Hello, and welcome to WD-40 Company's 2021 annual meeting of stockholders. Please note that today's meeting is being recorded. During the meeting, we'll have a question and answer session. You can submit questions or comments at any time by clicking on the message icon. It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Garry Ridge, Chairman and CEO of WD-40 Company. Mr. Ridge, the floor is yours.
Good day, and welcome to WD-40 Company's 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I'm Garry Ridge, WD-40 Company CEO and Board Chair. I'm very happy to welcome you to this year's annual meeting of stockholders. We believe in engaging with our stockholders, and we hope that this virtual meeting will maximize the participation of our stockholders while keeping the health and well-being of our meeting participants a top priority. Before calling the meeting to order, I'd like to introduce today's meeting participants. The following directors are in virtual attendance today. Daniel Carter, who served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of BevMo!. Dan is the Chair of our Audit Committee. Melissa Claassen is Vice President, Finance, Emerging Markets for the Adidas Group. Melissa is stationed in Dubai. Eric Etchart served as Senior Vice President of The Manitowoc Company. Eric is Chair of our Corporate Governance Committee.
Lara Lee. Lara served as a Business Unit President of Lowe's Companies, Inc. Trevor Mihalik is Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Sempra Energy. Trevor is chair of our Finance Committee. Graciela Monteagudo was President and CEO of Lala U.S. David Pendarvis is Chief Administrative Officer and Global General Counsel of ResMed, Inc. Gregory Sandfort served as Chief Executive Officer of Tractor Supply Company. Greg is our Lead Independent Director. Anne Saunders served as CEO of nakedwines.com. Anne is chair of our Compensation Committee. I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome and introduce you to Phenix Kiamilev, who was appointed Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary by our board of directors yesterday. Phenix has replaced Rich Clampitt, who, as we previously disclosed, will retire in calendar year 2022.
On behalf of the board, I'd like to thank Rich for his many contributions to the company's success and his relentless pursuit of superior corporate governance. Also participating on the call today is Jay Rembolt, our Chief Financial Officer, Steve Brass, our President and Chief Operating Officer, and Wendy Kelley, our Vice President of Stakeholder and Investor Engagement. I would also like to introduce Steve Embry from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the company's auditors. He will be available to answer questions during the question and answer session of the meeting if necessary. For the business matters to be conducted here today, I will act as chairman of this meeting. Phenix Kiamilev will act as secretary of the meeting. We will now officially start the meeting by confirming the proper notice of the meeting has been given, and we have a quorum.
Thank you. I'm pleased to announce that proper notice of the meeting has been given and that at least 12,651,266 shares are represented in person or by proxy, constituting a quorum.
Thank you. I now call this meeting to order. Following the secretary's introduction of the matters to be acted upon by stockholder vote at this meeting, our management team will share a brief business update, and we will then take questions from the online audience, and thereafter, the formal meeting of stockholders will adjourn.
There are three matters for stockholder consideration and voting at today's meeting: the election of directors, an advisory vote to approve executive compensation, and the ratification of the selection of our independent auditors. Stockholders have been encouraged to vote in advance of the meeting. However, if you've not yet voted or would like to change your vote, any stockholder attending the virtual meeting today who has entered the meeting with a control number may vote any time prior to the adjournment of today's meeting. If you need a copy of the annual report or the proxy statement, the links are provided online as well. Instructions for voting and/or changing a previously submitted vote are provided on the Computershare Meeting Center website. The following matters are presented for stockholder approval. The first matter is the election of directors.
I'm pleased to report that all the nominees have received sufficient votes to be elected to serve as directors until their successors are elected and qualified. With respect to the advisory vote to approve executive compensation, I'm pleased to announce that at least 10,551,083 shares have been voted to approve executive compensation. The third matter presented for stockholder approval is the ratification of the Audit Committee's selection of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the company's independent auditor for fiscal year 2022. A representative of PricewaterhouseCoopers is in attendance and has been offered the opportunity to make a statement and can respond to appropriate questions.
If any questions for the auditors are submitted prior to adjournment at the meeting, a PricewaterhouseCoopers representative will respond. I'm pleased to announce that at least 10,759,396 shares were voted in favor of ratification of the selection of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the company's independent accountant for the current fiscal year.
I would like to thank all our stockholders for their continued support. We'll now be pleased to share an update with you on the company and where it is headed in the future. Following management's presentation, we'll answer questions from stockholders in attendance. Questions or comments may be submitted at any time during the virtual meeting by clicking on the Q&A message icon in the right-hand side of the Computershare Meeting Center website. We will collate all the appropriate questions for a response. Before we proceed, I'm going to ask Wendy to get us started on our business update and provide our required notices.
Thanks, Garry. Good morning, and thanks for everyone for joining us today. I would like to ask our virtual audience to please turn your attention to the slides being webcast simultaneously through the Computershare Meeting Center website. As a reminder, today's call includes forward-looking statements about our expectations for the company's future performance. Of course, actual results could differ materially. The company's expectations, beliefs, and projections are expressed in good faith, but there can be no assurance that they will be achieved or accomplished. Please refer to the risk factors detailed in our SEC filings for further discussions. On today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP measures. The descriptions and reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures are available in our SEC filings as well as our earnings presentation.
Finally, for anyone listening to a webcast replay or reviewing a written transcript of this call, please note that all information presented is current only as of today's date, December 14, 2021. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Garry.
Thank you, Wendy. Let's talk a little bit about who we are at WD-40 Company and what does a good business look like. We believe that a strong and highly engaged culture with a simple and easy-to-understand business model, being a brand leader in its industry, having superior returns on capital, a sustainable competitive advantage, significant cash flow generation, a strong balance sheet and growth opportunities, and a proven management team is what a good business looks like. Our purpose is clear. We exist to create positive, lasting memories in everything we do. We solve problems, we make things work smoothly, and we create opportunities. More important to us is how we do that. We create positive, lasting memories by cultivating a tribal culture of learning and teaching, which produces a highly engaged workforce who live our company's values every day.
Our mission on what we do is we deliver unique, high value, and easy-to-use solutions for a wide variety of maintenance needs in workshops, factories, and homes. We market and distribute our brands across multiple trade channels in 176 countries around the world, so many people get to touch what we do. Our values are the cornerstone of our business. Our values are there to help our tribe members make decisions and to keep us on track of what we do. Our values are hierarchical. Our number one value is we value doing the right thing. We believe that a true competitive advantage is culture, and we're very proud of the fact that we have a 93% employee engagement.
Some other measures of note are 98% of our tribe members love to tell people they work at our company, and 94% are excited about the company's future. Our circle of competence. There are 4 areas that we believe are our circle of competence. Culture. We believe in the will of our people and consider our culture to be a competitive advantage. Our globalism. Our products are currently available in more than 176 countries and territories worldwide. Our distribution. We distribute our products in 62 unique trade channels, which makes us easy to buy. Our end users. We estimate 60% of our product volumes are used by professionals in workshops and factories, while the remaining 40% are used in homes around the world. A look at what makes up our business. 90% of our business comes from our maintenance products.
The centerpiece being the blue and yellow brand with a little red top, flanked by our Specialist product line, WD-40 Specialist, our 3-IN-ONE brand, and GT85. Our home care and cleaning products are available in niche segments and geographies. Our strategic initiatives. This year we refreshed our strategic initiatives. The headlines are, number one, to build a business for the future, and our desired outcome is to fully integrate ESG factors into our business. We want to attract, develop, and engage outstanding tribe members and to grow our employee engagement to greater than 95%. We want to strive for operational excellence, and our desired outcome is to execute against our 55/30/25 business model. Of course, we wanna grow our WD-40 Multi-Use Product, and we're gonna...
We wanna grow that product line to around $525 million in net sales by 2025, supported by growing our WD-40 Specialist product line. With an ambition to grow those revenues to $125 million and continue to support and expand our portfolio opportunities with our group of products under our household and other brands. ESG is now and has become a major discussion in the investment community. We've been on our ESG journey for more than four years. The company expects its next ESG report will be published early in fiscal year 2023. Our growth aspirations, I'd now be happy to pass over to Steve to share with you our growth aspirations for the future.
Thank you, Garry, and good morning. Before we dive into our future growth aspirations, let's spend a moment reviewing past performance. This chart shows our ten-year compound annual growth rates on our maintenance products. As you can see, our ten-year compound annual growth rates on our maintenance product sales has been 5.8% globally, with our EMEA and Asia Pacific segments growing 7% and 6.6%, respectively, and our Americas segment growing 4.5%. For the first time in our fiscal 2021, our EMEA segment overtook our Americas segment on maintenance product sales and is now vying with the Americas for the position of the company's largest overall trade block. In terms of future growth aspirations, our goal remains to deliver $650 million-$700 million in net sales by 2025.
Put simply, we need to grow by $50 million or so in each of the 4 remaining fiscal years, leading to our FY 2025, compared to the $80 million or so of growth we delivered in our fiscal 2021. The bulk of that growth, $154 million, is expected to come from WD-40 Multi-Use Product as we expand distribution and growth penetration to grow from $371 million in FY 2021 to $525 million in FY 2025. The second key driver of growth will be our WD-40 Specialist brand extension, which is expected to grow by $74 million over the next four years from $51 million in FY 2021, including WD-40 BIKE sales, to $125 million in FY 2025.
We expect a decline of $16 million in all other brands combined as we focus in even more on growing our maintenance brands. In terms of growth aspirations by segment, we've increased our expectations for growth from the Americas segment to between 5%-8% annually. Previously, it was between 3%-5%. This increase in growth expectations is largely fueled by expectations for much faster growth in Latin America. In fiscal 2021, we increased sales in Latin America by 50%, largely driven by a doubling of sales in our newest direct market of Mexico, and we see excellent prospects for strong continued growth across Latin America. Canada's growth prospects have also been significantly boosted as we roll out next-generation Smart Straw.
Our expectations for growth in our EMEA segment remain unchanged at 8%-11%, and in Asia Pacific, our annual growth expectations are for growth of 11%-13% per year. Globally, we're targeting revenue growth in the high single digits to deliver against our $650 million-$700 million goal. In order to deliver against our revenue aspirations, we're laser-focused on delivering our four global must-win battles. Our largest growth opportunity in our first must-win battle is the geographic expansion of the blue and yellow can with a little red top. We estimate the remaining global growth opportunity for WD-40 Multi-Use Product to be $900 million. We're laser-focused on delivering long-term growth in our top 20 focused growth markets around the world.
We increased our long-term marketing investments in these focus markets during the pandemic and have experienced explosive global growth in key markets such as India, Russia, France, and Mexico as a result. We've also continued our long-term investment in simple but effective sampling strategies in China, which we expect to become our number two market globally, with revenues in excess of $50 million within the medium term. Our second must-win battle is to grow WD-40 Multi-Use Product through premiumization. Premiumization creates opportunities for revenue growth, gross margin expansion, and most importantly, it delights our end users. Our Smart Straw Next Generation delivery system is currently available in Canada and is being rolled out in the United States. Smart Straw Next Generation supports our objective to grow premium delivery system penetration to greater than 60% of our WD-40 Multi-Use Product sales by 2025.
Our third must-win battle is to grow WD-40 Specialist. We debuted the global rebrand of WD-40 Specialist in fiscal year 2020. Now, for the first time ever, WD-40 Specialist is fully leveraging our most iconic asset, the blue and yellow can with the little red top. The WD-40 Specialist range aims to provide specialist solutions to complement our iconic Multi-Use Product and make the WD-40 brand more relevant to more people in more places for more uses. Sales have grown to $51 million since launch, and following the rebrand, we expect to see sales accelerate faster in the years ahead towards the $125 million goal we shared earlier. Our final must-win battle is focused on driving digital commerce. We believe we are well positioned to benefit from the significant shift to online behaviors in the post-pandemic world.
We're focused on developing a data-driven marketing strategy that empowers us to engage directly with end users in meaningful ways online. That strategy has already delivered a year-over-year increase of nearly 80% in website visits, doubled the views of our digital content globally, and has accelerated and deepened our engagement with end users on many digital platforms around the world. That concludes our overview of our growth aspirations and must-win battles, and with that, I'll hand over to our CFO, Jay Rembolt.
Thank you, Steve. First, a quick look at some of the highlights for FY 2021. As you can see, revenue increased by 19% in FY 2021, a growth of $80 million, while net income grew by 16% or $9.5 million. As a result of increases in input costs and U.S. supply chain challenges, gross margin fell 60 basis points to 54%. To help explain how we guide our business, let's look at our 55/30/25 business model. This plays a very important role in our company and helps us focus on the few simple metrics that we see as key to our success. It starts with the 55, which represents gross margin. We target our gross margin to be at 55% or above. Next is the 30, which represents our cost of doing business.
This is made up of all other operating costs except depreciation and amortization. Our goal is to drive our cost of doing business over time toward 30% of net sales. That leaves us with the 25, which represents our EBITDA target. If we're able to keep our gross margin above 55% and continue to reduce our cost of doing business towards 30, we'll be able to achieve an EBITDA margin of 25%. Now, here we see the trend of our gross margin over the last several years, as well as our approach to expanding gross margin. The short-term tactical way to address cost increases is through price increases, which we've begun and expect to complete in Q3 of this year. Our focus, here is on recovery of our lost gross margin due to the price, increases in input costs.
In addition to this tactical lever, we also have longer term strategic levers to improve gross margin. We focus on premiumization and new product development, as well as both product mix and market mix changes to help drive gross margin above the 55% over the longer term. This shows our progress over the last three years. You may note that while on a quarterly basis we've had fluctuations, on an annual basis, our metrics remain fairly consistent, with a slight slippage in FY 2021. As we look forward, we see improvements to our metrics that will allow us to get closer to the 25% EBITDA target. We will use price increases to recover gross margin back to 55%, and with our premiumization must-win battle that Steve just shared, we expect to improve gross margin above the 55% target over the longer term.
Now, let's turn to capital allocation. This slide describes our approach to capital allocation. In general, we first review targets for growth, along with those for liquidity, cash, and debt. We look to our maintenance CapEx needs and our dividend payments. Our target for our dividend payments to be in the range of 50%-60% of earnings. Any excess is allocated to the alternatives with the highest return. While we have listed share repurchases as an alternative, it is important to note that we suspended share repurchases in April of FY 2020 to preserve cash and liquidity in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have recently reinstituted our share repurchase activity, and our capital allocation strategy works to balance investing in the long-term growth of our business while providing strong returns to shareholders.
This slide shows our historical cash returns to shareholders, which have included regular dividends and share repurchases. The top section tracks our fiscal year dividend payments over the last five years and also includes the dividend payout ratios in each of those years. I'm pleased to announce that yesterday, the board of directors approved an increase to the regular quarterly dividend to $0.78, an increase of more than 8% from the last quarter's dividend. WD-40 Company has had a long history of dividend payments stretching back over 40 years without interruption. Now, looking at the bottom section, you'll see that over the same five-year period, the amounts of share repurchases we've made, and you can see that we had no share repurchases last year.
Our typical share repurchase levels have been between $20 million and $35 million, and we expect that this year's share repurchase activity to be in that same range. Now I'll turn the meeting back over to Garry for some final thoughts.
Thank you, Jay. Touching on some of the things of risks that we think about, certainly we think about the risks around global volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The game we're playing today is definitely a different game. We think of risks of not continuing to live our values or enriching our tribal culture. We think about the risks of loss of focus, not executing against our strategic drivers or our must-win battles. Not successfully managing the complexity of operating a business that markets and sells in 176 countries in 62 trade channels. Misaligned compensation, moving away from pay for performance, not being deliberate and focused, deviating from best-in-class products that generate positive, lasting memories for our end users.
The temptation to de-worsify or bad capital allocation, developing products that need more support than our business model allows, and targeting end users that don't fit our existing distribution model. Where does our focus need to be? We need to continue to live our values and enrich our tribal culture. High levels of employee engagement, as we truly believe that it's a competitive advantage. Steady sales growth, as Steve has shared with our WD-40 Multi-Use Product and our Specialist product range. Continue our focus on innovation and premiumization, particularly around delivery systems to support growth. Our continued commitment to raising our Digital IQ, which is an accelerator to our business. Maintain our gross margin at 55% or greater during these challenging inflationary periods. Managing our cost of doing business as a percentage of revenue, and to protect the power of the shield and to mitigate our regulatory impact.
Wendy Kelley has been monitoring the online questions being submitted. We'd now be pleased to answer any questions from our virtual audience at this time. Wendy.
Thanks, Garry. It looks like we have no questions from our virtual audience today.
Thank you, Wendy. With no further questions from the virtual audience, this concludes the WD-40 Company's 2021 annual meeting of stockholders. I'd like to thank everyone for their participation. This meeting is now adjourned. Thank you. This concludes the meeting. You may now disconnect.