What's that? All right. Okay. The goals of today's call or briefing are to introduce the investor community to the commercial business leaders of our core business units, highlight the strengths and opportunities of our global company, provide an overview of the products and technologies we sell in all our markets, and provide a more detailed view of our unique growth strategies being deployed for each individual business. The format that this is going to take is I will have a few comments of introduction, and then I'll introduce you to our four business unit managers, where they will give you a detailed briefing on each of their business units. This is something that many of you have asked for, and we promised to provide it. Today, we're going to go a deep dive into each business unit so you can better understand our truly global company.
There will be a time for questions. After each of the individual business unit managers' presentation, you will be allowed to ask some questions, but we'd ask that you ask the questions regarding the business units at the time. If there are more general questions about the company, Ben Fash, our CFO, and I can address those at the conclusion of the meeting.
I think it's important first to read or to go through this investment highlights one more time with you. We've presented this slide in the past to investors, but this is what we're going to discuss, or we're going to at least show you with our discussions to confirm these investment highlights. First and foremost, we have a highly experienced leadership team. We have talked to you in the past many times about the C-suite of executives having 100 years' experience. This next group, our next level down of senior business managers, are also highly experienced, as you will see, and they also have an excess of 100 years of experience between the four of them. We're going to show you that we have a well-established and proprietary suite of technologies, and we can address very high growth global end markets with these technologies.
As you have been told numerous times by us, the last couple of years, we have been shifting our strategic focus to more high-margin revenue segments and staying away from the lower-margin construction projects. We have also taken many steps to reduce our overhead and SG&A, and I have created a real strong discipline on cost management. Of course, we also, by nature of our business, have a strong ESG impact. We are going to talk a little bit about how we can grow and grow profitably.
Next slide. Okay.
This is just another update of the market. It's a large market. I'm not going to go into the details, but I think it's important to point out that on a global basis, we are dealing with both the municipal market and the industrial market, and we are dealing with both water and wastewater of all different forms. You can see there it's a significant market size.
Okay. Next slide.
We are not a new company. We have been around a while. With this setup, we have well over 1,000 installations worldwide. We are not a new company, but we are a changed company. That is what we are going to present to you. An important point about all these installations, there are a couple of very important points. One, they all become references for our business units to say, "We've done this before." In our market, in the water market in particular, like many markets, having experience doing something and solving a problem for a customer is very, very important to get the next job. We can use this information to show our experience. In addition, those are 1,000. We are going to talk a little bit later about our drive to get more recurring revenue in the business.
These installations create 1,000 customers that we can go market our recurring revenue services to. Okay. Again, we've talked to you about how we've changed the company a lot. In the past, we're a new company now. We're an older company with a newer focus. This focus is on the more higher-margin SPS-type products, we call them, with proven technology. It's important to note here that you can see from the bar charts, the projects and the projects we're going after are all of a higher-margin value, I say, as compared to the big Ivory Coast project we've been working on for several years. Okay. This brings us to how we're organized today. Again, you've seen this slide, many of you before, but this is what we're going to talk about: the four key areas of our business, the four business units.
We have the Municipal Water and Wastewater, Industrial Water and Reuse, as well as we've lumped everything together for the Southeast Asia and China region. You will hear from each one of these managers and be updated on how they conduct their businesses, where they see their growth prospects, and what they're doing to be successful. We go to the next slide. Okay. The four business unit managers you're going to hear from today are listed on this slide here. The first is Manuel García de la Mata, who is VP and Industrial Water and Reuse business. Manu, as we refer to him, has been in the business for over 20 years. He has been with the company in Argentina since they were part of Fluence, and he was with the original company, Unitek.
He's got experience in process engineering, engineering supervision, and business management. He graduated from the University of Mar del Plata with a BS degree in Chemical Engineering. Next is Fabio Poletto, who's VP of our business unit in Italy, the Industrial Wastewater and Biogas unit. He joined Fluence in November of 2006 when he joined the original company in Italy that was formed and ultimately purchased by RWL. Manu has served as R&D manager, sales manager, account manager, VP of sales and marketing, and he's now general manager. He's got a good idea of the entire business. He graduated. He's also got 20 years, 19 years of experience. Pardon me. I don't want to overstate your credentials, Fabio. He graduated with a master's degree in chemistry with honors. Next, we have Steve Scheidler. Steve is Vice President and GM of our Municipal Group.
He joined Fluence. He's the child in the group. He's the young one. He joined us in February of 2024 to run our newly Muni Group. He does have significant experience in the water industry. He's got 34 years in the business. He has been with some big companies. Xylem was one of the last ones he worked for. He also worked with Leopold. He worked for one of the finest companies in the world, Sanitaire and Wedeco, when he worked under Xylem. He has a tremendous amount of experience, especially in the municipal water waste treatment equipment business. He graduated from Penn State University with a BS degree in Civil Engineering. Finally, we have Michael Schnitzer, who we refer to as Mickey, who's VP and Interim GM of Southeast Asia and China. Mickey has been with the company since 2017.
He has over 30 years of experience in the global water market. His recent position before he took on assisting us to run the China and Southeast Asia operation was he was head of our R&D business, and he was one of our senior technical people in the whole company. He was also very much involved in the early designs of the Ivory Coast project. He has, like I said, over 30 years' experience. He was the one who actually started up our Chinese business when it started with a staff of engineers and designers before we had the factory there. He is not only familiar with the company, the business, he is familiar with China. We are very thankful Mickey has agreed to help us out and work on our new strategy for Southeast Asia and China. Mickey has a master's degree in Environmental Engineering.
These are the four individuals you'll hear from. I think what's important here is you notice we are a global company, and our four division managers are certainly global. We have South American, we have American, we have Italian, and we have Israeli/Chinese. We finally refer to Mickey as our Israeli/Chinese manager. With that, we can go to the next slide. I would be remiss since we're talking about the company in general and our business units without mentioning the Ivory Coast project. We are not going to talk about it today, but since it's a significant part of our revenue for this year and possibly next year with the Addendum , I wanted to just give you a very, very brief update on the status of this project. The main works, which was the EUR 164 million water plant, is basically complete.
It's in the final commissioning stages. We are working on a EUR 48 million Addendum that has to do with power needs and distribution lines to connect to their water distribution system. It's an add-on to the project. That is on schedule and on track, and it likely will be completed next year sometime. The exciting part of this is this month, we have started exclusive negotiations with Ivory Coast to close a multi-year long-term operations contract. Again, recurring revenue, the theme you'll hear a lot today. That contract would be several million dollars a year for a long number of years. We're still working on that detailed recurring revenue contract for us. While we're not going to talk about it today, I just wanted to give you that brief update. Next one. Okay.
Again, a theme you're going to hear quite a bit today deals with what we refer to as the one Fluence approach. We had talked about when we started our reorganization going from 13 P&Ls to four business units. One of the bigger problems that was going on with the 13 business units is there was no cross-selling. There was no collaboration between units. It was like having 13 different little companies working on their own. We have put a lot of effort into collaborating as one global company. With that comes cross-selling between units, working on a global operations team to assist each other for different practices and partnering with key vendors globally. We have also been putting together internal systems on a more global basis. Our core values, our human resources, our information systems. The whole idea is to make Fluence a one global company.
You will hear some of that from the four guys today. This is very important for us because it's the old theory of 1 + 1 = 3. In our case, we have 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 6. You'll hear a bit. This is important, and it's being embraced by the team members globally, and we're very pleased about that. If we can. Okay. I would like to now turn it over to Manu. He is the VP and GM of Industrial Water and Reuse. He has got some really exciting things to show you. We'll make the switch here and get him in the hot seat and let him give you his presentation.
Thanks, Tom, for the presentation, for the introduction.
Thanks for the audience for joining us today and for giving me the opportunity Industrial Water and Reuse business unit. As Tom said, my name is Manuel García de la Mata. I've been in the company for 20 years. I came from the predecessor company in Argentina called Unitek. I started to—I was hired at the very beginning to build the after-sales team and the service team. Then I have responsibilities over the technical department, also business development, project management, till I was nominated as an operations manager, meaning that I have experience in the technical and business development part of the company till 2019 when I became general manager for the South American operation and then Industrial Water and Reuse unit. That's a rough comment on myself. Okay.
Let's start with some history because I think it is important to mention that we have more than 30 years of history, the journey that we are Industrial Water and Reuse unit. It started in 1993 with our predecessor company in Argentina called Unitek. What is interesting to mention is that that company started with a product for the bottled water treatment. It started at the very beginning to work with the Coca-Cola family, let's say. That gave us the opportunity not only to act in Argentina but also in other countries of the region, being international from the very beginning. In 2013, the company was acquired by RWL Water. At that time, we already had a huge experience in South American countries in the industrial market with different types of solutions that we will discuss later on.
Till 2017, when Fluence was created, at the same time, Fluence Argentina and Fluence Brazil were also created. In Brazil, we acquired a small company called Acquavit, which was dedicated more to service water and wastewater treatment plants. That was a good fit for us because we have the capabilities of engineering and manufacturing in Argentina. We took advantage of that acquisition to establish ourselves in the largest market in South America, which is Brazil. Just to mention some milestones in our history, I think it is important to mention that in 2017, we made our first lithium mining project, which is interesting because that is a growing market in South America. We will discuss some examples of projects in this market later on. In 2021, we built, which is still the largest ocean desalination plant in Brazil.
That's a very important milestone and reference in Brazil for us. In 2023, we started our commercial efforts in North America, in particular in the U.S., to try to export our experience and our success in South America to North America. Finally, another milestone that I want to mention in 2024, after having dozens of projects in seven countries for the Coca-Cola family, we made the first effluent reuse system for service water, which is another interesting project that I want to comment later on. Okay. Let's discuss a little bit our markets and geographies. We have activity in mainly four main markets. The first one is the original one in which we started, which is the food and beverage market. We also have good experience in the power market. As I mentioned, the lithium mining is another market in which we develop our solutions.
The industrial reuse, industrial wastewater reuse, it is some market in which we are acting also. I think it is important to mention that the lithium mining and the industrial reuse markets are growing markets. Food and beverage and power are more established markets, but lithium and industrial reuse markets are growing up, and they are very interesting markets to be developed for us. As you can see, even when our main activity and history is in South America, we do have experience with large international companies like Coca-Cola, Danone, Dow, BASF, a lot of international companies. We are now starting to use those references and experience to develop the North American market. Our strategy is to export the success that we got in South America into North America using connections that we have from these international companies. Finally, why those companies choose us?
Because that's a question. It is important to mention that our approach is to develop solutions using proven technologies because we have a very high-capability technical team, meaning that we can develop solutions achieving low OpEx, high reliability, minimum water footprint for our customers. That's very important for these types of customers, keeping a competitive CapEx. That's one of the most important things to be competitive. Also, and something that I will comment also later on, we are in the entire customer lifecycle of their assets. That's also something important for us because we are not only selling capital equipment, but also we are a partner for our customers for the operation stage of the projects. More or less, that's the geographies and markets in which we act. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about the products and the technologies that we supply and we have.
As we were discussing, one of our main products and technologies are water treatment plants, normally for the different industries. We also develop solutions for ultrapure or demi. This is something used in the power industry. Also, we are looking for this type of solutions for the data centers, which are increasing because this type of solutions can fit for that market also. As I said, we also have tertiary wastewater treatment plants to reuse the wastewater to produce new industrial water normally for services, which is very important considering that the conventional source of waters are stressed. This allows us to use an unconventional source of water like the wastewater for industrial purposes. Also, we have some products and technologies which are not directly related with water because we do have products and technologies for the lithium carbonate process.
In our region, the lithium is produced from brines, meaning that you have to concentrate and to purify that brine before getting the lithium carbonate. We do have some technologies for some process stages to concentrate and to purify the lithium brine. Normally, for all of these types of products and technologies, we use an approach of modularization, skid mounted system to reduce or even containerized systems if the customer needs that solution. Always trying to reduce the erection or the installation time to reduce the project execution timeline. Okay. This chart is a try to summarize our value proposition to the market from the end to end because we started to work with our customers at the very beginning in the feasibility studies, supporting them with conceptualization or conceptual engineering at the very beginning.
We go until the operation with our after-sales services, supplies, and also in some cases, the operation itself. We also give that type of service for some customers. At the end of the day, we are present at the very beginning of the projects, and we keep working with our customers till the operation stage. There are a couple of things that I want to highlight here because one of them is there are a lot of competitors which could have some of these stages of this life cycle of a project, but a few which could be from end to end like us, and that gives us an important advantage in the market. It also, in this approach, gives us an important revenue business.
I will talk about it later on, but roughly, we have around 35% of our revenues coming from our revenue, which is due to this after-sales support and services that we have at the end of this chart. Finally, I think it is also very important being part of the operation and the support of the operation of our customers. We get important feedback to improve our solutions and keep improving our solutions over and over again, meaning that, of course, this is something to help our customers, but also it gives us the possibility of having a healthy business. Okay. Here we have a typical project timeline.
The idea here is first to highlight that the development of a new sale or a new opportunity could take between six months to a year, a year and a half because we are normally in, or we try to be part of the very beginning of when the customer starts to develop the solution. We support that conceptualization from the very beginning to try to establish a well-established project. Otherwise, in some cases, it could be a problem for the customer and for us when we have to build. I think the most important part of this slide is that after we get an order, roughly from eight to 12 months in this chart, you will see 11 months as a reference.
In this period of time, we can recognize almost 90%-95% of our revenues, meaning we can have in less than a year after getting a contract or an order, the revenues recognized. Also, if you take a look to the payment milestones, we also are able to collect between 90%-95% of the cash during the first year. With these payment milestones, we are able to keep a cash-positive profile during the project execution, which is very helpful and healthy for the operation of our unit. That's the most important thing: the capability of having a quick execution. That's normally related with using already developed engineering systems because we are maximizing the execution in our shop to avoid delays in the field. Those things allow us to keep this profile with a quick revenue recognition and also a quick cash collection. Okay.
I will present now a couple of case studies that we selected to give some examples of type of projects and type of customers. The first one, this is, let's say, one of the last projects we made for Coca-Cola, for the Coca-Cola Group or Coca-Cola family. After dozens that we executed for them, what is important of this case is first that it was the first wastewater reuse plant in Argentina for Coca-Cola. As they have a lot of guidelines, for them it was a challenge. They selected Fluence as a partner to develop this new solution for their operations. We were selected due to the extensive references we have inside Coca-Cola for many, many years. Of course, we were supporting them before the bidding for several months before developing the conceptualization of the project.
I think something else to highlight is we were able to discuss not only the capital equipment sale at that moment. We also put on the table a service contract for two years. It gave us roughly 20% more in that sale. It also gave us the opportunity to keep in contact with this customer. Not only in this specific plant because this bottler has other facilities in Argentina, but from 2023, we got $1.5 million coming from revenue on top of this contract, meaning that we have a good relationship, a long-term relationship with this customer. I want to mention also that this model inside the Coca-Cola family, we are replicating this in Brazil. I will talk a little bit more about our growth strategy later on.
We are using the same model in Brazil, taking advantage of the capabilities we have in our engineering and fabrication team in Argentina, meaning that we are not expanding our structure in Brazil to execute projects. Again, I will explain this a little bit more in the coming slides, but I want to highlight that we are using the same model to grow in Brazil. Okay. Talking about Brazil, this second case study is in Brazil. This is an ocean desalination plant to produce high-purity process water for ArcelorMittal, a huge steel producer around the globe. In this case, one of the main challenges was that it was the first ocean desalination plant inside the ArcelorMittal Group, meaning that they did not have any experience. Of course, a lot of fears because it was the first desalination plant for them.
Also, Brazil, it is interesting because Brazil has a huge coast, but in Brazil, the ocean desalination is not developed yet, meaning that not only ArcelorMittal did not have experience at that time, but also in the country, there was not experience. Something which is interesting till today, this is the largest desalination plant in Brazil. This is a reference that Fluence still has, giving us a very good position for this growing market because Brazil, as I said, has a huge potential to grow in terms of ocean desalinations. Maybe you are aware that Brazil is looking for green hydrogen projects, for instance. For those types of projects, of course, you need water and you need desalinated water or ocean desalination water, meaning that the perspectives are interesting in Brazil for ocean desalination.
Just last comment regarding why Fluence was selected because in this case, as you can imagine, there were other four international companies in this bid, and we beat them in this case for a couple of reasons. One of them is we were involved at the very beginning when this company started to think in this project and comparing technologies, and we were there supporting them. That's one of the reasons. The other one is that we made a process design, a specific process design using high-level pretreatment as the ultrafiltration. With our process design, we were able to be competitive in terms of price against other solutions using media filters as pretreatment.
I don't want to be more technical, but it is a low-quality pretreatment, meaning that our solution keeps the CapEx on the target, but with a better pretreatment, which at the end of the day gives to the customer a lower OpEx, which is important for them and higher reliability. That is the reason for which we were selected in this case. Finally, I want to mention that it was not only the CapEx contract, which was very important because it was at that time $8.5 million. After the startup in 2021, we also got more than $2 million in revenue with this customer. This is an example of how we can not only have the capital sale, but also after these types of projects, start to have a new revenue customer. The last case study that I want to share with you is a lithium project.
This is not the first because, as I said, we are in this market for eight years. We developed a very good experience in the lithium market, but this is the biggest and very interesting case to share with you. This project was developed for Eramet. Eramet is a French mining company, and they decided to install their first lithium mining project in Argentina using a new type of technology called DLE, which is Direct Lithium Extraction. For this type of process, which is a very novel process, they need a very, very high-purity water to extract the lithium, which is captured with this technology. We supplied the water treatment plant for this project. As you can see, it is in a remote location in the mountains, more than 4,000 meters above the sea level, a very difficult area. We developed our solution in containers.
We supplied 14 containers from our facility till the mountains. That's one of the reasons that the customer selected us, due to our solution reduced the installation and the erection activities in the field. As an example of the success that we had with this project, which was roughly a $5 million project, the customer gave us the opportunity to supply another three packages for the same facility for a total amount of more than $5 million, meaning that after the first contract, we doubled it with another three packages. At the end of the day, we supplied a more than $10 million contract. Of course, the lithium market, which is a growing market, it is not only an opportunity for the capital projects, but also for the revenue.
This plan, after the startup, is going to give us the opportunity of developing a new revenue customer, which is going to be very, very important. Okay. We will share with you now a quick video. Here you can see our facility in Argentina. This is our engineering and fabrication facility. As you can see, you have a nice area, not only outdoor, but also indoor for fabrication. We normally try to do this type of skid mounted system to avoid the jobs in the field. We have the ISO certifications to get the quality that our customer needs. It's a little bit we have to make the detail engineering before the fabrication, then the delivery. We also have the capabilities for making services in the field, as I mentioned before.
While that's an example, some important thing to mention is that we developed a proprietary remote monitoring platform, which allows us to support our customers from our offices. That's also something important. This is our facility, and we are using this installed facility not only for running the original business in Argentina, but also for leveraging our development in Brazil because in Brazil, we only have a commercial and service structure because we are taking advantage of this installed facility. Let's go because when we talk about the strategy, I will elaborate a little bit more. Here we are. Okay. Finally, before some questions, a brief review about our growth strategy and some financial figures. As I was mentioning, one of our main growth strategies is to develop Brazil as a target market for South America. Brazil is the most important economy in South America.
Till last year, we were having between 20%-30% of our revenues coming from Brazil, meaning that we have a big room to grow in Brazil. As I said, the strategy that we started a couple of years ago is to use our capabilities installed in Argentina in terms of engineering and fabrication and having a small structure in Brazil only for service and commercial and some administration. That strategy is working. As you can see below in the recent key wins, most of them, or almost all of them, are coming from Brazil, different customers, different industries, but coming from Brazil, meaning that the strategy is working. Just a side comment, the recent win coming from Argentina is also interesting because it is a two-year operation contract, meaning revenue. This is an old customer because we are operating this plant for five years.
We renewed this at the beginning of this year for two more years. That is another interesting thing to mention. As you can see, the other growth strategy that we are having is to develop the U.S. market or North American market. The idea is to try to replicate what we are doing in Brazil, taking advantage of our structure in Argentina. The references we have in South America to try to replicate this way of doing things in this new approach of one Fluence that we are, as a corporation, starting a couple of years ago, we started as an example of this. This is not an industrial work project, but we are supporting the Municipal Group led by Steve in the U.S.. Steve got a project in Florida for a brackish desalination system.
That project is being developed by our team in Argentina, the engineering and the fabrication team, meaning that this strategy could work, is going to work, and we are starting. As you can see, we already consolidated a very healthy business because we are above 30% of gross margin in the past two years. If you go a little bit behind, we were more in the 20s. After we changed our strategy and we started to be a little bit more consistent, we consolidated this gross margin in our business. We also consolidated a double-digit EBITDA in our unit. The challenge that we have now is to increase our revenues to keep this high gross margin and double-digit EBITDA. The idea is to do it, growing the U.S. market, which is the largest water market in the world.
That's what I have to share with you now. I open up for questions. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer. I have a limited time to the questions. In case we didn't get the time to answer all of the questions, please feel free to contact Andrew Angus. His contact is in the release, and I'll be happy to answer those questions also. Thanks for the time.
Thanks, Manu. I'm going to read off the questions and have you answer them as they come in. For those who would like to submit a question, if you'd like to do so through the Q&A section of the Zoom meeting window, feel free to do so, and we'll do our best to get through them, although we are going to try and stay on time here.
Hi, Manuel. Good to meet you in person.
How big a part in IWR is the portion of chemical supplies and services, the recurring revenue part of the business compared to new projects?
Okay. I c an answer for the Industrial Water Reuse unit. In our case, we are around 35%-40% of our revenues came from the revenue. Of course, we want to grow that percentage. I think it is a decent percentage, but we want to grow more and more that percentage because it gives us more not only margin because normally the after-sales of the revenue business has a higher margin, which is helping us to achieve this gross margin that I mentioned. It is more stable. In these times in which there are some turbulence in the world, the revenue business is much more stable. As a comment, I think some learning that we got from the pandemic.
During the pandemic, we keep almost the same revenue than before the pandemic, meaning that it's very stable. Of course, we are in a business in which our customers are food and beverage, electricity companies, let's say essential industries. That's why we almost didn't lose any revenue during the pandemic. To answer your question, in our unit, we are, depending on the year, between 35%-40% of our revenues coming from the chemicals, spare parts, services, water we call after-sales.
Great. Thank you. What are the main end markets of focus in Brazil out of the four markets that you mentioned?
In Brazil, now we are focused on three of the four markets because the lithium mining in Brazil is not a market. They don't have big lithium resources. We are focused on the food and beverage, particularly in beverage, in the beverage market.
Also in power, the biggest projects that we are executing now in Brazil for this company called Eneva is for the power market. Also, the industrial reuse market, which is all over the industrial, the industries, is also a focus for us. It is growing because, of course, as I mentioned before, the conventional source of waters are very stressed. Conventional sources, like the wood water, are starting to grow. I did not mention, or I made a quick comment, but I think it is important to mention in Brazil also the desalination because even when it is not a developed market like in Brazil, sorry, like in Chile or Peru, Brazil has not only a big potential because they have, I do not know, 3,000 km or more of coast. They have the sea there, but also in the north and northeast of the country, that is an arid region.
They are going to need desalination to keep growing their economy. Also, they are starting many green hydrogen projects. As I said, they are going to need ocean desalination, meaning that this is not a market in which we are now very active, but we kept or we keep the most important references in terms of ocean desalination. It is going to be a growing market in Brazil also.
Similar question, but referring to the U.S.A. Discuss your strategy to push into the U.S.A. and markets of focus.
As we are starting, we are using our references in big international companies like Coca-Cola and also some jobs that we do with international engineering firms which are acting in South America, meaning that we are starting to develop in the same markets in which we already have experience in South America: food and beverage, power.
Also, the lithium market is starting to happen in the U.S.. We are also using our contacts and our references in South America to start contacting companies which are developing in Europe and other parts of the U.S., some lithium projects. Our strategy is starting for the similar markets in which we do have references and also to try to take advantage of some solutions for some specific markets that are growing in the U.S. and they are not present in South America like the data centers because as we do have experience and solutions for ultrapure water, which is needed for this type of projects, we are starting also to prospect the data centers in North America, taking advantage of our experience in other markets, but with the same type of solution.
Great.
I'm going to combine a couple of questions here that are related to margins. I think you can answer them both at the same time. Where has the margin expansion come from? You spoke of a change strategy. As well, do you think margins are very different in North versus South America?
Okay. The first part of the question regarding the increasing of our margin, it's a combination of, I would say, two things. First is the change of walking away of the EPC type of projects. We are not getting any civil works or big erection activities, which normally are risky. We are not an EPC company. We are a technology company. We took the decision of concentrating our efforts in what we do or we know how to do.
That changes a lot our margins because we are keeping the margins from the sales till the end of the project. That's number one for the increasing in margin in South America. Comparing margins between North America and South America, the good news is, as far as I am seeing, the margins in North America are bigger, or at least we can take advantage of the cost that we have in our installed base in Argentina, which our structure in Argentina is more cheap than a similar structure in the U.S., meaning that we can get better margins from North America even than in South America. That's it.
Great. Okay. I thank everyone for their questions. In the interest of time and keeping us on time, I'm going to ask just one last question.
Anything we did not get to, we will do our best to answer it separately. Like I said, if we did not get to your question, please send them to Andrew Angus. We will follow up separately. Last question, Manu. Are you able to talk about your market share in the South American markets or estimate?
Okay. That is a good question. I would split in the, let us say, the capital part of the market share and then the revenue in the capital. If we take into consideration the whole South America, we will be around 10% or less if we consider the whole South America market. Of course, we have more market share in Argentina. I would say that we are above 30% in Argentina. In Brazil, we are close to 10%. There is a big room to grow in Brazil.
The revenue is a little bit tricky because normally we are not present in the, for instance, Veolia has some scope of supply for cooling towers, steam treatment that we do not have. If we compare all of these revenue markets in part of which we are not active, again, we are going to be between 5%-10% of market share. If we take out that in Argentina, we are going to, or I will say that we are above 30% of the market. It is not a straightforward answer because it is not as easy, but I try to, or I did my best to answer you, Ben. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for the questions, for the time. I will now give the time to my colleague, Fabio Poletto, who is going to present the Industrial Wastewater and Biogas unit.
Thanks, Manuel, for the introduction.
I want to thank also the audience for the chance that I received to provide an overview of our business unit, our division, Industrial Wastewater and Biogas. I'm Fabio Poletto. I'm the Vice President and General Manager of the Industrial Wastewater and Biogas division. I'm with Fluence since 2006, so it's almost 20 years. I cover for the company several positions from the technical point of view, like R&D manager, after-sales manager, the sales positions as key accounts, and VP of sales and marketing, and finally, as general manager of our units. Let's start from a brief introduction, a brief history of our division. The journey started in 2001 with the establishment of Eurotec WTT. That was mainly focused on the provide of wastewater treatment plants and ion exchange systems for wineries.
Thanks to the establishment also of an R&D lab, internal lab, we were able to develop several other technologies, increasing our know-how. This brings us to the first goal of the company in 2005 when we put in operation the first anaerobic digestion plants on the stealth sector, that is the meat sector in the chicken slaughterhouse in Italy, with the production of biogas. That was used to produce electricity and thermal energy. This was the first one of several projects that we did also with this customer. It is a very good customer for us. In 2011, the company was acquired by RWL Water. This gave us the chance to expand our presence abroad. Thanks to that, we arrived in 2015 with the first wastewater and wastewater treatment plant for another strategic sector in South America, in this case in Ecuador, for Eurofish.
That is one of the top players in tuna fish processing. This opened up the market, the Latin American markets. Thanks also to the following acquisition by Fluence, we were able in 2018 to do several projects in Latin America for big customers like BRF, Interagua, ArreBeef that we will see later. Finally, this journey arrived in 2023 when we established the first sales structure for the North American market, also leveraging our support from the municipal business that was already established there. Let's see the key markets where we are focusing. We are focusing our efforts mainly on food and beverage markets, and especially in milk processing and fish processing.
This allows us to develop along the time some very well-proven technologies and treatment chains that are not only able to treat the wastewater up to the limits that are required to the customers, but also providing the recovery of some energy from these wastes, moving from just a cost to a profit center for our customers, so adding value to the customers. We are mainly acting in the Americas. We have already several references in South America, in Europe, clearly. We are growing also in North America with already some projects that are going on. Our main advantage is that we are providing a complete solution for our customers from the beginning to the end, from the processed water to the wastewater and the recovery of the energy inside this wastewater using our deep experience across multiple technologies.
The application of these technologies is for the particular needs of the customer. This, as we say, gave us the chance to develop these specific treatment chains that are able to optimize the footprint. Normally, we have a reduced footprint compared to our competitors, but also lower OpEx, optimizing at the same time the CapEx for this kind of products. Here we have a list of different technologies that we can apply. The main advantage that we have is that we have a very large portfolio of technology. We can apply the appropriate one for the specific need of the customer. We have not to force a specific technology to a specific need. This is extremely important because we can optimize, balance the complete treatment chain, and we can give these advantages to the customers.
Especially, the first two tables represent the growing markets that we are following. The anaerobic digestion for the production of biogas, biomethane, electrical thermal energy that you can use in several ways that biogas is produced, and also the wastewater treatment plants to remove the nutrients or treat very high-strength wastewater that are coming from the digesters or some particular processes of our customers. In addition to that, we have the other technologies, some of them also in cooperation with our other division in the company, so water treatment plants for processed water and food treatment. These are mainly used as an entry door for our customers. Most of the time, a complete solution requires some time. For this reason, we are extremely selective on the project that we are following and the kind of market that we are following.
You can see here an average timeline for a project. We have almost one year from the beginning to the signing of the contract for a project. This time can be reduced with multi-sites, multi-facilities customers that we are targeting. Our main focus is multi-facility sites because you save all the time to create the trust in the customer. We have the project execution that can take up to 15 months. As for the case that Manuel said, in less than one year, we are able to recognize almost 90% of our revenues, also with the cash flow positive that is extremely important to support the business and make it grow. I would like now to show some of our installation because it is our main business card.
The first one is Coren, it is a chicken and turkey slaughterhouse in Spain that we did in 2018. They had a very big problem during winter with low temperatures, so problem with nutrient removal, space constraints. The existing plant was built into a hill, so in different levels. It was extremely difficult to operate on this plant and make changes to this plant. Also considering that at full capacity, the plant has to treat almost 5,000 cubic meters a day of wastewater. Clearly, the slaughterhouse can stop for days. They had also a problem with some byproducts that they had to dispose, so costs, high cost on the disposals. We were able to provide a complete solution using most of these existing installations in terms of tanks, so civil works.
We add only the civil works for the anaerobic digester, and all without stopping the facility for one minute, all with the facility running. Now they are producing almost 6,000 cubic meters a day of natural gas that they are using in the factory boiler. They save a lot of money on the disposal of some byproducts and wastes. They were able also to increase the capacity of the rendering plant where they treat some byproducts because we were able to take out some water that was limiting day production. It was a really holistic approach to this project to save the money of the customer, provide a complete solution, and a good solution. In fact, the customer now is asking us for another site, working on another site. The second one is similar, but is a dairy in Hungary.
This is a particular project because in Hungary, it's the second anaerobic digestion plant. It was not easy also from the local authorization point of view. We supported the customer completely for the support of the customer on that. Also, in this case, they had space constraints because the land is very expensive. We had to fit in a very small place. The plant required very high flexibility considering that it is a new facility. They can have fluctuation in the production. The plant has to follow this fluctuation. Here, we provided again the anaerobic digestion with the production of biogas or the primary sludge, some byproducts, and also some milkway that are not conforming with the standards.
The anaerobic digester is able to treat all that waste and byproducts of the facility that in most of the cases is just a cost for the customer, exploiting these wastes, producing energy that they are using into the boiler to produce hot water for the production. In addition to the anaerobic digester, we provide also the aerobic treatment for nutrient removal. They had very low limits on phosphorus, especially. We had to provide also the final tertiary treatment to comply with the limits that the Hungarian government applied. We show you a video. This is another plant in Argentina. In this case, ArreBeef is a cow slaughterhouse. This is the first anaerobic digester wastewater energy plant in Argentina in the cow slaughterhouse. It is one of the three biggest slaughterhouses around Buenos Aires.
Here, we provided the anaerobic digester, the biogas treatment, and all the primary treatment of the wastewater to be able to extract from the wastewater all the organic compounds that then we transform into biogas. All this biogas is used to produce electrical energy, to an engine, a gas engine, and thermal energy that they use in the facility. The full production is almost 36 MWh per day of electrical energy that they can inject into the nets. Very good results. This case study, this reference is extremely important because this gave us the chance to expand our presence for our plants in South America. After that, we did also another one in Gorina that is the second slaughterhouse around Buenos Aires. We are targeting several others in that area, especially in Brazil, where we see a big potential, as also Manuel said previously.
We are targeting that market. We are using these references also in the North American markets where we see a big potential. Just to give an idea, ArreBeef processes 1,000 heads per day. The standard size in the U.S. and in Brazil is 4,000 heads per day. We are speaking about four times the plant of ArreBeef's. The potential is huge. Next slide, please. Let's see the growth strategy that we are applying in the last years. Following the one-fluence approach, we are clearly leveraging our presence in South America to expand also our technologies, our presence there with our technologies using the support of Manuel. The same we are doing in North America with the help of Steve that has already facilities established in North American markets.
We are trying to create the highest efficiency for the whole company using already this presence there. We are focusing our efforts mainly on the beverage market. We are keeping our strategy. To do that, we expand our sales team, dedicated sales team to this kind of technology in both South America and North America. In addition to that, we are expanding our presence in Europe, especially using our references in dairy and meat processing. We are already well established in Italy, clearly, where we have most of our references. We want to use them also in the rest of the other part of Europe and Americas. In addition to that, an important part is the after-sales business.
We are using these new customers and also the other old customers to increase our business, our after-sales business, adding to our portfolio additional services and products that we can provide to these customers. This strategy is working. In fact, we have several recent wins that follow exactly this strategy on dairies, on meat processing in North America. For example, we have recently two wins, one for a very important international dairy company with multiple sites, and another one that is a food ingredients manufacturing company that also has multiple sites. Yeah, we are seeing the results. The results are shown also in the revenues that are growing and also on the gross margin and the EBITDA of the company. The backlog is healthy, is growing, and this will allow us to speed up in our growing strategy. Thank you for the time.
I'm open up for some questions.
Great. Yeah, thank you, Fabio. That was really good. I have a couple of questions that come in. Again, encourage anyone who does have questions to include them in the Q&A section of the Zoom meeting window. We'll do our best to answer as many as we can. Fabio, what does it take for the customers to successfully finance an Industrial Wastewater and Biogas project, particularly one that has a waste-to-energy component?
It depends. It depends from the region. If we are in Europe or in the U.S. or South America, in most of the cases, it is driven by production of costs. As we said at the beginning, our treatment chains create value for the customer. It's not just a cost of treatment, but they create a profit center for the customer.
Normally, this is enough for the customer to take a decision and find the way to finance this kind of projects. In other cases, we have some help clearly from the governments. We have some incentives. For example, in Italy, we have now the incentives in biomethane production. Similar systems are now growing in Spain. We had the same system also in Argentina with the Renovar, for example. We saw also some incentivization in the North American market with the Inflation Reduction Act. Most of the cases, the reduction of costs and the production of energy is already enough to be able to finance these kinds of projects.
Great. Thank you for that. What is the current geographic split of revenue as it is today and kind of what do you expect it to be going forward?
It's about 40% Italy, 60% out of Italy.
The 60% out of Italy is 10%-15% Europe, a big part in Latin America, so 30%. We are growing in North America. We are at 10% all last now. My idea and what we see in the future is more in North America and South America.
You anticipate that North America and South America will start to represent a larger percentage of your revenue going forward?
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Both are growing markets, growing demand. Also for us, it is easier to work in that countries because we have a great structure there with Manuel and Steve that we can use. This creates some efficiency that we have to use. We have also less competition probably in that market than the European market.
Great. What growth area excites you the most? That can be defined either by region or end market or both.
Good question. I'm really excited about North America because it has great potential and we see a lot of chance to do business there. Clearly, it's a pretty new market for our technologies. So we take some time to grow. But we see a lot of potential. The other one is for sure Brazil, mainly because in Brazil, there are a lot of huge food and beverage companies that we are targeting. And there are a lot of plans to do there, not only on the wastewater side, but also waste-to-energy side.
Great. Thank you for that, Fabio. There's been no other questions that have come in, so I think that this is a good place to wrap it up.
Thank you, the audience, to give me this chance. Now I leave the floor to Steve or the Municipal division. Thank you.
Fabio, thanks for the introduction. I appreciate that. Hi, my name is Steve Scheidler. I'm the VP and GM of the municipal business, as Tom introduced earlier. I've got 34 years in the water and wastewater business. I've been around the block a little bit, and I ran a couple of companies that Tom's very familiar with. Part of those operations were to restructure and reorganize businesses for growth. I'd like to take you through a little bit of our history here. It's a shorter history because there's a long history of four disparate companies within the business. Basically, we had offices in the U.S., Dubai, Israel, and Egypt for a number of years. They acted independently of one another in siloed businesses. They were put under an umbrella by the new management back in 2022, 2023. They still acted as independent businesses.
The plan was to work on a OneFluence approach to move each of these businesses from regionally project-oriented opportunities and focus on core technology, moving it into pre-engineered systems that were easily replicated across the globe. We have a giant installation list, and we were not leveraging it at the time in these siloed businesses. I was hired in 2024 to do the realignment, to bring it all together. Part of what I have done is, with the support of management, create a matrix organization. In fact, each one of these offices now actually acts as one. The reporting structure is such that operations reports in the operations. Yet we create project execution teams where regionally global location does not really matter. In the U.S., we identified a significant opportunity. It is somewhere where we really did not play.
Even though we had an office there, we did not leverage our technologies. Part of that plan in the development of that plan was to really take a look at our install base. We had some small successes in creating installations in the U.S.. In 2023, we started to actually add on to our sales capability by adding representatives. With the few installations we had, we were bringing our customers to that. We started to find our way out into 2024 where we actually got approval in about six different states in the U.S. for the technology. That is a pretty big achievement because, as most of you know on the phone, in the municipal business, it takes effort to get state approval. It is a great place for us to start.
The other reason that we wanted to focus on the U.S. is because of the regulation changes. The technology that we own and patented, the proprietary technology, is perfect for nutrient removal, which is one of the bigger challenges in the United States. To talk a little bit about some of the success that we did have coming out of 2024, we currently have about $5 million in orders in the U.S. On top of that, we're investing in our company and increasing our sales staff. We're also looking at land siding here in the U.S., a membrane manufacturing facility in Tennessee later this year. We'll talk a little bit more about the technology and why that's important in just a moment. Where do we play? It's municipal. We're playing in municipal water, municipal wastewater.
These are the two essential markets that make up what we've done in both the U.S. and overseas in our Middle East region. It is not pure municipal government work. You have private and you have public. On the public side, it's your typical city-town engineer municipal delivery. On the private side, there's also plenty of opportunity. We see a lot of our opportunity come because of the CapEx improvements that we can provide, the OpEx improvements that we can provide. Our treatment technology also operates in seasonal transitions. In other words, we can operate in cold weather and still get good nutrient removal from our wastewater treatment processes. On the private side, we work with private utilities, real estate developers, industrial facilities, hospitality industries. The unique thing about working in that space is that they're not experts in what we do.
They depend on us quite a bit. We'll see how we've developed our actual suite of technology in the offer in the cookie-cutter building block approach to move forward. One of the strategies that we do execute for success is we partner with maybe somebody in the private utility or real estate developer. We connect them with an engineer that we've had success with before. We help them then develop that opportunity and develop that water or wastewater treatment project for themselves. It helps make it seamless for the customer as we're helping to support them all the way through to delivery. As I mentioned, we do have geographical focuses in the U.S. and the Middle East. Part of our advantage right now is we have a wide install base across the globe with our technologies.
In the Middle East, it was more of a water focus for a number of years. If you recall, basically, we had siloed companies that did what they felt they needed to do and execute projects instead of sell products. In the U.S., it was more of a wastewater treatment focus. Now, with our matrix organization, what we have the ability to do is cross-train between the different regions and improve our selling capabilities to go after additional targets. We've already made good names for ourselves in both of those regions. Now we can add some more products to our portfolio.
The other thing that I wanted to mention here, it's worth noting, on a global basis, because of our prior success as Fluence, BlueTech Research put out a report, and they named Fluence as the number one decentralized treatment provider for MABR, one of our technologies in the globe. They've even cited that we own 90% of that business. We also have two key patents that are worth mentioning here. One is with the MABR, which is our core engine. We'll talk about that in a moment. The other patent is pending right now. It's around operating our MABR with a low-dissolved oxygen aeration system on the back end of it. What that does, that gives us tremendous advantage against all of our competitors because we will own that process. Why is that important?
We have developed some relationships with a lot of these large engineers here in the U.S.. They have responded to us saying that they are in the process of looking at considering and designing an MABR process with a low-DO aeration on the backside of it. We are in a pretty good position here. We expect that patent to be issued later this year. Go to the next one, Ben. Here is our core technology. This is our MABR in the center. It is a spirally wound membrane system. In its basic simplicity, the easiest way to explain it is it acts like a human lung. As you breathe in, the air and oxygen uptake in your body happens. Inside that spiral, we basically have a human lung where we blow air into it.
The bacteria, the good bacteria to remove the nutrients and all the other constituents that we're looking to remove, they respirate through the membrane. They're breathing immediately oxygen or actually air, sorry, and pulling the oxygen through the membrane. At that point, we don't have to add any additional energy. It's a very low-volume, very low-pressure system, and it works extremely well. It removes nutrients, and it meets the lower limits required by the increasingly difficult regulations in the U.S. It's ideal for a number of applications. This is the key behind the technology. It drives into all of the markets that we just talked about. It drives into in the upper left, we have our Aspiral. That's basically a municipal governmental municipal treatment plant on a small scale. It's a bolt-on opportunity for nutrient removal.
Down in the lower portion, we have the Aspiral Flex. The Aspiral Flex is made specifically for the unsophisticated customer who just wants one person to supply everything to take wastewater and have discharge on the other side of it. We'll talk about the developer market later and why that's important. We rotate down. We have the MABR towers, right? We can actually just sell our technology to other providers. They can put them in their tanks and use them for their purposes. When I say other providers, I'm talking about Fabio because this is one of the things our technology goes across our business. It's not just municipal. It's Fluence. It's that one Fluence approach. Coming up on the other side, we'll talk about our SUBRE. We can also obviously build with our patent pending coming out for MABR with low-DO.
We have an extremely small footprint in the greenfield space, but we can also apply that to retrofits. Again, these are more of the centralized treatment facilities. On the opposite side, we're looking at the decentralized treatment facilities. Oh, and by the way, we can apply that to return activated sludge, and we can treat side stream with that product too. The other suite of products that we have is on the reverse osmosis side. You heard Manu speak about this earlier. He's a true expert in this. What we do is we put it in a box. We create modular systems where we can stack to create the flow rate necessary for the customer, easily transportable. There are opportunities for either permanent location or rental or lease. These boxes, we do have patents around how we operate the system.
It is not just a box with RO in it. There is some technology associated with it. In some cases, again, when we are talking to some of our unsophisticated customers, they need pretreatment to protect the reverse osmosis box. We came up with our Niroflex offer, which offers exactly flow scale pretreatment going into the RO systems. Manu mentioned it earlier today. That is the other beauty of our product line. He is actually executing building a NIROBOX for us for a project that is in Florida currently. Let us talk about a typical timeline within our projects. We can execute because we are pre-engineered solutions. We have already built the designs to fit within flow ranges of customer needs. We can execute these projects in eight months from start to finish. The hard part is the sell part, right?
That can go anywhere from six to 36 months, maybe even longer in some cases. The reality is, in the pure governmental municipal market, we understand that that's a long road in the front, but you're getting to 90% design essentially before you actually get into the execution phase. There's not a significant difference between a governmental municipal project and then maybe a private utility or smaller decentralized opportunity. Let's talk about some of the case studies that we have here today. This first one is extremely interesting and is a huge part of our strategy moving forward. Dow City, Iowa. This is a treatment lagoon that's failing. In other words, it's not meeting its discharge regulations.
The University of Iowa came to us and said, "Hey, look, we want to pilot test your process because Iowans need lagoon solutions." The state is looking for people who have cost-affordable small-scale solutions because of rural community needs. In this case, most of the projects that we're looking at are typically between $500,000-$2 million with some much bigger in Iowa. This one specifically was about $400,000. It was a pilot plant. We offered it at a significantly reduced rate because we're trying to help the University of Iowa. We're also looking for the end game to get state approval, which is one of the keys in this environment. One of the simple statistics just sitting up here is there are 715 permanent lagoons in Iowa, and 407 of them have had violations.
The perfect solution for them comes from our Aspiral Flex opportunity, a small two-stage MABR with a clarifier and a filter on the end of it. The CapEx on this particular project—sorry, at the end of the project, the engineer released his report, and they did a cost-effectiveness analysis with two other technologies, including ours. We came in at less than 50% of the cost of the competition for the capital expense. On top of it, one of the other partners we are working with, one of our rep, they have actually installed solar panels to run this facility because it is such a low energy requirement. That is kind of key in the Iowa market because there are a couple of things. Number one, you do not want to be having an operator standing there all day long. You need a simple operation.
You need low power requirements because you do not have the infrastructure out there. You do not need to run all the power lines out to it. There is a package solution here that actually creates a significant advantage for us. Why is this really important to our business? Ben is going to show us when he flips the screen here. EPA is in a program right now over the last three years where they are starting to look at the lagoon treatment in the United States. They are going to every permanent facility. There are 4,500 permanent in the United States. The belief is that there are over 8,000 lagoons. The difference between the 4,500 permanent and the 8,000 is essentially some are discharging, some are non-discharging lagoons, meaning they do not discharge to the environment. They just do their business in place.
The market's even larger than the 4,500 at this point in time. What's the point of note here is if we look at the violation of any kind, when we take a look at those numbers, almost 50% of them have registered violations over the last three years. That's a huge opportunity for us. Again, we operate in cold water. That was one of the demonstrations that we had proved where we can effectively reduce total nitrogen in winter, very cold weather. Okay, Ben? This next case study is actually with a developer called Wilshire Road. Wilshire Road is developing a complex of 400 or 4,000 new homes. The initial phase of this particular project is to develop 750 homes. What's unique about these opportunities is Wilshire Road can't sell one lot.
They can't improve or change their cash flow until they have an operational permitted treatment facility on site and operating. This particular installation is in California, so there are some tight regulations on the discharge. In this particular case, this is an Aspiral Flex solution, about $2.3 million on a capital sale side. What's also interesting about this type of opportunity for us is this is phase one. There's going to be multiple phases. What does that really mean for our business? That means that we're going to have a repeat customer. On top of that, they're an unsophisticated customer. They don't want anything to do with the operations. We had the opportunity here to add on an O&M contract to operate the plant and the systems. Because of our unique footprint, we're actually saving some of the land area to sell as sellable lots.
We bring benefit to them. They bring benefit to us. This is a big part of our strategy moving forward. Okay, Ben? This final case study is very interesting for us. Look, if you have not been following the water market, the scarcity is becoming very transparent across the globe. Even the city of El Paso is currently doing a waste-to-tap movement in their community. Singapore has been doing it for a couple of years now, probably more than a couple. In this case, we partnered with a private utility developer from Europe. They are making investments and trying to create opportunities in different markets where water is very scarce. In this case, we applied Aspiral and NIROBOX technologies. At the end of the day, on the waste-to-tap project, we came in at the lowest cost and also the highest quality water, removing the highest percentage of contaminants.
The other thing involved with this is, as we talked about earlier, it's OpEx, right? You want to have a very simple operational system because you're going to be putting these in decentralized locations, and you have low power requirements. The utility build-out becomes a lot less. There are a lot of significant, and I would say there are recurring themes in each one of our opportunities here around that CapEx and OpEx discussion. Okay, Ben? To wrap up, let's take a look at our growth strategy. I mentioned a lot of the items during the presentation here, and I think it's important to just kind of reiterate them. More importantly, as we build out our team in the U.S., we're making investment there. As both Manu and Fabio had mentioned earlier, they're targeting growth in the U.S..
As they're targeting growth, I'm sharing and we're sharing the expenses to start the execution process. Sales teams, Fabio's lead salesperson, business development person in the U.S. feeds the municipal department with opportunities and vice versa. This one Fluence thing is actually really connecting, and it's driving things home. We have a common CRM system now as a corporate. Tom mentioned that in the very beginning where we've invested a lot of money in systems. We've also invested in our sales team, and now we're focused on building out more of our rep organizations and really starting to hone our abilities to drive the U.S. market. The global operations team, this is something that Fabio, Manu, and myself, and Mickey, we've all got together, and we help each other across the board to make sure that we're delivering our projects on time.
Where we need support, as in Manu's case, he's building equipment for us in order to meet the timelines. That's huge because that keeps the money internal, the manufacturing internal to the company where we can make more profit. We're certainly focusing on recurring revenue through operations contracts, and we're looking at ways and means and how we can support potential leasing out in the market. I think the biggest opportunity we have is in the lagoon market. That's where I'm most excited right now moving forward. If we look at the financials over the last three years, you'll see a continual increase on our revenue. In 2023, you'll note that we've added some between 2023 and 2024 and 2025. We've invested some of our profits in our sales team and developing the region. That's really important.
Part of that investment taken on by Manu and Fabio, and part of it's taken on by me within our teams. For instance, with Fabio's recent success in the U.S., we've hired an additional project manager to operate the two, and I think it's three new projects now. We were just overwhelmed in our current state. Again, we're growing from a revenue perspective. We're getting more opportunities for the business. If you take a look down at the bottom, you'll note that our backlog is significantly improving year over year. We've had a lot of success in the recent history here. You can look at some of the key wins here. There are some seriously significant opportunities here, almost $10 million in Nairobi over the last two years in the Middle East. That's where our business is strongest.
We're starting to land it here in the U.S.. That's part of our strategy. Then vice versa, we're doing cross-training opportunities right now with our Middle East team on the wastewater side. We're seeing some funnel growth opportunities there. This month, or maybe next month, it'll be now, we're sending one of our key process engineers over to see Fabio's team to cross-train them for any opportunities that they may find in their sales regions. With that, I think I'll conclude, and I'll take some questions if you have any.
That's great. Thank you, Steve. You were popular because there are a lot of questions that come in for you, which is just great.
That's perfect.
The first question is, is there a sweet spot in project size where Fluence's SPS solutions, Aspiral, NIROBOX, SUBRE, are most competitive in the U.S. market?
That's a really, really good question because I guess it depends on what side you're looking on. If you're in the public sector, it's probably in that $500,000-$1,000,000 range currently when we're talking about our Aspiral Flex products or our Aspiral products. When we're talking on the developer side, you're talking in that $1,000,000-$2,000,000 range because we solve the problem very quickly for them. It's a little hard to kind of nail that down. Overall, that $500,000-$1,500,000 range is where I see our profitability.
Would you think Wilshire Road, I think, is probably a pretty good example, $2,300,000 in that developer market as a good example?
Yeah.
No, that's a good—I mean, I don't know the total number of housing start or new developments that are in that 3,000-4,000 home range, but it's a significant number. I was doing some research the other day a little bit deeper. We do have two other opportunities in our pipeline funnel right now that'll go between the $2 million and $3 million mark. Again, because that's a repeat customer opportunity, right? They're already going to have us permitted. We're already going to be on the ground. We'll be proven. We'll have the operation contract in place. The opportunities are going to be multiple in that area.
Great. Thank you. How difficult is it to differentiate Fluence's value proposition in highly price-sensitive tenders?
Highly price-sensitive tenders. I think the challenge would be, I guess, if we're just talking specifically MABR market.
Look, the forthcoming, the patent pending that we have, I think that's going to be somewhat of a game changer. I think that's going to give us some good leverage and advantage in the market. The value proposition right now for us that works the best in the developer market is we solve your problem, we bring in the complete solution, and we do the operation at the end of it. It is not necessarily highly price competitive at that point. It is who can solve my problem the simplest for me because I do not want to deal with all these. I do not know anything about wastewater treatment. I do not care. Come and solve my entire problem. With the suite of products that we can go from raw wastewater to finished water, we have a significant advantage.
Again, BlueTech's report in that area says that our direct competitors struggle when we get involved in these opportunities.
Would you also maybe speak to nutrient removal and where we are able to differentiate ourselves in the, I would call it, the more public municipal market when it comes to the price-sensitive tenders? Is that a differentiator for us?
It's helpful, yes. If we're talking about other technologies, yes. We have that advantage there. We also have the advantage with a flat sheet membrane in that we can go deeper into the basin so we can use less real estate. We do have some of those advantages that we can apply in those opportunities.
Great. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit about your U.S. pipeline and what portion you believe is securable in the next six to 12 months?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I think if we just go back to look at the funnel size and use the rule of one and seven, we're looking at the opportunity here in the next two to three years to grow double digits year over year as far as percentage-wise. Our current funnel right now is—this is global, right? So it's not just U.S. only, but we're looking at about $300 million in our pipeline right now over the next three to four years. It's a significant funnel that's growing daily. Keep in mind too, Ben, that the technology itself, when we—Black & Veatch actually did a study on our technology in one of our facilities in Israel. They came back saying, "Yeah, hey, look, this is something that can be highly effective," densification, meaning small footprint process in the U.S. It was a very positive output from them.
We have the engineering community on the MABR side giving us the go-ahead that, "Hey, these guys are in the market. They're capable." Their process works very well.
We've had some early-year success in the U.S., in particular, almost $5 million new orders. Do we think that we can replicate or do better than that over the next six to 12 and continue to show growth on the order front there?
Yeah. Look, the shortcoming that we've had over the last, let's say, 12 months, even with the success of the $5 million in orders, has been the size of our sales organization. I've just secured two top-notch guys that have come on board from one of our main competitors that I used to work for. We've onboarded them here in the last couple of weeks. We're anxious to get in front of our reps.
I think it was just too small of a sales organization to really handle the influx. And so we were kind of cherry-picking things. But there's really more opportunity out there than we're actually securing right now. Again, that was part of the investment that I made for this going into this year to secure those opportunities.
Great. Thank you. There are a couple of questions here on the lagoon slides, which I think were of particular impact to the people that are participating. So I'll ask both of them. Hi, Steve. Thanks for the presentation. Do you have a timeline for the Iowa DNR approval for Dow City pilot? And are you working on other specific lagoon projects already in anticipation?
Yeah. No. Excuse me. Great question. I'm just going to grab a glass of water. For Dow City, the report was submitted, I believe, last month.
At least the facilities plan was submitted. It's going to take—I mean, we're talking about state government, right? It's going to take a little bit of time. We anticipate getting that approval here before the end of the year. I think it's a relative slam dunk given the performance that we had. On top of that, just the simple cost-effectiveness analysis that was run. We're very confident that we're going to get that state approval here before the end of the year. As far as other projects, I can say that we actually did sell another Aspiral 2+ unit, exactly the same as we had sold in Dow City on another failed lagoon in Missouri. We're not necessarily focused specifically only on Iowa. We've got other irons in the fire. Yes, we are starting to target that.
That map right there, part of the investment that we made for this year was on our product management side. We've hired an intern to help him crank through some of the data. The nice thing about the lagoon market and the fact that the EPA has put this program together is we have a list of names, addresses, and who. It is going to be pretty easy to work with our rep and actually start targeting some of these opportunities. Our rep is actively managing some of those currently in the state for us.
Great. Another question, I believe, on the lagoon market, if I make that assumption, you'll see why, says, "This is a huge market. Are you focusing geographically in certain states or jurisdictions, or are you pushing to get approvals across the country?"
Yeah. Look, we have a team of a certain size right now.
When we grow, I'll invest. I don't see any reason why we couldn't do that. Right now, specifically, yeah, we're looking at Iowa where we're trying to drive success. We have the demonstration facility essentially in Missouri. That's going to take a year essentially to get that technology approval. We'll be on the ground and operational. The best part about that is that job is with a private utility. That could be a repeat customer as well, given the fact that they own the facilities and own the responsibilities.
Great. Speaking of sales team, what is your sales approach in terms of the team required to capture these opportunities?
The team required to capture the opportunities. Look, I think it's people who are just motivated to go out and win.
We hired two gentlemen here in the last couple of months that I personally worked with one of them for years. I have a lot of confidence in his ability to work specifically with the representatives. I think that's where we kind of lacked a little bit before. We're not entirely into our rep organization as far as we need to be. They're our force multiplier, right? They're essentially our initially free cost because they go out and do a lot of the legwork. They have the relationships. They can bring the opportunities to us. We have to be able to effectively train them. Part of the hiring process was to figure out who knows how to actually train and manage a rep organization. That was one of the keys to hiring the right people to bring into our business.
Again, I'm very confident with the two individuals we just hired that they can go out and do that job very well.
Great. Another question on SUBRE. What is holding up adoption of SUBRE in the U.S.?
What's holding up adoption for MABR in the U.S. was probably the better question. I think the U.S. is typically eight to 10 years behind the rest of the world in technology, right? It takes time to warm the engineers up to this process. I think that's why we took advantage of Black & Veatch, "Hey, go look at our facilities over in Israel and give us your assessment and so forth." What we're finding here and WEFTEC this past year was one of the best WEFTECs I ever attended because customers were coming to us saying, "Let's go and let's do a project," right? They're interested in the technology.
It is really becoming part of the conversation in the engineering community. We are seeing it in a lot of the major engineering firms. Our product manager, Neree, is constantly engaged with three or four of the major engineering firms across the country. There are three or four projects right now that are in design. It is not like on the SUBRE market, there are 150,000 projects out there like there would be in normal secondary treatment. They are tiptoeing into it, but they have adopted and understand that this technology is real. It is going to be necessary as soon as the regulations hit. They know that. They know it is coming. They are pre-planning on a lot of these facilities. The best part about it is we are already getting a larger install base through our decentralized facilities in all of these states.
We're proving that technology every day where our competitors are looking for the elephants in the room trying to land those while we're plopping down our install base across. If you looked at our technology slide, our core technology is built around the MABR module. We apply it in different products to get it to the market. If it's in a small steel tank, it's still the MABR technology. I think that's the beauty of where we sit as a company, the advantage we have.
If I'm interpreting your sales process slide compared to, say, our colleagues on the industrial side, it takes a little bit longer to develop the opportunity. Once you get it, it's actually potentially a shorter execution timeline. It seems like it's a bit of a snowball once we get there. Is that fair?
Yeah.
It's a fair assessment depending if your customer, the contractor, or the municipality does their civil work on time. I think that's the limiting factor. I mean, the execution of the actual design and so forth and submittal documents and whatnot. In the case of the Aspiral, putting the steel tank, putting in the box, we can execute that in eight months. We can't necessarily force the concrete to dry any faster in some of these other larger municipal projects. That's the challenge. Yeah.
Another good question came in. Would developers prefer to lease or purchase the equipment?
Lease, of course, right? Because they're all cash flow driven. These developers, they form new corporations that don't have historical cash flow. The challenge is for them to get any kind of a bank loan or anything of that nature, they really struggle with that.
We're looking to find some partners that we can actually drive leases into the business where we would sell the capital sale to the leasing company. They would then lease it to the customer. We would own the recurring revenue on the operations contract on the backside. However, in some cases, they may not qualify, right? They do have cash. Some of these partners that get together, they'd rather not put cash out there, but in some cases, they do.
I'm probably not speaking out of turn by saying we are usually the step between them advancing their development. That infrastructure needs to be in place before they can, frankly, unlock some of the cash that is available in those processes, correct?
Exactly right.
I mean, they can't sell one lot and create any cash flow for themselves until they have a wastewater and water treatment system in place. The permits have to be in place as well. Again, on Wilshire Road, we saw, look, we're phase one, 750 homes, I believe is the number, out of 4,000. There's going to be multiple phases where there's going to be that opportunity. As they're generating cash flow, now they might go to a capital sale.
Right. We're locked in at that point already. We're on site already.
Yep. Technology is approved. They don't care to do anything different. They just want to, "Let's do that again." That's the concept.
Probably one more question, and then we'll try and wrap it up. Is there an opportunity to leverage your existing presence in South America to expand the municipal business there?
Yeah.
That's a great question. Manu and Fabio, we talk about that all the time because currently, Fabio and I, we share a salesperson where he supports some of our activity in the Caribbean. His Latin America sales guy is a treatment person. Michaele, he and I regularly connect. We talk about opportunities in those regions. They're going to be more opportunistic than they are strategically focal opportunities. There are certain challenges in Latin America that in my career, I've never been able to solve tremendously without having an office specifically just focused on the municipal part, right? For Manu to do that on the water side and the wastewater side, it doesn't really make too much sense for me. I put the focus points up there because we can't be all things to everybody at once.
I think that was part of the prior, let's say, disparate strategies that the municipal businesses had. "Hey, let's look over here. We can develop this." My focus is going to be laser focused. We're on the U.S. municipal market. We are in the Middle East municipal market. Those are my targets. We're going to grow that way. The way we built the organization with the Matrix platform, we now have a foundation that we can scale up on. Volume isn't necessarily the issue. It's when the volume comes, we'll grow. That's not the problem. As we grow, we'll invest. When we invest, possibly Latin America will work with Manu and possibly Europe. Michaele actually does work in Europe as well with Alessandro and the other sales guys. I guess I'm just excited about the whole thing. That's a great question because the possibilities are endless.
That's great. I think that's it in terms of questions, Steve. Thank you so much.
Yeah. No, I appreciate it. Thank you, man. Oh, that's right. My apologies. My other compadre, Michael Schnitzer. Mickey runs our China business. One of the things I did forget to mention is that Mickey and I are connected at the hip for the most part as we have shared supply chains. Mickey's going to present the Southeast Asia and China business. Please welcome him.
Thank you, Steve, for presenting me. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to present the Southeast Asia operations. My name is Mickey Schnitzer, and I am the General Manager of Fluence Southeast Asia. Today, I'm pleased to share with you an overview of our activities, performance, and the future strategy in Southeast Asia and in China, two of the most dynamic water markets globally.
Quick introduction about myself. I have been part of the water and wastewater industry over the last 35 years with experience in the water and wastewater treatment sector. I've led engineering operations across Asia, including several years in China where I led and managed the local teams, executed the major project, and drove the business development in the Chinese market. I've been involved in the establishing of the Fluence operation in China since early stages in 2017. I was responsible for the building, the company's engineering and operations team. I'm going to present now the business unit overview. Please the next slide. Let me talk through the history and evaluation of our business in Asia. We first entered the Asian market through China.
At the beginning, we focused on rural wastewater treatment and set up our first local operations, including the plant in Changzhou, the offices in Beijing, and in Shanghai. Between 2017 and 2019, our growth accelerated. We diversified into multiple sectors, reached more than 100 completed projects. These investments were critical in supporting rapid development and localized manufacturing. From 2020 onward, we expanded our presence across Southeast Asia. We set up a new company in Singapore, delivered major projects in Cambodia, and received several prestigious awards, including for our work in the Chinese highway sector and international business achievements. In 2023, we re-entered the Taiwanese market with desalination projects and large-scale water reuse systems such as the Taobei project. I will speak a little bit about this project later. In parallel, we strengthened our presence in the Philippines and further explored industrial segments like highway and railway wastewater treatment.
Today, with over hundreds of projects across the region and multiple ISO certificates under our belt, we are firmly positioned as a leader in the decentralized and centralized sustainable water solutions in Asia. This strong foundation allowed us to move confidently into our next phase of growth. Next slide, please, Ben. Thank you. These slides present our key end market, strategic geographics, competitors, and the core advantages. We focus on four major segments: the municipal water, the municipal wastewater, industrial water, and the industrial wastewater, addressing needs such as drinking water, scarcity, energy-efficient effluent treatment, and advanced reuse. Geographically, we operate across eight key countries: China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Each market is at a different stage of infrastructure maturity, which allows us to tailor our approach. China serves as our engineering production hub, offering cost advantages and deep execution experience.
Taiwan and the Philippines are core targets for water reuse and decentralized wastewater treatments. Vietnam and Cambodia show strong demand driven by rapid industrialization and government investment. Singapore and South Korea offer high-end opportunities requiring advanced technologies and strategic partnerships. Our competitive strengths are including expansion performance in total nitrogen removal and up to 70% of energy saving, minimal maintenance, quite odorless operation, ideal for urban and remote applications, low total cost ownership with strong OpEx performance, deep regional reference based on the experience in the in-house engineering team. Importantly, we are recognized as the trusted global company which has strengthened client confidence and positions us ahead of local regional competitors. In summary, we combine technical differentiation, local presence, and global credibility that enables us to win scale across the diverse high-potential markets. Next slide, please, Ben.
As Steve mentioned earlier, our MABR technology addresses a global market that demands decentralized and centralized energy-efficient wastewater solutions. MABR technology offers a disruptive and energy-efficient approach to decentralized wastewater treatment. By using the PES variation, MABR enables simultaneous nitrification and denitrification in a single reactor, reducing both the energy consumption and the footprint. We offer flexible deployment models, including compact containerized units and fully customized engineered systems. This makes the MABR ideal for the rural areas, industrial parks, resorts, and locations with limited space or infrastructure. In addition, MABR is a powerful solution for upgrading existing new centralized treatment plants. It allows for significant improvement in nitrogen removal or plant capacity with minimal civil work and operational disruptions. These advantages result in a lower total cost ownership, faster installation, and long-term performance with minimal maintenance. The next slide, please. Fluence provides a complete portfolio of water treatment technologies.
My partner, Steve, just mentioned these products in his presentation as well. The NIROBOX, compact containerized system for the desalination of drinking water, plug-and-play design with a fast deployment and a low footprint. The Niroflex, the modular building blocks like multimedia filter, ultrafiltration, and RO offer a flexible, scalable solution with a quick delivery for the industrial reuse and ultrapure water. All solutions focus on efficiency, reliability, and adaptability to the client needs. The next slide, please. Thank you. This slide illustrates the timeline of a typical small-scale project. I used the Xiaogan Highway Service area installation in China as an example. Later also, I will show this project as a case study. The opportunity was identified in April 2018, and the sales process moved very quickly.
Within single months, in May 2018, we expanded the client connections and conducted site investigation, negotiated the technical and commercial terms, and signed the sales contract. By June, the engineering design was completed and the procurement plan launched. The production was finalized, and the equipment began shipping by July 2018, with delivery and installation starting immediately after. By September 2018, all equipment was fully installed and commissioning began. The project acceptance followed shortly thereafter, and the plant entered the stable operation during the one-year warranty period lasting through October 2019. This case demonstrates our ability to deliver the compact, high-efficiency wastewater solution in a high compressed lifetime, sorry. From the opportunity to operation in just six months, making it a great example for the fast track project execution. Next slide, please. These slides present a typical end-to-end execution timeline based on the PS3 wastewater project in Sihanoukville, Cambodia.
Also, I will show this project as a case study later. We identified the opportunity during the execution of PS1 and PS2 projects. Building on that experience, we strengthened our relationship with the client and successfully entered their whitelist. This is a critical step moving forward in Cambodia. Following on-site investigation and the solution development, we provided a tailored quotation. After detailed commercial negotiation, we signed the contract in late 2021 and began the engineering design. In mid-2022, the procurement was completed and production began. Equipment was shipped and arrived on-site by the end of that year. Installation took place in mid-2023, followed by successful commissioning in September 2023, with the system meeting all effluent standards. As of today, the plant is operating stably under warranty.
The entire process, from the opportunity identification to a full operation, took approximately three years, which is very typical for the water infrastructure project of this size and complexity. This project showcased our structured, transparent approach and the ability to deliver the large-scale solution on time and on budget. Next slide, please. I would just like to share with you a few case studies. We will start with this project in Xiaogan that I mentioned earlier in China. This is a good example of how we solved infrastructure challenges in the scattered service location. This project addresses the wastewater from highway service areas that had no centralized sewage network and limited space. The sewage had high ammonia and total nitrogen content. The client required a Class 1A effluent quality that is under tight operational and spatial constraints. We deployed two Aspiral L4 units paired with clarifiers, sand filtration, and disinfection.
This compact modular solution allowed us to treat the high-strength wastewater efficiently and quietly with low energy usage and minimal maintenance. As a result, the consistent Class 1A discharge, odorless and silent operation, and significant reduction in OpEx exactly deducted our infrastructure operators and the government seeks for the decentralized projects. This project is a strong reference for similar decentralized infrastructure needs in both developed and developing regions. Next slide, please. Now I'll show you a video of the progress of this project. Two Aspiral containers were assembled at our plant in Changzhou. The equipment left the factory on the two container trucks and arrived on-site promptly. Very simple shipment, as you can see, just put it in the container and transfer it. The service area site includes the gas station, restrooms, small rest area for truck drivers, and the restaurants.
The available space for the system is limited, and it's important that the system does not cause any environmental nuisance as well. The footprint is very small, making it well suited for the site's limited space conditions, as you can see here. The on-site installation was completed within a few days. Very simple deployment and just almost plug-and-play solution. All the auxiliary equipment, including the pre-treatment, the clarifier, the sand filter, the control system, and disinfection unit, was installed inside the adjacent building, just close to the reactors. Here you can see the effluent quality of this site. Okay, thank you. Next slide, please. This is one of our flagship installations, a 20,000 cubic meters a day wastewater treatment plant located in a high containerized constrained site along the river bank of Sihanoukville Port in Cambodia. The project presented significant challenges. First, it is very limited land availability.
The plant had to be built on the river channels. Flood discharge had to be accounted for the design. Local electricity costs are high, and energy efficiency was a key requirement. It is the largest benchmark of wastewater treatment plant in Cambodia with strict effluent quality expectations. To meet these demands, we implemented the treatment process that includes the pre-treatment, MABR with our SUBRE towers, conventional activated sludge, and clarifier and disinfection. This hybrid configuration allows us to achieve the advanced simultaneous denitrification with the high total nitrogen removal efficiency. The system achieved 20% reduction of its carbon source usage, between 30-40% saving of energy for the aeration, compact footprint, minimal maintenance, and steady effluent quality. This installation not only meets the technical and environmental requirements, it also helps us to gain regulatory acceptance and build a long-term trust with the local stakeholders.
It now serves as a national reference for the wastewater treatment and reuse in Cambodia and across the region. Next slide, please. You can see the video of the execution of this project. As you can see, there was a challenge here that is just on the riverbank, so we have to protect the plant from the floodings. The equipment arrived on-site after the shipping from Changzhou plant and stored close to the site location. Fluence was responsible for the process design for the supply of the MABR equipment and the auxiliary equipment and the site supervision over the installation. Our partner was responsible for the civil works and the equipment installation. They did the civil works according to our instructions in the process design. As you can see, the installation is not complicated and does not require skilled manpower.
The whole installation process took place in no more than three weeks. You can see everything is already installed and ready for the commissioning. Okay, next slide, please. The Taobei project, also mentioned earlier, reflects the growing demand of advanced water use, particularly in the water-scarce regions like Taiwan, where the municipal industrial users are seeking for sustainable solutions. Value of about $6 million of this project. This project had an extremely urgent timeline, only 2.5 months, and required high design standards, including the full atomization, modularization, and the built-in redundancy. The effluent quality was challenging due to the high COD and organic pollutants, and the client needed reliable, consistent output from the non-potable reuse.
We delivered a Niroflex product, a fully custom-engineered solution using the standard products, close filtration, ultrafiltration, and reverse osmosis, supported by 10 UF ultrafiltration units, 10 reverse osmosis units, and 20 PLCs for the full system control. The plant now delivers about 41,000 cubic meters a day of high-quality permeate, making it one of Taiwan's largest and most efficient municipal reuse facilities. It demonstrates our ability to execute quickly, meet high-spec requirements, and deliver water-positive outcomes even under intense pressure. This project is a strong regional reference and positions us as the leading provider for fast, resilient, and sustainable reuse systems. You can see the next slide is some pictures of this project. During the installation, the installation of the equipment, again, we did all the installation was done by our partner.
The civil and the installation was done by our partner with the supervision of our team that came from China. Next slide, please. This slide provides an overview of our financial performance across 2023 to 2025, as well as strategic framework driving our forward-looking growth. In 2024, we experienced a decline in the revenues and EBITDA margin, largely due to the macroeconomic slowdown in China. Our goal by the end of 2025 is to reach the EBITDA break-even. Despite this, our outlook for 2025 is positive, supported by the strong project activity in Southeast Asia, where we are relocating our commercial focus and deepening our presence. To sustain long-term growth, we are executing a four-part strategy. First, we are redirecting commercial focus to Southeast Asia, targeting high-growth infrastructure markets.
Second, we are looking to establish a local presence in core countries such as Taiwan and the Philippines to accelerate the market penetration. Third, we deploy strategic reference projects to drive awareness. This includes demo systems and localized marketing materials to help build the trust of the short-term sales cycles in our target markets. Finally, we continue to leverage our China facility as the cost-effective engineering and manufacturing hub, supporting the Southeast Asia execution and also our operation in municipal to support Steve and to support Manu and Fabio using the advantages of the local production in China. Of course, to mitigate also the tariff exposure. Now, moving to our key recent wins, this illustrates the traction we're gaining. We secured 21 Aspiral project orders from ITEST, our strategic partner in China, totaling about $4.8 million U.S. dollars.
In Taiwan, we completed the Seawater Arrow Niroflex upgrade project, which was about $106,000. This is a direct result of the success of our Taobei project, which I presented earlier, and the strong collaboration with our partner in Taiwan. In South Korea, we won a 53 cubic meters a day MABR Nitro project, valued at about $500,000. This is a unique project, but this is the first commercial installation of the Nitro system, a Nitro technology in the world for treating a high concentration of ammonia. We also secured in Vietnam a 1,500 cubic meters a day Seawater Arrow Niroflex order for Swater. The value was about $770,000. Ultimately, this model enhanced the total project profitability while supporting the scalability and repricing competitiveness across the region, aligning our goal of profitable, sustainable growth.
To summarize, our strategic pivot toward the South Asia is already showing results, both commercial wins and in building a healthy backlog. These indicators point to an improving financial outlook and set the stage for sustained regional growth. Thank you for your time, and I'll be happy to answer any questions that you may have.
Thank you, Mickey. Look, a particular thank you to you, Mickey, joining. Originally, Mickey was meant to join us here in person and present it live. Unfortunately, his travel plans had to change, and Mickey is doing this in the middle of the night right now. I just wanted to give a heartfelt thank you for staying up late, Mickey, to provide this presentation. It was quite helpful.
Thank you for your support. I understand.
We do have a few questions that came in, and I will ask them, Mickey, and ask for you to answer. The first question, there's actually a couple that I'm going to group together because I think they are related. The question is, growth in China has stalled. What is the team doing to reignite growth in China? I think a related question, as you look at the next 12 months-24 months, what percentage of your revenue do you expect to come from China versus other Southeast Asian countries?
As mentioned before, we can see a decline in the sales in China in the recent two years because of the economic situation in China. Now the governments, the local government, are struggling. They do not have the funds for this infrastructure project.
We, as MABR technology, are focused mainly here in the municipal market in China. Unfortunately, because the local government cannot raise the funds for the many projects, projects are abandoned or on hold, even the projects that have already been published. I do not know what will be the situation in the next few months or the next year. That is why we are trying now to diversify our efforts to the industrial market in the Chinese market. They have more funds, and they have more capabilities to increase some of these projects, to raise some of these projects, especially for the foreign companies that have established operations in China, like the big companies, the food companies, and other companies that have operations already in China. There are also some opportunities to be found in the western part of China with the excellent scarcity of wastewater.
We are engaging with one or two of the strategic partners there as well to try to see if we can give them a good solution with our Niroflex and a solution for the brackish water desalination and other projects for the drinking water requirement in this area. That is more or less what we are doing now in the Chinese market. One of the reasons that, because of that, we are also relocating some of our efforts to Southeast Asia because we found in other regions, countries and regions, mainly to Taiwan and the Philippines, as I mentioned also, because there they are now raising the funds. It is much easier for us to penetrate. I think in Taiwan, we did a very good job in the recent two years that we exposed the MABR technology to the local government.
The local government in Taiwan accepted MABR as one of the technologies that they are going to adopt in the future in the existing bidding processes. I think this more or less will be the future of the growth in Southeast Asia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and other countries in the region.
Thank you. Another question. I think this is partly for you, Mickey. Going back to the OneFluence approach, it could probably be addressed by Fabio as well, but I'll pose it to you. Are there opportunities in wastewater energy in Southeast Asia?
Yes, there are several opportunities for wastewater energy. By the way, the natural process is, as just mentioned in South Korea, that we have. This natural process is for the wastewater energy project that our client is operating there.
We are doing the treatment of the effluent of the wastewater energy project. There are many opportunities. We think that now we are seeking these opportunities also in Taiwan because I think these are the most developed regions and the most developed countries that we can think about, how to develop this approach of using the wastewater energy solutions. We try to penetrate this market in China, but in China, it is more complicated because I think now there is a lot of domestic competition there. It would be more complicated to do it in China, but probably in other countries like Taiwan, where we also have some presence, there is good potential.
Great. Thank you for that. Mickey, I think that wraps up the questions for you and the Southeast Asia and China business.
Again, I do want to thank you for staying up late to present the business. If you want to have any closing remarks, we can move on to the next part of the presentation.
Okay. Thank you for your time. We are proud of the progress that we have made, but even more excited about what lies ahead. I'm happy to hand over to Tom and to you, Ben, to take it from here.
Thank you, Mickey.
Thanks, Mickey. We're going to wrap this up. You stay safe, Mickey. I would be remiss in not wishing that to you. First and foremost, I want to thank the four BU managers. They did a wonderful job. This was not done without a significant amount of prep work by them. I know their busy schedules. Thank you, guys.
I think you on the investors out there can see now why I have much more optimism in what's going on with Fluence on how we're organized and what kind of team we've developed and put together. I just couldn't be happier with the progress we're making with the team. I want to thank them publicly for that. They truly are very talented and certainly global, I think, four nationalities in the presentation. Thank you for that. As it turns out, getting back to the one Fluence comment, we are sitting here with the exception of Mickey in Toronto because we try to have a quarterly executive management meeting with this team, the team of eight, if you will. Sometimes, actually, Doug Brown joins us, and then we have to behave when our Chairman joins us.
I think he has also seen, as I have seen, the significant changes over the last year plus with this team on how well they work together. They truly are trying to help each other and support each other. That is going to make a big difference going forward to leverage one unit's positive items to another unit. Without further ado, let's get to the conclusion slides, Ben. The first slide is nothing more than a summary of what you heard for the last three hours, the growth strategies for each unit of significant importance. I think the takeaways from this are the fact that the growth opportunities across the business units are all quite unique, but they are strong potential. We can benefit with our suite of technologies and our geographical footprint and our market segments.
I think we can, for a very small to mid-size company in the global water market, we can really leverage this and continue on our growth path. We're really trying to pick the best opportunities for growth. I think these guys are doing a good job of it. We're also really excited about the potential for recurring revenue. Manu and his team have built up, you heard him, 35% of recurring revenue, which is significant. I don't know what it was five years ago, but it wasn't anywhere near that. If each one of our business units, and Fabio's about halfway there, am I correct, Fabio, maybe 15%-20% of recurring revenue. Of course, Steve's got to get there. He's got some in the Mideast, 5% or so. You have to have the projects to have aftermarket sales on.
You have to get the projects. That will build up. I guess my point is, if all four business units get up in that 30%-40% recurring revenue area, I mean, we're talking a significant annual revenue with high margin that keeps coming each year that we don't have to reinvent. As we grow, that, of course, grows. We're really excited about that. I think we have some more work to do as far as infrastructure. If we start talking large operations and rental service, we need to get our capital, our balance sheets in order for that. The point is, there's all kinds of opportunity for growth. We're going to explore it, and we're going to cash in on it. Finally, for growth, we do have some interest in some strategic M&A work. These opportunities are not big ones.
They're not reinventing the wheel opportunities. We'd also have to make sure our balance sheet's in good enough shape to do these as we go forward. We would be looking for an accretive acquisition that can also enhance the current growth plans of the business units. Not something out of the clear blue just adding a new product for the sake of adding a new product, but something that a business unit can add to their portfolio that'll help them grow in their current markets. That's the importance of it. We actually are looking at a couple of opportunities that are all small, but we're starting small. We'll continue to do that. The niche areas we presented to you in the last three hours, the recurring revenue, and some strategic M&A is really the summary of our growth plans.
With that, I'd like to turn it over to Ben for the final slide. It's on growth also, but it's more in the financial side of it. Then we'll entertain—I have a couple of questions I'll answer when he's done and then any new questions that come. Ben.
Yeah. No, thank you, Tom. Look, I'm going to repeat for the sake of everyone understanding the importance of this. I can't emphasize this enough. I think it is very rare for a company of Fluence's size to have the product technology and geographic diversification that we have. We've talked about this before, but I don't think we've perhaps emphasized it enough. I hope tonight's presentations really hit home in terms of how many opportunities we have to grow. What that presents is a foundation for sustainable growth going forward, right?
You're not counting on one end market, one customer, one trend. The water industry, as we talked about, is already large enough. It's growing fast enough. We are attacking multiple niches with proprietary technology in some cases. In other cases, it's decades of installation experience, which really, really matters in this industry. All of those things lead to multiple paths for growth. That's really important. At the end of the day, when you look at that revenue chart up in the top left, this is a business that, frankly, wasn't built or at least wasn't focused that way historically. It was counting on the revenue from one large project and one large end market, right, when we talk about China specifically. Ultimately, that can lead to challenges if you face headwinds with those projects or with those markets. The pandemic. That's a good point, Tom.
What we've been doing over the past couple of years is really stripping the company down to what we think we do well and rebuilding from there. What we have built as a foundation is very profitable. It is diversified. We think that it can generate significant profitable growth on a cash-positive basis. That is really critical. Hopefully, you heard that from all of our teams. The projects that they are taking on are high margin with recurring revenue opportunities that are at even higher margins. They are all cash-flow positive, right? We still have a ways to go there. We are improving every day, every week, every month on the cash-flow side of things, but that is coming. The projects that we are winning now are cash-flow positive.
The legacy projects that we have worked to de-risk are falling off, and the new projects that are coming on are going to be highly beneficial. When you look at that profile, right, we have now kind of brought the company down to its most profitable. We are supporting the growth of those businesses. They are selling higher-margin products. They are increasing their recurring revenue at higher margin. If we are able to grow those businesses at double-digit rates, which we believe is very achievable with the opportunities that we have in front of us, we expect to see that gross margin curve continue to go up. I think you have heard this from Tom and from myself. We think this is a business that can easily generate 35%-40% gross margins at maturity. Right now, we just did a year where we did 30%.
That sort of shows what the upside is, okay? In addition, we've spent the last two years, two and a half years, really cutting down on excess in the business. When I joined the company the prior year, the company had $26.7 million in fixed-cost SG&A. We just finished the last year under $20 million. That's about a 25% reduction. It's not to say we aren't going to reinvest in growth, as Steve has with his business unit, as Fabio has with his, and as we will with Manu in the U.S.. However, we don't need to grow our SG&A at double-digit rates to achieve double-digit revenue growth. You combine growing margin, double-digit revenue growth, and a cost base that we think now at sort of its foundational core without significant growth required.
Man, that is a recipe for operating leverage and profitable growth, which is what we have been after, what we are trying to achieve. That is really the story that we are trying to leave you with here, giving you a little bit more detail in terms of how we are doing it, the people that are doing it for us, their teams. We think that the opportunities in front of us are pretty exciting. Most importantly, for this audience, obviously, what does that mean? We think that those opportunities can generate a sustainably profitable company that is growing at double-digit levels and selling products that our customers really want. I think that is where I would probably wrap things up, Tom, if there is anything.
Yeah. I think we have a couple of questions outstanding, do not we?
Yeah.
There were a couple of questions that did not come in that are more directed for Tom and I. We can take a few of those. Question for Tom and Ben, Ivory Coast, the O&M contract. Is there a formal timeline or decision date expected for the contract? And two, do you expect one or two milestone payments for the Ivory Coast in Q2 2025? You take the first.
Yeah. Regarding the Ivory Coast Ops contract, all I can tell you is that the plan Ivory Coast placed in front of us in the last several weeks, as far as what they want to see happen, shows a completion of the negotiations by the early part of the fourth quarter or late third quarter at this point in time. They have actually said, "Here is the timeline.
We want to get this done and negotiated. If they stick with their timeline, we certainly aren't going to try and slow them down. We're ready to go now with the negotiations, but it's scheduled for, what, mid-October? Is that the dates? Something like that. I have to warn you, I think from last year, you can recall that things in Ivory Coast, when you have to depend on the government getting the next step over the finish line or putting a piece of paperwork together that needs to get reviewed, sometimes gets delayed for simple reasons like the politician is on a PR tour in another country or something, so it sits on the desk. I can only tell you their requested schedule was to get the negotiation done before the start of the fourth quarter.
If it happens, we will be very happy, but we'll see how it goes. That is about all I can tell you on that. It is a true schedule they laid out for us. We will certainly do everything in our power to keep that schedule. Yeah. Ben, you want to answer the payment one?
Yes. As we know, we did receive the first milestone payment earlier this year. We are expecting to, well, we are forecasting to receive another large payment before the end of the quarter, although, as you know, we are approaching the end of the quarter as we speak right now. It is going to be close. It is still our expectation that that will arrive, but it is possible that that extends into early July.
Right now, we're working under the assumption that we will receive an additional large Ivory Coast milestone. Tom, there have been a few questions that have come in that I think are at a more corporate level, more around quarterly results, recent share trading. I think that we're going to defer those questions for we've got a quarterly call coming up in a little bit. The purpose of this call today was really to discuss the operations of the business. I think we will address that at a future time. I will find there have been a few questions that have come in as we've been speaking, so that's good. That means that there's a question I like this. That was a fantastic summary from Ben for a $40 million market cap company.
What black swan event may prove to be a challenge to us going forward? Black swan being like something unpredictable, right?
I mean, all you got to do is look back at what happened in 2020 and 2021 with the pandemic. I mean, certainly, that basically wiped out the traction we had in China. It just wiped it out. Now you sit here, the biggest challenge we have right now is China and Southeast Asia as far as growth potential. An event like that wiped it out. I mean, Mickey is not here today because of a Middle East war. It stopped him from getting from Tel Aviv to Toronto. Where that ended up going, anybody knows. Yeah, there are some 10 years ago, I would have said there is not a black swan event that could stall us.
After looking at Middle East wars and looking at pandemics, those are the kind of events that at bare minimum will cause issues on a regional basis. I think the next one after that would be an economic issue. I mean, we do a lot of work in South America. Depending on what happens with economics and the exchange rates and the transfer of money from one country to another, tariffs from the U.S.. We have navigated around the tariffs from the U.S.. If that war starts up again, the economic war, that could cause it. Yeah, like I said, 10 years ago, I would have said there are not too many that could cause, but three or four in the last couple of years caused it. Other than that, I do not foresee, for example, water is not going to become obsolete.
Water is not going to become a buggy whip for a telephone booth. I do not see any technology change that is going to be a black swan event or anything like that. That is the best I know. That is all I can say on that, so.
Yeah. I think that is fair. There is another question on what are the medium-term return on investment targets? I will answer that, Tom, if you are good with it. At minimum, what we look at as a return on any investment in the company is an unlevered return of at least 15%. I would say that is at the very low end. Most of the opportunities that we look at, we are talking about unlevered IRRs that are significantly higher, usually in the 20%-30% range.
There are various investments that we can look at, whether that's a rental fleet, a build-own-operate project, a potential creative acquisition. All of these, I would expect, the types of opportunities that are out there are significantly higher than our minimum threshold, typically in the 20%-30% unlevered return basis. The question, I think this is a good one, and I'll answer it at a high level. Given the great presentations that our business unit managers did today, I think the question was, how are they incentivized? The reality is, it's very consistent with how the executive team is, meaning Tom, myself, Rick, and Spencer. It's based on profitability, right? We have revenue targets, but ultimately, it's EBITDA. We are focused on EBITDA, and that is the main incentive marker that we have out there.
We may also have some other targets, cash flow, gross margin targets, etc., that are unique to each business unit and what we are trying to accomplish. It might be a revenue growth objective, but the single largest one in every case is EBITDA. It's what we talk about every single day. Another question here. The session was incredibly informative. Do you expect to hold another session next year? Depending on, I guess, the reaction that we get, yes. Our goal here is to provide our investors with additional, more information to help them make a better investment decision. I think just giving you an extra layer of detail as to how we're running our business, and I think that this has been helpful for us as a team as well to communicate our story a bit better. I think we would absolutely consider it.
If this was useful, we would absolutely want to do it for the investment community.
Yeah. I think that's a good point, Ben. The fact that we obviously did just show up and do this, we had some prep work, and we did a few practice runs on it, whether it be a Teams meeting or what have you. I have to tell you, I think each and every one of us learned a lot for doing that and even encouraged each other to add something or do something different with their presentation, but it also encourages the team to do something different in their business when they go back.
That's right.
Just the fact that I think it's helpful for the team. Quite honestly, you guys have been asking for this for a year at least to go deeper dive.
We started off by giving you quarterly reports with more detail in the business units. This is the next step to say, "You can understand these units better." Yeah, we will do more. Again, I think it would be great to hear feedback on what you thought of this. We can tailor these to different things. We'd be happy to. As I told you just a minute ago, we were meeting for three days as an executive team for other things. To get one of these done, to take an extra day or an evening out, it's easy to do, and we'd be happy to continue doing them.
Yeah. I agree. Let me see if there are any more questions that have come in, Tom. Okay.
I think that's it in terms of questions at this time on the content of the presentation that we made today. Tom, do you want to close?
No, I just want to again thank our team for the hard work they put in. I want to thank all of you out there who took a significant amount of time if you did stay on for the whole presentation, even if you only stayed on for part of it. We appreciate it because your being interested in what we're doing is very, very important to us. Thank you for that, and thank you for taking the time. With that, I will sign off. Again, any further questions that you have, send them to Andrew Angus, and he will get them to the right location, and we'll get you answers. All right? Thank you.
Thanks, guys.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for sticking with us for three and a half hours. I appreciate it.
Have a good rest of the day wherever you are.