Hello and welcome to the Snap-on Annual Meeting of Shareholders. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. If you have already voted by proxy and you vote again during the online balloting during the meeting, your online vote during the meeting will revoke your previously submitted proxy. If you have already voted by proxy and you do not wish to revoke your previously submitted proxy, there is no need to vote during the meeting. During the meeting, we will have a question-and-answer session. If you logged in with a control number, you can submit questions or comments at any time by clicking on the Ask a Question icon located toward the top of the information page. It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary, Rich Miller. Mr. Miller, the floor is yours.
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the 2021 Annual Meeting of Shareholders for Snap-on Incorporated. My name is Rich Miller, and I will be serving as the parliamentarian for today's meeting. Due to the ongoing public health risks associated with COVID-19 and based on recommendations of public health officials, we are once again holding our Annual Meeting of Shareholders virtually. Our move away from in-person meeting is due solely to the COVID-19 pandemic and our concern for the health and safety of our shareholders, associates, retirees, and franchisees, as well as their families and communities. We all look forward to hosting you in person at next year's annual meeting. Now, on to the formal business. At this time, I call the 2021 Snap-on Incorporated Annual Meeting of Shareholders to order.
I direct your attention to the rules of order for the meeting, which are available on your screen, and I request that you abide by these rules. Links to other annual meeting material are available on the on-site meeting. It is now 11:35 A.M. on April 29th, and the polls are officially open. Representatives of Computershare, who will be acting as inspectors of election for the meeting, are in attendance. As noted at the top of the meeting, if you have not voted or if you wish to change your vote, you may do so using the link provided on the online meeting center. If you have already voted and you do not wish to change your vote, no further action is necessary.
Attending today's meeting are the following board members: David Adams, Executive Chairman and Retired President and Chief Executive Officer, Curtiss-Wright Corporation; Karen Daniel, Division President and Chief Financial Officer, Retired Chief Financial Officer, Black & Veatch Corporation; Ruth Ann Gillis, Retired Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer, Exelon Corporation; Jim Holden, Snap-on's lead director and Retired President and Chief Executive Officer, DaimlerChrysler Corporation; Nate Jones, Retired President, Worldwide Commercial and Consumer Equipment Division, Deere & Company; Henry Knueppel, Retired Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Regal Beloit Corporation; Dudley Lehman, Retired Group President, Kimberly-Clark Corporation; Gregg Scherrill, Retired Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Tenneco Inc.; Don Stebbins, Retired President, Chief Executive Officer, Superior Industries International Inc.; and Nick Pinchuk, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Snap-on Incorporated.
Also attending the meeting today are Eric Kuhl and Sandy Hoeft, representing our auditors, Deloitte & Touche, LLP. They will be available to answer questions following the meeting if needed. We have an affidavit that notices the meeting was mailed as required on March 12th, 2021, followed by a supplement to our proxy statement, which included a technical amendment to the proposed amendment to and restatement of the Snap-on Incorporated 2011 Incentive Stock and Awards Plan. The supplement was made available on March 18, 2021, and these documents will be incorporated into the meeting minutes. I now ask that the inspectors of election please confirm that all of the votes have been counted.
This is Fred Papenmeier with Computershare, and I am acting as the inspector of election for the Snap-on 2021 Annual Meeting of Shareholders, and I can confirm that all eligible votes have been counted.
Thank you. It is now 11:38 A.M., and the online voting is officially closed. I have been advised by our inspectors of election that we have a quorum with more than 88% of all shares outstanding represented at the meeting. 554,437,708 shares of common stock, each having one vote on each proposal, are entitled to vote at the meeting. Voting results are stated as a percentage of stock represented after the meeting unless otherwise noted. We have four agenda items on today's agenda. Our first is the election of directors. The board has nominated the following candidates to serve until the 2022 Annual Meeting: David C. Adams, director since 2016; Karen L. Daniel, director since 2005; Ruth Ann M. Gillis, director since 2014; James B. Holden, our lead director and our director since 2007; Nathan J. Jones, director since 2008; Henry W. Knueppel, director since 2011; W. Dudley
Lehman, director since 2003; Nicholas T. Pinchuk, director since 2007; Gregg M. Scherrill, director since 2010; and Donald J. Stebbins, director since 2015. Each of the director nominees received votes in their favor of at least 90% of the shares represented, and each has therefore been duly elected. Our second item of business today is the ratification of the Audit Committee's selection of Deloitte & Touche, LLP, as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for 2011. Over 95% of the shares represented voted in favor of this proposal, and therefore the Audit Committee's selection of Deloitte & Touche has been ratified. The third item of business is the advisory vote to approve the compensation of Snap-on Incorporated's named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement. As an advisory vote, this proposal is not binding on Snap-on.
Since over 92% of the votes cast for the approval of the compensation of Snap-on's named executive officers, the non-binding resolution is hereby approved. The fourth and final item of business is the approval of the amendment to and restatement of the Snap-on 2011 Incentive Stock and Awards Plan. 87% of the shares represented voted in favor of this proposal, and therefore the amendment to and the restatement of the plan has been approved. This completes our official business. It is now 11:10 A.M., and the meeting is adjourned. We will now have a short presentation from Nick Pinchuk.
Hello everyone. I'm glad you could join us, even if it's at a distance. You know, I always enjoy speaking to you on these occasions. And in fact, you know, I realize I usually use a podium, but this is a Snap-on Toolbox. I guess you can't really see it there. Maybe you can. And I kind of like this better than the regular podium, so maybe we'll institute this as a permanent part of our annual meeting. Look, we're showing you on the screen here our logo for this year, the 100-plus logo. Last year, these are interesting times. We had a once-in-a-hundred-year event with the pandemic, and it occurred in the year in which we celebrated our 100th anniversary, so it was somewhat attenuated.
We did celebrate, but we decided to carry that celebration over to this year with that plus, that red plus, designating that we're celebrating not only our 100th anniversary, but being in the second century and with the red plus so that people in the future, Snap-on people in the future, could look back and remember how we managed through the COVID, through the years of the virus, and managed we did. You know, the way we came through this year, it testifies to the resilience of our markets, the robustness of our model, and the capabilities of our team. If I have any message today, it is here that we've emerged from the virus, and I can say to you that your company, our company, has never been stronger. We believe that.
Now, let me go to the cautionary statement, which we have at the beginning of these things. We always show these things so that you can read them. Here, read them. That's your pleasure. That's long enough. Let's go on. All right. We start every presentation at Snap-on. In fact, this plaque with who we are, an affirmation of who we are. In fact, this placard is in every room, every major room in Snap-on. It states our mission. We provide the most valuable productivity solutions in the world. It talks about our beliefs. We believe in safety and quality and caring for our customers. We believe in making our products innovative, and we believe in improving ourselves every day that we come into work. It also talks about our values. We value integrity, truth, respect, teamwork, and we listen.
It also talks about our vision, and our vision is really simple. It has a number of words here, but it really means we want to be the choice, the first choice of all those we interact with. Now, on another level, Snap-on is still a company that celebrates the makers and the fixers. You know, we were founded 100 years ago, and since that time, we have been dedicated to the timeless principle of the respect for the dignity of work. We have been enlisted in the endeavor of making work easier for serious professionals who work on critical tasks where the need for repeatability and reliability is imperative. This is what we have done all these days. In fact, we are still there today, very much today.
Working men and women, the makers and fixers, see the Snap-on brand as the outward sign of the pride and dignity they take in their profession. We are in workplaces around the world for more hours, for more days than anybody else, and we take those insights and we use them to innovate and summon new products that will move the world forward. We do that as we look forward and we take that process, we go along runways, runways for growth. Here they are, four of them. Enhance the van channel. The van channel this past year has been stronger than ever. The franchisees are financially and physically, in terms of selling capacity, stronger than they have ever been. It is banded with repair shop owners and managers. We have more product to sell into those shops than ever before. Extend to critical industries.
We've learned to customize products to meet every one of those industries' specific needs and solve problems that no one else can solve and build in emerging markets where in Asia-Pacific, where the virus started, we have shrugged it off and it was up, Asia-Pacific was up double digits in the first quarter. We not only have runways for growth, though we have runways for improvement. I'm standing right behind a placard here that talks about these placards that are in most rooms in Snap-on. It's called Snap-on Value Creation. These are our principal value-creating mechanisms, the processes we work on every day. Safety. It's never been more important than in this period, huh? Occupational safety, of course, by keeping our people safe from the COVID, and we have worked hard on it.
Quality, making sure that our products are repeatable and reliable and dependable and that they are the first choice of professionals everywhere. Customer connection and innovation, these are dual tools where we connect with customers by actually being next to them when they work, observing the problems, translating those insights into new products with a generous dollop of innovation. We have had a tremendous array of new products in the past year. Maybe one of the most important things in this rapid continuous improvement, all over Snap-on, people get up every day and figure out how to make our jobs more efficient and do them better, and you can see it in our numbers. Now, when I think forward on these runways, we see, yes, we have done well in 2020 and into 2021 because, and we see opportunities.
We see opportunities as people move from or trend out of the cities into the suburbs and shift away from shared transportation into individual transportation and growing the demand for individual vehicles. At the same time, as we see new technologies roll into that vehicle park because new technology is the basis for Snap-on growth. Because we, in fact, what we do, the core of what we do is enable serious professionals to respond to those technologies and to deal with them as the units are used, as the products are used in the marketplace. That is why during this COVID, this great withering, this time of uncertainty, we kept investing in our people, our products, and our brand. We brought out more products in the past year than we ever did, more hit products, more $1 million selling hit products than ever before.
We kept investing in our brands, with our racing programs, with our celebrations, though attenuated with the 100th anniversary and a number of different ways that kept the franchise brand strong. We invested in our people, in training, and keeping our team together so that when we came out of this COVID, we saw these abundant opportunities and we would have these natural Snap-on advantages of product and brand and people at full strength, and so they are. The best way to see this is to look at the financials, I think, what happened in the last year. Let's look. We're going to do a brief financial update. I think the way this plays out, and the easiest way to see it, is to look at the sales by quarter over the last few quarters. You can see it played out right here.
You start in the first quarter of 2019. A little while ago now, seems like a long time ago. Now, sales were $921.7 million. The next year, $951.3 million. The year after that, $955.2 million. After that, it starts to get a little weaker, $852.2 million, then $724.3 million, then $946.1 million, and $1,074.4 million. You can see the V-shape as we go down into these things. You can see that V-shape in recovery. When we entered this difficulty in the second quarter of last year, we recognized that we were going to have a V-shape, and it played out just like this. We can not only see it in sales, you can see it in the profitability, in the EPS. Let's take a look at the EPS.
You can see it back to that first quarter, $3.16, then $3.22, then $2.96, then $3.08, and starting to get into the downturn where the virus affected us, $2.49, then $1.85. $1.85 was down, but it still was not an emergency. Then $3.28 and then $3.82. By the way, the $3.28 and the $3.82 were above the 2019 pre-pandemic levels. If you step back from our business and you look at this, how this played out over the years, we can see the sales for the corporation, I mean, the EPS for the corporation by the years, $4.71 in 2011. See that clearly. Then $5.20, then $5.93, $7.14, $8.10. You start to get into as-adjusted numbers. You can see the next number at $10.12. You see $9.20. Then you see $10.12, and that is an as-adjusted number. You see $11.81.
You go on to $12.26, an as-adjusted number. In the fourth, and last year, $11.63. The $11.63, I want you to look back in the great withering of that quarter or that year. In the great withering, the greatest challenge of 100 years of that $11.63 was greater than any EPS we had prior to 2018. Down, but not very much afflicted, resisting. Up 2.4 times since 2011, our EPS. We gave something back to our shareholders via dividends. You can see this. Back to 2011, $1.30, $1.40, $1.58, $1.95, $2.20, $2.54, $2.95. You can see this playing out. You can see it playing out, $3.41, $3.93, and last year, $4.47, up 13.9% in the pandemic. Overall, the dividends increased 3.4 times since 2011.
Underscoring the fact of our resilience, of Snap-on's resilience, we have paid a dividend every quarter since 1939, and we have never reduced it. This is a record of extraordinary proportion. You see that in our numbers. You can also see some of the other things we did beside product and brand and people. We invested in acquisitions last year, in the past 18 months or so. Dealer- FX, which we just acquired a couple of months ago, a Canadian-based company, but it is a company that does repair operation software and dealerships. It puts us deeper into dealerships, but it not only puts us deeper into dealership operations, automotive dealership operations, but it also puts us on the vanguard of seeing new technologies as it impacts the car part. We have early warnings about new technology.
AutoCrib, a business which we acquired in September of 2020, which gave us tool control and asset control, adding to our control portfolio that's so important in critical industries. Cognitran, a company in the U.K. , which provides advanced software frameworks that OEMs use to develop and update their software systems for shop information and repair information. It puts us further up the chain in software configuration, making us much stronger in that space. Okay, that's 2020. Let's look at what happened in 2021 in the first quarter. See these numbers. All right. First, sales, $1,024,400,000. Up year over year, 20.2% as reported, up 16.3% organically, and up versus 2019, 8.1%. If you look down at the OI margin, 19.6%, up 330 basis points as reported, 240 basis points, big numbers organically, and then up 50 basis points versus 2019 before the pandemic ever hit.
That is against 50 basis points of bad news for currency. You look at the credit company. I want to take a minute with the credit company. Profitability is 65.3%, up 14.8%. Up 14.8% in a pandemic, in a time of tremendous turbulence with delinquencies and losses down, rock solid. You look at the $3.50 for EPS in the first quarter, up 40.6% and up 40.4% and up 36.4% organically, and then up year over year, 16.3%. A tremendous quarter extending on to 2020. That is my story. Snap-on is a company that is executing on coherent strategies. We are still dedicated to that timeless proposition of the respect for the dignity of work and enlisted in the endeavor to make work easier for serious professionals, a cause which is as important and as relevant now as it was all those 100 years ago.
We are rolling down our runways for growth and for improvement. During the COVID, we went in and we absorbed the COVID, shrugged it off, demonstrated what has made that dividend run so evident, demonstrated the resilience of our markets, the robustness of our models, and the capability of our team. We have come out the other side with tremendous verve, and I can say that we believe your company, our company, has never been stronger. Now we are going to take a few questions. Sara Verbsky, the Vice President of Investor Relations, is going to field a few questions from the audience and tell them to me.
Thank you, Nick. All right. A few questions that have come in. As more OEMs enter the electric vehicle market, how do you see your business evolving as EVs begin to displace internal combustion vehicles?
Change is good for Snap-on, in fact. The thing is already an awful lot of auto repair is being done via electronics now today. Our diagnostic systems, some of our insulating tools are already addressing those situations. As that occurs, it requires more tools and different tools, and we're ready to do that. That builds our business. What we have done for all these 100 years is, as I said, anticipate change and enable the technicians in garages to be able to adjust to them. If the electronic vehicles and hybrid vehicles and plug-in hybrids came, we'd have an array of customers that would need more tools. They need them for internal combustions because they're not going away soon, and they need them for hybrids and plug-in hybrids and electronic vehicles, and that would be music to our ears.
We're kind of waiting for it. We're anticipating. We're happy to see it come.
Okay. Here's another one. With Snap-on's 100th anniversary falling during the pandemic, what plans do you have to celebrate this momentous occasion in the future?
Look, we've got a lot of plans, I think, here. I don't want to announce them all, but the thing is we're certainly going to have the SFC. We believe it'll be live. We're going to be in Disney World with our franchisees. We're going to have a great time. We're going to have a party in the parking lot. We had a party at the 90th anniversary, the 95th anniversary. The 100th anniversary is going to be bigger, we think. We'll have those. We'll have a number of smaller events here in Kenosha and a number of places around our Snap-on world.
Okay. Next question is, Snap-on came through the pandemic with a lot of momentum. Will the business continue to grow at this rate?
I'm not sure about the rates. I think you can look at the rates versus 2019, and you'll see that we have a robust rate even versus pre-pandemic levels, and I think that's a good guide for going forward. One of the things I do know, in the pandemic, we got stronger. Our franchisees got more capable in selling, which is one of the big bottlenecks to what we sell. Our product line got stronger. We brought out, as I said, more products, more new hit products than we ever had before. Our brand, we believe, has maintained its robustness, and we have maintained our team, and we think there's a lot more opportunity because as people shift away from the cities to away from shared transportation, that's going to be good for us. As I just said, the new technologies will be great.
Okay. With that, Nick, I think that is all that we have for questions, but I'll leave you to some closing thoughts.
Thank you, Sarah. Let me just close by a little broader. Of course, I want to reemphasize that we've demonstrated great strength. All of you have demonstrated great strength in the COVID resilience and robustness and capability. We've exited stronger than when we entered. For that, I want to start out by thanking some people. For our investors that are on the call, I want to thank you for your confidence. For our customers, who I probably some of them are on the call, for faith in our product. For our communities, for our community leaders, I want to thank you for your unfailing support. Especially, I want to thank our retirees. I want to thank you all for the hope you have placed in us and the great company you have given us.
Because as we reached higher and in the COVID, in this great withering, we had to reach higher like we never had before. We know we did so. We could only do so because we stand on your shoulders. Thank you all for that. Finally, I want to give a special moment and comment to our franchisees and associates. I know many of you are listening here. What you are doing has never been more important. We are in a difficult time. The last time the U.S. was, the last time we were all tasked like this or threatened like this, I say, was back to World War II. Historian after historian has held forth that in that period, we had great leaders.
We had brave soldiers, but we also had makers and fixers, everyday men and women who created the industrial substrate, the industrial base that gave us the supplies that allowed us, our soldiers and all of us, to win the one war we could not afford to lose. Snap-on was part of it. It is enshrined in our museum in terms of some of the letters we receive from government officials, how Snap-on people contributed. We are at war again, a different war, of course. Weapons are different. We are sheltering and distancing and masking and contract chasing and vaccinating. We have been meeting the uncertainty with vigilance and have come together to provide for the common defense in this storm. Snap-on people are in it again. You have all been active in maintaining the world we know in this storm, in this turbulence. That is clear.
In terms of helping to maintain the critical mobility of our world, the emergency vehicles, the delivery trucks, the transport systems, the factories that turn out the products that we have to depend on, you have been extraordinary in this situation. You have worked every day. You have worked every day to keep our society, the society we hold so dear, going, and to keep it from disintegrating while we engage and defeat the COVID. As I said in the beginning of these remarks, what you have done, what you are doing has never been more important. When you look back on these days, I guarantee you you will look back with great pride and justifiable pride. Snap-on people will speak of your contributions during the COVID with great reverence, a tremendous reverence. You should be proud. I am proud.
I am proud to be with you. I am proud and privileged and fortunate to be here with you. To all of you, franchisees and associates, for your work on behalf of our society, you have my deep admiration. For your contributions to our enterprise, allowing us to go through the COVID, shrug it off, and come out stronger than we, enabling us to do that and come out stronger than when we entered, you have my congratulations for that success. Most of all, for your dedication and commitment to our team in smooth sailing and turbulent times, you have my thanks. I look forward to when we can be together again face to face. I hope that happens real soon. In the meantime, all of you stay safe. You're very important to us. Everyone, good day.
That concludes our meeting. Good day.