Annual meeting of the shareholders of Parker-Hannifin Corporation will please come to order. I would like to welcome all of our shareholders who are here in person as well as those participating via the webcast. I am Tom Williams, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the company, and I will be presiding at this meeting. At my left is Joe Leonti, Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary of the company, who will act as secretary of the meeting. First, I'd like to introduce our director nominees and other company representatives who are present at today's meeting. The 10 nominees for election as our directors are Lee Banks, President and Chief Operating Officer, Bob Bohn, Linda Hardy, Kevin Lobo, Candy Oburn, Joe Scaminaci, Åke Svensson , James Verrier, Jim Wainscott, and myself.
Here with us are three current directors who will be retiring from our board as of today, Bob Kohlhepp, Klaus-Peter Müller, and Wolf Schmidt. I'd like to take the opportunity here in public, we did it last night at a retirement dinner, to congratulate and thank the three retiring directors for their service for many years, and congratulate them and wish them all the best in the future. It's nice to get a round of applause at a shareholders' meeting.
Along with Lee, Joe, and myself, our other company executives present today are Kathy Seaver, Executive Vice President of Finance and Administration and Chief Financial Officer, Mark Hart, Executive Vice President of Human Resources and External Affairs, Skip Bowman, Vice President and President of Instrumentation Group, Robin Davenport, Vice President of Corporate Finance, Bill Eline, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, John Thompson-Tiller, Vice President of Global Supply Chain, Joachim Guhe, President, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, Kurt Keller, Vice President, Todd Leombruno, Vice President and Controller, Candido Lima, President, Latin America Group, Rob Malone, Vice President and President of Filtration Group, Craig Maxwell, Vice President and Chief Technology and Information Officer, Michael O'Hara, Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing, Jennie Parmenter , Vice President and President, Engineered Materials Group, Andy Ross, Vice President and President of the Fluid Connectors Group, Roger Sherrard, Vice President and President of the Aerospace Group, Michael Wei, President of Asia Pacific Group, Andy Weeks, Vice President and President of Motion Systems Group.
In addition to our board and executive team, Lang Johnston, a representative of Corporate Election Services, is present and has been appointed to act as Inspector of Election of this meeting. Bill Snyder, a representative from Deloitte & Touche LLP, our independent registered public accounting firm, is also present. Bill will be here to make a statement if he so chooses and is available to answer any appropriate questions concerning the company's financial statements during the question and answer period at the end of the meeting. That concludes the list of our director nominees and other company representatives here in person. Before we move on to our voting matters, I'd first like to turn it over to Joe to cover a few procedural items.
Okay. Thank you, Tom. First, for those of you here in person, you were provided with an agenda and a list of the rules of conduct on the back of the agenda for this meeting. To ensure an orderly meeting, we need everyone to abide by those rules of conduct. Second, concerning the order of this morning's events, we'll conduct the annual meeting first, and after we adjourn, Tom will take a few minutes to comment on our fiscal year 2018 and our progress and objectives under the Win Strategy, followed by a brief question and answer period.
Third, please note that in my capacity as secretary, I've delivered and present the following in connection with this annual meeting, the minutes of our last annual meeting of shareholders, which was held on October 25th, 2017, the financial statements of the company for fiscal year ended June 30th, 2018, certified by Deloitte & Touche LLP, an affidavit of mailing establishing the notice of this annual meeting was duly given, and finally, a list of company shareholders of record as of August 31st, 2018, certified by our transfer agent, Equiniti Trust Company. Each of these items will be referenced and incorporated into the minutes of the meeting. Finally, all shareholders of record at the close of business on August 31st, 2018, are entitled to vote at this meeting. All persons holding proxies are requested to give their proxies to Mr. Johnston as our Inspector of Election.
All shareholders present who wish to vote in person on any matter to come before this meeting who have not already advised Mr. Johnston or received their ballots and instructions, please see him now. Okay. Mr. Johnston, how many shares are present?
There are present in person or by proxy at this meeting at least 118 million shares of common stock, a quorum for the transaction of business representing over 89% of the shares issued and outstanding.
Thank you, Mr. Johnston. At this time, we'll move on to our voting matters. I'll turn it back over to Tom as Chairman.
Thank you, Joe. The first proposal to be voted on is the election of directors to serve for terms expiring at our annual meeting of shareholders of 2019. Our board has nominated for election the following 10 persons as directors of the company: Lee C. Banks, Robert G. Bohn, Linda S. Hardy, Kevin A. Lobo, Candy M. Oburn, Joseph Scaminaci, Åke Svensson, James R. Verrier, James L. Wainscott, and myself, Thomas L. Williams. The second proposal to be voted on is the ratification of the appointment of Deloitte & Touche LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending June 30th, 2019. Our board of directors recommends in favor of such ratification. The third proposal to be voted on is the approval on a non-binding advisory basis of the compensation of our named executive officers. Our board of directors recommends in favor of such approval.
The fourth proposal to be voted on is the approval of an amendment to our code of regulations to permit proxy access. Our board of directors recommends in favor of such approval. The fifth proposal to be voted on is the approval of an amendment to our code of regulations to allow the board to amend our code of regulations to the extent permitted by Ohio law. Our board of directors recommends in favor of such approval. Are there any questions or discussions on the proposals presented for a vote? That concludes the items that will be voted on today. The Inspector of Election will now collect any outstanding ballots or proxy cards. Looks like there's none. Votes are now in, and I declare the polls closed. Joe, please go ahead and review the preliminary voting results.
Thanks, Tom. Based on the preliminary voting results, each of the director nominees has been elected. The appointment of Deloitte & Touche LLP as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal year 2019 has been ratified. The compensation of our named executive officers has been approved on a non-binding advisory basis. The amendment to our code of regulations to permit proxy access has been approved, and the amendment to our code of regulations to allow the board to amend our code of regulations to the extent permitted by Ohio law has been approved. Please note that any ballots collected before the polls closed and not reflected in this preliminary report will be reflected in the final report of our Inspector of Election.
The final results will be ultimately available and disclosed on a Form 8-K that will be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after the votes have been certified by our Inspector of Election.
Thank you, Joe. Is there any further business to come before the annual meeting? If not, the annual meeting is now adjourned. I will take a few minutes to comment on fiscal 2018 and our progress along the Win Strategy, followed by a brief Q&A period. I think everybody is familiar with the forward-looking statement, the Safe Harbor statement. You can reference that as you get time. There's three things I want to cover this morning. First, there's a couple key messages I want to talk about last year, how we see the future. We'll cover the year in a little more detail. Then we'll talk about the future in a little more detail. Key messages. Last year was a great year. I think as shareholders, you should be proud of the team that put up these results.
There's all-time records for sales, EPS, CFOA, cash flow from operating activities, and operating margin. We really had a strong organic growth. We grew organically about 8.5%. The performance of the company was very strong. As we look at 2019, we're projecting the same thing, records in EPS, CFOA, and operating margin, and sales as well. We've got our first quarter earnings call next week, November 1st, and we'll give you an update on the details at that point. The key point I want to mention is we've made a tremendous amount of progress, and while we're excited about that, very early days of the Win Strategy still. So much so the combination of progress and where we think we can go has allowed us to update the new financial targets, which I'll highlight for FY 2023, which I think are pretty compelling for our shareholders.
Let's talk about last year's results, starting with safety as we always do. We're after building a zero accident environment, zero incidents, and that's what we're trying to do, and we're not going to be happy till this number is zero. We saw a significant reduction in 21% of injuries, which is good progress towards that goal. Looking at the financials, remember I mentioned the records. I tried to circle the records here. You can see the sales, $14.3 billion. Of significance here and what I really like, if you look at last year's sales at $12 billion, we just skipped the 13s. It's just nice to just skip $1 billion. I can't commit to shareholders that we're going to do that every year, but that's a nice thing to do. 19% growth.
The 15.7% operating margin was an all-time record. So was the EPS. This is as reported, there's no adjustments for taxes and restructuring. I think the significance of both the operating margin and EPS is pretty impactful. If you think about operating margin, the last all-time record was FY12 at 15.2%. We have significantly more restructuring this year than we had back then. We beat that all-time record by 50 basis points in a period of much greater restructuring. Then the EPS number, $7.83. We had two big tax events. Of course, everybody should remember the Tax Reform Act that impacted most companies. If you take that with the Facet divestiture and the tax impact of that's about $2.10. We had a negative $2.10 and still delivered an all-time record EPS for the company.
That's like saying we're just going to have a race a quarter and still try to beat the all-time record. That's pretty significant. It's a little bit easier when you look at this next slide because we adjust that out. This is apples to apples, taking out restructuring any tax-related one-time events. I would just call your attention to the green box, this is the change year-over-year looking at it just shows you that the team did a pretty nice job. Pretty compelling numbers here. Obviously, the goal is to keep doing that. Let's talk about the future, let's talk about it kind of at a high level. When we think about the Win Strategy, there's two main things we're trying to do that frame all the strategies within the companies underneath the Win Strategy.
First, to be a top quartile company versus our proxy peers. Shareholders have choices. People have choices of where they want to work. Customers have choices of where they want to buy, et cetera. If you want to be at the top of that list, be a top quartile company. Number one, want to be known as a company that generates cash in a great fashion and deploys cash on behalf of our shareholders in a fashion that creates a lot of value. The combination of the progress you saw last year and the last several years, in addition to the changes to the Win Strategy, has allowed us to update our five-year targets as a company.
The very first IR day that we had when Lee and I started our roles was in 2015, we rolled out the five-year targets, which you see in the middle column there, the FY20 targets. We are basically about two years ahead of schedule. We're about two years ahead of trying to achieve these goals. As a result, we wanted to update a new five-year vision, which we laid out at Investor Day in March of this year. You can see the numbers that changed year-over-year, we put in gold. Growth, we want to continue to grow 150 basis points faster than global industrial production. That's what GIP stands for. It's a proxy for the market. That continues to be a best in practice target, 150 basis points over the cycle.
19% segment operating margin is the new target for the company over the next 5 years. A lot of shareholders, if you would remember, for years and years, the target was 15%. We raised it to 17%, now we're raising it again to 19%. In a period of about 3 years, we've raised the target 2 times. Pretty significant. EBITDA margin, we didn't have as a target in FY 2020, we're adding that, 20% of the top quartile number there. Free cash flow conversion is still best in class. Anything we can do over 100%, that's best in class. We want to continue that. We do all these things, we're going to generate an EPS CAGR over this period of time with a little bit of capital deployment on top of that in the 10% plus range.
It'd be a very compelling EPS growth over the next 5 years. How do we do it? What makes us stand out in a crowd? Why would you want to be part of our team? Why would you want to own our shares? This is the short list. It starts with the Win Strategy, which is the business system of the company. It's the operating system of the company. It is how we do what we do. There's a lot of structural things that makes us stand out in a crowd, and the first is our divisional structure. We are decentralized, which the beauty of that is we have people close to the P&L, close to the customers, and that creates a lot more intimacy with what's going on.
We have the best distribution channel in the world in the motion control space, and we continue to see opportunities internationally to build that out. A lot of what we ship to our customers has a very high element of intellectual property, either patents, trade secret processes and tooling, trade secret materials. It's what makes the company special, is that it's hard to replicate what we do. We're globally balanced, so we can serve the customers around the world. With concerns about tariffs and trade issues, our supply chain is balanced around the world. We make, buy, and sell in region for the region, which really helps offset a lot of those challenges. We have the broadest breadth of technologies and capabilities compared to any of our competitors, so we can solve problems at a much higher level than anybody else does.
That allows us to create more value for our customers. This is our list of competitive advantages, really the strategic positioning list of how we win versus our competitors, and what should attract shareholders to be part of our company. I talked about the Win Strategy being the business system of the company, and I could spend a long time talking about the Win Strategy. What I want to cover is the first goal, the engage people part of the Win Strategy, which is really what sets the whole rest of the cadence across the Win Strategy. It starts with a picture of a lot of celebrations that we took in 2017. I'll remind shareholders we're in our 101st year, but last year we celebrated turning 100. These are some snapshots of people celebrating that last year.
The Engage People strategy, and this is underneath there, is a clear cultural competitive advantage for our company. It's something that's been decades in the making. It's what makes us special, what makes us different. At the end of the day, it's all about people and how people take care of our customers and our shareholders. I want to talk a little bit about that as far as what the key strategies are. There's really three. The first is our high performance team concept, which is the belief, which we firmly believe in, is that the people that do the work know better than anybody else how to get things done, how to improve things.
Whether you sit in a factory, you sit in a warehouse, or you're in an office, you're part of a high performance team that you're going to have a piece of the pie. You're going to have responsibility for your cell, your natural work team, your value stream, whatever the case may be. We're going to design what that team's going to be responsible for, and the team's going to take ownership of those things. The other part is we're trying to drive that concept of engagement and that leadership linkage down as low as we possibly can so that our leaders get feedback. Every year we do a survey on how our team members feel about how the company's doing, how are we progressing, things we can improve upon. We want that leadership feedback on how we're doing. We're doing that every year.
We're going to continue to drive that down. We're going to focus on the frontline leaders. The frontline leaders are the sergeants and lieutenants of the army. The generals like to think we're running the place, but the sergeants and lieutenants are running the business. If we help the frontline leaders be more successful, help them do their job, listen to them, explain what we're trying to do, have them be part of the solution, help them lead the high performance teams, that's what we're after. Long story short, the whole engagement initiative is about creating owners. It's about creating an ownership culture, an ownership mindset. You might say, "Well, why should you care about that?" You think about the difference between being an owner and just being at work. If you're an owner, you think differently than if you're an employee.
Most of the times you'll hear me describe our people as team members. We want team members to think and act like an owner, because when you're an owner, there's a level of caring, there's a level of intimacy, there's a more inspirational effort, and there's a lot of input that comes in when you're an owner. That will drive performance. When you think about the circle of performance, it's engagement, it's that ownership. It's going to drive financial performance, it's going to drive safety, it's going to drive all those type of things. That's why I spend time on this, because this is the first goal, but it lifts up the performance of the entire company. I think the people that are going to be in this video can do a much better job than what I did just trying to describe the impact of that.
The video you're going to see, every year I try to, at the shareholder meeting, show a video. Usually I have Craig up here showcasing our technologies, our innovative products, and we're still very excited about that. This time we're going to showcase our people. You're going to see two things. You're going to see the power of engagement and the power of the Win Strategy, because that's a lot of what the comments are from the people that are in this video. Take a listen.
Parker is a global leader in motion and control technologies.
We produce products and sell to every country in the world.
What I like to tell people is that we're part of your everyday life.
We help better the lives of people around the world.
We really are here to engineer your success.
Engaged people is what it all starts with.
Engagement, to me, is when you really care about what you do when you come to work.
I've been here for 42 years, and I've always felt I had a voice.
When you listen to people and give them the chance to talk, they feel more engaged. They feel they're part of a bigger picture.
Taking ownership and having that entrepreneurial mindset means that we can make changes to make things better.
All the value streams have a high-performance team, and they're put together to try and help solve problems. I love our HPT teams. Small teams making improvements, making the quality better.
It gives us room to improve. It helps to bring everyone together.
Working together on the right things, getting that engaged feeling that what you're working on is gonna make a difference at the end of the day.
Safety is a priority here. Safety is number one.
As you noticed when you first came down the drive, we had a sign that says, "Safety starts here.
It's just the environment that makes you feel like they're on your side and making sure that you're gonna go home the same way you showed up for work that day. Premier customer experience means quality.
We have very great products, good quality, and we deliver on time.
We always want to strive to get better.
When we talk about premier customer experience, what we're talking about is engaging ourselves with our customers, making their problems our number one priority.
How can we satisfy our customers' needs throughout the entire course of our business dealings with them?
Exceed our customer expectations every day in every single thing.
We are all part of the Win Strategy here, and that's what I love about the corporation.
The Win Strategy is that glue that kind of brings us all together. Everybody's working together at the same goal.
The values that they hold that are in the Win Strategy, there's no other company that I'd rather work for.
Parker is a great place to work. It's a great company. I have not enough words to describe. We do a lot of stuff for community. We do a lot of stuff for each other. It's like a family. It really is.
I like Parker because it's a company who respect people and allow people to grow.
There's a lot of people that have been here for years, people don't stick around if the company's not good.
I feel like the work we do makes a difference.
I brag about that all the time. From fluid connectors to electronics to parts that goes in turbine engines.
I now know that when I board an aircraft, I feel safe.
It feels great to be a part of a winning team.
Everybody likes to win, and I've been a part of this winning team for a long time.
Parker.
Engineering-
Engineering-
Your success Engineering your success.
See, I told you they'd do a better job than I did. Great video, great people. That concludes my presentation. Just want to say thank you to all our team members around the world for their hard work for last year. I'll thank you in advance for FY 2019, thank the board for all their effort on behalf of the shareholders. I want to especially thank our shareholders, because without you and your ownership, we're not here. Thank you. Have a great day. I'll take questions from anybody at the end that wants to ask me some questions. I'll have the management team here, but that concludes our session. Thank you very much.