Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the earnings call of Shelly Group SE regarding the full year figures of 2025. I would like to welcome the company's CEO, Wolfgang Kirsch, and co-CEO, Dimitar Dimitrov, who will guide you through the presentation in a moment, followed by a Q&A session via audio line and chat. With that, I hand over to you, Mr. Kirsch.
Yes, thank you very much. Welcome, everybody, to the trading update for the fiscal year 25 of Shelly Group. I've just been promoted because I'm as well only co-CEO and not just Dimitar as my co-pilot, so we are running this company together. As a quick reminder, what we are doing for the newcomers among you, we are making building smart. We are optimizing energy, we are making building safe, and we have more and more product to really cover everything that you need in your house, apartment, or bigger building for offices and others. What is still missing will soon come.
Today we will run you through the highlights of 2025, through the details of our financials 2025, and we will give an outlook for 2026 with our guidance and a couple of information as well about new products coming and some updates that Dimitar will present at the end. Dimitar and I will run through this presentation, and let me directly start with the highlights from last year. We have reached with revenue and EBIT, our promises, our guidance for 2025. We have grown in all regions above the market. To remind you, we expect or estimate the market to grow 10%-15%, and we are significantly above that. That is not a big surprise. That's something that we did in all the last quarters.
I think the last 30 quarters, we always were on our promises, and there are no negative surprises so far. We continue to expand our distribution in all countries, in do-it-yourself and in professional. We started 2 years ago, our installer network, and we have significantly scaled that. Dimitar will talk about that in a minute. We have local organizations. Last year, we added our Polish subsidiary with 5 people in May last year. They are starting, or they started to deliver in Q4. Benelux, we onboarded in October last year with 4 people, and we have more that we started beginning of this year. We are accelerating our growth, especially outside of DACH. DACH was performing good, but now we are much more balanced geographically across Europe. We have a strong increase in cloud activations.
Our installed base expansion and as well monetizes in the long term. One thing is the Premium App. We have more Premium App users and more premium revenue than the year before, and we have as well an increasing number of repeat buyers. Everyone that we can track, we cannot track everyone, but everyone that we can track, we see people are coming back more often and buying more devices and adding more devices to their cloud. Our customer satisfaction that we measure since a while ago in NPS increased a little bit for the overall Shelly solution to a level of 56, which is a very good number, and the NPS for the Shelly app, and that's something that is really important for us, reached a level of 37 after mid-20s last year and after close to zero the year before.
This is really making significant steps, and we expect this to continue, especially with the things that Dimitar will show you at the end of the presentation. We estimate 5.6 million households are using Shelly devices. We know that we have 2.7 million cloud users. That increased by 46% in the last 12 months. Why are we estimating the households? Because we can only exactly measure the users that give us all the data, that have their data in our cloud. One of the beauties of our systems is that not everyone is forced to use our cloud. People can use other clouds or no cloud at all. We have 38,000 Premium App users.
That's a plus of 61%. Our installer network grew 494% to 5,300 installers. It's continuing to grow. Now to the financial performance. With EUR 149.7 million, we reached our revenue targets. We are in the middle of the guideline roundabout with 40% growth. Once again, if the market is growing 15%, that would mean we are outperforming the market 2.5 times with this growth rate. Our EBIT grew to EUR 37.7 million, 43%, a little bit above that. Here I have to say that this is the adjusted EBIT because you all know that we started in 2022, a management share program that is now finished in 2025, and we had to make the accruals for that.
It's an amount of EUR 7.4 million. That is absolutely cash neutral for the company because this will done in the course of the next years over small capital increases. No, no huge and immediate effect and no cash effect for the company. Our cash in total is roundabout on the level of last year. I come back to this during the presentation with the free cash flow chart. If we look to the, to the quarters last year, no big surprises. All the quarters were growing. Beginning of last year, we said that we expect the growth coming more from the H2 of the year and accelerating quarter-over-quarter. That's exactly what happened.
We will have a similar development this year, maybe even a bit more push to H2 due to product launches and a couple of other effects that we will explain during this call. This is. If you ask me, that's a perfect chart. As well, the EBIT chart, everything looks in the right direction, so we are increasing our EBIT. The EBIT margin in total last year, the adjusted EBIT margin was 25.2%. You know that we are always talking about a 25% EBIT margin. Around 25%, that is our target, so we are exactly on the target or even a little bit above, and we expect to stay in this corridor around the 25% for the coming years.
The regional share, that is, end of last year or in the total year 2025, sorry, is on 42% revenue share. Was growing 27%, so as well, DACH was outperforming the market 2 times. I would assume that the market in DACH is not growing 15% currently due to the lack of constructions. That's a little bit slowing down, and that's why we are here as well, outperforming the market very nicely with 2-3 times. The rest of Europe growing above that level and has now a share of 50% of total revenue. That shows that our systems, our products are working in all countries and not only in DACH. We already proved that our products are liked by customers all across Europe and all across the world.
Rest of the world, typically, we say rest of the world for us is opportunistic. Our main markets are in Europe, but with a 9% revenue share and with the highest growth rate in that region, and that's mainly Asia and the United States, we are more than happy with that development. Especially the U.S.. is still on a small level, but is showing very nice progress and some promising developments for this year. A bit too early to say that everything will be super good, but in the course of the year, we will update you on that. If things materialize that we see currently and that we prepared last year, that looks as well very promising.
We are more balanced than we have been before, and we reduced with this, if you want a little bit, the weight, the a bit too high weight of DACH and show that we work everywhere. On the free cash flow, we have solid cash situation. We generated EUR 5.3 million from operations. We have more than EUR 4 million investments in R&D, and then we have some currency effects. We have paid a dividend last year, and of course, we always stress that working capital is still something that we have to optimize. I would really love to have the CFO development a little bit higher, but we make good progress, and we are not suffering here too much, but there is something to optimize in the course of 2026 and 2027.
It's nothing that can happen from one day to another. We have reduced our stock level a little bit by the end of the year. We have relatively high receivables. That is something that, of course, comes from, from more professional distributors, from retailers that ask for 60, 90 days payment terms. If you have a distributor in between that as well needs to stock products and need to finance that, that is something that we have to balance better, and maybe we have been a little bit too generous on that level. In general, we are in a very solid cash position. We have 78, close to 80% equity ratio. That's still very outstanding numbers. If you look to more details, I will not go into everything here.
Already in the last call, I've mentioned that we have a little shift between, between gross profit and especially sales and marketing expenses if it comes to MDF. Do you see that in 2024, this was a huge a shift towards MDFs? That is something that is balancing out a little bit with the, with the margin, and we feel quite comfortable with the development that we see here. Our margin is still around 58%, and we do not expect this to drop in the course of the year. We see as well, once again, the 25.2% adjusted EBIT margin. That's a very good development, and we are really proud that we could achieve all our targets. Now, Dimitar, with some things about products.
Yeah, thank you very much. Welcome to everybody. There is a few slides where I can show what happening from the development side. Not everything, in the time which we have, I can try to explain, to show what happening. The first slide, which is very important, you can see that the on 25, the 55% of the revenue is generated from our latest product generation, Gen3, Gen4. Why this is important? Because this has changed significantly the foundation of the people, what they use in their houses.
Our latest generations, they generate more revenue, they are much more cost-effective, the margin is better, and on top of that, they deliver significantly more value for the customer, for the customers which use them, which help us to keep the leading position against competitors. From the same time, I think this is also proven what we see on the previous slide, because as you see now, our customers continuously and much faster start increasing device in their houses.
The new devices, the more capable and more and delivering more value, and more services help them to understand what else can be done in the houses, help them to optimize their energy consumption even better, and also give them opportunity to place and to control much more, let's say, points in their houses, not just for lighting and power measurement, but almost everything to be controlled via Shelly devices. Something which is also important, we're counting from the cloud side, the real-time activations of the devices, and we've seen that compared with 2024 to 2025, we have a 38% continuous growth of the activation of the end customers.
This is, as the Wolfgang say, is not the old devices, because we've seen that many and many devices also start be used from the third-party platforms, and they not connect to the cloud. The numbers is the similars, so similar, this, and this kind of the activation graph shows exactly the trends and how it's going. Something which is important to know, for a very long time, we doesn't show the numbers, but now we can show them how many customers start using the premium app, even if it doesn't push the customers, even that we deliver them enough, content without paying. We've seen that more and more customers is above 61% more compared to 24 start using our premium application. We've seen that the interest is increasing.
With the new features, which I'll show on the next slides, we will see that the premium customers, which have a much more benefits, and we're expecting this to drive from the close to EUR 1 million-EUR 2 million, to double number of our revenue coming from the subscriptions and from the customers who are using our Premium app. Something which is important, and that is our next very potential where we expect a huge growth, and the Shelly to be used almost everywhere, the electricians. A few years ago or even a year ago, we doesn't have a such a database. We have less than 1,000 electricians which using which install Shelly devices. We have registered and certified over 5,000 of them.
We have a contact of them, we have almost monthly newsletter and personal contact with them, asking them about the month, talking with them about the challenges, and help them to improve our devices and also to simplify their work after. This is the huge transition because this help electricians to be not just wiring cables and place the devices, but we help them how they can dive into the IoT world, in the smart home, how they can provision and use devices, how they promote them to their customers. Something which is very important, we just launching in the last months, the cashback program, which help us additional electricians to share with us their projects.
If somebody have a project and upload the project with the detailed information, what kind of the Shelly device is in use, they can ask for the cashback, partially for the amount which we pay them back, which. This, for us, is the very important data collection, and this, for us, help us also to keep connection very warm and close with our with our installers and electricians. Also something which also promising now is life. We, for the first time, we start to using the data from our customers to offer additional services.
In Germany, this is together with Verivox, we start offer comparing the prices from the local electrician provider based of their consumption in our application, and to give them option to choose and to switch directly from our application, their energy provider. This is the, this, at the moment, is a proof of concept, which is working, which is start creating revenue, and also based on that, our revenue is coming from the commission when the customers decide to switch to somebody else.
For us, there is a most important sign that there is a way, and maybe we're the first one from the old companies, which providing such a monitoring and services for the smart home, which can really use the data in favor of the customers and also with additional services for the energy providers and companies which are offering the appliances. Now it's back to Wolfgang. Thank you.
will come back later with an outlook for 2026, and a couple of new features that we have in the application. But now let me first go back to 2023. In 2023, beginning of 2023, we gave out a 3 years guidance. We said we will do this one time. At that time, we came from a basis in 2022 of EUR 47 million revenue, and we said we will do EUR 200 million in 2026. At that time, a lot of people among you had big doubts that we will deliver that and said that this is a bit too bold, and will this really happen? We said, step by step, we will deliver, and step by step, we will develop that.
In the last year, we confirmed that we are on the way to 200, and we gave out a guidance of 145-155. We reached more or less exactly the middle of the guidance. We keep our EBIT on the promised high level, around 25%, which was as well an increase compared to 2022. Now we are almost there, and I had a couple of questions, will we now start with a new three years or even long-term guidance? We will not. That's what we said from the very beginning. We did this just one time to show everyone that we are thinking long-term, that we are delivering again against our long-term goals, and this is what we are planning to continue. For 2026, we confirmed the 200, or now we open a corridor.
We say we will be between 195 and 205. We are a little bit careful here, because last year, we had a couple of late-coming products, a couple of surprises. That's something that you can never avoid in R&D. It was simply a bit too much last year. We are confirming the 200. We see some possibilities, that's why we opened this up to 205, which is as well 205, 206, 204 is the consensus of all the analysts. We expect an EBIT that is somewhere between EUR 47 million and EUR 52 million, that is more or less on the level of EUR 25 million once again.
The growth rate with this is going a little bit down to 34%, but percentage is one thing. Percentage on higher amounts are more complicated and more challenging to reach, so that's a normal effect. With the 34%, we would once again outperform the market 2 to 2.5, maybe 3 times. That is our challenge and our demand and promise for the coming year or for this year. Where shall this come from? We have a couple of growth drivers. One is what Dimitar explained. We see that the existing customers, a bigger and bigger proportion of existing customers, and we can only monitor this for the cloud, so this is not the total amount.
We expect a similar behavior from other customers as well. From cloud customers, we see that more than half of customers that had an account already last year are expected to add 3, 4 devices, let me say it like this, to their solution. Some of this is coming from new product categories, some is existing product categories, but this is something that is constantly driving and increasing our revenue. We have the market growth, so we expect the market once again to grow 10-15%. We have a product, a growth coming from new product categories and from product expansion, not only from upgrading and updating of products, and we have a geographical expansion.
I already told you that last year in May, we opened our Polish subsidiary with a full team, the Benelux in October, and this year, we started the year with implementing and onboarding four country managers in four countries. We have finally appointed a person for the UK, we have appointed a person for Iberia, for France, and for Italy. In some of these countries, we already had small teams with one sales manager. This is already on the way to be increased and improved. We have hired more people for Italy, we have hired more people for France already, and for UK as well. In Nordics, our Nordic subsidiary is delivering nice growth rates constantly. Here we have onboarded in this month, three people, three salespeople for Sweden only.
Sweden, for us, is a very big and very important country in that region, we expect that to continue growing and to deliver the constant growth that we expect in Nordics. We have now eight markets in Europe, eight countries in Europe, with a full team on board or almost full team on board, that should be completed in the next couple of weeks and months. We expect them to deliver a significant revenue growth in the H2 of this year. That is as well, pushing something to the H2. We expect the H1 of the year to be moderate in growth, the H2 of the year to deliver growth from new countries and from a couple of other initiatives.
Some of them is coming from products, and I will give back to Dimitar so that he can talk a little bit about the high-level roadmap.
When we talk about the products, I don't want to jump into the details, this is the new categories which we're driving at the moment, products will be released in the H1 of 2026. The first one is the cameras. To be honest, we have a little bit delay with the cameras because we're expecting indoor camera to be done to the end of 2025. During a little bit consideration about the RAM, flash memory price and everything, we need to rearrange a little bit the chipset which we'll use there, which the which cause additional delay, but not so much.
We're expecting in only, the end of the Q1, the cameras to be on the market, and in the Q2, we to deliver then in the high volumes. After the camera for the outdoor is coming for the H2 of 2026. The circuit breakers, as you see, we passed the all certification tests, and now they're in the mass production, so they will reach the market. This will be completely mind-changing for the electricians because we offer them the measurement protection, connected devices, in the single, very no units for them as a breaker. The locks, now we will release the another version, much more simpler version of the lock, the pure version, which will be compatible with much more doors.
Also there is coming the full series of the different locks, including the third-party locks, which will be completely equipped with our Shelly technology. For the plugs and strips, there is coming a lot of new devices. They're already on the market, not in the so high quantity, but now the quantity is rising. We see the demand is coming bigger and bigger every week. The TRVs, the entry series, there will be a new version of the TRV also. Not only one, but there will be also the HVAC thermostat for the room controlling. Monitoring and security, presence sensor, BLU presence sensor, we also extend this line.
This is the, the overall product portfolio, not in the exact product details, but what we will drive further this year. Something which is very important, we decide to have a door, door enter, door opener device, which everybody can buy without thinking twice. This is our volume driver. We've seen that when the people start with Shelly, they stick to Shelly. They wanna buy more and more and install and automate their house even deeper. For us, what is important, to deliver technology to everybody else, and this is the perfect plug-and-play device. This device, we're expecting to sell in millions of pieces in 2026.
It's already on the market in the small quantity, the huge quantity, especially delivering to distributors and everybody, this will be done end of the quarter. Really, we are expecting this to give opportunity to more customers just to start into using our ecosystem. This will position us also not only the company, not only for the electricians, and not the company only for the geeks, but for everybody which wanna do a little bit more using the high-quality devices and diving in our infrastructure. Something which is next to this one, we know that for the most of the customer, the monitoring, making scenes, and controlling their home is the big challenge, especially for the people which not so tech-savvy. Now, there is a solution.
We will launch this week, not next, this week, end of this week, most powerful AI assistant made ever for the smart home. I can show some example. Idea of this assistant is not like, now more people is much more familiar with Alexa and Google, where they're very limited what they can do. We talking about very deep analysis, direct connection on assistant to the Shelly hardware, analyzing data, and give us very smart responses.
there is, for example, some analysis, you can ask assistant, the customers can ask assistant for any device statuses, in real time, the assistant will connect to the device or to our cloud, analyzing the data, and give answer to the customers what exactly happening and how the equipment is working, when is working for the last time, something which is not just simple status check. A lot of the smart context which we build in the Shelly AI, this system is based on the system which we develop by ourself and continuously increasing the capability of the system. there is a really deep historical analysis and the scenes creation.
Until now, the customers need to use scripting, and until now, they need to use a lots of menus to go in between. To make a scenes now, no matter a simple text and simple context, without explicitly say for what devices you wanna do something, without explicitly saying which rooms, you can just say what you want. Then, based on all data, the assistant will do that for the customers. So like this, they're definitely democratizing the way and the entrance to the smart home for the... even for the customers which doesn't have such a skills. There is a more and more examples.
By the way, soon we will see and we will publish how this, how this can be done in life, and everybody here can do that. It's controlling and telling to the assistant and asking, for example, a question about the historical correlated with the person in the house. The assistant is there, and something which is important, at the same time, is very secure, and this is not breach the people personality. The data is here, we just analyzing the data, and this data can be used only for the customers which generate it. There is no third-party sharing of the data. There is no non-anonymized approach to the external servers. Everything is happening in there, and the customer is completely secure.
It's just, as I say, same analysis based on the customer data and giving back to them, not to nobody else. Just a small comparison what we built for the, and now what we launch, even compared with the big names here, nobody of them can have a hardware access to the smart home devices than our assistant can, really deep in that. There is no real-time historical, you know, analysis when we can do that and give us very reliable answer to the customers. There is not natural language control, just few languages, then our system support almost every language in this world. Nobody. There is no assistant which is capable to create a very complex scenes than our one is almost without limitation.
In all of that, just completely change the way how the customers will controlling and manage their houses. There is really, there is no somebody which is close to what we're doing now. In summary, I think it's the Wolfgang, the last turn. Yeah. Okay.
Let me summarize before what you just presented, because I have seen presentations at CES last year, CES 2025, about AI in smart home, and this was all prototypes, and none of the prototypes is on the market. There were some companies trying to convince us to use their solution that was not working, that is not working until today. A lot of companies are talking about what AI can do in smart home. There is no solution on the market that is really doing it. We all know Alexa, say, you can say, "Switch on the light," but if you ask Alexa how the energy consumption yesterday was, there is no information.
we are really a big step ahead, and this is something that will push the adoption of our of our app and of the Premium app in the next step. That leads to the summary of last year and the outlook for this year. Summary last year, we have achieved all our targets despite some headwinds. Dimitar said some products are delayed, and some products were significantly delayed and are coming now, and come now as well in bigger quantities. We started in 2023, we started the installer onboarding. End of last year, we had 900. We have onboarded more than 4,000 in 2025 successfully, and we expect this to continue. We see a very big demand here. We have new countries launched in 2025 with Poland and with Benelux.
We see that our initial steps in towards recurring revenue is working, and we have an continued improvement of customer satisfaction. For 2026, we confirm our guidance that we gave out beginning of 2023, we will end between EUR 195 million and EUR 205 million in between revenue and between EUR 47 million and EUR 52 million EBIT. We have built organizations now across 8 European countries, with adding 4 countries beginning of this year already. They will be fully operational in the next couple of weeks and deliver in the H2 of the year. We have a product roadmap that supports our next growth phases with new categories like cameras. We are going in the entry price level to get new first-time customers.
As well, this is more weighted towards the, the H2 of the year with, with higher quantities, because it will take a while to get the production ramped up for these new categories. We have the AI initiatives that Dimitar just showed, that will bring us, once again, one step ahead of competition, and that's all quite promising, and that makes us really confident that we will deliver once again against our promises and against the guidance. Thank you very much. We are now ready for questions, and as usual, if you want to have the presentation, you can get it from our website or just scan the QR code. If you want to have more information, just scan the QR code and subscribe to our investors' newsletter. Now, happy to answer questions.
Yes, thank you very much, Mr. Kirsch and Mr. Dimitar. Ladies and gentlemen, now it's your turn. We're opening the Q&A session for a dynamic conversation. Please click on the Raise Hand button for questions via audio line. If you're dialed in by phone, please press star key nine to raise your hand and star key six to activate your microphone. You're also welcome to post your questions in our chat box, and we will read them out loud for you. We have already received a question by Vasil. Please, you may unmute yourself now.
Hello, I have three questions. My first question is for Wolfgang. This EUR 100 million that are in the report, plus the EUR 20 million overdraft, what will you use them for, acquisition or share buybacks?
Yeah. What? EUR 100 million-
EUR 100 million, yeah, which we move from the subsidiaries to the.
Okay.
Yeah.
We might be prepared for a future capital increase. There are no concrete plans. That was the reason to move the money upwards to the holding and not leave that in the subsidiaries. That is just a preparation. There are no concrete plans about a capital increase.
Okay
enables us in the future to do something.
Okay.
Cash split or whatever we might do. That's not concrete. It's just an enabler to do so, because otherwise we would have done this in different steps, and that's just preparing.
Okay, thank you. My next question is again to Wolfgang. You're going to receive a big bonus of shares this year. We are very happy about that. Are you planning to sell them?
First of all, I will receive the shares in the H2 of the year, and I will receive the shares in very small proportions. This is not everything coming this year. The shares will be given out over the course of the next years. I will probably sell part of the shares that I will get this year. I'm planning to keep a lot of the shares because I'm confident that selling the shares at a much later stage will increase the value.
Sounds great. Thank you. My next question is to Dimitar. Obviously, Shelly is facing a transition from hardware company to a software company. Where are we in this transition, according to you? What's your opinion?
No, I can tell, we make a very capable hardware. The moment we use it, and the use case is limited by the software platforms, and the UI when the really what, what we can do and what we can deliver. Now, with the we are much more capable to not exactly to switch to the software company, put the combine the strengths. To and from I think from this year, that will be one of the significant changes that you can see, not, and maybe we can start to report not only smart home users and smart buildings, but maybe also some smart city projects, maybe some industrial projects, because the device is capable to do that.
Now we on top of that, we power them with different interfaces, quality, and options customers to interact and to use them. This is one of the big changes. Of course, yeah, that's switching to the from the retail, not switching, adding now and going into the professional channels, not only retail channels. This immediately create the demand for the software services. How they will be driven?
For example, we can decide, "Okay, guys, if you use our platform, we can give you device for free, and then you can pay the subscription." Complete opposite version, "If you buy enough number of devices, then the platform will be for free." This is the both, completely in two different ways. I think we'll, depends on the projects, we are completely free to switch between from one to another and to be somewhere in the middle.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for your question. We have another question by Mr. Specht. Please, you can unmute yourself now.
Yes. Hello, good morning. Three additional ones from my end. First, on your distribution, are there any news on existing or new channels you're planning? We all know that, let's say, Amazon Europe was a problem last year. Can you give us an idea of how negotiations are progressing? Second one, on competition, do you notice any easing of pricing pressure from, especially from your Far East competitors, that used to be nasty, at least in 2024 and early 2025? The last one, on your own production, the plant in Sofia, can you tell us if the start of mass production is still on track as you planned it for, I guess, March this year?
Okay, I will answer the first two questions, and the last question is for Dimitar. First, to distribution channels, we are, especially with going into the countries with organizations, we see that we have a much deeper knowledge about where should we sell our products, what are the right channels, and that's for retail and for professional channels. That's what we saw in Poland, that's what we see currently in the Netherlands, and we expect this to happen in all the countries where we are. To have a much wider distribution with new retail channels if you want. I mean, the channel is do-it-yourself stores, physical stores, online. That will continue and will accelerate with having people on the ground in the countries. The second part of this question was about Amazon.
Amazon behavior did not change. Our direct negotiations with Amazon are somewhere stuck in the middle. We are not giving up because they ask more, and more, and more, and more. What we see is that Amazon is buying products from our wholesalers, and we see this from two different angles. On the one side, we say, "Okay, our products will be sold on Amazon," not directly from us to Amazon, but from wholesalers to Amazon, or from wholesalers or distributors on the Amazon Marketplace. The channel is still available for our customers. That's important because it's an important channel for smart home do-it-yourself. That will balance the revenue a little bit out and will reduce and will avoid the dependency from us to Amazon.
We will not go into the trap and just say yes to everything that they are demanding, and that is. In a lot of cases, that's simply ridiculous what is happening there. We are not the only brand. We know that, talking with current and former competitors, that everyone has the same problem. We see that products are sold, that the revenue is done on Amazon via third parties. We make more profit there, so we are happy with that development.
About the price pressure and competitive-
yeah.
like in there. Okay, what can you say? Yeah, there's more competitors than three years ago. Nobody's close to us, but they copying the device form factor. They try to copy some of the features, still with the, let's say, Chinese approach or with the approach which probably some customers will be interested from. What we do, as we see, and I think exactly with the new PoC M, which is going on the market, probably there will be not only from this PoC. During the year, we can add something else. We wanna fight for the customer, and this is our plan, to fight for the first-time customers.
We very good know, and if you ask me, there is no customer switch later, or there is just few from all these millions, which start with Shelly and then change to something else, just because after they understand that something else, it doesn't work and cannot deliver the value from the money. For us, it's important for the people which doesn't know, which they just buy because the price. We need to catch them, after that, they will continue ordering the devices. Yeah. The second question about the factory, everything is going on time. Let's say our internal opening day is 24, 25th of March. This will happens. All machines is delivered. Now they are under assembling.
Everything is completely prepared. The production will start, some trial production, we are expecting to start, beginning of April. Also to be concrete, this is not replace anyhow the, our production facility in China. The factory is made only for the modules, for the third parties, for the chip with the device, which doesn't require any handmade work, and everything to be 100% automated, which is, by the way, is not a big part of the devices. This is the factory is made explicitly for the chip manufacturing and delivery.
Thanks a lot.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you so much, Mr. Specht. We are moving on to Mr. Hohwald. You may unmute yourself now. We can unfortunately not hear you, Mr. Hohwald. I guess we should move on for now until you've sorted the microphone out.
I sorted it out.
Oh, there we go. Perfect.
There we go. Sorry.
No worries.
Complicated. Lots of permissions and so on. Thank you. Good morning. Two questions. One is in relation to the reserve for the share-based payments. You did say it's not cash relevant. Can you remind us why? Then this accounting treatment this year is different from last year. Can you maybe explain why that's the case, and what we should expect next year? Then one question to Dimitar about around memory prices. Maybe if you could elaborate a little bit more how this is influencing the-
Of-
... the camera.
Mm, mm
... introduction, and how you will, well, replace it or otherwise?
Mm, mm.
Yeah.
Of course. Let me start with why is this cash neutral? It's actually even a little bit cash positive for the company because the shares will be given out in the course of our employee share program, we have the chance to buy them at the nominal price of the share. The, this will happen in the next years in small proportions because we cannot give out a huge number or this huge number of shares in one shot. This will be really, in really small steps over the next years, but there are no costs involved for the company. The company actually gets couple of EUR for the nominal capital of the shares. That's one point. The second is the, the treatment.
We have disclosed every year in our accounting, the treatment of this in agreement with our auditors, Deloitte. In the first years it was not clear because the program is relatively complicated, that's what I have to admit, and it took me as well a while to understand how this is constructed. Now we are clear that this is at the end. We are clear how much we earn. We did not get the maximum. We get a nice proportion of the possible maximum, and that's why Deloitte this year agreed to make an accrual for that and not in the years before. Does this answer the questions?
What should we expect in terms of accounting treatment in the next years?
I would, of course, dream about that the shareholders give me another incentive program like that, but currently there is nothing. For the next years, there is no planned treatment. Currently that's it. We will discuss in the next couple of weeks and months what is a possible long-term incentive for the next years, but there is nothing planned currently.
Okay.
For the existing shares, that will be as well the same.
Yeah.
Partially, every year, the company will make a capital increase for the management with the limited number of shares because this also By regulation, we are limited how much this could be. These shares will be given to the management.
Yeah.
This is step by step.
This has no accounting effect anyway.
But not accounting effect, yeah. That's important. About your last question, I will tell you, when we start develop the cameras, we start middle of 2025. And our first camera, we were targeting to be in the basic camera with the price of the affordable price, for example, below 30 for the end customer. But to be capable to do many things with limited AI features, most connected to the Shelly infrastructure, with the all kind of the APIs, what we built and everybody which is used now.
We decide, okay, we can be a little bit generous with the RAM. The camera could have 256 MB of RAM, which could give us options in the future to add some additional features into the camera. For example, camera doesn't require to have a SD card. Everything could be stored into the RAM between customer see it, some events. This is how we decide. Unfortunately, what end of the year, the RAM price is starting increasing. By the way, this is not the same memory we're using for the rest of the Shelly device, especially this is the rest of Shelly devices, this not affected from the RAM prices. The price is stable.
For the cameras, exactly camera using the memory, which is affected from the price increase. When we see what happening, then December, the December, we decide to launch it or to rebuild because the RAM price is doubled and more. This will going into the range, let's say, below EUR 30, maybe we'll go above or close to EUR 50. We decide that will be not so successful selling in the numbers, in volumes, and there is no additional benefit for us. There just customers need to pay more. Then we decide to rebuild it, to remove some features, and to make from 256 to 128 MB flash to be enough for the first camera, which unfortunately take a time.
It take a time now, in January, we do that, but in February now, you know, that the Chinese New Year, when they cannot start production, now production will start after the Chinese New Year, maybe next week, and this is the delay. Delay is because we decide that it's most important to deliver the affordable product in affordable price, without additional, cost for the customers, and this is the situation. Yeah.
Okay. Just, so, with this somewhat slimmed-down version compared to your original ambition, are you still sort of leading, or will you be leading in terms of capabilities?
No, definitely, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll tell, the only difference with this one: in the first version, the customer doesn't need to add SD card into the camera if they want a camera to store events. They can see them directly because there's additional 101 to 128 RAM inside on the camera. They doesn't need to do that. The only difference, by the way, is that they need the SD card if they want to store more than 3 minutes events in, into the camera. The camera will coming with the SD cards on a side, so the customer just need to push and use it. This require the whole PCB rewiring. There is no SD card, there is no SD card to swap before that.
we need to add it, we need to decrease the RAM, we need to make a changes from that side is coming, and only this is the difference.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you so much, Mr. Hohwald. We're having another question by Mr. Kawai. You may unmute yourself now.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah, perfectly.
Okay. Sorry, just wanna understand how you make use of. The question is to Dimitar. Thank you for the presenting the new AI feature. How do you make use of AI? Do you see cost saving for coding, or you don't need to hire more engineers, or it's gonna accelerate the launch of new products, hardware and software? Any detail would be very helpful for us.
I can answer you. Currently, 70% of our code is made by AI. We doesn't need more engineers. We need to increase the knowledge how to use AI existing engineers. For that, there is a little bit changes in the also from the in the hiring side. We decide to hire much more salespeople and the business developers, because with the AI, we can build everything much faster and much and cost effective. But after that, we need the people to sell this one to the customers. This is the change. In general, no, because we increase the power of the team, and we will hire a limited number of engineers, much limited than before.
This help us a lot in helping every day more and more, developing, adding, for example, new silicon to be support for Mongoose OS, which before does require 6 months, last try required us a little bit more than 2 weeks. That's the direction I think every company which doesn't start using that will be in trouble. Something on top, which is very, very important, because our open APIs and because the well basic knowledge of the AI about Shelly. If you ask any AI, they know about Shelly, they know about the features, they know how to control device, they know everything about our devices. This give enormous power opportunity for everybody else, which want to use Shelly devices in their own use cases, just to start and make it right away.
I think this is our top, let's say, we are the top beneficial companies from the hardware company for the AI at all worldwide, because there is no other company which AI can build from the device to the platform and just to control multiple devices, except Shelly devices. There's just no way. We are the only company. I mean, the mix between our more hardware capability, the well knowledge for the AI, and the much more powerful AI, which is itself, this is something which I expect a lot. I cannot say how much, but I expect really this synergy to bring our us in a complete different level.
In the next three or six months, we will keep you updated on what is coming there.
Mm
surprised.
Thank you very much. Looking forward.
Yeah.
Thank you so much, Mr. Kawai, for your question. We have another question in our chat box. Let me read that out loud for you by Mr. Schönitz. "Could you please explain why operating profit growth in 2025 was relatively limited compared to 2024, despite strong revenue growth? We see a significant increase in administrative and operating expenses, which appears to have presumed margins. What were the key drivers behind this? Also, could you provide more detail on the quality of operating cash flow, particularly giving the apparent impact of tax refunds and how underlying cash generation compares to 2024?
Okay, can we take that offline, maybe? There was a lot of questions, I'm happy to answer this, especially when, when we have Indiana in the call. In general, I, I don't understand the question exactly. What, what about the generating or the, the gross profit? Gross profit is stable. Is this a question about cash flow, so free cash flow from operations, or what exactly is the question?
I can-
Maybe we can take that offline at a later stage if this is... Because it's a bit complex...
I-
It needs maybe half an hour, a call to go through all that.
Absolutely. We're moving on to Mr. Anderson.
I'm sorry, just come back, and we can answer that offline. I think that's easier than going through all the details now with a ping pong. That was a bit complicated.
Absolutely. You always have the opportunity to also ask questions at a later time to investor relations. Mr. Anderson asks, "Could you mention the activities in the U.S.A.? Do you have people in the U.S.A. that work with the market? What is the expectation of sales the coming years?
Yeah. First of all, yes, we have a team in the U.S., and second, we are not disclosing individual U.S. numbers. As I said, we are quite confident that we are on a good way, but we are not reporting the U.S. completely separately, and we will keep that for a while. Our core market is Europe, and U.S. and Asia is, I typically say, is opportunistic. We had a couple of good meetings with potential distributors that can be big, but I want to avoid that we raise expectations here that we cannot fulfill at a later stage. It looks good. U.S. is on a good way, growing over proportionally with a good potential that we have another breakthrough this year and in the next year.
Will take some time, but please, we will not change our reporting.
Thank you so much. We have another question by Mr. Allenton. He's asking: "Can you give some more flavor regarding the Nordic market, particularly the Swedish market that you mentioned as important?
Yes.
What are you seeing there? Any price pressure from local players there?
No. I mean, the Swedish market is a market that is well advanced, or the Nordic market in general is well advanced, if it comes to smart home, compared to other European markets. I said already we have a Nordics organization that was so far three people. Three people for four countries in Nordics is not enough. Especially in Sweden, we have a very good demand from wholesalers in Sweden, so the local players there, Ahlsell, Omnilink, and a couple of others. We have one very good competitor, Plejd. You all know them as well, a public listed company, that is delivering 50 or 60 million EUR revenue in Sweden. That shows how big the potential is.
If we compare, because you asked about price pressure, if we compare our products to Plejd, I would say our products are most of the devices are less than half the price. I want to be careful what I say, but Plejd is not really smart. That's a very simple solution, excellent, solid for installers, but compare the level of smartness with our devices, we are outcompeting them by far. That's one reason why we, first of all, see demand from wholesalers that want to build up Shelly as an alternative, and they see that we can do much more at lower prices, and for this, we need people. That's why we have put three people on the ground in the Nordics team.
They are reporting to our Nordic sales manager, and we expect that not from one day to another, but over time, that can deliver significant revenues in Sweden and the Nordics.
I can add something. What we've seen in the Sweden market, there is very high revenue, and also the main player, it's mainly related to the lighting control, roller shutter control, but you also see in also in our market that we are strong in the power management and monitoring. This part also is missing, but we have a very well-educated marketing, market, which we doesn't know, let's say, Plejd, they have their role, and this is very important there. We can add next to this, the power management, energy monitoring, with the all kind of the with our devices, which will deliver another service in the market. In the market, you already know what mean automation and what means something to be to be used.
This is important that we've seen huge market, well-educated, with a big gap and potential demand, especially in the services where we are stronger.
Thank you so much. We have another question by Mr. Polanski. "Hello, congrats for this development. Two questions from me: The AI assistant will be available only to premium users, is that right? What is the market share of Shelly in smart home market in Europe and Germany? Quick third one, can you make a brief comment on the quality of the receivables? Are there more delays or something like that?
The first, the assistant will be available now for the first touch to everyone. We will continue, then the premium customers, they will have a almost unlimited on the fair usage access to the AI system. For everybody else, they can ask it, and they can do their scenes, or they can use it a few times a day, and different kind of the usage and limitations. About the second question, I can tell, you can try to ask somebody, and it's not clear exactly what mean and what kind of the market in Europe. What I can tell, nobody except us currently have a 4,000 smart new households on a daily basis. There is nobody, and it's not comparable with nobody.
Maybe all other together, they reach such a number, the new households, they on the daily basis. There is probably nobody have a smart devices connecting over 20,000-30,000 new devices every day, connect to the cloud or users start using it. There is no one also. If you put in this calculation, Alexa, Google, I don't know, smart TVs, it's that one. If you talk about the in general relays, it's a different situation. When we talk about the smart relays, I can tell that we have a huge percentage on the market share. The problem is that currently there is no real and still not real market analysis which could tell us what exactly is our, yeah, percentage.
I can add to this. We're using market data from Statista that I always have problems with to trust them, but that's the best data that is available. If you take the total market, everything, including high-end office buildings and all the big brands like Legrand, Gira, Siemens, ABB, in this market, our market share is relatively low. If you take the do-it-yourself market, and there is no data about the do-it-yourself market itself, I would say in Germany, revenue-wise, we are number 2, maybe number, yeah, 2 or 3. Pieces-wise, we are number 1, because the one of the big players in the German market is Homematic.
They are doing in Germany alone or in the DACH region alone, more than EUR 100 million revenue, but their devices are twice as expensive as ours. If we take the numbers of devices, we are leading in do it yourself. If we look at the revenue, we are not yet the number one, we are aiming, of course, for the number one position. That is a bit different country by country, and it's different product category by product category. The Dimitar presented at the price entry version of our plug. That is a product that will bring us much closer to the Chinese competitors and where the mass market in that segment is. That's one more road for us to become a leader in this category as well.
Last question.
Last question about receivables. If I understood this right, we have no problem with the quality of the receivables. We have a problem with the level of the receivables. I said we are a little bit too generous, and we had a lot of demand from wholesalers, and this is the chain. If you work with a, with a distributor like Leroy Merlin or Hornbach, OBI, Bauhaus, all those guys, they typically ask for 60, 90 days payment terms. Now if you have a distributor in between that needs as well to stock 30 or 60 days, that sums up to a big amount. We have to rework that, but we have no problem with the quality.
Most of our of our receivables are insured, so that there is no issue, and the ones that are undisputed, so that there is no zero risk. Like with Amazon, they will pay. The question is just that sometimes they just pay 30 days late for whatever reason, but they pay. They have enough money. There is no risk in the receivables. It's just too high.
Thank you so much. We have another question by Mr. Roussil. He says: "Hello, thanks both of you for the great results. Mr. Dimitrov, you mentioned starting the production of your own chip. Can you open the door by sharing in advance something that is coming up on the horizon?
Sorry, can you repeat what opening the door for what? Starting of production?
Shelly chip.
In Shelly chip.
Oh, you mean the Shelly X maybe.
No, these are the modules. No, this is the modules, meaning the factory will not make the chips. We will make a modules from chip. Excuse me, it's maybe it's my wrong, but it's. Okay, there is a Shelly chip from the two years ago, and there is a two version of the chips, of the Shelly modified chips for Shelly and produce only for us. Maybe more of them will come in, but using this chip to, to, in this, in the factory to make a modules which will be deliverable to the third-party companies for to automate their own appliances. You've seen that at the moment, we have a, for the first time, the, it is the Nordic company for the white-label solution, for the spot whites, and we automate them.
Now we are preparing the production with our, with one of the biggest European whites manufacturer also to make their devices smart, with which require the modules. If there is a question where this is developed, how we can secure the supply chain, what about the controlling the additional, the quality or from the security reason or for the everything that's can be, then we can deliver it from Europe. If when you're working with the some Chinese appliance manufacturer, they're asking to build in, to develop their devices and build in Shelly technology, then we can do that in China. We have a 2 different sources, depends of the customer requirements and place of the delivery.
Thank you so much. Due to time, we have one last question by Mr. Rykov. "What is the current Pro installers share of total revenue? How do you plan to manage the margin impact of the cashback program, or the impact will be only marginal?
Can you repeat the first part of the question? I didn't get that.
What is the current Pro installers share of total revenue?
Okay.
How do you plan to manage the margin impact of the cashback program?
For the first, for the first question, we can only give you an estimation. We always talk about 70% do-it-yourself, 30% installer share, because you cannot get this number out of the channel revenue, because the installers buy from Amazon, they buy from their dedicated wholesaler. We know from Hornbach and other do-it-yourself chains, that they estimate their revenue to be around about 30% of Shelly revenue done with installers. That's a lot of guesswork. We typically run once a year, a survey with our customers, then we get some data, but that's as well, not a hard number.
We see that this number is relatively solid because we see as well that our share of Pro devices is increasing, of course, with solar installations and electrometers and things like that. Now the effect of the installer kickback, that's something that we will find out, but I can tell you that we have enough room in the margin of Pro devices to do that, and if we see that we are a bit too generous with kickbacks, we can reduce that in a very short period of time, because no one says that this is a program that will run forever. It is a door opener in, especially in the project business. That's what Dimitar explained.
The installer has to report his project that he's doing. That is a door opener into bigger businesses. We have enough room for margin adjustments. This will not have a negative impact on the overall and average gross margin.
I think something which is very important and in one moment, yeah, it's most important when a well profitable company, when the business is developing, well and faster, is most important not to working for today results. With Wolfgang, we share this opinion that if we can connect or to deliver twice of more of products for the even for the same revenue, we will be happy because we will know what mean this in the future. If we can make, I don't know, 1 million house, new households in a quarter, even without increasing the results, this later will give us and then a huge opportunity.
By the way, even that maybe is not completely, I don't synchronize with volume, but believe me, if you're not playing kinda as a public company, and we believe that, and we playing to and we wanna lead the market, which we can do that now, we will stop looking for the numbers. How much is the revenue, and how much is the profit? Because it's a very clear and, and financially is very good. We can dominate on the market much faster.
Of course, as a public, and the requirements, and expectations, we need to be one answer for that, and we need to balancing between in how much households we wanna be together tomorrow, and how to offer, how to show really the good results, and this is the whole time, let's say, also internal fighting and what we can do. We can do take the both of them to do the best. But also we know that the potential, this, our company to be in every house in Europe, to have at least one device in their households, and millions of millions of millions household to be equipped with Shelly. This is something which we can do with the proper planning and the and managing the company and products.
Yeah, of course. Yeah.
Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, due to time, we will come to the end of today's earnings call. Thank you very much for your interest in Shelly Group SE. A big thank you also to you, Mr. Kirsch and Mr. Dimitrov, for your presentation and your time. If your question was not answered in this call, or should you have any further questions at a later time, please feel free to contact Investor Relations at Shelly Group SE. I wish you all a successful day. Handing over to you, Mr. Dimitrov, once again, for your closing remarks.
The closing remark. I think I maybe I tell them just before then, but yeah. Thank you very much for everybody. Thank you very much for your trust. I think everything which we now deliver, and it's because is not only you, but everybody, our partners, our shareholders, our employees, is believe that we can do that. I'm sure that the this year, 2026, next year, 2027, that will be remarkable year with a lots of challenges, but also with a lots of positive news for all of you and for us. Thank you very much. See you in the next.
Quarter.
quarter. Yeah. Thank you.