Ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome to the conference call of LION E-Mobility AG. At our customer's request, this conference will be recorded. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If any participant has difficulties hearing the conference, please press star followed by zero for operator assistance. May I now hand you over to your host, Jörg Peter Hahn, Head of Finance?
Good morning, everyone. This is Jörg Peter Hahn. I'm Head of Finance of LION E-Mobility Group. With me is Dr. Joachim Damasky, our new CEO. I want to start with the first slide, which is basically the highlights of Q4. We talked already about what we're gonna achieve as revenue in year-end 2023. So, we pointed that out, and we have now surpassed, actually, our guidance of EUR 55 million slightly and reached EUR 56.1 million. Q4 was, indeed, as you know, our best quarter in 2023, and we almost could double our sales compared to year-to-date September. If you're looking at our underlying production, the second half of 2023 was our first full year of full production.
So, this also shows that our customer appreciated our own-produced packs, despite also I mean we had have seen high raw material prices in late 2023, but this is also reflected in a slight drop of the EBITDA. The EBITDA decreased by about EUR 500,000-EUR 800,000, which included a small impairment of a contract related to a customer. If you go into the operating free cash flow, looking at it, we could see that we increased in the last Q4 quarter the operating free cash flow by EUR 1 million. This is again have to emphasize this in our first year of our own production. So going over to the full-year comparison in the next slide. So we are now comparing 2022 - 2023. Our revenue went up 4%, going down through the P&L.
Main topic, the operating income, which increased about EUR 1.2 million in comparison. So mainly this was derived by accrued R&D subsidies. If you look at the gross margin, it also increased from 13% - 14% in 2023. We hope surely that we could improve these margins further if we turning now towards SVOLT, but this is more in the next year. The staffing of the new production site in Hildburghausen increased our personnel costs from 7%-10%. This is, as we said, again, new production. Looking at the operating expenses, they were also attributed to the shifting of the new business model from trade to production, and also included, as well, the opening of the prototype shop, which we also shifted from Garching to Hildburghausen.
Looking at the depreciation doubled, compared to 2022. If this is mainly reflected as well. New production sites, lines, licenses that we had to buy, and also additional facility items. If you look at the finance expenses, there is a major increase. We had to finance all this increase of assets. And so we had the RBI loan in mid of 2023. And also, I mean, the shareholder loan was given in the last month, in December 2022, but it shows that we had the increase of the finance expenses as well in 2023 additionally. Looking at the cash flow, mainly again, mainly focus investing in the production site. So the finance activities, as you can see, funded the increase of the assets.
We generated EUR 2.1 million cash flows from operations. Again, from May on, we had our first year of production. If you compare the two last years, and add up the minus EUR 2.7 million investing activities and the EUR 10.2 million investment activities, this is almost all that we the EUR 13 million that we invested in Hildburghausen. Looking at the balance sheet, we have non-current assets, which increased by 9.9%. New production site in Hildburghausen. We have a large production license that we had to buy, and further also the capitalized development costs for Light Battery and battery management systems at LION Smart, which add up to the EUR 23.5 million. Current assets increased by about EUR 28.3 million. This is mainly due to higher sales in Q4 in November and December. And the inventory also an inventory stocking.
So this increased as well, mainly in the last month. Compared to that, on the other side of the balance sheet, there's the major increase of current liabilities and non-current liabilities of which the increase to EUR 16.6 comes from the RBI loan. Yep. Cool. So I'm gonna switch over to Joachim Damasky for the guidance.
Yeah. Good morning to everybody. Thank you very much that you come to my first investor relations meeting. May I give a short introduction of my person? You know that I joined the company some seven weeks ago. I'm working in the automotive industry now since my whole career. I started with my PhD work with Ford in the United States, Dearborn, Michigan, in the year 1989. After my university time, I went to Hella. 14 years I was with Hella in Lippstadt. Then I moved over to become a board member of Webasto AG and later on Webasto SE. I was asked to take over the position as managing director of the VDA. That means the German Association of the Automotive Industry in Berlin. I did this for two periods of about three years. That means in total, six years.
After this, I was asked from BMW if I would like to join them. So I ended my relationship to BMW then, in end of January, and I'm with the company now here. Let me give a short, let's say, summary on that, what I have found. LION Smart is a good company, with a lot of good opportunities on the technology side. I saw also that it was possible to move over the production from BMW, and you have seen that BMW was running this production line, with five times more batteries, and it was able from the company to keep the margin even with a much lower value, volume and also with all the settlement costs for relocation of manufacturing line. And this has been absorbed in the last year.
And you see that even the numbers shows that now the customers are still with us. We did not lose customers. We changed some of the customers, but you can see that it was even in a year for relocation possible to keep the turnover of the company stable. And also, there was a lot of development work done in the company. So even the financial situation is the more or less the same like it was before. On the other side, we now increased the balance sheet more or less double. And this shows that we are on the right path now. For this year, we are expecting a turnover between EUR 60 million and EUR 65 million overall worldwide. I think we are much confident to get this turnover. We are broadening the customers to get a little bit more independent on certain customers.
So, in total, we are stabilizing also the way to the market. What do we have for the time being in plan for the next year? You can see that we want to increase the market share also on the storage, where we had in the last year 41% of our turnover there. We hope we will be able to get 45% in this area. Also, we want to keep the turnover that we have in the mobility area stable. But then, due to the increase of turnover, the percentage will be lowered from 59%- 55%. We had a very good workshop some three weeks ago with our salespeople also from the United States. So we are really confident that what we have in mind we will be able to achieve.
I will come to the preconditions later on what we have to do to get this. You see that we want to increase also in the United States our storage business, but the focus mainly will be this year on mobility. Therefore, we are now also started a development project that fits to the market, and especially for the vehicles that we are addressing in the United States. We are also now increasing our sales force on both. That mean on both, so as well as in the United States, but also here in Europe. Fortunately, we have been able also to hire already people for the sales, sales strategy, and also doing then the marketing. I think we will get much more professional. Ian asked me two days ago when we had our board meeting what I would see to be the difference.
I would say this was a very good company already. The management was able to stabilize the relocation of the production. But now we try to come to the next level, and we now have to make the company fit for OEM business, and I will come to this also, what we are going to do. So what we have in mind also this year is that we really want to communicate outside. We are building up mockups for new battery systems that we want to show, and also the market interest in that what we have done in the past, especially that what has been developed in immersion cooling, is really increasing. So we are running already the first batteries with OEMs on their test benches. The good thing is that we already got order from Karsan, a Turkish bus manufacturer, in total over EUR 12 million.
We hope that we will be able also to have even a higher turnover with them. This is what we say this should be a baseline for that. We have already the order confirmation for the first EUR 6 million. So, we are now in the process of organizing the supply chain for that what we have in mind for this year. We have to order. You know that the lead times are quite long for battery cells, especially our prismatic cells with Samsung, that we get currently, but also in future. So this has to be done now for the whole year. But in future, we also want to switch over to another cell supplier also to lower our cost. So let me come to the next slide. What is what we are doing now? As I mentioned, the current battery is filled with cells from Samsung.
the future, we are going with SVOLT. What is the advantage of SVOLT? The cells themselves are cheaper, but of the right, the same quality. What is good with these cells is that we get in the same packaging both technologies. That means NMC Plus, but also LFP. You need LFP. They have a much better thermal propagation so that we can use them even more in the battery storage area. Also, some customers in the mobility area ask for this. And with NMC Plus, we are able to increase the density of energy within our battery, at least by 15%. So I think we are on the right track because our customers already and they show big interest in this new technology. We are building up the samples this year.
Therefore, we need also a new BMS that we are doing with an external supplier, to be ready for the market, and to ship the B and C samples end of this year and beginning of next year. We are very much confident that we do have chosen the right supplier for us with this BMS until we are ready to support this with our own new developed BMS then in maybe one or one and a half years from now on. What is also very important is what you can see here, named as Generation 3 Immersion Cooling. The immersion technology, I think we are on a very good track. What I would like to show also in the next slide. We are running in more than two weeks now with 80% of the full load with our battery on a test bench of an OEM.
They even paid us for getting samples that we sold to them. We are now on their test bench. They simulate also the vehicle now. We are detecting some minor things on the electronic side, and we are solving this together with the OEM. We have, and this is a confirmation that comes from our customers. We have the by far best performing immersion cooling battery set. We are even 30% better than that what AMG is putting to their car, for the time being. And this is a confirmation. This is not from us. It's coming from the customer. They are very confident in that what we are doing here, especially because we have a very unique way of the controlling of the batteries themselves. We have test stripes with electronics directly connected to the batteries there. We are working together with the supplier.
In this case, it's NXP. And we are developing the latest stage of these battery control modules with them. So, for the time being and also from my outside point of view, we have the most advanced immersion cooling set. Why do we believe we are now in the right time? LION Smart has been very early with this technology. Now we see the first cars on the road, especially in performance cars. We have development in the passenger car vehicle. When you look to China, we have different technologies. We are for the lower price segment, it's going more and more to LFP because batteries are cheaper there. And for normal cars, in addition, it's sufficient for smaller cars. Then we have for normal cars. That means bigger cars that we see from our customers, they still stick to NMC, NMC Plus.
When you look to the performance cars like Mercedes-AMG, like Mercedes-Benz, like the Audi RS and others, they need to integrate for their plug-in hybrids now the immersion cooling battery. And this is what we are currently doing. What you can see there, 520 kW per pack. This is really something that they want to have, and they urgently need for their performance cars. We had several meetings with Audi and, not with Audi, with also other companies, like Volkswagen, also BMW. So we have in connection with the German carmakers. And they are very much interested in that what we are doing here. The big battery volume, the OEMs now, they start to build on their own.
For the smaller volumes, especially for the high-performance cars, this is something that we can see that they are interested to work together with us because we do not have, not only the battery technology available, but also that what is needed for the balancing of the cells. You can see in the lower left corner the design that we are doing now for an RFQ. So we expect to get a request for a quotation for zero production in the third quarter of this year. And we also will bring the first cars with our battery on the road in the third quarter of this year. So this is something that's going into the right direction.
That was a wise decision from LION Smart to go in this technology because this will give us also the possibility to show the technical competence that we have, including the battery management system that has been developed on our own. This is what I would like to show on the next slide. For the immersion cooling project, we have our own battery management system. That's what you can see, as a stripe above the electronic board, is that control that we put directly into the batteries, where we are able you can see the small black dots there. These are the sensors. There is a communication between the different cells, so that we can control the cells themselves and can also see what is about temperature. We are doing what I have shown in the picture before, also thermal simulations for the new design.
What we are not doing on our own, where we also get support from a very well-accepted engineering service, to fulfill that what is necessary for the OEMs. This means also, once we want to get fit for the OEMs that we do not have only to increase our technology and develop what they want to have. We have also to enhance our process capabilities. We are also building up an internal quality control system. We have to be ready for an IATF 16949 confirmation so that we get what is necessary for an audit that we expect to get end of the year, IATF 16949. This we have to fulfill once we want to supply to the OEMs. Therefore, we have also external support from people I know.
I think you can imagine that my network is not that bad, after being six years in the headquarters of the association. So therefore, we do have quite access to quite good people who will help us. And it's not only this. It's also regarding next level of cybersecurity. It's the next level of what we need for the functional safety. That means we have to fulfill the ISO 26262. So this is what we do have to do. We will increase our capability on software development to fulfill the functional safety requirements from the OEMs. And therefore we need to hire people. It was possible for us also to hire from the market good experts from competitor companies, so people that we do not have to train. They know what they are doing.
Quite good people for both electronics and mechanical design, where I'm very confident that they bring also experience for OEM business, coming from their companies, where they are currently already in OEM business. So I think this is what I meant by we come to the next level. Let me come to something else. What we need also, this is cell-to-pack. That means we have, you know, the complexity of that system that we have now that has been designed for OEM business. And as it was one of the first batteries that BMW designed for their own cars, where they had to make sure that, of course, there should be no thermal event, that this has to be done because BMW did not want to risk anything. It is a complex system. And this is a little bit maybe too expensive and too highly sophisticated for the storage market.
It was necessary to get the thermal propagation requirements. But what we are doing now is we are looking for cell-to-pack. That means we are taking our housing that you can see in the gray area around it. We put as much as possible LFP cells. And you can see we are able to come up to 40.5 kWh in our battery pack. That is a really good value, especially when we look to the storage market. We are just building up the first prototype samples. I was in our factory in Hildburghausen yesterday, and we are now looking to the plan what we are going to do. But also, you see all these connector pipes between the cells there. We want to reduce this. We will go to our SVOLT new supplier company.
They have other; they call it blade cells, where we can reduce also the cost of the battery contacting. Again, we will be there in four weeks from now on and talk to them. They will make a design for our housing so that we can keep as much as possible, and we can lower the cost in addition not only to the cells, but also to the cell contacting systems and other things that you can see here. So we are doing, I would say, a lot of things for the future. As I mentioned before, we are also working now on a so-called narrow pack for the United States. What is the reason for that? What does it mean? When you see the size of our battery pack, it was originally designed to be mounted below the car body of a passenger car.
This is something, from the quality side, it is absolutely sufficient also for truck business. But when you see the United States trucks, they have a ladder frame, where all the things are mounted. We have a width of some 39 inches. And this is a standard in the United States. The other companies are building up their components like, for example, axles coming from Dana and other things all to this frame. And now we have to make, and we have been asked from our customers in the United States to make a so-called narrow pack that fits also between the side bars, where they have axles mounted, where the body is mounted. And this is something where we also are building up the first prototypes. We'll ship them to the United States.
We make the tests because we have to run this on a test bench, as you can imagine, not for electric because this is something that we know, but for mechanical design, that what we see in the United States because suspension systems are very much stiffer than that what we have in the United States. And you also see the roads are mostly under worse conditions, like, in comparison to Europe. Mechanical demands are higher. We have to go to the shaker with the battery, but we think we will be able to solve this until third quarter of this year so that we can ship out the samples also in this year to our customers. So you see a lot of things going on in the development. I think also we have quite a good mood change.
We are hiring people. Also for the development, we are getting experienced people, here and people with a lot of knowledge in the automotive business. And we are now bringing the company LION Smart to a level where we can supply automotive industry. So now I would like to hand over to Ian. Ian, I'm done with it. I hope it was informative for you. And I hope you will have some time to ask your questions later on. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Joachim. Hannah, am I unmuted?
Yes.
Yes, you can hear me. Okay, just checking. Joachim, thanks very much. Look, you know, Alessio and I are delighted to introduce Joachim. We printed his CV. You can see it on the website. He has great experience, great leadership skills, very enviable connectivity in the industry. I'm sure many of you know he was CEO of the VDA. So we're very excited about the next leg of our journey. In case you didn't hear it, and I am, as all of our investors know, not an engineer. I'm a finance guy. And Dr. Damasky said that our immersion is the best in the market. By the way, this is also what Dr. Eichhorn tells us. And I could hope and believe it, but when authoritative figures like Dr. Damasky and Dr. Eichhorn tell me, I do get excited about it.
And I think, as Dr. Damasky said, you know, it is sometimes painful to be early. And I think we were too early with immersion. It is what it is. But I think the market is now moving in that direction. And I'm not sure, the immersion slide has some great stats on it. And, I think that's important. And again, not being an engineer, I feel the excitement from Dr. Damasky when he says, "Ian, our pack has been on an OEM test bench operating 24 hours a day at 80% of capacity, delivering high charge and high discharge." So, my hope is finally, we're getting to a much more exciting point of our immersion journey. The one thing I was going to mention, and we had a few investor questions, is we do want to do a capital market day.
I'm sure many of you would understand that our host on that day will be Dr. Damasky, our leader. I think it was important and polite to give him, you know, five weeks to, you know, 8-9 weeks in the saddle to get up to speed before he starts presenting. Our hope is that we can come and do this mid to late April. We will prepare a lot for this. We do want to get Michael Reich, our head of sales, to talk through what we've been doing on sales. I can't remember, Jörg, on the slides, but Alessio and I were in Munich on Wednesday. Michael Reich told us that last year we did about 3-5 conference or other trade fair attendances.
This year, we are scheduled for 30, where some we're speaking, some we are attending, and some we are visiting to meet people. That's both in Europe and in the U.S. That's a huge difference. So, great energy from the sales team. So, that was one thing I just wanted to come back with. But, Hannah, perhaps now we can move to the Q&A.
Perfect. Thank you very much. So, dear ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you are dialed in, the conference call and have a question for our speakers, please press nine followed by the star key on your telephone keypad. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you find your question is answered before it is your turn to speak, you may press nine followed by the star key a second time. One moment, please, for the first question. To state a question, please press 9 star on your telephone keypad. So, at the moment, there seem to be no questions. Therefore, I would hand over the floor back to you, Mr. Ian Mukherjee, for some closing remarks. Oh, no, we are having a question incoming. A question from Daniel Koenig of Mirabaud Securities. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. I hope you can hear me.
Yes, of course.
Yes, we can.
Yes. Yes, I have a very simple question. And I am reading at EFAHRER.com that more and more German car producers are delaying somewhat their electromobility model launches. And I also read some strange things about LION Electric, that their e-bus is not really picking up speed. I was wondering what your take on this, especially as you have a vast experience in the automotive. Then my second question is, it's a political question. You probably read also that Donald Trump is gaining in popularity, and there are the elections in November. And the question of your plant maybe being established in the U.S. was also always in discussion. I was wondering where we are in where you are in your current thinking about the U.S. now with a potential change of the administration.
Then I was wondering, my third and last question would be on your sales guidance for 2024 because the sales guidance of +13% is somewhat below the market growth you have for total addressable market. I was wondering, is this just a sign of conservatism, or is there a market dynamic which has changed? I was just wondering if you could elaborate on your sales guidance versus the total addressable market. That's it. Thanks.
Thank you very much for your very good questions. Unfortunately, I had no time to touch them already. Let me come first to what you told, that we see postponements of new car models. But also, the question is how far we will come, also the total sales numbers of electric vehicles.
First of all, the passenger car business is something that is the big series like Volkswagen ID.3, ID.4, or BMW i4 or whatever. These are not; this is not the market that we address. We address the market with the immersion cooling. This is the high-performance cars. This is something that has nothing to do with a normal sale. And you are totally right that you say there might be a slowdown or ramp-up of electric mobility in the passenger car business overall. But this is not our market. Our market is mainly small buses, as you said, LION, for example, in the United States, Karsan, and others, but also the storage units. And this is the reason what I tried to explain in one of the first slides that we also want to increase our portion of the storage.
In the storage business, there is needed a lot of capacity overall. The question that you already asked is what is about Donald Trump? We are in the phases of looking to manufacture the Narrow Pack that we are currently developing in the United States. We hope we will get the possibility to ship the battery modules from our manufacturing here in Germany. We are currently working on what has to be done that we get this approval for assembled in the United States, or made in America. You know that under the IRA, Inflation Reduction Act, in the United States, they have strict regulations that what you have to fulfill to get the tax subsidies in the US. We are working now on this together with our people in the United States. We are already thinking about having a manufacturing in the Detroit area.
We are looking already for a partner where we can do this, not to invest all on our own, but starting with somebody who is already feasible to do something like that, who used to or knows how to do this, metal framework that we need there. We know that the acceptance under the IRA is in that market that we have. We are talking about commercial vehicles, different than in the passenger car business. If you don't mind, I would like to answer the question in our next call because then, I think we will be much further, and we know what is necessary to be done to get the acceptance in the United States market. This has nothing to do with Trump or Biden. You know that Biden was the one who introduced the IRA.
We have to look very carefully what does it mean for our cell business, because we will buy cells now what is urgently needed from our side, because the prices are going down in that country from China. But we have to make sure that we get not any problems with Chinese battery cells in the United States. The American car makers are buying their cells there as well. You know that in the U.S., there is not really a big cell manufacturer who can fulfill the demands of the market. Your last question was on the sales guidance, that you say the market is growing more than our expectation. Yes, this is right. No, it's not conservative. The problem that you see here is that we have to sell in this year the battery with our current cell manufacturer, Samsung, where we have higher prices.
You see that there is a huge price pressure on the cells, the Chinese. They are exporting their crisis now to the world. They are exporting cars. They are also exporting a lot of batteries on a lower price level. And this is the reason why we say with our existing customers, based on our good name, based on the security of and the safety of the batteries, our customers stick with us. But we have also to supply them in the future with new battery technology. And this is the reason why we are conservative this year. And you will see then for the next year, once we are so far that we know when we will be able to release serial production, then you will see that the numbers will increase because then we are competitive on the price side as well. I hope this answered your question.
Okay. Okay. So did I get it right that one could assume for 2025 a higher sales growth number than for 2024?
Yes, absolutely. This is our internal planning now.
Huh. Okay. And coming back to the U.S. question, when do you so you're, you're basically did I get it get this right, you're not concerned about any administrative changes. You're more do want to make sure that you get the process right because the bureaucracy and the local content is quite complicated. So. Yes, exactly. Did I get this right?
More a kind of a. No, you get this right. Not a political question, but more a technological legal question. No, it's the question for us, what is necessary for us to get the acceptance in the market under the IRA, so that we get the stamp assembled in the United States, or made in U.S.? This is what we are currently doing. The market is there. The market asks us. A competitor of us have quality problems where we are sure that we won't have them. So, the market is waiting for our new batteries. So we are building up the samples. We will ship them in this year to our customers. And I'm sure that we will get the order, that helps us then to set up the manufacturing in the United States.
Okay. Okay. Thanks, sir.
If, if I may, Can I can I make a point to, to Daniel as well just on the U.S. because I follow it? Daniel, it's really important. There are not enough cells being made in the U.S. to electrify the U.S. That's a big problem. The way Trump could hurt us and others is if he said, "We're going to slow down the pace of electrification, and I'd rather use more fossil fuel." That's how Trump hurts. If Trump says, "You know what? You can't use Chinese cells," then, unfortunately, U.S. electrification is going to grind to a halt because China is manufacturing about 80% of cells in the world. That's a hard problem to get around.
Okay. Okay. If I may, can I ask an additional question just out of curiosity with your higher Q4 sales? What is now the, on Q4 sales number, the capacity utilization?
The capacity utilization, we have been selling in Q4 also batteries that we have been taking over for. With one shift, we can run 800 battery packs per month. We are now planning this year, when you look to the total turnover, that we can use our capacity. We have to build up some stock in July and August because in September, we want to close down the manufacturing because we have to rebuild our manufacturing line for the new cells. So we are running on a level of roughly 800 packs per month.
Okay. Thanks, sir.
Joachim, the closure in September is for one month for retooling for SVOLT, correct?
Yeah. Exactly.
Okay. Thanks.
Any further questions?
As of now, there are no more questions in the queue. So feel free to press ninestar now. Otherwise, I would hand over to Ian Mukherjee for some closing remarks. Oh, no. There are questions incoming. All right. The first question comes from Christian Sandherr of NuWays AG. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. I would have a question on your raw materials. I believe one of the first sentences from Jörg was that you saw higher raw material prices. Now, if I look at price developments of of lithium and I look at some larger indices that tracking battery pack prices, it rather looks like they're coming down. So I was wondering what was driving the higher raw materials that you guys saw?
Yeah. Let me answer this. We are not talking about lithium. And this, the lithium, the cell prices are going down, and this is something that we already addressed with the change of supplier of the cells, the prismatic cells. The problem that we faced in the last year was that, mainly, the other manufacturers could buy the cells under the frame contract that had BMW with the cell manufacturer, because we took this over. This was unfortunately not the case with other things like the coolant systems, for example, like the housings, because the volumes have been coming down from a serial production to our production numbers. So as I mentioned before, the production volume and the price negotiated from BMW with the suppliers was based on a five times higher number of production.
Therefore, we had to face a price increase, not on the battery price, but mainly on the other components that we need for assembling.
Right. Understood. And I guess with the switch to SVOLT, all this is, a thing of the past?
Yes. We can reduce this. We also have to look for new suppliers, where, for example, also for the new frames, we'll be able to reduce to increase the gross margin. On the other side, we see also the situation that the market price pressure is there, that we have to face, to keep our sales. Of course, without lowering our costs of goods sold, we will not be able to increase that number of sales what I just proposed also for the next year.
Yeah. Understood. And then I have another question on Karsan. If we look at their plans to grow the business over the next, well, rather in the short term, do you see them becoming an absolute cornerstone client?
You know, after the experience that we had with other customers, like B-ON and others, honestly, we do not want to have cornerstone clients. Of course, the we will be have strategic customers that we need, and we want to have to be a basis of our sales, of course. But we are just currently widening the number of customers to get a little bit more independent on, let's say, certain special product issues or whatever else. We will at the end of this year, we'll have hopefully a lot more customers, both in the stationary but also on the mobility side.
Right. And then, maybe a final question on the immersion cooling topic. Do you have a broad timeline in your head by when you would have a validation that the pack, the way that you are producing it or you plan to be producing it, will actually become part of a vehicle?
Yeah. We expect, as I said to you, after we will now run with the vehicles that have to be on the road, we expect to get, based on this proof of concept, where we are really confident that we will achieve that, we get the RFQ for a certain model in the third quarter of this year. What you have seen at the lower corner, this pack there, this is already from the OEM-given packaging, what they allow us, what we have to bring to the car. So we are working already on that, and we hope that we will be able to finalize this until the end of this year.
Okay. And if this would, let's assume it all goes well, and the customer wants to put it into a vehicle, I would assume you'd have to build up quite some production for this. And this would also then work with some prepayments or some sort of financing from the customer.
Honestly, we have to decide what we want to do because once a customer is paying too much for production line but also for the tooling, we are not able to use it to somewhere, somebody else. So this is a negotiation that we have to have with the OEMs. If they pay maybe about 60% of the tooling and production line, and for the other 40%, we will be able to run this also for other customers. We want to have this as being a, a modular standard pack that can be used in other vehicles as well. And the interesting thing is that already the car manufacturer who has been asking us is not doing this for only one model. They say this will be also for the performance car, something like a standard module.
Yeah. This would also be then produced in Hildburghausen, right? I remember there's still some space next door that you could also buy or you still have some options.
I was yesterday there. In Hildburghausen, we have from the municipality, that means from the Gemeinde, already an area that is right beneath our existing factory where we have a prepurchasing right. But if this would come with the OEM, we would take that building that we are using currently as being our storage. We will build a new storage building on the same ground, but we want to use this because it's right beside our existing factory, and we can also use the same logistics systems.
Right. That's understood. Great. Thanks for that.
You're welcome.
Thanks. Thanks a lot, also from my side. The next question comes from Tom Jacoby of [audio distortion], sorry. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning. Thank you for having my questions. Maybe first, one technical issue is to you experienced there weren't any questions at first. I haven't found any button to ask questions online, so I had to dial in with my phone as well, to ask questions here. So maybe you can or want to fix that for the next presentation. I couldn't ask the question.
We will not do that, yeah.
Well, my first question is about EBITDA in fourth quarter. It obviously went down and was not only connected to that one-time write-off. So maybe you can elaborate a bit on that, especially when you see that the revenues really went up in Q4. So you might expect that EBITDA goes up as well, but it was negative, despite the fact it was positive in third quarter, right?
Yeah. Maybe I answer this question in a way. There was a big customer that placed the order with us, and unfortunately, they stopped this order, what means we had coming in a lot of raw material from cells, whatever else. And so, we have been in a situation that we said, we are running the production. It doesn't make sense that we build up a much too high stock. And therefore, we sold this to our customers on a special price. That means a little bit lower price, to make sure that we would not have all the stock on our balance sheet for the year-end closure. So this reduced the margin, but the customer knew that this was a special price, and we are now currently back on the price level that we had before.
To make sure we had to do this to make sure that we did not have to rent outside space to stock the incoming material. This was the reason why we made this by a special price.
I see. Did I understand correctly, you sold the raw material, or did you sell any produced?
No, sir. No, no. Battery packs. So we produced the battery packs, because we also needed to have our production running. And we sell both. We sell modules and we sell also packs to our existing customers. But it was unfortunately in a way that and this was one of the reasons why I said before, we have to broaden our customer basis to get a little bit more independent of some certain customers. You see, still in that kind of a special vehicle business that one has to face financial issues with the customers, look to B-ON, look to e.GO, other manufacturers where we all well suddenly have to face this.
This is the reason why we want to broaden our sales basis to more customers, so that we do not have to face a situation like that what we had in the last quarter of the year. We have still been able, as you can see, to stabilize this, but the price level in the last quarter was a little lower than it used to be before.
Yeah. And, can you can you give us a number? How big do you think was the effect on EBITDA of that?
I'm sorry. Please apologize. I'm within the company only since seven weeks, and this is something that I cannot change. It was a part of the past. We will look into detail after we have finalized our year-end closure, but for the time being, I cannot answer this. But as you see the overall numbers, and it was not that bad.
Okay. Then a question regarding the revenue outlook to 2024. Well, it's supposed to be a nice rising, but well, maybe it could be even more. You know, there was an analyst prediction saying it might be EUR 86 million even, which is much higher than your guidance. So, what is included in this outlook, and what is the additional potential maybe?
We do have some additional potential, but, you know, I have learned in my career to be conservative. There are customers. We are dealing with new customers, but I do not believe the numbers until I have seen the manufacturing side. I will go there also in the months to come. There might be some upsides as well. But as I mentioned before, it's not only the sales number, but it's also at the end the profit. Because we still have during this year to sell our modules with the existing cells where we cannot lower the price, I do not want to create now a so-called Wolkenkuckucksheim that we cannot fulfill. So this is something that we offer now with the 60-65.
There may be possibilities of enhancing this as well, but then we have to make sure that we also have the right materials in place. I do not want to give purchase orders to our suppliers that at the end we have to take, and then we run in the same situation of what we had in the last year. This is the reason why we are a little conservative.
Yeah. Makes sense. Can you say how many of the six around about EUR 60 million's revenue are fixed already right now?
We are currently in a phase that we say that we have for roughly 75% already customers. And there are 25% more or less where we are now dealing with new customers, but they have a big interest in it. So I think we are quite confident that we will achieve that.
I see. And one final question, please, about the 40 kWh storage pack. What is the potential market price at the end? How competitive is this going to be?
This will be quite very competitive. I think we will be able to come back to the same level with that we had in the past. So, if we are then ready in the next year, we can double or even triple the turnover in that storage area in comparison to what we have, will have in this year.
But you can't tell the potential market price?
The potential market price, we know that it's going down. We are just in an observation phase because we have announcements of CATL running in that business. They want to lower their prices. Of course, what I understood that the customers are not the that satisfied because they see some quality issues with them. Also, this will be something that I can answer much better when we will have our next call.
Okay. Good. Thank you.
You're welcome. Any further questions?
At the moment, there are none in the queue. Feel free to press nine, star now to state a question. So I believe, Mr. Daniel Koenig of Mirabaud Securities has a follow-up question.
Yes. Good morning. I have just two simple questions. I was just wondering, what is the latest on TÜV SÜD company's participation? Is it steady as it goes, or is there anything else to tell? And then I was wondering, how was the split, the regional split between Europe and North America, in particular Canada? How much was Canada in 2023?
I think I have shown the Canada issue on a slide regarding the sales. Let me come to this, where you can see between Europe and North America, 15% North America, 85% in Europe. We want to increase our North American share, as I mentioned before. For the TÜV SÜD, there are no news. It's a stable business, and I just went to TÜV SÜD last week to meet the people there, Dr. Rapp, who is the CFO of TÜV SÜD. He's a former colleague of mine, coming from Webasto. You can see this in the history of both of us. We have a good relationship, and there are no news for the time being to be told.
Okay. But then isn't it the conclusion correct that the business in Canada has gone down quite a bit? Because I remember in previous information, the Canada-North America part was much, much bigger.
Yes. This is right. LION now started to have an own production for batteries. But they want to keep us as being their second source, especially for some models where we are integrated in the vehicle, and there where they do not want to make a new homologation of the vehicle. But this is also what I said. This will be reduced, and therefore, we have to broaden our customer side. This was related mainly to two customers in the United States, and we, we are now looking much more for the smaller truck builders, for the work truck builders and other things, so that we are not depending only on two or three companies in the U.S.
Okay. Thanks. TÜV SÜD battery, steady as it goes. Is that the correct description?
Sorry. I did not get the question right, right.
TÜV SÜD, you have a participation.
Yes.
I was just wondering, is that steady as it goes?
Yes. It's steady as it goes, and it's growing on a stable level. Everything is fine. What we have done is we moved out of the building here of TÜV SÜD because our prototype manufacturing is now being built up in Hildburghausen, where we have the manufacturing, where we have all the parts ready to lower our cost, but everything else is running stable.
Okay. Thanks, Joachim.
You're welcome.
Thanks, Joachim. As there are no further questions, I'm handing the floor over to Mr. Ian Mukherjee for some closing remarks.
Thank you, Anna. I think that just to summarize, it's really important. There were a very respectable set of results, bearing in mind that last year was a huge transition year for us. Any of you involved in industrial projects or who followed them will know that, last year, we set up the plant. We had to take over all the supply chain, make sure that we qualified the plant, that we diversified the customer base, built up the sales team, and, guess what? Generated positive cash flow. I think this is really, really important. That's what I look at. And then we have another year in front of us. One thing I'd like to add because there was a question on it. This year's sales forecast is only existing ID.3 packs. We include nothing for Gen 2. Gen 2 will be more about next year.
Remember, with Gen 2, this is higher energy as well as LFP, so it brings our technology completely competitive with the marketplace. So I think, for me, it was a very, very challenging year in terms of what we had to do technically: get a factory up and running, maintain our sales when, for six months of the year, we had no production whatsoever. I think that's a very respectable achievement. We have an incredible base for the next few years now, a great base of sales. I think, well you know, Joachim mentioned this, and it's important. We want a diverse customer base. What I worry about is a too big a customer who goes into a default and really hurts us. We don't want that to happen. I don't want that to happen. We all have money invested here.
That would be bad. So we want a diverse customer base. As Joachim said, we don't, you know, we want to have good investors, but we don't want one investor who basically we are very nervous if anything happens to them, and we're going to try to avoid it. And I think, you know, the buildup at our, you know, we, we do want to present Michael Reich and, and, and to talk about what's happening in sales because I think it is important. It is, you know, Michael Reich started about a year ago with us and has done a great job building our sales organization in a very, very professional way. Like I said, we're going to attend 30 events this year. We have 20 in-house design projects going on for potential clients.
The way I think of it is if we can pull 10% or 20% of those into production for us, this is really good. That's a normal sales organization. So, respectable result. It's now all about this year. We have a great captain, you know, at the helm, with huge experience, great enthusiasm. And I think the whole team is very excited. And I'd like to end with that, Anna. Thank you very much.