Of the board of directors from day one when Shelly became public, so very long-time follower and supporter of Shelly. We have Svetozar Iliev, Chief Financial Officer. He will help me if you ask nasty questions about too many lines, about free cash flow, and how to book what when I have to give up. So he's there to support that. Mirche Atanasovski is the guy who delivers the revenue, so very important, especially in this quarter. So thanks for being here and not pushing more products over Black Friday into the markets. Denitsa Georgieva, our Chief Investment Officer and as well Head of Legal, so she's responsible for the disclaimer. Among others, that's the favorite page, and she finally gave her okay to all presentations and things that we present today. A newcomer, he took over my responsibility for Shelly DACH.
I'm really happy to have him on board. I know Karsten for a very long time, and in the German market and DACH market, we are at the beginning, although we have some reasonable revenues already, and Karsten already started to address a couple of these things, and Dennis Dalgaard, our Nordics manager, who is having a small team in Nordics already, which is the region where we have the highest share of professional products, so thanks to all of the Shelly guys to be here as well. The key investment highlights in a nutshell: we are in a positive market that will continue to grow. We have a strong brand, and we think, to our knowledge, that we are the fastest brand in consumer—sorry, not in consumer electronics, in IoT, in smart home, fastest growing in the world, at least in our size, not a very small one.
I did not find a company that is growing that speed, so with around 50% or above 50% the last years, that's outstanding. Our technology is outstanding as well. I talked about our software already. The hardware that goes with it is. I usually say, to make this very simple, Dimitar could talk hours about that. We are outperforming competition 10x with what our products can do compared to what their products can do. We have a reasonable scale. Our products are sold in 100 countries, which is a big number. Of course, we are not strong and big in 100 countries, but the product works there, and that gives us as well some upside potentials, addressing more regions, more countries, United States, Asia, but as well some countries in Europe where we are still at the very beginning. We have strong financials. We have a great management.
Of course, what would I say standing here to say we don't have a great management? That would be a bit stupid, and ESG is not only an obligation for us, it's as well something that we stand for, and we help a lot of companies to fulfill their ESG reportings and ESG goals, and we help them to save energy as we help a lot of private households to save energy, so that's a very good combination: our own ESG goals, helping others to fulfill theirs, and that's, of course, a driver of our revenue, so coming to the program of today's presentations, I will start talking a little bit about the market, so what is the general market doing? How big is the market? And where is the market going?
Dimitar will talk about products and technology and what is in the pipeline, what can you expect in the next one, two years, and there is a lot of really cool stuff coming. Revenue growth, so how will we reach our midterm targets? You know that we gave out a guidance beginning of last year already for more than three years at that point of time, which is quite long term. How will we reach that? What do we think are the next steps that we have to do to continue increasing revenue? And then the last point is about our financials and the long-term outlook until 2030. What will the market do? What do we have in the pipeline?
Of course, that is very far away, and we will not have a very concrete and hard number, but you can make your calculations on your own and find out what is the right number that you put there. That's your job then at the end, and then if you want to stay after four o'clock, we have time to have a glass of wine or water or whatever and to talk, and as well, the team is there, of course. Whenever you have questions, feel free to address that. So, smart home market. Before I start that, the numbers that you see here about the market, they come from different sources. It's super complicated to find a real good number about how big is the smart home market or the IoT market.
There are usually, if people talk about smart home, they mix in televisions and smartphones and all the stuff that is not our core business, so what we see here is coming from different sources. We have some views into Statista. There is a company called Berg Insight. They are coming from the Nordics. They make a smart home report, 300-400 pages once a year. There's some data coming from them. We check competition, of course. We have a lot of expert interviews in the United States, people that are long time in the market and our own estimations, and what you see here is a mixture of all that. There is no hard number. If you go to well-renowned companies like GfK, they have zero, nothing. Smart home is, yesterday we discussed, is it 20 years old?
I think 20 years ago I bought my first smart home product, one of our competitors, Homematic. Didn't work that well. But this has nothing to do with Homematic. It had to do with the time. And Dimitar said, no, it's 30 years ago the first smart home products came to the market. But it was, in the old times, it was expensive. So I remember what I paid for my TRVs, my valves for my second residence to switch off the heating when I'm not there was a fortune, and it never worked in a good way. It was more or less installed in new buildings and in very luxury high-end residences. There were many different interfaces and protocols, and nothing was really working together. The technology was moving slow, so not fast advancing, and every year something new. The efficiency benefits were limited. So what could you do?
Show your neighbor, look, I can switch on the light in the garden with one push on my smartphone or on this button, so it was not really good. Installation was complex, so in most cases, you need an installer. You still need an installer today if you don't really know how to work with the cables and with electricity, but today, a lot of people can do this on their own. The integration in the systems is easy, and customer awareness was not there, and usually, the installers were blocking like, this is not reliable. I have too much trouble with that, so this was not the best. That changed. There are a lot of advantages. There is a lot of connectivity and intelligence behind, so if today I'm not in my second residence, I get an information that I forgot to switch off the light.
I can easily adapt the heating. The safety is improved. So our products, and we tested this a couple of times as well with third parties, are as secure and safe as your Wi-Fi at home. And over your Wi-Fi at home, you make your banking business. So that should be better safe. And we have a couple of other things that make life easier and make the products more valuable. You can save energy. The high energy prices are, of course, a driver and a helper for us. And I'm always asked, how do you want to compete against Alexa, Google, Samsung, SmartThings, and the other guys? And my answer is always the same. They are an enabler for us. They open doors, and we help them. We are as well an enabler for them. We have a lot of projects European-wide with Alexa.
They want to go into hotels and senior living facilities for handicapped people and put the Alexa there. But what people do if they go to the hotel room, the first thing they say, switch the light on. And not, I want to order a whiskey or whatever. So first thing, switch the light on. And they need our devices to switch on the light. And that's why we are a very good couple in developing the market. So they are helping us and pushing us. And the more money Alexa and Google invest in the market, the better for us. The smart home market, from our point of view, is at the edge or just entering the mass market.
It's no longer something only for the enthusiasts, for the geeks, for the guys that are super happy that they spend the weekend to install one device and finally make it work. It's a mass market product, and especially with the high energy prices and with a lot of other things that you can do, save money, have your life much better. It's at the beginning of a very long growth period, and we see this not stopping in the near future. The market expectations, and once again, this is a blend of numbers from market research companies, expert interviews, competition that we checked, competition we are talking to, and our estimations. The market estimation is somewhere between 10%-15% the next year. Here it says 26%. Other numbers say 28%, 29%. So we think that this will continue the next most probably 10 years.
A little bit more should come from the professional segments, so the industry, because they are. Sounds a bit strange, but they are behind, and we found out that a lot of big players are now waking up because they say, oh, oops, we have ESG goals to fulfill. We have to report our energy consumption, and you are aware that we made a bigger deal a year ago or one and a half years ago with Vodacom, Vodafone in Africa, because they need to report the consumption of energy of their base stations, and they use one of our devices, one of our best-selling devices to do so, and the same with BMW for all their retail outlets. We are one of the preferred brands that they put there.
It's not a huge business because it's basically one device that monitors the whole energy consumption and reports this to a central station. There are other options like city automation, city lighting. As well, Dimitar will come, I think, a bit to this with some new technologies that we have in the pipeline. I talked about hotels already, for elderly people, senior living, but as well, if older people want to stay at home, there are a lot of things that are there or that will come that make their lives easier and make them more comfortable staying at home for a longer time. So it's growing in different segments, and these are the biggest segments. And you see some estimations about market size, Europe and the United States. That's thermal management, so that's heating and air conditioning, energy management, a huge business for us.
Smart lighting, appliances, and appliances means make your heat pump at home smart, something simple as your garden irrigation, or open the garage door or make whatever you have as motors or other devices smart and integrate this in the Shelly environment. Smart security, very big business. That is one of the main drivers in the United States for smart business. That's security, of course, with the high burglary rate and people are afraid. That is not that strong in Europe, and that's a market where we are just entering and beginning, but we have some light for the U.S. market in this perspective, so all the segments are expected to grow. If we look at the markets, Europe versus United States, we see the same number, 10%-15% growth expected in the next years. The markets have a similar size.
If we look to a different split of the market, new buildings, and today we don't have that much new buildings, especially in Germany. The industry is suffering versus retrofit, and retrofit for us is renovation. You have an old building, you want to make it smart, and with our devices, you can do this in an easy way. We think this market, or we see this market is much bigger, two times, maybe even more bigger than the new builds because, of course, there are more old buildings that people want to make smart, want to save energy than existing buildings. Just to give you an idea, with such a small device, you make one switch, one room smart.
You can switch the light. You can use a remote control, or you open a garage door with the same device. And can from this moment on, the switch continues to work. You just put it behind the wall switch. You have seen the videos here before, how this works, and that is very cheap. The product is EUR 15. This one is even EUR 12. You don't need a hub. You don't need anything else. That's the first step into the Shelly world, and there are a lot of trends supporting this, so from whatever angle we look at the market, the market is in a positive move, so people want a connected home and more and more bringing things together, and we offer a full solution for that. Energy management, I mentioned this a couple of times. That's a big driver for our business.
Each of these devices, so if you take that one that has the same functionality as the blue, it is just measuring as well the energy consumption. So it tells you what is this product that it's connected to consuming as energy now, the last hour, the last week, the last month, and you get your reports every month. Commercial applications, I mentioned that as well. If this is in offices, if this is in hospitals, if this is in cities, in senior living facilities, so whatever it is, it enters this business because first, it makes the life easier. Second, the energy consumption is critical. And then we have industrial processes, solar plants. We have a solution for a solar plant that is switching off the whole solar plant if the energy price is too low so that it doesn't make sense to operate it.
And it's a very cheap product, and it's a very simple algorithm that it's connected to the stock exchange. If it drops below a certain price, I stop production. And the other way around, it works as well in countries where the energy price is completely flexible and fluctuating. If the price is below a certain point, switch on my EV charger. So very simple solutions that will help to grow the business. We have a position that is quite unique. So first of all, it's very easy to install the product and to use the application. We have the best hardware and software. We just increased our warranty to three or to five years for Pro devices because we see that the failure rate is very low. Best price and value, and our products are super flexible and are safe. We use a European cloud.
We are 100% GDPR compliant, and that is for a lot of customers more and more an argument to buy devices instead of a cheap Chinese device. If we look to the price segmentation on the right side, we are somewhere in the middle, and we feel very good in the middle. We are twice as expensive as the cheap Chinese competitors, SONOFF and a couple of others. So if you take this nice blue device, if this is, by the way, that's the smallest relay in the world. The Chinese don't have that. But if you would take that device, it's like EUR 15, then SONOFF would be EUR 7.50.
I think for most customers, reasonable price, EUR 7.50 more or EUR 8 more to have a product that is not produced in Europe, but that is developed in Europe, that uses a European cloud that is safe without having any problems. Compared to other renowned competitors like Homematic, they are still on the market. They are very successful, mainly in Germany. Our product is half the price or less than half the price. If this product is EUR 15 , Homematic doesn't have it, but would be like EUR 30 , EUR 35 , EUR 40 . If we go to the top, we see Legrand, we see Siemens, we see Schneider, Gira. We have half the price of their devices with our Pro Line or even less than half the price with the Pro Line. We are in the middle of the market.
We did not increase the prices for the last two years. We could do that because the others increased the prices a little bit. So the gap is increasing, but we want to be a mass market offerer. We want to push the market. We want to get more people in our system, and you will see later why this makes sense. And the products are used in different occasions. So residential business, in apartments or in one or two family houses, in offices, in hotels, in senior living facilities, facilities for handicapped people. We will have a roadshow in Germany in the next two months going from city to city to senior living facilities together with Alexa to show the solution that we have implemented. There is one of the users of these solutions that won an innovation prize from the organization.
I don't know how this is called, where they presented all the things that they did because all the people using it are super happy. So it's not true that old people say, "I don't want to talk to Alexa." They use it. They are super happy because they say, "Now I can switch the light. I can change the heating. I can open the curtains without calling someone who has to come and has to open the curtains. I can do this with just my voice." And we will make this aware and will push the market with this. Industrial applications, city lighting is something that is at the very beginning. We have a cool solution for that in the pipeline. Energy management is something that is for the industry with high energy prices is absolutely crucial.
Restaurants like McDonald's in South America, I mentioned this a couple of times, is using one of our devices or a partner that is operating the energy for McDonald's is using one of our devices to monitor the energy consumption of McDonald's restaurants in South America to make sure that the fridge is still switched on because otherwise they have a problem next morning. But the deep fryer is switched off. The air conditioning is switched off. The outside light is on, but the inside light is off. To optimize energy consumption and to have the reporting as well. All this is really important. About the market, the smart home industry is at the edge to become a mass market device. It's not stopping.
Although the growth rate in percentage might go a little bit down because in the past it was more like 15%-20%, now we talk about 10%-15%, the level, the starting point is much higher. We talk about the EUR 1 billion business. Of course, it's more complicated to grow if the level is already higher than the level is zero. To grow from 0-EUR 1 billion , from 1-2 , it's easier than from 100- 120. We lead the market with great products. If I say global presence, that sounds too bold and too big, but our products are used in more than 100 countries. They work because they are constructed that they work in every country with every switch, with every device. Of course, we need the local legislation. We need certifications for the regions.
In the United States, you need UL, in Europe, CE, and in other regions, it's different. That's a burden, but it's something that is relatively easy to do. We have a unique technology. No one right now can follow us, so there is no comparable product in the market. And we think that with the combination of our software and cool hardware and everything that you will see later, we are on an excellent way to continue growing. So the market is positive. That was the first part. Now, open to your questions for this part. So we will have a 15-minute question and answer round after every segment. If you have questions to the market, ask the questions now. If not, Dimitar can continue with the products. Maybe you have more questions there. No question from the chat.
Can you hear me? Sorry. Yes.
How large is your market share in, not your market share, but the share of revenue that you have in the United States compared to your global revenues? And how has this been growing?
Yeah. We are not reporting the United States separately. We are just reporting the rest of the world. The rest of the world is 10% of our revenue, round about 8%-10%. We are growing in the United States. We are growing in the same speed as we grow in other regions, like 50% round about. I would love to grow faster because we are at the very beginning. Revenue is not where it could be potentially, but the United States is a country where we made a couple of changes in the last 12 months. We are addressing more the do-it-yourself market. At the beginning, we were shooting with do-it-yourself products to the professional market.
That didn't work out, and we see that this pays back, so we have a good visibility that it should speed up, so the growth rate should grow, and later we come to two, three other points about the United States, why we think that now we found a good key to open this market.
Thank you. How is the competition in respective market? Does it differ, for instance, in the northern Europe compared to the rest of Europe? Or how is the competition?
Yes. Yeah. Competition is completely different region to region. So if I take our strongest region, DACH region, our biggest competitor, of course, besides the global players like Schneider, so Schneider is everywhere, but with different brands. So in Germany, they own Merten and a couple of other companies, so they bought companies in different regions.
If we take our biggest smart home competitor in Germany, I would say this is currently Homematic IP. If we go to Nordics, to Sweden and Norway, our biggest competitor is a company called Plejd. And then we have a lot of smaller players in different regions. There is a company called Z-Wave Europe, but they have their own products as well, their own product line. So it's not the standard. They have product lines. They are quite small, EUR 15 million revenue based in Germany, but not growing. And wherever you go, you have Somfy in France, very strong in some of the areas. So it's completely fragmented.
Yes. Could you comment on the market sizes in Europe? Is that corresponding to the GDP level of the countries, or is it different in terms of the development of the different countries?
It's different. I mean, we made a lot of analysis now because at the very beginning, two years ago, when I started to make the first analysis, my assumption was the markets are similar and they are comparable to consumer electronic spends. With my knowledge from the consumer electronic market, I said, "Okay, it's easy. If Germany is 100, France is 80, and the U.K. is 80," which is not exactly true. Now we found out, again, with all the interviews and all the market research data that we found somewhere, we see that the biggest market in Europe for our devices is not Germany. It is the U.K. The U.K. market is size-wise bigger than the DACH region. We are at the very beginning in the U.K. We come to some developments later. We are at the very beginning. We just hired the first salesman.
We are looking for more people. We look for technical support and marketing, so we will put a team on the ground in the U.K. because that is the biggest market. France, as one of the big economies in Europe, is the market for our products is on the same level as Benelux or Netherlands only, so the Netherlands is a very strong market, and for us, interesting enough, Italy is a relatively weak market, but it's our second strongest country, so that shows that we can get with our price positioning, we can get a lot as well out of these markets, and we have two, three countries that we analyzed where we saw what was happening, and from this learning, now we will make new steps in some other regions.
Yeah. We have two questions from Rasmus Persson.
First question is, which markets outside the DACH region is most interesting? And the second question is, looking at Norway and Sweden, Plejd have a very strong position within lighting. Will that hamper your growth in those markets?
Yeah. So first question, I think I answered partially. What are interesting markets in Europe? U.K. is the biggest country in Europe for our business, not for our business, but in general for smart homes. So that's a market that we definitely want to take very serious, and we do the steps to really address this market in the right way. For us, an important market is Italy, as well as Spain, so southern Europe, where we develop quite nice. Interesting enough that we are very good in Portugal, in a small country and a poor country in Europe. We are very strong. We have a very good partner there.
There are a lot of countries where we see some potential. Now, if we look to Nordics, Dennis is here. When you have specific questions in the breaks, you can ask Dennis as well. In the Nordics, we have the highest share of professional business. We come later to this as well, the split between do-it-yourself and professional. Nordics is really heading that development. Plejd is working 100% with distributors and professional electricians. Maybe that's a specific thing in the Nordics that people don't want to touch the wires and are not that strong in do-it-yourself, maybe. But that's not a burden for us because we see a good development. We see a very interesting point right now that Plejd is Sweden and a bit Norway. We see that the distributors that are working with Plejd are now coming to us.
They come to us, not we to them, asking us if we can make a cooperation because they feel that Plejd is too dominant. Plejd is doing this year, I would guess, EUR 70 million revenue round about. That should be kind of the number, maybe EUR 75 million. They are good, doing most of this in Sweden and in Norway. That means that in the lighting category, in that country with the wholesalers, they have market shares of round about 70%. Is this right, Dennis? 70%? Yeah. That's the number that the wholesalers gave us. They said, "Sorry, someone who is 70% of my business, I want to reduce that." That's why they opened the doors now for Shelly because they see that our solution is demanded.
And especially in Nordics, Dennis presented two weeks ago what is going on there in the Facebook support groups about IoT or as well the Shelly Facebook support groups. They are really growing tremendously. So we see that in the Nordics, we can make a good development. And the strength of Plejd is maybe helping us because of these open doors from the wholesalers and because everyone wants to have an alternative that is half the price, easier to handle. And that's a challenge for us, but it's not a burden. Yeah.
Just a quick question.
Wait for the microphone.
Yeah. Quick question regarding the U.K. because you mentioned that that has much more it could be bigger than even the DACH region of Germany. So how is that market work? Is it more a professional market, direct-to-consumer? Who are the main players? So in the Nordics, it's Plejd.
And how is your strategy going to attack that country, given all the experience that you have? That's it. Thank you.
Yeah. So what we need and what we have in the U.K. is we think we have found the right partner in the country. So we need a very strong distributor that wants to work with us. And we identified one. We have found one. We have a verbal commitment. We have meetings in the next two, three weeks. So their CEO comes to visit us in Sofia, and we will talk about how can we develop the market. And they are willing to put some money on the table for marketing. We are willing to put some money on the table for marketing. We learned that it's better to have a local team, with all respect to what happened so far.
This is almost a miracle because we developed the company to the status we have today with a sales team that sits in Sofia. Everything's centralized. Now we see as well from feedback that we get from Germany that local support in the country language is very well appreciated. Now we could say U.K. is English, easy. No, it's not. It's the specific words. If you are a native speaker, you find out that's not a native speaker I'm talking to. The feedback from Germany is super positive, and we will as well have technical support in the U.K. That was one of the feedbacks that was coming from our local guy there. We need local marketing because how can you know from Sofia? From Germany, it's impossible for me to decide what is the right media.
In Germany, I can tell you the place to be is COMPUTER BILD , is Heise.de, is two, three other players that you have to be in because that's what people read. What is it in the U.K.? I have no idea. That's what we need, local people. Do-it-yourself and professional is a similar mix than we see in other European countries. It's not important if it's 80, 20, 70, 30, 60, 40. Both markets exist. We will try with our partner. We will now enter the key players there, which is, of course, it's Amazon. Amazon is, in our business, worldwide the biggest and the most important player. There's no way around. Amazon is a dangerous animal, so we need to find the right way to control them. We could grow with them much more.
We try to limit the growth, not giving them everything that they want. They are always hungry. And if you tell them, "Sorry, I don't have enough food for you," they are a little bit less aggressive over time. But in the U.K., it's Screwfix. Screwfix is the place where all the installers go every morning picking up their devices that they need for the day. And as well, the end users going there picking up the things that they need for the day. Screwfix is like 70% professionals, 30% do-it-yourself, and other do-it-yourself chains and onliners. So we have a local partner with this player. We will identify where do we have to go, and then we will open the market. It will take two, three years. It will not be like tomorrow we are on the level as in Germany, but we see a good development there.
That's what we will do country by country.
Thank you. Oliver Madsen of Baader Bank. You mentioned Portugal as being a very interesting and developing market for you. Do you interpret that as a sign that your products could be very suitable for other emerging regions like Eastern Europe, Latin America, Middle East?
I think, Oliver, our products are first suitable for every country in the world because they work in every country of the world. And Portugal, as a country that is not the richest country, of course, people are more open to buy a product for EUR 15 or EUR 20 than one for EUR 50 because they can have twice as much smart devices and make their homes twice as much smarter, if you want, or 3x as much smarter. And that's no interpretation. That's a fact.
So if we would have enough people and enough R&D resources to make everything happen that we have in mind and that this guy especially has in mind, we could be faster. But I'm slowing down a little bit. We want to keep focus. We want to do one thing after the other. Asia, for example, we have a subsidiary in Shenzhen that started the operations with controlling the factory, going to suppliers, organizing the supply chain from China to Europe, making sure that the factory follows all the guidelines, that the quality is good, quality checks. All this was their origin. Now they start to visit exhibitions in China. We are present with Shelly booth in China and in other countries in the region. They start to sell. We see that on a very small level still, they make some interesting revenues.
If we talk to our managing director there, he is quite positive about the next two, three years. So again, we will not see a jump to millions as we do it in Germany, but over time, it develops. One of the bottlenecks, as always, is having enough people because we need for some Asian countries, we need a special certification. And to pass a certification for Japan is not so easy, but we have first demand from there. We have demand from Australia. We had last year at IFA, we had a visit from Amazon Australia. They knocked at our door and said, "We want to sell your product in Australia." And we have as well distributors in Australia. So the region is coming. It's still on a very small level, but it's developing. And that's one of the chances that we see for the future.
Just coming back to your last point about China, how do you deal with competition and pricing pressures from China and competitors there?
If you remember our price positioning, so we said we are no one is listening. Usually, I say we are twice as expensive as the cheap Chinese shit. I would never say that in public. But our products are outcompeting feature-wise SONOFF 10x . We can do 10x more. So we are not comparing ourselves directly to a product for EUR 7, EUR 8. But we want to keep the distance in a digestible level for end users. So EUR 5 more, EUR 10 more, or for a EUR 100 product, maybe it's EUR 50 more, but it's much more reliable. So we think we can handle that, but we keep an eye on them.
Looking to the other side where we have upside potential, so companies that are two, three times more expensive than we are, that's as well an option to go more up the market, but we want to sell huge quantities. That's as well important for us. And the Chinese are good in copying, but what they copy is our hardware. They are not able to copy our software. That is not as easy as it sounds. And Dimitar will talk a little bit about that. What are as well our users doing with adding to functionalities? That's something that is unique for Shelly. That's why we are not hiding away. China is, on the other hand, a potential market for us. So part of the revenue that we see now coming from Asia is coming from China. So Chinese retailers, customers, installers are looking for Shelly products.
We are well known there, although we are quite small revenue-wise, and they like what we can do. So that's the positive side of that. No more questions? Excellent. Then I give the stage to our what did I say? Technical mastermind. Dimitar, happy to listen to what you have to say.
Okay. Thank you.
I'm a bit disappointed that you don't have your own devices.
Which is the button for the green button, right?
Yes.
Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. First, thank you for everybody who is participating in our first Capital Market Day. I'll talk about the products, about the technology, and what we're looking for, not only for now, but also for the future, how we can still compete with the competitors, what kind of features we implement into the devices. But let's start one by one.
I think part of the points already Wolfgang talked about that. Something which is really important for us for this, I think, seven years, seven to eight years when we started with the first Shelly device, we built not just something to control lighting. For example, when we talk about the Plejd, they're very strong, but only in lighting. And for example, Philips doing exactly the same. We make the devices not only, for example, to control the heating, which is, let's say, if you're looking for the tado°, they're a very good pair, but they're only on the heating. We make over, at the moment, more than, I think, close to 60, 65 different kinds of devices, which can control almost everything in every house, which can monitor everything in every house. Energy-wise, security, access control, garage, water, or solar energy, everything. If it's powered, we can control it.
If it's not, we can measure it. And this helps us a lot to make the experience for the end customers just with a single brand to have everything from it and in a very reasonable price. Because if you compare our company with many others, and if you compare the portfolio from many others, then you'll see that even when we talk about the Chinese, there is no single provider which can offer so many devices in different kinds of the product lines. Because we talk about the in-wall, the retrofit devices, which the people can build inside the switch, the professional devices, which are working in the breaker box, the sensors which can be placed everywhere. And all of this is a one ecosystem provided for a single company.
Maybe we can compare with the Legrand or ABB or Schneider, which provide a similar solution, but then really, still, this solution is very, very, very expensive. And something which we proved that we have many, many partners. And one of the reasons to have that, this is also the second big difference between us and maybe all competitors. Because each device and everything, we provide them the open platform. No matter if they're the Chinese or no matter the expensive brands, but their main philosophy is to keep customers locked to their own technology, to keep customers locked to their own cloud. But we're thinking completely different from the very beginning.
We give us options, the customers to choose by himself, do they want to use our cloud and our solution, or they want to just use the piece of hardware with our software built in, but to connect to their own infrastructure. Which is, let's say, if you talk here, it's a Windows against Linux. When from Windows, customers stick to the operating system and on Linux that everybody can add and can control the environment and control the software from their own side. And we choose exactly this way. And from what we see, this is very appreciated from our customers from the very beginning because they don't feel that we as a company try to walk them exactly. Just all the time to be dependent to what we build. They can control their devices by themselves locally through their own cloud or from a third-party solution.
And this is the results. All of these companies, or I think all of them, not most of them, but all of them, they make a special support. And not only this one. At the moment, you have more than 400 integrations because they've seen what we do, they're happy with what we provide them, and they start to build their own infrastructure to support our protocols and our devices, but from their cloud, from their site. Which for the first time, and this is nobody made it before in such large scale. And this is really, really huge. And this is every day. For example, we have a special team now, which is an integration team, helping every day more and more companies to integrate our devices to be part of their own infrastructure. Our cloud is completely off. The customers don't need it.
And these companies also feeling this gives them the additional security because in most of the cases, they've seen that there is a rising star, a new company which is providing amazing technology. After three years, no more money. Investors don't want to continue supporting them. And then the company is gone. And what happens with devices and the customers? What happens is all this technology they provide, in most of the cases, nothing. And the customers need to buy another technology or something like that. But in our case, because we are open protocol, the devices, they can be connected to everything. And even they know that in their worst case, if something happens with the Shelly Cloud, we don't care because their device is communicating directly with us. And this is something which is completely different with how the competitors are thinking about the business.
And the third one, because we are almost a software company and you are very good for to maintain the huge data and the big amount of data, we have the cloud platform, which for the usual customers, for the people which don't want to care about the whole process, they just want to plug and play the devices, we have our own cloud solution. Partially, these partners are also using our cloud solution as a backup. If something happens with their own cloud, they can use our one. But this is the third part. Then we offer not only any kind of the automation, any kind of the area to be automated, but also we're covering almost every platform at the moment in the world, possibility of our device to work with it.
And on top, we are also covering for the customers which don't want to, the regular customers which just want to use the devices. We're offering them a very advanced cloud platform. And when we talk about the key drivers, I think more of them. Maybe many companies can say that, but the next slide, you'll see the difference. The first time, yeah, that's as we say, is our cloud, which is made from scratch. And this is very important to be profitable because many of our competitors, what they do from the very beginning, they don't want to spend money to build their own solution from scratch. And then they're looking for the ready-to-use services. So use third-party services, for example, Google big d ata services or AWS Amazon services, which can collect data, IoT, something, cloud. What happens in the future?
Unfortunately, from the very beginning, this looks fine. They're selling the device at once, but this device must be supported from the cloud, for example, for the next 10, 15 years. When they have, for example, let's say we have 50 million devices on the market, 50 million, just imagine if this costs them just EUR 0.5 per year per device. This is an additional cost of EUR 7.5 million for them. This slowly starts killing them because the only way to support this one is to sell more and more and to increase the price of the devices. Because our company history is 20 years, I think 26-year-old company, which usually controlling data, we have a lot of experience with the big data because we have software for the mobile carriers, maintenance data for some financial institutions, and we have experience.
This cloud, basically, this proprietary secure cloud solution keeps our cloud cost extremely low, which helps us to provide the devices and services connected to these devices in very reasonable price compared with other brands. And the second one is fully open protocol, which I talked about just on the previous slide because this also gives us option for the customers to use their own cloud. For us, this is fine. Okay. They buy the device. They don't use our cloud. We are completely fine because we don't need to pay additional cost for the cloud for every device. The second one is everything, the software and hardware is 100% built into in-house development. There are some third-party services which we use, but this is only, for example, for design.
We're using some consulting services how to make something better, but everything is building, which means that everything is under control. This helps us a lot because in case of the chip shortage, for example, or in case of when the COVID is coming, for our team, it's much easier to find the alternative solution fast, easy, and to switch and to use a different kind of the chips and components, which help us to continue growing and selling more compared with the other companies which are suffering and waiting for somebody to deliver them the new technology or just to chip shortage to go to finish. And the second one, which is good, everybody can say that they have our best world-class engineering and software developers. On top of that, we have one more advantage. We're in Europe, European Union, but this is Bulgaria.
Our R&D is in Bulgaria, where the cost for the people and the taxes is relatively low, one of the lowest in the European Union, which helps us only to have these talents in the reasonable monthly cost and to have options not to prioritize the different devices and services, but to try to make more at the same time because we can find the right people. Yeah. The integration with the ecosystem, compatible leading protocols. This means that not only do we have open protocols, but if there is a system like Samsung SmartThings, Google, Alexa, Amazon, Matter, our devices, KNX, for example, our devices are compatible out of the box with any kind of the protocols and ecosystems, which gives us customers just the easy way to use it. Community driven design.
For the community-driven design, I can show maybe the next slide, which is most important because this is from the very beginning. What happened is from the very beginning, and this is we still, I think, is moving the company forward, and this is our community. There is no other company, but there is no, which have such a larger community, the brand, which have such a larger community in the social media. If you open the Facebook and you look for the Shelly, for example, support groups, you will see that there is a main group with 100,000 people therein, a very active group with more than 20, 30 posts per day, Saturday, Sunday, maybe 50 plus more posts per day, hundreds of comments every day, and this is something which we are supporting, but it's not built by us. This is built by our customers.
But it's not only. If you check, you will see there is a German group, there is a Danish group, there is a Netherlands group, and there is a Poland group. There is almost in every language our customers create groups where they can talk and where they can share their experience and knowledge about our products. And we are there to help them. We are very actively talking with them. All developers, including me, but also all developers in the company, they are obliged to see what happens and they personally helping and to tell people what they can do, which many companies claim that we are close to the customers. We're working together with the customers. This is okay. Compared with what we're doing, I think this is almost bullshit because we're really working with them very actively.
And not only this one, but also we use their experience. I can tell you a little bit more about how the process, but for example, we have a very large QA team, which is our most active customers, not customers, participants in the Shelly Groups. We invite them to be part of our external QA team, which helps us to short time to device to be reached the market. First, if you have some idea, we can talk with them. And believe me, some of them, they're in very high position. Some of them are working, for example, the main network engineer for Cisco.
Another one is, for example, some of the engineers which are working at Honeywell, and they have all this experience, but they're happy for free, okay, almost for free because we give them, for example, devices to test and everything, but they're happy to test the new devices in different kinds of the environment to give us the real feedback, how we can improve the devices, to give us some ideas to implement them. And this is really one of the most, let's say, for us, a huge help. It's something which is, from the very beginning, drives us to the more and more level. And you know because all of these people engage. Now, I think over all channels, we have more than 200,000 people which are more as ambassadors, not just the client.
I think, for example, doTERRA or some brands, cosmetic brands, they try to make such kind of the multi-level marketing, and they pay a lot of money for that. The good thing is that this happens for us without paying any kind of the money. We just don't spend for the first year. As you know, from the very first years of the Shelly, we never spent a single cent for marketing. Everything happens viral. And it's happening because these people, which is now in these groups, they're just talking about the brands, friends, their coworkers, and to everybody, they talk about that. They're showing what they can do with our devices. And then this grow, what you're seeing, it happens because of them. Now, of course, we spend money for marketing, but we don't have something which is I have a question for investors.
For example, I think in one of the meetings, the question is, how much is the customer acquisition cost per customer? I say, what is this? I don't know what this is because we never spent such money. I mean, if you spend money, we now spend money for the IFA or CES in Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. We spend money to have a beautiful booth because we know that the partners will come. We want to talk with them. The people want to see us. And we spend most of the marketing in this direction. We never spend money. Okay. Now we spend EUR 10,000 for advertising. How many new customers we have for EUR 10,000? No, this is not our until now.
Right now, we never invest money in this area because the demand sometimes is bigger than what we can deliver and prepare the next production. This is very special for the hardware. If you have from month to month, for example, a 30% increase of demand, you need to cover it. But unfortunately, for the real things, not just the software, you need to prepare the raw materials. You need to be ready for such a scale. If not, just the people are waiting, complaining, and it's not so easy to work on that area. We're doing very well. But still, this is one of the reasons for that because we never spend on it; there is no targeting. The people are just waiting and asking for more and more devices, and they buy more devices. And they generate the content.
If you're looking at the YouTube and looking for Shelly, you'll see, for example, 5,000, 7,000 videos already for the Shelly, and we never pay for the video. The people make it for us. They shared these videos, and this happens. And I think this is very unique for the Shelly because there is no other company which their customers are so active. What is the results until now based off what we're talking? Over 100 countries, and we sold more than 15 million devices, which is 6.7 million we sold in the last 12 months. Okay. Last year, yeah. Which seen that the growth rate for the sold device is very high.
Currently, when we do something and when we say something, absolutely without paying nothing, we have more than one million reach immediately because every post is shared between the many groups for the whole automation over the world. Immediately, some influencers publishing a video about the new devices or the new technology, which is make the million coverage is almost for a day, and which is good also the customer satisfaction. We're measuring our support team measuring all the time the customer satisfaction. This is over 60, which is one of the best in this kind of business area. Currently, we have 1.5 million cloud users.
What we can see, let's say the cloud users mean also the number of the households, but it's not the old one because we have some questionnaire for our customers, and we have some additional data that we know that 50% of our devices, half of them, is installed in the systems which the customers don't want to use any kind of the cloud, or they're using the third-party cloud. This, for example, the user which is in the Home Assistant or openHAB or Homey, which they want to use their devices completely isolated from the environment, just in their houses. There are many devices in the hotels and some institutions which also don't want to connect their device to the cloud. They're using some internal platform. This is 1.5 million customers. We can double the households.
This is the 1.5 million households, which means currently we have over 3 million households which are operating where the Shelly device is operating all over the world. Yeah. And you can see, of course, the DACH region is the most successful for us. Half of the installation happens in the DACH region. The rest of Europe is 41%, and the rest of the world is 7%. One of the reasons because I see a question of what happens in the United States and everything is not easy, and there are two reasons. If you can, there are not so many European brands and European movies which are successful in the United States. And there are many United States products and movies which are successful in Europe, which means the way to make a jump from Europe to the United States is not easy.
The second one is not only easy, but it's very expensive. From the very beginning, most investors know us from the very beginning. They know that we are not like management; we don't want to gamble. We don't want to say, "Okay, let's spend EUR 50 million or EUR 15 million this year in the United States to see what will happen." We're going slowly. We prefer to go, let's say, where is the river and to make small steps, but secure steps and not to make some risky steps and to spend a lot of money to see just what happens and maybe this or that. This is one of the reasons because we're expecting in time, and we know that will happen. The success in the DACH region, success, for example, in the rest of Europe, this will happen in other countries in the world.
Just need more time and take more time for this one. And this is something which first time I will show Gen 4. Nobody sees Gen 4 because now the current one of the devices is Gen 3. Now we will be first, we'll know that there is a Gen 4 which is planning by us. But this is how we're driving the technology and why we are much better than the competition. The first devices in 2017 when we built, this is the Gen 1 device which can operate only over the Wi-Fi and the only third-party protocol which the customers can use to control devices. This is MQTT, one of the most, let's say, protocol for the geeks and for the home customers. Then in 2021, we make a Gen 2.
Gen 2 devices, what we add on top of all kinds of the features, we add the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and still the protocol is only MQTT, which the customers can connect our devices to the third-party services. Then it's coming the Gen 3, and Gen 3, what is very special in Gen 3, this is the first line of devices where we're building our own chip. It's not completely one. Let's say we make it with a partner. We don't produce it by ourselves. We are fabless for the chips, but the chip is made by our requirements. This immediately means that this device is much more capable compared with the competitors. I can show you something which Wolfgang doesn't say, but this small device when we talk about it is not just the relay. It's not just measuring the energy.
But for example, this device is a router. This is the Wi-Fi repeater. We don't need repeaters. If you put behind the wall, this device starts repeating the Wi-Fi signal, and you can use it. You can use it for other devices. You can use it from your mobile phone in such a size. This device acts as a gateway for the other Bluetooth devices because usually the Bluetooth devices, for example, Plejd's the Bluetooth. What customers need to have, they need a hub. And you need this hub because the Bluetooth is not in the internet. This is the local protocol. And if you want to control these devices abroad, you need a hub. Each of these devices acts as a Bluetooth hub in this size. There is no changes. Each of these devices has something called this is the JavaScript.
If I got to explain, I can try to explain the easiest way. If all kinds of the feature is not enough for the customers, if the customers have a very special protocol which we don't implement, we make inside the programming language that every customer can program this device by themselves and can add additional features. Something like an application meant you can install additional application inside of this device. On top of that, it's not only this one, but this device automatically knows, for example, can check the weather conditions and can take a decision. Raining, okay, I don't want to switch it off, or can send a command to another device to switch it off. This device has the sunset, sunrise, for example, every day and can act independently without any kind of the controller and to control the on/off or dimming or measuring.
If measuring the energy, this device measuring the energy can decide if the energy is more than expecting. Maybe is better to consumption is too high, for example, is better to tell other device to do something. This everything is built in this device, and this is because what we're exactly doing, adding to make a special chip for us. Not only this one, but these devices have Wi-Fi, have Bluetooth. On top of that, supporting the protocols, the Ethernet, the KNX protocol for the first time is there. KNX is one of the first home automation protocols. Do you know how costly the KNX devices? Extremely expensive. Not only this one, they're wired devices.
Meaning this room has a KNX, for example, but if tomorrow you want to put here a new wall and you want to put the device, you need to call somebody to come. New wiring, new cables. What we do, we build in the KNX wireless KNX protocol in this device, and this device can operate with all kinds of the ABB Siemens Schneider KNX system without adding nothing on top. And this is inside. For the first time, we are supporting DALI protocol for the lighting, and we're going for the industrial automation with the DALI protocol and big office building protocol. And also for the first time, we introduced the Matter, which is the new protocol for the smart home and for the end customers.
The Z-Wave is the same size of device, just a little bit kind of different chips inside to support the Z-Wave technology, but everything is ready. Both these sizes is for the Gen 3 devices. And we released then the first Gen 3 devices at the beginning of the year. And now just a year later, now we think about the next one. What will be the Gen 4? What is missing? And as you've seen already, the two new protocols are there: LoRa and Zigbee. What is very special for this one? LoRa. LoRa means that these devices, because we will keep the size, we can make a little bit bigger, but we will keep the size. These devices can communicate between each other in 5 km distance. And you can make a small mesh for 150 km if you need it, which solves a big issue.
And also one of the reasons for LoRa, the LoRa is the industrial protocol, which means, for example, with such devices, but with LoRa, as we've seen, LoRa add-on because we don't want, for example, the regular customers to spend additional money if not needed. But with the LoRa protocol building into the devices, these devices can start controlling the street lighting or agriculture, for example, sensors to receive the data in very large distance. The next one is the Zigbee. The Zigbee is the same. It's almost industrial protocol, but also smart home protocol. And on top of the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee, something for Gen 4, which will be very important. The customers now, if you open the Amazon, no matter what kind of website, you'll see that you have a choice to buy a Zigbee device or to buy the Wi-Fi device.
What we make with Gen 4, all of this protocol we will build in the single device. We just buy, and then the customers can decide what exactly need to use. I want to use Zigbee. Okay, this device, switch to Zigbee, working with Zigbee. I want a Wi-Fi. Okay, go to the Wi-Fi, and not only this one, we make possibility customers to use all of them at the same time. Meaning I want this device to be connected over the LoRa, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Zigbee. Okay, welcome. You can do that, and you can control device. There is no such technology on the market. There is no such device, and on top in this size, nothing different, which is completely new era of the, let's say, possibility how people can use the Shelly devices, and this is the Gen 4, which we're planning in 2025, 2026.
We're coming in the steps from the first to the next devices. On top of that, you see additional protocols, Z-Wave, LoRa, which will allow devices to communicate, the Z-Wave to communicate from one kilometer each to another. This is basically the next step which we're working on. Yeah, maybe tomorrow in Facebook group, somebody will ask me when Gen 4. Do you know how many questions when we Zigbee will be there? I say, I don't know. It's late. Yeah, but yeah. Yeah. This is the Shelly Smart Control App. I think there is some kind of video which needs to be played before I talk about that. Yeah, the Smelly, yeah, Shelly cloud application. Some customers are joking with Smelly. But yeah.
The Shelly app, what we build in, I think, compared with our application, we make a very at the same time for some customers is a little bit complicated, but when they dive in what we offer them with our application and then start comparing with their one with other applications, they see that we provide them a lot. We provide them a really very good customer experience. We are one of the, or maybe the only one already with somebody which can open the application on the web browser, and this application looks like completely same as opening for your mobile phone, which makes them very easy to manage the application, to install new devices directly from the laptop, and also remotely over the VPN, and this is again something which is unique.
At the moment, everybody's concentrating to control everything from the smartphone, but really for the large installation of large houses is much easier also to open from your desktop. This is what the Shelly Smart Control provides them with very detailed information about the energy data usage, consumption of the houses, give them additional analysis and historical information, what happens in their houses, create a different kind of the scenes. Absolutely, our application is covering more than one area of the smart home. It's one of the most advanced applications for the customers. The second one, as you know, a year ago, we launched the first premium subscription for our application. We do that with very careful because there are no competitors which at the moment are asking customers to pay for this one, even the biggest one.
If you have Amazon, for example, or Google, they never ask for additional payment, especially to control your houses. We do that very carefully and listening to our customers. We choose a very special thing which does not exist in other brands. For example, if they want to have some kind of the AI-enabled features to receive information if they've forgotten their lights or if there is a pre-failure detection of their devices, automatically our cloud can calculate the data, can see that something happens which is wrong, and can send a notification, and they're very happy about that. The second one is the customers which want to, for example, have a really detailed energy data information. We keep them for five years and for every minute what happens for the last five years, and they can really go and see every moment what happens in their houses.
Even they can analyze, they can compare the historical information. This is something when we add. At the moment we continue adding additional services for this subscription. What we can say at the moment, there's a question how many are the subscribers. We still keep them. We don't say how many they are. But what we can say is something which is a very important number. The current premium revenue from the premium customers completely covering our cloud cost, which is for us, this is as a first step, is just perfect. We continue working on them. We will start to make some kind of the gamification and the application for these customers and hope in time the numbers will be a significant part of the revenue.
But still, as we can say, this is still our some kind of the not test, but careful steps before to offer such kind of a subscription for the customers. The second something which is completely new, and you can check in the Facebook notes, in the Google if you ask, you can see more data. We start providing not only services for the home automation, but we're working on the security, on the SaaS service, the cloud-based security system, where based on the same our Shelly devices, the customers can create the access control system and also the controlling working time, monitoring working time of the workers. And this is one of the first additional services which we start adding on top of the devices, on top of just the smart home automation, which also is showing that our device is not only for automation.
They can do any kind of the job with a proper backend and control. In the very beginning, now we have two or three test customers when we started when we were where the system is launched and it's under the testing condition. Next year, that will be one of the platform and direction where we're going also with Shelly. The third one is very specific, the Fleet Manager System. And this is related mainly to the big institutional customers and the big buildings. Because just imagine there is a hotel. One hotel could not be dependent on the internet connection with the cloud because if something happens, the system will fail. At the same time, they don't want to use a third-party solution. They want something from Shelly. They're asking us, "Guys, can you provide us the private cloud just for us?" And this is the Fleet Manager.
Fleet Manager gives our customers the possibility to install our cloud in their on-premises. And this is very important, for example, for the bank institution because one bank, they say, "Okay, we don't want data to come out of our ecosystem. We want everything to be built in." But at the same time, we don't want to use the third-party services because it's very expensive. And then we provide them the Fleet Manager, which makes these customers control the devices closed in their environment. This is also SaaS service because we provide them under subscription the support for our cloud, but installed in their on-premises. And also there are lots of advanced features. For example, if somebody, let's say, one energy company wants to monitor one million energy metering in real time, this is something which is now our cloud is not built for.
This is built to control the house and to monitor one house, but this is not the problem for the Fleet Manager. If you want to monitor, for example, 100,000 temperature sensors or water level somewhere or energy in some region, the Fleet Manager is completely optimized to do this job for such big companies, and also, there is also a cloud version of this Fleet Manager for somebody which wants to use the independent cloud, not the centralized cloud as you have. We're also offering as a SaaS service, and this is another area, and there is a Shelly X. I think before I start talking about Shelly X, it's another video for the Shelly X. It's a short video. Without sound. Okay, but it's short. Okay. Basically, Shelly X. I can start talking on top of the video.
Why and how we decided to have a Shelly X and what is the reason to be there? From everything as I told, connectivity, multi-platform support, the open protocols, low cost for the cloud support and maintenance. Because the Shelly is going very popular in Europe, we've seen that there is an increasing interest from the appliance manufacturers from China, from Europe, from Turkey, which ask us, "Okay, can I have something which is, yeah, can I build your technology in my device?" For example, let's say this is the fridge manufacturer, and they want to connect their fridge to the internet. Or they're just, let's say, in Turkey, there are many brands also which make the washing machines, and they want their washing machine connected.
Unfortunately, if they start calculating how much they need to pay for the cloud cost, connectivity, development, and everything to such a platform just for the washing machine, this is very expensive for them. And they prefer to use third-party technology. Currently, worldwide, there is just one competitor, a real competitor. It's called Tuya. It's a Chinese company, a big Chinese company which is providing such technology for many European, United States, and China appliance manufacturers. But first, it's Chinese, especially GDPR. Nobody knows what happens. Also, the cloud is in China. Support responsibility also is not clear what happens. And many customers also, because they're going to be too big, especially the Tuya, and the only one, they start to be a little bit arrogant to their clients. And we want to use that.
We want to use that because we want to create and to give not only the and also something which is very important. When you talk to one of the customers, they know what they have, right. If I switch to Shelly X and Tuya switch me off, tomorrow nobody will say, for example, that my Tuya doesn't work. Everybody will say, for example, my washing machine, let's say Whirlpool. I don't know Whirlpool is Tuya, but just an example, my Whirlpool will stop working. And they are afraid about that to be dependent with a single brand. The second one, which is completely different between us and the Tuya, for example, as a main competitor and only competitor at the moment, is that we give them the possibility to control devices out of our infrastructure.
For example, if tomorrow we go bankrupt and say, "Okay, kill Whirlpool." No, he cannot do that. No one can do that because the Whirlpool can have an additional separate channel next to our cloud. They can continue maintenance and monitoring their own devices and managing their devices. Something which at the moment nobody offers them such a solution. And for this one is the Shelly X when we provide them our chip, making a module. It looks like that, the module, especially this one, with all kinds of the software needs for them just to be sold, just to be put inside in their own equipment. And this equipment to be smarter, to be monitored from everywhere, to be managed from everywhere, and to have all kinds of features. This means also that this vacuum cleaner can act as a Wi-Fi repeater in your house.
If you don't have coverage, you can just set the vacuum cleaner over there and you have an internet spot. Just because this is part of our technology. Yeah, funny, but this is the Shelly X and something which we are working on now. The first Shelly X products will be on the market end of the year, beginning of the next year. Let's say we're planning December, maybe for Christmas. There'll be first Shelly X products which are powered by Shelly with the Shelly X built in these products. And this is the live data which we've seen. You can see in our webpage. Yeah, now a little bit just to I see it on my screen. Just a few seconds, you'll see over there. This is the live data that I can show you. Wow, how big is it?
Where we can see almost what happens in real time. In our website, you can see in real time what's happening. This is the only device which is connected to our cloud. For example, this screen, especially this map, is a device which is connecting to our cloud. Just keep in mind that one more, this is just the half. Another half, we don't see because the customers buy it and they don't allow this device to be connected to our cloud. They choose another solution. And you can see here that especially Saturday, Sunday, when the people are at home, you can see that almost every two, three seconds, there is a new device which is popping on the map. During the week, let's say every five to ten seconds, average time between all devices at the moment is less than five seconds.
Every five seconds, somewhere, somebody in the world installs the new Shelly device. On top of that, you can see, for example, when we talk about the big data, for the last 24 hours, our cloud stored and analyzed 18 TB of data. For the traffic, the real traffic which is at the moment to the cloud is something like close to 30 GB per second. This is the traffic which we receive and the information which we are working on. From this, I think, this is the early morning executions. It's just 80 million. But by the end of the day, over 100 million, maybe 150 million scenes will be executed from our cloud. Over a million times, somebody, this is the least number, executed Alexa and Google commands, meaning more than one million times the people will say, "Shelly, switch on the lights.
Shelly, set 25 degrees temperature." And this is per day. And we have lots of data. Now, currently, 5,500 EVs charging. How many lights is on and off? The real cloud data. Per minute, we're executing 175,000 scenes in our cloud. Yeah, and yeah, it's a huge data. And this is exactly one of our big, big, big advantages. That when I have a meeting with Google and show this one, they say, "Guys, how do you do that? Do you know how many times I ask for our engineers to show some amount of the data and let's just do this data in real time?" And they say, "This is impossible.
How do you do that?" I'm not saying that our journey is better than Google engineers, but maybe at the end, what we make and our all kinds of optimization, what we do gives us the possibility to really present and to maintain a huge amount of data and still to be very, very profitable with the devices. Yeah. And I think this is yeah, just waiting for the last slide. Yep. Okay. And yeah, this is some kind of the information and the future prediction. We stop somewhere because nobody knows what happens with the Shelly X. Let's say if you're working with Tuya, if you compare with Tuya, Tuya is selling 100 million-200 million modules annually. If you compare these numbers, maybe, and if you succeed, Shelly will be over the moon compared with others and compared with these numbers.
But we try to provision what will happen if you continue like that, growing like that. And you can see that, okay, 2022, we have 8 million devices on the market. 2023, we have 30 million. 2024, at the end of the year, we're expecting to have 20 million devices on the market. And then 2025 is over 30, over 40. If you continue like that, some calculation, maybe we will have over 150, 200 million devices operating on the market in 2030, which means this is the customers using our devices, using our technology. A big part of them, the half of them will be connected in our cloud. And on daily time, they use our application.
This is showing that the potential with what we're doing, as I say, without adding Shelly X on top, is huge and shows the very huge potential of the future of the company. The second, what we're looking for, this is the main area when we are not, let's say, present, but working on it and which can add additional customers, revenue streams, and sales. The Smart Locks, you know that you acquire the assets from one company for the Smart Locks. The idea behind is just to dive also in that area. We believe that the smart homes, Smart Locks is a part of the home automation. Now the integration is done. In a month, the Smart Locks which we buy will be part of the Shelly application, and the customers can automate it. Also, together with that, we don't buy just assets.
We buy the experience and knowledge and working for the more than one type of the smart home in the future. The second one is intelligent sensor. What means intelligent sensor? The intelligent sensor is not only to report the data, but intelligence inside that the sensors can decide if this data is important or is not important. What means best of historical analysis. Many people will say AI-enabled sensors, which is not true. Intelligent sensor is the most correct word because, yeah, you don't need to have an AI with the, I don't know, with the power plant for the sensor. It should be the battery-operated device, which with the low power profile and energy to be enough intelligent to analyze the data, not just to report it. The smart cameras. Camera is the huge area.
There are many companies there, but we've seen the demand for our customers to monitor everything from the single app. And we believe that we could have not a wide range, but a few very targeted smart cameras, ring bells, doorbells, which we see that there is demand. And we're planning next year to go in that direction. Long range, as I showed you with the Whirlpool technology and also with the Zigbee technology, with the Z-Wave technology, long range will give us the opportunity to dive into it and to approach the industrial market and the city automation, not just the building automation. The Shelly X, when I talk about, I don't need to repeat to. Then the AI-driven predictive maintenance could be additional streams. This is the hardware. Let's talk about the software.
Yeah, the AI gives us the possibility at the moment really to analyze the data much faster and big portion of data and to help customers giving them any kind of the prediction. We can tell them how much they will consume at the end of the month, how much energy, how they can save some energy, what to do. This is something which before that is not so easy, and also something very important that the customers can control, can create the scenes with the voice. Now they can need to click and to make it. In the future, what we're planning, the customers can say to the application, "Okay, Shelly, just I want when I come home to switch on the lights, the heating 25 degrees, but when I go in the bed, please switch off the lights," something like that.
Then the SaaS services, which I show you. Now we're also working on the different kind of the SaaS services which can give us additional revenue, recurrent revenue, and working on it. The advanced energy solution and monitoring. We're working with many different energy meters which can work in the different kind of the conditions and analyzing the consumption. Cloud management and data lake, something which we think that the time is coming because we have lots of data. This data we never showed and give this data to the third parties. We use in favor of the customers which create the data. And this is very important. But some of the customers, maybe if they allow their data to be used for the municipality or to be used for the third party to improve the environment, for example, condition for ESG goals, we could help there.
And the Shelly X software, with our platform, we also will start offering to our Shelly X partners opportunity to build the recurrent revenue and to have a recurrent revenue through their appliances. Let's say the washing machine, before the maintenance, automatically send the data to the service center to come in to clean the filters. Or if some of the something is gone, that some of the liquids is gone, the washing machine can order this directly from Amazon or somewhere. And this is some idea which we're planning for the future for the Shelly X. And this is pure software solution. Yeah. And at the end, I can just summarize that we're providing the full range of the technology and to covering any corner and every special task which the smart home required.
We are really, I can say, we're the most innovative company for the smart home. We're providing the technology. We're creating the technology. Everybody following us at the moment. We have products for the plug-and-play customers which don't want to understand the technology for the customers who don't want to do anything, just plug and play and have a simple remote control to the customers which want really everything, any kind of the data, and they want to use it for their own special services. We also provide them the services for them. The Shelly X gives us the possibility to be technology-enabled for the third parties and to be more oriented extremely to increase the coverage of the Shelly technology in households, for the customers, basically everywhere. Yeah, I think the second one is what we give them. We give to everybody the right platform.
And the people which need the proper platform to integrate the devices, we just give them the right tools there to do that. Yeah. And yeah, thank you. Thank you. I think this is the point here. Questions. I just tried to run away from the scene. Yeah. Questions. Yep. Yeah.
Thank you, Dimitar. Question on the SaaS services, the Fleet Manager and access control. Can you talk a bit about the revenue model behind those services? Is that per device, per company, per?
Yeah. It's both. If you check, there is some kind of the modules already in the web page. Both of them are available. It's per account, it's per device. But mainly it's per device. And both of them are paid per device. A monthly fee per device. Yeah. It's not so cheap, but yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
Hi, Dimitar. As you build these multi-purpose chips with all the protocols in there, do you have to pay royalties for these protocols?
Yeah, we pay a lot. It is not exactly per chip; it is not royalty. But we need to be part of the Wi-Fi Alliance, Bluetooth Alliance, Zigbee Alliance, and the Matter Alliance. Multiplied by 25,000 per year for each of them. It is 100,000 per year we need to pay to be part of their alliances. On top of that, for each device, we need to pay for certification one more time. Wi-Fi, Zigbee, blah, blah, blah. Additional, let's say, EUR 30,000-EUR 40,000 for certification. But this is not the royalty because after that, we do not pay nothing per device. The only one which we need to pay per device is for the Matter protocol. We need to pay; I think it is something like a, yeah, EUR 0.03.
We pay EUR 0.03 per device for special keys, which is all devices to be connected to the Matter infrastructure. This is the only royalty which we need to pay for the security, but which is also important. Anyhow, we paid for these security keys. We also reuse this security key for other things. If you want to connect the device to your cloud, you can use this security key which is stored and which is programmed in the factory. But this is the only way which we pay.
W e have some questions from the chat. First one is from Rasmus Persson. On top of the chip, is there any cost for your customers with Shelly X software cost, developing, adopting cost, etc.?
It depends on the case. Most of the case, we're covering for free, and we give them the chip completely finished for their one solution.
If somebody is coming with very special requirements, we have such a client which produced the heat pumps, is coming with very special requirements, then there could be some kind of the surcharge for the development, but let's say this is per case, but in most of the cases, 90% of the situation, the Shelly X is completely capable without any kind of the additional development and charges to work. Do the job out of the box.
Thank you. Just two very fast questions so on the LoRa protocol, that means that you guys can start creating devices for the agriculture sector, and that's something that would you be interested in, given that devices can communicate for 5 km? And I don't know if anybody is doing that, and the last question is any?
But what is the first question?
The LoRa, w hether you are going to go into agriculture industry to create devices to communicate.
No, we don't need to create these existing devices. They can be used to communicate between each other in such a distance. It's not needed. But okay, because we have devices with measuring the temperature, humidity, we don't have some devices which measure the nutrition, for example. But you can control with our devices irrigation. You can do many things, but now in the building or in the house. For agriculture, this opened the area. And maybe in the future, there will be some special devices for agriculture. But the idea is that existing devices can be used, for example, also in this direction or in this some. It's an add-on to existing devices.
That's very useful.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.
I'll leave it there. Thanks. Yeah.
The second one?
No, just quickly, is there any major brands already using Shelly X or what is the timeline with?
We cannot discuss.
You can't.
We cannot discuss.
Okay, good.
There is, but they don't tell us to discuss. NDA and no. Yeah. You cannot imagine because the Porsche is there and because now Shelly, if you buy the new Porsche Macan, the Shelly app seems installed by default. And we're waiting them more than six months. They told us to make a PR that Shelly is one of the chosen applications to be pre-installed on the Porsche. Yeah.
Hi. I have a question regarding what you described with fleet.
Is this aimed at partners then managing multiple of their customers and having fleet installations on-premise with each of the customers, or is that the other way around as well where as a partner, you can manage multiple of your customers centrally from your location and they essentially?
Both is possible. Both. I mean, the initial idea is, as you say, the customers install. This is something which is installed in the premises of the customers, and they can locally control the device and monitor the devices. But what we've seen, when we build it, some companies come and say, "Okay, I'm fine, but can you host this solution for me? I don't want to be in my premise. I still want to be on the cloud solution, but I don't want to be connected, but I don't want to use the same cloud as the regular customers.
I want to have an independent, for example, because they pay. This is their own premise, cloud premise, for example. They rent it, they own it, they just want to install it in their own, on their own cloud or machines. And this is the, let's say, as you ask, the bot is [audio distortion] at the moment with the Fleet Manager. Yeah.
We have other questions from the chat, Dimitar. Alexander Dupré asks, "Do you think Amazon and Google will at some point create also premium subscription plans for their customers which could make your plan more attractive?"
We will be happy, very happy if they do that because then we will not be the only one. For me, I will be much more relaxed to offer them more services or, let's say, to limit them. Yeah. And we'll be very good.
But if they do that, okay. No, that's good for us.
Thank you. Very inspirational. Keeping the speed of innovation, do you need to hire more engineers?
Yeah, we do that. I think last year we hired 40 more people in the R&D team. This year we're planning almost the same number of engineers because I show you Gen 4, but okay, me and some small part of the team working on Gen 5, 2027. Yeah. And we have idea, but now we need to prepare idea, chips, something. It's coming. And yeah. And still we need, on top of what you see, we need to decide from now and to choose the right support, to choose what kind of the chips to how to manage, how to change it. Yeah.
Just on the Shelly X, can you tell us a little bit more about the financials, like the gross margins, etc.? Are they similar to the Shelly?
It depends on the customer. It's too early to say, but yeah, basically it's similar to Shelly. Very hard to see from now and from the beginning. It's planned to be similar and even better. But let's see the reality when we have a customer because if somebody comes and says, "Okay, guys, give me 100 million modules," maybe we'll be much more relaxed regarding the margins. And on the base of what we're calculating now, still we want to keep this one. For example, there is a Tuya. We will not be competitive to Tuya because Tuya really, okay, Tuya really lost 100 million every year.
We don't want to lose EUR 100 million every year just to make the business, which means we will be more expensive than Tuya. But we will provide a completely different kind of the level of the security information and capability with our model compared to them.
Okay. And do you think you need to raise prices for the Gen 4 series or will you keep it similar?
This is the wrong question. If you ask me, never raise the prices. If you can decrease a little bit, it will be better. But this is the wrong. Mirche would have a little bit different opinion than me. And yeah, you need to ask them.
Good. Thank you. Yeah, just one more question on Shelly X. Is there any area where you wouldn't sell Shelly X where you maybe want to have your own products?
Yeah. No, this is the very strict. Yeah.
We don't offer Shelly X to the companies which make products similar to our one. There we don't allow to have a company which, and there is a demand which already request which already rejected. For example, if somebody makes a relay, no, there is no way. There are companies which they make up, even the Chinese company, they make it very smart because they come and tell us, "Guys, you have a see how many relays you have a different kind, but we don't have a relay which is 60 amps. Can we make it for you and power it by Shelly X?" We're completely fine. We will give you the whole development, everything, just but we can do it for you. We can make it for you. And this is the only partner which you allow and tell him, "Okay, guys, make it.
We really don't have something which controls 60 amps." There is a demand from the market for the water heaters, for the big appliances which consume a lot of energy. Okay, make it for us and we will give you the Shelly X model which is completely capable, which is capable for your hardware. And this is the only one. The second something which is important for Shelly X is we don't want to make what making Tuya. They make something and say, "Okay, we have a module for the humidifier." And then they give modules for a thousand of the, not thousand, okay, tens of Chinese companies. And they start making the same humidifier. And they start competing with the prices. And at the end of the day, nobody makes money because marketing, competing, nothing. And customers, let's say, win because they have a cheap humidifier. Quality is suffering.
Everything is bad. In our Shelly X, the idea behind which is not part of the presentation that we don't give this technology to everybody. For example, if you talk about the humidifier, we will choose two brands which can give them the module for the humidifier. But they should give us the, okay, first year we will sell, for example, a million humidifiers, next year five million humidifiers. If they don't reach the target, then we have a right to give it to somebody else because we're looking for the quote. For example, this year target is 100 million humidifiers. And if there is a single company which can do that, fine. If there is no single company, then it could be more.
But we don't want to go in the cheap Chinese or European products just to start competing with the same modules, with the same technology, with the same features. This is not good for the brand.
We have one more question from the chat from Rasmus Persson again. Given that the U.S. has a completely different electrical system than EU, don't you need to make large adjustments to the products to be able to work? If so, how much of your product portfolio has been adjusted for the U.S. market?
Yeah. U.S. market. What is the difference? It's much easier than Europe because the voltage is 120 against 240. It's much more relaxed from the product, developing the product, which means that every European product can work in the United States, which is not true from the vice versa. It's just time and money for additional certification to do that.
This is, I think, it's the same every device. The only difference is the socket size, but this is the single device. Everything for our device. And also our devices at the moment, we don't do any kind of the modification for the United States. We just make the UL certification, which requires some of the parts to be changed a little bit, for example, to use a different part number. Because this is not because the parts in Europe are bad or something. This is because to have a UL certified product, not all, but some important components inside must be also UL certified. And they're a little bit expensive because it's that. And for that, for Europe, using the non-UL certified component for your products, UL certified components, but that's the difference.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you very much. We make a 25-minute coffee break.
That means we restart at a quarter to three. And we will catch up. I will talk a little bit faster. So we will catch up the 15 minutes. And now I'm a Shelly fan because I learned a lot about our products.
Into the dynamic world of Shelly Group. Step into the dynamic world of Shelly Group, where home automation and professional solutions unite, powered by cutting-edge IoT technology. Whether you're enhancing your smart home experience or implementing professional-grade energy and monitoring solutions, Shelly Group empowers you on both exhilarating fronts. With a user-friendly setup and unwavering support, we transform your energy savings and customization into an extraordinary journey. Welcome to Shelly Group, where innovation unlocks the full potential of your home. Explore the possibilities.
So, I hope you are ready for part two.
As usual, after Dimitar's fun part, I do more the boring part: numbers, things, and explaining them all the number questions that might come from you. The third chapter is about revenue growth and scale-up potentials. If we look at what we did the last year, in 2023, we gave out a guidance until 2026. Some people said, "Why are you doing that?" Others said, "Oh, that's great. It's usual. There's not only one opinion." We did this for a simple reason: we had to build more credit. We wanted to give more a longer outlook, build some more trust. We said from EUR 75 million, and don't forget, this is the end 2023 number. Before that, we were on EUR 50 million. We said we want to be on 200 in 2026. Then some people said, "This is too much.
They will never make it," after we reached the 75, and then we said we want to make 105 in this year. The same people said, "That's not ambitious." So whatever you do is not right. But how do we think? And we feel quite good right now. So, you know that in at the six-month number that we released, we are growing above, or around 50%, which is an excellent number. The market is at least in our biggest region in Germany, but slowing down. There are not a lot of new constructions. If you talk to our competitors, everyone is complaining, it's not so good. The market is tough. And we usually say we don't care. We grow. So, from 2023 to 2026, we have a market growth. And you've seen the number at the very beginning.
We expect the market 10%-15% to grow. Maybe it's a little bit more. Maybe it's a little bit less than the 15. But in this area, the market will grow. And then we have a couple of initiatives that I talked about. We talked about at several locations that should lead to the 200, because if we just add from 75, 10%-15% per year, we will never reach the 200. So, what are we doing? We have one thing is, and I touched upon that at the beginning as well. We go into the regions with teams, and we have set up the German team for the DACH region in 2022. We see the results. You will see a graph in a second. We have the Nordics region, and Dennis is here, where we have now four people on the ground.
We have a local marketing, and Dennis and some other guys in his team are doing local support. That's very well appreciated, and we see that, especially in the professional market, very important for the Nordics. We see some development, and we have added first people, one person in the U.K., one in Spain, one in France, and one in Italy, and we plan to increase the teams in these countries. So, we are looking for people. We want to set up local organizations with a full small team at the beginning and then to add more people as soon as we can afford, and we have the Benelux and Poland on our list, where we want to start with local people next year. So, we have a huge search going on.
That means we will invest in people in the countries, knowing the countries, speaking the language with the right connections as well. So, if we see how the regions developed. So, if you take the DACH region and you see the revenue development, DACH was, and Dimitar mentioned that from the very beginning, our strongest region because we found friends. The community was just started. That's something that you cannot just copy. We cannot say we do exactly the same in the U.S. now. It will not happen because it just happened. It was a lot of luck and a lot of positive coincidences, and that happened. But after we opened, in 2022, the office in Munich with local support, and if you just read in the Apple App Store comments about our application in Germany, you see that people are so happy.
They rate us with five stars in the application because we have local German-speaking support, which has nothing to do with the application, but it has a lot of impact on the revenue. And you see that in 2022, 2023, I was, still now I changed that, but I was still responsible for that region. And I said, "Oh, guys, we will not continue growing in that speed. We reach a certain limit." And now you see what happened. And we do not expect this development to stop. We are at the very beginning, casting no pressure, at the very beginning of this development, and we expect that this continues to be our biggest region. And you see Italy, that's the blue line, without having people on the ground. We just hired someone now here, and we will add more people marketing.
We expect that this takes the same line in the U.K., where for a long time we said, "Yeah, that's a market, but no focus." You see very very now taking off a little bit. So, this should in the next year take the same curve. This is what we expect country by country. And that's why we are investing that much in local people. On the right side, there was a question about competition this morning. And here we took the two most famous ones: Homematic in Germany, a very famous brand, very well-reputed brand, very good products. They are much older than we are, so like 25 years old. Plejd, I don't know how old Plejd is, 10 years, something like that, maybe 8 years. But here you see, and we just made a very simple calculation.
We didn't take the last 12 months because it would look much more in our favor. We just took since Shelly exists, how many devices per year in average did we sell? 3.3. And you've seen that last 12 months we sold 6.7. So, the number would be much more in our favor. Homematic, since Homematic exists, average per year 2.5. Since Plejd exists, 400,000. That's the number we have from their website. So, that's public numbers, and we just compared that. If you look to the lower side, we made a calculation. We know that the average customer that adds the first Shelly device in his cloud account adds in average per year roundabout a little bit less than two devices. So, it's not like with tado° that you once equip your home with thermostats and then you are done.
No, it's every year on average two more devices per customer or per account. That means in 2020, in 2020, we made 35% of our revenue with, you cannot really call that recurring revenue, but it's like repeating customers that buy. In 2022, it was 40%, and this year we expect 43%. So, customers that already have minimum one Shelly device and that minimum one more. And that's the revenue. That's the data we get from our cloud because we can see how much products are added. And we think that this will continue over the years. Why is that happening? Because we are in the whole house and there are multiple angles where a customer can start.
Is this with a very simple plug that people buy now before Christmas to put it in the socket, connect their Christmas tree and make the Christmas tree smart, switch it off, switch it on with Alexa or with your smartphone or with a remote control or whatever, because the socket is hidden somewhere behind something and you cannot really access it in a good way. Or they have a photovoltaic system, balcony power stations, very popular in Germany. They take such a small device to check the power consumption or power production of the photovoltaic system. And then they start to add something like when there is enough energy, switch on the heat pump. They need another Shelly. Switch on the car charger. They need another Shelly. Switch on the washing machine or whatever you want to do.
For more comfort, we have the wall displays. People add more and more devices to their Shelly environment. This is what we call the Shelly flywheel. We have economies of scale. We have higher purchase volume. That means we can reduce costs or we can keep the costs at the level with more equipment in the devices, more memory, better stuff. We are increasing the distance to customers, better pricing, bring higher numbers. The technology is improving. Customers see more and more benefits to use Shelly devices. Energy reporting, energy consumption is reduced. After they are locked in the system, as with a lot of others, they want to add more because if now they want to add something to their heat pump, it's better to use a Shelly again.
That all leads to an acceleration because if you start with one or two and then you add two, you add two, you add two, that really spins up and we see that this is accelerating. One more thing is the distribution. We talked about professional installers. We talked about the do-it-yourself market. We are a do-it-yourself-first brand. That is our history. In 2022, we decided to enter additionally to the do-it-yourself market, the professional market, because we see that the market is much bigger. The do-it-yourself market in total is maybe around 30% of the total market. 70% is done via professional installers because people don't want to touch 110 V, 230 V in Europe. That is the bigger market.
But it was as well very clear for us from day one when we did this. We do not want to risk the do-it-yourself market because that's our core. That's where we are strong. By the way, that's something that in the United States at the beginning we targeted with do-it-yourself products to professional market and that didn't work. Now we change that and we go more to do-it-yourself, Amazon, Home Depot, Lowe's, Walmart Marketplace, and we see that it's step by step it's picking up. Then after a while we get demand from the professional market. In 2023 we realized and that's where this number from. It's some calculations, some information. What are we selling to professional distributors? Okay, we have that number. So, Rexel, Sonepar and a lot of others in Europe.
But as well from HORNBACH, we know the do-it-yourself store in Germany. We know that because they told us that they sell 30% of Shelly devices to professional installers. They go to the store, pick it up in the morning and install it during the day. So we are we were at 80% do-it-yourself share, 20% professional in 2023. This year we see it's going to 70%-30%. Next year we expect this to continue growing. In the Nordics we are already, Dennis, 40%-45% professional. Yeah, that's the number that we already see in Nordics. So it is working and we will add more professional devices. And we see currently that the professional distributors for those guys, that's a completely different way of distribution.
They come to us because more and more installers call them and say, "Why do I have to buy this product at Amazon and why don't you offer this?" So it's starting. We have as well a platform for installers where they can register, where the customers find them. That is growing very nicely. In Germany, we have now round about 500. The next country, of course, Nordics, where we have a couple of hundreds and where we will onboard much more. We train those people. They have different standards and we will professionalize this platform as well, giving them some displays so that they have some showrooms where they can show Shelly devices, and all this is on a good way.
So, if we see the development of distribution on the left side, the professionals that I was just talking about in 2020, I don't want to say maybe zero, but let's say zero. We had no contract with Rexel in any of the countries or Sonepar or Zander or FEGIME or others. Nothing. In 2021 we had five. In 2023, 10. End of this year we will have 20. And next year we estimate 35 to 40. So, we will be in most of the countries onboarded with these big players that are important to sell to installers. On the other side, do-it-yourself channel. And I mentioned a couple of times Amazon is a big player. There's a lot of online channels. That's as well HORNBACH, BAUHAUS, OBI in Germany. The do-it-yourself guys with online and physical stores. That's Conrad Electronic. That's a lot of specialized platforms.
And it's more and more distributors, retailers with stores like E.Leclerc in Italy. Very strong development. Just onboarded in Spain. And we are waiting to onboard them in France as well. So, there is something going on. HORNBACH takes us to all their other countries. So, they want to start with us in Sweden now. We needed to change some things with the owner's manual of the products. They have not been localized. But all this is developing. So, we will have round about 80 professional players working with Shelly devices in the retail sector. And next year will be above 100. We have. I mentioned that at the very beginning. We have, of course, our ESG strategy, but we have as well help from the ESG regulations, from EU regulations or country regulations.
So that's like all the buildings need to report their energy consumption at a certain point. The companies need to report their energy consumption at a certain point. Need to prove that they reduced without monitoring this, without showing how much did I consume at which point of my company. It's impossible to fulfill that. So, that's tailwind that we get. There is a new EU regulation that forces manufacturers of household appliances to monitor and to report and to register the energy consumption. So, every washing machine now I have to admit it's in one or two years that it starts. Do you know that, Dimitar? The regulation for washing machine.
I think it's in two years.
So everyone, Miele, Bosch, Vestel, Beko, Hisense, everyone needs to report how much energy is my refrigerator, my washing machine, my dishwasher, whatever consuming.
They have no idea how to do that. Some of them are coming to us and say, "Do you have an idea?" Of course we have. Just build one of the Shelly's or the Shelly X and then you have the data and we have the storage. So that's another tailwind that can happen. Maybe they find a different solution. Of course we have our own targets as well that we communicated already one and a half, two years ago. By 2030 we want to use 100% renewable energies. We want to reduce our energy consumption by 70% and Net Zero GHG emission in 2030. That's tough targets. If not we, who else can do that? Because we have all the tools to make that happen with some challenges like supply chain and a couple of others.
So, we have a clear idea where to go from 2023 until 2026, the EUR 200 million. That was, I say it again, that when we published this, everyone said they are completely crazy because we made like EUR 50 million. It was super ambitious and it's definitely something they will not achieve. And we got a lot of questions and big eyes. "Are you completely crazy? Why are you doing this?" But we did it to build reputation because at that time I made the tours typically in Germany from the Baader Bank Conference, Equity Forum in Frankfurt. I was at every investor meeting and everyone said, "Where are you from?" Bulgaria. Thank you very much. That changed and we did this to as well to change that and to show that we are there and we want to deliver. So, we have a growth strategy.
We know how we want to reach and we will reach the 2026 targets and we feel quite comfortable. So, if you make a simple mathematics, this year our guidance is 105. We will be in that corridor more or less. We never know how Black Friday will work. The hot season for us will start in the next four weeks. But it will not be, even if Black Friday fails, it will not be a disaster. We will have a good year and we feel comfortable whatever happens in detail to reach next year's target. If you just make the mathematics, you will see that average growth needs to be below 40% then. And I already hear the next guy saying, "Wow, below 40%. What a disaster. They are not ambitious. This is the end of Shelly.
They will never make it." So we will at the end deliver 200 and everyone will say, "Hey, this story is over," more or less. I don't think that the story is over and I come to this in a second. So, we want to go to the countries, to our customers in the country language with local support, with a lot of challenges that come with that because if I see Svetozar sitting there, he says, "Oh my God, I have to close how many subsidiaries or branch offices and include this in the monthly closing, quarterly closing, annual closing." Yes, that comes with the size. That is absolutely normal. The Shelly flywheel.
So, the effects that come from someone has the first product, likes the product, adds the next product, one more product, one more product, makes one room after the other smart. Once again, such a device. The red one is with power metering. So, that shows you the energy consumption. That is a EUR 15-20 product and you have your room, the light or whatever you want to do smart and you have the energy consumption. If you start this in one room and you say, "Well, that was easy to install or my electrician installed it," you do it with more rooms and at a reasonable price you have made your whole house or apartment smart. So, that's and that on top of this adding more products and adding more ideas because the community shares ideas and our online shop, our online platform, we show ideas.
All this really accelerates the system. We have a lot of help from third parties like Huawei or other manufacturers of solar panels that recommend our products. That is another entry point and all this will hopefully lead to our guidance in 2026 of EUR 200 million. Questions before I come to the last part.
Hey, can you hear me?
Yeah.
How do you plan to set up the sales force given that it's vastly different to sell DIY devices to a mass consumer market versus the Pro devices to a professional audience?
So, first, that's what I said in my first presentation. We need the right distributor in the country. So, we have a very strong partner in Germany. That's a company called ALLNET.
They do a lot of logistics for us, but as well open a lot of doors to distributors where they have contracts already. The same in the U.K. We have found a partner. We will make the final contracts and have the final talks in, I think, two weeks from now. And we expect that this really helps us to accelerate because they have the contracts already with Screwfix and a lot of other players. There's no additional negotiation needed then. And we need the local team. So, if I take the German team, that is of course after two years now big or three years bigger and more specialized. We have two full-time employees for marketing. So, for localization of stuff, but local marketing. We have now added to our team. We had one salesperson. Now we have three more salespeople, and they can be specialized.
One goes to Rexel, one goes to HORNBACH, one goes to some others to help our distributor to make the business. The key is always local marketing. We have to create demand from the market. We have to play in Germany. We have a very strong relation to COMPUTER BILD . That's a magazine for mass market, but as well for some electricians. That really helps us to be, and they love our product. The boss of COMPUTER BILD is a Shelly fan. He has a lot of Shelly equipment at home. With them, for example, we had a live stream. They do live streams about special products every month with very selected partners. We had a live stream with them.
Our German technical head was there talking about Shelly together with the boss of COMPUTER BILD , and all this makes us more known and creates demand. Then if you have someone who says like Tim here in the first row, I have two left hands. I cannot install that myself. He goes to an installer and says, "I want a Shelly." Then the installer goes to the wholesaler and says, "I want Shelly." If this happens 10 times, the wholesaler wakes up and says, "I need Shelly." That is how this works.
Okay. One more question with regards to the Pro installers.
What kind of charging structure do you suggest to them given that historically they usually charge X% of the device costs, which can here be, I mean, if you have a EUR 20 device, it's probably not feasible for them.
I mean, my electrician historically charges me EUR 40 to EUR 50 to EUR 60 per hour. So, they are not charging additional to the to the product costs. What a lot of those guys understood is that with Shelly, the device is cheaper, which means in the first moment they say, "Yeah, but I earn less." If I have my 30% margin on a EUR 50 expensive device, it's 30% is EUR 15 . If I sell a EUR 100 expensive device from Gira or Schneider, I make EUR 30 .
On the other hand, they realize that if they install twice as much devices in a house, they can make much more money with these EUR 50 per hour that they charge. And maybe as well with contracts later on for maintenance. And if something breaks down, I make the updates and all that stuff. So we have the first ones that are in a very positive mood about Shelly, again because they can install more. And for the end user, it's they usually spend a similar amount of money if they buy a full solution. Just they make twice as much, they have twice as much devices and can make their house twice as much smart. And that makes a big difference. And again, the electrician makes money with the hourly rate that they charge.
Wolfgang, how do you see the trade-off between maintaining profitability margins and reinvesting back in the business and growing it?
That's an excellent question. And it's easy to answer. We have a couple of sources for increasing our gross profit on the products. So, one is a constant discussion that I have with this guy over there, increasing the prices. Our competition, all of them increased the prices in the last two years. We did not. So, we will make and we started to hire or we hired a pricing specialist that will make very concrete analysis in the market to see which product we have the possibility to increase the price without losing our position in the middle. And you remember this lineup where we are in the middle where we feel quite comfortable.
And maybe where do we have to reduce the prices because we might need some fighter models to bring as many plugs as possible in the market because that is the door opener. This is the door opener because that's something that and by the way, when you leave, you have a bag outside where one of these plugs is in. So, you can all try that out at home. This is a product you put in the socket. You don't need an electrician. You open the Shelly app, install the Shelly app, open it. It's easy to install. It pops up. It shows and then you see how easy that is. And then you all will be addicted.
That's, I mean, that's why the product is for free, not because you are here, because you will buy five others afterwards and you will start to call your electrician or do this yourself and install these devices. So, we might have fighter need to have fighter models like that to open which lower margins. But we did not even start to optimize our supply chain. Today, we are flying 100% of our products from China to Europe. We have to change that anyhow because of ESG. And now shipping is a bit complicated because of the situation in the Suez Canal. But if this is over one day, hopefully, we can ship. And shipping would save us if we would ship 100%. Shipping would save us 4%. 4% on EUR 150 million. You can make the calculation yourself.
That's like EUR 5-EUR 6 million savings just because we ship. We will never ship 100%, but maybe half of that. That is possible. We have, of course, we talk to our manufacturers and to our suppliers, but not in a very systematic way. We want them to live. We don't want to over-squeeze them and risk that they are going bankrupt and they don't like us anymore. But there is as well 1%-3% optimization. So, on the gross profit side, I think we have a lot of resources to increase that, even though we might lose this money because we have to be more aggressive with some devices in the market. So, that's a balance. That's a wash. There will not be a big effect.
Of course, if we hire people in the countries, they are more expensive because of the tax situations in Western Europe where you pay 50% tax. In Bulgaria, you pay 10% tax. So, the gross salaries are higher. The costs for the companies are higher, but we will not hire so much people there. It's just a core team that we have because all the back office function, all the supporting functions will of course stay in Sofia where it's or in Bulgaria where it's cheaper. As a lot of Western European companies outsource some departments to Eastern Europe, sorry, we are already there. So, we would be stupid to build up basic functionalities in the West, and with the economies of scale, we will not need to hire proportionally people in every department.
A lot of our investments goes in R&D and R&D has a payback time because of the very short development cycle of products that is very short as well. So, and Dimitar and I, we have a plan how much people, how many people we have to hire per department. For example, for the cameras, we need a full team. So, we cannot just say that's something that Dimitar makes in his garage over the weekend and we have an assortment of cameras. Not going to happen. We need a team and that costs money. But it's well calculated and it's balanced out. On the other hand, I would prefer if we talk about EBIT margin now. So, we are around the 25%. So, let's say 25%, 23%, 24%, 26% in this range. And that's where we want to stay.
But I would be more than happy to deliver in and don't take this as a hard number, but to deliver in 2026 to deliver EUR 50 million revenue, which is 25% out of 200, but coming from EUR 250 million with only 20% EBIT margin. So, same EUR EBIT amount from a higher revenue, which means a higher market penetration, which means more devices in the market, means more first-time buyers, more people that come into the flywheel and that buy more devices later. So, it would be an excellent investment. It's not about hunting the percentage of EBIT margin. It's about the total picture and what is best for the future of the company. Questions? No, you have a question? I was going to say an easy answer in 20 minutes later. Good. So, yeah, Marco.
My question is around the DACH experience and you were showing that at some point that really started to speed up. My question to you is how that then fed into the new regions where you launched like Italy and U.K. and how do you think this will help you in terms of R&D and synergies in your future?
Oh, that's a good question. I mean, the app, the we need a certain number of customers in a country. And so that's if you see, if you remember the curves, that goes very slow. And then after a while, we are everywhere. Everyone talks about us. Everyone knows us. And if we are at IFA today in Berlin, which is a world-respected international IFA, it's a local exhibition, Germany. So, but how many people pass by and say, "Oh, Shelly.
I have a Shelly at home. I heard about Shelly. They stop by, they see what's new. And that is the effect that we want to have in all countries. We need a certain level of customers. Why am I confident that we will make a good development in Italy? Last IFA, there were a couple of Italians, just professional customers, not end users. They said, and I was surprised because they said, "We don't know what happened, but everyone in Italy talks about you." Now is the moment where this happens what happened two years ago in Germany. That will repeat. After everything we plan to do with the sales team in the U.K., we will expect the same effect. We'll take one or two years. People need to talk about us.
That is the strongest thing because we are not planning. Dimitar said at the beginning, we didn't spend a penny for marketing. We are not planning to spend now EUR 10 million for above the line communication in the U.K. We cannot afford that. You all would be disappointed if we invest EUR 25 million EBIT into nice videos with nice ladies showing some, sorry, men as well because it's more a men's show here in nice devices. And this will not bring our revenue, but we need to invest in YouTubers, in platforms, in being in the right support groups. So, all this is something that is relatively cheap and brings a high effect. And then it starts multiplying. Sven? Okay, we almost caught up. So, the last point, key financials, a bit of a look back and a little bit to the future.
This year, after six months, we have a growth of 49%. EUR 42 million is in the pockets, in Svetozar's pocket in this case. Still a good number to come. We published our third quarter numbers already, the preliminary revenue. Next week on Thursday, we have our earnings call where we will publish the final numbers. I do not expect big surprises on the revenue side. The EBIT, let's see how this came out after nine months. We have the last quarter to come. We are on the way to reach our yearly target. I do not see huge surprises there and huge deviations. There can always be a small hiccup. We are a bit late with some products, but we are very confident to reach our targets, which would give us a kickstart into the next year. We are good.
55% gross margin, 26% EBIT margin after six months, and I said already in the corridor of, so basically when we started with the guidance, we said we want to reach 25% EBIT margin by 2026. Unfortunately, we were there already last year. But it's the corridor that is around 26%, 24%, 23%, that is perfectly fine if we reach that, and we are on an excellent way. 22% net margin. So, you see the difference between EBIT and net margin is not that big. Reason is 10% tax in Bulgaria. We have to pay some small taxes much higher in Germany as well, but we try to limit that, and in other countries like Slovenia, the same, but we try to limit that, and that gives us as well a nice advantage, and 5.1 cash ratio is as well an excellent number.
In general, so that's, you see, the revenue growth. In the last two years, we grew 57%. I double-checked the number because I said it by coincidence, 57%. So, it was 56 point something and 57 point something. So, 57%. This year, we expected with the EUR 105 million, 40% growth. Once again, the basis is much higher. So, it will be more complicated to add more revenue on top of that. But we are on an excellent way, 105. And then we have one step in between to reach the 226, all on a good way. EBIT margin as well. The expectation for this year is still EUR 26 million, 25%. So, somewhere in this region. And the cash position, I talked about that very extensively in the last earnings call.
The cash that we are generating with our net profit is mainly going in the working capital with bigger distributors that are buying as professional guys like Amazon and HORNBACH and BAUHAUS. They all ask for longer payment terms. The times that we could ask a distributor to pay upfront are definitely over for most of them at least. We have to plan our chips in advance. We have to pay them six months or longer in advance. The bridge to finance is very high. On top of this, in this year, beginning of the year, we made the next step in the acquisition of Qubino, the Slovenian developer. Today, our development hub that we bought the next small proportion of shares. We paid a dividend to shareholders of EUR 2.3 million. That's where our cash is going.
Next year, we already for next year, we already started a lot of measures to optimize working capital. We are working customer receivables much better already than we did before. And I think that we will have a solid position like that like we had after six months by the end of the year. So, we are good with cash. On top of this, we still have an equity ratio of 90%. So, we have always the option to talk to banks for a bank loan or to have, if we need more money, to have some other creative ideas how to cover that. We have historically the last years, so from 2018 to 2020 to 2023, let me say it was maybe a little bit easier on a very small level.
If you go from zero to something and then from something to higher, a bit easier to grow with 68%. That's as well why for me it's normal that the 40% or 40-something percent or only 38% is not less ambitious. It's a very, very important number, but we have outperformed the market. If we look to the numbers for 2023 to 2026, we expect the market growth 10%-15%. We expect to continue growing two, 3x above the market, which means we end up with 40% growth and with the EUR 200 million revenue that we promised. We have as well historically, and you see all these years, we have performed against our guidance or forecast or however you call that.
So, whenever we said that's the number that we are targeting, in some cases we had to rework it, so upgrade it a little bit. But we were never below. As well, this is with a hard number that we are communicating is tougher because if now we make in 2026, we would make 195 instead of 200, everyone would be super disappointed. So, we have to avoid that and we plan to avoid that. But EBIT and revenue, we always outperformed the market. And we are not planning to change that. That is something for us. I don't want to overstress that we are a Bulgarian company, but still there are a lot of people looking a little bit like, who's your auditor? Deloitte? Okay, yeah, but even the big guys, you cannot trust them anymore. So, that's what I heard. I don't know how many times.
It's strange, but we are delivering and we are delivering like a well-oiled machine. I will skip that. So, there are a lot of things that support everything that I said, market expansion, high-quality product, our margins, supply chain is a big source of increasing or stabilizing the margin. And let me say that as well once again, I'm not a big fan of delivering more than 25% EBIT margin. If we would go to 30%, I would say we made a mistake because we did not invest enough in R&D, I mean in the future, in what is coming next year, what is with, what did you say, generation five? And I'm sure this guy has generation eight already somewhere in his mind. So, we need to reinvest. We need to invest in more people in the countries to grow faster.
We need to invest in a better supply chain. So, everything above 25%, I would say, not good. If it's 26% by accident, fine. But if it's 30%, something is wrong. So, reinvest in the market, invest in growth, reduce the prices, be aggressive, stay attacking and not just lean back. That's something you can do if the market is not growing anymore and if you are not growing anymore. So, margin, I think I talked enough about margin. I can skip that. Just as a reminder, this year we want to make the 105. And that would mean the average growth, the CAGR until 2026 is only 38%. EBIT should grow in the same speed. We are not expecting to lose on the EBIT side. We are not expecting to win on the EBIT side. That should be in this corridor.
So, the EUR 200 million are not something where we say, come on, this is, that starts to be tough. The percentage of growth goes down with the higher level of the basis that we come from. That is all absolutely normal. What are we doing with the capital that we generate? So, we are planning again to fuel with this our organic growth. Working capital is something that I don't want to say will be critical, but will demand more investments. And we will optimize that in the next years with reducing the stock level that we have in Sofia, agreements with our Chinese suppliers about payment terms, and a lot of other activities. We will optimize that, but it will not go away. If you grow 50% or 40%, you need more working capital.
R&D, everything that we planned now on the product side that Dimitar tells you needs teams and we need people, so we will hire something, I think it was 45 people or 50 people that we have on our list in for R&D in the next year. That's huge, so most of the hires will go to R&D. In other departments, we will not hire that much people over proportionally to R&D to build a solid future. M&A and organic growth is an option. It's not something that we are really seeking, that we are looking for. We had two opportunities, one with Qubino that we took, the Slovenian company that is strong in the Z-Wave, which gave us access to the Z-Wave technology and to some of their customers, and with LOQED, that was as well something that was there on a silver plate.
We said, "Well, come on, that's very low in investment." The teams are working on integrating that in our Shelly environment. Then we are in the market of smart locks. That is huge. There are a lot of players that are on the market. The penetration is very low. If there is tomorrow a company we can buy in the United States to get a better market access, I don't want to say to products because we are good with products. We don't need to buy a company that gives us some product innovations. We have enough of that. But access to the markets, to the retailers, to the channels, that would be an option as long as it makes sense and as long as this is in an area that is viable. So, sometimes in the U.S., you pay huge multiples for companies.
We have to see if this makes sense. That comes back to what Dimitar said. We are really careful step by step and not everything on one card, and now let's buy something for EUR 100 million and the world is great. Shareholder returns, traditionally we pay a small dividend mainly for the Bulgarian shareholders, and here I'm not talking about Dimitar and Svetozar. I'm talking about the other shareholders. That's a specific Bulgarian thing that they expect a very small dividend. Normally you would say from Western European point of view, a share price that doubled in one year where you make EUR 10 profit on the share and then you pay EUR 0.10 of dividend. That's a joke, but we need that as long as we want to respect what they did for us in the early days.
We will continue if at a certain point we think we need the money better to fuel our working capital. We might do that as well. In the medium term, we decided in the Board of Directors that we want to tie this to the free cash flow generation. If there is enough money, we don't need the money in the next 12 months, we pay a dividend. If not, we don't, but right now the idea is to keep a small dividend for the Bulgarian tradition to pay something. We have a return on capital employed of 30% in 2023. For financial stability, we are careful with spending. We are as well careful with acquisitions. We want to have a traditional and clean balance sheet and not put that much in there.
That's as well a reason why I specifically always talk about EBIT and not EBITDA, which is the number that is more used in our industry. Because this is for me, that's a bit like some fog around. So, we think, okay, EBITDA, great number. What about the EBIT? And then usually EBIT is negative. So, we have nothing to hide. And the difference between EBIT and EBITDA in our case is as well very small because we do not have to write off that much. One more word to the acquisitions. I talked about LOQED already with Qubino. We have one hope, good development for the United States, not yet materialized. But now we have an almost full range of Qubino devices, Shelly Wave devices, how they are called today, Shelly Wave devices with the Z-Wave standard. And Z-Wave standard is the standard for the United States.
So, Wi-Fi as well in the cheap areas, but Z-Wave is the standard. And at the very beginning in my first part of the presentation, I showed you that in the United States, the security market is the market that is driving smart home. And the security market in the United States is companies as Alarm.com, Resideo, Vivint, and a couple of others. And they all work exclusively on Z-Wave standard. So, now we are with our devices in the process of certifying them with Alarm.com, Resideo, Vivint, which means that the installers are enabled by those companies to install Shelly devices to make something beyond the security business. So, they can now use the first, I think first one or two are certified. We want to certify, of course, all of them. And this can be a door opener for the United States.
So, if Alarm.com jumps on our devices and says now with Z-Wave, that's fine. That's something that I can do. That can be a game changer for us for the United States. Now, the famous 2020-2030 outlook. I see a person in the first row who's very disappointed because I promised to put a huge number on that chart. And now he sees I did not. I think it would not be serious. If now we would say this is the number that we expect for 2030, that's six years, seven years ahead. That is not serious. No one really knows what's going on. But all the expectations, all the sources that we have, say the market will continue growing 10%-15%. Now we can discuss, is this conservative? Is this optimistic? 10%-15%, I'm coming from consumer electronic market.
The market was flat over the last 10 years. So, that's a great number. Historically, we outperformed the market by 2-3x . Now you all have a calculator in the smartphone. You can make your calculations. The conservative guys would say, okay, 10% market growth, maybe not 2x, 1.5x. What is the number that is there? If the starting point, and that's given for me, is 2026, EUR 200 million, what is the outcome for 2030 for the Shelly Core business? Here I'm talking about Shelly Core. The other things that are coming potentially on top, Dimitar touched upon a lot of them in his presentation, they are in most cases still a bit away. So, that's nothing that we will have in January 2025 or in the beginning of 2026 in a materialized number. Shelly X can be a complete game changer, it can fail.
Our Fleet Manager, our access system can be a complete game changer. It can fail, but there is a lot of potential that is giving some upsides, so we talked about AI-driven maintenance. Already today, that all sounds a little bit like future and, well, this might happen one day. We have with a discount chain in food. We have a very small project, just a test project to figure out if the fridges and deep fryers need maintenance. So, how do you do that? You put a Shelly Plug and the Shelly Plug reports to their central platform the power consumption. And if the power consumption goes up, something is wrong with the machine because then the filter is blocked or the ventilation is blocked and they better send the technician before the machine breaks down. It's just a very small test.
We don't know if they roll that out. If they roll it out, it's not a super big business. It's like they have a couple of thousand stores. Of course, everything fine. They need a couple of plugs per store. Yeah, fine. We sold last year, we sold 1 million plugs. This will not be the game changer. It shows what can be done, and with integrating a Shelly X in the device, a lot more of these. That can be something as well with recurring revenues and other things. Software as a service, Dimitar talked about Fleet Manager and a couple of other things that might give us recurring revenues as well. If we talk about Shelly X using our platform for some of the manufacturers and charge something for that because we can do this much cheaper than they can, that can give additional revenues.
Advanced energy management. We have something like this already, but it's not used like that. So, what we do today is optimizing the energy is coming from the solar panel, switch on the heat pump, switch on the air conditioning system and the EV charger or whatever. But here we can talk about as well in combination with the next one with data monetization. We had visits at our IFA booth from big energy providers. They all see our data and they say, wow, that's amazing. I mean, we can do something with that. If you say what, they say, I have no idea. But some of them are talking about this can give information about how the grid is used and how they can optimize in a whole country the energy consumption. So, we talked about that with EDF in France. We are still way too small.
We need the size there. But they said, oh, if we have a Shelly device in every of the water boilers that they use with electricity, we could switch them off in case we have not enough energy and we can switch them off on two hours later. So, there is a lot about national energy management. And in Germany, we have the size. Now we start talking to the energy providers. We talk to as well to them about selling energy contracts. We know what the customer is paying for his energy because he puts it in our application. So, if we can, of course, with the consents of Denitsa is somewhere, so legal is here. So, with the consents of, there she is, of the customer, we can send him offers about having a better energy contract and we can monetize that.
That's a lot of things. Cloud management, Dimitar said, I think he did not mention a number. We are much, much cheaper in cloud management in the storage of the data than every of the manufacturers and our competitors. We have expansion into, that's partially baked in in new categories. We expect the cameras to come not after 2026. They should give us as well some tailwind to reach the 2026 numbers. New regions. Here it's not only about the United States. If we win in the United States, the game completely changes. If not, we have enough to conquer in Europe. We have enough to gain in Asia, in Australia and in other regions of the world. There is enough room to grab and to reach our numbers. We have outstanding financials. I think that's without any doubt.
Whenever I start a presentation with the key numbers, people say, "Is this really true, or does it sound a little bit too good? You're Bulgarian." We outperformed the market that is expected to grow in the next year 10%-15%, historically three times. For the future, we say, let's take 2-3x , but we want to, of course, grow above the market. We are not only in one country, and we see that all the expansion is ahead. With all that, we have a nice top line growth. We think margins will be stable. We will have some measures to increase them, but we will lose something with more investments. This should be a wash and should be balanced. We are generating a lot of cash. We think that it's enough to fuel the working capital.
If we would need something special for making a bigger acquisition, we might think about other ways of getting more money. We still have no bank loans or almost no bank loans. So, we can go to banks and get some money, which of course at a certain time we will do. But if we need much more for a bigger acquisition to consolidate the market faster, which is not in here, we might have some other ideas, and if we tap all the opportunities or only some of the opportunities beyond the Shelly Core, I leave this to your imagination what this could give for 2030 or 2028 or 2032 or whatever. Dimitar realizes the number and I look at this from the shareholder point of view, sitting there retired and smiling and pushing the team a little bit to deliver the numbers. That's all. Questions?
So, you alluded to outside investors. I mean, is there no discussions around getting a larger investor in to fuel the growth, to conquer more markets at the same time or spend more in R&D?
Excellent question. Actually, we have a couple of potential investors, and I'm not talking about strategic investors knocking at the door. Right now, the majority shareholders don't want to sell. They sell to small proportions last year and the year before. They don't want to sell a big part of the shares because they believe in the business. And we are not planning a capital increase in the short term. But as I said, if we would need more capital for making some bigger things, the opportunities are there. So, we have people that say, I would like to buy a bigger proportion, and that's nothing that you can buy on the market.
Opportunities are there, but we are a bit careful. And as well, if you look to this round, a lot of people will say, don't make a capital increase. This would dilute me. So, there are always different ways right now. Nothing concrete.
And another question as a shareholder, when do you plan on listing on NASDAQ?
No concrete plans. So, believe me, we have enough work with being in Sofia and being in Frankfurt. That is sometimes a nightmare because we have to follow two legislations, and they are completely different. So, having a third place, I don't know if this would be that much fun, but never say never. So, it's right now no plans.
So, your marketing ratio was quite low the last few years, and you said it was mostly trade fairs and not the usual paid marketing you would expect from a consumer electronics company.
Do you plan to increase that in the future, or what is your paid marketing strategy?
Yeah, so first, our marketing spends increased already significantly because in the last years, this year we were at CES. We were at Light + Building in Frankfurt, most successful show we ever had. We were at IFA, very successful show for us, and we were at, Mirche, help me, 10, 15, 10, 15, maybe even 20 smaller shows. IoT Barcelona, Light + Building Istanbul, some things in Nordics, in the U.K., in Italy we had two, so smaller things that, but the small things cost each time EUR 30,000, EUR 40,000, EUR 50,000. The big ones, EUR 300,000. So, that's where a lot of our money is going. And we do a lot of nowadays, a lot of marketing activities that are connected to sell out activities with our distributors.
So, we are not going to the TV channels in Germany and say, let's make a nice campaign. We go to our distributor and say, what can we do to sell out more of the product that we have on stock, that you have on stock, and that your customers have on stock? So, that's where we invest a lot of money, and that's what is as well visible. But we balance that still to keep the 25%.
And another question for me, you build out the central functions in Bulgaria, but also in the countries quite a bit in the last few years. There are some sales and marketing, which you mentioned you will further build out in the countries, but is the central functions built out more or less complete?
Central, you mean the teams in Sofia?
Apart from the engineers and the R&D team.
Yeah, so we will invest in R&D. We will have to add a couple of people, but underproportionally. So, of course, with rising revenues, we need, with all respect to SAP, that is almost fully integrated now, but this will not book everything automatically. So, we will need more people. We invested in controlling. So, we have a much better view on numbers now than we ever had before because we have specialists in controlling. So, and as well in sales, we will add one or the other person. We have an Amazon team there. We have an online team there with rising revenues, and we need more people there, but underproportionally. So, the big number of investment goes into R&D and goes into people, sales, marketing, and technical support in the countries.
What do you see as the main risk factors? Is it external or internal?
What keeps you up at night?
You know, at my age, you sleep well. What keeps me up at night? I mean, there is a limitation in growth that comes from people. We have hired a first salesperson in the U.K., and we failed. After a year, we had to change. Happens. Same happened in France. We hired a salesperson in France. After a year, we kicked them out and have a new one, so that's something that I don't like, but that happens, but that's a normal daily thing, so get the right talents, find the right people that you have the right level of trust in the countries and let them do their business. That is something that, do we make the right choices there, and we are careful. We have always more than a four-eyed principle if we hire people there.
And then we need to find the person that can run our business in the U.K., like we have now Karsten running the business in DACH. And of course, reporting and all that needs to be done. The bigger thing is what happens if something happens in China. So, what happens if Trump wins today or at the end of the week, we will most probably know, did he win or did Kamala win? What is the effect on that? Will they increase the import duties from China with 50%? Will our products then not be competitive in the U.S. market anymore? I mean, everyone will have to pay that, so we would proportionally, but what is the effect on the market? For some of the things, we have plans. So, we might be able to produce the UL devices somewhere else, so to not pay the high import duties.
As well, if something big happens in China, we have plans, and we discussed this already in meetings that we had before, to move factories to Vietnam or to other places, maybe even to Europe, to Bulgaria. Labor costs are not that high there that we couldn't do that. Just the supply chain, all the spare parts are coming from China, doesn't make life easier. So, that's the big things, but that's something that more or less we cannot influence. So, if this happens, sorry, but the whole European economy is in deep trouble because everything comes from there. And if this is medication or if this is car industry or whatever, then everyone is, it's not only us that is in problems then. But I sleep quite well, Tim.
We have a question from the chat.
Oh, now the guy comes saying that he's disappointed that I did not put the hard number.
Thank you for that, actually. You know, it was really good.
This will keep you away from troubles, believe me.
One thing about you two guys, like what are you going to do different from today that you did last time? So, what are like the main lessons on the industry and the approach and all that will make the success more likely or some change of approach?
I mean, lessons learned. One lesson learned is, and I think Mirche agrees there with me as the top sales guy, we will be faster with hiring people in the country because we see the effects and we see that we cannot control everything from Sofia.
So, that's something that if I could do this again, I would push for doing it yesterday and not tomorrow. Lesson learned is, and I think here Svetozar will agree, we started with professionalizing our systems in the company. In this case, it's SAP, could be something different, too late, which we pay a high price because now the whole team booked and worked on two systems in parallel the whole year. So, which is a huge effort, costs a lot of money. Everyone is, of course, tired, and hopefully next year this is over and we only have one system and release a lot of working power that we can use to continue growing. So, some of the things I did not, I saw it coming and I didn't insist enough to make it happen now. I waited too long. That's what I would do different.
The way we work together, I think I would not change anything because we are as an unmarried couple, we are super different, and that makes the strength. So, that's Dimitar's strength that I will never have. Maybe I have one or two things that he might not have, but that makes the balance between us, and that's not always easy for the teams, you can imagine. I mean, you have two co-CEOs that are super different, and to manage this balance is complicated, but I think that's part of the strength of the company, and I want to keep that. Something from your side to add?
No, completely fine with what you're saying.
Okay, Wolfgang, we have some questions from the chat. Russell Mock asks, will you be able to grow free cash flow positive given that you're now having a software as a service model and Shelly X?
Okay, which year? 2029?
He did not specify.
I know. So, I think that we will have a positive cash development next year, as soon as, not from January, but as soon as all the measures that we implemented. So, now we will have a procurement department. We did not have a procurement department. Everything was done by Mirche. So, Mirche was in the past, he was our Superman. I think he's wearing the shirt below his, if he makes like this, it's a big S, because he did everything, marketing, sales, and now we want him to deliver EUR 105 million this year at the same time, take care for procurement, go to China, talk to the factory, impossible. So, we will have a procurement department that will constantly negotiate with the suppliers, payment terms, optimize the stock, optimize the supply chain, the flow.
So, if we can reduce our stock level by one or two months, that is a release for working capital. If we control our customer contracts better, that helps to optimize that. So, I think we will see a positive development there next year, but it will not go through the roof. And until we see first effects from recurring revenues, that will take a while. So, that's not something that I expect in 2025, maybe a bit in 2026, that will go beyond. And Shelly X, we will have to order the chips six months ahead. And I have not the right experience to say that if you make a deal with Bosch Siemens, that they pay upfront. If knowing them, I would say they ask for 30 or 60-day payment terms, so that's not a big help for working capital. That will really demand money.
Okay, we have two more questions from Alexander Dupre, Baader Bank. Do you expect EBIT margin to be around the same level beyond 2026?
Yes.
Thank you. Next question.
Sorry, with the exception of what I just said, I would prefer to grow the top line faster and sacrifice the percentage margin a little bit, but the euro amount should stay or should grow.
Okay, next question is regarding reporting. The listing currency recently changed from Bulgarian lev to euro. Do you plan to change as well the currency of your accounts in the future to attract more international investors?
We will change the currency in accounting as soon as we can, which means as soon as Bulgaria joins the eurozone.
Which is probably 2025, right?
You never know. I mean, people expect it, other people are not expecting it.
And the currency, Svetozar, maybe a question to you. Can we change that without this? I do not think so.
We started research on this topic, but it's still difficult to give a precise answer. We started to discuss this with the auditors and with other external parties, like for example, the company that is making ESG tagging. And there are some companies that report into currencies, but in Bulgaria, the legislation is quite restrictive in this respect. We'll keep trying, and we may surprise you at the end of the year.
Oh, that's something that is new for me as well. But in general, I mean, I think everyone knows that the Bulgarian lev and the euro are linked. There is no currency exchange risk. So, if you just put this once in your Excel, you have the euro numbers.
So, I do not know if this is a huge burden for international investors. We are already paying our dividend in euros. We are traded at Sofia Stock Exchange in euro. This was a prerequisite to be listed on Xetra. By the way, we see as well in the last weeks that our trading volume on Xetra is really growing. The whole market was under pressure, but we are, let me say, relatively stable. And we have some ups and downs, but the trading volume has been very well digested by the market and taken by the market. That's good news for me. So, that Xetra starts to play the role that is expected, and that's all quite fine. Thank you. No more questions. No more questions. Questions? No questions.
One more question. What's your favorite Shelly device? This one. That's a device that I have.
I mean, besides the TRVs. So, the most used are most probably the TRVs for heating. But this is a device that I have built like, I don't know, 20x , 30x in my house to switch lights and to control lights where I could not control them before. So, this one, all the two-channel version of this one.
Further questions?
Good.
Wolfgang.
So, thank you very much for coming. This was a long day with long presentations, 56 charts. I know this is the maximum or maybe even a bit more as a maximum that companies do at a capital market day. So, thank you very much for listening, for being here, for supporting Shelly. And yeah, let's stay a little bit. We have time for networking, talk to the people that are here from the countries, the specialists.
If you have more questions about finance, please go to this guy, not to me, and yeah, enjoy some time here. I think we have some drinks as well, so thanks for coming and supporting us.