Good morning, everyone, and a very sunny good morning from Hamburg. As everyone, probably you have nice weather. We are happy to kick off our industrial technology conference today. Unfortunately, as you might have realized, ATNS had to cancel because of illness. Circus SE is in the pole position today. I'm very happy to have Nikolas Bullwinkel, CEO of Circus, with us and Elena Kohl from Investor Relations. Nikolas will enlighten us on the current development of the company. As you might know from conferences before, some housekeeping. The presentation will last about 15-20 minutes. We will have time for a 10-minute Q&A, and the presentation will be recorded. Questions can be asked using the chat box on the bottom right. Given that we have only limited time, Nikolas, I'd like to hand over the mic to you.
Thank you and good morning, everyone. Maybe as a starting point, since we have limited time capacity today, we are hosting our Q2 operational update call in roughly, what is it, two and a half weeks on the 16th of June. This is where we have probably 60-90 minutes, and we'll dive a lot deeper into all kinds of numbers and the progress of the company. Feel free to also join this one with a ton of more updates. One, two sentences on Circus and who we are for the ones who might not know us yet, right? Since we are more the young kids on the German public markets. We are a Munich-based deep tech company developing fully autonomous sustainment and nutrition robotic solutions. Mainly known for the so-called CA-1.
I think something that definitely got some attention also with the integration into REWE supermarkets last year. Just to get you some impressions. Our two core focus pillars from a business model perspective are commercial and defense integrations. On the side corner, you can see also one of our integrations into a barrack infrastructure in Northern Germany for the German Armed Forces. We're not only making family and kids happy with a great meal, but also soldiers on ground and really building the stretch on a proper dual-use case here. The company right now being roughly four years old, right? We're coming from a fairly long R&D phase of really developing our technologies from peak, everything on the software AI, as well as on the robotics side.
We pretty much tripled on the patents right now, also driven by acquisitions over the last years. Right now with more than 50 patents in our books. Really the global IP owner when it comes to autonomous cooking technology and related modules on that end. You can see some elements and some impressions here from our growing production facility. I will dive deeper into this in a second, but overall, something that we've right now grown over the last one and a half years and shipping our systems since Q4 last year, with right now constantly growing and basically doubling production capacities every quarter. This year, we've really much pushed on the rollout right now with all our systems active across eight countries. Europe focused right now, including first deployments into Kyiv and Ukraine for the Ukrainian Ground Forces.
Right now on the production capacity side, growing rapidly overall space for up to 6,000 units per year. We're honestly not getting there this year yet, right? Growing on the CA-1 side, but as well on other systems across multiple factories in Asia, Europe, and U.S. to come. Why even food? Just a very quick element that I always love to show, right? Why even having the strong focus? We're not building humanoid robots. We're not going into warehouse optimization. When we really look into the industry where we see industries still heavily under automated, food processing is really much the top one where we still see a lot of opportunity. The customer traction that we right now achieved over the last years, I think definitely underlines and shows that.
This is really our core focus of everything that is sustainment and nutrition solutions purely based on robotic and full autonomy. I put that slide in. Some of you might know that with some elements from our last Q1 update, but just to give you a bit of a brief understanding of where we stand over the course and where we're developing over the course of the year. Launched the German Armed Forces earlier this year, basically a few weeks ago. Also started with operation in Ukraine together with 3AB, part of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, and supplying them with fresh meals 24/7. Basically taking first steps into the U.S. mark et with first NSF certifications for part of our portfolio products.
T his is something that definitely gets a lot closer this year and to really make the first jumps into the U.S. market. On the same side, really making sure that we can also grow from a business model perspective with the first bond that we placed earlier this year, that is additionally fueling our growth, and the pace of which we can right now win customers together with different leasing partners and facilities that we've grown over the first half of the year. The majority of new customers that we're winning is based on actually leasing contracts, not anymore direct purchase when it comes to new customers. You can imagine that this makes our life a lot easier with having the ability to finance the hardware long-term for our customers and not always come from an upfront CapEx model.
On the rollout, we're very happy with the progress over the course of the year. We unfortunately couldn't really show all the launches that we had over the past weeks, so there's a ton of more press events and launches to come. We're right on a very healthy double-digit range and growing right now with a very much back-loaded structure for the second half of the year when it comes to deployment and production growth. I think I shared some insights on this before. With right now growing the production capacity, obviously there's very strong growth every quarter, which is very much driven by production capacities, logistics, and launching new customers. Core fact here, 90% plus uptime on the systems is something that I think has been heavily discussed also over Q4 last year.
We launched the first systems. How stable is it really? Is the product ready to market? I think today we can prove that fairly nicely, that we can show the systems are working perfectly. We have a constant quality and a fair handling time. Over the course of this year, we've also grown our product portfolio. I think most of you know the CA-1 as our flagship product. CA-M, which right now is in the setup of setting up serial production, will also launch this year, with first customers basically already waiting for the systems. A very kind of smaller new kit as an addition to our overall portfolio of systems.
Alberts, a Belgian company that we acquired basically a few weeks ago, all to really build a proper portfolio of different kind of systems for autonomous sustainment solutions so that we can really fuel customers in all kinds of cases, independent of their requirement of meals, space, electricity, and so on. We can always find the perfectly matching case. The big upcoming case here, the CA-1, the first fully autonomous field kitchen, which is something that you can def initely plan with, from a revenue perspective also, for the second half of the year. The Alberts that I just mentioned, the smaller scale direct office well-being sports integration. The core focus here is really much the commercial business, where we work based on frozen ingredients, and can do everything from a pasta cup, to a soup, smoothies, frappes, even a matcha.
Everything fully autonomously and always way cheaper than existing solutions you can find on the market, which run on manual labor-based structures. More things we've done over the course of the year is really growing our integrations. We are always a center point from a software perspective, something that honestly, I think from our equity story, is still something that is often overlooked, how deep we are integrating with our customers. The core of the business model remains and is growing mainly on the software side right now, with over 20 microservices and different software solutions that we've grown, not only this year, but also over the past four years, to really have the kind of back of house SAP-like system when it comes to food operations.
From stock management to managing the units, every recipe, supplier integrations. We've launched quite a couple of new technologies and new AI software features here. When you think about the business model, it's really much always razor blade, right? We're not even optimizing too much on the margin for the hardware side. As soon as we get better based on higher production volume, we try to lower the price for the hardware because the core business here for us and the high margin with 80% plus margin profile is on the software, and hardware always comes with that software stack. Right now ranging between EUR 4,000-EUR 12,000 per month, depending on the system. Right now, bringing smaller systems obviously also means smaller tiers of software, but a product that is scaling much faster compared to the CA-1 here.
One thing that you can right now plan for the next weeks even, and with the launch of first customers in that segment, is our first software-only product. We right now launched our first AI models, which are dedicated towards, how is it called? Ingredient measurements. Temperatures, spilling, temperature control, quality control on the ingredient side. Everything that we already run in our systems today is something that right now we are extracting as a standalone product with a core focus on inbound quality control of ingredients, many fresh ingredients, as our own branded Circus visual intelligence product, which is the first product that comes right now out of the FullyAI acquisition that we did last year, which is a fully SaaS-based product.
When you think about also the revenue growth for this year, we're right now also growing in direction which is not always dependent on the hardware component, but can also independently grow on software solutions only. With the whole AI integration optimization on the software side, that's something that you can definitely also see right now already when it comes to our operational metrics, and something that I always love to show how we improved here just within the first few months. We will dive deeper into this in the Q2 update. When you just look at system uptime, stability, and also the handling time, this is something that we radically improved, driven by our own AI models and a bigger and growing stack of software solutions.
Something that not only benefits the customers, but also our future growth and stability of the ecosystem. Driven by that, I put some new pictures in. You see the front line of the production here with four units in a row, with a depth of multiple rows based on the production side, where we not only improved on a lot of modules and where we launched next generation. On the left side here, where you can see our own AC systems, which are cooling the entire unit and handling the ventilation, but also the capacity of the production. We right now pretty much tripled the production capacity since we launched the production Q4 last year, and are really much on track when it comes to the production capacity.
Right now with basically multiple rows that we're producing and coming from batches of two to four units right now with a production capacity that can handle eight to 16 units fairly easily and a very much shortened production time, which right now will have a rapid effect also when you think about the second half of the year as we're growing with a lot more pace on production headcount and optimization on the production line. Big topic here, something that I just added. It's a bit nitty-gritty, but we get a lot of questions on this. How is your risk profile on the supply chain, specifically also talking about geopolitical issues in different regions of production, dependency on the supply chain.
Something that we were definitely facing also with the increase in cost on the overall supply chain when it comes to shipping, air freight, logistics, and so on. From a pure BOM perspective, we managed to really much improve heavily on the risk profile with right now multiple suppliers on every component. The huge portion here, on the risk management side for the supply chain is very much stable, we don't run into risk where we're not able to produce, even though there's quite some global tensions that we're facing on the procurement and technical procurement side. The last quick update and something that we have been talking about for the last half year, probably, we launched that right now a few weeks ago, live in six countries with our Alberts.
Before that, we were always quite dependent on wholesalers. We were still working closely with the Metro, METRO Chef now, Transgourmet, the big known names basically. What has definitely always been a challenge in growth is to have a certain quality standard. When you think about the Nespresso machine, that's always something that you want to achieve, to not switch between suppliers and optimize the margin profile for us. We're coming from a past where we just were making money on the ingredient side for the robots on a kickback structure with a 2%-4% margin overall on the ingredients. Right now, we're already providing over 30 different ingredients across six countries for the iVERS as well as the CA-1 and the upcoming M.
We have much more ownership through partnerships that we established on the ingredient side right now with a 30%+ margin on the ingredients, not the 2%-4% that we had previously. You can imagine that this definitely has quite a significant impact already for this year. I think that's nothing that has been reflected too much in the analyst report and also not on the side of the guidance. When you think about the growth for this year, there's a significantly higher and faster growth on the software as well as on the defense margin side, and not only on the element of hardware and specifically CA-1 growth. Overall structure, not too much changed. I put it in here to give you an overview. Two capital increase that we did last year with EUR 50 million of fresh capital.
We haven't really grown crazily on the headcount. On the capital spend side and the R&D cost that we have, that capital fuels us for quite some time right now and can definitely bring us into profitability, which is right now aimed for 2027, 2028, depending on the pace of international growth and the time for the U.S. market entry. On the lockup side, something that probably is known, management with a 30%+ share. Me as the largest shareholder, still a single shareholder still to date. A lockup on investors and the majority investors, and myself to September 2028. What we did is through the last capital increase, definitely increased the free float significantly when you not only look at the stock price, but specifically the development of the liquidity of our stock.
We're quite happy of how that really turned out over the last two years with coming obviously from an early direct listing at very low liquidity to right now trading a very solid liquidity on a daily basis independent of daily news flow, where we changed quite some things in our communication strategy. For that, I keep it short today. I'm very happy to jump into all kinds of questions and hopefully see you on our quarterly update in two and a half weeks. Thank you.
Thank you, Niko. There's a ton of questions already coming in. We won't be able to go through all the questions, but we will kick off with the first one from Thomas. He asked, "If production scales as planned, the entire order backlog is expected to be cleared by early 2027. How confident are you that there will be more orders coming in during 2026 to fully utilize capacity in 2028?
What we're doing right now is, what makes us a bit slower is we're mainly launching new customers. It technically would always be much easier to just go with one, two clients and you don't have all the integration work to do. What right now taking us more time to, every customer is new. Every integration is custom, setting up supply chain, integration to their systems. Down the road, that creates a massively higher growth path because you already have the integrations with the customer's life up and running. Doesn't matter if it's Mercedes-Benz, Schön Klinik, Raiffeisenbank, German Armed Force, Ukrainian Armed Forces, Meta, just to name a few that are already public through the press events. For this year, what we're doing is we're collecting orders, yes, this will all create also definitely a backlog towards 2027.
Right now we plan to completely fulfill that backlog into 2027, really completing all the orders that we have in the backlog. Early 2027 probably is not realistic at the moment, it's also something that depends then on multiple countries that we're launching. To give you one example, we wanted to launch Abu Dhabi and fulfill orders in the UAE already in January, February. The situation in that market wasn't ideal, right now we're launching Abu Dhabi in July. There are some customers which definitely have been facing a delay. On the other side, on the defense and the Alberts side, we've grown much faster than expected. In 2027 is where we plan to really rapidly decrease our order backlog close to zero so we can really take on new orders and fulfill them much faster.
Perfect. The same respect, how many devices have been shipped so far, and how many devices are currently produced each month? Can you give us some more color on that?
We had a very healthy double-digit number right now on the system side. We'll give more updates in our quarterly update call on that end. That basically what is communicated so far. The core focus, as mentioned, on launching new customers and new markets, new countries. On the production capacity, we're ranging eight to 16 units right now, so we're basically just switching on that end right now to grow beyond the eight. I've been sharing that before a little bit. The core blocker here was always production time rather than the capacity itself, where the lead time for components have been very slow with a high dependency on certain suppliers. That's something that we resolve right now over the course of the year of accelerating production and production capacity.
Eight to 16, that's something that you can right now calculate with. On the CA1 side, everything on the M and the Alberts side is something to be added, where we give some updates over the next weeks.
Okay, great. Last part of this question was any update on your current guidance. I assume that's something which will you discuss in two weeks' time as well.
Exactly.
Perfect. There is another question asking, Circus Defense SE, is that a daughter company of yours? Do you own 100% of it?
Yes. That is a fully owned subsidiary of Circus, mainly comes also from different regulatory structures. We operate a fairly international team, which with roughly 35 different nationalities. Not every nationality is always allowed to operate with all kinds of Defence customers. We also have Russian employees. We have employees from all kinds of countries across the world. That is something where we right now are putting a more dedicated team from regulatory perspective. Something that I can tease a little bit is that we are also in multiple negotiations right now to bring in more strategic partners on the Defence side, structure a bit to be defined. When it comes to a production deployment, there is definitely a handful of Defence primes and different customers or partners that could further accelerate Defence rollouts.
That is something that we are looking in deeply right now.
Great, thanks. There is another question asking that you promote companies like Meta or Mercedes-Benz. Thomas says he has a tough time thinking about these customers ordering more than 20 or 30 units. He asked whether these are the companies which you need to scale into a three-digit range, or whether there are other companies which will be the driver behind that.
Best case, all customers are growing into that range, right? What we are focusing on is that we are launching and rolling out with really Tier 1 customers who are able to handle that volume. As you know from the past, we are not selling to small restaurant owners. We do not really care too much about the customers that can buy one to two units and then that is it, basically. Just one office handling one unit or something like that. It is a great market, but it is not necessarily the customer that can grow with us. We are focusing on really enterprise customers on that end. There is still a lot of contracts we build, and we can grow with every customer.
You can definitely expect quite some growth on the retail side and everything. Industry is something that we are really growing well on. On the automotive side, for example, it is not only Mercedes, but there is also more customers to come there to launch, where we have some updates over the next weeks on this.
Mm-hmm. You mentioned the retail side. Obviously, there is one name, like REWE, which you mentioned before. Is there any update on the cooperation with REWE or the customer REWE?
Right now, the whole phase of piloting right across multiple cities runs over the course of the year. Some of you have maybe seen that we are actively doing kind of road shows together with REWE. Last week, for example, I shared the stage with a strategy director from REWE on the annual Handelsblatt Conference. We are actively promoting the case, because the majority of REWE stores is not necessarily only owned by REWE as the group which we own the contracts with, but also owned by kind of the local franchisees who own then something between 10-100 stores. The structure with REWE is on one side, we are negotiating on bigger volumes with the group.
On the other side, we are promoting the case with the franchisees, also have the goal basically to purchase independent of the goal of the group. It is basically multiple customers within one group, if that makes sense. That is something that is all happening in parallel, and we are growing the account. If you walk into the stores, you can see there is quite a bunch of promotions going on. REWE is actively using the CA-1s in the store to, for example, drive different discounts, different like get a free drink if you buy two dishes, all these kind of things to actively promote the technology, drive adoption, drive volume, and use it as a kind of trigger to drive more traffic into the market, which is working quite well on that end.
Great. Switching from the retail side to the military side, are there already confirmed orders for the CA-M?
Nothing that we have communicated yet. I can tell you there's a bunch of things happening on that end. That's why we're setting up serial production.
Okay, perfect. There are a couple of more questions, all about how many orders have you received. I will skip that because we more or less answered these questions. Maybe you can just drill down a little bit on your competitive environment and what's your USP, and who are your major competitors?
It's a bit funny right now when you look into the development of the whole industry. The competitive landscape in Europe is quite small. There's a handful of players, which I wouldn't call competitors, but more peers. This is where, in the European market, we are more fighting for high awareness of the technology overall. When you look into the U.S. market, there's two players which have significantly grown right now the past years. One is always worth a look at, Atoms, which is owned by Travis Kalanick, the former Uber founder, who right now with Lab37, I think it's called, also is building something in the food robotics space. Some of you might know CloudKitchens, right now they're taking the CloudKitchens business into more robotics environments. Similar case to ours, and probably some of the most renowned founders worldwide.
Second business is Wonder. Right now, I think the last round they raised is EUR 600 million, led by Google Ventures. Also very much right now driving into the field of robotics with the acquisition of Spyce. In the U.S., you already have two billion-dollar companies evolving, while the European market is still a lot smaller. That's also where we come from on right now, jumping into the U.S. market, making sure we can also fight for our leading position in that market, while in parallel growing the European market.
Great. Sorry to switch back again to the CA-M. There's one question, would the CA-M generate recurring software revenues like the CA-1, and how much is that? I've seen another question which asks whether the economics are all the same for all the different defense, retail, or industrial sectors here.
Yeah. Good question. Yeah. Fair question. From the pricing perspective on also the defense side, technically two products that we also use in the defense sector. The CA-1 is priced at around EUR 250,000, a hardware price, plus then a EUR 10K on a monthly basis, as a SaaS cost. The CA-M is priced at around EUR 500,000-EUR 600,000 . The difference here comes mainly from the casing. There's armed forces who, for example, do everything bulletproof, and when you speak to the Ukrainian forces, they say, "We don't care about bulletproof, just make sure you can deliver a new one." It's very different strategy on different forces that defines that. On the CA-M, you have recurring fees as well, with the difference that these are often based on annual contracts, not monthly payments.
That's something that is highly preferred from their end, but for us, at the very end, doesn't make too much of a difference. One last point is that also for the CA-M, the whole ingredient revenue stream is something that is growing with it, because what they want is a standardized set-up, and we can not only deliver standardization on the cooking process, but also on the ingredient and supply chain side. That's something that you can really always think as the same for all kinds of products and cases, where it's not only the hardware and the software, but also right now, even with the growing part on the ingredients. We really offer an end-to-end solution and have multiple margin drivers in this, even independent of technology.
Great. Perfect. I've just entered all the other questions which just came in. I apologize, we can't answer all of them. We only have time for one last question. We will hand on over the question to you, Nico, later on. Maybe we have time to send them via email. Maybe just one last question, are you planning to roll out any personal household goods products, or will you focus on production for companies only?
We would love to go into households at some point. I think it's too early from an adoption perspective, right now really tackling the market where we see the biggest urgency first makes the most sense for us. That's defense, that's care, that's also industry and employee integrations and catering on that end, that has been proven to be the right case and the right fit for us. What we're definitely exploring on and spending some R&D time on is the kind of Alberts set-up where you also have smaller systems on one to two sq m size. We right now are seeing this on the Alberts side, that the growth on this and the sales cycle is basically, it's a few days.
To just have a wall plug in one sq m is still something different, not only from a pricing perspective, but also from an integration perspective. We would love to also right now grow into that portfolio end up offering even smaller systems where you maybe are good with serving 10 to 20 meals an hour, which mainly is everything around sports, nutrition, health, wellbeing is a huge case right now for us on this. Office integrations. The office, for example, our office here in Hamburg, which is a smaller one, CA-1 might not even be needed. Co-working spaces. There's still some more niches that we would love to grow into. For now, we're focusing on the three units, which we are busy with.
Perfect. Time is running out. Thank you very much, Nico, for the time and covering about 15 questions. For all of you who would like to switch over to the next meeting, there is the link. We will have Kontron presenting. Have a nice day, everyone, and Nico, if you just have a quick second, then we can just stay tuned. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Thank you for joining.