. Leavitt, and Anne Martin-Vachon have been duly elected directors of the company. I am also pleased to report that the advisory resolution on the company's approach to executive compensation and the resolution for the appointment of KPMG LLP have all been carried. Detailed results for each vote will be available shortly on the SEDAR, EDGAR, and Gildan websites. This completes the business on the agenda for the annual meeting. Before concluding this meeting, we'd be pleased to answer questions from any registered shareholder or duly appointed proxyholder who wishes to address the meeting.
For each questions we answer, I will read out the question as well as the name of the person who asked the question, and if applicable, the entity the person represents. We ask you please limit your questions to topics relating to today's subject matter and keep your questions short and to the point. We'd like to remind you that questions which were already answered or that are redundant or repetitive will not be answered. The question period will start now.
Mr. Chair, it does not appear that there are any questions at this time.
Very good. There being no questions, we are now concluding the question and answer portion of the meeting. Before concluding the meeting, on behalf of the board, I wanna thank Gildan's management team and all of the employees of Gildan for the great work they are doing as they pivot towards Gildan's sustainable growth. Company was able to leverage the strength and resiliency of its people and its back to basics focused business strategy to pivot towards a very strong recovery. The board is extremely proud of what Gildan has accomplished in 2021 and how it has emerged stronger. In addition, on behalf of the board and the management team, I wanna thank our shareholders for their ongoing feedback, confidence, and support. I declare that this meeting is now terminated. Thank you for having taken the time to be with us today.