Good morning. I'm Mark Trinske, the Vice President of Investor Relations here for THOR Industries. To both our live audience and those participating via webcast, we thank you for joining us today for THOR Industries 2022 Investor Day. We'll begin the day with a brief introduction by Peter Orthwein, THOR Industries Co-Founder and Chairman Emeritus. Following Peter's remarks, Bob Martin, THOR's President and CEO, will join us for opening comments and will then introduce the members of the company's senior management team who will be presenting today. Our Investor Day presentations will start momentarily, but first I'd like to share an overview of our schedule and a few housekeeping items. We have a short mid-morning break, and we'll have a break at lunchtime to gather your meal and return to the meeting room, and we'll eat during our Q&A session.
The formal portion of our Investor Day and our webcast will end at 1:00 P.M. Those taking the early shuttle will gather in the main lobby, and the shuttle will depart at 1:15 P.M. All others will gather downstairs and will begin the Airstream factory tours and the tour of the new Airstream Heritage Center Museum. THOR's management team will also be available for questions after the tours are completed. Also, as you noticed when you arrived, we have a number of RVs on display for your review. These models represent a few of our best-in-class products, including Airstream's new eStream and the THOR Vision Vehicle, which are cutting-edge electric products. We encourage you to have a look around and see the different products. THOR's overall 2022 Investor Day will end at 4:00 P.M.
For those taking the later shuttle, the bus will be departing at 4:15 P.M., and if you'd please gather in the front lobby, the shuttle will depart where you were dropped off this morning. Now, before I turn the stage over to Mr. Orthwein, I'd like to remind everyone that during today's Investor Day presentations and Q&A session, our comments may include certain statements that are forward-looking in nature within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended.
These forward-looking statements are made based on management's current expectations and beliefs regarding future and anticipated developments and their effects upon THOR, and they inherently involve uncertainties and risks. Risks and uncertainties faced by THOR are discussed more fully in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended April 30th, 2022, and Item 1A of our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended July 31, 2021. Following today's presentation, if you have additional questions, please feel free to reach out and contact us. We'll be glad to help you as best we can, and our contact information is on our IR website. With that, I'd now like to turn the stage over to Peter Orthwein, THOR Industries Co-Founder and Chairman Emeritus, to officially open our 2022 Investor Day. Peter.
Thank you, Mark.
Oops. Do you want me to use that?
Yeah. Good morning, and welcome to Jackson Center, Ohio, the home of Airstream. This is where it all began with THOR acquiring Airstream on August 29th, 1980, 42 years ago. Airstream was a lot smaller back then and did about $26 million in sales that first year. Who would have thought today we'd be a $16 billion company? Today you will hear from the people that made that happen and the success that THOR has enjoyed so far. With that, I would like to introduce Bob Martin, the CEO and President of THOR Industries, who will tell you about THOR's exciting future.
Thank you, Peter. Thank you everyone. Thanks, Peter. Obviously this is special for Peter, Founder of the company. For me to have him as a mentor and as a guide for really all of us for many, many years is just a rare opportunity. That's a lot of what you're gonna hear from me today is not really, you know, much from me. You're gonna hear more from our team. Peter's an integral part of that team, you know, when it comes to M&A and, you know, things. There's no better person in the room. Over the last 10 years, we've had great success with M&A and strategy, and that's Peter's forte. I just wanna thank you for coming today.
Peter got to see this for the first time last week when we had the Board in town. To see him walk in the door was just a special thing. Kudos to Bob Wheeler and his team for putting this together. With that, you know, part of it just Airstream's new state-of-the-art facility was opened in 2021. In March of 2020, I was a bit nervous when this was still underway. For years, Bob had, you know. We just hit this wall with production, and Airstream was down the street. We had it on once. Bob, you know, came with this grand plan that we needed something that represented the brand. This is unlike any other factory that we have in the United States.
It is very similar to our factories in Europe. As you get out and you get in the factories, you'll see automation, just the line flow. The technology is very unique, but it's the next age for the RV industry, so we use this as learning for our companies, even out of Elkhart. You're also going to see at the end of the day, you'll go on the midday on a tour of the factory. Then at the end, you'll go into the Airstream Heritage Center, which is a museum. Bob, it'll be part of his story, I'm sure as well, but they have people that donate Airstreams back when they pass away because they don't want them to go anywhere else.
Bob's got quite a collection of Airstreams out there that you'll get to see here right after the tour. For me, as I said, what has helped THOR grow over the last, you know, 10 years that I've been involved with corporate is a team. As you look at the team, you know, we've got myself, Colleen Zuhl, Todd Woelfer, Ken Julian, Trevor Gasper, and that's our C-suite. We work very closely every day. We've been together for a long time, and even last night, we were going back and forth joking, how long has it been that we've all been? It was 10 years, 12 years. It was 10 years. We've had, you know, a great run during that 10 years, and this is what builds a great company.
We've got a stable team that's been together for a long time. If we go to the next slide, I even add our senior operations management, Matt Zimmerman. You're gonna hear a lot from Matt today. Matt came from Keystone. I worked with Matt, you know, it's been going on 20 years now I've worked with Matt. Troy James runs International. Troy's been with the company a long time as well. Troy and I worked together at, when he was at Dutchmen, part of the Keystone Group. Then obviously Bob Wheeler. Bob, this is his baby, so I'm not gonna steal much of his thunder. We're gonna have him come up and present to you, how the success of Airstream has been so dominant, you know, in the last few years.
I won't steal your thunder. I know you've got a great presentation. Off to the right, I did wanna just touch. If you look at these, the names and the time, like Jeff Rutherford with Airxcel, 27 years. Darin Elswick, 30 years. Kyle Kwasny, 18 years. Alex is newer in Europe, with seven years. Ryan Juday, 23 years. Ken Walters, 28 years. Aram Koltookian, he's like 27 years, and I've been with him 22 years. Kevin Robinson, Jeff Kime, 33 years. Leigh Tiffin, he's only nine years, but he is a Tiffin, so he's really been in the industry 33 years because he's 33 years old. It was just kinda for me, when I was reading all these last night, it made me remember just last week, I was out at a Tiffin rally.
At the Tiffin rally, Bob Tiffin, you know, he's 80 years old, and it was their 15th anniversary, and they had 650 motor homes out there and, you know, about 2,000 campers in audience. It was a big party for Bob. As Bob got up there, he was unscripted, but he was serious. He looked at everybody, and he said, "This deal has gone so well." This is one that I never thought we would've been able to buy Tiffin. When Bob called me and said, you know, "Could we do something?" I said, "I'd love to." It's gone so well that Bob got up there in front of all of the customers. He told them, he said, "Listen, my daddy lived till he was 93." He said, "I feel great.
I'm 80." He said, "I'm gonna commit to 10 more years." The crowd went crazy. You don't get that in the RV industry. There are a lot of times a sale happens and, you know, the owners are gone pretty quick. We love the fact that we can get people to stay, you know, as long as, you know, it's an agreed deal that we want them to stay. You know, some are ready to retire right away. Bob Tiffin, that just kinda put the cherry on top for me to have Bob there to help guide Leigh, who is very young, along with us. This leadership team is what gives us confidence to weather any storm.
We know that, you know, over the next few years, we're gonna have bumps in the road. It is what it is. We've done it before. We've gone through 9/11. We've gone through 2008, 2009. I was going back for me. Keystone 2006 was kind of a tough year. We've all done it so much that our teams, we don't have to sit them down and tell them what to do. They know how to manage through the ups and downs. That's that variable business model that Peter and Wade Thompson created, and we hold it true to this day. With that, I wanted to pull up just some numbers we presented to everybody in October of 2019 in Germany, and many of you were there.
Before then, we never really gave long-term guidance. With that, we put up some numbers of $14 billion on net sales, gross margin 16%, and then cash of $3 million over the five years. I'm very happy to say that you know, we've surpassed the net sales of $16 billion and gross margin of 17%. We're on our way. We're $1.75 billion, well on our way to that $3 billion, which we laid out as our goals. With that, you know, it's been a lot of ups and downs since then, but we're pretty happy and proud of our teams for achieving that over the last several years. Now I'm gonna present to you our vision for the future.
After I'm done with that, the team is gonna start coming up and telling you how we get there. Some very bold goals. For us, by the end of 2027, we feel as a team and as a group that we can hit $20 billion in sales. We feel that we can hit 17% and sustain that gross margin of 17%. We feel that we can hit an EPS of $47. The buildup of cash over the five years of over $6 billion. We've also added in there, greenhouse gas emissions going down by 40%. For us, a couple new things, the EPS and the greenhouse gas. You'll hear our ESG initiatives. Colleen and Todd will come up, and they're gonna walk you through how we get there.
We know these are big, they're bold, and for us, we feel that we can attain them. For us, we're always looking for the long term. We don't manage to the quarter. You know, we're always looking at the big picture, and we're always looking at what we do. It's with the team that you're gonna meet today and a lot of the teams that are back at the factories today running it, that's how we're gonna get there. For me right now, I'm gonna pass the baton to Ken Julian. He is our Senior VP of Administration and Human Resources, and he's gonna walk you through our people journey.
Thank you, Bob. Good morning, everyone. I just want to take a few moments here just to kinda share THOR's look at HR and how we view it as part of our strategic initiative to make sure that we bring value not only to our teams, but also to our shareholders. Our approach is continuing to adapt and address the current market and future markets. As Bob mentioned a few moments ago, we've had a lot of ups and downs over the last few years, and our people are prepared and ready to address it. Thank you. Is that better? Can you hear me now? Okay. With that in mind, I, as the slide showed earlier, I've been in the RV industry a little over 33 years. Been with THOR for 18 years.
When we look at our people leaders, we have over 200 years of experience in dealing with really the day to days and then ins and outs of the challenges we have with respect to people management. There are really four areas of focus that I'd like to point out, and it's really the foundation for our people strategy. When we look at this, we have four areas. One is our purpose and our commitments. When we think of our purpose, which is we inspire and empower our people to go everywhere and stay anywhere.
Our family of co-companies share this global commitment, and they're really focused on making sure that we foster an inclusive workplace, we conduct business fairly and ethically, we generate long-term value for our shareholders, and we meet and/or exceed expectations in providing industry-leading innovation and customer service. We're also people-focused. Our employees are engaged and encouraged to be their best person and emphasis on growth and development. We have open and honest feedback. We value and encourage open feedback and making sure that clear communication is among all our team members. We also live out our core values. Our four core values are community, compassion, trustworthiness, and also adventurous. These four areas really are the foundation for our people journey.
As we look to be an employer of choice, these four areas here that are on the screen, they're really the focus points as we move forward. True to our progressive business model, companies are each tasked with determining the best and most nimble path forward. This approach is really key to how our people strategy will be fulfilled, 'cause it adds value, and it really differentiates THOR from our competitors that we are constantly battling for talent. The progressive decentralized business structure inspires our companies to reach their goals, and when advantageous, we leverage the size of THOR. In the past couple of years, as Bob mentioned a moment ago, we've been through quite a bit of ups and downs.
The nimble and the ability of our companies to be able to adapt and change and move their strategies accordingly will make us successful. Whether it's developing a return to work plan for COVID-19, establishing inclusive and purposeful recruiting strategy, or determining an approach to elevate underrepresented groups in our companies and elevating for a diverse talent our workforce. We also work with our local educational facilities to ensure that we grow talent within our industry. We also adopt safe best practices, so we can create a safe work environment for our employees.
As I said, I think one of our team members said it best with their employee value statement when they said, "We believe in cultivating an inclusive culture and investing in our team through career development, rewarding benefits, and community involvement." Their people strategy really is rooted in how we interact and how we engage with our people. To continue our program, I'd like to invite our CFO, Colleen Zuhl, and our COO, Todd Woelfer, up to the stage. One thing I would like to note, Todd's role as COO is a little different than the classic COO role, where Todd is not involved in the day-to-day operations, but he really is one that oversees all the strategies you're gonna see today. I thank you for your time.
Good morning.
Thanks, Ken. Good morning. The last time we had a chance to see you all, we were in Tampa, and we talked about in Tampa this day. We said we were gonna have this Investor Day where we were gonna do two things that we were really excited about. We were excited to announce our 2027 goals, our long-term initiatives that Bob just gave you a glimpse of. We'll talk about those as the morning goes on. We were also equally as excited to start what is a new investor communication approach from our company, where we will talk about not just what our results are, but how we think about operating this business, the strategies that we will use to drive toward those long-term targets that Bob outlined for you.
How appropriate is it that when we start and we kick off that new communication approach, that Bob and Ken talk about our most important asset, our people. That is the foundation of how our business operates. Now I'd like to talk a little bit about the business itself. What is it about THOR that makes it different? THOR is the only global pure play in the RV space. What a time for that to be true. There is no industry that has a greater upside than the RV industry right now. We have short-term macroeconomic challenges that everyone is well aware of, but the underlying demographics that have driven the secular shift in demand are undeniable. If people aren't seeing that and seeing the long-term upside in our industry, then they're not paying attention to what's happened. We'll talk about that today.
Matt Zimmerman will show you some statistics to support that. We're excited about being the pure play in this space. We're not a company that is going to dabble in boats. We're not a company that's gonna step outside of our strength and our comfort zone. We're good at what we do, and we know that that's where we belong, and that's the lane that we should stay in. We do that. Our team is a growth-oriented team. It was that way when Peter and Wade started the company in 1980. It's that way today. We've had an incredible run of growth that we'll look at in a minute with Colleen. We're driven on that growth pattern by the leading brands in the space. We'll talk about our market position today.
Our business model is structured in a way that allows us to be an incredible cash generator. On the slide, you can see what we've done with free cash flow in the last five years. In fiscal 2021 is the year of the COVID shutdown, so you can see the impact there. You can see those numbers. The trailing 12 is higher than the numbers that you see on your screen. We are, because of our size and our scale and our operating model, one of the things that sets THOR apart and makes us different is our ability to generate cash.
The other thing that makes us different is there's a great article that was put out by McKinsey several years ago, and it asked the question: For your business, is it better to be growth-oriented, or is it better to be really hyper-focused on your return on invested capital? At THOR, we've answered that question, it's best to be both. We believe that we can drive both. We can drive top line growth, and we can increase our profitability, and that is exactly what this management team has done. Over the last five years, our ROIC is at 18%, and that includes the impact of Erwin Hymer Group, right? That pulls it down a bit. We knew that was true when we acquired Hymer, and we knew we had opportunity to improve that, improve profitability in Europe.
We'll talk about the strategies today that will make that happen when the supply chain provides motorized chassis for us in Europe. As a company, THOR is the company that can push top-line growth like no other company in our space, and at the same time that we're doing that, increase our ability to generate profits. We've done that on a consistent basis in our history. That's possible because of our business model.
Just a real quick comment on the free cash flow that you see here. If you notice during Bob's slides and back in 2019 when we announced our long-term goals for 2025 and just recently for the 2027 goals, the goal is focused on net cash from operations rather than free cash flow. That's intentional for us. We view that the GAAP measure of net cash from operations is the best measure for us. It shows us exactly what we're generating from our operations, and it also provides us the cash that we then look at to see how we're going to allocate among our priorities, of which one is capital expenditures, but it is just one. For us, capital expenditures generally are short-term in nature, other than when we do facility additions.
Even then, those are additions that in the grand scheme are generally in normal times relatively short in duration. We also have the ability to pause those if we need to because of macroeconomic conditions, and we've done that in the past. Even our maintenance capital is relatively low, and again, it's flexible such that during a downturn, we can also pull back pretty significantly even on our maintenance capital. For the remainder of the presentation today, you'll see us focus more on net cash from operations and our plans to allocate that.
THOR, in 2019, as everyone knows, we acquired the Erwin Hymer Group in Germany and across Europe. At that time, we were presented with a new challenge for our company. You know, we've been a U.S.-based company forever. We then were faced with the challenge of creating an enterprise-wide culture. To handle that, we came up with what we call our essence statement, and it's simple, and it's very broad, Under One Sky. The idea of that is our team members may face different challenges day to day in Europe or in North America, but in the end, at the end of the day, we're all on the same team operating under the same sky.
That idea also applies to other key initiatives to us, things that really matter, like DE&I, where we are intent on driving change to make the outdoor experience a more inclusive one where everyone is under the same sky. It matters. Also, it applies to our ESG strategies. Our purpose is pretty simple, right? We inspire and empower people to go everywhere and stay anywhere. You know, we sell RVs to our dealers, and dealers then sell them to the users. What our dealers and THOR together are really providing are life experiences. That's what we provide. Time with family, time with friends, time away from the grid. That's what we do as a company. That's what we enable and make happen for people, and that is why we've seen the secular shift that we have.
It's why our best days in this industry lie ahead, and we're confident of that. Our footprint that we've grown this to today is we operate in five countries, if you include Poland. In Poland, we've invested in a facility. We're not building there yet. Instead, we've donated that use to the Red Cross to help refugees from Ukraine. We're in five countries. We've got 30,000 team members across the globe. We have almost 400 factories, and we have 3,500 dealer partners across the globe.
Good. Looking at our sales numbers on a trailing 12-month basis, we've generated sales of $16.1 billion. Obviously, a record for us, and then also a record trailing 12-month EBITDA at $1.8 billion. It's important to note that all these records were made during a period where we were struggling and continue to struggle with supply chain shortages throughout our organizations, and as well as ongoing COVID impacts impacting our employees and our production levels, and then also inflation.
Our teams were able to achieve these results really through all the dedication, the experience from having been through past downturns, and just the knowledge and working collaboratively to find solutions when we did run into supply chain shortages, trying to find alternatives quickly to meet the demand of our dealers. The record results are testament to our business model and the experience of our teams. Our net sales on a segment basis, slightly over 50% of our sales are North America towables. Approximately 23% are North American motorized, and then roughly 20% for Europe. Breaking it down by where our sales are generated, again, about 70% is the U.S., Germany, 16%, and then Canada, 10%.
Our market position in North America is pretty easy to talk about, right? We are number one in every segment in the space. If we look under the hood of those market positions, you wouldn't find one or two strong brands. If you look at the top 10 in each category, you would find multiple THOR brands. That matters to us, right? The breadth of our offering and the strength across the enterprise of our brands is a difference-maker between us and our competitors. The Class B position is particularly notable. It wasn't long ago when THOR was third or fourth in the Class B market space. At the time, we were struggling to figure out how do we put Class Bs in the market at a margin that is acceptable to our teams.
We also were seeing the explosion that now has driven Class Bs to be the number one segment in the space. About two years ago, when THOR decided to really push to become number one in the Class B space, we leaned into our sister companies in Europe. We borrowed strategies and best practices from Europe. Hymer helped propel the North American strategy. If you watch, just look at the quarterly run over the last two years, you can see the power of THOR when it gets behind a market share initiative. We came from the near bottom of the Class B space. We're now number one, leading that race and pulling away as we go. We're just getting started on the Class B positioning, and we're currently number one. That's the impact of the scale of THOR when we focus on market share positioning.
Number two, in Europe. We're a market leader in Europe, and we knew that Hymer is a strong company with a solid base, great employee base, great dealer base, putting out a world-class product in Europe. We see number two as an opportunity, right? We see where our work needs to be done. We're working through the supply chain issues. We'll talk a lot about Hymer today when Troy is up, but we're working through those supply chain issues. As those happen, if you notice last quarter, we picked up margin in the midst of the toughest supply chain challenge that company's ever experienced. We're picking up margin because they are dialing in their operations to our expectations. We have a lot of reason to be optimistic about where Hymer will be driving.
Our market leadership position is protected by several key competitive advantages that distinguish us from our competitors, that make THOR different. Bob and Ken talked to you about our team. What matters, especially right now, everybody in this room is asking about, "Well, what's the market doing? How uncertain, how concerned are you about that?" We're concerned. We are short-term realist, but there is no company in this space that is positioned like THOR with the experienced team that we have. Every one of our leaders have managed through those times. Every one of our leaders has done it successfully. We're confident in our team on a relative basis as we go into this kind of a market. Then we talk about right below that, people and community. Our people are our team members. Our community, those are our vendors and our dealers.
THOR is blessed. Because of our size, the breadth of our offering, we have relationship with vendors in our space that others just simply do not. We also are incredibly blessed. We have the best-in-class dealer body. Today, we have with us two of the very best dealers in the entire country. We have Loren Baidas from General RV Center and Jon Ferrando from RV Retailer. We are blessed to call these companies key partners, and it is with our partnership with key dealers like RVR and General that drive our success. We are very careful to cultivate those relationships, drive those relationships, create value, and that is difference-making for THOR. We have the best-in-class dealer body in the industry. That was true five years ago, that will be true five years from now because this is part of our DNA.
Other key leadership competitive advantages that support our leadership position that we'll talk about here in a minute is our innovation strategy, our balance sheet, our scale, and our business model. Our business model was developed by Peter and Wade, and it is specifically tailored for this space, and it matters. We talk about it all the time. When you become a $16 billion a year company with 30,000 employees and 400 factories, you have to support and drive a decentralized model if you wanna win in this industry. Why? One simple reason. Decisions have to be made closest to our customers, closest to our dealers, closest to the end user consumers. That is a must in our space. We've had, in our industry, really successful companies that had share bigger than THOR's that are no longer here. Why?
Because they pulled away from that strategy. We will not pull away from that strategy. It's been successful for us since 1980. It's successful today just as it was back then. What it does for us is it allows us to be fast, flexible, and to stay focused on our targets. The other thing our model has done is helped us develop a huge enterprise that is incredibly variable cost-driven. Our ability to flex up and down as the market turns is unmatched in our industry. That's why when we go through times like the Great Recession, THOR was the only company that made a profit. That's why when we go through absolute global shutdowns like the pandemic, THOR outperforms.
You know, Mark, I talked to Mark every day during the shutdown, during the pandemic and said, "Hey, what are you hearing from the analysts and investors?" The question of the day always was, "How much cash are you burning?" Our answer was, "We're not burning cash." Our model doesn't promote burning cash on that kind of a shutdown time period. It just doesn't happen. Mark was right. That is our model. That's how we operate. We can flex almost instantly, and we do. Here's a snapshot of our history of sales and net income. We took this back to 2007. We did that for a reason. We wanted to capture the Great Recession. We were, in fact, the only RV company that was profitable during the Great Recession. That happened because of our model and because of our leadership teams.
You can see also on this slide the growth, not just in sales, but in our net income. Growth of sales alone without growing your return is not an answer for us as a management team. We are incredibly disciplined about investment of dollars into our business and the return that we expect back for our shareholders. If we don't see that kind of return, then it's not an opportunity that will interest us, and we pass on those all the time. This shows you the growth. If you look at this management team, we came together in 2012. We were about a $3 billion a year company at that time. Today, we are north of $16 billion. As Colleen said, that $16 billion is a bigger number if the supply chain could have kept up.
Yeah. Let me just dive down into some of the numbers between fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2021 a little bit further. As Todd said, in 2012, we were $3 billion in net sales. We've grown that as a management team through the end of fiscal 2021, our last full fiscal year, to $12.3 billion, a nearly 300% increase over a nine-year period. That results in a nine-year compounded annual growth rate of over 16.5%. On a gross profit basis, we were at approximately $350 million in 2012. We're now nearly $1.9 billion in fiscal 2021, an increase of $1.5 billion over that nine-year period.
We've also increased our gross margin percentage from 11.6% up to 15.4%. As Bob mentioned, in 2019, we set a goal of 16% sustainable margin. We've now upped that to 17% going forward. We've made incredible progress over the last nine years. You'll hear through the rest of the presentations today on how we believe we can get to a sustainable margin of 17% as well. On an Adjusted EBITDA basis, about $210 million in 2012, $1.2 billion, an increase of, again, $1 billion in Adjusted EBITDA over that period. Net cash from operations, like I said, that's really our focus.
We're about $120 million of net cash from operations, over $525 million of net cash from operations in fiscal 2021, an increase of over $400 million. It's important to see that despite the increase, you know, certainly we wanna grow the top line, but it's more important for us to see that increases in the gross profit, EBITDA, and cash flow from operations is even greater than the increase in the net sales.
That's the McKinsey question, right? Are you interested in growth? Yes. Are you interested in improving your return? Yes. We answer that question in the affirmative on both pieces, and that's how we operate this business. It's not a coincidence that when you look at the CAGRs in the far right column, that we're pushing at above or just below 20%. At the management level, when we look at opportunities, we scrutinize those intensely, and we make sure that we are going to push that kind of return, or it's not an investment that is worth our shareholders' money. We're careful stewards of that, and that's how we think about managing this business. One of the things we've done historically in managing this business and growing this business is we've been successful in our acquisition strategy, as Bob talked about.
As a team, we had our first major acquisition in 2014 when we bought KZ RV. When we bought KZ, they were making 4.8% net before tax profit on their net sales. Today, they're at 13.8%. That delta, that growth, is the kind of growth that THOR sets out to deliver to the companies that it acquires. That's improved profitability from that company that comes from adopting best practices, being introduced to the industry's best dealer body, all those opportunities. At the same time that we did that, we grew their top line 155%. The next year, we acquired two. We had two big deals. We acquired Postle, our first foray into the supply chain, right? Postle is an agnostic supplier. It supplies to our competitors just like it does THOR.
We would do it no other way, and that's how we operate that business. When we acquired Postle, they were at 8.7% NBT. Today, they're 20.3%. We grew their top line by almost 55%. That same year, we acquired Cruiser and DRV. When we did that, Cruiser and DRV were at 6.6%. Today, they're at 15.6%. Again, that's the power of THOR leaning into a deal. If you imagine a hypothetical deal where we're sitting around and it's a great company, and we've looked at some of these, but they are running so well that we can't bring value to it, that's not a deal that would be attractive to this management team. If we don't see our ability to drive meaningful upside, then that's not an investment of a shareholder's money that makes sense to us.
We can do better elsewhere. Jayco, here was the ultimate test, right? You had an iconic brand, incredibly well-run company that was established in the industry, and they were a behemoth. We acquired them. When we acquired them, we had specific meetings and analysis where we talked about, we believe even though they're so firmly established and entrenched and well-run, we thought the power of THOR would bring about two points to their ability. That's where we are today. We're not done. We'll do better than those two points when we're done. We have shown that ability with a company that big, that entrenched, and that well-run, that's the value of THOR. There is no other buyer in this space that could do that. We grew from 5.5% to 7.5%. We grew their top line 25%.
That too is still growing. Now we're up to Hymer. Here's the challenge, right? We made a major investment in 2019 in the Erwin Hymer Group. The year before we bought them, that full fiscal year, they were at 4.4% NBT. Today, they're at 3.6%. At fiscal 2021, they were at 3.6%. We see the opportunity in Hymer. The opportunity in Hymer was to improve the efficiency of their operations. When we bought that company, we saw that opportunity. At its core, it is a fundamentally top performer in that space, driven by a great management team with leading products in the space. Our upside in Hymer, if you remember Q4 of last year, we got hit hard by the motorized chassis issue, you started to see Hymer move in the right direction.
That is coming. Last quarter, we improved margins even though top line was getting devastated by the chassis suppliers. Look, that's a challenge for us. It's a challenge for us in the U.S., but in Europe, if you understand those markets and how they are the inverse of each other, it's particularly challenging for us. In the U.S., we're heavily towed, and in Europe, we're heavily motorized, so that when the motorized chassis suppliers pull up short on us as they have, that creates a much more significant impact on their P&L than it would for us in North America, and that's just reality. The final acquisition I wanna talk to you about is our most recent one. Bob talked to you about it, Tiffin. Tiffin is the high-end Class A leader in the space, right? They build the best product on high-end Class A and have for years.
That's their reputation. That's been their model and their success. When we bought them, they were at a 2.5% NBT percentage. Today, they're at 5.5%, and that's in a very short period of time. We had to use trailing numbers here because we haven't even owned them enough. They've grown their top line at 5.2%, even though they're a heavily motorized company, so that number is pulled down. Their actual upside on that top line is yet to be determined and will be answered once we get a full supply of motorized chassis. We're excited about what Tiffin has done.
Moving on and taking a look at our debt profile, where we stand currently. Historically, THOR has been pretty averse to taking on debt because we are in an industry that can change extremely quickly. At the same time, we view debt as a tactical tool that we will utilize when there are opportunities that meet our strategic plan and opportunities. We do view it as a tool to be used selectively when appropriate. We also, though, when we do take on debt, we are extremely cautious and tough negotiators in those debt agreements. Because, again, we want to maximize our flexibility and minimize the risk to us by having the debt.
When we go into those negotiations on the debt agreements, we have structured them such that we have no burdensome financial performance covenants, which is critical when we go into down periods, which may impact our net income or our EBITDA for a short period. Ours are more structured around cash availability of cash on hand, as well as under the ABL, which we then can control much more so, and we can weather those downturns. That's extremely critical to us, is just the structure of them.
The other thing that where we're at currently on our Term Loan B, we've made prepayments on the Term Loan B such that we don't have any required mandatory amortization-type principal payments between now and the maturity of those loans in fiscal 2026. Again, that provides us maximum flexibility in the event that there is a downturn, and we wanna utilize or maintain our cash and our liquidity. We don't have to worry about principal payments on the Term Loan B. Our ABL is sitting at borrowings of only $100 million. We'll see in a minute, but we have an extreme amount of liquidity under the ABL given where we're at today.
The unsecured notes that we did last fall, again, those require no principal payments prior to maturity, which extends out until fiscal 2029, and it's at a very favorable interest rate. We locked in at a 4% fixed rate between now and 2029. You know, where we're sitting with our debt right now fits in very well with the model that Todd spoke about. It's flexible. It's minimizing the risk, given our industry. That goes back to Peter and Wade that we're very cautious on taking on the debt. You know, when we took on the debt, as we did with going all the way back to Jayco as well, we've always said that we will be prudent and consistent in paying down the debt quickly.
We've done that even with the Term Loan B's and the ABLs. Our leverage from 2019, which was about six months after we acquired EHG, we were at 2.6x net debt leverage. We're now just below 1x. That is our long-term goal is to be at 1x or below, but that doesn't mean we're gonna stop principal payments or continuing to pay down those debts as we move forward. Again, this is part of the conservative model that we operate under. As Todd mentioned earlier, we do generate a lot of cash.
If you look at the period from when this management team came together, the five-year period between fiscal 2012 and 2016, we generated approximately $1 billion in net cash from operations. The next five years, 2017 through fiscal 2021, we've more than doubled that to $2.5 billion. If you look at the trailing 12 month through April 30th of this year, we're almost at $1 billion of net cash from operations that has been generated. Again, that's a focus on a conservative balance sheet approach. We monitor AR. AR turns very quickly. You know, and this is in the face of the last year or two of supply chain.
We've certainly invested in additional raw materials where we can. We've had issues with being able to complete units, so our unfinished WIP has grown. Even in the face of all of those challenges, we've still been able to generate nearly $1 billion. On our liquidity, as I said, we maintain a safety cash level internally between the U.S. and Germany. At the end of April, it was about $330 million. The liquidity under the ABL was $870 million. As of the end of April, we had approximately $1.2 billion of liquidity. That provides us maximum flexibility, and it stays true to the business model of minimizing risks in this industry.
One of the things that separates THOR from our competition is our scale. We built an entity that is global, that is a $16 billion-a-year business. Doing that creates opportunity, it creates an obligation, right? We view that on our side that it is our responsibility, having built this entity as we have, to manage it accordingly. That means take advantage of what it means to have the scale of THOR Industries, and we do that. We have done that, and we will continue to do it. We do it on sourcing. By sourcing when we have difficult supply time, and we have challenges right now today. THOR engages in constant conversations with all of the global leaders on the supply chain side on a regular basis.
It's the enterprise power that enables THOR to engage in those kind of conversations. We were able to do better than our competitors on some of the supply chain challenges this past year. I had an analyst tell me, after last quarter that part of the problem with your stock, Todd, right now is you guys did too well as the supply chain was really difficult, and you managed through that better than other industries and THOR better than some of its competitors, and there's a concern that maybe you pulled sales forward. Well, look, If we're guilty of that then you can paint us guilty because we're proud of our ability to drive that difference in those conversations. It matters to us. It separates us from our competition. Vendor relations.
Different than sourcing, vendor relations give us a seat at a table with companies like Mercedes-Benz and ZF and other key suppliers, not to talk about supply, but to talk about development opportunities and co-development opportunities. There aren't RV companies in our space that are engaged in those kind of conversations like we are. Why is that? Because we're global, we've got a great partner and team members in Europe, and because of our enterprise size, it makes a difference. I've talked about our dealer relations. It is the enterprise size and the breadth of the offering and how we think about dealer relationships that separates us from our competition. Those matter, and we leverage that. When we buy a Tiffin, for example, there are introductions to be made with some great dealers around the country that THOR can make that others could not make.
Product development and innovation. Our size, our scale enables us to invest in the future of the business like no other company in our space, and we are doing that. Why are we doing that? Because we intend for those investments to drive true long-term competitive advantage for THOR. We'll talk about innovation a bit more in a minute. Last thing we do with our scale is we leverage our best-in-class practices. I talked to you a bit about Class B and how we leveraged what Hymer could teach us, and we brought that to North America, and it helped catapult us from third or fourth place in the B space to number one in a flash, and number one and pulling away. Another example of that is Leigh Tiffin. Leigh Tiffin, Bob talked to you, the grandson of the founder.
When we closed the deal with Tiffin, Leigh leaned into us and said, "I'm so excited." We said, "We're thrilled to have you as part of the family too." Leigh's like, "No, no, I don't mean that. I'm excited about that, but what I really mean is the opportunity to learn from some of the best companies in the space about how I can conduct our business better." He did that. Remember his numbers? He was 2.5% NBT when we bought them. He's 5.5% now. He's more than doubled their ability to generate profit in about this much time. It's incredible what he's done. That's the power of THOR. You can lean in with best practices from Europe.
You can lean in with best practices from Keystone, Jayco, TMC, you name them, and Leigh Tiffin has done that in an incredible way. He's a rock star manager, and he's driving an incredibly well-rooted company, one of the best brands in our space, to levels that I think it probably never imagined. He's just getting started. It's the power of THOR that he has leashed and is using for his advantage that makes a difference. Innovation has always been important to THOR. You don't stay number one if you don't innovate at the company and brand levels. Our engineers and our product people at our brand levels are the best in the industry. There's nothing. We've been that way for some time. There's nothing new about that. That won't change.
What did change several years ago is our management team said, "Look, we're not doing enough on the long-term horizon." Nobody in the industry was doing that. We started to think longer term about innovation investments. We started to talk about a concept that we use called patient capital. That investments in our business that we don't necessarily expect to see in our P&L the next quarter, but we do expect to drive real competitive advantage for us. That was a meaningful shift, not just for THOR, but for the entire industry. We did that. One of the things we did that was a pretty hefty investment in Roadpass Digital. When we made that investment, I think people scratched their heads and, "What is THOR doing?
Why? You know, they're an OEM, why would they do that? We're pretty excited about what we've built, and we'll talk about that in a minute and what it means to us. Our data strategy is another example that is a beginning process for us, where we will leverage our size and our enterprise scale and drive a data strategy that will create more value across the THOR enterprise than any of our competitors can dream about on a data strategy. Finally, strategic partnerships. They matter to us. If you go back 10 years ago, we didn't have strategic partnerships beyond our dealers, which are our most important partnerships. That's true today, it'll be true in 10 years. We're talking about opportunity, new opportunities on the innovation front. Those partnerships now exist with key OEMs, chassis manufacturers, with other suppliers. We've got some exciting ones in place.
We've got some exciting ones that we're anxious to be able to announce soon. Watch your newsreel as partnerships come. A great stat is at the bottom of this page. When we started as a management team in 2012, if you looked at the number of patent pending applications that THOR Industries had, you wouldn't have to look very long because that number was at or actually was zero. When we became a team, we started to have a conversation, said, "Why is it that it's only the suppliers in our space, it's only LCI and Patrick who can get patents when it's actually usually ideas from our team that they're running with and getting a patent?" We decided that we could change that. We could change the paradigm that existed in our industry with all OEMs, that OEMs don't really get patents.
They don't really have an IP portfolio that can make a difference. We changed that. We brought in somebody to manage that for us. His name is Chris Putt. Chris has done an outstanding job changing how THOR Industries thinks about patents. Our acquisition of the Erwin Hymer Group grew incredible value for us as we think about patents. We've now created a culture across our enterprise where team members on the floor are thinking about, "How do we make this better? How do we invent something that will make a difference?" When you got 30,000 people thinking like that's difference-making. That's leveraging your scale like no other company in our space can. IP matters to THOR, and we're in a great spot with that today, but we're getting better with it every day. Our ESG initiatives are core to who we are.
Always been true. We're an outdoor company. If it doesn't matter to an RV company, it probably matters to no one. It's mattered to us for a long time, but what's different today is we are learning how to track that and how to report that, and we're still learning that, and we probably still will be in the next couple of years, but we're getting there, and we're making progress. We've made some significant strides in how we're reporting what we're doing, and we are on track with our own expectations. We've pledged to be 50% down by 2030. You saw our pledge today that by 2027, we'll be 40% down on our greenhouse gas emissions. At THOR, here's a great example of how we leverage our scale.
Erwin Hymer Group was the first major RV manufacturer in the world, I told you this in Tampa, to operate and manufacture RVs on a net neutral basis. We have companies hoping to get there by 2050, and Hymer is doing it today. That's how far Europe is ahead of us with some of these strategies. At THOR, what happens is you get really well-run American companies like Bob Wheeler's Airstream. Bob Wheeler says, "Hey, we can do that, too." He leans in, and he works with the Erwin Hymer Group and takes best practices to drive Airstream to new levels of ESG performance. Airstream's on its own path, setting its own course and leading the North American industry in its ESG initiatives. That's an example of how that scale matters, right? Hymer accomplished what it did.
Airstream leans into that, uses its own genius and drive to make it work here in North America, and that's a difference that only THOR can bring to the table. We've done a number of serious investments in how we think about this. One step that we're really proud of is our partnership with the National Forest Foundation, where we've pledged to plant 500,000 trees. We've pledged to otherwise support that initiative. That is important to us, right? The environment. What's more important to an RV company? Equally important to us are our social initiatives, right? We have an absolute, fundamentally intentional strategy on what we're doing on DE&I. We have an amazing leader that is guiding our company, every one of our operating companies, and our corporate headquarters.
Chandria Harris, who we lean into and has become a bit of a leader in the entire industry for what she does and what she's accomplished in a very short time with us, is unbelievable. Our progress on DE&I and opening up not just our employee base, but our view of the entire industry, right? In the outdoor lifestyle. Chandria is a big piece, and Renee Jones on our marketing team is a big piece of an effort in a project that we co-founded, something that Bob Martin was passionate about. It's called Together Outdoors. Together Outdoors is an initiative that isn't dedicated to RV, it's dedicated to the outdoor life. The idea is it's well past time for the outdoor lifestyle to be an inclusive lifestyle. It is important for us to do that.
If we believe that what we're doing is providing life experiences, we should provide those equally for everybody. We are on an impassioned mission to make that happen. Chandria is central to that, Bob's passion that drives us to lead things like Together Outdoors. This matters to THOR in very real ways. We're excited about where we are on the ESG journey. You know, we've done a lot of other things. We could stand up here and talk about everything that we've done, the THOR Community Foundation and everything else, but we would be up here talking about that for a while. Suffice it to say, we're proud of our industry-leading position here. Who we are as a company, a recap. We are the scale player in this space, and that matters. Nobody can generate the kind of cash that we generate.
Our business model puts us in a position to perform no matter what cycle comes at us. We just harnessed an incredibly hot market, and you saw our numbers, and those numbers are muted because the supply chain understandably couldn't keep up with us. Those numbers would've been bigger. Our upside is more than what we've seen in the last 12 months. We can also perform during the downside, and we'll talk about that, how we've performed historically in downside still this morning. We're the market share leader in every category in North America, and we're number two in Europe. The positions in North America are not going to change. We're very focused about our position. It matters to us to be number one in those categories. It matters to us to have depth in every one of those segments, and that's difference-making for THOR.
We don't have one or two or three strong brands. We've got a family of really strong brands. We have a focused people strategy that is driving difference for us, and we're the market leader in innovation in ESG. Now we're gonna talk a little bit about the strategies that will drive us to the targets that Bob talked to you about. Before we get into the specific strategies, I wanna talk a little bit about how the management team, how we think about strategy. When we consider strategic opportunities, we think about several things. We think, is this strategy going to provide a material opportunity for us to meaningfully grow our earnings? Will it drive important initiatives for us, like DE&I and ESG? Or will it create a lasting competitive advantage for our operating companies?
If we can't answer yes somewhere in that list of questions, it's not a strategy that we're gonna be engaged with. We're very careful about the steps that we take when we think about our strategic direction. Ultimately, the goal of our strategies are pretty simple, make our company better, put us in a position to return more to our shareholders. Those are the strategies that we adopt.
Yep. As far as capital allocation, as I mentioned, you know, we are, and Todd has mentioned numerous times, we generate a lot of cash. That's who THOR is. That's who THOR has always been, thanks to Wade and Peter. How we think about capital allocation is a key topic that we spend a lot of time thinking about on the allocations. At the same time, we think about debt. We use it, like I said, as a tactical tool when necessary, but then we also protect our liquidity. Again, we understand this business extremely deeply. We've been through the cycles. We know we have to maintain that liquidity to minimize the risks and to make sure that we can achieve all the objectives that we wanna do through our strategic plan.
We're active in our management of all those factors. We're managing our balance sheet constantly in a conservative manner. That provides us with the cash from operations then to invest in these other areas.
A key area for us, obviously, is supporting our operations. One of the things to understand, we have almost 400 factories across the globe. Our factories are not very capital intensive in terms of the investment, and what that means for us is our maintenance CapEx is pretty modest given that we have 400 factories worldwide. We manage it that way. We also manage it very flexibly. What I mean by that is, if the market slows down, we can make adjustments there, and we do. We make those investments in maintenance at the right time, so we're careful and prudent about how we manage that spend. Same is true with our capacity expansion strategies. We do not expand every time we have a company president saying, "I need more capacity." If we did that, we would have about 800 facilities.
We're careful about when we say yes and when we say no. We need a proven plan that gives us confidence that through the cycles, we can get sufficient capital utilization out of those new facilities, and that's an important step for us. We're prudent expanders, and we do it carefully and only after we look at it very closely. We'll spend money in the next five years, and we're gonna talk about this in a minute, on automation like we never have before. We're spending money on quality initiatives, and we're seeing it make a difference. You've seen our warranty numbers improve. We're making investments in PDI facilities and trying to increase the level of quality across our companies. We will continue to make those investments. As our margins improve, that doesn't happen by accident.
That happens because we've got an OpEx playbook that we work with our companies to put in place. We have 400 factories. Each factory has its own profile and opportunities that differ from the others, and we use that playbook to help drive those strategies and those initiatives designed to improve quality, to improve capacity, to improve our ability to put out best-in-class products. We'll invest in those initiatives. We'll also invest in what we think is an industry-leading innovation strategy.
Yep, as I mentioned earlier as well, we'll continue to reduce our debt balances, our outstanding debt. Historically, our cadence throughout a fiscal year would be that we'd use cash in the first half of the year or so, and then start to generate cash in the latter part of the third quarter and the fourth quarter. These last two years have been very unique situation. That cadence hasn't quite been the normal, but we do see that coming forward again. We would anticipate, again, going forward that you'll see the bulk of our debt payments probably in the latter half of the year. We will continue to do that. That will, again, keep our leverage ratio low.
When you think of it combined with our cash generated from operations and our liquidity, it creates a huge buffer for us to weather any kind of macro environment.
Shareholder distributions are part of who we are, right? Peter and Wade started a policy of dividends. We've had a run of 12 straight years of increased dividends, and that matters to us as we return value to our shareholders, and we'll talk a bit about that. As we go forward, you know, we're at roughly a 2% yield company right now, and we expect that our dividend will continue. It's sustainable. We expect that we will grow it as we have over the course of the last 12 years. Right now, there's something that is much more on our minds, and that is buybacks. Our stock is incredibly undervalued in this market. We understand the short-term challenges. Believe me, we talk about them all day, every day. We're mindful of those. We see those. We're experiencing those.
We talk to really smart people like Jon and Loren on a regular basis to understand what is happening in our market. We get that. Long term, there is no industry that you're gonna find that has the kind of trajectory that we have, that has been around for as long as the RV industry has. This isn't some startup. This isn't some, "Hey, is the industry there or not?" Look at the demographics. Look at the numbers. Matt will share those with you and what the upside for this industry is over the course of the next five years. We are incredibly optimistic about our future. We're short-term realists, long-term optimists. That's who we are. We understand the current environment.
What that tells us is our opportunity when our stock is trading where it is, it is, there are no better investments for us to make than in ourselves, and we are buyers of our stock right now. We bought $100 million, which is a start. That's what that is. We had a $250 million authorization, so management had $150 million in our pocket when we walked into our Board meeting last week and said, "Please give us more." We got a $450 million additional authorization. We now have $600 million of authorization. We've also aligned our debt where Colleen told you our long-term goal is, right? We've got the debt to that point. We're really comfortable with that.
We've got a stock that is grossly underpriced in the market, and we've got $600 million of authorization, and we're generating cash. We are buyers of our stock, and we will be aggressive buyers of our stock. We'll talk about what that means here in a minute. Last thing on this page is our acquisition strategy. We talked about it. There's an important thing on here, though, that bottom bullet point. Over the next three years, I think this is the first time this is true since we became a management team. For the next three years, our management team does not foresee a major acquisition. We have other really important initiatives where our capital should be deployed, and we're very focused on doing that.
We may have some small roll-ups, I'm sure we will, some strategic moves that will make sense to us. In terms of major acquisitions, and this truly is, I think, the first time. I'm looking at Bob. I can't remember another time.
Never know.
When we did not have a thought of what might happen in the next two or three years. Right now, our thought is we have much better opportunities and much wiser investment of our capital. Our OpEx focus, we've talked about this, so I won't spend much time here, but it is crucially important to us. One thing I will talk about, and it's on the next slide, is automation. At THOR, the next five years, we're gonna change what automation means to the RV industry. Today, we automate. We have some CNC machines. We automate more in Europe than we do here. We've learned from our European partners on how we can bring automation. We've had our eyes opened up to that opportunity. It's always been a North American thing where we say, "Well, RVs, we're building a house on wheels.
You need craftspeople to do that." That's true, but there are steps in that process that lend themselves to automation that will bring real value to our operations. What we're after? We're after better efficiency, better quality, increased capacity and growth. We're gonna free up human capital, which will help us with improved retention and ultimately drive better customer satisfaction. Here's a case study. We're not just talking about this. We were talking about it two years ago. Now we're making it happen. We identified a pain point, a very high warranty incident item, delaminated sidewalls. It can be an expensive fix. It's prevalent across the industry, has always been that way.
We sat down and we said, "What could we do to make THOR stand out from our competition when it comes to sidewalls and the risk there?" The answer was, we could create a repeatable, uniform process that allows us to build best-in-class sidewalls with the best efficiency and best quality in the space. How we do that, we designed a robotic milling, routing, and welding system, automated system, that will process our sidewalls. It also will automate the non-value add material handling steps that are in our line today. Those people will then be able to be deployed to value add steps. This is how we will improve our margins. Additionally, from where we are today, we are excited about where we are with this. We've accepted this as a challenge for us. The opportunity is real, and this is one example.
This is the first one that we're gonna hit, but there are a number of steps in our process that lend themselves to automation. Under the leadership of our global innovation team, we will drive and bring automation to the RV industry like it's never seen before over the course of the next five years. Our approach to innovation. Look, our scale positions us uniquely. We have a global innovation team. We happen to have the best innovator in the space who leads that team, and it's great that we're here today 'cause this is his home turf. We took McKay Featherstone from Airstream after McKay had done wonderful things at Airstream.
McKay's ability to lead THOR through our innovation journey at a time when we have this massive rush in development of technology that will shape our industry over the course of the next 10 years is unmatched. He has, in two months on the job, positioned us to where we have identified six portals of opportunity that our innovation team can help us lead. We've named them. Hassle-free RV. Here, the team is focused on reducing friction points in the industry. THOR can have a major influence on that. What's that do? That helps people stay in the industry, stay satisfied, it brings people into the industry. Another portal, together forever. There, the strategies are, we're gonna do a better job of building and cultivating and nurturing brand loyalty. Another is EV revolution.
This is one we talked about a lot in Tampa, but I wanna say it again because, forget that we're talking about electrification right now for a second, this is a great example of how THOR thinks about innovation differently than our competitors. Our strategy on electrification is not find the best electric chassis out there that can go 100 miles and put THOR on the side of it. That's not a solution for us. When your charging time lasts as long as your travel time, that's not an enjoyable experience. That's not going to lift the RV industry into the electrified times. What matters to us, we identified through our own research driven by our marketing team what users expected from us when it came to electrification. They expect a journey that they can enjoy, and that doesn't mean stopping every hour.
We set out, we developed with our team, with key strategic partners, technologies and strategies that extend that range meaningfully. That's the difference. That's how we think about. We bring true innovation to those kinds of challenges. We sit around and talk about, "How do we make this better?" Yes, we can go buy an electric chassis, and we could throw it in the market like everybody else can, but that's not going to differentiate us from our competition. When electrification comes, and it's coming, the only question right now is when. When electrification comes, THOR will have the solution in the space that differentiates itself from our competitors because we develop that with our strategic partners. Grow the pie is another portal. Here, what we're interested in is expanding the interest in the lifestyle, helping drive people to our dealers' lots. Another one is Circle of Life.
Here, we're thinking about the entire lifespan of an RV. Used market, shared economy, where can we be value add in that chain? How can we help drive initiatives for our dealers and increase that activity in the chain? The last one, more, better, faster. This gets into our size, our ability to produce better and higher quality products, and to do that more efficiently. Lots of opportunities for us there. You would find our automation strategy in this portal. Here's a strategy that is an example of hassle-free. One of the big pain points in our industry right now is aftermarket. We've seen an incredible growth in our industry on the top line. The back end support has struggled to keep up with that, undeniably.
If you do any study of top 10 pain points for users today, you'll find this in the top 10, usually towards the top. THOR, identifying that as a friction point, has set out to develop and nurture and push a strategy, working with our dealer partners to help drive their aftermarket strategies to remove that friction point. How do we make that process hassle-free for owners? The business opportunity for our dealers and for THOR is big. Our ability to really become good at that offers a huge opportunity for our dealers and for THOR. THOR alone in an incredibly conservative analysis, if you look at this, the THOR units that are on the road today, it's a $2 billion a year opportunity, and that's crazy conservative. $5 billion, if you look at the whole industry.
We've made some moves that lend itself to developing that kind of an aftermarket strategy, working with our dealer partners to bring that to life and to improve that whole experience. Airxcel , Roadpass. We'll talk about that reach through Roadpass. Here it is. When we made the Roadpass investment years ago, I think people scratched their heads, but here's where we sit today. We've built the most comprehensive digital platform in the space. We have a leading campground review site. We have the world's largest trip planning app. We have a leading unit service tracking app, and we have the RV industry's leading social community, kind of the Facebook for RVers, all on our platform. What's that done? We now have 6 million users across our platform.
We're now at that point where we've reached this critical mass and the opportunity to lean into this strategically and watch the value that we can harness from Roadpass. We've got 120,000 paid subscribers, and we haven't really even marketed the subscriptions because it was just last year that we completed that platform. We're at that point now where this has built, and we're looking at the strategic opportunities. What are they? They fit neatly with kind of our portals of opportunity under the innovation strategy. We're gonna increase RV lifestyle participation, grow the pie on the innovation strategies. We're gonna have a broad consumer reach through diversified product offering that we can push through that platform, create brand loyalty.
We're gonna have connected technology that will remove friction from ownership in the industry, and there will be a strategic value that we will harness from that app that includes, but is not limited to, the data that flows through it. With 6 million users across the app, there is no competitor in our space who is in a position to harness that kind of data and find that kind of value. That's difference-making for us. We talked quickly in Tampa because it had literally happened the day before, about our partnership with TechNexus. What that is it connects us with a global ecosystem of entrepreneurs and startups that are technologically focused, and it enables us to create our own filter of that ecosystem. That filter is defined by what our strategic initiatives are, what is important to us strategically.
Then through that filter come companies with whom we have the opportunity to connect, maybe to share information, maybe just to understand where is electrification infrastructure, what is the timing of that. It's kind of important to us, right? 'Cause we have good solutions, but having great solutions and bringing them to industrialization before the market is ready for them, it would be a mess. Timing that is important. We now have seats at tables that we never would have had before. We also are given the chance to partner with some of these startups if it makes sense for us on our business side. Ultimately, what our partnership with TechNexus does is it creates strategic value for us. It differentiates us from our competition, and it will drive financial returns for our shareholders.
The last strategy I wanna talk about is our data strategy, and I'll talk high level here. The important point is it's our scale that makes it different for us. The volume and the value of the data that we have within our enterprise umbrella is unmatched across the industry. You could take the rest of the industry and aggregate it, and that would be true. We have a very intentional strategy here. We've partnered with an analytics firm exclusively in our space, a proven firm that has made differences in commercial businesses, and we're excited about what they'll do for us.
We've identified in the green bubbles here the opportunities that we think we have at THOR that are unique, and our ability to lean into our enterprise-wide data is a difference-maker for us as we move forward, and we're very focused on bringing that value to life. Now we'll talk about how we think financially in our strategic plan. You know, we talked about dividends. 12 straight years of rise. We're about a 2% yield company. That's kinda who we are. We're proud of that. We're steady. It's sustainable. It's not at risk. When the market gets a little soft, people who are asking if THOR's dividend gonna go away have not paid attention the last 12 years. But more importantly, what we should talk about is the bottom of this page.
With the most recent authorization that we got last week, that we announced this morning, we have. If you include the $100 million that we bought back, we have $700 million of buybacks that we are focused on making happen over the course of the next three years. Under a real conservative modeling, which has prices actually starting to get closer in line to value, we think that that puts us in a position to pull back about 14% of our market cap. We are absolutely focused on doing that. We've got our debt in line. We're generating cash. Our stock is incredibly underpriced right now. We know our best investment is in ourselves, so we will be aggressive on buybacks. Won't spend much time on this, but here it is. We've not talked about this publicly before.
If somebody wants a call on this, we'll be happy to tick through that whole process in detail. Here's what matters on our acquisition strategy. First, it's the thing across the banner across the bottom. We're not making a big deal in the next three years. The other piece is, when we do make a deal, we don't just buy some company because it's big, and we want their earnings. If we can't see our pathway to materially increase that company's top-line performance and its profitability, it's not a target. It makes no sense for us. If we're not bringing material value to that deal, that is not a good investment of the shareholders' money. We've been like that since day one, and we're incredibly restrictive in that process. 99.99% of the things that come across our desk are quick nos.
The few that aren't quick nos go through a really detailed analysis for us before we can be comfortable with them. We could walk back through the framework, but there it is. That's the difference making of THOR. We lean into our scale. That is what puts us in a position to do more than what our competitors can do. Now I wanna introduce you to Matt Zimmerman. Matt is our Group Manager for our North American RV Group. Matt.
Thanks. Take that. I'm disappointed there's no strobe lights or smoke, but it's all good. Good morning, everyone. Again, my name is Matt Zimmerman. I'm the Group Manager here at North America for THOR, and I'm excited to share with you guys a little bit more about our North American business operations. First thing I wanted to do was remind everyone who we are in North America. We operate out of 16 manufacturing companies, which represent 140+ brands. 28 of those brands respectively sit in the top 10 categories, which is pretty dominant, and we have the pleasure of serving 2,200 dealers across North America. We operate out of seven states, 250 facilities, and 17 million sq ft of manufacturing space.
As Todd mentioned earlier, we are the industry leader in all product segments that we produce product for. Last year, fiscal year, we represented roughly $9 billion in total sales. Many of you are probably aware of THOR's business model. When Wade and Peter founded THOR Industries, they created a business model that was very decentralized, and that decentralized model has brought a lot of success to THOR Industries. You may be wondering, what does THOR's progressive decentralized model actually mean? What it means is we recognize the value of that decentralization. When our companies have the autonomy to make decisions on their own, instead of being led by the greater organization, we will always be faster to the market, we will always be more flexible, and we will always deliver products that our customers desire. When our companies compete against each other, it fuels this passion.
It fuels this passion of innovation and brand strategy, and that is hugely critical to our success. In everything that we do, that will be the core focus of our business model moving forward. However, we are no longer, as Todd and Colleen mentioned, a $4 billion company or have four operating companies. We now have 16 companies just in North America, not to mention our supply companies, not to mention our data companies, and the fact that we're global. We produce revenue of over $16 billion, and if we're not utilizing that scale and size to our advantage, we're leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.
We've introduced the progressive decentralized model, and that progressive model allows us to take advantage of things like finding best practices and deploying them across our business units where it's needed to improve operational improvements. Leverage our size with brand and even company agnostic-type purchases to deliver the most competitively priced products in the industry. Even affect a change with industry friction points. Imagine parts for a minute, and that is one of those friction points in our industry. What we could do from an enterprise level to eliminate that friction point. It provides a better customer experience. Ultimately, it's to develop and execute an enterprise strategy around data, lean, automation, and even high-level innovation, such as the EV products we have.
You imagine a world if all of our companies were going down a separate path with EV, it would be a mess. THOR's progressive decentralized model is in full tilt, and it's performing quite well. When we look through the lens of being central guidance, we really turn to these four strategic priorities. First, not only to continue to lead the industry with industry-leading product, but deliver the most advanced RVs to our dealers to help them win the future of RV. Second, operational excellence, and that is really around utilizing our scale to improve our operation efficiencies. Third, center the entire organization around prime quality. Last, but certainly not least, deliver a superior customer experience. These are the foundations or the foundational principles that will help us enhance our market share leading position. Product.
Product is always and will always be key to maintaining market dominance, and we recognize that. At THOR, we are quickly and very focused on evolving our product strategies to attract the fastest customers in the fastest-growing product segments. Many of you in this room probably are well aware that baby boomers one time fueled our industry for many, many years as the number one demographic in the industry. Today, they're the third largest group and only represent 22% of the overall RV space. Now, don't get me wrong, we love our boomers, and we will certainly continue to build products and serve them up to 'em that they desire. But Gen Xers and millennials today represent nearly 70% of the RV space. If we're not building products that are attractive to these young enthusiasts, then we're missing out on incredible opportunities.
For the first time in my career, RVing isn't just something what the grandparents did. It's the cool thing now, right? This is how these young enthusiasts wanna get outdoors. They wanna connect, they wanna use an RV. I'm happy to report to you today that over 60% of THOR products, you can put solar package and/or battery technology on those products, either through the factory or our great dealer partners to help those young enthusiasts get off the grid and do what they desire. We are building smaller off-road capable vehicles to help them go find those adventures in public lands. We're also building models that are designed for remote work. That's a big thing these days. Over 50% of our products are now capable of becoming a roadworthy hotspot through connectivity. That is something that those young enthusiasts also desire.
I don't think there's any one better example of building to a product or a demographic than what we've done with our B van segment. As Todd mentioned earlier, just 2.5 short years ago, we were a fraction of this segment. We recognized and we had forecasted that this segment was gonna be very popular with young buyers. See, they're not your traditional RVer. They're not going to your campgrounds. They're adventurous. They're hitting the open road, and they wanna get off grid. We put together a strategic plan, and now 2.5 years later, we are number one in that product category. We're forecasted to have over 45% of that share by the end of this calendar year.
When we talk about operational excellence, this is a real big deal for us at THOR in North America. Operational excellence really is encompassing of a lot of different things, some of which we just covered. Sharing of best practices, deploying those best practices to drive operational improvement. There's probably not one or two more important initiatives within this strategy than the two you see on the screen. First, inventory management, and second, distribution. I'm gonna start with distribution. You see, distribution for us, great products need great retailers. The first thing we need to do is find those retailers that are aligned with our goals, which is to provide great service and an unbelievable customer experience. Then it goes beyond that.
It's really in our company's hands or historically has been in our company hands to go find the right dealer partners for their business. That's worked incredibly well for so many years. Once again, as we've gotten larger, what we found happening is we were starting to cannibalize each other, right? XYZ company has some brands that are available. They call up the dealer, says, "Hey, I've got this product available. This is why it would fit great on your lot and why you probably should kick off that brand." Sometimes that brand is our very own sister company, right? 'Cause of our decentralized model. What we've established through our progressive decentralized model is a THOR playbook.
That THOR playbook identifies those dealers that are aligned with us in terms of our goals, and it also identifies those dealers where it makes sense from an enterprise view, not just solely the company. Today, when our companies make decisions on distribution, they reference that playbook. I'm happy to report that because of this, we have less cannibalization today in our organization. We've not only sustained market share, but we've even grown some market share. The next part of this is inventory management, and I know there's been a lot of chatter out there relative to overproduction in our industry. Some cases, even THOR has been labeled as overproducing. Well, I'm here to tell you that our strategy this year today is not to overproduce. I'm sure you've heard that before, maybe heard it from other companies, but it's very real under our progressive decentralized model.
Our companies understand what the expectations are, and our companies today are managing to what we call optimal dealer inventory, not just by company, but all the way down to the brand. What that is it's data. It's data through distribution points, market size and retail performance in the past and retail performance in the future. We're not managing our production levels based on backlog. It's about where our current inventory is in the field. When we do that, we're guaranteed we will not overproduce. Because when you overproduce, it leads to deals. When you deal, it erodes trust with our dealers, it erodes margin for our dealers, and ultimately erodes margins for us. We are not dealing product, and we will not deal product. Now, I will tell you, let me make sure we're clear on this.
From time to time, THOR companies will run promotions and incentive programs, right? We will always be market competitive, period. It will come in a form of promotions, and there's a distinct difference between promotions and dealing. See, promotions are strategic, thought-out plans with the long-term health of the business in mind. Dealing is emotional and very short term. THOR is very focused on the long term. Quality. When we talk about quality and centering the entire organization around quality, what does that really mean? Well, we start in the very center. We invest in our people. THOR launched an initiative earlier this year to deploy over $25 million across the organization to improve the working conditions in every single one of our facilities. That included break rooms, bathrooms, workstations, LED lighting inside and out of every single facility, parking lot improvements.
Why does all this matter? It matters because it drives morale. When we have high morale, we have less turnover. When we have high retention, we get a more experienced worker. When we get a more experienced worker, we produce higher quality products. I'm proud to be able to stand up here in front of you and let you know that our Board and our executive team authorized that spend, which is a significant spend to improve how we build here at THOR Industries. You're gonna get a taste of that a little bit later. You have to stay and see what we're talking about. It's exceptional here at Airstream. We didn't stop there. We looked at other programs as well. Software, right? Quality software, where now real-time data can be shared across our entire organization.
Not just stuff that we are gonna report in a week or report back in a month, right? Where we've missed that opportunity to get it corrected. We have people that are punching in defects that they find online, real-time. It spreads throughout the entire plant, and we can fix the problem overnight. All of these things are above and beyond what many of our competitors do, and we take pride in them. Just to say that we're doing them and not track them, you know, it would be like, okay. We track our performance. We track our performance based on warranty percentages, which is at a historic low right now. We track it through all of our secondary PDI stats. Every one of our facilities has a secondary pre-delivery inspection facility where the plant is not involved.
The products go to that facility. They actually get checked out, and then we report all those stats and all that data, and we can see that those stats are also at historic lows for us. Then DSI, which is the only dealer-awarded reliability and quality award you can receive in our industry. I'm proud to announce in 2021, THOR companies received more DSI awards than they had previously in the past seven years. We're doing the right things when it comes to prime quality. Customer experience. Man, this is, unbelievable. There's this thing in our company where we are transforming ourself from a product-driven company to more of an experience-driven company, and you probably got taste of that with Todd's presentation. This is a big deal. Our customers aren't looking for just great products.
They're looking for great experiences. It's our responsibility to deliver those experiences. It starts at the very beginning. It starts at selecting those great retailers. It starts with our own companies having a responsibility in the purchase, right? Helping some of those first-time buyers get the hard questions answered. Maybe it's the most discerning customer that's had four or five RVs that really wants to dive in technically. That's why every one of our companies now have a concierge service on staff, not a little chat box that sits in the bottom, but real live people that our customers, new and old, can reach out to get answers to their critical questions. That's just starting the experience off the right way, right? Imagine this. You finally make that purchase. You're all excited.
You get home, you get on the living room sofa, and you start to plan that trip. You got the family around you, and you realize, wow, the campground that I was thinking is booked. I don't know where to go. How do I find other campgrounds? Well, now let's just take a longer trip. We'll go to Bristol, Tennessee. Put the directions in Google Maps. Wait a minute. There's mountains there. I've got an RV. Can I go that route? I don't know if my 13-ft, 11-in tall or my 40-ft long RV or my 12,571 weight is supposed to be on that road. How do I find information out like that? I wanna know what tricks and tips are available to me. Who can I talk to that also RVs? This is our new first-time RV, right? Where can I find public lands?
I don't wanna go to campgrounds. I wanna go off the beaten path. I wanna take my kayaks, and I don't want anyone around me. Where do I go? That's RV anxiety, and it happens every day with so many purchases. THOR's focused on delivering an experience that removes RV anxiety. That is where Roadpass, our digital companies, and our overall digital strategies come into play. We live in a world where every single THOR customer today can receive a free app through Roadpass that will eliminate many of these anxieties. They can go on and see thousands of campgrounds and public lands that are available to them that have thousands of user-generated reviews and photos. Soon, I might be letting the cat out of the bag, they can go ahead and book it right online and have an open table experience of camping. Planning that trip?
Don't know if your rig's ready for that road? Don't worry. We have RV-centric GPS. Plug in the model you have, it recognizes your specifications, and it will route you down the road that is safest for you to get to your final destination. You wanna connect to a community? You can now connect to a community of over 650,000 unique RVers to ask questions. And oh, by the way, if you pull into the campground where your friend on that community is at, it'll ping you and let you know, "Hey, did you know Bob Martin's in the same campground?" How cool is that? All of these things eliminate trip anxiety and delivers a better experience.
Once you're out on the road and you're camping and you're doing all those great things, we understand that customer care is a critical part of the experience, so we're here for them. We're deploying our rapid response fleets across all of our companies, so we can do service direct to consumers, expanded parts and service strategies. We're expanding our customer service hours, and we're using more than ever connected resources, like QR codes next to water heaters. Just scan it. Oh, I forgot to turn on the button. The button's over there. Got it. Or what's the number to my local dealer? It's in there. Or what's the number to the service center where I you know, from Keystone RV? It's in there. Or how-to videos.
All of these things, if done well, will drive a better consumer experience for THOR owners, and we're passionately attacking these as we speak. If we do all of these things really well, we will continue to lead with our dominant market share position. As you can see and you saw earlier, we're number one in every single category. I think what's most important here is we have some of America's most trusted and favorite brands. Did you know that our Coleman travel trailer is the fastest-growing travel trailer in the industry? Did you know that our Jay Flight stick-and-tin is the number one stick-and-tin travel trailer in the industry? Our Montana high-profile luxury fifth wheel has been number one for over 20 years.
The Phaeton Class A diesel is the number one brand, and our Four Winds Class C is also the number one brand. Going to North American outlook. We lost power. There it is. Got it. North American outlook. I think you guys all know it's a little volatile, right? It's choppy. Business year- over- year is down compared to last year on the towable side and the motorized side, somewhere in between 20%-28%, depending on the product segment. That's where it falls. The only product segment, by the way, that is not down is Class Bs. They're up 47% year- over- year. While it's down, it doesn't feel great, the reality is we're still projected to have a top six year in our industry. It's not all that bad.
That puts us in line with probably 18% or 19%, somewhere right in that range. Frankly, I believe it's really healthy because what gets us out of this crisis management mode that we've been in for the last two years and gets us back to executing great strategies, and that's where THOR really, really excels. When we look at dealer inventories, again, there's been a lot of chatter about that. Our towable inventories are at or near optimal, depending on product segment and brands. There's no doubt that we're more on a one-for-one replenishment cycle for those particular product segments. However, our motorized inventory levels still remain very low in terms of optimal inventory levels. That's largely due to chassis constraints that we've had. We expect the chassis constraints to go into 2023 before it starts to clear up.
The other note that I'll give you here under dealer inventories, while dealer inventory levels are balanced and optimal, there is a need to rebalance some of the inventory that's out in the field. You might have dealers that had to pick up some brands short-term to survive during the crisis that they need to get off the lot to create space for their more core brands they're coming back to. You might be heavy in stick-and-tin because frankly, those are the easiest to ramp up because we weren't faced with supply-related constraints like we were on our laminated products. We might have some rebalancing, or we certainly do have some rebalancing out there, and that'll take place over time. Supply chain. It has certainly improved tremendously on the towable side of things.
Today it is business as normal when it comes to supply. Doesn't mean we have zero, but it's nowhere near where it was. On the motorized side, we continue to be handcuffed by availability with chassis due to chip shortages. Dealer sentiment. You know, I could sit up here and talk all day about dealer sentiment, but we have two of the largest operators in this room, and I'd ask them to come up with me so I can ask them a few questions. Let me introduce to you Jon Ferrando from RV Retailer.
Morning.
Loren Baidas with General RV. Thanks, guys, for joining me.
Hey.
Appreciate it.
Good morning.
Are you gonna need a mic?
Good to see you.
Maybe. Only because we're the last segment before lunch, and I've learned a long time ago, you don't go long on that segment when they're hungry, we'll keep it short and brief. They'll be around, so by all means, you can pick their brains after this. Short term, long term, what do you guys view the business as?
Yeah, long term. Good morning, everybody. Long term, align with THOR, very optimistic on the industry, the demographics, they're very strong. We see tremendous growth over the next 10 years in RV. No question about it. You know, we're putting our investment behind it. We're investing a ton in training, whether it's service techs, sales, service advisors, management, you name it. We're also investing a ton in facilities and in acquisition growth. We have 100 stores today, 32-state network to service our customers wherever they may travel. We have over $100 million of construction projects going on right now, including a flagship standalone Airstream facility in Austin that will open next month. We're very optimistic.
We share THOR's alignment around growth, around the customer experience, and around taking a long-term view.
Yeah. Jon, is this working?
Wanna switch?
There we go. That sounds better. Yeah, we have a very similar thought process and approach to long-term strategy. We've been around in this industry since 1962. We've seen just about everything that this industry and economics can have us run through, from 9/11 through the Great Recession, and even the last couple of years, the ups and downs. From a long-term standpoint, we're in the same position as investing in our facilities, investing in technologies, investing in customer experience. We know that's going to be the future. If our customers are having a better experience, it's only gonna provide a bigger customer base in the years to come. Long term, very much positive.
What do you guys see short term, right? I know the markets is what it is. I know you don't have a crystal ball, but I'm sure they're all wondering, so we're just gonna ask the question.
I'll start with this one. Short term, lots of challenges, obviously. We're tied very much to the overall economics of what goes on in discretionary income, so we see the ups and downs of it. Probably the bigger thing that we recognize and look at is the RV industry tends to be one of the leading indicators of overall economics. We tend to be the first one that kinda feels it when economics are going backwards. We're also the first ones typically to get the upswing as the economic engine starts to go more positive.
Even though there are some short-term challenges with some of the numbers I think you already talked about with retail numbers going down, we are tracking very, very similar to 2019 numbers at this point, which for us as an industry was one of the top five years in the industry. We think that's about where it's gonna sit. Then as economics slowly get better, we're gonna see that growth pop back up. That's our short-term strategy when we talk about inventory levels, we talk about customer sentiment.
Great.
Yeah, I would echo that, Loren. Clearly, the consumer is cautious, more so than a year ago, so that's where we are in the cycle. Business is still very strong, very good. RV buyers are out there buying. Retail credit's good. I think we're in a good spot on inventory. If the industry manages that well, which THOR is a great partner on that front, we will get through this whatever might come on the macro, and you guys can predict it as well or better than us. We're, you know, very agile, prepared for whatever will come. Still feel like it's gonna be a very good year in RV. We're still investing for the future. RV service is off the charts.
If you think about the number of units we've sold, that's actually a very, very strong part of the business. We're very focused on investing in that part. It's higher margin. Also builds more customer loyalty. Very much share that enthusiasm and focus around the customer experience, and I think the industry's doing a very good job of that. A lot of these new RVers that came in the last couple years are definitely going to buy again, service again, and stick with it.
Awesome. Thank you, gentlemen.
You're welcome.
Appreciate your time very much.
Sure. Thanks.
Okay, we'll just set that there. When we talk long-term retail outlook, on the last part of this slide, you will see where we believe passionately by 2027 that our industry will achieve the range of anywhere from 585,000 to 630,000 retail sold units in 2027. Those numbers are really supported by real data from RVers. Whether it's 95% of new RVers that are happy with their purchases, as our retailers just alluded to. 97% of lightweight owners are happy with their new purchase. Typically, those are Gen Xers and millennials. 97% of B van owners are happy with their unit purchases. Here's the biggest stat of them all. 68% of our current RV owners intend to purchase another RV in the next five years.
If you just look at that math, there's no reason why we can't achieve the forecasted goals for 2027. That is it for me. I'll leave you with these key takeaways. We are number one in every single product category. THOR's progressive, decentralized business model is new and in full effect. Highly profitable segments. Best-in-class operational experience centered around innovation and quality. We are ready and positioned to meet changing needs of customers. Lastly, we are shifting from just being a product-driven company to more of an experience-driven company. Thank you very much. With that, I think I'm introducing Bob or-
No. With that, we're just, it's not long. We're close. We're actually gonna do just a quick break, and then we'll come back and we'll finish up, and then we'll have lunch. Kind of a working lunch as well.
Exactly. We've covered a lot of great information so far. I hope you're seeing and hearing our efforts to provide, you know, detailed and insightful information for your use. We're gonna take a short break right now and short refreshment break. Coffee and light snacks are in the lobby if you'd like to grab anything. For our webcast participants, we will continue with our live presentation in approximately 10 minutes. Thanks, everybody.
Thanks, everyone. If I could get your attention, we'd now like to continue with our next presentation. I'd like to welcome Bob Wheeler, Airstream's President and CEO. Bob will share his thoughts about operating within the THOR family of companies from an Airstream perspective. Bob?
Housekeeping standpoint, I was asked to announce that we do have wireless here. It's called Airstream Wireless. I know other people are having some trouble getting on. We've created a system that filters out any negative news. Whatever you post, just know it's going through that process. Anyway, welcome to Jackson Center of the Universe, as we like to call it. Many of you have been following THOR long enough to know that their headquarters were just down the street about a half a mile. I think Peter alluded to it, in a little brick building that can only be described as humble, I think. Take a look at it as you go by. From such humble beginnings, juggernauts emerge, and that's certainly the case with THOR Industries. Today I wanna talk to you very briefly about a number of things.
One, the state of the business for Airstream, which spoiler alert, is really, really good. Two, what our strategic pillars are, what sets us apart as a company, what makes us different. Of course, what it's like to be an operating subsidiary of the world's finest RV company, THOR Industries. Thanks, Mark. To the state of the business. Again, speaking for Airstream, we're in a very, very good position. We continue to operate well behind market demand. That's been the case almost since the start of the pandemic, when we realized that this, pandemic-related recessionary pressures weren't really going to apply to the RV industry. From an Airstream standpoint, our dealer inventories are still well, well below where they should be. We're still about 23% of inventory nationwide, and that's down by a consensus.
We poll our dealers frequently and they tell us exactly what they want, how many units in what category. We still have a big upside opportunity from a dealer inventory fill. On top of that, most of what we're building actually has a retail name on it. That 75% actually looks through the whole production schedule. When you take your tour today, over 90% of what you walk by is gonna have a retail name on it. Again, we look at this as our opportunity if there were a softening in the market. Our opportunity is to fill dealer inventories, even if those estimates change. We've got a lot of buffer built in from where we are as we've been trying to catch up to the market over the last two years.
Lead times are between 36 weeks and 50 weeks between order placed and fulfillment. We really like to operate about 15 weeks-20 weeks. We run in the scarcity model, and that's kind of our sweet spot. We've got a lot of wood to chop to get back where we'd like to be. I'll talk to you in a little bit about some of our struggles and what's caused us to be behind the market where we are. What are we doing to support that? From a production standpoint, of course, this beautiful 750,000 sq ft or 725,000 sq ft facility, which we're very, very proud of, and I thank THOR for having the trust to support our vision. Opened in January of 2020, right before the recession and the pandemic hit rather.
We're glad to be back and hitting our stride. As it turns out, we needed every square foot of that to try to get to where we need to be to support the market. 675,000 sq ft of manufacturing space + 50,000 sq ft of offices. We've really created a facility here, a flagship facility that allows us to represent the Airstream brand to our consumers and our dealers. Also attract and retain employees. We've got an on-site medical clinic. We have a full cafeteria. It's a great facility to draw in people and get them to stay, and that's been one of our challenges.
Just because we've got a travel trailer facility upgrade, which has allowed us to dramatically increase our capacity, there's also carryover benefit for our motor homes because they moved into our old travel trailer facility and thereby over doubled their manufacturing space and capacity. It's really a two-for-one investment. Of course, the Heritage Center, I think you're gonna get a brief tour of that today. We're a 91-year-old American brand, and it's we're spoken of in the same sentences as Harley-Davidson and Mustang. It's high time we had a Heritage Center Museum that we could celebrate, represent the brand, all the great stories around it. You know, we like to say we honor and respect our history, but we're not constrained by it. That history is on great display in the Heritage Center.
We're very proud of it. Now open to the public only about a month, so it still just took the wrapper off. Supply chain, that's been talked about here briefly. You know, we struggled with supply chain challenges, especially for the first 18 months of the pandemic. Those are starting to resolve, at least for Airstream, you know, starting at the first part of this year. There's still things that crop up, but from a day-to-day supply chain whack-a-mole standpoint, that's largely resolved. Logistics as well. That was another, obviously, another big part of our challenge to get stuff in here. Labor, getting it and keeping it, right? We're used to being the first shift employer of choice in Shelby County, but labor's gotten really tight.
We adjusted our pay and benefit scale to put us back in that first position, and now we're getting the labor we need. We also made another big adjustment. We took our marketing department, we have a world-class marketing group, and said, "We don't need new Airstream orders." If you don't hear RV company presidents saying that very often. We had plenty of backlog. What we needed was workers, so they put together an amazing local marketing campaign, TV, print, radio, billboard, and now the funnel's full again with folks that wanna come work in Airstream. Inflationary pressures, of course. You know, cost increases were coming faster than we could deal with them from a price increase standpoint. It's a real challenge for a company that maintains price protection as a 30-year policy.
We've been putting out anticipatory price increases so that we make sure we don't get behind the curve on our cost side, and that's been very effective with our dealer partners, one of whom's here today. Of course, innovation. Airstream's known for innovation. We've been on the cutting edge of this industry since 1931, before there was an industry. Some new products. We're famous for our co-branded products. They create a lot of marketing for us. We partner with firms and companies that have a marketing machine that gets us in front of customers that we might not see otherwise, like Pottery Barn. That's been a big hit. In fact, for Pottery Barn production, we're sold out into 2023. We have a product we're going to announce in a month, a co-branded Basecamp product.
I can't tell you who the partner is, but keep your eye on this space. Very excited about that. Again, huge marketing machine, customers we don't see otherwise, and it's a real boost for that product line and for the brand as a whole. We're developing and we'll soon launch a product, another Class B product into the hottest segment in the industry, as you've heard us say many times. Our Class B business is extremely strong, but we see another whole level of opportunity and one we're gonna capture. Within a month's time, you'll be getting that news. Then, of course, the eStream product right behind us, we'll take a look at later today. We're very, very proud that THOR chose Airstream as the platform on which to showcase those technologies.
You know, not just the battery power and the self-drive axle and the convenience that provides, the tow range and carbon footprint reduction, but the convenience and really the customer experience touches and platforms that have been put together as part of that product are really world-class and really swung for the fences. This thing is not smoke and mirrors. They went all in, and from that will bleed down into producible and marketable products some of those innovations. We're looking forward to continuing on that path with THOR. I wanna touch briefly on our strategic goals as a company. I know this is a THOR day, but I just wanna touch on some of these to give you a sense of what we're about as a company.
Our number one goal, which we put in place in April of 2020, is to increase output. With every resource available in the company, we need to grow output in a way that maintains or improves product quality. That piece is very, very important for us as a company. Cranking up volume with new hires and putting out substandard product is the worst thing we could do for the long-term health of the brand. We've maintained that strict focus. It's limited our output, frankly. We could have been putting out more travel trailers and motor homes, but we said we're not gonna do that. It's not the right thing for the company or our customers. Investing in a digital future. This is an exciting initiative. THOR's backed it and supported it.
To build a customer data platform, we have all these disparate pieces of information about our customers through all the ways they connect with the company, but we've never been able to stitch them together in a way that gives us a 360-degree view of the customer in a way that many, many retail companies have done. We hired a professional that came out of the Limited Brands out of Columbus, and he's building a very powerful tool with the help of a lot of consultants that allow us to understand our customers, every level of demographics. I'm not even go down the list. How do we communicate with them in a timely fashion with the right information at the right time when they need it? How do we market to them with the right message that's personalized for their taste?
How do we provide the service in a timely fashion that improves their customer experience and ultimately makes the brand stickier? Very excited about that considerable investment, but the payoff is clear. Quality Management System. Even Airstream, with a world-class reputation for quality, still has a QC system based largely on audit and inspection. Find and fix can be very effective, but it's not the most efficient process. We've doubled down on a process to focus on driving quality back to the source. Defect prevention, not find and fix, and an amazing technology platform that supports real-time feedback and information, training for new hires, retraining, process control, checks within station, not after station. It's really driving a cultural change here at Airstream that's really, really remarkable. Finally, culture of engagement. You know, I started in the company in 2002.
Been with THOR since 2002, the culture we didn't talk about. There were 325 employees. The culture was just there. The average seniority was 20 years. I was still on probation until I had my 20th year last week, so. But as you bring in 1,000 people that didn't work here all those years, the culture is what they brought through the door. That, you know, it almost happened without us paying attention. It happened slowly. We realized that the Airstream way that people the understanding that there was a certain way, the right way we did things, some of that had been lost. You saw that reflected in all sorts of things, product quality, attendance, attrition, safety, morale.
We've doubled down and refocused on bringing the Airstream way back in, being very explicit and intentional in communicating that to new hires and old employees as well. What are we about? Chandria Harris is a really big help in that area as well. Not to single you out, but so excited about that. You know, people want that. They hunger for that. They want a direction and understanding to be part of something bigger. At a company in a culture like Airstream, with a brand as powerful as ours, it really works well. All right, last but not least, you know, what's it like to operate under THOR?
You know, I've been with THOR for 22 years now overall, and the changes I've seen in the last five or six years are the most dramatic I've seen in the history of the company, and I'm very excited about where THOR is headed. Of course, at the core of their business model is this decentralized approach that allows companies to make decisions based on market input, agile decisions, feedback from dealers and retail customers, without the cumbersome process of getting everything approved through THOR corporate offices. Our strategy is set locally. We understand the needs of our dealers and our customers. What THOR has started to leverage dramatically, and you hear a lot of talk about this today, obviously, is how do they create these centers of excellence?
How do they leverage their size and their resources to provide a tailwind for their subsidiaries in areas like digital platform innovation? Data power, automation, supply chain management and contract negotiation, and many, many more. All of these centralized centers of excellence, and THOR's putting tremendous resources toward these things, are gonna benefit their subs dramatically. As I look back in 22 years and the next probably not 22 years for me, but I'm very, very excited about THOR's, where THOR's headed in the next chapter. I guess it goes without saying to this group, but stay tuned. Thank you. Next up, I believe we have Troy James to talk about European operations.
Well, thank you, Bob. Hello, everybody. My name is Troy James. I'm responsible for European Operations at the Erwin Hymer Group. Today I'm here to talk about some exciting things that we have going on in Europe. As the team has already alluded to, we're facing some unusually challenging times in the marketplace. That's no different in Europe. I'm gonna get into more specifics on that as we get deeper into the slides. First before we dive in, I think it's important for us to visit or revisit the reason for our acquisition in Europe. Todd mentioned this earlier. When we acquire a company, we look for companies with upside potential. High-performing companies, but still with upside potential. That's still the case for Erwin Hymer Group.
We firmly believe that. I know that. I work with the team every day. The challenges that we face since the acquisition are something simply out of our control, right? We have supply chain challenges over there unlike anything that we face even here in North America. In addition to that, another strategic reason for EHG, Todd already mentioned it, is a global footprint. Bringing THOR globally, leveraging that scale, bringing innovation from Europe to the U.S., sharing best practices back and forth across the Atlantic, those are things that bring value to our company, both here in North America and for our European operations as well. Todd mentioned innovation being a key pillar for THOR moving forward. He mentioned EHG being a key part of that. There's no doubt that was true and that is true moving forward.
They are excellent at looking into the future, developing things that you and I aren't even thinking about right now. We have a very gifted team sitting in Bad Waldsee, Germany and other places throughout Europe that are bringing value to THOR, and we're excited to bring more of those, advances here to the North American market. Additionally, Todd mentioned this already too. I feel like he almost went through my entire deck, which was awesome. He took the pressure off me a little bit. We have strategic partnerships that are a result of long-term relationships developed long before we acquired EHG with key partners like Mercedes, key partners like ZF that we're leveraging for our global position, in the RV space, and we're excited to continue to head that direction. Last but not least, the experience in after sales.
Matt talked about after sales becoming a bigger part of our vision. Todd mentioned it as well. We were already in that space. When we acquired EHG, THOR stepped into that space unknowingly. We knew it was there, but we didn't know the importance of it back then. We knew it was coming, but in today's market, as Matt talked about in North America, the same holds true for Europe. Customer expectations are much higher today than what they were five years, 10 years, 20 years ago, and we're there at EHG to support that through various aftermarket sales initiatives that we have in place, and we'll talk more about that. Now we're gonna take a little bit deeper dive into some of the numbers, which is what most of you in the room really care about, right?
You're like, "Man, just tell me about the numbers." We're gonna talk about it. At EHG, we've achieved in fiscal year 2021, $3.2 billion in sales in U.S. dollars. That is an incredible growth. That is actually an 18% growth actually in net sales, not retail. Net sales since the acquisition. Our EBITDA has also improved in that same time period. The EBITDA improvement in that same time period is roughly 35%. Even in the midst of very challenging times, as Todd said, Q4 2021, it gave a glimpse into what is potentially happening in Europe. It's not a potential, it's a reality. Our team is positioned and ready to react and respond when supply chain initiatives improve. We will do that. Our team is fully committed to executing.
It's unlike any operation that we have. Beyond that, you can see some other high points for our operations in Europe. We have 9,000+ employees. We have 21 brands across Europe. That includes aftermarket and rental. We have roughly 1,100 dealers throughout Europe, but not just in Europe. It's a very complex company that we run over there. Our dealers for EHG are located in Europe, primarily, Asia, the Middle East, the U.K.. It's a very diverse set of dealers, ones with very strategic or challenging demands that our team rises to meet every day. To give you an insight just a little bit, anybody wanna guess how many, how many different languages our team at EHG deals with? It's very different than North America.
North America, primarily English, some Spanish, right? At EHG, our team can effectively manage through nine different languages. It's an impressive and complex organization that we run over there. An overview of the brands that we operate in Europe. You can see up there that we have 15 different brand names of RVs throughout Europe. Each one of those is positioned in a specific category. It's a very strategic approach that we have in Europe. In Europe, we actually position each one of our brands according to the Limbic marketing model. So each one fits into one of those three quadrants. So they're strategic. There's strategy behind that, right? Why do we do that?
Well, it increases value to our dealers, it increases value for our end customers, and it improves our bottom line, because we're actually able to position our products in a way that we stack on top of each other, if you will, entry, mainstream, premium, and it's very strategic in the approach that we take. In addition to our core RV business, as I mentioned earlier, we also have the accessory and service businesses, Movera, Goldschmitt, and our rental businesses as well. Those are all critical pieces of our business model going forward in Europe, and they are meaningful contributors to our margin improvement going forward. As I mentioned earlier, it is a very complex organization located across Europe. Todd mentioned it earlier, we've stepped recently into Poland. That's listed up here as one of our 10 operating sites. We have operations in France.
We have operations in Italy, the U.K., Germany, our home country, and now Poland. The Polish operation, I'll talk a little bit more in detail here in just one minute. Our product offering. Matt mentioned this for North America. Product is fundamental. That's what's going to drive our growth going forward ultimately. We need awesome processes to support it, but we need vision for products, and we have that in Europe. Todd mentioned it, Matt mentioned it, I'm gonna mention it as well. We're bringing a lot of those products and those ideas and bringing them to the United States and to North America to help propel THOR forward in North America. Likewise, we're taking product ideas from North America back to Europe or over to Europe, I am.
You can see up here that we cover all the major segments of the market in Europe. We have the urban vehicles, something that we currently don't offer in North America, but it's an early trend in Europe. It's a smaller B van, if you will. It's really a subset of the B van marketplace. The camper vans. Having EHG gave us insight into the possibilities of what that would mean for our North American business and for THOR globally. We were already into that business in Europe. That market is different. We have smaller vehicles over there to begin with. Customers are already out. They have limitations on campgrounds. It's just a whole different process and a whole different setup over there for camping. We recognize that, and we captured that for our North American businesses. We are a leader in camper vans in Europe.
As a matter of fact, since 2018, we're actually the fastest-growing market share gainer in European camper van business compared to any other RV manufacturer. We're fully committed to this space. We're gonna continue to leverage our scale, our partnerships with Stellantis, our partnerships with Mercedes, just to name a few, will allow us to do that. In motorized, normal, if you will, as they call it in Europe, normal motor homes, we are actually the number one manufacturer of motor homes in Europe, and we fully intend to maintain that position through our focus and our dedication on product development, on processes of continued quality improvement. Then caravans, this market, we are in this market across four of our different operations. It's the reverse of what Matt described earlier. Todd mentioned it as well.
It's the inverse of the North American market. Towables is roughly 20% of the market in Europe versus 80% here, so it's the complete flip. It's still a key category for us to stay focused in, and four of our brands operate in that segment, and we continue to put resources behind it. As I mentioned earlier, outside of core RV business, we also operate in complementary business units. What are those? Well, you can see them up here on the screen. You can see that we have the Movera product offering. What is Movera? Well, Movera is an aftermarket sales organization, not only to end customers, but to dealerships as well. And that's a key strategic strength for Erwin Hymer Group and THOR in Europe. How?
Well, it actually allows us not only to support customers as more and more customers are coming into the marketplace, and they're experiencing, you know, as Matt said, "I don't know really what I need, what I want." They go, they buy their RV, and then they realize, "Oh, I have bikes that I need to take with me. How do I get a bike rack for an RV?" Our Movera business unit can support that and does support that. More importantly, beyond the upside potential as more and more customers are entering the RV lifestyle in Europe, is actually our foray into dealerships through Movera. It's not just EHG dealers that deal with Movera. We have competitive dealers that are exclusive to our competitors, that do business with Movera as well. It's not just limited to our channel. Lots of upside potential there.
The Goldschmitt product offering, it's a technical aftermarket service company. It does specialty suspension, but it is a growing business for us and one that we continue to have high belief in and one that we know will have meaningful impact to the bottom line results of Hymer. The rental business. Something that when we stepped into Europe, none of us on the executive team really had firsthand knowledge of. We have great customer partners here in North America that specialize in rental. But in Europe, it's different. We own and we operate one of the largest rental companies in Europe. We have roughly 3,200 rental stations across Europe and throughout Southern Asia. It's a very different machine. But what does that mean for us? What does that mean for you as you're looking at numbers?
Well, what it really means is, it's that gateway of bringing people in. First-timers are coming in, they're experiencing our products, young products, and then having a positive experience with it, and then converting into actual customers of our products. You see, our dealership or our rental stations are primarily at our dealerships, and of course, we have others outside of that as well. We don't leave product in the rental fleet over there. We have a cycle that's much faster than a typical rental company. Why do we do that? Well, it's twofold. Primarily because we want customers to have a positive experience so that when they go home and they're thinking about buying an RV for themselves, they buy that Hymer or they buy that Dethleffs that they had a positive experience with.
Again, tremendous amount of upside potential for bottom line improvement through the rental business as well. This is a key point for my presentation. The market evolution. When you look at this slide, if you haven't done your research on Europe, you can see that since 2016 through 2021, the numbers are up here, right, at a growth of 54%. Really exciting growth, really exciting times. Then 2022 hit. 2021, we were feeling confident, we were heading into 2022. What you see is a dip. I wanna stress to this room, and I can't stress it enough, that dip is not because of a lack of dealer confidence, dealer demand or end customer demand, retail demand.
That dip, that forecasted dip for 2022, is simply a direct result of our inability, the industry's inability, not ours, the industry's inability to secure the chassis that we need to meet customer demand. In fact, if you look at it and you think to yourself, "Well, what does that really mean going forward and how are they getting those numbers, 317 in two years? That's crazy. They can never get there." That's not the fact whatsoever. The reality is that right now, for us, our backlog position is very robust, it's very strong, but we've actually stopped taking orders. We've had to do that in order to ensure that we're able to supply and build the products that we already have orders for. Our backlog position, we have a strong retail position, much stronger than what it typically is. The European market is very different.
Our dealers are different in Europe. They're smaller. They're not Loren Baidas and Jon Ferrando. They're smaller individual markets in these small towns across Europe that have a couple of vehicles in stock, and they're taking orders off of it. We always have a retail position in Europe. Right now, it's almost 2.5 t imes higher in retail position than what it traditionally is. Some of our brands are sold out well into next calendar year already in retail, before they even start replenishing dealer inventory. That's a critical piece for you guys to remember. The market share evolution for Erwin Hymer Group, another key point here. Again, if you look at the motorized market share across there, as I mentioned earlier, we're still the number one manufacturer of traditional motor homes in Europe, even with that slight decrease.
Again, that slight decrease isn't because of our team's inability to execute. That is literally because we simply are hand-to-mouth right now on chassis supply. Next level down, if you look at camper vans, you can see, as I mentioned earlier, the growth that we've experienced in camper vans. Specifically, if you go from 2018 to 2021 or 2022 year to date, they're the same number, roughly going from roughly 8% to 13%. You can see a meaningful growth there in that period of time. Our team is fully committed to continuing to grow that segment of the market. Then, as I've already touched on the caravan or the towable market segment, it's relatively flat. That market, if you actually look at pure numbers in the market, the actual market situation, not our market share, it too is flat.
The reason for that is limitations within the European market. You can't tow a 40-ft travel trailer down the road. If you did, you wouldn't go very far. The police will pull you over and ask you what you're doing. Totally different market. What does our dealer network over there look like and what does sales look like going forward? Our dealer network, as I mentioned earlier, we have over 1,100 dealers. It's growing. Of that, a really cool stat, something that I think our North American businesses would be really envious of, is we have over 400 exclusive, nearly 40%, 35%, you guys are the numbers wizards. About 40% of our dealer network is exclusive to our products.
That goes back to strategically placing our products and executing to that, having entry, mainstream, mid, and being intentional about the design, about the product. In addition to that, if you look at the breakout of our sales channel, I mentioned that we have a crazy number of locations. Actually, we operate in 38 different countries. Bob Martin, even his eyes just got really big. But we have 38 different nationalities that we're dealing with or countries that we're dealing in. Of that, roughly 80% of our sales are in the core European markets, so Germany, France, Great Britain, just to name a few. Dealer inventory levels. I touched on this earlier, and I'm gonna touch on it again because this is a critical point for our long-term plans in Europe. It's a jump-off point for us.
If you look at this number here, you can see that we've become disciplined in tracking dealer inventories. The dealer inventory process and managing to it actually started after we acquired them. It's something that we encouraged them to do. You're probably wondering, why don't they have numbers back before? Well, frankly, because they implemented a tracking system in 2019 after the acquisition. Our numbers prior to 2020 aren't really solid numbers. They're not pure. Now we have the systems in place in 2020 and forward, and we're confident in these numbers. You can see the results of that. Our overall dealer inventory position is roughly 35% below normal levels. That's for all of our dealers, all 1,100+ dealers. If you narrow that down into core markets like Germany or Great Britain, as an example, it's well below that.
The U.K., as an example, is actually closer to 65% below normalized levels. We have a lot of runway ahead of us just to fill the pipeline and get back to normal conservative levels. Moving forward, what can we expect from EHG? We're gonna put some goals out there. Been working with the team over in Europe, and we're gonna stretch a little bit. We're gonna put some statements out there. One of those statements is we are committed to improving our margin, improving our gross margin by 200 basis points over the next five years. By fiscal year 2027, you can fully expect us to be at 15.8%. Our goal, of course, Todd might not like this, Colleen might not like this. My goal is to actually accelerate it, but we're committing to 2027.
We hope to get there a little bit earlier, and we're excited to get there. How do we get there? Well, we have a number of different drivers. We have a lot of different initiatives, keyed up and ready to go. Our leadership team over there, we've been meeting with them on a regular basis. I have been, and we're driving these initiatives forward, and they're excited to support them. We'll go through them in a little bit more detail here, and you can read them here on the slides. Pricing to offset current inflationary concerns, innovation-focused on product differentiation, and then operational excellence. We'll get a little bit deeper into that one.
Our strategic priorities in Europe and how we are going to improve that bottom line performance and get those results that we knew when we acquired EHG that it was possible of achieving. Strategic priority number one, operational excellence. We wanna look a little bit deeper into that supply chain. That falls under operations, right? It goes beyond the current situation with our chassis. We've actually taken steps already. Six months ago, nine months ago, a year ago, we were already diversifying our supply chain partners within chassis. We're not dependent on one or two manufacturers like we were in past years, many years ago. We have actually accelerated that. We've now partnered with Volkswagen, we've partnered with Renault, just to name a few. We've deepened our relationship with Ford in Europe.
All of those things have taken place, and that's part of our strategy for growth going forward in improving consistency in production. Additionally, we fully intend to further diversify and dual source wherever we can from a strategic standpoint. We're single source in a lot of categories in Europe, but we've been working very diligently over the last year to dual source and diversify where we can. Areas like, I don't know, appliances, as an example. Believe it or not, one of our opportunities in Europe was actually to leverage Airxcel, and we've done that. We've actually implemented a plan at some of our brands that were challenged with shortages on appliances. It's now opened an opportunity for our own Airxcel business. Beyond that, we're planning to optimize manufacturing. We're planning to diversify our manufacturing. We'll talk a little bit about that in a little bit.
The automation piece of it as well. The other part of it that our team is committed to, it's really easy, as one of the guys said earlier, to ask for a new plant in Europe, ask for a new machine. Our leadership team in operations in Europe, along with working with myself and other leaders at THOR, is to actually maximize throughput of our existing facilities and our existing machinery. We know that we have upside capacity in some of our facilities.
Before we go and we invest a ton of money in a new facility in Europe, because trust me, there are a lot more money in Europe, you guys know that, than what they are here, we're going to make sure that we're maximizing our return out of our current facilities and getting efficient throughput on all of our existing machinery. The next key strategic priority for us is innovation and digital. Innovation of new product. That goes without saying. Product is king. Product drives a business, a brand, right? But beyond that, what are we doing to actually improve behind the scenes? Well, I'm working with a team over there, we're actually working on improving our design process to improve throughput. Now that doesn't mean that we're gonna go to a very vanilla, generic product.
We need our products to be exciting, and we need them to be innovative, and they will be, and we're fully committed to that. We also recognize that we can reduce some complexity in Europe that will help us improve our throughput and improve our bottom line performance. The digital space, that one's pretty self-explanatory, right? Capturing data, making use of it, all of those things, and I'm not making light of it, because it is a critical piece of our business going forward. We have big investments in Europe in the digital space. They were one of the leaders in what we call over there, the Smart Caravan. The Smart Caravan Unit is actually what we call our own digital device, our own operating system over there that's harvesting data for us.
Like everybody else, for a couple of years, everybody was chasing data, and then you get to a point, you're like, "Well, now we have all this data, what do we do with it?" Right? Our team over there is executing. They're harvesting that data, and they're pushing it out to the brands to make sure that we're using that not only in product decisions, but then disseminating it all the way down to the operational level as well to determine where we can simplify to improve throughput. The next key item of our strategy and our strategic priorities for operations is product and pricing. So products, again, goes without saying, accelerate new product innovations, bring them to market faster. That's something that THOR's really good at here in North America. Boy, I'm gonna tell you, that's been a challenge for me.
I came from a business operating unit that if it took seven weeks to get a new model developed, I was having a heart attack. I go to Europe, and it's, "What do you mean you want it in less than two years? Are you crazy? That'll never happen." We've accomplished that. We actually developed a B van product at two of our operating companies over there, and we came out with them in under 12 months, which for a motor home is fast even in the U.S. We're really excited about the direction that our team is heading there. Some other examples of what we've got going on, acceleration, things that are gonna set us apart and help improve the bottom-line performance of EHG is our innovations within the product categories. As an example, the Erwin Hymer Group. Some of you may be aware of this.
A couple years ago, 2019, the Düsseldorf Show, we introduced a product called the VisionVenture vehicle. Everybody, that thing went crazy on the internet, social media hit it across the globe, quite frankly. It's like so many other things. When you see it, you're like, "Now what? How's that really gonna be meaningful?" You got all this buzz. Our team saw it as an opportunity. We fully execute it, and I'm excited to tell you that we brought the VisionVenture to production series last week. It is being produced by the Hymer brand as we're sitting here today. We're excited to get it out into actual marketplace. Unfortunately, it's retail sold for quite a few months, so if you want one, you'll have to place your order pretty soon.
Outside of that, pricing, another key thing for us to improve our bottom-line performance of EHG. You might think that we haven't been doing anything, and I can tell you it's quite the reverse of that. Our teams in Europe have been aggressive, frankly, the most aggressive in the RV space in Europe on our approach to pricing adjustments to make sure that we're not only staying current, but we're actually a little bit ahead of inflationary pressures that are in the marketplace. We've already communicated to our dealer partners our plans for the next months. The operational framework and how we're gonna get there within the operations world, some of these I've already touched on. First, quadrant there, value analysis and cost engineering. I've already talked about the simplification and what we're doing in those segments, right?
We are fully committed to delivering on that space to offset inflationary costs, not just with price increases, because there's a risk involved there. You can price yourself right out of the market if you're not careful. We need to be disciplined within our operations framework as well to identify potential cost reductions that we can execute on, and we will do that. Additionally, other things within the operations segment that we are committed to. Lean management. We are fully committed to lean. I know that's a buzzword that you guys hear all the time, but if you walk into our operations in Europe, I'm not gonna tell you that they're all perfect, and they're not. They're all leaned out. That's another buzzword, right, or phrase.
It's not that, and we don't intend to go that extreme because as we've learned in the global crisis here recently, is that globalized economy can also have its downside challenges, and all of a sudden you're caught with just-in-time inventory systems that aren't so much just in time anymore. Matter of fact, they're months behind. We're working to improve that, and it's caused us to think different and think a little bit more intelligently about how we're managing our inventories, and we are disciplined, and we will do that. In addition to that, you have the global sourcing models and the focus on that. I've already touched on that, but it is something that we are relentlessly focused on. Our team there in Europe is disciplined in this area.
We have specialists within the Hymer Group that are focused on identifying alternate sources, working with those alternate sources, not only to have supply, but also to make sure that we're in a cost-competitive situation going forward. Then standardization. That one almost makes me a little queasy, because it isn't to make all of our products in Europe, all 17 or 16 brands the same, right? It's simply to standardize our processes, not our products, and I have to stress that. Our processes within the organizations, we are laser-focused in those areas to make sure that we're optimizing our throughput. One of the things that I touched on earlier is our strategy for diversification. What you're seeing here on the slide, photos of our new facility that we acquired in the last six months in Poland.
As Todd mentioned right now, part of this facility, we're pleased to say that we've actually, because we're still in the setup process, we have excess space. We don't need all of the space, and I'll talk a little bit about that here in a minute. We're allowing the Red Cross to use it as a staging location for supplies for the Ukraine crisis. We're pleased to announce that. This operation is a critical piece for us going forward. It is an operation that will allow us to improve, our, excuse me, expand our product offering in Europe. It will also allow us to take advantage, there's the word. Take advantage of special situations in that area. We have an economic zone that we're operating in.
Its location to the Stellantis plant that Stellantis just went online with in the last two or three months that builds vans that we use and will be used in this new operation in Nowa Sól, Poland. In addition to that, another strategic reason for the location is that it's roughly 100 miles away from one of our highest-performing operations in Europe, existing operations in Neustadt, Germany. That operation will lend support in the early years to the Nowa Sól, Poland location. Back-end services, processes, using them as a sounding board, collaborating together, what's going right, what's going wrong, what can we help you with? It's a strategic location from that standpoint. In addition to that, labor force. The labor force in that area is unlike anything that you could ever believe. It's highly educated. The people there are very highly educated in that region of Poland.
They are well-trained already. That economic zone, there are 40 companies operating in that economic zone that we feel we can take a good position within. Our team there is executing. We're actually hiring people starting this month. Our management team has already been identified, and several of them have already relocated from Germany to Poland to lead that operation. Innovation, another key driver, not only for THOR, but for our operations in Europe. You guys are gonna hear more about that later, I'm sure. You've already heard a lot about it. In addition to what we've already talked about, the electrification, Todd mentioned it earlier in his presentation, that is a key topic in Europe.
They are farther ahead, if you will, in regulations that are coming in Europe, and it's forcing our teams over there to think differently and to think farther ahead in not only electrification, but weight reduction initiatives, aerodynamics. All of those things are initiatives and innovation that are taking place at EHG each and every day that then they're collaborating with Bob Wheeler and his team as an example here in the United States. It's exciting to see. I already mentioned the Smart Caravan Unit, the SCU, and we're gonna learn a little bit more about that or see that in action here in just a minute. It is an exciting time at EHG. We have a lot of exciting developments within the innovation segment.
With that, I'm gonna step back and I'm gonna let you guys watch a little bit of a highlight reel of some of the innovations that we have going in Europe. All right. If that doesn't get you excited about product in Europe, I don't know what will. Each one of those things that you're seeing isn't just a concept. What is it doing? It's actually going into production, every one of them, which will drive bottom-line improvement in Europe and separate us from our competitors. None of those are fictitious. None of those are dreams of the future. Those are all real in today's marketplace in Europe, and we're really excited to get them out there. I'm gonna leave you with five key takeaways of Europe. First, top line is expected to return when supply chain normalizes.
As I stressed earlier, our dip in top-line results is not because of a lack of demand or interest in our product, both from dealers and from end customers. Number two, strong focus on operational excellence. Number three, innovative new product direction and development. Number four, a commitment to continuing to be the market leader with our established and proven management team at EHG. Number five, a strategic plan that's expected to expand gross margin by 200 basis points, as we talked about earlier, by 2027. Thank you for your time. Look forward to speaking with you later. With that, I'll turn it back over to Todd and Colleen.
We've talked today about how we feel about the current market, right? I'm not going to pound back through that now. You've heard a lot about how we feel about it, more importantly, how Jon and Loren see it. There's current challenges, right? The Fed has made very clear what it's trying to do and what it's setting out to do, and it's being successful, and it's gonna impact demand. That's happening. That's what we see in our market right now. Same time, there are some puts and takes for us, and they're on this page. That's the current challenge that we have. We're very real about what we're facing right now. We wanted to give you, because there's a lot of talk about this, like how bad can it get? How do you operate in a down market?
We wanted to give you that scenario. I wanna do this very carefully. I need everybody to listen to this and read that banner at the bottom of the page. This is not a forecast or guidance. This is not a forecast or guidance. I need everybody to listen to this and read that banner at the bottom of the page. This is an indication of how our model operates in a market. We put together a market that is about 35% down on the trailing 12. You think about on a retail basis, maybe just under 400,000 units. That this is what we would see, and Colleen will kinda walk you through our performance there.
Yeah. Before I get the numbers, though, I wanted to just give some background in our processes and how we think during a softening or a downturn market. Again, not our forecast. I think one of the critical things that we have to our benefit is our forecast process. It starts with our subsidiaries, who are very good and very experienced in forecasting in different environments, but it also continues at the corporate level. We have a very experienced team and a very robust model that we utilize for forecasting processes. One of our really key components of that is an individual on my team, a vice president of reporting and financial reporting and analysis that is also instrumental in our forecasting.
Bob Martin has developed a forecast over a number of 10 years, 12 years at THOR, but also having experience previously in RV or related industries. He really understands the nuances within the RV industry and the relationships between sales and the various costs and the levers. The magic of being able to have a very robust forecast process is that it provides us, as the executive leadership team, with information on a real-time basis that is critical when we face environments that are changing very quickly. I think one of the best examples is the COVID. You know, we had just gone through the process with our subsidiaries of doing their forecast in that January, February timeframe of 2020.
We got into the middle of March, and we were literally shut down in a matter of days. We needed to forecast. When I think back at those, that middle of March of 2020, we had no idea how long we were gonna be shut down, how long our dealers were gonna be shut down, what it was gonna do to the consumers. We had no idea. We had to be able to react. Bob had to take this forecast that we were assuming was gonna be a kind of a normal year.
We had just come out of the 2018-2019 timeframe, dealer inventory, everything was looking good, and then we got hit with COVID. Being able to quickly look at what some scenarios might look like that in that situation when we tried to forecast, okay, how long could this shutdown look like? What might the longer term look like? What levers, which I'll talk to in a minute, what levers do we pull, and how far do we pull those? It was critical to have that insight that our forecast model provides. Then if you think through that process, we go through that process, and then, you know, eight weeks later or so, we were starting to open back up, which was good. We were thinking, okay, this is gonna be, you know, very low level of production.
We did some more forecasting, and then not long after that, we had to forecast again because the demand was so high. All of those different scenarios put different pressures on different parts of the organization. How much cash did we need to utilize? Certainly, you know, the supply chain, everything. The forecast model is really critical to us, and we utilize that heavily, like I said, to determine how fast and how hard do we pull some of these levers. I would say throughout the various cycles that we've gone through, THOR has developed a playbook, a downturn playbook, if you will. Every time we go through a different scenario, we keep adding to it because we learn new lessons. Again, you know, nobody had been through a COVID or pandemic shutdown.
That was very much different than the Great Recession or 9/11 or anything. We keep adding to it. We also within that can have levers related to production rates, headcount. We can consolidate production plants much quicker than you might think within automotive or anything like that. The facilities are very similar, and they can do a lot of consolidation. We're talking days, weeks timeframe versus long term. It's important to know what we're looking at to know again how hard do we pull those levers and at what point. Headcount obviously goes along with that. We've talked this morning about CapEx and being able to pull.
Again, we need to have that visibility to say how far and how hard do we pull back on those, and having the forecast and the communications and the experience of not only the executives that you've seen here today, but really of our the experience goes deep within our organization, every subsidiary, the financial teams as well as the operational teams, and we leverage all of that and work and have great communications between the organizations of making sure that they're aligned on their action plans when things like that happen. Historically, we've. Again, we talked this morning, or earlier today, the conservative balance sheet. Typically, we have more accounts receivable than we do accounts payable.
That provides us another buffer when something happens on a macro level because we're collecting that AR, our payables are less, and then we've also, when we do production, we're producing to dealer orders, which we can then still turn into cash. Our conservative balance sheet comes into play as well. Again, then now moving to the numbers themselves, again, as Todd said, we looked at a 35% reduction in trailing 12-month sales, so that puts us right about $10.7 billion. Just if you look back historically, that puts us right in between, I think, 2020 and 2021 on a sales basis. We would expect to see in a downside scenario a reduction or a compression in our margins.
At a 14% margin, that's still well above the margin that was a normalized margin back in 2012 when this management team had took over. That is an increased normalized margin in a down cycle. Certainly, we'd expect to see some pullback from a 17% that Bob mentioned earlier today as our long-term goal in a normal market. That would generate EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA of about $900 million, positive net income, and then positive cash flow from operations, and not just positive, pretty robust. Again, that's because of our model and turning receivables into cash, inventory into cash, and being conservative on how we spend capital expenditures.
I think you know, this next slide is really trying to take a look at how has THOR performed in past downturns, which is a great indicator. Again, this management team. If we weren't all together at THOR, we were in the industry and had experience in both of these markets. In the 2008, 2009 financial crisis, we're looking at North American industry. At that time, you know, we didn't have the European operations. But from a wholesale shipment side of things, sales dropped 53% between fiscal 2008- 2009. You can see over on the right how we performed.
Again, we saw some compression of our margin, but we were able to maintain profitability at the segment level as well as at THOR overall. I didn't have it on the slide, but we also generated cash during that period. As Todd mentioned earlier, in downturns, we generate cash versus burning cash. It's because of our model and the experience of our teams, which act decisively and ahead of the curve. We try to be ahead of the curve and not trying to play catch up in any markets. We wanna be on the leading edge, whether it's up or down. The other scenario was 2008 to, 2018, sorry, to the 2020 period. During that period, sales of unit shipments were down about 32%.
Our sales as well, if you looked between 2018 and 2020, were down about 33% as well. You know, interestingly here, we saw a slight dip in margins in fiscal 2019, but from 2018 to 2020, pretty flat and just up a slight tick. Again, we maintained profitability and positive cash flow. Again, I think this is a great reminder of how the THOR model, which has 42 years of experience, is well suited for our industry, and it reacts quickly because of the experience and the knowledge of our teams, the information we get from our consolidated forecasts and just the communications.
Yeah, I think the reality is that every one of these down cycles that we've experienced, as we've gone through it, we've performed well relative to the down cycle. Even more importantly, as we come out of it as an industry, we come out stronger than we were when we went into it. That's an important takeaway. That has happened every single downturn that we've experienced. Our numbers again. These are the numbers Bob identified. Couple things about these. These are a normal market, not a hot market, not a down market. This is what we would call a steady market in 2027. The other thing, and my guess is there has to be some skeptics in this room, right? That's the way it works.
In 2019, I would remind the room that there were skeptics then when we put our numbers up. People who thought that we were crazy to talk about $14 billion. We were silly to talk about our ability to get to 16% margin. We got there. In fact, we got beyond there. We're still going beyond there. That was a five-year projection, and we still got a couple more years to run on that. As we sit here now, the management team, as we look at this, if you assume a normal market, a steady market, we have extreme confidence. We're not just confident. We have extreme confidence in our ability to hit these numbers. We will hit these numbers. The market will be strong. The long-term outlook is that positive for us. The upside in our industry is positive.
The investments we're making to position ourselves to improve this company over the next five years will move the needle, and this is how it will come out at the end of fiscal year 2027.
Maybe, Todd, just a couple quick comments on this. I mean, in this five-year forecast, as Todd mentioned earlier, we're not currently planning any major acquisitions for the next three years, at least. This also includes the investments that Todd talked about, investments in innovation, investments in automation, some of which we have to actually create the automation to work in our industry. Those are key elements of our five-year plan as well.
Now we'd like to ask Bob to come back up for some closing comments.
Now I know I'm the one between all of you and lunch, so I will be brief. Thank you. No, really just wanted to say thanks to all of our groups for presenting today. Just what a tremendous job. What a great story. I mean, for us, I mean, the story started with Peter right here in Jackson Center, and 42 years later, we're right back here at this mega facility that you're getting ready to go see. Just wanted to thank everybody for that. I'm gonna release you early, so you can go get lunch, and then we're gonna come right back in here and do a working lunch Q&A. I know some have some transportation they have to hit. For me, more than anything, it's an incredible story. We look forward to Q&A, and we'll release you then. Mark.
Thanks, Bob. As Bob said, we're now gonna take a short break to get lunch and reconvene here after getting our food for a Q&A session. To get lunch, please exit the door on the front right there, and there you'll find our lunch offerings, and you'll also see the eStream and the THOR Vision Vehicle, our cutting-edge electric products are there for viewing as well. Once you have your meal, if you would please return here, we'll eat in the room and have an open Q&A session where all of the presenters today will be available on stage to answer your questions. For our webcast participants, we will begin our Q&A session in about 20 minutes. Thank you.
Start the Q&A session. If you would, please raise your hand if you have a question. We'll be walking down the aisles with microphones so that we can hand you the microphone because we'd like to get your questions on the webcast audio. We have the presenters from today all available, and we'll be going for probably till about 1:15 P.M. or so with questions. I'd like to begin with our Q&A session. Like I say, please raise your hand and we'll come around with a microphone. Thank you.
Hi, Scott Stember with MKM. Thanks for taking my questions. Can you maybe talk about the current run of retail that you're seeing right now? Have you seen any meaningful falloff in the last few weeks as inflation has started to creep up even more?
I want the map.
I apologize. I've taken my mic off, but I think you can, you know, hear. Actually, we haven't. It's been pretty steady. Actually, talking with a few of our dealer partners that are here and some other dealer partners, we've actually seen a little bit of an uptick in June, where June is on pace to potentially outperform May.
Hi. Kathryn Thompson, TRG. Thank you for taking my questions today. Just in terms of share purchases, it's a key focus for you, even more so than M&A. Two-part question. What is cheap for you? You know, how do you define that in today's market? On the M&A standpoint, what in your mind would be classified as a major acquisition, and how is that different as you think going forward? Thank you.
All right. Sure. What is cheap for us is a stock price under what we think is a reasonable valuation, at least even the low end of a reasonable valuation. We were buyers north of 100. There is, in our modeling that we did, we had us buying back over time at prices as high as 125 and 130. Where we sit now, it is ridiculously cheap, and we are incredibly focused on buybacks. We believe there's lots of room for us to be buyers for a period of time, even if the market starts to wake up and normalize a bit. We think we have lots of runway, which is exactly why management went and obtained additional authorization.
We anticipate using that, and we'll use it aggressively until we get that price back in line where we think it matches our value or at least comes meaningfully closer.
Then just on acquisitions. You know, for us, we found that anything under $200 million is really better to be a bolt-on to one of our companies. You know, to be realists in North American RV space, we're probably running out of opportunities for manufacturers, so there could be some supply bolt-ons. But right now, there are a lot of companies actually for sale. We're seeing books weekly. But they're not in the area that we would want to look at. They may be adjacencies. So for us, we've, you know, talked as a team with our Board that we want to stay to our core, you know, U.S. and international. But in international, we're still digesting the Erwin Hymer Group. With COVID, it was a couple years we kind of took off.
We'll be back to the Düsseldorf Show, and we'll see if there are opportunities. There are a lot of smaller bolt-ons that are available over there. Even with that, we've got a lot of work to do to really just position the company to where it's ready to take anything on. As for, you know, today, you know, there's really nothing that really has interest to us. Three years from now is when we'll be in a better spot, and we'll be able to, you know, move on.
Can you give the Q&A mic?
Hi. Xian Siew, BNP Paribas Exane. Thanks for the questions. You talked about the downside scenario. I just want to ask a bit more about that. You show a 14% gross margin, which I think, to your point, is better than the last downturn and better, and that was better than the one before that. I guess maybe help us with the building blocks of what's different in terms of the structural benefits so far. Then on top of that, I guess you have automation, but that hasn't maybe kicked in. Yeah, just help us on that bridge. Thank you.
Colleen?
Yeah, I'll start, and maybe the others can join in. Do we not have these?
I have.
It's for you. It's for you.
As far as the margin, a couple things coming into play for that. I think Matt talked during his section of really protecting the margin differently than we have in the past. Certainly that is, Bob Wheeler spoke about it as far as making sure that we're ahead of costs. Then Troy talked about it within EHG of getting the margins up. We think all of those. Plus you also have things like the aftermarket that Todd also spoke about that generally would carry a higher margin that would help support that as well.
I think the way we think about it is we've had fundamental, sustainable core margin improvements, and that's what that 14% kinda creates a floor for. That had been operational improvements, efficiencies, things that we've driven that will last and stand through markets. We've also had recently, when we're ticking north of 17%, those transient benefits of a really hot market, right? Those are the kind of things that could fade away. The core margin improvements are here to stay, and that, now that becomes our new floor that we build from.
Wanted to ask a question about your expectations for the upcoming open house. Obviously, always a big kickoff event for you guys. Could you maybe talk about any leading indicators that you see into that, understanding retail's a bit uneven right now, but maybe how dealers are approaching that, the feedback, enthusiasm that you may or may not be getting? Secondly, when you look at the $27 target, does that include the buyback activity that you've talked about or what. Maybe help us understand that.
The last part's easy. The answer is yes.
Yes.
It does include the buyback and where we would be. Yes.
Open house, Matt? Yeah, I'll take. Hello? Okay. Hey, I'll take the first part of them. You know, I think the
The swift action that we've taken with our production and managing it to the current demand is gonna give us a window to flush through any worries with rebalancing of product as we enter into open house. We anticipate when dealers arrive at open house to have a more normalized cycle there, where they're planning their next 12 months with us. We're back to managing the business in that type of cycle versus, you know, what's happening in the next month or two months. We feel good about kind of our positioning going into open house.
Just the dealer kind of excitement for open house. We haven't had open house for two years. We've had to cancel it, you know, kind of at the last second. All the planning's been done. We've only enjoyed the Peter Orthwein once. I think everybody's excited to get back and have, you know, a couple thousand dealers come in, and I think they're excited to come in and see friends. It's camaraderie, but then they do. It's where we launch new products, and we've lost some of that opportunity. We've found other ways to do it, but to have this open house and have it be the first time that a Tiffin has been part of our open house, they're excited to have this opportunity that they've never had before.
For me, I think the dealer optimism is there. What Matt said, we need to manage the inventory during the summer to get them in a position that they can rebalance in the fall and have a successful open house. We're looking forward to it.
Yeah. The open house, as you said, is really significant to us. After open house, we'll be coming out with fiscal year 2023 guidance, where we'll put that out, not just for ourselves, but for the industry. We'll speak to that publicly.
Brandon Reyna with Novare Capital . Matt, you talked about kind of passion and competition among all the different brands. I'm kind of curious, how do you guys manage that process to still allow the Leigh Tiffin to learn from the other brands when it is so competitive and there's so many?
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the key is our. First off, our presidents are much, much closer than they ever have been. We bring them together, we communicate strategies at an enterprise level. It's opened up a lot of dialogue. I can share an example with just a recent presidents meeting where Bob Wheeler on Thursday shared a lot of his best practices around people and culture, things that they're doing here at Airstream that are highly successful with the entire organization. It was, what? The next day he received a, an email from Leigh Tiffin saying, "Hey, I'd like to dig into that one just a little bit more." Bob shared the entire playbook with the Tiffin group. Those type of things are not. They're agnostic, right? They're not gonna change how Leigh Tiffin competes against Airstream or vice versa.
They don't compete against each other, but they will improve best practices. They will improve our culture, and those are the things we're really trying to leverage in our progressive model.
It is another funny one with Leigh. He was building a fifth wheel, and he wanted to build a toy hauler. It's a very high-end toy hauler. It wasn't really going to compete with anything we build.
Mm-hmm.
Matt invited them up to go to Keystone, not to go through the factory, but just to see how the door goes on and how the frame drops. We had Lippert come over, walk them through, and that saved Leigh a year of testing just to see how it's done. He now has his Ambition.
Ambition.
Yeah, big new expensive toy hauler, but it's beautiful, and it really jump-started just with some of those best practices.
Thank you.
Hey, Brett Andress, KeyBanc. Going back to the downside scenario, the 35% top line, is there any way to maybe talk a little bit more about how you're thinking about volume and price? I just don't think the industry has seen this much price taken this quickly over a short period of time. How sustainable is that, particularly with dealer margins, I think, you know, starting to come back in?
Matt
Yeah. It's good. There's no doubt, you know, our invoices, along with the rest of the industry, is inflated to, you know, all new highs. We historically, Loren, I think, and I had a great conversation the other day about this. Historically, if you look over the history of our business, we don't have a lot of price increases. We do a really good job of adjusting our products and mitigating those cost increases that are coming at us. We fully expect that we're gonna stabilize where we're at and probably get some reduction in price points going forward. Over the long haul of two, three, four years, we'll feel pretty comfortable about where we sit in terms of invoice pricing.
Some of that towards the second half of this year. You know, steel, aluminum, they're indexed, and those are trending down. They go up and down, but we're looking at steel down a little bit the second half of the year, which could be a positive.
Good afternoon. Joe Altobello, Raymond James. Couple questions, if I could. I guess first, as we sit here mid or late June, thinking about 2023, and I appreciate the outlook you gave us for 2022, I'm curious to at least directionally how you see demand next year. It sounds like it's gonna bottom early in the year and then ramp up. I'm curious to at least directionally if it's up or down versus the 460-480. And then maybe secondly, what kind of steps you're taking to cut back on production? Because it seems like to get to the low end of the RVIA range, we're gonna have to see at least 25%+ reductions across the industry for the balance of the year. Thanks.
Wanna start or finish or-
No, go ahead.
Just give it to Matt.
Matt
I can answer the production level.
Yeah.
You know, we've talked to that too. You know, we look at that a couple different ways. We look at that on days off. We look at that in terms of extra shutdown periods to give our associates, you know, vacations. We also look at that from cutting rates. I can tell you that all three of those have been deployed. We feel very comfortable with moving forward where our production rates are as we watch our optimal dealer inventory levels for the balance of 2022. So that really isn't a big concern of ours moving forward. As we look into 2023, how long does this thing go? I think it really depends on the macro environment, right? How long that continues to take place.
Hopefully it's at the beginning of the year, we start to kinda bottom out, and we actually start to pull out of that situation. Your guess is as good as mine on that one.
Thanks for taking my question. James Hardiman, Citi. Two points of clarification. The 35% revenue decline in the downside scenario, just wanna be clear what that assumes for sort of retail and wholesale. What are you assuming those are gonna be down if you get to 35%?
They end up basically in a one-to-one relationship just south of 400,000 units in that math.
Okay. That is versus where we are today?
Trending flow.
Just to be clear.
Yep.
Okay.
That's right.
Those are ultimately down similar to the revenue decline. Is that how you're thinking about it or is that
That's right.
Okay.
Yep.
Because I think that the bear case is that, you know, retail will be down a certain amount, wholesale would need to be down more than that, and then pricing on top of that. You have all three of those things fairly similar in terms of versus where they are today?
Yeah, we do.
Okay. That's fair. Another point of clarification. Matt, I think you mentioned that June may have been a little bit better than May. I just wanted to make sure we're all on the same page because I think it's an important point. You're talking your business specifically or the industry? Are we talking similar declines versus last year, similar declines to 2019? How are you thinking about that?
That comment was centered around improvement from this May to this June, right? June shaped up for many dealers, as we're hearing. Now June isn't done, but it looks like June is gonna be better in retail than what May was the previous month.
Okay. Absolute units.
Correct.
May just compared to June of this year.
Yeah.
Got it.
It really points back to the original question, are we seeing things starting to decline even worse, 'cause of the latest couple of weeks, you know, announcements around, excuse me, with interest rates and things of that nature? The answer to that is no. We actually see June shaping up to be slightly better than May.
Okay. Just remind us, June seasonally is normally bigger or smaller than May?
I think they're about the same.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you. Gerrick Johnson, BMO. Your retail forecast or goals for 2027, 607,000 units at the midpoint, right, for the industry, 30% above where we were in 2019. Now, 2019 was 466,000 units, and we were down 6%. We all understand the inventory situation that was at hand. That hurt wholesale. I've never really heard a good reason why 2019 retail was down. Why was that down? 'Cause that's the last year before the pandemic, so our trend was down. Granted, strange things happened the last two years that have changed things, but our base was declining prior. Why are we so confident that we'll get to this or approach that 600,000 unit level?
You wanna start and I'll finish?
I don't know the answer. No.
You know, it's a great question. I don't remember what happened in 2019. You know, when the pandemic hit.
2019 was the year that, I mean, we pulled back our production intentionally because it was at 2018. You had the overproduction, so numbers were higher, but 2019 we pulled back and, you know, so we didn't have high inventories going into 2020. That’s part of it.
I'd have to go back and look and see what macro environment was taking place in 2019 and compare that stat. I'm not familiar with that stat.
As far as speaking to the confidence in 2027.
Yeah.
Certainly I think we can speak to that. I mean, part of it is the surveys that Matt went over. Part of it is also just the number of new entrants into the lifestyle during the pandemic and the overweight of those folks enjoying it, wanting to stay in. They might not have ever come into the industry, but now that they're here, they enjoy it, they see the benefits of it. And those folks we're hearing already too that they're gonna be on the same or quicker recycle of trade-in, trade-up type of thing. So that's certainly part of it and it's the whole younger generation that's just wanting the experiences as again as Matt commented on. It's not just the boomers, retirees.
Younger and younger, individuals are getting into it. My kids, their age, they're into it. All their friends are into it, and that wasn't the case when I was their age.
I'll say, 2018 we had the overbuild. 2019 we tried to pull back and correct our dealer inventory. As we started 2020, I think a lot of people forget, if you remember that Tampa show pre-pandemic, it was record. We were probably off to a 20% up run rate in 2020.
Pre-COVID. When it hit, we had phenomenal shows, you know, record attendance and record sales at Tampa, along with all the other shows because they were going on. Since then, it's hard to baseline because you haven't had a Minneapolis show in years. That's what gave us some of the confidence. We saw by really kind of controlling the inventory that our retail was up in 2020, pre-pandemic, and then all the numbers kind of go out the window. That's where we did see the trajectory. Then Colleen's right. I mean, bottom line, we've got younger buyers coming in, and a lot of these little trailers, little B vans are trending towards that, you know, that younger buyer. If, as Matt said, baby boomers used to be our bread and butter, and now it's 20%.
We can focus on that younger buyer and the life cycle of every three to five years, the turn. I mean, we've talked to people. I'm sure the dealers have had people. Actually had a guy that he traded in three times from Jon's store in Tampa in 18 months that just started. That's where we see all these positives, that, you know, as you get through all the macro, we've got, you know, many brighter days ahead. I think the easy answer for Matt would have been weather.
Very well might have been. I'm not sure.
One more question for Matt while I have the mic. I don't know if it's still on. You talked about inventory rebalancing across dealers. If most are independent, how do you accomplish that and what does that cost you to get that done?
I don't think it's a cost as much as it's just a concentrated effort in making sure we're having good communications with dealers on around what are the 12-month product needs and getting back to really a business plan. Then that might mean we're backing off of a particular segment and ramping up a different segment, so we can help that rebalancing.
Hey, Michael Swartz from Truist. Just wanted to maybe dig into the gross margin outlook in your 2027 plan a little bit. Obviously, you're on a trailing 12%, you're operating around 17%, your target's 17%, but there's gonna be some puts and takes. You talked about some of the positive things, but maybe give us a sense, you know, in leaving the recessionary scenario out of it, the 14%. Talk about what a normal promotional environment means to gross margin in the near term, from, you know, which you would presumably build off to get back to 17%.
[audio distortion].
Well, it's a good question. I think, look, pre-pandemic, if our incentives were at this level and now we're here, the expectation across our organization is to be somewhere in the middle, not be back up to where we once were. We'll do that through good long-term planning with our dealer partners over a 12-month cycle and not dealing. That's the big difference. As far as how that actually percolates down and through the consolidated, you know, gross margin number, I'll turn that over to Colleen. Incentives are just one piece of that, right? There's also the operational efficiencies and improvements that we've put into place during these times that will continue on even in slower times.
I mean, the incentives were in past years enhanced because people were building large numbers of open inventory. Everybody was. Then selling it month end, and that drives it. I think going through this pandemic has kind of level set things where I think dealers may not stock as much, and we'll balance that with them so that there's not the need. It's just better planning. There still will be some, but it just won't be to that level.
You're right, as far as there's gonna be some puts and takes. As we look out into 2027, we'd expect some of the innovation items that Todd has talked about to come into play and doing a better job than maybe we've done historically of making sure we get a margin, an acceptable margin on those innovation features that we can deliver that others can't. So that would be a component of it as well as the aftermarket. We've obviously not in the past had Airxcel or much of an aftermarket presence, but that's also a focus as we look out, especially into 2027, and again, would expect the margins to be higher there.
As for Airxcel alone right now, other vendors took some different looks. They focused more on aftersales. Airxcel focused on the manufacturers. They just got all the companies their product, and then that aftersales will come, you know, years from now. But they have a point now if they can ramp up a little bit more, they can focus on RV aftersales now. That's an opportunity that we see and we're helping them grow too.
Yeah. Thank you. This is Craig Kennison from Baird. I wanted to follow up on that aftermarket point. First of all, just how much of your aftermarket business did pivot to being an OEM supplier as opposed to dealing with the aftermarket, and what was the implication for margin then?
From us or other companies?
On your aftermarket business. Did you suffer margin erosion because you focused on the OEM for a time?
For Airxcel. They did, yes. That was calculated just because they have. The whole play, you really wanna take care of the manufacturer and then when they replace that air conditioner, you want them to replace what they already had on it. Airxcel really just they focused on taking care of the manufacturers. There were others that they focused on aftermarket because it was more profitable. We knew that when we bought them, but we saw that as an upside when we bought them. That is, you know, part of that formula coming out in the years to come.
Then secondly, can you speak to some of the holes in the aftermarket portfolio you might address through M&A, number one. Two, what's the distribution strategy? Is it all through dealers or is there a direct-to-consumer opportunity as well?
There clearly is a direct-to-consumer opportunity, right? Through a digital commerce program that ran through Roadpass Digital. There's a great opportunity for us there. How we think about distribution, one of the holes is, and some dealers are outstanding at this, but the industry as a whole is struggling to keep up. It takes too long to get parts. They can't get parts. Sometimes when they finally get the part, it's not the right part because it's not a very reliable system that's in place. Curing those challenges will remove that friction, and that's where we're focused.
What that means for us is, you know, regional distribution, and the ability to get product to consumers in a very timely fashion and to get it to them, and depending on the product, to get it to them with a service provider who can put it on their rig for them and make it work. That's the idea behind the strategy.
Hey, Brian Biros from TRG. On the long-term revenue guide, can you kind of give more comments on how that breaks out from unit growth or pricing from where we stand? If that includes any M&A outside of that three-year no M&A, no large scale M&A, or if there's anything embedded in that for acquired revenue?
I'll answer the last one first. There is even in the 2027 goals, there's no major acquisition factored into that one at this point. It's more the tuck-in acquisitions in that. In the-
Any comments on the first part?
Oh, the first part. No, we really aren't prepared to provide the breakout of the 20 between the segments. Is that what you're asking?
Yeah. I guess, yeah, just from where we stand with the, it's like $4 billion added in revenue, if that's mostly unit.
It is mostly units.
How pricing implies in that?
It's mostly units.
Okay. Thank you.
Peter, do you have one?
No. Hey, it's Brandon again. I know it's.
I know.
I know historically it's hard to track production increases or capacity increases. Sorry. Okay.
That's all right.
Do you have any estimate of how much either capacity you have added since COVID or how much capacity the industry has added over the last two, three years?
The industry, I mean, really, we've added a little bit, but not much. I mean, when you go back to 2018, we added a lot of capacity then. When COVID kind of exploded, we had, you know, some empty facilities that we went into at that time. For us, too, you know, when we pulled back in 2019 to shut our facility, the carrying costs are not very high. We had most of our facilities. I know Class B's, we've expanded twice since COVID just because the market has taken off so much. We've not added a lot of extra capacity. We actually already had it. There were some empty plants that we started building units in. It's not like we're investing even more just to catch up.
Yeah. The only other thing I would add to that is Bob's spot on. Over the past 24 months, we've added on roughly 2 million sq ft of space that is either built or committed to be built. But just over half of that is dedicated to support facilities and/or operational excellence. A lot of our smart growth has been centered around improving our operations more so than just putting out more output.
Yeah. As we said, some of our CapEx has been a large facility at Jayco for predelivery inspection, just to focus on quality. Heartland, the same. We have had CapEx, but it hasn't all been to add capacity, but there has been some. You don't need a mic.
Thanks. Craig from Baird again. I know when Peter started this business, he was very focused on the right incentive plan for brand managers to make sure they maximize profit and really grow this organization. I'm wondering, with a bit of a philosophical change in how you run the business, in terms of having, what is it? Progressively d ecentralized organization, have you had to make a change in your compensation structure, either the brand manager or at the executive level?
Not at all. They're fully on board. The reality of the situation is if they look long-term, it'll pay dividends, their current plan based on this.
Yeah. Really, I mean, we've at the companies, we've held true to the plan that Matt and I lived with at Keystone. It's very similar. The only thing we did add was several years ago, right about the time I came to corporate, the Board approved a percentage that. It's not just high-level executives, but it's brand managers. Some companies go down pretty far with RSUs stock units.
RSUs.
Yeah, RSUs for people within the company. Before that, I never really saw, you know, the effect of someone at Dutchmen towards someone at KZ. Now they do look at things just a little differently when they get that stock award. Things like the president's meetings, Matt is bringing everybody together really.
Creating these alliances, I think the RSU program has helped, but even with that, has not changed the way that, you know, we pay them at the core. Part of that it's market. It's what we are facing when we're up against Forest River, very similar comp.
The only thing that's changed, Craig, is the comp structure for the NEOs, and it's relevant to the discussion because now we are paid for certain metrics, including generation of free cash flow and how well we do with our return on invested capital. The kind of numbers that we had in the deck today, we're held accountable to those by our Board. Those are something that management is keenly focused on, and it matters. That's been really the only comp shift.
If I may, are there incentives tied to the 2027 plan that you framed today?
Not yet. They tie our incentive to an annual target. We're not yet to the point with a long-term target, except the math, if you pull out the math of ROIC that's involved in those numbers to get there, those get pegged, and on a three-year basis, we look and then we're measured against those.
The PSAs are discussed?
Yes.
Craig, as I say, that Bob has really pulled the team together, thinking of THOR. Back, you know, when earlier on the divisions were very competitive against each other, there's no way they would be sharing best practices or anything. Through Bob's leadership, they really, you know, put THOR first and I think it made a big difference. Everybody gets all the company presidents go on, and they see the value of, you know, making THOR a better company.
It was small things like the if you remember years ago, the open house, we were separate. I at Keystone got Bill Fenech to get THOR Motor Coach, and we teamed up, and we upset everybody else. By bringing everybody under one roof, now dealers know. It makes it easier for the dealers. When they come to open house, all their premier brands are right there, and that's really just there's no one thing, but there have been many things that have kind of brought this camaraderie to get everybody on the same page. In the back row.
Just a follow-up question on warranty costs. Kathryn Thompson, TRG again. How are you tracking warranty costs? Just because, you know, and you're ramping up production to meet demand. There were some quality issues, but that was across the entire industry. Where are we today, and where do you see that tracking going forward over the next 12 months-24 months?
I'll start on that. You know, I mentioned earlier that we have a playbook. It seems like we had a COVID playbook. We've got a downturn playbook, and one of them was the warranty, too. I mean, lessons learned from the past ramp-up in 2018, where it was very quick. We learned some lessons in that. The teams and it's really all of the operating presidents really took that seriously and said, "We're not gonna let that happen again." They're focused very much on quality throughout the process. They've changed how they hire people, how they open new plants.
The PDI facilities, which is also some of the investments that we've had in CapEx over the last few years, is to do additional checks on units before they're shipped to the dealers. There's a host of things that have changed since just even that 2018, 2019 timeframe that are all intended. It's dealer experience, customer experience, as well as lowering our warranty costs. Matt, anything else?
No. Well said. All of our business units understand that there's a target out there and to manage to that target. They're focused on warranty like they've never been focused.
Scott Stember from MKM again. Just in Europe, it seems as if supply chain is really, you know, skewing your view of what's happening at retail. But underneath, can you talk about in the individual regions how they're being impacted by what's going on in the tough macro environment?
I'll take it, and Bob can follow up here. Individual, just for clarification, the individual regions meaning within the countries themselves or just so I have understanding of.
Countries, yeah.
Yeah. I mean, all the countries just like here in the U.S. I mean, if you look at it as, I hate to say it, but from a state level, every state has a little bit different situation going on. It's the same thing in Europe right now, where Germany's economy continues to run along. You guys see the numbers, you guys see the economic reporting at a good pace. Of course, there are macro environments that are potentially going to impact it in the near future and long term, but we're navigating through that. Retail demand right now across Europe, generalized, is still strong and robust. A lot of our brands over in Europe have just come off of their annual dealer meetings that they weren't able to hold during COVID lockdowns.
This year was their first year in the past two years to be able to hold those. Not only are dealers positive, but the report from the dealers at those events have been positive about retail activity, which is the key driver at their dealerships, and that's across Europe. Dealers coming in from, say, Sweden to Norway, our home country of Germany for most of our operations or down into Italy. It's a pretty good outlook right now, even in the face of rising interest rates and consumer confidence hitting the headlines in Europe as well.
Thank you, everybody. Appreciate it. That concludes the formal portion of THOR's 2022 Investor Day. I hope the meeting has provided our investors and analysts with additional transparency and detail and exposure to the breadth and depth of the senior management and operating management team. Thanks, everybody, for attending. Today's presentation will be available on our website at ir.thor.com. A replay of the webcast and a transcript of the webcast, including the Q&A session, will be available later this week. For our webcast participants, we also thank you for joining us today, and we will now end the live webcast. For all others, we will gather in the lobby to begin the Airstream factory tours and the new Airstream Heritage Museum tours. After the tours, we will have a reception in the lobby, and THOR's management team will be available to continue with questions.
Also, as you noticed, as we mentioned before, when you arrive, we have a number of RVs outside the building that for your review, and I'd encourage you to go out and take a look. There are a broad range of products out there, open for you to look at and look inside, and they're really interesting and they're great. THOR's Investor Day will end at 4:00 P.M., and the last shuttle will be in front of the building at 4:15 P.M. With that, time to move into the tours. Thank you, everybody.