As we toured the exciting and award-winning products from our RV brands of Winnebago, Grand Design RV, and Newmar, as well as our marine products from Chris-Craft and Barletta. This afternoon, we'll be offering test drives of the innovative all-electric e-RV that was developed by our Advanced Technology Group for anyone who is interested. Lastly, a bit of housekeeping before we begin. I would like to remind you that certain statements made during today's event regarding Winnebago Industries and its operations may be considered forward-looking statements under securities laws. The company cautions you that forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and are inherently uncertain, and a number of factors, many of which are beyond the company's control, could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. These factors are identified on slide four and in our SEC filings, which I encourage you to read.
We have five speakers for you today. Mike Happe, President and CEO of Winnebago Industries, will kick us off with a comprehensive business overview. Following Mike, we will hear from Ashis Bhattacharya, Senior Vice President of Business Development and Advanced Technology. Ashis will share updates and information regarding innovation and business development for Winnebago Industries. Ashis will introduce Amber Holm, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. Amber will touch on enterprise marketing for the brand and business units. Chris West, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Operations and Barletta Boats, will provide an update on operations and supply chain for the enterprise. Bryan Hughes, Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President of Finance and Information Technologies, will provide a comprehensive financial overview of Winnebago Industries. At the end of our speakers' prepared remarks, we will open the floor for a short Q&A.
For those of you joining us virtually, please submit your questions through the webcast interface. Now, let's get started and bring up Mike Happe, President and Chief Executive Officer of Winnebago Industries. Mike.
All right. Thank you, Ray. Let me add my welcome to those of you here in attendance in Georgia but also those of you online. As Ray said, what I'd like to do is provide you really an overview of Winnebago Industries and our story and strategic intent. Then you'll hear from several of my teammates here later in the conference to put some meat on the bones as to some of the most important things that we are working on at the present time. Then Bryan, as Ray said, will come back and wrap things up with a financial overview before the Q&A. I've had the privilege of being at Winnebago Industries since January 2016.
As many of you in the room and on the call know, it's been a crazy almost seven years. We feel good about what we've achieved to date, but I think one of the key messages from today's event is that we have a lot more to accomplish in the future. You see on the screen some of the key messages we're gonna talk about today, and it ranges from everything about the reinforcement of our premium branded portfolio that we've been building, that we believe has significant organic growth potential. Those of you here again at Lake Lanier have engaged with members of our leadership team and extended leadership team during this event, and we continue to foster a strong culture.
We'll talk more today about advanced technology, enterprise marketing, specifically some consumer insights work that we've done, some of the great work we've done on enterprise operations, to especially create more productivity and profitability. We're also gonna give you a few of our insights into how we think about inorganic aspirations or intent. We get asked often, especially because of now the strength of our balance sheet, about possible continued inorganic intent, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. What I know Bryan and I are most proud of, arguably, is the resiliency of the company, the strength that we've created over the last number of years, and this commitment to a disciplined, flexible, high variable cost operating model, that we believe is leading to success in the market and success financially.
Lastly, we certainly are always well aware that the outcome of all of our work should absolutely be value creation for our shareholders. We will give you some thoughts today on how we're thinking about life at the end of our fiscal 2025 year. Sort of a three-year set of LRP targets. Real quick mention on the team. This is my executive leadership team and my direct reports. I'm extremely proud of the team that we have pulled together.
I know investors obviously look at their choices in investment in businesses in a number of different dimensions, and we hope at Winnebago Industries that we have built and continue to build confidence in the team that is actually doing the work, that is leading with our 7,400- employees, the work that we need to get done. We have many of our enterprise functional leaders in the room here today. We have most of our business unit presidents as well. Unfortunately, Don Clark, who leads our Grand Design business unit, was not feeling well and could not make the trip. I'm really proud of the team that you see on the screen. It is one that is engaged, leading passionately and, really, you know, sets the bar very high.
It's a pleasure for me to continue to work with this team. We are a purpose-driven organization. I know, folks talk about that, but, we really try to live it. We are an outdoor recreation company. On the screen you can see our purpose, our vision, our mission, and our six core values. We recently recognized many of our key leadership team members around their behavior in our core values. You know, this is the North Star that's going to continue to drive you know, our work going forward. Notice on the screen you do not see the words recreational vehicles or boats.
We certainly are in the business of manufacturing those products, but we are absolutely committing to making sure that the customer experience is an exceptional one, as we call an extraordinary experience, and we are focused on making sure that those end customers become advocates for us, become lifetime owners, as we try to build a trusted outdoor recreation leading company around three golden threads, quality, innovation, and customer service. Many of you knew Winnebago Industries a long time ago. We are a 64-year-old company formed in 1958, and for a majority of that time, we were singularly focused on the recreational vehicle market, and in fact, for much of that time focused on the motorized recreational vehicle market.
When I had the privilege of joining the company back in 2016, the board almost now infamously said, "Mike, your three priorities are restore core leadership in the motor home category, become competitive and a player in the towable segment, and pursue profitable diversification of the company to enhance our financial resilience and strength." We've spent the last six or seven years trying to bring the board's wishes to fruition, and I think we're on our way. We compete in two significant outdoor recreation industries. Just last week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis talked about a $862 billion outdoor recreation industry in calendar year 2021.
The RV and marine industries are the two largest portions of that $862 billion market, and we believe there is significant synergy, commonality, possible harmonization across our value chain about creating successful brands and businesses in these two spaces, especially with premium outdoor brands. We have went from one premium outdoor brand in the Winnebago flagship brand that is still such a jewel for us and of great value, but we've added four fantastic brands to our portfolio. We absolutely believe we are a caring, nurturing fantastic parent for premium brands and businesses. Our product portfolio continues to expand.
For those of you here in Georgia that had the opportunity this morning to see some of our boats and RVs on display, we have talked repeatedly in our business about continuing to very carefully expand our reach into emerging customer segments, but also in some cases, like pontoons here with Barletta, an advancement into more of the meat of the market as well. Still with a differentiation story, but allowing us to continue to pursue, you know, increased market share. We believe that the RV and marine market can continue to grow meaningfully into the future. We believe these are two categories which will become secularly more popular over the next 10-20- years.
Part of what you see on the screen is the way that we think about, in some cases, segmentation with our end customers, lifestyle segmentation, and needs segmentation. Our businesses are not just focused on more horsepower, or more storage, or another air conditioner on the roof of an RV. We really are trying to become much more intimate with our end consumers and make products that meet the needs and their lifestyle trends. This is a one-legged stool that has become a two-legged stool.
Perhaps in the future there might be a third leg to this with another outdoor adjacency, but we are quite confident that there remains significant runway for us in both of these industries, to grow our business, organically. Most of you know the numbers here. The success that we've had, we believe a lot of it has been, you know, dictated by our teams and their efforts. We also acknowledge that, you know, the business was aided in, 2021 and 2022, as people, you know, continued to flock to the outdoors for physical and mental wellness, in the shadows of the pandemic, that started here in North America sometime in early, 2020.
What we're most proud of on this screen is the increase in profitability. We have worked very hard to create a company that has runway with profitable growth. When I first had the privilege of coming here, as many of you know, gross margin was below the teens. It was somewhere in the 10%-11% range. At the end of fiscal 2022, our gross margin was in that high 18% range. We firmly believe that we can build a company with gross profitability that starts with a two, and that is one of our financial behaviors that we continue to aspire to. The teams are working hard.
I know many of you have questions that we'll get to in the Q&A portion about the sustainability of the profitability in a cyclical set of industries. I can assure you what we're trying to do structurally and systematically with our business is to make sure that we're generating superior profitability in the industries we compete. We subscribe to the theory that if you drive superior profitability you can certainly reinvest a lot of that profitability back into the business and have plenty left over to grow inorganically and/or return some of those profits to our shareholders as well. This is a good story, but we're not satisfied. We wanna continue long-term to move these numbers up and to the right. This is our strategy boiled down into one slide.
I talked earlier about our competitive advantage and differentiation around these golden threads of quality, innovation and service or experience as a synonym for service that we're beginning to use. It begins with a collaborative, inclusive team. I constantly ask the team to think about these operating characteristics of seeing around corners, of doing good and doing well, of creating strength and discipline in our businesses so that we have a business in which the peaks and the troughs are narrower in the future than they were historically in our business from a performance standpoint. We want to accelerate growth in our core. We wanna pursue profitable strategic expansion of our business that makes sense and leverages our capabilities. We wanna integrate doing well with doing good. I'll talk about corporate responsibility here in a few minutes.
We have been relatively stubborn about the five strategic intentions or priorities that you see on the screen. Those have mostly stayed the same during my time at the company, and we continue to believe that they are the right ones. What we've added here recently is that last one around utilizing technology and information as catalysts. We are a manufacturing company, but we are so much more in terms of the capabilities we must have in our business to win. Data, technology, information is at the core, we believe, of building a successful future business, especially when you talk about electrification and digital transformation of the businesses that we compete in. How we win are the things that we think about every day, making sure that we're best in class.
I hope some of you who are here in Georgia had the opportunity to hear many of those during the product tours. I'll share with you today some targets around 2025 that hit on a number of the elements you see on the screen. Here's a little bit more detail in terms of the five enterprise strategic priorities. These have been consistently in our investor decks through the years. Certainly, the sub-bullets change as the business evolves. But you know, they are who we are. Our teams in each of the five different brands and businesses are connected to these enterprise strategic priorities in everything that they do. I feel really proud about the five brands that we have.
This is outside of our people, and sometimes even people choose to be transferable in, you know, certain industries. These brands are assets that cannot be taken from us by our competitors. It is our obligation and responsibility to nurture each of these five brands. The Winnebago brand is the most recognized RV brand in North America. I would argue it even has some, you know, small awareness outside of North America. But we believe we have significant runway with the Winnebago brand in motorized RVs, towable RVs, and even areas like specialty vehicles and other outdoor adjacencies. Grand Design, a 10-year-old record-breaking story, the fastest growing towable brand in the history of North America, has continued to take steady market share through that time. We continue to innovate with product expansion and technology.
We continue to invest in that business from an operational excellence standpoint. This is a brand story that has runway left as well. The Newmar brand, added in late 2019 into our Winnebago Industries family, known primarily for being a leader currently in luxury Class A product. This is a company that in their 52+ year history has been in other categories within the RV space, but has been very focused in the last 10 - 15- years on leading in Class A, competing and winning in Class A diesel, competing more vigorously and growing market share in Class A gas. We have not really even begun in the Super C category with some of the supply chain disruptions of the last couple of years. There's significant runway left for us with the Newmar brand.
Again, like Grand Design, the Newmar brand has the authority and credibility to continue to expand its product catalog. We're really proud of our two marine brands. We started on the very high end with Chris-Craft. I like to call it sort of the cherry on top of our brand sundae at Winnebago Industries. It is the Aston Martin or Ferrari of the marine industry. With the leadership of Steve Heese and his team, a 148-year-old brand that is viewed as iconic and recognized as the luxury boat brand, especially under 40 ft, not just in North America, but around the world. We have customers from, arguably more than 40 countries around the world in the Chris-Craft brand. This is a brand we continue to invest carefully in.
It won't be our biggest business, but it can be one of our biggest brands. It set the table for us as we began to do further work in the marine segment. I think the way we cared for Chris-Craft led to a great conversation with the founders of Barletta, who joined in August of 2021. It's a five-year-old brand, and not unlike the Grand Design story, Barletta has become the fastest-growing brand in the history of the pontoon segment, going from 0% share to approaching 6.5%-7% share now in the pontoon industry in North America. A top five brand that we believe has the opportunity to be a top two or three brand in the pontoon segment.
Very fortunate to have this and we believe these brands truly differentiate our story. Here are our golden threads. I've listed several examples. On the quality side, I just wanna mention, we believe we're probably the only outdoor recreation company that holds the top satisfaction awards in their respective industries at the same time. All five of our brands, three in the RV side, two in the marine side, hold either the Dealer Satisfaction Index award, which is the RV standard of excellence, or the Customer Satisfaction Index award from NMMA, which is the marine standard of excellence. All five of our brands are living this promise of quality and meeting our customers' needs through feedback from our dealers and our end customers. We continue to work very hard on innovation.
We were recently awarded the RV of the Year for the Winnebago-branded towable product called the HIKE 100 FLX product. We actually had that product out at the campground that many of you got to see early this morning that Huw Bower walked you through. It continues to be an example of how we are investing in all of our businesses and meeting emerging needs from our customers, which in this case is a rugged, lightweight, off-road, connected towable vehicle. Really allowing us to expand the use case, but also the attraction to more customers to come into the RV lifestyle. Ashis will talk later about the Advanced Technology Group, a significant intentional strategy that we've begun to invest in in the last couple years. We made an announcement here today about an innovation center in the Twin Cities that Ashis will talk about.
The ATG group will allow us to disrupt and innovate for years to come. Last but not least, service. We take great pride in taking care of the customer after the sale. Lots of our folks talk about sometimes the features of the products make the sale the first time. It's the service that makes the sale the second, third, and fourth time. Each of our businesses is focused on increasing the effectiveness and the reach of their service capability as well. I've talked to many of you through the years about our operating model. Corporations and large organizations can operate their business any number of ways. In reality, there's a lot of gray on this topic, and it's very nuanced from firm to firm.
We've chosen very intentionally at Winnebago Industries to try to combine the best of the autonomy and the leadership on a day-to-day basis from our five different brands and business units with their own teams, their own strategic plans, facing the market, creating value for our customers, and we combine them with these enterprise functional centers of excellence that we've built around these almost a dozen areas you see on the screen here. The responsibility of the centers of excellence and the enterprise functional leaders is to help our brands and businesses grow more effectively and more quickly in the right way. We are investing significant effort to make sure that our teams collaborate, cooperate, and coordinate around our operating model. We do not compete against ourselves.
We work very intentionally to customize these centers of excellence to the businesses to complement the significant capabilities they build in their own business unit functions on a day-to-day basis. We think the result of that is enhanced growth, increased profitability, and portfolio synergy. One of the things you'll see from Ashis is validation that for the four acquisitions that we've made in the last six years, that each and every one of those businesses is healthier after they've been in the organization for a period of time, either on the top line, the bottom line, culturally, or all three. We believe we are adding value with our businesses because of this operating model, and this operating model is one of the differentiating factors of our secret sauce.
Amber will talk about consumer insights and some of the work we've done recently to listen to our customers and understand their appetite for the outdoors. We believe demand for the outdoors, especially from a participation and engagement standpoint, continues to be very healthy. What's exciting about what happened in 2021 and 2022 is that millions more consumers and participants came to the outdoors, whether they rented, whether they shared, whether they borrowed, or whether they owned. They participated in the outdoors, fishing, hiking, boating, riding, tent camping, RVing. The participation numbers increased significantly, and we are seeing a younger, more diverse set of outdoor consumers that we believe will have significant secular benefit throughout the future, despite the inevitable cyclicality of some of the industries that we compete in.
The evidence that we are seeing is that a high majority of the first-time customers remain satisfied with their decision to get into our RV or marine products in the last two years. We are very focused on making sure that those customers are taken care of and they remain future customers of Winnebago Industries and our brands in the future. We have a multitude of reasons why we believe we can continue to grow organically. We cannot control the macroeconomic environment. We cannot control at times the market size on an annual basis of the industries we compete in, but we can absolutely control the way we compete in the market. This slide for each of our businesses lists several short-term opportunities mostly about how we can compete more effectively in the market and go after market share.
My expectation of each brand in our current portfolio is that they pursue profitable growth regardless of the size of the market in terms of market share and yield in their business. That is the expectation, and I fundamentally believe that each of our businesses has the opportunity to grow in a responsible, profitable manner. We do with Bryan Hughes' leadership, we have significant financial stability and health. We have some dry powder in terms of low leverage, access to healthy cash flow. We continue to be very active around possible inorganic ways to add value to the organization and to our shareholders through portfolio expansion that is again smart, responsible, and disciplined. We are working actively today on many, you know, ideas and opportunities, but we are especially focused on four areas around possible other OEMs.
Technology as a path toward possible vertical integration or product development acceleration, other outdoor adjacencies and even consumer experiences. Ashis Bhattacharya and his business development team are working a very intentional process around each of these areas. We have a strong track record of being a proven acquirer that is accretive to the cultural, strategic and financial health of the organizations that we welcome into our family. Bryan Hughes will give you an update on our balance sheet and our capability to do so. As you all know, the M&A side of any business is about timing and it is about good judgment. We need to exercise both of those in the future if we choose to continue to expand inorganically. I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit more in the Q&A section.
I wanna touch on corporate responsibility. To be fair, we probably should and will talk about this more in the future. We take the approach that corporate responsibility is not another set of file folders on the corner of your desk. It is the responsibility we have to integrate it with everything that we do. We have set aggressive goals, we believe for both 2030 and 2050 in the area of energy, waste, water and product life cycle or stewardship. Our teams are actively working with the leadership of leaders like Stacy Bogart and Chris West and others to make sure that we are attacking you know environmental targets in the future that we believe are in the best interests of the outdoors.
This is not, you know, something that we're choosing to do because someone tells us to do it. It's the right thing to do. We're an outdoor company. ESG corporate responsibility can be integrated in a way that is accretive for our commercial business prospects. We're spending significant time on increasing the diversity, inclusion and equity within our culture as well. We made a great investment in a new leader several years or a year and a half or so ago that has turned out to pay great dividends in her leadership and some of the traction we're starting to make. We're now starting to extend our reach into our partnerships with suppliers and dealers and other partners about their own DEI plans, so that we can partner together to increase diversity and inclusion around the outdoors.
I mentioned earlier, more than 50% of first-time buyers were diverse. Again, this is not something that we're being told to do. This is something that is the right thing to do to make sure that we meet the needs of future customers. The last thing I'll mention is we have given away anywhere from 19 - 20 times more money on an annual basis in 2022 versus 2015. We are extremely proud that as we've done well, that we're doing more good in the communities. Our Winnebago Industries Foundation with Stacy's leadership continues to make sure that the money we do choose to invest in our communities is going to great places and is doing great work. The last thing is I'm gonna share the strategic plan targets for 2025.
Bryan Hughes is gonna put more meat on the bones around this earlier or later in his presentation. Let me tell you the way we kind of think about the cycle to 2025. We're coming off record revenues and profitability in fiscal 2022. Many of you are projecting us to have a softer year on the top line and bottom line in fiscal 2023. We announced our first quarter results on December 16, and we'll share some results from the first quarter. Many are expecting that we'll see a retreat in revenue and profitability in fiscal 2023 because of more difficult industry and macroeconomic conditions.
We do believe in 2024 that most of our outdoor industries will stabilize, and we believe in 2025 that in both the RV and marine segments, you'll begin to see modest growth in those industries going forward. We have established a set of goals that are targets and aspirations for our enterprise. We've set a net revenue goal of $5.5 billion, which is a combination of both organic growth, but likely inorganic investment into the business as well. That would set a new high for revenue, you know, in the enterprise. We have a desire to continue to diversify our business.
RVs is still our core market, our core industry, but we believe that we can create a portfolio that has significant benefits to our business and ultimately to our shareholders if we have a higher level of diversity with outdoor revenue streams. Today, we're around 8% non-RV revenue. By the end of 2025, we want to be 15%. We have market share of around 12.5%-12.7% in the RV segment in North America. We believe that we can be at least 15% or higher at the end of fiscal 2025 on a rolling 12-month basis. Our pontoon market share, as I referenced earlier, is around 6.5%-6.7%.
We believe that with Jeff Haradine's leadership and the Barletta team's passion, that we can continue to grow from a top 5 brand to, as I said, a potential top three brand, and that we can reach double-digit market shares by the end of 2025. We believe by the end of 2025, through a combination of organic growth, inorganic investments, and continued work on enterprise operational excellence, that we can get gross margins to the 19% level. That adjusted EBITDA will be in that early teens, low teens, 13%+ range as well. Bryan Hughes will talk about cash flow historically. We will target at least $400 million of free cash flow into fiscal 2025.
While the last bullet may not matter as much as we'd like it to some of our investors, internally, culturally, we're gonna shoot for a goal to give away twice as many dollars in fiscal 2025 responsibly than we did in fiscal 2022 to the communities that our employees live, work, and play in. I'll let Bryan expand on these goals in his part, and then I'm sure we'll talk about some of your questions about the paths to these goals during our Q&A session. Here's my summary slide, the foundations for success. Very similar to the messages that I've hopefully talked about during my time here.
We believe that these are the things that have done well, create an opportunity for us to continue to be successful in the market and a good choice for investors to consider, you know, putting their faith in the future, as well. At this time, I'm gonna invite Ashis Bhattacharya to come up, who is our Senior Vice President of Business Development, Advanced Technology, and Strategic Planning. Ashis.
Thanks, Mike. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Winnebago Industries Investor Day. It's great to have all of you in the room and for those of you listening online as well. It's such an exciting time to be part of the leadership team at Winnebago Industries with so much going on. I've been here now six and a half years, and it's just been wonderful to see the transformation and evolution of this company. I'm gonna talk about two subjects today. One is just business development as a driver of growth, and the second I'm gonna talk about is advanced technology as a driver of innovation for us. When we think about business development, we like to think about growth very broadly. When we think about business development, there are three areas that we look at.
The first is mergers and acquisitions, M&A. The second one is strategic partnerships, and the third is organic adjacencies of growth. While we clearly see M&A as a key driver of growth, we have a track record of doing M&A. We've demonstrated that we have this record of being able to acquire and integrate companies. This will be a focus in future, but we also want to talk about the two other areas. One is in strategic partnerships investment. Just building an ecosystem of partnerships with companies. You know, bringing in, companies that have best-in-class capabilities and specific skills to help us build out that ecosystem and just working with them very closely and making strategic investments in key companies. We really want to continue looking at that and make sure that we do that.
The third area we want to look at is organic adjacencies and growth, where with our business units, we want to really work closely in partnership with them to identify adjacencies and just use a very customer-focused lens to identify opportunities and look for areas which are applicable across multiple business units that we have in the portfolio. So business development is going to be an important focus for us as we think broadly about growth. When we look at acquisitions. Could we go to the next slide, please? When we look at acquisitions, you've seen that in the last six and a half years, we've done four acquisitions. Two have been in the RV space, two have been in marine. Let's just go through them in order that we did the acquisitions.
2016, Grand Design, one of the fastest-growing RV companies, focused on towables, grew very fast when we acquired them in 2016. They've continued growing even faster. 2018, Chris-Craft on the right in marine, our first entry into marine, really iconic, close to 150-year-old luxury high-performance brand. We followed that up with Newmar in 2019, a maker of really high-end Class A diesel and gas RVs, and then lastly with Barletta in 2021, which was our entry into the pontoon market. When you look at that portfolio, I think what it shows you is that we've been able to identify opportunities to significantly expand our market reach. When you look at the numbers at the bottom of these slides, it's the three-year compound annual growth.
It shows you that in each of the categories, so for Towables, close to 40%, for Motorhomes, close to 30%, and in Marine, 76%. This has been growth which has outpaced the market by a large measure in that time. What we've been able to show is that we've acquired these companies, and under our ownership, they've continued growing even faster. Next slide, please. When you look at the acquisitions that we've done, one of the key things that we've been able to do is to bring in a really thoughtful integration strategy to these acquisitions, because acquiring is one piece of it, but continuing to make them grow and prosper is a completely different thing.
What we've done is we don't come in with a cookie-cutter approach to integration, but we have a very thoughtful, tailored approach, which starts with people first. In the acquired business, we really want to give people the ability to grow their businesses, and so a real focus on people. We have a very formal integration program. Typically, one of our executive leaders is the head of that program. We have a one-year plan. That plan is really focused on key sources of value. It really focuses on where value can be added, and then it's focused on execution and results. When you look at the right side of how we specifically add value, the first thing I would say is we bring a very thoughtful, strategic approach to bringing capital to the business.
It's smart capital, it's thoughtful capital, and it helps the business grow in the places that they want to grow into. The second we look at is scale. We are now a $5 billion company. We can bring in significant scale with our suppliers. We can also bring in significant scale in indirect spend areas of the business. We have the centers of excellence that we've talked about, leveraging those centers for back-end support, and just a unique operating model, which on the one hand, gives our business units a tremendous amount of flexibility to grow the business the way they want, while at the same time providing back-end support and efficiencies.
Last but not least, I would say that when you look at dealerships and you look at reach to the channel, we have a number of relationships all over the market, which we use as well very effectively with our business units to help them to grow. Next slide, please. When you look at our M&A strategy, it's a really active, thoughtful strategy to create long-term value. What's the long-term goal here? You can see that we are really committed to deploying our capital to make sure that we acquire or extend our leadership position in the markets that we're working in over the next three to five years. What are the four areas that we will look at? We will continue to look at our portfolio of premium brands and see how we can acquire more premium brands.
We want to look at adjacencies and expand into adjacencies, to increase the scope of what we're doing. We definitely want to look at innovation. Innovation is an area that's really important to us for differentiation, and so we want to look at innovation. Last but not least, we want to look at operational resiliency. The last couple of years have shown us that in terms of operations, we really need to bring in a very, very thoughtful and detailed approach to operational resiliency. It's an exciting time for us to look at this. It's an exciting time to see, how this evolves. It's great to continue to be involved in this area. Next slide, please. When you look at, our M&A approach, I want to talk about three acquisition criteria that we have.
Whenever we look at an acquisition, we have a group of people in the company, the business development committee, that looks at this, and there are three criteria that we look very closely at in terms of these acquisitions. The first on the left is cultural, the second is strategic, and the third is financial. When you look at cultural, this is perhaps the most important one for us, which is the leadership team, do they share our values? Are they focused on quality, innovation, and service? Can they independently continue to run and grow this company? It's very important to have a meeting of minds. The strategic is an important one as well, which says, does this accelerate our existing strategies and allows us to leverage the core capabilities that we have and really add value to the acquired business?
Financial, of course, for us is this business quickly accretive to our earnings per share? Does this have the potential to drive even more growth? As you've seen from the acquisitions that we've done and the results that we've shown, I think these criteria have held us in good stead. They've really helped us to grow these businesses, and this will continue to be a focus for us as we go ahead. Next slide, please. Let's now move to advanced technology as a driver of innovation. This is a really, really exciting area for me to be involved in, and it's just great to see the investments and commitment that this leadership team has made to advanced technology. Next slide. When you think about advanced technology and the origins of the Advanced Technology Group, the thesis for us has been very simple.
The business units are typically focused on the short term. They have to build vehicles, RVs, and boats. They have to deliver them in the short term, and they don't have the capability, the resources to think about longer-term trends every day because they've got to be focused on execution. What we wanted to do was we wanted to create a group at the center, which was going to be really focused on these longer-term trends, to think about things which are five, seven, or even 10- years out with a very customer-focused lens. Looking at other industries, there could be technologies in other industries which we haven't brought in to our industry to look at, you know, technologies there, but ultimately, to really look at differentiation and innovation as the driver coming out of this.
When you look at many of our leadership team, whether they have come from companies in the past, which have been international, multinational companies, many of us have seen very successful examples of Advanced Technology Group s working very, very well. It wasn't that much of a difficult decision for us to get this going and form this group. We started this group a few years back and have continued investing in this group. When you look at the innovation in this group, there are four pillars that we have of the Advanced Technology Group. They are on the left, as you can see, the four are alternative energy management, data and connectivity, materials science, and autonomy.
When you look at alternative energy management, as you know, in an RV, there are a large number of subsystems that consume energy, store energy, and generate energy. Just managing that whole ecosystem and getting more efficient with it is a really important initiative. When you look at data and connectivity, nowadays, all of the subsystems in these vehicles are becoming what we call smart, connected products. They have the ability to transmit and receive data. They have connectivity, and we want to monitor that as we go ahead. The third is material science. In an RV, like in many other industries, weight is very important. The less weight you have, the more you have, weight and space for your customer and their personal effects. Insulation, vibration, advanced materials in manufacturing are all kinds of important areas. The last, autonomy.
While full autonomy might still take us a while to get realized, we do see a number of applications in autonomy that are interesting that we are looking at. When you look at the commercialization model of advanced technology, what you'll see is that with these four pillars, we will be working very closely with our business units to commercialize these technologies. The partnership with the business units is really important, and what we've done, you'll see in the middle of the page, is we've defined three big umbrella projects. The first one is called Motorhomes of the Future, the second is Towables of the Future, the third is Boats of the Future.
Under these umbrella projects, we will be doing a lot of sub-projects, where for the business units, they don't have to wait for a very long time to see benefits, but there might be benefits that would come as these projects are being done. Just staying, you know, focused on that is really important. Could we go to the next slide? Yep. On the operating model, what we've got is that we will build out a small core team of skilled people, but build out an ecosystem of partners, because for us, these technology areas that we're working in, some of them are long-term technology areas which are still evolving. They're very, very, you know, early-stage, nascent technologies.
Continuing to look for people with expertise in these technologies and continuing to build this ecosystem of partners is going to be really important. Last but not least, having a variable cost model. This approach allows us to have a variable cost model which we can flex up and down depending on business conditions. I'd like to talk about our electrification strategy. As all of us know, electrification is one of the big mega trends that we are seeing in any vehicle-related industry. For us, it's a trend that we've been really working on for the last four or five years. We started this initially in our specialty vehicles business, where we built out some really, really interesting applications, which are in the mobile medical and mobile education space.
We developed and launched our first e-RV concept vehicle that we launched at the Florida RV SuperShow in January 2022, and we then took it on a road trip from Washington D.C. to Minneapolis. We drove 1,300 mi. While this vehicle is a concept vehicle, it's a real-world vehicle. It's got a license plate. We've driven it 5,000 mi, and we really are going through a process of co-creation with our end customers and our dealers to refine this vehicle. Now we're gonna be working closely with our business units to make sure that they are developing something which is a commercially viable vehicle. When you look at all of the business units across Winnebago Industries, whether they're in RVs, marine, or specialty vehicles, each of these business units is really looking at electrification.
Each of these business units is trying to figure out where that fits, what's the timeline, who are going to be the early customers, and what is that compelling offering that we can come up with which is going to make us really the leader in this space. Stay tuned for next steps on this and what we'll hear on electrification. With that, we wanted to show you a quick video, that takes us through the journey of the e-RV concept vehicle and some of the work we've done with it. Go ahead with the video, please.
There's a whole segment of outdoor enthusiasts whose deep love of nature is balanced by their drive to protect the environment, who believe technology enhances their experience of the world. For these premium pragmatists who seek products that help them enjoy the outdoors without hurting it, Winnebago has created our first all-electric RV prototype. Introducing the e-RV. The e-RV is built on the Ford Transit 350 HD chassis with 100% EV power by Lightning eMotors. With state-of-the-art components and best-in-class engineering to deliver a premium driving experience. Whether you're headed to the grocery store or off for a weekend of hiking, the e-RV delivers zero emissions, a quiet ride, instant torque, and highly efficient systems for mobile outdoor living. With multiple charging options at home, at dedicated charging stations, and at campgrounds to charge the 86 kWh battery. That's just the beginning.
The eOne's human-centered design approach incorporates advanced technology with real-world utility. A new proprietary control system allows customers to easily monitor and control the major systems from within the vehicle or remotely with their smartphone or tablet. Owners can monitor battery levels and energy use, control HVAC and other systems, even enable remote diagnostics. The eOne incorporates 350-volt appliances for its major subsystems to minimize energy loss while maximizing battery performance. The eOne also delivers residential-grade Wi-Fi, enabling high data streaming levels where traditional Wi-Fi is unavailable. With thoughtfully designed features, multi-use furnishings, and premium materials, the eOne makes an ideal home base for life on the go. Materials are selected with a preference for eco-friendly, sustainable choices wherever possible. To further maximize comfort and efficiency, the eOne incorporates innovative multipurpose solutions indoors and out.
There's even secure ventilated storage with built-in charging for electronics and conveniently placed USB ports throughout. The eOne is transforming the RV experience, providing a new solution for a new breed of RVers.
Well, I hope you enjoyed that introduction to the e-RV, and it gave you a feel for the extent of the work that we've done on this. Let's go to the next slide, please. I'd like to just close by talking about the Advanced Technology Innovation Center in the Twin Cities. I think this is a signal about the commitment that the leadership team at Winnebago Industries has for advanced technology, and it's really gratifying to see that. We announced this morning that we are going to be building out a new facility. It's a leased facility in the Twin Cities where we are going to be able to build and test RV, marine, specialty vehicles, and outdoor systems. It's gonna be a fully equipped lab with a lot of capabilities for prototyping and testing.
We are thinking that, you know, in the first half of 2023, at some point we'll move into that facility. It's gonna have expansion capability for the next three to five years, and we're gonna be building out partnerships to be able to support this capability, the facility that we have. I hope I gave you a good feel for some of the work that we're doing in business development and advanced technology. It's just really exciting to be able to work in these areas. With that, I'd like to introduce our SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Amber Holm, to talk about consumer insights. Amber?
Thanks, Ashis. It's great to be with you today to have the chance to talk about brands and marketing at Winnebago Industries. I've been a career brand marketer, and the opportunity to join Winnebago Industries as the CMO in July of this year was truly exciting for me because it's not often that you get to come and build out the marketing function on a portfolio of brands, really remarkable brands, both our iconic brands and our emerging brands. We're really starting from a place of strength with our brands. As we look ahead, there's more opportunity to engage more consumers, amplify our brand stories, and continue to win in the marketplace. Our brands are united by a common purpose. As Mike mentioned, we wanna help our customers explore the outdoor lifestyle, enabling extraordinary experiences as they travel, live, work, and play.
For us, as I'll share a little later in this presentation, we've seen that the outdoor lifestyle is more meaningful than ever to people. It's really a purpose that's resonating with our consumers. We believe that we can deliver truly extraordinary experiences when you start with our brand strength and couple it with our golden threads of quality, innovation, and service. As we build out marketing at Winnebago Industries, there's three key areas that I'm focused on. First, around consumer insights. For us, that's deeply knowing our consumers, empathizing with them, really understanding their journey. It's also leveraging data and analytics and using that data to add value to our business. Second, it's around brand building.
As I mentioned, we've got great brands, so we wanna make sure that we're leveraging the power of those brands, making both rational and emotional connections, and demonstrating our superior value proposition. We really feel there's opportunity to drive even further consumer reach with integrated marketing plans. Finally, the digital experience. As we think about our consumers, we know they wanna interact with us digitally. That's how they live their lives today. It's important for us to transform our shopping, buying, and owning experience. We also wanna enable our dealers to have efficient digital platforms to work with our consumers as well. If we can do these three things, we're focused on marketing really being a source of strategic competitive advantage for Winnebago Industries. Let's start with our consumer insights. We wanna know our consumers best.
Only if we truly understand their experience with our products can we really empathize with them and understand how to deliver on unmet needs and bring value that's gonna win in the marketplace. The great thing is that our consumers are passionate about their boats and passionate about their RVs. They wanna talk to us, so it's pretty easy to get feedback, and we have to continue to learn to leverage that feedback. We wanna really understand their experience across the purchase journey. For us, we wanna influence perceptions, so our brands are in the consideration set when it comes time to buy. When it is time to buy, we need to make sure that we're providing a seamless experience, both online and when they visit a dealer to actually make the purchase. Finally, it's about the experience owning the product.
We wanna be supportive and make it a convenient experience and one where we can continue to interact with them, so we really build advocacy. This is what we'll be focused on. To that end, in knowing our consumers best, we've done significant consumer research recently over the past couple of months. We've ridden along with our consumers when they've been out in their RVs. We've taken boat trips with them. We've done significant interviews, and we've done two large quantitative studies with thousands of respondents to really get to know them. We found some really encouraging news about the outdoor industry overall. First and foremost, our outdoor enthusiasts are even more positive about the outdoors. In fact, 89% of them said that they would be as active or more active in the outdoors over the next six12 months.
When you expand that to the next two to five years, 85% of them still said they saw themselves as being as active or more active. The activities that they plan to do line up very well with the product lines that we have at Winnebago Industries. Things like swimming, going to the lake, fishing, camping, the things that our products enable. Then, as Mike mentioned, we really see that this is a lifestyle that benefits their well-being. People wanna relax and recharge, things that they need more than ever in today's crazy world. Our products help deliver that, whether they're out on their Chris-Craft or they're out in their Winnebago, really appreciating nature, but also really focusing on holistic wellness. They're very sticky activities.
Then we took a survey back in 2020 when it was the height of the COVID pandemic, and we asked them those same questions again recently. Even with macroeconomic uncertainty, inflation, and some other unknowns, we see that our consumers again say that the outdoors are more important to them than ever. They use them to connect with their friends and family. They use them to socialize, and they see that they're even more passionate about the outdoors than they were previously. All of this are great fodder for us, I guess, as we think about what our brands can do moving forward. The other news is as we look at our R.V. consumer specifically with some research that we did on our Winnebago brand, we see that we brought in new first-time buyers over the past two years.
We also saw that many of them were younger, which is great news for us as we think about the future and continuing to build our businesses across the generations. Then those that have come into the industry are actually finding it that it really fits their lifestyle. 86% of consumers that came into RVing have said that they're using their RV as much or more than they expected. That's great news for us, again, about the stickiness of the industry and that we've brought new consumers in who are really feeling like this is something they wanna continue. In addition to our consumer insights focus, you'll see us continue to ramp up our brand building. For us, that's continuing to attract those new participants I just talked about and then retaining them once they're in.
To that end, we know that we wanna continue to attract diverse consumers. One example of how we're doing that is a partnership with the Melanated Campout, and that's an organization whose sole purpose is to help people of color fall in love with camping. We see this as a business opportunity as well because these are historically underrepresented groups in our industries. Additionally, we wanna increase access. You can see the example here of our Newmar partnership with Sam Schmidt, who was a former IndyCar driver, who's now a quadriplegic, but he's able to use his Dutch Star now that he leads Arrow McLaren SP and travels around to IndyCar races.
It's a great opportunity to expand access for us, but also demonstrate that our brands display the values that our consumers care about. Finally, as we innovate, we're looking at new consumer segments as well. Those of you that are here in person got to experience our Imagine AIM from Grand Design and our HIKE 100 from Winnebago today. Those both enable more consumers that have smaller vehicles and can't tow a large travel trailer to experience the Winnebago or the Grand Design products. Our Barletta Aria also lets a new segment of consumers experience Barletta quality with something that's even more affordable. We look forward to continuing to bring in new participants, both through our product offering and our marketing.
Also, on the brand building side, we wanna continue to focus on targeted partnerships to get our message out there and reach more consumers. You'll see more integrated campaigns from us. One great example of this is our Winnebago Go Where You Feel campaign. This is kind of built on that insight around freedom. When I get in my Winnebago RV, you know, the world is my oyster. I can get out there and do what I want. This campaign really brings forward online video, social media, and support at our dealers to talk to our consumers about the emotional benefits of Winnebago. Additionally, we're focused on social communities and influencers. One example of this is our Grand Design partnership with Changing Lanes. They're ambassadors for the Grand Design brand, and they actually helped co-create our Momentum Toy Hauler.
We took input directly from them into how we developed the product. We've seen millions of YouTube views on their videos about our product as people wanna get a walk-through and see it for themselves. Finally, we're continuing to look at partnerships. I like to think about it as partnerships with a purpose. For us, we've had a long-standing relationship with the National Park Foundation, and so that's just a natural fit for us as you think about our brand purpose. Again, conveying to our consumers that we care about conservation, the environment, and that we're helping them with really a shared vision for what we want the future to be for our products and as we all think about, you know, the environment and sustainability together. Finally, we're focused on the digital customer experience.
Again, for us, that starts with the consumer experience. Because if you don't really understand the consumer experience, you're gonna end up with technology just for the sake of technology. We wanna make sure that our technology is really there to support the best experience possible. That leads us to a connected ecosystem, kind of starting with the shopping experience, the buying experience, and then ultimately, the owning experience as we look at connected products. You'll see us continue to accelerate our digital marketing focus and really our performance marketing focus as we continue to track our KPIs in terms of how many customers we're bringing into the funnel, tracking them through the funnel, and converting into leads, and then finally to purchase. We wanna be where our consumers are, meeting that demand with the right product message at the right time.
We're also focused on leveraging technology to help guide that journey. We've been launching new tools to empower our consumers. Great tools that we've launched across the Winnebago brand. You can see our Chris-Craft View My Boat, Build a Boat tool right there. We know that they wanna shop, they wanna go online and do these things themselves. We wanna make that even easier for them. The other side to that coin is really enabling our dealers as we think about the digital customer experience. Because as we all know, consumers can research online, but they're still gonna ultimately purchase through a dealer. Our Winnebago SourceBook is a great example of the training opportunities that we provide so our retail selling associates can be very up-to-date with the latest products and what we wanna talk about.
We have our Newmar Noogle knowledge base, which is really a best-in-class product information system, so that service techs and people at the dealers can be very knowledgeable on all of our products. Our Barletta dealer portal has also gotten tremendous feedback from our dealers in terms of providing all the information about our business at their fingertips. The great news is, across our five brands, we're able to leverage these competencies and share best practices and learning. Ultimately, that will lead us to improving the overall ownership experience with connected products. We launched our Winnebago app this summer, which has had thousands of downloads, and that has specific information about your RV. It can also do things like tell you where the nearest service center is, and we'll continue to add features and functionalities as we build that out.
We'll also be launching a MyChris-Craft app, where you can, you know, control, you know, to see the key KPIs on your boat. The great news is we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time we do this, and that's the power of the brands that we have together. As you heard from Ashis, that will really help us as we want to empower our connected owner of the future. Our e-RV, you can see the interface there, has a very intuitive, user-friendly experience, as you saw in the video. That's what we're really looking to add as we think about the connected experience that we want all of our consumers to have. Our digital customer journey doesn't end when they buy, it actually just begins, really having a great shopping, buying, owning full experience.
I think if we can do these things right, continuing to know our consumers, continuing to grow our brands and build them, and really accelerating our digital focus, is gonna help us continue to take market share and lead well into the future. With that, I would like to introduce our SVP of Enterprise Operations, Chris West.
All right. Thank you, Amber. Appreciate that. Very good to be back in front of all of you. I know it's been a few years since most of you have got to see me in front of you, so definitely appreciate the opportunity. Really what I wanna do today is emphasize just a few things, but I wanna focus on our operating model that Mike talked about and how the capabilities that we're building from an operations standpoint, how they're actually creating yield in our business, how it's actually setting us up for our future, and how it's creating a competitive advantage. You know, Mike had mentioned that you know, one of our strategic imperatives is to drive operational excellence and portfolio synergy. Our operations teams are really focused on three things in doing that.
Number one is really being able to mitigate risk in all the capabilities that we build. Being able to create value, but then identify those opportunities for synergy, and then drive those across our portfolio of brands where it makes sense. One other critical aspect of all of the capabilities that we're building is enabling the ability for the organic growth inside of the business, but also that ability for inorganic growth, to be able to support the inorganic growth. The last time we met in 2019, these statistics really represent from that last time we got together on an investor day. In that amount of time, with the growth that we've had, our footprint, although we still operate geographically in the same areas that we operated then, we have added a few businesses.
What we've also done is we've increased our footprint by about 20%. We've increased our head count about the same amount. What we've been able to do with those inputs is our outputs are far greater. We've had a 60% increase in the number of units that we've produced. Our return on assets, it's up by 600 basis points, and we've seen an improvement in our labor yield by a factor of 2x. Now, in the midst of doing all of that, what we've also seen is we've been able to reduce our injury severity in our businesses, and we've also been able to maintain that very highly variable cost model that you've heard mentioned quite a bit today.
What I wanted to really emphasize here is this clearly demonstrates our ability to be able to create the yield as we grow the business. How are we creating that yield? You know, as Mike talks about centers of excellence from an operations standpoint, we've established four key centers of excellence in the process of continuing to enhance capabilities in these areas. You know, the first one, our EHSS, which is our Environmental, Health, Safety, Security, Sustainability. This is focused on safety, really driving us towards our goal of zero harm, but it's also helped us establish a clear, actionable roadmap to hit our sustainability targets. Quality. Quality for us, you've heard it mentioned, it's a golden thread.
This is about driving consistency among all of our brands and what we do in quality, so we can fulfill our brand promises in each one of our brands. From a business excellence standpoint, this is our continuous improvement leg of our business. This is where we wanna drive operational excellence back into each one of the businesses. From a supply chain standpoint, we are focused on capabilities here that will really help us drive resilience, agility, and flexibility into our supply chain. What I wanna do is talk just briefly about each one of these. Safety is really a subset inside of the center of excellence around EHSS. We talk about safety for a couple of reasons here. You know, safety is a cornerstone capability.
You know, Mike refers to this as this is an imperative for us in our business. Safety is more than just, you know, the right thing to do. It's more than, you know, just about us protecting our people, which are our greatest assets. It's also an indicator of control of risk. It's an indicator of control of processes. The better organizations perform in this area, it actually improves employee retention. It also lowers operating costs. You see higher levels of quality in each of the operations. It reduces overall business risk whenever you can control this. It shows control of not just safety in those systems and processes, but your overall operational processes and systems. That's why this for us is an imperative.
When we talk about quality is one of those areas, each one of our brands, we're already very well-recognized. We have an award-winning portfolio of brands. When we think about this, we're focused on common systems, tools, and processes that we can drive across all of our businesses, where we can focus on designed-in quality as well as built-in quality. What we believe is this is a competitive advantage. We believe that consumers will reward those brands and those organizations who can deliver on those brand promises around quality and reliability. That again, is why this is one of our centers of excellence and a capability we're trying to build in our business. The business excellence piece, this is really built on four key categories. Now, this will continue to expand.
We'll continue to add additional capabilities here, but right now we're focused on four key areas. The first one is around business process frameworks. What this really does is helps us identify all of the critical business processes, make sure they're well documented, and make sure that they're under control. It's a framework for all of the businesses to be able to operate under. This, again, reduces risk, general risk in our business. The lean transformation. This is a set of capabilities here. This is just one tool in the toolbox that we're applying, creates a visual management, a process and a system for visual management in our factories.
It's the capability for us to be able to not only eliminate waste from our operations, but also that ability to be able to identify normal from abnormal conditions, giving our businesses the ability to be more reliable and consistent in their daily operations. The advanced manufacturing technology, this is where we partner with the businesses and identify what are the business problems they have and what are the appropriate technologies that could help them address some of those business problems. Could be in the form of safety, removing people out of harm's way. Could be in the form of capacity. It could be in the form of quality and reliability. And we partner internally and externally, to go, focus on those things. The last area is special operations.
This is where sometimes, and Ashis talked a little bit about this, in ATG, sometimes all of the skill sets aren't there and they're not necessarily necessary on a day-to-day basis for each of the businesses, where we can either take internal resources that we have or external resources and go in and work with the business in very targeted areas where they may have opportunities or issues that they need addressed where we can go in and help them. But at the end of the day, the business excellence is really designed here to help the businesses get into a, take them from where they're at from a performance standpoint and help them continue to elevate their operational performance. The last center of excellence I wanna talk about here is supply chain.
When we think about supply chain and the world we've lived in the last few years, we believe disruption is the new normal. We believe that all businesses are just gonna be faced with disruption. Our strategy is built on building resilience, flexibility, and agility into our supply chain. We believe it's actually gonna be a competitive advantage as we move forward. There are five capabilities that we're building here. The strategic sourcing is really focused on three key areas. It's about where is there value in our supply chain, and how do we get that value out of the supply chain? We are focused on the risk. Where do we have the highest level of risk? What strategies can we work with the businesses to employ to reduce that level of risk? The third area is around cost and inflation mitigation.
We've seen yet that happen over the last couple of years here, where we work in very targeted ways with the businesses to help control that. The second area is around supplier performance. Now, this one is a new capability that we've been building now over about the last 18- months, and it's focused on, again, three very key areas. The first area is around supplier qualifications, so we bring the right suppliers in right up front out of the gate. The second is the capability to measure and monitor supplier performance. The last area is in our ability to be able to improve the performance of our overall supply base.
Spend management and analytics, we brought a small team in that actually takes the data and information, both external data as well as our internal data, provides that in the form of insights back to our strategic sourcing team, supplies it to our supplier performance team, as well as to the businesses, so there's a better understanding of what's happening, what it means, and provide insights back. The fourth area is around integrated business planning, and that's ultimately taking retail, wholesale information, being able to take our internal supply chain information and put that back or provide that back to the business so we can do better business planning. This is an area we've actually put a resource in one of the businesses to build that capability, up in. The last area is digital enablement.
I'm gonna flip to this and just talk about the digital enablement here. When we look at the digital specifically in supply chain, data is at the core of everything we do in our supply chain. This feeds every one of the capabilities that I showed you on the prior page. What's really important here is we're trying to create a digitally connected supply chain. We believe this is very, very different than what anybody else in our industry is doing. We believe this is really important because with a digitally connected supply chain, we're focused on data standards and data governance. What it's going to enable us to do is, as we bring in information, it allows our businesses to continue to operate on the ERP systems that they operate on today. It's ERP agnostic.
Well, why is that important? Well, it doesn't force our businesses into updating or going into new ERP and MRP systems. If you think about the acquisition model, as we stay acquisitive, it actually allows us to easily integrate new businesses, because with clean, harmonized data, we're actually able to bring all of the information to create one central source of truth. The second thing this does is it starts to enable future technologies. When we start to think about connecting our supply chain and connecting suppliers, we now have the ability to create supply chain ecosystems. We can either do that, connecting suppliers, supply partners together or different tiers in the supply chain.
The last thing it's gonna give us the capability of being able to do is if you think about our internal data, we can now start to take both structured and unstructured external data, tie that to our internal data. Now we can start to sense disruption. We're trying to build a foundation here with this strategy that gives us future technology capabilities as we move forward that further build that additional resilience into our supply chain, as we move forward. I'm gonna end with this. We honestly believe that the capabilities that we're building, plus the operating model, when Mike talks about that, the collaboration, the way we work with the businesses, this is truly different than what we see in our industry and what anybody else is doing. We believe it's a competitive advantage.
We also believe it's very difficult for anybody to replicate. We believe this is very reflective of the power of "and," and we also believe it proves our ability to do or that one plus one can equal more than two. With that, I am going to turn it over to Bryan Hughes, our CFO.
Thank you, Chris. I wanna start by extending some thanks to all of you in the room. I appreciate you being here, your time, the energy it takes to get here. I appreciate your great attitude this morning as we struggled with a bit of weather. For those of you that are dialing in online, we've got rain and 40 degrees here. We're still trying to thaw out a little bit from a couple hours of experiencing the products. Thank you for that. Look on the bright side, our portfolio doesn't include snorkel gear yet, so you didn't have to experience that. That would have been another level. Thank you for being here. I really do appreciate it. Thank you to those online, logging in and joining us online virtually. I appreciate your time.
Special thank you to the presidents of the business, to Casey, to Huw, to Steve, to Jeff. We appreciated you joining us as well. We unfortunately couldn't have Don with us. He's not feeling well. Great to have you with us, and I know it's highly appreciated by the folks in attendance here too. We're very proud of our leadership in the business units. You don't often get to interact with them, and they are a really key part of our success so far. Lastly, I wanted to extend a special thank you to Steve Stuber, who's done a great job of leading our investor relations program.
I know that many of you have worked closely with him over the past several years and he's really developed our relationships with all of you and has been key in that regard. He's really stepped up our game. I know he passes it to Ray Posadas, and we'll be in great hands in terms of continuing that tradition of providing transparency and great information to all of you who are interested in investing in Winnebago. My job here is to provide a financial overview for Winnebago Industries and wrap up the presentations here and get to some Q&A, touching on some, I think, key important things along the way. It really highlights who we are, what we have become, our transformation journey, and most importantly, to set up what we believe to be the opportunity going forward here.
Our financial journey has reflected that transformation, has provided some great proof points of our strategy. You can see our sales growth going from $0.9 billion all the way up to $5 billion or 5.5 times the size we were in 2016. Our profitability, both measured in gross profit, gross margin, EPS, has likewise increased dramatically 8.2 times each in gross profit dollars and EPS. Then we've also generated very strong improvement in free cash flow. This has not just come through acquisitions. We've talked about that several times today, but very much an organic story. An example, Grand Design, when we purchased them, was right around $500 million. They eclipsed over $2 billion this past year under our ownership. It's very much an organic growth story as well as an inorganic growth story.
That will continue to be the case. We'll continue to grow organically, and as we've talked about a few times today already, we'll continue to focus on that inorganic opportunity as well. Those financial results are very much the product of great performance in the market with superior products, superior brands. You can see the market share increases. We've shared this frequently in the past. 3% RV share in 2016, growing to 12.7% here this most recent year. You know, typically seeing growth in market share in the 70-point to 140-point range. This most recent year with the market dynamics being what they are, that growth slowed a bit. We expect that that will continue to some historical growth rates as things normalize in the marketplace.
Very strong market share growth in RV that has contributed to those financial results. On the right, you see what has been accomplished by the Barletta brand in a very short period of time since their formation in 2018. Already growing to the number five brand in the pontoon space, very fast-growing marketplace. Number 5 there with a 6.5% market share. Great growth in market share that we expect to continue. We've got an interesting market dynamic that we're faced with. I know this is a common question, so we wanted to address this head-on and give you our perspective on it. What you're seeing here is a rolling twelve units for the RV space by month. You can kind of see the shape of the curve.
It peaked in the summer of 2020 at about 600,000 units on the retail. This is retail, okay? 600,000 units in retail. It eased to about 500,000 units in the peak summer season of 2022 here. We expect, as we've communicated at our most recent earnings release, that that will settle in at around 400,000 units. That will be the new floor. That's what our current expectation is. We're currently, as of September, at about a 450,000 trailing twelve unit RV industry on the retail side. So you can see that our expectation of settling in that 400,000-410,000 unit range, that's our current view. It's a headwind.
You know, going from 500,000 down to 400,000, we recognize that. We've been fighting many headwinds, including supply constraints. We've talked about several of those along the way. The market dynamics. In similar fashion will be another headwind. We do have another headwind I wanna bring people up to speed with. I think many people are aware of this headwind already on the supply side, but in the spirit of making sure everybody is on the same page here, wanted to bring you in the loop on another headwind that we're fighting at the moment, and we expect to handle in much the same way we have handled other headwinds. This is dealing with our Winnebago motorhome business.
Within the last two weeks, we were notified of a safety recall by one of our chassis suppliers, which will have an impact on our customers and on our results for the first quarter of fiscal 2023, ending November 26, as well as the potential of impacting future quarters pending the resolution of this safety recall. Mercedes-Benz AG has issued a global recall related to an electronic parking brake affecting 2019 through 2022 Sprinter chassis. As of today, Winnebago Industries, our dealers and other upfitters using the Sprinter chassis are not allowed to sell any of these affected products. The remedy is a software update.
However, we will not have approval of that software update in a timely fashion, therefore preventing us and our RV dealer partners from shipping, selling or delivering any products that have not received the fix on the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter chassis. This impacts all RV OEMs, upfitters and dealers who sell the Sprinter chassis and therefore the impact of this recall is not limited to Winnebago Industries. While the situation is fluid and a remedy may be provided soon, we believe that this will have an impact to retail sales of the products utilizing the Sprinter chassis for the next several weeks or even months.
As this also affects our ability to deliver product to our dealers, this situation will have an impact on our financial results for our first quarter, approximating $50 million -$60 million in net sales with a corresponding impact to our profitability, including the impact to yield as a result of productivity loss and deleverage. At this point in time, we believe the impact to our second quarter to be in a relatively similar range to the Q1 impact. We are hoping or we are having ongoing discussions with Mercedes-Benz on the remedy, the implementation of the remedy, as well as the timeline of the remedy, and we expect that this will be an evolving situation over the next several weeks. We'll provide further updates to this situation during our Q1 earnings release about a month from now, December 16th.
I wanted everybody to be aware of that and on the same page, with yet another supply challenge. It's not a new thing for us. Certainly we've been dealing with these and I know that our team, Hugh and his team, as well as Chris West and the supply chain team are working very closely with Mercedes-Benz to address the current situation. Like I said, we'll keep you posted and give you an update at our earnings release. Nonetheless, our track record of creating shareholder value, this slide is not fully loading. I'll expect that you guys are working on that back there. We're showing here a comparison of our performance relative to the S&P small cap.
It's not showing the red line for some reason, but ultimately it ends at 42.29 for Winnebago compared to the S&P small cap at 20.73% and demonstrating a great delivery of value for our shareholders over that period of time that we expect to be able to drive continued outperformance. In addition to the value that we've driven, we believe that we're currently positioned very well for driving further value. This is a historical view of our multiple, our PE. Now it's trailing multiple. Okay, you can see that historically it's bounced around as certain shocks to the broader economy have occurred.
You see a recent shock upwards on the multiple as a result of the pandemic, and the dramatic impact that had on earnings, negative impact and therefore a positive spike in the multiple, right? Recently in 2020. We're currently trading between four and five roughly compared to the 12-15 roughly historically speaking. We view that obviously as an opportunistic situation, and that's why you've seen the level of repurchases that you have from us over the past couple of quarters that we have announced. We think that also and likewise represents a great opportunity for our shareholders. We've talked a lot about diversification throughout the course of the presentations today. If you look back at 2016, the beginning of the transformation, we were largely a motorhome company.
You see that on the slide here. 90% motorhome, 9%, just 9% towables. That juxtaposes the market which is 85% towable. You can see we were underrepresented pretty significantly back in 2016 and just 1% in some other businesses. That has changed dramatically up through 2022 where you can see the split of business now being 52% towable, 39% motorhome. Still not quite matching the industry at 85% towable, but we have great momentum going with market share in our towables businesses. Now 9% in non-RV. Mike shared with you earlier our diversification goal of having 15% of our business as non-RV in the future. Now, that's important because these segments all behave differently through a cycle. We acknowledge that they are all cyclical industries, okay.
I don't wanna convey to you that we believe otherwise. They are cyclical industries, but they behave at different levels of. You know, the wavelength is different in height and depth. The length of the wavelengths are different. The timing is different. We're seeing some of that play out in our most recent quarters, and we expect to continue to see some of that diversification play out in the future as well. We do believe that there is this benefit, even among the segments we participate in today, of diversification. Mike shared with you our strategic goals. I think they're worth repeating or reiterating for you today and providing a little bit more context. First, on the top line, the $5.5 billion. As Mike indicated, that's both organic and some inorganic.
We believe that this is an achievable goal. As you know us, we've tended to be on the conservative side when we put out goals, things that we believe to be achievable, okay, with great execution. Underlying that $5.5 billion, I think it's important for you to understand that we do not expect a dramatic rebound in RV retail units, okay? Effectively, this goal that we're holding out here does not differ in market much from that 400,000 retail number that we shared earlier, okay? We're not counting on this dramatic return of the industry to high levels of retail to accomplish this. It's very reasonable assumptions that we've made. The 15% non-RV revenue, I think Mike did a nice job of characterizing that as our diversification efforts play out.
The North American RV market share of 15%. As I mentioned earlier, we are at 12.7% at the end of 2022. We have a track record of adding anywhere from 70 points-140 points historically. We think that we can continue to achieve that kind of growth in our market share. You see the products that we are introducing, the focus on differentiation and innovation, our tenets of quality, innovation, and service. All of these things we think will continue to enhance our market share over time. Again, that assumption is based on a historical track record of market share growth. Our 10% pontoon market share again reflects the momentum of the trend that we have with the Barletta brand and what we believe that product can bring to the market.
We've talked also about the introduction of new price points, new brands within the Barletta portfolio that we know will help achieve that 10% target as well. Gross margin of 19%. Hey, we finished at 18.7% in the most recent year. This is not a stretch goal relative to the 2022 accomplishment, but it certainly does acknowledge the marketplace dynamics that have been a tailwind here in 2022 with the very strong retail demand, and that will be one of those headwinds as that market position lessens. We also look at the innovation, the differentiation, some of the things that Chris West just talked about in terms of our enterprise capabilities, as being those tailwinds that will help us accomplish that 19%.
I'll talk a little bit more about margins in the coming slides. Then adjusted EBITDA, similarly 13%, very much in line with our recent achievements, and then free cash flow of $400 million, which will represent an improvement in our working capital position. The challenges of the supply chain and otherwise have caused working capital to increase the last couple of years. We think as those things become manageable and as some of the efforts that Chris is working on with the enterprise, we'll be able to make some improvements to our working capital, to deliver that $400 million of free cash flow. A little bit more on margins. If you look at our history by segment, you can see some of the movement that we've generated.
In the motor home business, we have historically had margins. These are EBITDA margins now, okay? EBITDA margins. We've historically had EBITDA margins in the motor home business in that 3%-5% range. We made a step change through several initiatives that were underway through that 2017, 2018, 2019 period, including significant product mix changes, but then also several operational changes that enabled a step change to occur in the last couple of years that we expect will persist going forward in terms of that step change. We've talked about historically maintaining EBITDA margins in that motor home business of 10%. We think that with our innovation and our differentiation, in particular in this space, we will continue to demonstrate superior margins relative to the industry. Towable segment margins have been very consistent over the last several years.
You can see ranging in that 13%-14% very consistently, delivering as high as around 15% this most recent year. That too is a segment that will rely heavily on operational efficiencies, enterprise-wide synergies, differentiation and innovation as delivering continued industry-best segment margins. Lastly, marine. Historically, this has consisted of Chris-Craft. You can see the impact that the pandemic had on that small scale and the margins delivered in 2020 in that shutdown period, and then the recovery in 2021. With the addition of Barletta and the very strong margins we have in that business, that has propelled them to 14%+ in the most recent year. Several things drive our margin. Just wanted to call out some of those things. They've already been mentioned a few times.
It starts with innovation and differentiation. That is the most important driver of margin, in our opinion, and we will continue, therefore, to invest in that area to make sure that our products are differentiated and hold a great position in the marketplace and are demonstrating the power of our brands ultimately. Differentiated operating model, that gets to the conversation Chris had. The ability at an enterprise level to develop these capabilities and then transfer those across the businesses so that they can leverage those capabilities. Leveraging scale as well. As we grow the business, take market share, that will certainly provide that tailwind that every business should enjoy as they grow. Then the ability to add inorganic growth through the power of our balance sheet as well, we expect to be a margin enhancement over time. We're dealing with some near-term macro forces.
We certainly acknowledge that. Higher interest rates, the inflationary pressures we have seen across every industry. These are headwinds in the near term that we will likewise be addressing through our resiliency and the efforts of Chris West and the business units. I'm gonna speak to close out about our capital allocation strategy. It is consistent with what we have communicated in the past. We're re-presenting it in a slightly different format here, starting on the left-hand side with maintaining a very healthy balance sheet, a capital structure that I will review with you and targeted leverage ratio, combined with healthy liquidity. Okay, so it starts there. What that allows us to do then is invest in the opportunity, both organically and inorganically. We believe we can grow this business.
We've demonstrated that we can, and we certainly believe that that is an opportunity for us to pursue in the future yet. Secondly, to return cash to shareholders, I'll share with you our dividend history and some of our recent announcements as it relates to our dividend, and then also return cash in the form of share repurchase, which we have certainly employed in this past year as well. Starting with growth, CapEx, you can count on about 1% of sales as maintenance CapEx, and then we invest on top of it to support our growth, as well as support innovation. Innovation is the second category in general. Ashis talked about advanced technology. That will continue to be an area of focus of ours, and then certainly product introductions, the differentiation that comes along with those introductions.
Just seeing the product today, I hope you were able to identify and have some of those things come to life for you as you toured our product displays. Those enterprise capabilities. Amber shared with you today the consumer insights. The digital capabilities have been mentioned several times as a means of us differentiating digital in the connectivity with customers, but then also in our product and what our product offers in terms of the digital capabilities. Lastly, the operating model and the supply chain strength. Inorganically, we've talked about our opportunity there, focusing on marine, specialty, and then technology, including supply chain, vertical opportunities. Ashis also reviewed with you our acquisition criteria. We look for businesses that are in growing market segments and that have favorable trends.
We're not buying businesses that are in trouble or need rescuing. Rather, we're buying very healthy businesses with great management teams and a great cultural fit. That is what we're aiming for. We've got a strong financial foundation that we anticipate we'll continue to build on. This shows our targeted leverage ratio of 0.9 - 1.5. It's in the light shading there. That is on an ongoing basis where we target to be. That has been the case for several years now. We have talked about a willingness to spike that to 3.0 for acquisition activity for the right deal at the right time. We did that, you can see, with Grand Design, just short of 3.0 at 2.7, and we were able to very quickly pay down back into our targeted range. Next was Chris-Craft.
We used cash for that deal, spiked it to 1.6, and quickly brought it back within the range. Then came Newmar in the pandemic, right? That caused us to have our leverage ratio increase to about 2.5 and then very quickly come down from that time. You see the Barletta deal, which we were able to likewise consummate with cash on hand and return very quickly to our targeted leverage ratio and then below, where we sit today at 0.5. Our liquidity is very healthy. We've got $283 million cash on hand at the end of our fiscal year end at August, and then we recently increased the capacity in our ABL to $350 million as well, which remains untapped. Very strong liquidity to support our growth as well.
Lastly, we will return cash to shareholders in the form of dividends. Can you go to the next slide, please? In the form of dividends and share repurchases. We announced recently a 50%, 50% increase to our dividend for the year, our fiscal year 2023. That follows a 50% increase that we announced last year. We're ramping up our dividend very aggressively. You see even with that increase, our payout ratio has been easing. Those 50% increases, we hope to stabilize that payout ratio. On the right-hand side, you can see the share repurchase activity. $210 million share repurchase activity in this most recent year.
Very strong increase relative to the history that we're showing here, $45 million in the year before and pretty nominal activity in share repurchase because of some of the acquisition activity that we've been pursuing at the time. Very strong share repurchase activity. With that, I'll close. Next slide, please.
We're positioned really well for growth. We've got a great opportunity ahead of us, and I hope that opportunity is coming to life as you revisit our story with us today and see some of our product, meet some of our leadership team. We're very well-positioned for growth. We've got a great foundation to build upon superior brands and a marketplace that we feel has a lot of long-term growth behind it. Thanks again for attending today. With that, I'm gonna invite Mike up to the front with me. We're going to take your questions now. We'll be tapping into some of the other leaders in the room here to answer your questions, as we think that might add additional color. Ray and Steve, Joe, I think you're going to steer the traffic, if you will.
Please, we welcome your questions at this time.
Hi. Scott Stember from MKM Partners.
Hey, Scott.
Can we talk about how things are shaping up for 2023 models? I know that we have a little bit of a consternation going on right now, but as far as the expected pricing that will eventually wind up on these units, where are we with dealers negotiating on that?
We'll have to break that down either by segment or by business, as you know. Let me start from a cost input standpoint. I think we stated this during our recent fiscal 2022 Q4 earnings call. We have seen material moderation of cost input chaos into our businesses. The bill of materials is becoming more stable from a cost standpoint. It does vary by business. I wouldn't call it by any means deflationary. There are signs of, you know, positivity in terms of cost stabilization. Because of that, we have less pressure internally to have to go to the market with, you know, what I would say is abnormal pricing, you know, strategies or moves, and those are returning to a more stable market-based model year, you know, rhythm. It does vary by business.
Certainly, when we bring out new products, we obviously price those for the first time as well. The market is different as well, Scott, as you know. I mean, the consumer demand has softened materially on the RV side. It is softening a bit on the marine side as well. I think everybody acknowledges that. The pricing power we have with the dealers is a little bit different because as field inventories have healed themselves, the dealers are having to compete at lower margins than at the peak of record demand here the last couple years. Those margins for dealers are probably returning to more historical levels as well. Our pricing power is diminished, coming back in line probably with some of the costs that we're seeing.
We'll do it on a more traditional basis timing-wise going forward. That's how I don't know if I answered the question well, but that's how we would describe the current pricing, you know, pricing environment, more stable, less aggressive. The consumer, in many cases on the RV side, is probably seeing a much more competitive price, particularly in towable RVs because at the peak of the frenzy, you had a lot of MSRP retail pricing activity. Dealers are returning to more normal competitive promotions and discounts in that space. Derek. James, did you have a question?
Yeah. Two for me, if I may. So the 2025 targets, you touched on there's some organic pieces, there's some more inorganic pieces. I'm guessing you're not ready to quantify how much of the 5.5 is inorganic. But maybe just qualitatively, if I think about sort of the three building blocks here, or at least three of the building blocks, North American RV market share, non-RV, RV revenue, and then the pontoon market share, any indication of which of those might lean more heavily on organic versus inorganic? Then I had a quick follow-up.
I think, James, the organic market share or the organic growth will absolutely first and foremost come from RV and marine with the current businesses. Our pursuit of 12.7% RV market share to 15% by fiscal 2025, most of that should be organic. I mean, candidly, that's our expectation to our business unit leaders and teams, is let's go create strategies to continue to go get share. I would say we have the pontoon brand that we want. That 6.5% market share to 10+ with Barletta, depending on the size of the overall pontoon market in the next three years, should also deliver some organic growth as well. Most of that organic growth is probably going to be, you know, through the five brand.
Well, it is going to be through the five brands we have today. We have some opportunities in a very small business that we call specialty vehicles and some new vehicles we've introduced there that we didn't spend much time on today called the Roam and the Inspire. If you do the math on the diversification of the portfolio towards non-RV, that is where you can probably infer that we have some work to do both organically with our two marine businesses, but inorganically to continue to diversify. Yes, we're obviously not gonna be prescriptive today about, you know, exactly what that path will look like. With Bryan's leadership, we obviously are in good position to be inorganically active with the right target at the right time that fits who we are.
We anticipate that 5.5 will include some top-line benefit from an acquisition.
Got it. Then a follow-up, given that it does seem like one of the key building blocks here, right? The 12.7%-15% in terms of the North American RV market share. I think that comes out to maybe 80- basis points a year.
Mm-hmm.
On the bright side, as you've pointed out, you've done that over the years.
Right.
I guess on the flip side, you talked about Grand Design doing something that no brand has ever done before, right? You sort of caught lightning in the bottle with Grand Design.
Mm.
Does this assume that you continue to catch lightning in the bottle? I guess, ultimately, what gives you confidence that you will sort of return to that pretty steep trajectory from a market share perspective?
I would say that, you know, the targets that Bryan and I communicated today emanated first and foremost out of the businesses and brands themselves. This is not a top-down directive to the three RV brands we have. Each of those businesses and their leaders and their teams, through our strategic planning cycle, has presented to Bryan and I and the rest of our team a path we believe to get to those goals. It's gonna require, you know, execution across the entire value chain, product development, sales, marketing, service, operational excellence. I personally believe each of our three RV brands has significant runway in front of them. I'll give you one example on Winnebago. We have a small Winnebago towables business. Now, candidly, it's about three times as large today as when some of us came in six years ago.
We've achieved some really nice growth with Winnebago towables, both on the top line and the bottom line, but it still only has a, you know, little less than 2% market share in the entire towable segment. That business in and of itself, we believe should be mid-single digits, you know? There's one path in that business. Both Grand Design and Newmar, as I stated in my comments, are credible, legitimate brands with different histories that have the credible authority to keep expanding their product portfolio in smart ways. Again, we're not gonna share those specific plans today, but you saw two new products from Grand Design, an example today. Well, the Momentum MAV, which we had showed at Open House, plus the Imagine AIM, you know, both of those are examples of Grand Design just incrementally continuing to add.
There are more aggressive plans there in Newmar, you know, down the road. We recognize competition's gonna very much try to make that 15% goal challenging for us. We've got some new companies in the RV space we're well aware of. We're gonna go compete and try to make that happen. We wouldn't have put it out there today if we didn't believe it wasn't possible. Doesn't mean it's guaranteed, but we believe it's possible.
Thanks.
Gerrick?
Yeah. Hey, Gerrick Johnson, BMO. Two for Bryan, please. First, on the plan here, we see gross margin expanding, but EBITDA margin compressing. What is it in SG&A that's causing that compression?
That's gonna be the continued investments that we're intentionally making, Gerrick, in some of the things we talked about today. You know, our goal over time is to invest at a cadence that SG&A as a ratio to sales allows, okay? There is a balance over time between gross profit delivery and margin enhancement, yield enhancement, net gross margin, and what that allows for us to invest in innovation, in the digital journey that we are on, in our people and otherwise. It's a balance there. Our goal over time that Mike and I emphasized during our planning process is we, as you can imagine, have a whole host of investment ideas that we think are very legitimate.
It's pacing those investments and timing them, along with our sales and our gross profit growth, okay? That's really what we're aiming for there.
Okay. The second question, at Elkhart Open House, we had a conversation on the side. We talked about potentially providing a downside scenario, and it seems you decided against that. Why not? Maybe if there is something you could provide us, so we could think about a downside.
Yeah. There's a lot of merit in potentially providing that. We debated it, and we decided that is just not helpful at this stage. Nobody really knows what this future and how it will unfold, how the consumer will behave through a potential recession. There's certainly downside scenarios out there we know from the investment community. To provide further guidance in that area, I just don't think it's productive. What we provided to you was what we feel, and as I mentioned, is a very steady state RV environment at that 400,000 units. I mentioned that 400,000-410,000 range assumption is what delivers a $5.5 billion goal that Mike and I have shared today.
To provide any kind of downside scenario, I just don't see the productivity in that. Mike, I don't know if you have some additional perspective on that. We certainly debated it internally.
Thank you.
Hey, Mike Swartz, Truist Securities. I just wanted to follow up a bit on the question James asked earlier, just with the RV market share, and I think your target of getting to 15% plus in a steady state market would mean about 10,000 incremental units a year. I guess the question is: what are some of the broader product trends or areas of innovation you see playing into that growth? And then, two, how much incremental capital would you have to expend, you know, to support that level of volume growth over the next couple years?
Well, let me address maybe the trends, you know, that we see. You know, I guess our belief that we can get there, and then Bryan, you can speak to maybe the capital side of the business. I think we showed you a few of the trends today on the RV side with, you know, more lightweight single axle product as an example. More off-road rugged product. Adventure camping, boondocking, being off grid. She spoke at length about electrification both in RVs but also marine in the future, as well. Obviously, you know, we've been one of the leaders in the shift to Class B.
You know, that has become, certainly, as our competitors have joined the fray, a much more competitive arena. That category continues to grow. We believe that, you know, sans the supply issue that Bryan referenced, we believe, you know, it will continue to grow as well. Younger customers, more diverse customers that we can target, the ability of our businesses to produce stronger lead generation and conversion through digital tools. You know, there's a whole host of things that we think are changing that we can participate effectively in, that we can win and, you know, be more effective than we are today.
Newmar has introduced two to three years ago a Super C product that we've barely gotten started on in terms of market share attainment because of supply chain challenges and other factors. Their market share can be much higher in Class A gas. I can go brand by brand, and our business leaders do this themselves, but they can pick areas where they believe that they are under-shared in the market today. That's where our investment is going to go. I personally, 10,000 units is a big number. I'm not sure we're going to need much more capacity from a roof standpoint to get there.
The Winnebago motorized campus in Forest City in North Iowa and several other campuses there have been working very hard, as Chris West talked about, to get more productivity out of the current footprint. The Grand Design business was the beneficiary of significant capital over the last three or four years in terms of expansion, more assembly, more lamination. With, you know, with sort of the market retreating a bit there, we've got plenty of capacity under roof at Grand Design to grow. We are in the midst of a multiple eight-figure manufacturing transformation at Newmar, where they will go from one assembly line to more than one assembly line, which will give Casey and his team significant flexibility to evolve the product line, but candidly, also to improve the profitability, quality, employee safety of that business.
The last couple of years have been noisy, right? With record retail and supply chain disruptions and B and C brands taking up a lot of space on dealers' lots. We believe we have a path to continue to go after share. Now, I will tell you, I do believe fiscal 2025 will potentially see a return to growth. If you believe our consumer insights work and from some other sources like Go RVing and then KOA, we believe the RV market is healthy in the future from a secular standpoint. More people will come to it. We see fiscal 2023 as a softening of the market that we're in the midst of.
We see 2024 as a stabilization of the RV market, and we see 2025 as a time when that industry will continue to get back on a little bit of a growth track and hopefully its next upcycle and so, I think Brian's message is we can go after that 15% regardless. I think we'll also get a little bit of tailwind, you know, over that three-year period back in the market, but.
The only thing I'd add as it relates to CapEx, Mike, is we've mentioned the Barletta expansion that we're doing on that campus, and then also the Chris-Craft expansion down in Sarasota. Those are ongoing right now and should be complete within the next six to nine months here. As Mike said, to achieve the organic growth target that we held out, I don't think we need brick-and-mortar on the RV side to achieve that. We've got the latent capacity here.
Thank you. It's Craig Kennison from Baird. Thanks for hosting this Analyst Day. Bryan, I wanted to follow up on the recall announcement that you made today. Should we assume that that is hitting your competitors equally, first of all? Also, do you expect to get that revenue that you lose back in subsequent quarters?
Yeah. Great question. I'll take part of that, and then maybe Huw, be a great chance for you to chime in as well. I can't comment on how it will hit the competitive base. You know, the product mix that they might have, what percentage of their product mix is built on that chassis, I'm just not as familiar with what they might be seeing. We know that, as I stated in my comments, that other OEMs, anybody else who uses a Sprinter chassis, including the whole dealer network, is on a freeze right now. So presumably, it will have a broad impact here. Huw, why don't you answer the other parts of the question there?
Yeah. I think, as far as the timing of shipments goes, you know, it predicates a fix, the software fix that Brian referred to. The timing of the catch-up shipments really depends on the timeframe at which dealers are unable to ship inventory or retail sell inventory, and how much negative impact in the marketplace accrues because of an inability to fulfill retail demand. If that's a short period of time, there'll be a relatively limited impact on dealer inventory. If it's a long period of time, then we're looking at a more substantial impact. This is fairly fluid, and it's evolving, you know, as we speak.
The retail impact and how long that customer is willing to wait for the Mercedes-Benz chassis RV is the open question there. Some will be very willing to wait because it's what they want. Others may substitute a Ram or a Ford chassis and go with a different model rather than wait for the Mercedes-Benz to be cured.
If I could ask one other question on just financial leverage. You've said you've stretched to 3 times leverage in the past. To what extent do you look at the current macroeconomic environment and say, "Look, this is just not the time to take on that kind of leverage?
Yeah. That is certainly one of the factors that Mike and I, and the board would talk extensively about, where is the opportunity, which market, and how risky might that market be? Certainly in the context of our broader portfolio, Winnebago Industries, and where do we view, the cycle to be, and what the risk appetite we might have at that point in time. That is very much a part of our consideration.
Let me be clear. Now is not the right time for us to be at 3 times leverage.
Yeah.
You know.
Yep.
That is not something we're discussing, but we've got plenty of runway that we think is in a responsible zone for the right opportunity.
Right.
Hey, thanks, guys. It's Fred Wightman from Wolfe Research. Brian, just a clarification question. The double-digit EBITDA margin for Motorized, is that still sort of the floor that you guys are thinking? That's unchanged, right?
That's correct.
Okay.
Yeah. That's our conversations, and I've said this before internally. It's always been 10% operating income, which is kind of an internal metric that we have, that we communicate with the team. As Hugh and Casey and the Grand Design team develop new product, it's always with the expectation of double-digit operating income.
Let me be clear, though, or add on, that that is our view prior to the Mercedes issue. Meaning, I mean, as Huw said, this is an issue that's evolving daily. You know, we're quite confident in the sustainability of Motorized margins in that double-digit zone going forward. When an issue like this presents itself, we have to work through it to make sure that we understand the financial implications. We literally learned of the issue about two weeks ago and have been trying to get our arms around it so.
Okay. That's fair. Mike, last time that you hosted one of these, which was a while ago, I think you talked about longer term and aspiration for market share. I think you used a similar verbiage to the gross margin target. It was something with the two handle. Wondering if you could just comment on where that stands today, if you still think that's reasonable.
I do think it's reasonable. You know, listen, we understand that we got some tailwinds financially from you know, record-breaking retail and the you know, the ability to flex some pricing power you know, during that time as well. I think we've been working consistently to lift the floor of our organic business from a profitability standpoint, from a gross profitability standpoint. We believe the businesses that we intend to grow and/or add, and things we're looking to invest in, will help take the profitability someday to something that does start with a two. You know, my ambition for this company is to have gross profitability that sustainably starts with a two. We're not giving a timeline to that.
We've obviously put 19% out as a goal for fiscal 2025. It'll be a combination of organic growth and some inorganic additions, most likely. You know, we believe that's possible. Innovation is the best organic path to driving that. If we can create value, different, unique products in the market and the customer will pay for the value to them, we think we can go after that. We also think there are some other spaces in the outdoor recreation economy where we fit that probably have a higher profitability profile, as well. That's still a long-term goal, Fred, but not something we're ready to commit to in the next three years.
Okay. Just lastly, as we think about these 2025 targets and sort of the market path or cadence that you outlined, do you see a big divergence between RVs and marine, or is it relatively homogeneous?
You know, we have to be very specific in the sense that we're in two marine categories. We're in, you know, 20- 40 ft, you know, luxury runabout, you know, products with Chris-Craft, and we're in obviously, the pontoon category with, the Barletta business. I'm always careful, versus some of the other larger marine companies to comment overtly on the industry dynamics, there. Our cycles have tended to be in our marine businesses behind the RV cycle, especially towable RVs versus, you know, those two categories. You know, we've started to see, you know, retail, especially on the pontoon side that, you know, is pacing a little bit lower than, you know, what the business was doing a year ago, and we're being responsible and managing the Barletta business accordingly.
We believe the pontoon category will continue to grow. You know, again, I mean, we're gonna get through sort of this macroeconomic turbulence here in the next year or so. But we believe that that's a category which is offering more functionality, more value, more innovation, and our business is leading the way, especially on the innovation side. So we think we're gonna get some lift long term still from that pontoon space. You know, it's tended to run in that 50 ,000- 60 ,000-70,000 unit range in North America. I'm not suggesting it will be 100,000 units a year someday, but we do believe that it can get back to growing here. So the timing, to Brian's point earlier, that's also been the benefit of diversification, right?
You have to take the pluses and the minuses, but our Motorized profitability strength combined with our marine profitability strength in the last two fiscal quarters has absolutely kept our company on steady ground and producing significant results. Marine is definitely a little bit behind cycle-wise.
Bryan, I just wanted to follow up on the downside scenario question. I just was wondering, as you did sensitivities and as you think about kind of, downside to that EBITDA margin, this idea of high variable costs. Just wondering, as you flesh through that, maybe what is a downside scenario on the EBITDA margin or how you thought about what gives you confidence that you can hold that?
Yeah. What we have emphasized in the past is this highly variable cost structure. We have talked about it being between 85%, 90% in past comments we've made in this regard. That is something that Mike and I continue to focus on pretty heavily as we make investment decisions, as we continue to grow our infrastructure, our enterprise capabilities. You know, to maintain this highly variable cost structure is really important for the reason that you bring about. I think as you run scenarios and you all have the assumptions, and you've probably run some scenarios on the downside on what the industry might do, pending certain macro trends, consumer sentiment, the ability for customers to offset that inflationary pressure they've been feeling, as one example.
That as you make those assumptions, I just encourage you to use that 85%. It is something that we are very much focused on, and I think is a reliable assumption to make as you're wondering what downside could mean to margin and yield. Now, obviously, we're gonna do many things to offset in those downside scenarios, right? Some of the assumptions that we see and I'm sure that you're all dealing with are quite extreme, you know. In those cases, Mike and I take a very active role in managing that equation, right? In the extreme cases, there's no such thing as a fixed cost, right? I guess that's one other comment that I'd make, is we manage that pretty aggressively.
Gary, we do routinely run, just so everybody's clear, inside the company sensitivity analysis and downside scenarios for many reasons. We obviously compare those to some of the more bearish, you know, downside scenarios we see, you know, from parts of the investment community. You know, we make sure that we're aware of the gravity of any further declines in the market and how we would manage it. I will tell you consistently, you know, our internal downside scenarios are not quite as dramatic in terms of net profitability result as what we see in the market.
We wanna take one more. I know that.
Do we have any?
We're beyond our online time, and people have been very gracious with their time and attentiveness, so.
Do we have any questions online, Ray or Steve? Just to be fair to that audience.
We do not.
Okay.
Okay, thanks. I'll let you close.
Great. Bryan, thank you. I wanna just add my thanks to the entire Winnebago Industries team, the production and support team, you know, in the back, certainly the staff here at, you know, the Lake Lanier facility. Most importantly, my thanks to you all who have attended today's event, both in person, especially in person, but also online. I hope you can see that we are passionate about our future, that we have a strong team around the business, ready to lead us forward. We have a historical track record of being, I think, pretty honest, pretty sober, conservative even at times, about, you know, the reality of the market.
We've also tried to express what we believe are some optimistic and bold pursuits targets that we're gonna go after in the market. You know, Bryan and I and Ray remain accessible to all of you on an as-needed basis to continue to talk about our future. The next time we'll formally be together with you will, as Bryan said, be, I think Friday, December sixteenth is the date where we will have our first quarter fiscal 2023 call. We will certainly give you an update on the Mercedes issue that Bryan commented on at that time. We'll also have the results of our first quarter, which our first quarter ends at the end of next week.
A few more days to work on here. Thank you again for your participation and time. We appreciate it. Have a great day.