En los próximos años se incrementará el estrés hídrico en varias zonas del mundo, pero en particular en la zona del Mediterráneo con mayor intensidad. En este sentido, tan importante es la gestión de la oferta, es decir, cómo generamos nuevas infraestructuras para regenerar agua, para desalar, para utilizar fuentes alternativas, como la gestión de la demanda, es decir, cómo acompañamos a todos los sectores hacia esa transición hídrica para ser más eficiente, utilizar menos recursos y, por tanto, en definitiva, ser más resiliente y más competitivo.
Creo que los dos grandes retos que hemos de afrontar son, de una parte, almacenar agua en épocas de abundancia para poder disponer en momentos de escasez y utilizar el agua tantas veces de forma tan eficaz como sea posible.
Climate change is obviously one of the major culprits. Its impact is often manifested through water, whether that's too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time, such as flooding, or too little water, such as drought. The pool industry itself, of course, is intimately connected with water, not just the most obvious connection of the end users putting water in their pools.
Si conseguimos que esa piscina consuma menos agua por los sistemas que podemos hacer de eficiencia, de protección, de digitalización, todo eso va a contribuir a que al final el impacto en ese sector económico o en esa ciudad o municipio sea mucho menor.
Disponemos de procesos técnicos para hacerlo cada vez más potentes, cada vez más eficientes y cada vez más capaces.
Yo creo que parte del trabajo del sector es conseguir cada vez más una piscina que tenga menos impacto o que pueda utilizar recursos alternativos a los convencionales. Un elemento que a veces la normativa, desgraciadamente, no va a la misma velocidad que la innovación y la tecnología.
It was a pleasure to read the report by Fluidra because it acknowledges the complexity and the interrelatedness of those challenges.
Creo que Fluidra marca un camino en la idea de las empresas que quieren trabajar en valor compartido, en la idea de que no solo es una cuestión de competitividad, que también, sino también es un elemento de impacto social y ambiental positivo.
All these things put together make this a seminal report, and I believe it will have an impact way beyond the pool industry. I think, first and foremost, it's a call for action, for collective action.
Es un campo abonado para que Fluidra tome esa posición proactiva y desarrolle, y sobre todo asegure que se utilizan esas prácticas sostenibles de uso del agua.
Just like water, we are in constant flow. We see ourselves in it. We are inspired by it. We let it guide us. At Fluidra, we work to protect the sustainable and renewable nature of water, as well as the experience it creates. We innovate with it, turning it into a useful resource for today and vital for tomorrow. We protect a safe and healthy future where water continues to offer memorable moments for all. With every wave, we move forward, ready to find new paths, new ways to transform ourselves into something better, all with one purpose: to turn water into a better world. Will you help us to achieve it? Fluidra. We turn water into a better world.
Hi. Good afternoon to all of you here. We have around 100 people joining us in Barcelona today, and we have another 100 or so online. Good afternoon or good morning to everyone joining us today. I'm pleased to welcome you to Fluidra's 2025 Capital Markets Day. I'm Clara Valera. I'm Strategy, IR, and FP&A Senior Director. I have 24 years of experience in corporate finance, strategy, M&A, and investor relations, and I have been with Fluidra two and a half years. It is a pleasure to be here with you today. I have an amazing group of Fluidra's leaders who are going to talk to you about our markets, about our global leading platform, our strategy, our initiatives to accelerate profitable and sustainable growth, and to continue to deliver value. I also have—we have a packed agenda.
We will have a break around 4:30 for coffee and some drinks at the end. We have a beautiful product display here to showcase our connected product ecosystem, our innovative and sustainable products, and our beautiful commercial pool projects. Nacho, Torsten, Francesc, Nicolas, and David, they will be really happy to answer your questions. Please take your time and go and learn a little bit more about Fluidra. Now, we have a Q&A session at the end, so I would ask you to please let the presenters do their presentation and save your questions. We have plenty of time for that. That is it. Thank you all to Barcelona for hosting us today. I leave the floor to Eloi for some initial words
Hello. Okay. Thank you, Clara. Welcome, everybody. We are really glad to have all of you here with us this afternoon. When we set up this Capital Markets Day—no, I lost part of my finger—when we set up this Capital Markets Day several months ago, I'm honest with you that we didn't imagine that that was going to happen just at the same time that Trump was going to announce all his tariffs worldwide. We know that these periods of time generate a lot of uncertainty. We are probably going through a period of uncertainty once again. I'm saying once again because when we look back at the history of the last 10 and 20 years, we have been through this kind of uncertainty several times.
We know that this kind of environment raises a lot of questions, questions about the global economy, questions about the sector, questions about Fluidra itself. We will try to give as much color as we can on this period of uncertainty that I was talking at the beginning. My father, he shared with me, I would say, a piece of advice once some time ago in one of these periods of uncertainty to hold to manage this kind of periods. He told me, "Eloi, try to find three anchors that for you are strong ones, anchors that you can feed during the time that you go through these periods of time." I'm going to share with you my three anchors. The first one related to tariffs. I wanted to connect each of these anchors with one word.
When I was thinking on the tariff one, it was for me difficult to find a word because I could say pricing power or global footprint or better position than the competitors. I choose the word of anticipation. In Fluidra, we have been working in a possible plan or in plans to set off the tariffs. I would say since Xavier, since December or November last year. The most important thing is that we have executed already part of these plans to be sure that we are able to offset the tariffs. My first anchor, we have anticipated and we are able to offset the impact of them. The second anchor, and probably one of the most important ones for me, the second anchor is related to our sector. The concept related to this anchor is resilience.
This is a market that has shown resilience time after time. If we look where we have today, the most cyclical part of our business, which is the new construction, we see that new construction is at the lowest point, practically at the lowest point of the history. Anticipation, resilience. The third anchor is related to Fluidra itself. Here I could not find one word. I was using two words. I would say solid fundamentals. We have been building a company that is unique, a global one with a team with expertise to grow, but also with expertise to adapt to the market. We have been in all these past years demonstrating our capacity to bring huge results. We have, in a certain way, gained market share, improved our margins faster than no one.
This is all about the fundamentals of this company, the team, and the experience to manage this one. Of course, we are going to face some challenges in front of us, but also we see a world full of opportunities. We believe that Fluidra is in the best place to get all of these opportunities. As I say, we have the fundamentals, we have the talent to do that, and we have the vision to do that. Like always, there's going to be losers and winners. What we are trying to explain today to all of you is why Fluidra is going to be the winner once again. With this one, Xavier, the floor is yours.
Next slide is one that we have added at the last minute with all this noise coming from the tariffs. Look how we have started the year. Very solid start of the year, very much aligned with the guidance that we provided at the end of February. Revenue growth of 7%, which if you adjust for currency and perimeter, it delivers at 5%. With North America, a little bit higher than Europe. North America running mid to high single, while Europe and rest of the world running low to mid single digit. With very positive contribution of volume and a little bit of contribution coming from price. Great start of the year, very much aligned with the direction that we shared with all of you back at the end of February. Talking around the elephant in the room, the tariffs.
As Eloi was mentioning, we have already taken action. We were anticipating this. We have already passed a 3.5% price increase in North America. This was to take care of the initial round of tariffs, so it does not include the impact of last week's reciprocal tariff. We are planning and thinking about doing an additional round of price. In addition, we are working with contract manufacturers and the supplier base to share part of the pain, and those negotiations are progressing very well. Our expectation is to offset entirely the impact of tariffs in the P&L. We shared the guidance in February with you. Obviously, that guidance did not include all these tariffs.
What we are trying to do here is we're going to have a higher revenue number because we are passing significant price increases to offset the cost of tariffs that we will have to pay to achieve the same EBITDA number. In absolute values, we are looking for that absolute number of EBITDA that we shared with you at the end of February. The plan is ongoing, part of it has been executed, and we are about to execute on the second phase of this plan. There is a lot of uncertainty out there, but we are focused on executing on what we can control. We have a strong company with strong fundamentals in the sector, and we are convinced that we are going to deliver on what we promised a few weeks ago. Okay? With that, I will give the floor to Eloi again to continue with the presentation.
Thank you, Xavier. I forgot that it was my time again. Okay, let me ask you one thing. Close your eyes just for a second. Do not think about market trends and tariffs and so on. Just close your eyes and think about, I would say, a nice moment on your holidays. Close it, close it that I do not see you with your eyes closed. Close and think. I am sure that in many of these memories, in many of those memories that you have think, there is a pool. I mean, a pool is much more than a hole and all the equipment around the pool. I am sure that you have imagined yourself or with your family or with your kids or just alone relaxing, enjoying a glass of wine or a glass of water, depending on what you drink.
We like or we think in Fluidra that we wake up every morning to make these memories happen. We like to think that we are the ones that we are behind the scenes preparing everything for these moments, for these unforgettable moments to happen. That vision, which is like living on purpose or by purpose, is giving us a competitive advantage because it's giving to us a wider approach to our sector and a deeper approach of our sector. I forgot to turn on the... These are the people that you were thinking about before. These are your moments. In Fluidra, we have a purpose, which I think is simple from one side, powerful, and beautiful. I don't know if you have... I don't know if you know our purpose, but I'm going to share with you. This is our purpose. We turn water into these memories.
We turn water into these unforgettable times. A better world could be many things. You could think about a better company to work, a better supplier to supply, or I love to think the smartest company to invest. We turn also water into the smartest company to invest. If we look back at our numbers, and this is our numbers, since we got listed, a growth of 7% CAGR on sales, expanding our EBITDA, practically beating all the index in the world. If you look at the last, I think that this is six years, if you look at the last six years, exactly the same, or I would say even better numbers. You know, numbers are really important. For me, it's one of the things that we follow and we try to continue to improve.
The most important thing that we did during this time is to build this unique company that we have, this unique platform that we have. We are sure that with what we have built, with the fundamentals, with the talent, and with our vision, this company is able to accelerate growth and continue improving our profits. That is what we are trying to explain today. Jaime and the team will walk you through our plans to show you that we did that in the past, and we are going to repeat that going forward. Jaime, now it is your turn.
Okay, so good afternoon and good morning to those connected. I'm really pleased and very excited to be here in front of you today. I joined Fluidra back on June 1 of 2024. It's been almost 10 months, 10 wonderful months. I have learned a lot from great people. I have learned a lot about the industry. I have to tell you that this is a phenomenal company. During those 10 months, I've been getting asked a lot of questions about what's your strategy? What is it you think about the business? What do you think about the industry? What's next for Fluidra? That's what you're about to see today. We're going to try together as a great team to answer those questions, to give you clarity on what we're trying to accomplish at Fluidra. Let me start by talking about the industry.
As Eloi mentioned, as you know, I came from a very different industry. What I have learned about the pool industry is that this is an industry with strong fundamentals. It's a very resilient industry. It's an industry that does well even in difficult macroeconomic times when you think about new build, when you think about aftermarket. I find this industry fantastic, a great opportunity to invest for all of you, of course. Now when I go and get into Fluidra, and to answer this question of why Fluidra wins, I have to tell you that Fluidra is a phenomenal company. Eloi and the team who have been working together for many years have built a beautiful and amazing, very strong platform. A strong platform within, as I said before, a structurally attractive industry. Why are we winning? Why is Fluidra winning?
Number one, it's clear that we're the number one player with a unique footprint. What I mean for unique footprint, I'm talking about manufacturing footprint, commercial footprint, the global presence we have in all the different regions. You will see more details. The broadest product assortment we have, the great brands we have, strong brands in North America, strong brands in the European markets, and of course, our operational excellence. We are the leaders in customer-centric innovation. I call it that way, customer-centric innovation. It's not innovation just because we're not doing innovation. It's all directed to meeting the needs of our customers. We have been working a lot in connectivity. We have a lot of connected products. IoT has been a focus for this company. Of course, sustainable products, sustainable pools.
What we're trying to do with all this, and we're going to get deeper into the presentation, is how we differentiate ourselves from the global competitors. We're going to be different. We're going to be more attractive. Third, an outstanding track record in M&A. This company has done more than 20 different acquisitions in the last 15, 16 years. What's the beautiful thing about that? Those have been financially and strategically compelling, and have helped the company to consolidate the industry. Of course, the phenomenal team we have in this company. A team that is committed, a team with ambition, a humble but courageous team, and a team with determination. That determination that Eloi mentioned when this company has gone through difficult times to get stringer, to get better. Last but not least, you saw Eloi's numbers.
I do not have to talk about it, but I have to. The phenomenal, outstanding financial performance of the company. When you think about why this company is different, why this company wins, you can go through the list. That list makes this company different than the rest of the players in the industry. When I was getting ready for the presentation, and I have to learn a lot of the things because I was not here, I found this information fascinating. Think about a company that went public in 2007 and for multiple years worked on being focused on the European market and built the strongest presence in the European market. There is not a single competitor that can even, that is close and can even match the presence this company has in Europe.
That's a huge strength when it comes to diversification, when it comes to how this company can use different opportunities to grow, to manage difficult moments like the one we're going through right now. During all those 10 years, I was not here, but the team did a phenomenal job growing the business, making the business stronger. It was the opportunity about the U.S. In 2018, they made the decision to acquire Zodiac. The acquisition of Zodiac took this company to the next level, took Fluidra, and what happened after that acquisition to the leadership position in the world, in the industry, to become the number one company in the pool industry with all the attributes you can see right there. We'll talk a little bit more about it. I'm not going to get into the details.
What I want you to take out of this is look at the financial performance, look at the revenue growth, look at the CAGR, look at the profitability, look at the return on capital employed. Amazing, amazing numbers. Here we are today, having this opportunity to share with all of you what's next for Fluidra, what's the future of this company, what is in this next phase of growth for the company. That's exactly what you will see today. How are we going to do it? What are the different things, the different strategies we're going to have? What's going to happen on how we're going to reinforce our leadership? How are we going to get better in some markets where we don't have a strong presence? How are we going to get better in product development? How are we going to get better in innovation, in digital?
Of course, innovation, digitalization, and differentiation. I want you to keep this word, differentiation, as a keyword for what we're trying to do in Fluidra. You will see from Jorge May Torrena, our COO, what it is that we're going to do in operations. The muscle that needs to get stronger in operations is a huge opportunity for us. It is going to make us more competitive, more cost-efficient, and it is going to impact our productivity. Now we get into the numbers. I'm not going to go in detail to those numbers. What I want to call out is very simple. This is much better in this table, Eloi. It was a good idea. The phenomenal financial performance this company has had in the last 16 years is going to get to the next level.
That's where you see a lot of pluses in all the different pieces. In our CAGR, in our revenue growth, we want to be plus 8, plus 6. Our profitability, we want to be plus the 25% that you see right there. As I said before, we have big aspirations, we have big ambitions, and we have the platform, and we have the people to do it. Here you can get more granularity on how we build these numbers. Behind this, what I want you to read is this concept of why this industry is so resilient, why this business and this company in this industry has so many levers that we can work on, that we can develop, that we can go after to drive growth, to drive profitability. We have new build.
Whether we like it or not, every single year we have new pools in the market. I mean, you can have less, you can have more, but every year there is new build. Second, the install base, millions of pools in the market. Those pools need service, those pools need repair, those pools need remodeling, and it's millions of pools. That, to be honest with you, that was the first thing I learned about this industry, that the install base, and I don't know if I'm going too far, but for me, the install base is a goldmine because those pools are right there. We just got to go after those pools. Then how we keep getting our average ticket up in the equipment business and how that does happen because of our bundle concept. We keep adding more products to the bundle, and that's a competitive advantage.
The bigger and better the bundle, the more money people will invest in the pools, and the more differentiation we're going to have with competitors, with Chinese competitors. Some of you asked me the question about Chinese competitors. Here is the answer for that. You get weather, you get market share gains, and, of course, inorganic growth. Why is inorganic growth important? Because of the history of this company acquiring companies. I'm going to pause a little bit here because this is a very important slide. This is the beginning of what you will see from the rest of the team today. This is what we call as a team strategy and enablers that deliver our long-term, midterm, and long-term growth. This strategy has four attributes. It's very clean, easy to understand, it's very straightforward, it's adaptable. We need to be adaptable.
Look at what we're going through right now. I mean, we thought it was going to be difficult, but not that difficult. We got to be adaptable. It is a very consistent strategy. What this allows us is, first of all, to explain this to you in a very simple way. Simplicity is important. Beyond that, this allows us to explain this to our people around the globe so they know exactly what we're trying to accomplish, what we're trying to do. The first one is accelerate growth, but it's not any kind of growth. It has to be profitable, sustainable, and consistent growth to make us stronger, for us to be able to deal with good moments and with difficult moments like the one we're dealing with right now. Competitive differentiation and foster competitive differentiation. How are we going to do this?
With our customer-centric innovation. We're going to go faster in innovation. With digital, with connectivity, with product development. We're going to be better developing our products and want to be faster. With our sustainable products. What's the purpose of everything we're trying to do from the competitive differentiation? First, we just don't sell products. We want to sell products, services, and solutions. Number one. Number two, whatever we offer to the market should offer productivity to the pro, to that person that builds pools and cleans pools and repairs pools. Connectivity to the homeowner and connectivity to the pro and a great experience. This business is an experience business, good experience for the homeowner, good experience for the pro.
Those two things, the product services solutions, the productivity, connectivity, and experience all together, at the end of the day, will get us to how we generate more demand for our products. That demand generation is what is going to support our growth. We have the enablers. There is no way it can be successful implementing those strategies without the right enablers, without the right support of the enablers. Of course, our people, the talent we have around the globe and the culture we have. Financial discipline. Xavier and the team, they do a phenomenal job from that perspective. Technology, data, digital, artificial intelligence, analytics. I do not mean we are great at everything, but we keep those in mind. When we are good, we got to continue being good. When we are not good, we got to improve. We need this.
We need technology to be more efficient. Ongoing transformation. It is clear that in today's world, companies that have the capacity to run the business, deliver results, grow the business, improve profitability, and transform the business because of everything that is going on, those companies are the winners. That is why we talk about ongoing transformation. We have a team of transformation in the company that supports the business function and supports the regions in that process of improving how we work, how we make everything we do more efficient. Last but not least, sustainability as a key competency for us as a company, given the industry and the products we have. What is the key for that strategy? To take it into, to turn it into a reality, to turn it into something that we can see is people, is the organization we have in place.
During the last six months, our organization has evolved. This org chart is that way on purpose. You can see on your right, my left, your right side of the slide, the regions. Before, we had two regions. We changed that, and we now have three regions. We go after the market in three geographic regions today. North America, run by Jon Viner . You will hear from Jon what he is doing in North America to grow the business. Southern Europe, Australia and New Zealand, run by Carlos Franquesa. Then central, I have to read this, I am sorry. Central and Northern Europe, and emerging markets. What is emerging markets? Emerging markets is Latin America, Asia, Middle East, and Africa. The reason we did that is to stay closer to the markets. You heard from me, customer-centricity.
That's what drives this organization, is to be closer to the market, to be closer to the customers so we can serve the customers well, we can meet the needs of those customers. You got on the other side, our functions. Our functions to support what we're doing in the regions. You have the scale of these global functions, economies of scale efficiencies with the adaptive go-to-market approach. What do we have in our functions? We have finance. Xavier runs finance. We have operations run by Jorge. You will hear from Jorge. He's in strategy. CPO, our product function run by Keith. Our CIO, he's not here. He's here with us. He won't be presented. He's Xavier, which is everything related to technology and IT. CHRO, Sandra, she's also with us. The strategy, IR and FP&A, Clara.
You already heard from her, but you will hear more from Clara. With this organization, with this strategy, I want to close with two slides. This slide shows you our global footprint. What is really interesting about this slide? If you take this slide and do a comparison between Fluidra and the other big competitors of the industry, they do not have the geographic coverage we have. This is a unique footprint when it comes to manufacturing, when it comes to commercial organizations, even when it comes to R&D. What you have to take out of this, and this is why I also love this industry, look at the market sizes you have. I am not going to get into the numbers. You can read the numbers. Look at the market sizes. Look at the market shares we have. We are either number one or number two.
This is a great opportunity, number one. The most important part of that opportunity is today we have the regional presence that gives us the strength to go after those markets and to accelerate growth, to go after those strategies that I just shared with all of you. What we have here is a lot of growth potential, number one, and number two, diversification. It's great to have a great business in Europe. It's great to have a great business in North America. It's even better to have them together, one or the other. You have them together. If you're trying to go after the other market, which is the new organization we put in place for David to go after emerging markets, you have markets where you can have significant growth, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa. There are opportunities in those markets.
We see those markets more as markets with opportunities instead of risks. You just have to know how to do it. You just have to manage that. My last slide before I turn it over to Clara is the functions. The functions that give us the global capabilities and the scale to support this growth, this regional growth, and to support the transformation. Here we have our broadest product offering. Some of you will say, "Yeah, but that brings a lot of complexity to have products for Europe, to have products for North America and the brands." Sometimes a little bit of complexity is good for business. You got to try to keep it simple, but sometimes a little bit of complexity, if you do it right, is good. That is exactly one of the strengths we have.
We can meet the needs of the reciprocal, the consumer, and the commercial business. Customer-centric innovation is a core competency and lever of differentiation for us, as I said before. Technology, digital, data, you name it, to offer productivity, connectivity, and experience. For us to be able to generate demand, to convert more users into our products. Our central operations team, Jorge May Torrena, is doing a phenomenal job. Believe me, it's not easy. He came from outside to come into this company. We have more than 30 manufacturing facilities, but he is doing a phenomenal job, and he has a great idea. You will hear from him the plan he has to continue gaining productivity, to continue gaining efficiencies, to make this business better, stronger, more profitable, and also to help us on how we invest in the business. Our transformation office.
Our transformation office is that support office for the group to be able and to make this happen. With this, what's next in this is now you will hear more details about the strategy. You will hear from the regions on how the plan they have. Now you will hear from Clara about the market, and you will see the opportunity. We will get into the regions, and we will get into the functions. You got more granularity and more substance of what is behind these strategies and the plan that we have. Thank you very much, and I'll turn it over to Clara.
Thank you, Jaime. Fluidra is the global leader in a EUR 17 billion market. We have a 12% share, more than any other player in the world. In fact, we are number one or number two in 80% of the countries where we operate. As you've heard, in the largest market in the world, we are the number two player. Our market is fragmented, which means we have plenty of opportunities to consolidate, as well as opportunities for expansion. Around 80% of our market is residential pool, while commercial pool is around 20%. In both cases, aftermarket represents the large majority of those market areas. That means, or that provides resiliency and predictability to our business.
We are well positioned in the residential pool market to continue to grow, and we have a significant opportunity to expand in commercial pool, where our sales are 10%, while the market represents around 20% of the market. I will talk a little bit about residential and commercial pool in a moment. I also would like to draw your attention to the fact that new pool construction represents around 30% of our business, which is not that dissimilar to the average of the industry. Now, much attention and time is spent on discussing new pool construction, even though it is a smaller part of our business because it has gone through a big period of growth recently and then an adjustment period. I want, and obviously, it is the most cyclical part of our business, but I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what drives demands for pools.
As you heard from Eloi, and you'll hear from me, a pool is a great place to relax. It's a great place to create memorable experiences with your family and friends, to exercise, to enhance your well-being. It's the anchor to the backyard experience. Therefore, the desire to own a pool drives demand for our products. Coming back to the resilience of our business, the beauty of this industry is that whether we build 50,000 pools or 100,000 pools, they are all adding to the installed base, an installed base of pools that will need to be maintained over time. Now, over the last 17 years, you have seen how the installed base of pools has grown by around 2% to 20 million pools. Now, we expect that 2% growth to be a good reference for aftermarket demand in our industry and in our business. And why is that?
Because once you own a pool, you will invest to maintain it. First, you build the pool. Then you spend some money on consumables to enjoy your pool, to maintain your pool, such as chemicals, water testing products, water treatment products, a robot, a cleaning kit. After a few years, you probably need to replace or upgrade some of your equipment. Maybe you change your single speed pump with a variable speed pump to save some energy costs, or something breaks and you need to repair it. You will have to spend some money on upgrading and repair. Probably after 17-20 years, you'd like a new pool, or you have to remodel your pool. In fact, pool owners today are prepared to pay twice as much for a pool as they were prepared to pay 10 years ago.
In the U.S., probably more like four times, given the more connected and value-added equipment. When you think of building a pool and the budget you spend on a pool, pool equipment only represents 10%-15% of your overall budget. That means that although price is important, product quality and product consistency is a much more important decision when it comes to the site, what equipment to put on your pool path or on your pool, because when the summer comes, you want to make sure that you will enjoy the pool with your family. The average age of the installed base is around 20 years old. That means there is a big opportunity to upgrade with more connected, with more value-added equipment, and to repair the existing installed base of pools.
Once a pool is built, it creates a reliable and predictable aftermarket spending stream. Now, bear with me for a moment. There is a lot of information on this chart, but coming back to new build, okay? This is new pool construction over the last 44 years in countries representing more than 70% of Fluidra sales. Five countries. Now, over the last 44 years, and actually over the last 10 years, the average number of new pools built was around 210,000 pools. That is actually not that dissimilar to what we believe is a normalized level of new pool construction in those countries. Now, look at 2024. We built 174,000 pools. In the U.S., 61,000 pools. That is very close to the historical trough in 2009 of 54,000 pools.
If over the next five years, new pool construction is to return to the normalized level, we will see growth in new pool construction of around 20% or 3%-4% per annum. Where we sit today, we believe we are at trough levels, and that new pool construction will drive growth as it returns to normalized levels in the midterm. I come back now to commercial pool. This is a EUR 4 billion market opportunity where we are underrepresented. Aftermarket represents 60% of the market, including consumables. Growth in this market will be driven by demand for hospitality, wellness, and recreation. Aftermarket services will provide stability and reliability. We are strategically well positioned to grow in commercial pool. Now, what drives growth in commercial pool? A project with Water Future.
You can see here a range of commercial pool projects, which expands more or less from bigger residential pools for hotels, motels, apartments, and condominiums. That is a very large residential pool. As you move to the right, you see a spectrum of much more complex projects like wellness centers, leisure clubs, lagoons. Now, a water feature in each of these projects enhances the visitor's experience. A pool and a spa in a hotel is much better than a hotel without a pool and a spa. Fountains in a park make the park much more enjoyable. Enjoying water drives demand for commercial pool. As you move around the spectrum of all these projects, you need more specialized equipment. You need turnkey services to provide end-to-end solutions and ensure you have a reliable and durable installation. Now, let's see some water in action.
To sum it up, Fluidra is the global leader in a EUR 17 billion market with an opportunity to consolidate and plenty of opportunity for growth, both in residential pool and in commercial pool. With that, I leave you with Jaime for some closing remarks.
Thank you. Thank you, Clara. Okay, before you start hearing from the team, the people that are making this happen, the heads of the region, the head of the functions, and while we were going through the presentation, we wanted to kind of close, but also open this section. It is kind of a way to explain this slide. You heard from Clara about the market. You have heard about residential, commercial, everything. You have heard from me a lot about customer centricity. I think what is very important to put in front of all of you is what is that we mean for customers and putting the customer at the center. Everything you will hear from here is going to be around that customer centricity. How do we win?
It's very connected to how we see the market, which is on one side, the residential pool, and on the other side, the commercial pool. What you just heard from Clara, which is a very good opportunity for Fluidra. We don't have the market share in commercial pool that we want to have. That's why we're going to speed up and accelerate our commercial business. How do we see the residential pool? First of all, the residential pro. Who is the residential pro? That person that goes and builds pools, gives maintenance, the famous aftermarket. What do we provide? We provide high quality and reliable products and great service, helping to improve productivity. Let's go back to the famous word, productivity. For the consumer, for the homeowner, people who own pools, what is that that we do? We make their pool easier and more enjoyable.
We provide a hassle-free pool experience. The other keyword, the experience. Productivity and experience. You can see the range of products. This is the famous plug and play products. On one side, you have the equipment products for the pool pro. For the consumer, you have the plug and play products and all the kind of products. You will hear a lot from Xavier when it comes to Aiper, what you have right there. That business goes straight into this business. In the commercial pool, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but commercial pro is what Clara did really, really well, and she explained. Here you have, it's very similar to residential pro, which is we provide specialized products.
We have specific products for this vertical, and you saw all the different verticals, but we have special products for this business to basically improve their productivity, make their job easier and efficient. Then solutions. This is a very specialized vertical of commercial pools. You see those Olympic pools, those are big projects. This is where we provide end-to-end solutions. Here we have today in this group, Torsten, Head of Commercial Business . He's brand new in the company, not in the industry, and he's helping us to take this to the next level. The summary of this is, again, going back to try to show everything in a simple way, this is how we win. This is how we see our customers. This is how we put customers at the center of everything we do in the company.
Now I'll turn it over to the regions. Jon is going to go first talking about North America, and then the functions will come and explain some of the enablers. Thank you very much, Jon. I'll pass it over to you.
Thanks a lot, Jaime. Jon Viner , President of North America. I've been with Fluidra for just under three years. You can tell I'm an American as well by the accent. Originally from England. Prior to joining Fluidra, I was the global president of BioLab, which is KIK Consumer Products Pool Division. I do bring a lot of pool experience into this role, both in North America and from a global perspective. I'm really excited to talk about the North America region. Before I dive into that, let me reiterate what we're doing in respect to tariffs, because it's very topical for my region. As you heard from the earlier remarks, earlier on the year, we collaboratively worked as a team to understand the issue. We know that there were preliminary tariffs early in 2025 that were going to impact us from our supply footprint.
We worked together to identify three key pillars to address these tariffs, work with our supply chain team to minimize the impact, control our controllable spend with financial discipline. Third, minimize and nullify the effect of those tariffs through pricing actions. We announced those pricing actions mid-March with a 3.5% price increase, and they will go effective on the 15th of April. In the last couple of days, we've seen some more noise around the tariffs. We're going to replicate our strategic playbook again. We have to understand where everything lies, what the impact is going to be. As Xavier highlighted earlier on, if we need to, we will execute pricing actions again to ensure that there's no impact to our P&L.
I'm sure there'll be questions later on, but I want to reiterate that the teams in North America are doing a great job collaborating at the global level to address the issue that's out there. Let's now dive into how we're going to win in North America. North America is the largest, most profitable, and highest value market globally. There's over 10 million pools, 6 million of that installed base, that gold mine that Jaime talked about. We've got 4 million above-ground pools and over 360,000 commercial bodies of water. This region is a rich, sustainable opportunity. It's not just a numbers game. The American dream of having a pool in the backyard has evolved. These are now smart, automated pools that have a resort-like function that brings experiences and long-lasting memories to families, individuals, and families.
The North American region also represents the largest opportunity in size and value to Fluidra. Valued at about EUR 9 billion, that market's comprised of pool equipment, chemicals, cleaners, water testing products, pool covers, vinyl liners, and other pool materials. As you look at the market and how it's organized, in each of those key categories, you have one or two players, key manufacturers, and a number of limited distributors on a nationwide basis. It is relatively a concentrated market. Fluidra occupies the number two position with 10% of the market size. Over time, we've grown that share through organic growth and through strategic acquisitions. I think what's more exciting is the composition of that market and the demand that's part of it. We've heard about the residential new builds, the aftermarket, and the commercial. I want to look at each of these individually.
Let's start off with 50% of that demand generation, which is the residential aftermarket. As you've heard previously, it's about the servicing, the maintenance, the repair, and the remodeling of that installed bodies of water and installed pool base. It's a beautiful, recurring, reliable revenue stream. It's beautiful. What is more important is that we have an aged installed base of pools in North America. These pools, as Clara said earlier on, go through that cycle where they need to be replenished, repaired, and replaced, but also with new and advanced technology. The residential new build, we play really well as Fluidra in the mid to high price point of these new builds. The beauty with the new build, there are some exciting new trends that are taking place.
We're seeing the migration in the U.S. of people coming to the Sunbelt states, the southern states, where a pool is a high demand from a residential perspective. Also, as I said, the pool is about the excitement of a backyard experience. Pool owners are looking at things like lighting, LED lighting, multiple lights, automation, chemical control, all exciting features which build up the pool, which adds to a higher pool content. Now, I think what's more exciting is seeing the evolution of Fluidra. This is why Fluidra wins. The sales evolution of Fluidra outperforms three of our other key pool players when you look at the period of 2019 to 2024. When you look at that CAGR of 16%, we are the fastest growing pool player in North America. Let's double-click into that a little bit more to understand where's that growth coming from.
If we look at our dealer network, these are our pool builders that we work with, our retailers, and our service pro professionals. If we look at that dollar spend from a new build perspective over that same time period, it has increased. The CAGR is 16%. The number of accounts or customers that we have in that new build category has a CAGR of 10%. Looking at the aftermarket, the CAGR numbers are 14% and 11% respectively. We are gaining market share, and we are growing faster than anyone else in the region. Why are we doing this? How are we doing it? It starts with the customer. We are 100% focused on the customer, the customer centricity.
We have an attentive, extensive, and committed technical sales team that partners with the customer from a relationship perspective but provides the technical expertise to help them do their job and be the best. This then fosters long-lasting relationships. We have a large, extensive dealer network that's getting better. We provide exclusive benefits and partnership that makes the professionals and builders be better, thus making us the partner of choice. We don't just sell equipment. We sell the Fluidra bundle, the Fluidra pool experience. It's a smart, automated system that keeps on getting better. We innovate at scale, leveraging our R&D capabilities. You're going to hear from Keith McQueen, our Chief Product Officer, later on. That's going to go into more detail. We set the pace for innovation. Our customer-centric approach delivers consistent market share gains.
I think the true testament of this, of our customer-centric approach, is our customers are telling other customers to do business with us. That is really powerful because it underpins the customer-centric mindset of the sales team, a true testament to the sales team and the overall team of North America. We are going to take the wins that we have and continue to leverage that as our foundation to accelerate the growth. We are going to focus on the key area, which is the residential pro market. We need to continue growing our new build. These are the seeds of the future. The new pool builds go into the installed base, which is that beautiful aftermarket. Whilst the market saw a down 15% in new pool builds last year, the Fluidra builders saw a flat to 5% increase in pool builds.
We're partnered with the right builders to win. As we see an upturn in the marketplace, the new pool builds, we're very well prepared to see the benefits of it. Our biggest opportunity is the aftermarket. Our mix of revenue between new pool builds and aftermarket is underrepresented versus the industry average. We have a huge opportunity here to continue to take market share. We've been winning with the programs that we've been implementing. A great example of this is our drop shipping campaign. We have smart, automated equipment, pumps, heaters that are easy to drop right in and replace competitive products in their pool set. We're also investing in digital technology to make our pool professionals and builders better at their jobs, helping them be more efficient, providing diagnostic information so as they plan their routes. They know what they need to do.
They can be more effective, utilizing their time more efficiently. Again, reinforcing why we're the partner of choice. We've heard a lot about the commercial pool and our opportunities there. We want to take our market share to 15% in the commercial pool for commercial pools in North America. We're currently at mid-single digits. How are we going to do this? Focusing, first of all, on those hotel, motel, apartment condominiums. They're a natural extension to the residential pool where we've seen great success. We've broadened our product portfolio, driven the awareness that we're participating in commercial pools in HVAC. In addition to that, as a result of that, we've seen double-digit revenue growth over the last three years, and we see that continuing.
On the more sophisticated institutional large commercial pools, we've placed investments in technical personnel that can partner with the design engineers and the architects to help with these products and solutions. We need to connect with the consumer. We have our current Aqualink app and our future Fluidra Pool app that are going to enable us to connect, communicate, do call to actions, to create demand for our consumers and pool owners. More importantly, those applications will enhance the consumers' and pool owners' experience with the pool so that they can have memorable experiences with their family and friends and really enjoy the Fluidra experience. We are the number one build player right now. We're well positioned to deliver aftermarket growth. We are growing faster than anyone else in the marketplace. In conclusion and closing, North America is a highly attractive, high-value region.
We have a winning strategy. We are growing market share. We have a customer-first mindset, and we have the opportunity to unlock unmatched potential. We are winning now. We have set the foundation to win even bigger in the future. Thank you for your time. I hand it over to Carlos for our Southern European region. Thank you.
Thank you. Hello everybody. I'm Carlos Franquesa. I'm the President of Southern Europe and Australia. I will explain why I do have a region, Southern Europe and Australia. Okay, and I've been 18 years in the group, most of them in Europe and Australia. Okay, just to start, why we have these regions, it's clear. The markets are exactly not, but more of the same. Mature markets with extended installed base of pools. Okay, the go-to-market is very similar in all these markets.
Okay, we are talking about an area of these 4.8 million installed base pools. Okay, important. We were able to build in this area 120,000 new pools in 2024. This is when you saw from Clara the graphic, you see the importance of these 120,000 pools. Okay, we are in seven countries. It's Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Italy, and then Australia and New Zealand. Okay, we have 70 ProCenters. What a percentage is? Maybe some of you already know, but it's a regional branch in a self-service mode. This means that we don't have people on the shelf serving the customers. They come, they pick the goods, they sign, and they go back. With this, we have avoided a lot of transit in the stores, and we have accelerated a lot of the business. What is more important is a really light way to connect with our customers.
It's the lightest way to put branches in the area in Southern Europe. Okay, our competitors are starting to copy us now, this model. Okay, so I think this is a winning model. It's important to clarify. And we are serving to 25,000 customers in this area. Okay, on top of that, and this is important, 30% of the sales go through ProCenters. But we have 70% of the sales that go direct to our customers from our three main hubs: Spain, in the north of Spain, France, and Belgium. From there, we can deliver to small builders, to any store in the area. Sometimes we are doing dropshipping to people selling through Amazon. Sometimes we go to your homes to deliver the goods. It's us sometimes. Okay, we have this capability in this area. Fluidra in this area.
It's clear we are the leaders, but 18% is huge. We have four followers that do not arrive to 14% all combined. This is the main characteristic of Fluidra in this area. It has been always the leader and keeping the leadership and growing and getting more market share in the area. I think this is important. Also, as this has been pointed before, residential aftermarket is 50% of our demand. This is a really resilient market. We have a lot to do with commercial and a lot to do with residential aftermarket. We are in the lowest new build. Correct. We have an additional opportunity here to grow. Another characteristic in this area, very difficult for our customers to adopt IoT connectivity. This has been, I will say, a constant activity that we have been developing in the last, I will say, 10 years.
We only have, of these 4.6 million pools, 200,000, maximum 250,000 pools connected. You see how difficult it is for us and has been for us to connect our consumer. Our feeling is to go for this IoT because it is going to be the way to bundle with our customers. If you have a pool, I do not see you using three apps to manage your pool. You want one and the best one. This is our game, to be the first and have the best application with end users. What additional is there? You see, if we are number 118, we have less than 14. It is a completely atomized, I would say, more than atomized sector in this area. We have a huge opportunity of concentration. Acquisition will be important here. We always say we are vertically integrated.
I'm trying to explain in just one minute what is vertically integrated. As you see here, 75% of the products that we are selling are manufactured by us. We are manufacturers, and we are the largest manufacturer in the area. There is no competitor close to us. Why are we selling these 25% from third parties? Because when we go to the market, we present us as distributors. This is the beauty of our model. We have the knowledge of manufacturing, and we go to the market distributing. Why? Because we consider that the best option in this area is to be one-stop shop. This means that a customer that is coming home is picking everything he needs.
We do not want them going to a third party, buying some products that we do not have, because then we are giving the space and the opportunity to this competitor to sell our products. I think it is relevant because with this model, we can be manufacturers, but distributing to any kind of customer in the sector: consumer, retail pros, and commercial pros. These are the guys that are delivering to the end user for sure. How we win? How we win? capillarity. We are the closest company with the customer. The ProStore Lite approach, this permits us to be very close to many of our customers. On top of that, we launched the online portal that has been developed in the last seven years. We are digitalizing our approach with the customers.
Once they get an easy and comfortable way to connect with you 24 hours, for them it's 24 hours, they will not go to the competitor. This is also a course for us, a running race, I will say. We need to be and continue providing this digital capillarity. Vertical integration, as I explained before, this is very important and very effective in the area. Reliability. When you sell a pool in our area, EUR 30,000, you have to deliver everything. We have pieces of EUR 25. If they don't install a skimmer, they do not open the pool. You have to understand how important it is for us, service. What we have been able to demonstrate in the last 20 years is that we have been very consistent in quality and service. This is a key competitive advantage we have.
Product offering, we are the largest manufacturer, and we have the best portfolio. We are launching every year products that represent more or less 20% of our sales every year, coming from new products. This is what the sector is demanding us. The last point, I just noted just five, but we have more. Fluidra, Fluidra culture. We have been always being fast from the beginning of the company. Really, really fast in decision-making. This has helped us, being in vertical integrated, to understand the user very quick and to move this information to manufacturing and R&D and to be able to come back and deliver the right product. We love to get things done and very, very quick. We are very fast on that. Now, what we are going to do to continue to accelerate our growth, profitable growth.
Okay, retail in this channel, keep pushing capillarity. It has been demonstrated that this is a winning strategy, and we are going to keep doing so. In 2025, we are going to open something like seven new ProCenters. We have a plan to open between five to ten in the next five years. There are opportunities. We are detecting greenfields, greenfields mean areas that we can go and open with our competition. Okay, and also keep developing our portal or our digital approach with our customers through the website. Consumer. We are building brands for the consumer. We are building new product offerings to the consumer because this is about products that are easy to install or plug and play or to maintenance. This is the channel that is representing more of these products. We are detecting a transfer from recipro to this consumer market.
Commercial pool was clear. Prescription, we continue to prescribe solutions. If we prescribe solutions, we are going to install the products. This is forcing us to develop new products as well. It is like an ongoing circle, we would say. IoT bundle, I already said we need to go deeper to continue training our sector and help them to adopt this. This is the winning path, I will say, to combine our products to also come to these apps. We have the Fluidra Pool for the end user. We have the Fluidra Pro for the Pro. We have to connect them. We need both at the same time. For sure, with this tremendous market, we have an important opportunity to concentrate through acquisitions. Just summarizing, we are leaders. We have the right platform to continue winning and being leaders in the region.
Thank you. David is coming now.
Thank you, everybody. My name is David Mendez. I'm the President of the most excited region, I would say. I'm the President of Central, Northern Europe, and Emerging Markets. I'm working in Fluidra for 23 years. I was born in Fluidra. I'm almost a brother of Eloi. The last 17, opening many of the markets that I'm going to introduce you. What is Central, Northern Europe, and Emerging Markets? To make it easier to Jaime, I would say it's the rest of the world. It's a region that counts with around 9 million pools that are growing very fast with around 300,000 new pools a year, where we have a local presence in 38 countries within the region, counting with 72 warehouses and six manufacturing plants and more than 1,800 local employees.
How is the pool market in that region? As you can imagine, it is very different from one country to another, but we can divide it into three main markets. That is depending on the typology of products that they are buying. The first market would be a market that is demanding basic pools. This is mainly in LATAM and Africa region. It is a region with the largest number of pools, with the faster growth, but with the lower price point of a pool. It is about EUR 5,000-EUR 7,000 per pool. This is a region that is key to have local presence because it is usually highly protected markets. We have local, as I already mentioned before, in the key countries. It is also very fragmented. Here you can see an example of one of the pools in that area.
There is a second market that is demanding about premium pools. This is mostly in Central and Northern Europe, where the average price of a pool is about EUR 50,000-EUR 70,000. The pools used to be like in North America, fully equipped with a lot of products. They come with a dosing system, automatic pool cleaners, pool covers, heat pumps, humidifiers, a lot of products that you can check later on here on the display. This is a market that requests high standards of quality, service, and availability. They are also looking for connected and sustainable products. We have a market that demands more commercial pools than the residential pool. This is mostly in Asia and the Middle East area. This is a market driven by the tourism and by the public investments supported by the new urban developments.
In that region, there is very low maturity on the residential pool market and very low penetration on the pool accessories due to the affordable household cost. To manage all this diversity, we have global and local teams focused on each of these markets. If we go to figures, we estimate that the market is about EUR 4.2 billion in size, the second bigger region, where we are the only global player leading the market with more than 12% market share and, like in South Europe, being bigger than the next four players together. We are competing in a very fragmented market with hundreds of small local competitors.
Despite all this diversity of countries that there are in this region, the pool market, or 50% of the pool market, is concentrated in eight countries led by Germany, Brazil, South Africa, or the U.K., countries where we are very well established from a long time with strong teams. What makes us to be the strongest player in that region is our local strategy that we have been putting in place during this year, which means having global policies with local implementation through our local teams. We are also, like in South Europe or in North America, vertically integrated and with an adapted product portfolio and differentiated go-to-market for each of the regions that I was explaining before. We have a winning team on the commercial pool space, a winning team with strong market recognition and end-to-end capabilities.
We have scale and financial capabilities in front of our competitors. As a summary, we have a unique platform for expansion in a region with high growth potential. I would say to Jon that that region has even higher potential than North America. What is our strategy to accelerate the growth?
The main pillars to accelerate the growth in that region are based on providing best-in-class service availability in order to be the first choice for our customers, to keep expanding new products and novelties to differentiate from our competitors as well and adapt it to each of the markets, enhancing our commercial excellence strategy by deploying in more markets our sales methodology, like pricing, like lead-to-cash initiatives, or like inside sales, to increase our penetration in the existing markets just to secure our leading position in the key countries, to increase our penetration in new countries where the pool market is growing very fast or is big enough, like could be Saudi Arabia, Argentina, or Japan, as an example, to keep growing on the commercial pool space by deploying in more markets our Turkey solutions capabilities, and last but not least, by consolidating a very fragmented market.
As a conclusion, we are 20 years ahead of any other global player in that territory. We have been building the fundamentals, as Eloi and Jaime were saying. We have already the infrastructure. Now it's time to accelerate the growth. Thank you so much. Now it's time for Keith.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Keith McQueen. I'm the Chief Product Officer here at Fluidra. I've had the privilege to work at Fluidra—oh, wait a minute. Oh, sorry, David. For 30 years. I must be Eloi's older brother. Okay, 30 years. Over those three decades, I've had the opportunity to watch us transform from a small regional pool equipment supplier to a global leader. Today I'm going to talk to you about how products are going to contribute to the organic growth. We're going to talk about our product strategy.
We're going to talk about our innovation engine. We're going to talk about global capabilities and opportunities. Okay, before I get which way are we going? Before I get there, I'm not sure. Oh, we have the let's start with the broadest footprint. Hey, we're proud to have the broadest footprint in the industry. Okay, we've got every product and accessory to deliver and win. What makes us unique and how we win with that local approach is we adapt those products and accessories to that market. Hey, it's not all about the hardware. We talk a lot about the digital. I grew up in digital. I've been in digital since 2015. We were the first to lead. Digital is the opportunity. I call it the we started talking about the digital ecosystem. We talked to digital bundle, the digital fence.
What that means by the digital bundle, we've created a bundle of products. It's not just about the product. It's about services to the pool pro, to the homeowner, and to that pool. It's very important to us on that digital bundle. That's what creates demand and how we take care of that pool pro and that homeowner. We want to enhance that experience of that pool owner. Let's talk about innovation. Everybody talks about it. Jaime talked a lot about innovation. There are two things about innovation. We have to have innovation, and we're proud about being—I believe we are the company that focuses on the user and the pool pro the most. We create winning products. We're going to show you some examples. Winning products with emerging technologies that create new business units, new business opportunities for our three regions. Now there are three things.
Eloi talked about an anchor. There are three anchors we have when we talk about innovation. Sustainability is important to us. You will see that we have got a good plan for that. We talk about the customer experience, the user experience. The customer, we call that, is the pool owner. Okay, the user is the customer, but the customer is the pool pro, and the user is the pool owner. Those are how we go to market and how we innovate. That is the three things we think about when we talk about innovation within Fluidra. Let us talk about their global platform. We have got a huge global platform. We have got twice as many patents active as our two largest competitors combined. There is an opportunity for innovation, right? We are going to talk more about a million. We have got a million connected pools. We are going to talk more about that.
Orlando is going to go into that deeper when he talks about his digital strategy. There he is, over there, Orlando. Okay, we have a big investment in R&D. I am going to explain to you what we are going to do on that investment in R&D. Every year, we come out with 20% of our new sales, our total sales are made on new products. That is called our vitality metric. We are fortunate enough to have a venture capitalist fund that we go down there, and we look at emerging technologies, and we invest in things that maybe we would not ordinarily do that might have a longer horizon. Before I talk to you about—just want to make sure what got us here today will not get us to where we are going, especially in R&D. What we are doing, we are very R&D. We are very regionally focused.
We have six R&D centers spread across the world. Our product marketing is by regions. What are we going to do? We are going to create product management, global leverage and scale. We are going to create R&D centers of excellence, scale. One of the things that is going to be the enabler of that is called platform. We are going to use platforms to drive efficiencies with our supply chain, drive down COGS, faster time to market. We want to create platform parts that we can use across all our products. Let's talk about what we get out of R&D. R&D today, by going to a center of excellence, we want to get faster to market. We have to get faster to market.
We're going to go from a little bit less single digits of low-cost country design to over 30-35% of our resources will be low-cost country. Okay, and then we're going to take our time to market from three and a half to two years. That's our goal when we talk about going from a regional-centric approach to our global approach. Hey, we talked about innovation, and we got a video here to play. Someone's going to have to help me back there. Innovation. Innovation is not worth much unless you do one thing with it. You got to know your customer. You got to know the pool pro, and you got to know the homeowner. If anybody has a saltwater pool and they're generating chlorine through their salt, they know they have to clean their cell. You go out and talk to the pool pro.
Outside of emptying the basket on the pool pump or cleaning the filter, probably the top thing to do is one of the more honorary things to do is clean that salt cell. What have we done? We've listened to the pool pro. We've listened to the homeowner. You'll see it demonstrated in the back. We have a self-cleaning cell. You don't have to have no more maintenance. It's free of maintenance. It's got better warranty. And guess what? Through innovation and understanding the customer, we have over a 50% cost reduction. If you can, can we play that video for me? Video back there? All right, thank you.
Thank you. That's a great example of having innovation and having understanding the pool pro and the user. Okay, let's talk about our vision.
We do work a lot on thinking about products, but we have a vision out there, and we have all the products to be able to make that vision come through. We want to become—we want to create the positive pool. We want to create a pool that contributes to society, contributes to the environment, that contributes to the homeowner. We have our variable speed pump. We have our cartridge filter. We got our water saver covers. We have best-in-class innovation, I mean, sanitation. All we're doing is thinking about a positive pool. That is what we think that is, that future of Fluidra. We want to be the first to market to bring that positive pool. It is not a dream. It is not a vision, but we are going to make it a reality. It is getting closer and closer. Hey, I talked about being this company 30 years.
I got three decades. We are in an inflection point. I talk about—we used to talk about the product bundle. When you get a product bundle, everything works better together. We've taken that bundle and expanded it to the digital bundle. It is just not about products anymore. It is about products, the pool pro, and the homeowner. How do you touch all three? We are very much analog. We are moving from what we call a command and control to where you take a remote through your phone, and you take and you say, "Hey, I'm going to turn my light on," or "I'm going to turn my pump on," or "I'm going to turn my gas heater on," or "my heat pump." We are going to what we call next-generation automation. Now, we have two times more connected pools than our competitor.
We got two times more patents of our two competitors combined. If they have 250 and 250, we got 1,000. We have two times more connected pools than our nearest competitor. The opportunities are huge for us for that, what I call the digital bundle. The digital bundle, we'll be able to do predictive interference. We'll be able to say, "Hey, this product's going to fail. Bring it in to have it serviced. Hey, call your pool pro." If you're a pool pro, think about the value of the pool pro. We can tell him the product's going to fail within 10 hours, 8 hours. We can tell him the part. We can tell him what to bring. We can tell him what's wrong through the app. Listen, we've got a great opportunity here. Orlando's going to go through this digital strategy deeper.
Hey, in closing, in closing on products. Now, how's products going to contribute to that growth from two to four? We've got the broadest footprint, broadest product offering in the market. What makes us unique in David, Carlos, and Jon's area is we adapt those products to the local market. It brings new business opportunities. Okay, we talked about innovation. Innovation's on one, but you got to have user work on the other combined. That's what makes a great product, is to have those ones. We talked and gave you an example of what we really do. We talked about patents. We've got a great portfolio of patents. Patents, to me, being around 30 years, patents protect the gross margin. We're a bully in the marketplace. We like our patents. We go after people. Connectivity, I've explained to you.
We've got two times more connected pools than anyone out there. Great opportunity to do this digital bundle. Talked about the global capabilities. We've got six design centers around the world. We're going to do scale. We've got to create scale. We're going to use platform as an enabler. We're going to have global project management, and we're going to have global engineering centers called Center of Excellence. That creates scale. What are we going to do there? We're going to go faster to market. We're going to go from low single digits, low-cost country resources to over 30-35%. We're going to be a better use of capital. Our engineering resource capital will be there, be more, better there, sir. Listen, I'm going to turn it over to Orlando next. I hope you got an understanding of what we're going to do on products. Thank you very much.
Thank you. My name is Orlando Badea, and I am the Global Vice President of Customer Experience and Digital here at Fluidra. I also know I'm the only thing between us and the coffee break for you, which, by the way, is going to go until five before I forget. I wanted to share with you our vision for the future, give you a glimpse into our digital strategy. You heard from Keith. We were the first one to successfully lead the transformation from analog to digital in our pool industry. This gave us a really important first-mover advantage. Today, we have over 1 million app downloads for our connected pools.
To put that number in context, it is way over the double of all our competitors combined together, double all of our competitors put together. Now, we were the first ones to transform the industry from analog to digital. Now we are going to be the first ones to transform this industry from digital into a connected ecosystem, a connected ecosystem in which pool owners will engage seamlessly with pool professionals. A connected ecosystem that will drive seamless experience for the pool owner, and it will drive value for the pool professionals. Fluidra Pool, it is where we connect with our end users. We led the transformation from analog to digital. What does it mean? In the past, you would engage with your pool via a switch on the wall, turn on the pump, turn on the light via a switch.
Today, you do it over your phone. Every time you open your phone, every time you touch your phone to change the schedule, to change the color of the light, you're doing much more than just changing the color of the light. You are engaging directly with us. You are letting us know what kind of equipment you have, what equipment you don't have, how do you like using your equipment, what are your preferences. This knowledge gives us a unique advantage, an advantage that we use to provide better customer experience, design better products. More important, it gives us an amazing opportunity to engage with the end users like we've never been able before. It gives us an opportunity to engage with our end users in a two-way communication, offer customer support right in the palm of their hands.
More important, also communicate our messages, give them diagnostic messages, sometimes give them some promotions, but our favorite one, highly customized messages that drive brand awareness and build trust. Messages like, "Hey, Jon, it was really windy around you yesterday. It would be a good idea to run the pool cleaner and get those leaves before they stay on the floor." Messages like, "Vanessa, sunny weekend ahead. The water is perfect. Temperature is great. Enjoy the pool with the kids." Those messages drive trust. Trust drives loyalty, and it drives preferences for our products. Across the pool, the pool professionals engage with much more than the pool equipment. There is a vast array of pool professionals from maintenance, repairs that work around the pool. Fluidra Pool will also be the place where pool owners will be able to engage with the pool professionals servicing their pool.
They will be able to see the logs of the pool maintenance. Did Mike come and clean the filter when he came next? Yes, check. Did he clean the chlorinator? Probably not because you have our last chlorinator. If you do not, it would be important for you to know that he did not do it and when that chlorinator should be cleaned next for good maintenance. You can even, or you will be even able to pay your pool professional straight from the app that you use to control the pool. For pool professionals, this is even better. We have Fluidra Pro. What does every pool professional want? What does every business owner want? You want your business to grow. You want your business to scale. IoT, the Internet of Things, has given them a unique opportunity for that. Today, pool professionals are able to monitor devices remotely.
They are able to monitor water remotely. They are even able to change the water chemistry remotely. This will drive scale. This will drive scale, and it's going to enable pool professionals to serve even more pools with the same resources. It's going to help them migrate from going every Tuesday in the morning to the same house to see what might be needed. It's going to let them service pools when they need it with the treatment that they already know before going there. This is efficiency for their operation. This will be a great change. It's a great opportunity. It also will require pool professionals to evolve, to adapt to all these technologies, to get new systems, to get new processes. Fluidra Pro will also be the solution for this.
We are working to launch a new version of our Fluidra Pro that would include a complete pool management software, a one-stop solution for pool professionals to connect with their devices, to connect with their customers, to monitor water quality, monitor pool equipment, collect payments, run their business like they have not been able to run before. We have everything to be successful here again. We manufacture and distribute the devices that connect to the internet. We have a very significant advantage when it comes to the number of connected pools. Now, with our new pool management platform, we will be really able to take this to the next level. When we are talking about platforms, we are talking about stickiness, the stickiness to our products, the preference. I am not going to ask you to close your eyes like Eloi, but let us think for a minute.
You have this route where there are 700 pools connected. Suddenly, a chlorinator stops working. Would you, as a pool professional, the person of trust for this pool owner, recommend that they go with a device that is outside of your ecosystem? Let me rephrase that. Would you even allow one of your pool owners to get a chlorinator that lives outside of the operating platform that you use to run your business? This is what Warren Buffett calls build a moat around your business. Now, Fluidra Pro is much more about driving scale and integrating pools. It is also about improving engagement with our pool professionals. It's about managing their journey end to end. Yes, pool monitoring, monitoring the routes, but we also have everything they need for training, pool configurators, calculators, loyalty, customer support, everything under one roof. There is even more. You heard from Carlos.
By the end of the year, we're going to launch our new digital sales platform. We have been extremely successful in Europe and in emerging markets with our Fluidra Pro centers. What is a Fluidra Pro center? It's a physical space, a physical store where pool professionals go, get advice, learn about our offers, learn about new products, and buy everything they need. We are now, thanks to our digital platform, able to scale our 70 Pro centers to a Pro center in the pocket of each pool professional. Now, imagine the power of being in the hand of every pool owner. Imagine the impact of being in the pocket of every pool professional. Pool professionals and pool owners all integrated in the same platform.
What makes this unique is that Fluidra Pro and Fluidra Pool are two sides of the same coin, one integrated global platform, one platform for pool owners, one platform for pool professionals to connect, and all these powered by Fluidra. That is what we believe is the future of the pool industry. That is the future that we are working on to deliver today. Thank you. We have a coffee break. Remember, 5:00. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone. Hi, everyone. I'm really sorry. The break is over. The break is over. If you stay a little bit longer, we have fantastic drinks around 6:00, and we can talk further. Can I ask everyone to please, please, please sit down? Remember, the best party is about to come. You want to be seated? Please, can I ask you to sit down?
Good afternoon, everyone. I think you got the most exciting part of the day now coming with operations and finance, right? That is always the most experience, the most fun part. My name is Jorge Mayt orena. I lead operations at Fluidra. I am excited today to talk to you about a couple of things going on in operations. First, let me recap what happened in the last hours. When I first joined Fluidra, somebody asked me, "Are you going back to the manufacturing business?" I said, "Yeah, the manufacturing business of products, you know, like supply chain operations," until I realized that I was actually going to the backyard entertainment business or the commercial entertainment business.
Because if you think about it, what our products do is not just the product; it's supporting the entertainment industry, whether it's in the backyard creating good memories with my family, or if it's going to be in a hotel enjoying the pool, or even in a park watching the water flowing through the fountains. That is what we do at Fluidra. In operations, that is what we enabled. Today, I'm going to talk to you about three things. Number one, what is the current rationale of our operational model and operational footprint? Number two, I'm going to talk to you about what are the outcomes of our simplification program over the last years? Lastly, which is the most exciting part, is what are we going to do next? As we have untapped value, is there more value that we can continue to untap?
Our supply chain and operations is more than a backbone for Fluidra. It is actually a competitive advantage, a competitive advantage as we operate in 41 countries with more than 30 manufacturing hubs, more than 150 distribution points. We actually manage more than 100,000 products. We partner with more than 10,000 suppliers. All of that scale is what has enabled us to be close to our customers, listen to them, evolving our products, and responding to them. From a glance, somebody would say, "This looks complex. This footprint looks complex." That source of complexity has been always that strategic advantage that made us successful till today. However, there is always an opportunity to improve. There is always an opportunity to continue to scale our operations. When we think about where have we been evolving till today, a lot of the focus has been through the regions.
As we start thinking now, we're in a process of evolving from a regional execution model, very successful, to a global capability with the local execution. We cannot forget that global capabilities are what's going to make us more rounded from a company perspective. We cannot be away from our customer. Our focus now is how do we retain both of the best worlds? How do you actually do a company that is this complex, more efficient, more profitable, more flexible? There is a way. We had our strategy in operations. Our strategy is all about how do we become more resilient and how do we support the growth of the business. In order to do this, we have to enhance our operational excellence. In order to enhance our operational excellence, we're focusing on three main things.
Number one, we're strengthening our process foundations. Why? As you saw the footprint, when you're so scattered, you got to simplify your processes. You got to simplify in order so you can scale going into the future. Here's what our Fluidra operating model is all about. It's how do we create an operating model that can be replicated as we go through acquisitions in other places, as we continue to gain synergies through that model? It's our approach towards lean. Second, how do we become best-in-class operations? When you think about having a footprint that is scattered, many times you may have pockets of execution that are excellence. Our goal here is we want to have best-in-class operations all across our footprint. When we don't have best-in-class operations in something because it's not our core capability, we want to partner with somebody that can.
That's where our seven contract manufacturers that we have today kicked in, as we don't have to be the experts in everything we do. We got to be the experts on the things that create value to us, our shareholders, our employees, and our customers. If we're not going to be an expert on something, we can always tap that interesting part of our contract manufacturers in that experience. Lastly, we're focusing on our resilient and agile sustainable supply chain. We saw in our footprint the flexibility that we can have through regions by either moving products from one country to another one that is less affected by tariffs, or by moving actually core capabilities from one country to another one so we can synthesize that core capability and become more effective and efficient in the way we use it.
Supply chain is not about just ordering parts and distributing those components. It is by strategically allocating your supply base, your manufacturing centers, your distribution models, and how do you go to market? For us, the portion of resilient and agile is how are we going to connect that supply chain from an end-to-end perspective? What is important here is how do we deploy our tools to balance that demand that we have from the market with the supply that we need to give on the facilities? Why? Because cash is not unlimited. We want to optimize our inventories. We want to optimize the cash we utilize. The only way we can do that is by synchronizing that supply chain. Now, our strategy has strong foundations or strong enablers. I am going to focus on one that is a high-performance culture.
I think I cover what this strategy is going to bring for our customers from strengthened processes and the resilient supply chain, what it's going to do for my shareholders from best-in-class operations to drive productivity. What about our employees? Our employees are the ones that are going to execute this. This vision can only be executed with a high-performance culture where people actually turn ideas into action and turn ambitions into results. You might say, "But that sounds like a vision, right?" It is a vision, but it's something we're already executing upon. We're not new to this. We have developed some capabilities around this. Year to date, we have captured nearly $68 million in gross savings out of our simplification program. We're well on track to execute upon $100 million by the end of 2025.
Now, how did we achieve this? Multiple areas, but I'm going to touch upon three main levers: global procurement negotiations. It sounds simple, right? Go to a supplier, ask for a discount. It goes beyond that. It goes around aligning how something should cost. It goes around negotiating manufacturability of our own products that they can actually improve on their cost position. It works around putting those partnerships together. A good example of this is how we managed to renegotiate contracts with contract manufacturers, giving up to $4 million-$5 million in productivity, depending on the regions. Design to value. When it comes to design to value, it's towards our approach towards value-added, value engineering. How do we simplify products to make them more manufacturable? We're starting with initial families. It was about eight core families that we initiated this process, evaluating the platforms, evaluating the product.
Does it create value to my customer? Does it connect to manufacturability? With that, we have managed to transform our robotic platform to now gain savings of up to $2 million just on redesigning our robot platform. Lastly, SKU rationalization. Let me be clear, SKU rationalization is not about cutting products out of our catalog. It is about understanding where we have complexity and where that complexity is being unrewarded, or it is truly not creating value at the marketplace. If complexity is creating value at the marketplace to our customers, let's make sure that we get rewarded as we should. If complexity is not being rewarded and is not creating value, let's optimize our portfolio.
You might say, "Hey, what technology is going to be doing on all of this?" Technology is a clear was another of the enablers that I presented earlier. Since 2021 at Fluidra, we decided that the transformation of our business was going to be hindered with technology. Sounds obvious, right? It is not as easy as you think it is. While we have this journey of transformation and simplification, technology for sure is going to be an enabler. Our journey is going to be much simplified as we simplify our operations. In 2024, we kicked off a new sales and operating planning to give us better tools and analytics of how do we manage our total supply chain. How do we optimize the cash utilization?
It's because of these tools that are going to enable us to go faster to market and be more predictable. As we go in 2025, we're starting our journey on going to a new ERP implementation. When I talk about an ERP implementation, it's not about the software, because there's many softwares out there. For us, an ERP implementation is not about a shift and lift operation. It's an opportunity to redesign our processes and to redesign the way we operate to then connect that to a platform. The idea is, how do you do things in procurement? How do you do things in finance? How do you do things in manufacturing? How do you do things in distribution that are going to make the difference when we connect to that platform?
Over the next seven years, we're expecting to invest $85 million in that transformation. So far, I talked to you about what we have achieved so far, the transformation journey through technology. What's next? Next, how do we untap further the value of Fluidra? I think the interesting part here is that as of today, we've touched some levers. We're not radically transforming our approach. As you can see, the consistency around strategic supplier management and design to value remains there. This is good. We have developed capabilities. It's now about scaling those capabilities. The other option here, the other point that I have here is around the new one, is flexible and scalable footprint. Let me start first with strategic supplier management, which is the one that we see a more immediate effect.
In the past, we have focused our efforts around global sourcing on only 60 suppliers. If you recall, at the beginning, I mentioned we had 15,000. That's the size of our opportunity. As we go into the next opportunity, it's not only how do we tackle those remaining suppliers, it's how do we utilize data-driven information systems to give us the best guidance or where to start tackling that pie. In the area from design to value, we have done some clean sheets and design of products on eight product categories. We have 100,000 products. That's the size of our opportunity. As we develop these capabilities and we start thinking about product optimization and platform, it's much simpler to go after design to value and those manufacturability simplifications and margin optimizations from a platform perspective.
This is where the going from a regional model to a global scale model with the regional execution towards our customers is all about. Let me talk to you about scalable footprint. Because our footprint has been a source for competitive advantage. It is also a source for opportunity and efficiency and scale. Through the many acquisitions we have done over the years, we still have a lot of legacy structures that are part of that infrastructure. Now it is about going after those legacy structures, consolidating manufacturing plants with a single identity, an identity based on core processes, on centers of excellence that can differentiate our manufacturing capabilities as we go to market. We strongly believe that if we tackle these three main points and we execute upon our strategy, we have an opportunity to deliver additional EUR 120 million of productivity and cost savings by the year 2030.
When I think about strategic supplier management, design to value, the opportunity around material savings, it is also going to help us offset whatever inflationary environment is going to be coming in the future. It is this powerful combination that is going to allow us to win in the market. In short, we have a very complex footprint that has been a source of strategic improvements. It is what has been enabling us to win at the market. Number two, our simplification program has delivered the savings that we committed to. On top of that, it has demonstrated we have the capabilities to execute. Number three, we strongly believe that our new strategy is going to enable the opportunity of EUR 120 million in the years to come.
With these three things, I strongly believe that my next topic, which is going to be sustainability strategy, is going to be absolutely connected to what operations and supply chain is doing. Carla, all yours. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Jorge. Hi everyone. My name is Carla Coloma. I'm the Global Sustainability Director at Fluidra. I've been working in the sustainability field for around 15 years now, five of them here at Fluidra. Now we are pleased to share with you our sustainability strategy, which is inspired by our purpose, turning water into a better world. Because at Fluidra, we believe that we can make business while doing a great impact, a positive impact on the people and also to the planet.
The Responsibility Blueprint is the framework that we have that guides us and that has very clear and ambitious goals, be the leaders in sustainability and create long-term value for our stakeholders and for our company. As you can see, the strategy is built on three different pillars. First is environment, because we want to create value through the sustainable solutions that we put on the market. And because we want to reduce the amount of natural resources that we need to operate. Second is the social piece, because we really care about our employees and on the communities in which we operate. Third is governance, because we are committed to our responsible leadership and also business ethics along the value chain. In Fluidra, we act on climate not just because it's a global challenge, because it's a shared responsibility.
That's why some years ago, we committed to be carbon neutral in our operations by 2027. That means that in just two years, our carbon net emissions will be zero. For that reason, during the last years, we have been working a lot to reduce our carbon emissions, to increase our energy efficiency, to increase the percentage of renewable electricity that we use. We are also proud to say that today, our Fluidra forest accounts for more than 40,000 trees worldwide, which are the size of 13 football fields. I know that you can imagine that a little bit better. All these actions are helping us to reduce our transition risks and are also helping us to enhance our operational efficiency. Water, as you can imagine, is at the heart of what we do. It's our essence, it's our reason of being.
That is why, and also inspired by our purpose, we have committed to being water positive in our operations by 2030, giving back to the environment more water than we use. That means that during the following years, we will be working a lot with the operational piece to increase even more our water efficiency and implementing different initiatives to help us to protect this vital resource for future generations. In parallel, of course, the focus will be on increasing the number of water-saving solutions that we put on the market, because the need and the demand is increasing. This is also helping us to lead on the water management strategy. Our ultimate goal is to have 80% of our total sales coming from sustainable solutions, giving us also a very unique competitive advantage.
To conclude, and because at Fluidra, we think that to improve, you need to get measured, we engage with several ESG rating agencies, some of them probably you know. CDP or MSCI ranked Fluidra as some of the top performers in our industry. Standard & Poor's has ranked us as a global leader in the sector and in the industry in all different countries. That means that our sustainability strategy is ambitious, but it is also delivering results. As you can imagine, all this good performance is delivered not by a very large number of different initiatives that we do at the different levels of the organization in many different areas. There are many more to come. Thank you so much for having us today and for joining us in this journey of making a better pool, a better world through pools. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Carla. The money slides, as Jorge was saying. I'm going to talk to you about four topics. I'm going to start with value generation, historical value generation, then move into the inorganic activity that the company has done and dive a little bit into Aiper, the latest acquisition that we have done. Then look at our capital allocation priorities to finish with our commitment to the market. Let's go. I borrowed this slide from Eloi. We have delivered outstanding value in the last five years, beating all the indices, S&P, IBEX, stocks, indexes, tremendous performance. What is the winning formula behind this value generation? It's a combination of accelerated growth that you see on the left-hand side of the screen, where we have delivered 9% growth over the period through a combination of organic and inorganic with expanded margins.
We have expanded our margins at 12%, gaining more than 300 basis points of margin. That's really the winning formula. Remember, accelerated growth and expanded margins with strong return on capitals. That's the winning formula behind this shareholder value generation. Let's look into the inorganic piece for a second. We play in a fragmented market. We have the capabilities of targeting, engaging, and acquiring companies in this sector. It's a key capability that we have. We are going to continue to execute this lever as we look into the plan. What do we look for when we look at inorganic activities? We look for three things: technology, products that we can then lever through our distribution network, access to customers to reinforce our distribution network, or access to new geographies where we are not present or we have limited market share.
Those three focus areas are the ones that explain the array of acquisitions that we see at the bottom of this slide since the Zodiac merger in 2017. All of them meet those criteria, and they have been looked at through a financial lens that looks at, do they make sense in terms of our acquisition? Do they deliver revenue synergies? Do they deliver cost synergies? Do they buy them at the right price so that they deliver good returns on capital employed? That is the lens, the financial lens that we use when we look at acquisitions. Let me look at Aiper. Let's spend some time talking about Aiper, the acquisition that we announced last year of this Singapore-based company. By the way, you have already some products out there of the company. What is Aiper?
Aiper is a technology company that delivers a lot of growth and a lot of innovation in pool cleaning. If we look at technology, think about this. They have 470 people, of which 270 are R&D engineers. They have spent $20 million on R&D. Very strong focus on technology, on developing technology. If you look at growth, great growth performance with a CAGR of 41%, with very well-known brands by the consumer, and more than 80% of their sales are done directly to the consumer. Online sales direct to consumer. If you look at innovation, they are fast innovators. If you look at the product roadmap that you have on the left-hand side of the screen, you can see that they started from the OPP price in 2023, but they have developed a full range of products with a lot of capabilities in this segment of robotic cleaners.
Probably the only negative on the slide, which, to be honest with you, when we did the acquisition, we thought it was a clever approach by these guys, is this strategic supplier footprint in China and Vietnam. They were thinking about, okay, the China manufacturing will be to deliver, to serve the market in Europe and to serve the market in the rest of the world, while Vietnam is going to be used to deliver North America. Now, this has changed as of last week, but it points to one of the good values of this acquisition that is complementarity. Fluidra has contract manufacturers in Malaysia, has contract manufacturers in Mexico, and as we acquire the company and start to collaborate with them, we can leverage that manufacturing footprints that we have to really choose the right place for supporting the business. Complementarity, we are complementary companies.
By putting these two companies together, we have everything that we need to win in the fastest-growing category in the pool industry. Look, there are 30 million pools in the world, 20 million in-ground, 10 million above ground. Slightly less than 25% of the pools have robotic cleaners. What Aiper has done is to democratize access to the pool cleaners. They believe, and we believe with them, that in the future, 80% or 85% of the pools worldwide are going to be cleaned using cordless robotic cleaners. Imagine the amount of cleaners that this penetration means, the size of the market. This is the fastest-growing segment in the industry. We have developed this deal in a two-phase approach. As you saw last week, we announced that we have acquired 27% of the company, and we signed the deal.
This is going to go through antitrust and all this stuff, and it's going to complete in Q3 or early Q4. We acquired this 27% with an investment of $100 million. We have a phase two when the company reaches $370 million of revenues and EBITDA above 15%. To get to that 51%, we have two options: to either pay in cash or to contribute in kind. What we are going to do is contribute our robotic cleaner business to this company at an already agreed value that is going to put us in a position where we are going to own at least 51% of the company without having to put any additional cash or any material additional cash.
This approach puts us in a situation where when we execute phase two, we will have a unit that will be focused on delivering B2C, on serving consumers direct, while Fluidra continues to focus on the B2B segment where we excel. We will buy the products from Aiper as we have contributed the business to them. We will scale that unit really to become super productive. Aiper will do B2C, we will do B2B. In summary, I think this is a great deal for Fluidra. It's a good way to put complementary strengths to really succeed in the fastest-growing segment of the industry and deliver tremendous value for the company. Let's look into how we deploy capital, how we use our money. An easy one, we have had a very consistent capital allocation approach, and the framework is unchanged.
We deploy capital first to support our organic growth. Around 3%-3.5% of sales goes into CapEx for maintaining, expanding our plants and our R&D. Second, we deploy capital on value-accretive acquisitions, like we have seen before. They should deliver at least 1% of revenue in the years to come. You have seen that historically it has been slightly above that. Third, we keep our dividend policy of distributing around 50% of cash EPS or adjusted EPS, which, as you know, we adjust for amortizations of intangibles and non-recurring expense. Very consistent policy to continue delivering returns on capital above 17%, while we keep our financial policy of running the business with a balance sheet with a leverage ratio of around two times. Why do we set this two-times ratio? Because sometimes the cycle changes.
When the cycle changes, our leverage ratio can go slightly higher than that, like it happened in 2022, 2023, and 2024 as we went through the correction of the inventories in the channel generated by COVID and all the supply chain. If you look at our guidance for the end of 2025, in the midpoint of the guidance, our leverage ratio should be around two times already. With the Aiper acquisition, it will probably be around 2.2 times at the end of the year. If we do not look at the leverage ratio, but we look at the structure of our balance sheet, very, very solid balance sheet. We refinanced early 2022. We have $1.1 billion term loan B in US dollars and in euros that matures in 2029. We have an untapped unused RCF of EUR 450 million that matures in 2027.
We have a very, very solid balance sheet with, you have there the ratings by S&P, Double B Plus. It's a company that generates a strong cash generation, solid balance sheet. It provides us flexibility to execute the plan that we have shared with you today. The most important slide, what is our commitment to the market? What is our medium-term guidance? Look, with the strategy that we have shared with you today of delivering accelerated growth, enhancing operational excellence, and fostering competitive differentiation, the team, the company is going to deliver annual growth of 6%-8%, adjusted EBITDA margins above 25%. That is more than 250 basis points above where we are today, where we are at the end of last year, keeping returns on capitals well ahead of our cost of capital around this, above this 17% as you see on the slide.
I know we live in very fluid times or uncertain times from a macro perspective, from a geopolitical perspective. Look, we operate in a sector that is very, very healthy. It has a resilient piece driven by the install base, and it has the new build at very low levels near the trough. Very healthy sector. We have a very strong company with a very clear plan of what we need to do, where we need to focus, and with the winning formula, I'm pretty sure that the company is going to continue to deliver tremendous value in the years to come. Thank you. With that, I will turn the floor to Jaime for closing remarks.
Thank you, Xavier.
First of all, I want to take this opportunity to say thank you to all of you for joining us today on a very important day for all of us at Fluidra. We hope you enjoyed the session, and we hope you enjoyed the information that you found very interesting. I also want to thank the team. You guys did a phenomenal job presenting today, showing what we are doing, explaining where we are going, and why this company is so strong and so different. I want to thank the team who put all this together. They have been working like crazy, putting the presentation together. You have no idea how much work is behind a meeting like this. Thank you, thank you very much to all of you. Can we give them a round of applause?
Just to close and to summarize, I do not want to spend a lot of time on this. We are going to go to a Q&A. Today started really, really well for us with Clara giving us the welcome, and then Xavier coming with the great result we have in Q1, 7% revenue growth and 5% organic. That is phenomenal when we think about that we are talking about uncertainty. This uncertainty started in February. We went through Q1 with a lot of uncertainty on tariffs and what was going on. We had a phenomenal quarter that just reinforces what we have been doing in the last three quarters. We started to be positive organic in Q3 of last year. Q4 was positive, and now Q1 is positive. We are very excited with those results. We heard from Eloi about purpose. Purpose is important for us.
It's the glue of this company. It's the glue we're going to take beyond the company to all of the different players and shareholders connected and related to Fluidra. Clara talked about the market, $17 billion, a lot of opportunities, Fluidra being the number one. I think you can get it. This is a market with a lot of opportunities. This is an industry, as we all said, strong fundamentals, resilient, new pools built every day, aftermarket. This is a great, great industry, even in difficult times. We started talking about Fluidra. We talked about the strategy. You heard a lot of great words. I'm not going to go into detail. You heard about profitable and sustainable and consistent growth. You heard about digital. You heard about experience. You heard about platforming. You heard about what Keith said about digital bundle, not product bundle, digital bundle.
That's a key one, Keith. You heard about sustainability. You heard from Jorge about the unique footprint we have. At the end of the day, it's about how strong this company is from the global perspective in Europe, in North America, how close we are to the customer, how everything we do is about customer centricity, being connected to the customer, understanding the customer, meeting the needs and the expectations of those customers, and how the system works together. On a global scale, how we leverage scale, how we leverage cost. On a regional level, how we're close to the customer, how we're in the markets. Something very difficult for our competitors to really bring together. We're the number one in Europe. We're the fastest growing in North America, as Jon said, and we're the number one on a global scale.
Phenomenal job from the team. You heard everything about how we're going to take this company to the next level, how we're going to accelerate growth. You saw the numbers. I'm not going to get into the numbers. All positive numbers. Yeah, we're living in difficult moments. We don't control that. We're focused on what we can control. We're focused on what we can do. Last, Xavier talked about the financials. Great story, great track record of the company. He talked about Aiper. I just want to give you this message. More than a product company, Aiper is a technology, digital, customer-oriented company. It is a big difference. That was so key for us when we started talking. Eloi started talking to Aiper many, many, many months ago.
That is why this is so attractive for us to complement our portfolio, to make us stronger. What you saw, the aftermarket , and then on the commercial side. We see commercial as another great opportunity. The best part of this presentation is the team we have in Fluidra. We have a phenomenal team running this business. People who are absolutely committed and with passion. People who are humble, but with a lot of courage. People with ambition and people with determination, with capacity to react, with capacity to move fast. We take problems as opportunities. We do not take problems as issues, no. Everything for us is an opportunity. I would not say we are excited with what is going on today, but this is a great opportunity for us. That is the way we see it.
What are we going to do to emerge stronger, to emerge better, and to move faster? Thank you very much for everything you have done for us and talking to the team. Thank you to all of you for supporting us. For those who are starting to think about investing in our business, you got to do it. I think you have a lot of information now to see that this is a very attractive investment. The future of Fluidra is amazing. This company has a great future. We're in great things together. Thank you very much. Now I'm going to turn it over to Clara for Q&A.
Thank you. Thank you, Jaime. Thank you to all the presenters. It is time for questions. We are running a little bit late, but we've got time. Please bear with us for a couple of minutes.
Also, those of you on the line, we're going to arrange the stage a little bit. I invite Eloi, Xavier, and Jaime to join me here for questions. Just give us a few minutes, a few seconds. Thank you. Thank you all for waiting. We are now ready for your questions. We will start with some questions here on the floor, and then we'll move on to virtual questions. For those of you joining us online, if you'd like to ask a question, please follow the instructions on the Ask a Question tab on the webcast. Once you're in the Zoom meeting, please raise your hand so we know you want to ask a question. Okay, here on the floor, and for those of you joining us virtually as well, please introduce yourself before making the question.
We may invite Fluidra leaders as well, so be ready. Okay, can you raise your hand? Oh, lots of hands. Okay, I see Paco already with the microphone, so why do you not start? Stand up, please, Paco. All right, Paco.
First of all, thank you very much for the great presentation. It has been very, very good and a great job for all of you. Some people have said that is the older brother or the father or the cousin. I am the younger cousin of all of you because I have been probably the oldest analyst covering the company for many, many years. I have been commenting with Eloi before that I have heard this story before. Four years or five years ago, you talked about commercial, you talked about digitalization or connectivity.
My question is here, why now and what has happened in the last four, five years, not seeing a big jump on this? Or probably we have seen it, but probably it's not meaningful versus the rest of the story. The second question is regarding your growth. Okay, you're targeting a 6% growth, 6 plus 2, more or less. Probably in the best moment of the industry, from 2019 to 2024 with COVID, with inflation, you delivered this 8%. Why are you going to be able to reach that figure or the same figure that you have done in the last five years?
Thank you. Yeah, why now and what has happened over the last period, why you haven't seen an expansion on digital and commercial?
Really, I would say it's a combination of the impact of COVID, if you will, and the power of acceleration on residential business to start with, combined after that with the supply chain crisis and so on. In reality, we have been driven by the residential pro business, by the residential business, the strength of that business on one side that hasn't allowed the company to focus a lot of resources to develop the commercial pool business, which I remember everyone that was a business that suffered during the pandemic. That's on one side. If we look at digital, we've made a lot of progress on digital, Paco. We've reached one million of connected pools, which was one of the internal targets. What you are seeing today, what we have been sharing with you, is the next step on this digital evolution.
We are clearly focusing teams and resources now to execute on digital and to execute on commercial so that we protect those investments and we start seeing so
me traction, if you will, additional traction on those businesses. Yeah, probably what I would add to what Xavier said is on top of the timing, is today we have put resources and investments going after those opportunities, the commercial pool. I mentioned we have Torsten here. He's an expert on that area. Orlando, he joined the company. So we're bringing not just the team. We have a clear strategy, and we've been very careful on how we reallocate and allocate resources. I would use those two words. It is not that everything is going to be an extra spend for the company.
We're moving money from even digital areas that haven't had the significant impact we expected connected to probably what you said, to really now bring this together. We are very confident on the opportunity. As Xavier said, and as I can tell you, we're moving in the area of resources and people. Knowing that I have all my family here, I've seen cousins, brothers, older cousins, older brothers, I can talk. I would not add too much to what you say, but I think that if I look back in both, I would say in commercial and in digital, if we look where we were four years ago and where we are now, honestly, we did a good journey. We were not in America. We were zero in America, in commercial pool. Today we are. We are small ones. We want to go to the 15% market.
Actually, Jon was running it. Exactly. You were starting running commercial at home. Also, on the digital side, I mean, we are the company with more connected pools. We have built a platform that is ready to explode. I think that with it, I agree with Xavier that residential market was booming in part of this time, which put a lot of our attention to that. In the meantime, these two opportunities were already growing and generating a platform inside of the company. Going forward, I do not have any doubt. I mean, I think that the regional focus is going to help to develop part of this one. I can see also, Jaime, in the way that you are thinking and managing the resources going forward, be sure that these two activities will have the support and the investment needed.
Make me feel that because today we are more mature and we have more clear that we are going to invest here, that we are going to see a faster growth in both things. Thank you. On your second part of the question around, do we believe that 6-8% based on historical trends? What I can point to is, if you recall, there was one slide in Jaime's at the beginning of the period. I think the CAGR was around 2%. That 2% is heavily impacted by the investments. When the company went public in 2007, we had significant businesses of irrigation, domestic water treatment, and industrial water treatment. We decided to focus on pools so that 2% CAGR has a significant impact associated to the investments.
If you look at the second period, the CAGR is much closer to that number, although it's also impacted by all the pandemic acceleration, deceleration. There's a little bit more pricing than volume. I think that this 6-8 number or this 6 number is what the market in a normalized environment is going to deliver. On top of that, we're going to add market share gains. We have demonstrated our ability to do that as well as inorganic activity. A lot of confidence on the number.
Thank you, team. Leo, I saw your hand was up. Okay, Manuel, and then you pass it on to Leo. Okay, just go ahead.
Yes, hello. Good afternoon and congratulations again for the effort of the presentation and all the treatment that you have given us today. My first question, it's probably on client positioning, right?
Last time that we were here on the Capital Markets Day, the pool industry was a $13 billion business and you were roughly 13% market share. In a similar slide that you presented today, the market value of the pool industry is now $17 billion and your market share is 12%, right? 13%. I do not want to double-check whether it is 13% or 12% because you also have given the number that you have increased market share in the US from 10% to 11%. I do not want to double-check numbers because I understand that time to time it is very difficult to check or to double-check. I want your feeling whether or not you believe that you are gaining market share in clients or you have a stronger positioning in the clients regardless of the numbers.
Good question. I do not know the story.
The story of the buy is we have added, I mean, as we expand into some different verticals in commercial and so on, we expand that buy beyond what this grows. So the perimeter is not equivalent. That is why you have this, but we are certainly winning share. I mean, Jon has shared some key data around how accounts win, revenue, and the ratios that we see in the regions of Carlos. And David also pointed to these share gains. You want t o add something?
Jon wants to add. Sorry, the microphone is coming. It is a wider market definition than it was, but Jon wants to. Thank you.
Hey, thanks a lot. Yeah, specifically in the U.S., I mean, it was a broad market, but specifically in equipment, I can categorically say yes, we have gained market share since the last presentation.
I wasn't there at the last Capital Markets Day, but just in my experience, we have gained market share in North America. And that market share is organically? It's a combination. We've obviously done acquisitions in that period, but there's also been an organic market share in that period of time as well. Okay, and then my second question, it's more related to the new builds bounce back, right? I don't have an idea of when, how, which speed is going to return. But at the start, I might have started to have the fear that especially again in the U.S., the pool has moved from a premium to a super premium type of category given the fact that the cost has doubled up to $1,000K.
My question is, historically, there has been an X correlation between new builds and new pools, whether we might consider especially in the U.S. market that that correlation might decline because we are moving to a really, really super premium type of category. I think you have the full range here, Manuel. I mean, an entire range has moved up, but you still have entry pools and so on. I am not saying that super premium, it is moving a little bit, making it a little bit more difficult, which is what you are pointing out. There are also other trends in the industry, like moving to the south. If you look at the migration data, there is still significant migration going from the northern states into the southern states.
That's a trend that tends to favor the number of new pools being built because as people move to the south, they want to have a pool in the backyard and they want to enjoy that backyard experience. There are probably pluses and minuses there. We believe that directionally, the number that Clara has shared, which had the U.S. there, is still a solid number. It has nothing to do with the cost, more to do with the construction dynamics within the U.S. |
I wanted to add that over the last 44 years in the U.S., the average number of new pools as a percentage of single-family home completions was around 10%. During COVID, we were at 11-12%, that type of level. In 2024, it was 6%. That reinforces my message that we are at trough levels.
When things recover to their normalized levels, we should see growth in pools in the U.S., but also in our top five markets in the medium term. Good. I think let's do Leo first because then Juan, and who else has a question so that I have you on the? Here in front. Leo here, here, just here. Then Juan.
Leo Carrington from Citi. It's not working. Good evening. It's Leo Carrington from Citi. Could I ask firstly, in terms of your platform, your digital platform, how do you think about interoperability with third parties? Clearly, you want to balance the experience for the consumer with capturing your fair share of the aftermarket.
Secondly, to go to commercial, to what extent do you think the next phase of your growth is about changing the product mix to be more suitable for commercial versus just adapting the go-to-market strategy to capture your share of that? Okay, you're going to have to repeat the first question because I didn't get it. I don't know exactly what the question is about. In terms of the connected pool platform, is there interoperability with third-party vendors built in? What's your perspective on the importance of that to maximize adoption of your platform?
Okay, we consider that very relevant. For us, the digital bundle and the connected pools at the end of the day is how we're going to protect our ecosystem.
When we talk about connected pools, connected pro, and connected homeowner, that ecosystem is what we believe is going to make the differentiation, the key differentiation for us. It's working in parallel product, IoT products, and the digital platform that will bring all the pieces together. Because on top of that, what makes us stronger is really our connected products that go into the pool. We see that as a key pillar, number one and number two, when it comes to differentiation, as we said, from competitors, but also, and to put the topic on the table in a very simple way, from Chinese products coming into the market, we see that as a key thing to protect us. The second question was on commercial. We have specific products for commercial. We have more to do in that area. It's not that we're adapting products.
There is work for us to do on product that's going to be part of a combination between Torsten's team and working with Keith's team on do we have the right products? Do we have to develop those products? It is part of the strategy. At the end of the day, going back to the resources piece, we know we have to focus from the product perspective and from the people and organization perspective. In fact, in commercial pool, we have done also some M&A. M&A, specific M&A. That has been a good point to complement our range of product in commercial.
Thank you. I'm going to move. We have a question, a virtual question that was submitted in writing from Alexander. The question is, what opportunities does management see in currently untapped markets? Does Fluidra have any plans to enter those markets in the near term?
This person gave us an untapped market, so markets where we are not present. He also asked specifically about Iraq. I do not know if David wants to. I am going to pass the question to David. David, you answer the question. Untapped markets first. Can he have a microphone, please? Thank you. Thank you, Leo.
Now it is okay? Sí. Okay. As I was explaining during my presentation, the potential markets that are growing faster now are more Saudi Arabia, Argentina, or Japan, countries on where we could put focus. Iraq, to be honest, we are selling through these pools. Can you hear me? Yeah. On these 17 years that I was opening markets, I was maybe 15 years ago in Erbil trying to open Fluidra Iraq. It was a potential opportunity, but the market was not big enough for us.
I guess in that moment, it still is not big enough to put all the efforts. I mean, we are going to continue with distributors there, local distributors that we are supplying through Turkey and through Fluidra Export. We are going to keep focusing on the markets that have faster growing, like the ones that we already are, like Brazil, that Jaime explained, or these new opportunities that I was explaining before. Yeah, I think one important thing to clarify because when you talk about the BRICS region , you can get the question, you know, so many countries, are you going to try? No, are you going to try to go after every single country? No, we have focus markets, number one. We have identified, David has identified focus markets where there is good potential for growth, number one.
Number two, commercial pool is a very attractive business in the BITS market. Going back to why commercial, there you have part of the answer. Third, we're exiting some markets where we don't see progress. We just shut down our operation in China, for example. From the pool perspective, this is kind of weird to say that China is not an attractive market, but from the pool perspective, it's not that it's an attractive market. We had an operation that didn't show significant results, so we shut down. The reason for shutdown is number one, because we need to focus on other markets. Going back to the reallocation of the resources, what we were spending in market, we didn't have good results. We're trying to reallocate that into markets where we see opportunities.
Thank you. Juan, you have a question. Microphone over here, please.
Bruno, tienes el micrófono. Who has that? Bruno. Okay, fine. Bruno, go ahead and then you can pass it on.
Hello. Yes, Bruno, I'm from CaixaBank PPI. I have two questions. The first one is on the impact from the tariffs. I understand that you already mentioned that the net impact should be completely offset with price increases and all the restructuring that you are doing to the supply chain. My question is on the end demand. How a potential recession in the U.S. could affect the end demand for pools in the U.S. I understand, and I imagine that you are going to say that aftermarket is resilient, that new builds are at the bottom. My question is, what is the visibility that you have that allows you to support that and to be confident on the end demand evolution for this year under a scenario of recession?
This will be the first question. The second question regarding your EBITDA margin target for the medium term. This one split on two. First, trying to understand what is the year which you are targeted to reach that at least 25% EBITDA margin. The second question on this topic is why the 25% threshold, considering that you are assuming sales to go up between 6%-8%, and on top of that, you have a EUR 120 million cost-saving plan that accounts for 5%-6% of your current sales. My question is, if you are able to grow sales at those levels with the execution of the cost-cutting plan, if the EBITDA margin in the end should be clearly above that 25% threshold. Thank you very much.
You want to take the second one? I can take the second one.
You want me to start with that one? Yeah. I mean, specifically, we do not set a date in which we are going to operate. But if you add all the pieces together, we are probably going to start operating above 25% in around three years' time from now. Now, if you look at all the potential that Jorge and the team have shared in terms of cost savings, you look at growth, you look at operating leverage, clearly you are going to come up with, towards the end of the plan, margins above 25%. Now, we always, you know as well, you know that we do it step by step. We do not want to over-promise. Let's get to 25% and from there onwards we will deliver. There is potential to do more than this? Yes, there is potential to do. That is why we have the plus, the plus 25.
There was also a related question coming from the line around margins. No, but hold on, on the North America. No, no, but it's related to this topic. That's what I'm talking about. Talking about the $100 million of cost savings and whether it's part of the 25% EBITDA margin target. I think you can confirm it is part. That's one of the components to be there, clearly. Yep. Jon, you want to go on the North America, the volume? We had two microphones. I don't know. Can we have the can I have it here, please? I think then we have the leaders here that they have it ready too. Thank you.
The first question I think you posed was. Volume. Volume. It was on the volume. Look, as we go into this, yes, the aftermarket's going to be resilient.
We're going to see a lot of remodeling. I'm already hearing that as I have conversations with the team just in the last couple of days. On the new build, we're going to see what the macro economy is going to do and what's happening there. A lot of orders were already in the books. We're going to see those orders come through. We're going to monitor it closely. Overall, we're going to put a lot of reliance on the aftermarket during this period of time and closely watch the new build as we go through the next couple of weeks and months. It's still early in the season as well. We're confident for the balance of the year. It's too soon to tell what is going to be the impact in the market.
What we have visibility, things continue to go in the right direction. The right direction. We've had a strong start to the year.
T hank you, Juan. Can we have the microphone? Juan, todavía tienes pregunta? Te la hemos contestado.
Juan Canovas from Alantra Equities. As opposed to Paco, I'm the most recent analyst for Fluidra. I've been covering three months, so excuse me if I'm asking silly questions. It was related to margins, actually. You have made phenomenal progress at the gross margin level in recent years, but the progress at the EBITDA margin level has been quite below that. I wanted to understand why and why should it be different in the future. That was question one.
The other question was if you could quantify the opportunity in the commercial pool market you are going after now, or at least being more aggressive, and likewise on the retail pool market, which you have not fully addressed until now. Thank you.
Yeah, on the difference in terms of margin expansion between EBITDA and gross margin, we have been investing in operating expenses. You have seen Jorge share with you a plan that we started in 2021 around technology with an S&OP new platform. We are starting with SAP. There is a lever of technology that we are putting there as an enabler, as well as we have done other investments in commercial in North America and in other areas of the company. The main difference here is investments for future growth.
I mean, we haven't really guided here in this number in terms of how much is going to go to gross margin, how much is going to go to really what we are looking for is for EBITDA margin expansion and for expansion of cash flow generation. That's what drives the business, and we allocate resources to maximize that return.
Thank you. I have one more question coming from online. And then Roberto. There was the second question.
I f orgot about the second question. Sorry. Commercial market and retail market opportunity. Oh, yeah, the commercial market opportunity. I don't know if you, David, want to address that one. It's for the pro rather than retail. It's not a consumer market. I think that's your question. It's pro. It's commercial market. Commercial market. Commercial pool market. Commercial pool market, sí.
I guess that the main is by deploying in all the regions. I mean, my region is already selling 20% of the business on the commercial pool path. As I was saying, we are going to expand our turnkey solutions to more countries. Now my colleague Jon and Carlos, that also they were talking, Carlos about prescription in his markets. Jon, that is just starting on the commercial pool business, is where I guess is the bigger opportunity for Fluidra in North America in the commercial pool. A very simple way to say it is today, commercial represents a single-digit revenue rate for us in the business. We want to take it to a double digit. That's the plan we have. Okay. Okay, on the line, we have a question around the acquisition of Aiper.
Why have we decided to double down in a category that, given there is competition from lower-priced products, it might not be as attractive? Why do you believe this is a good acquisition? Okay, I can take that one. As I said before while I was closing, when you see those products, you can get a little bit confused that what we bought is a product company. It is a product company, but it is a technology. It is three things. It is a technology company. It is an innovation company when it comes, and they do a phenomenal job when it comes to platforming and speed to market and how they design those products. Third, on the business model they have, the direct-to-consumer, for that specific category is extremely, extremely important and makes a big difference.
The other piece is because they have been able to do a phenomenal job from how they design and how they platform their products. This company is very competitive, and they have a great differentiation between OPP, MPP, and HPP and capacity to disrupt the market. We believe this is a competitive advantage. This company has been the most disruptive, the fastest, the most innovative company in the space of robotic cleaners. I'm going to give you a parallel. This company is the equivalent to when you see the auto industry, it was a disruptive company. It's probably, let me call it that way, it was the Tesla at that moment with moving from corded products to cordless products, which is why they have grown so fast.
Jaime, one of the discussions that we had several times during the analysis of this acquisition, the gross margin of this company is amazing. Oh, it's very good. Which is a big difference between on the way that the question comes. I mean, I think that this is going to be a very profitable business. As Xavier was saying earlier on his presentation, the installed base of pools is under-penetrated in terms of robots. We believe it's a category that will grow as more and more people adopt or buy cordless, probably, but maybe also a corded because there will be a bit of space for that. They buy a robotic cleaner to clean their pool and dedicate their time to enjoying their pool. Good.
Good. One last question, if that's okay. Roberto, you have the honor. Thank you all for your patience and attention.
Hello. Yeah. Hi, it's Roberto Casoni from Otus Capital. My question was actually related to the latest from the audience. The Aiper acquisition, there are two ways of looking at it. One is, I mean, how high are the barriers to entry into the pool industry and why Aiper have been able to do what anyone would have expected to be done by the market leader, which is Fluidra, as you say. Why have a bunch of engineers from Singapore been able to create something that you found as a leader extremely interesting? Why them and not you? My second question is on the next integration. You mentioned that once Aiper will reach a certain level of sales, retail sales, not wholesale sales, of EUR 350 million, then you will be having the option to go up to 51% either with cash or in-kind. You give your cleanest division in-kind.
If I do a little math to reach up to the 51%, I mean, you value your division, not the same multiple you're valuing your target, no? Can you elaborate a bit on that? Because it's a bit confusing. Also, it's confusing the fact that you are wholesale and they are retail sales, yeah?
Thank you. Do you want to take the second one? I'll take the second if you take the one. Okay, the first one. Yep. On why we went in this direction and we didn't do it inside? You're going to have to help me a little bit. The reality is when Aiper started this, they started four years ago. When you see the level of technology, the amount of engineers they put into this business, they have 260, 250 engineers? 270. 270.
You showed that we have 350 engineers for total Fluidra, which is great for Fluidra. In this specific category, they went so fast. They were so innovative on developing products from ground zero and really platforming. This is not a criticism for us, but when Fluidra moved into corded to cordless, it was kind of an evolution of corded products into cordless products. These people started from ground zero. They really disrupt the industry. At the same time, when it comes to the innovation, the technology, and the platforming they have, it is what makes these people different. They can sell robots with a $199 retail price to a $2,500 retail price. They can cover the whole category. As Eloi said, they have very good margins.
They have been using those margins to invest in digital marketing and the direct-to-consumer and also in the innovation. They moved so fast. I have to say, they did not disrupt Fluidra. They disrupted the industry of robots. For me, listening to you, I mean, for me, there are two things which I think we need to clarify. First of all, we are talking about a product that the nature of this product is a plug and play. I mean, this is a product that you do not have to install, that you do not need a pro in the middle, and so on. This is the first thing. The kind of disruption that the cleaners' markets or that we have seen in the cleaners' market has been basically two. Robots move from corded to cordless, which means from technology plugged to the energy to a battery one.
This was a big transformation where people that are starting from scratch had some advantages. Also, this category moved, basically for the nature of this category, which is a plug-and-play product, moved from, let's say, omnichannel, but from the professional channel to the direct-to-consumer channel. This was the two disruptions happening at the same time. That's why we didn't see it. That's why the other competitors didn't see. We were just doing an evolution of our product when someone was disrupting it both. That's the reason. Can that impact in another business of Fluidra? Difficult. I mean, there is no category of product similar to that in our core business. I mean, robots is probably the category that could happen that we could have this kind of disruption. What we get doing this movement, I think, is that we are now moving with the trend.
Now we have a company that has the capabilities on the technology, has the capabilities on the channel to the market. That is what we like. We are still having something on our hands that the value is extremely interesting, which is our robot business. We believe that having a focused company in the midterm, putting all of that together is the winning solution. The other piece is this is the fastest-growing category in the business, which was also very attractive for us. We are going at 200 kilometers per hour, and we are going at 80. We are not going to catch up. Probably you can take the second one. I mean, on multiples, it is a difficult deal to look at, Roberto.
What we can tell you is that if you look at the multiples to sales versus other robotic cleaners, or even versus our multiple to sales, I mean, we have bought them at reasonable multiples. We have locked the value of our robotic cleaner business based on what it delivers today. The evolution goes more into consumer, as we believe this piece doesn't lose value. It is valued at reasonable pool industry multiples. I think in the end, you have to look at the deal as Fluidra gains access to a channel, as he was mentioning, and is able to have a platform of fast innovation technology through a contribution of our assets that are devoted to this and $100 million.
I think it's a very good deal, and it positions us very well in a category that's going to create, that's going to grow fast, and it's going to generate value for us. I think it's very important that it would also help us support our customers with more price ranges across the professional channel. We will give them a broader range of products.
Okay. Good. Thank you so much, everyone, for paying attention. This marks the end of today's event. Thank you, all of you who have joined us virtually. I think we had 130 people or so joining us virtually. Thank you all for listening to us. I would like to thank our speakers and also Bolsa de Barcelona for hosting us. If you have any further questions, as always, please reach out to the investor relations team.
We'll be very happy to help you. Thank you. For those that are here, I'd like to invite you to a little farewell drink. Thank you. Thank you very much.