Ladies and gentlemen, 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. May I now hand over to Dr. Damasky?
Thank you very much, and good afternoon also from my side. I can hear an echo. Somebody has a microphone.
Not a lot for yours.
I think now it should be better.
None.
Okay, so I have to reduce the loudspeaker.
Very much.
So, first of all, hello from my side. My name is Joachim Damasky, and I'm the managing director of the LION Smart. I'm also heading LION Smart Production. As you know, we do have two different companies, and I'm speaking here on behalf of LION E-Mobility AG. So, first of all, because this is something that everybody's talking about, is I would like to have a short look over our area of activities. We are especially looking on the question of sustainability. This is very important for us. As you can imagine, you know that we are producing batteries. The most batteries that we are currently selling is based on the BMW i3 battery, and we are still purchasing from BMW under their own sustainability demands, the batteries itself. We are also working on a special bus business.
That means smaller buses in the mobility, but also we are working in the stationary market. In the stationary market, we are also looking not only for a first-life battery but also second-life, so we can also use and offer to our customer use the i3 batteries for stationary power supply backup battery solutions. So this is something that we are really driving, and our customer's demand is from us. We are also looking according to all the supply chains and the sustainability within the supply chains also for our new products. So I would like to introduce the speakers. First of all, it's myself. I'm working since 35 years now in the automotive industry. I've been working with Hella, with Webasto. I was also working with the VDA as a Managing Director and with BMW. Then we have also Mr. Michael Reich.
He has been sales executive for more than 25 years in international companies like OSRAM, OSRAM Continental, and also Plastic Omnium. Michael Geppert is joining us. He's talking about technology, especially about Immersion cooling technology. He is the head of engineering at LION Smart, and he is working with the company since the beginning. That means from 2008, he was one of the co-founders, and he's still with the company. He has been working in the TÜV SÜD joint venture. I will talk about this later on. Since 2018, he's heading the engineering here. Also, we can rely on Dr. Eichhorn. Dr. Ulrich Eichhorn is working since also many years. I think it's the same time. That means 35 years in the automotive industry. He has been working with several companies like Ford, Volkswagen, and others.
He is supporting us, especially when we are talking about detailed information regarding applications in the automotive area. He has a lot of knowledge about driving dynamics and what is necessary for a sufficient drivetrain. What are we doing currently now? I think what is very important that our battery pack, what I mentioned already, based on the BMW i3, fulfills highest automotive standards. This is what we are well known for and what the customers value with us. We have very good safety, quality, and reliability tracks with our customers. It may be that in some areas, we are a little bit more expensive than our competitors. Yes, but our customers value this because they do not have any issue in the field with this. This is not only for the automotive area. That means for the mobility but also for the stationary market.
We are now working for the growing energy storage market. We are working for leisure vehicles but also for commercial electric vehicles. Currently, we are looking also, and Michael Reich will come to this later on, also to smaller work trucks in the United States where we will be active in the next years. We have a strategic focus for small to medium-sized batches. That means smaller vehicles. It's not our idea to sell for big trucks or for big buses. I think the advantage of our battery is it's self-contained. We have cooling within our packs, and we have also the BMS in our packs. We are also looking for new battery suppliers. We are working together with SVOLT, a well-known Chinese battery manufacturer for the next generation of cells with higher energy density.
We are quite cost-efficient, and we are running an OEM-tested manufacturing setup where we can produce up to 45,000 Battery Packs per annum. And I already mentioned our sustainability goals, and I think this results in an attractive financial profile. So what are our products? You can see the modules at first. These are modules where they can be connected together as a Battery Pack. We sell these modules also as single modules to customers who want to do some customer-fit batteries. We are working also in the battery management systems. What you can see here is only one of our layout boards, our PC boards. We have to do this because otherwise, we would not know what is happening within the battery and how we can control the battery. We have developed a system that we can control temperature but also balancing of each single cell in the battery.
Then number three, you can see our standardized packs. This is based on the BMW i3 battery that we sell to different markets, to the bus market but also to some work trucks. And what you can see on the right here, number four, is what we are currently working on. This is the Immersion cooled battery. What does it mean, Immersion cooling? Immersion cooling means we all know that we have some electrical power in the battery. The efficiency of the battery is 98% and higher, but the 2%, especially when you are charging with high power or you discharge with high power, is heat that is coming up within the battery. We have to get rid of this heat.
This is done in the Immersion cooling battery by a liquid that is running between the cells and cooling the overall battery to control the temperature of the battery. And this heat, together with other batteries - and Michael Geppert will come to this later - to a very high-efficient and high-power battery, Immersion cooled battery. These are the things we are working on. I'm now with the company roughly 100 days that I started some three months ago. And therefore, I would say we are on a right track. We are highly innovative, so we can see that we do have a lot of good engineers. We have been hiring a lot of engineers, now new engineers with a good experience in the automotive industry because we are preparing now ourselves also for serial supply in the automotive industry.
Therefore, we have to make sure that we are fulfilling the right standards, and there we have hired the right people starting also next week with us. So I'm through with my introduction, and now I would like to hand over to Michael Reich to give us the market overview. Thank you very much.
Hello, everybody. Good morning in North America, good afternoon in Europe, and maybe good evening in Asia. My name is Michael Reich or Michael. I'm the head of sales and marketing, and I'm working with LION Smart now since a little bit more than one year. I would like to talk for the next hour, roughly, to you about our sales initiative, the sales plan, and also our sales strategy. When I started my role at LION Smart, LION Smart had an entrepreneurial sales approach. So that meant we had limited amounts of customers, and so in the end, just two customers were leading to 95% of the revenue. Being confronted with the risk of depending on the success of just two customers, we did together with Roland Berger a strategy project in the second half of last year.
The major goal of that project was we wanted to define the markets where we have a right to play, where we can define the total addressable market. Second, we wanted to sharpen our values and our USPs, which is then also the base for the definition of our product portfolio and also the product developments. And third, we wanted with this consulting project, we wanted to lay the base for aggressively broadening our customer base. And we wanted, of course, then also by this reduce the dependence on single customers. Knowing that in 2021 and 2022, the revenue was coming from just one or two customers and knowing that one customer was even building up their in-house supply for batteries and then keeping the revenue on the level over the last three years on between EUR 50 million-EUR 60 million, for me personally, that was already a success.
In 2023, we were already five. We were achieving the sales with already five major customers. So we are now growing the customer base. This is the proof that we are on the right track and that we get more resilience in our sales funnel. First, I would like to step again one step back and talk with you again what drives us. So what drives the sales team? What drives the engineering? What drives the whole LION Smart? Why are we successful in the market? And we are really convinced that we can electrify the world. At least we can contribute to that target and to this goal. And we will make the world cleaner, more sustainable, and also more energy-efficient. And we are convinced that this progress of a clean planet that progress and achieving a clean planet can coexist.
LION Smart will provide solutions to make this happen. I would like to talk with you now how we want to do that over the next slides. First, I would like to do a quick look into the evolution of LION Smart. So where do we come from? LION Smart was founded in 2008 by six students coming from the Technical University of Munich. In the first years, it was consultancy. It was testing. It was gaining experience and knowledge about batteries. Since 2014, the company started also designing their own batteries, and they offered concepts, or we offered concepts to the customers. Due to the good and close relationship with BMW, we then started integrating the i3 battery, so the i3 packs, into new applications. Then after being a designer and integrator, we also started producing in 2023 our own packs.
What is our value, what we are giving to our customers and also to our partners? We have a state-of-the-art production facility. Everybody who wants to come and see it is very much invited. We can produce 45,000 packs per year. It's highly automated. It's high quality. A lot of cars with that batteries are still on the road. We have a robust and we are a one-stop shop for battery design and integration. We have very good in-house engineering capabilities, and we have a development competence. Also, what is on our and what we are developing at the moment is the next generation of batteries. This portfolio, I will talk about a little bit later. We will start sending samples to our customers in the second half of the year, and we will ramp up in 2025 with the first customers.
I talked about our consultancy project, which was in the second half of 2023. LION Smart was serving a lot of markets in the past years, and we needed to focus, and we need to define our segments more in detail. What we found out based on our cell chemistry, on our values, on the feedback from our customers, we then defined five key markets which we want to address and where we want to grow our market share. The first one, we called Mobility. Under Mobility, we summarized the market of e-Buses, especially the smaller and midsize e-Buses, the Electrified Trucks also here, smaller versions like Class 3, 4, 5, 6, and also off-highway applications. Here, everything what is related to driving a vehicle: is it off-site? Is it off-road, or is it maybe in a harbor where you have it for material handling?
This is what we consider under off-highway, also tractors and so on. In the stationary Storage market, we have identified two markets which we would like to grow. The first one is the commercial and industrial market behind the meter. This means it's not a grid application. It's behind-the-meter application. Commercial and industrial applications usually are with plants, with commercial buildings where you need to buffer energy or you have to shave peaks. And this is where our battery is strong. Also, what is interesting for us is the UPS market. It's uninterruptible power supply. Here, the energy and the power needs to be ready to be supplied to the application at short term and with a high power. Therefore, this is also a market which is of interest for us.
The outcome of this project was that these markets which we have identified are growing in Europe and in North America by more than 25% year by year on an energy installation level. So in 2024, two-thirds of the addressable market, even a bit more in that time, is the behind-the-meter commercial and industrial plus UPS markets. So this is 16 GWh. And the bus, truck, and off-highway market is approximately 3-4 GWh. This market will grow fast until 2030. We will have in 2030 about 60 GWh which we can serve, which is addressable by us. And approximately 40 GWh will be the stationary storage market, and about 20 GWh will be the mobility market. The mobility market will grow faster over the next years. It is more than 35%. The stationary Storage market will grow by 25% in energy.
What does that mean in addressable market in EUR or in U.S. dollars? This is what you see on the next page. Here, you see again the expected market growth from 2024 to 2030. We also have an expected price decline. We see that the price decline is a little bit stronger in the mobility market but starting from a higher level. Also in the Storage market, we still have a price decline year-over-year of 8% but starting from a lower level. We think that the price declines will be relatively strong in the next years and come to a bottom in the end of the decade. The reason here is that we have a high overcapacity with the cell manufacturers, and we have low lithium prices at the moment.
As we are purchasing the cells, we will participate in these price downs, and we will also get our cost downs so we can also give the cost downs to our customers and can be competitive to them. The total addressable market for the Mobility sector will be EUR 600 million in this year. It will grow to EUR 2 billion in 2030. For the Storage market, it is this year at EUR 2.4 billion, and it will grow to EUR 3.7 billion in 2030. This is the market we want to address, and this is where we want to grow our market share. This is now the base for our sales and business plan. In the next minutes, I would like to show you some examples where the LION Smart team is active at the moment. Please allow me to show you some selected deep dives.
This is not everything what we are doing, but I would like to focus on some examples and go a little bit more in the details instead of doing everything and then only on the surface. So I would like to start with a deep dive on electric city buses. We have picked the city bus as our target application. The reason for this is quite simple. We have a high-power battery at the moment where you get high power from a smaller battery. So we call that we can achieve high C- rates, so a lot of power out of a limited battery energy capacity. If you go to the big buses, you need a lot of energy capacity on the bus, so you need big batteries. And then our battery cannot play the advantages as well as in the medium-sized buses.
Why we are not going in the mini buses is easy because the automotive OEM manufacturers are doing this usually also with their own in-house batteries. So it is difficult to go in that market with our battery. However, the city bus market is quite fragmented, and we have proof points that we are able to win 3-5 customers over the next months and years and to serve them on a regular basis. If we look into the history and we look on the registered buses year-over-year, you can see that the overall produced city buses is relatively stable at 16,000, 15,000 vehicles per year, but the electrification is growing fast. In 2023, there was already an EV portion of the overall produced vehicles of more than 40%.
There is additional growth expected, especially in the public transport, because it is pushed in cities to become CO2-neutral or at least to reduce the CO2 footprint. The good thing is, because it's a quite fragmented market, the customers we are having are usually medium-sized, and they don't have the resources to build up their own battery production, and they cannot fund cost-intensive developments at suppliers. What they need is a ready-to-use battery which is road-proven, which has high quality. This is where our values are. Do we think that this continues like that, the electrification? Here we say yes. We think the legislation is guiding that one. We have the boundaries which are needed. The Green Deal of the European Union is motivating that also the electrification of the city buses continues as it was in the past.
By 2030, there will be at least 100 climate-neutral cities in Europe. They need climate-neutral transportation in the cities. Scheduled collective travel under 500 kilometers should be carbon-neutral by 2030. Also here, the larger city areas should be also addressed with CO2-neutral transport possibilities. This is also helping to install CO2-neutral buses here. Then large and medium-sized cities need to put in place their own sustainable urban mobility plans by 2030. The boundary for continuing to grow the EV portion of the city buses is set. We are at the moment in contact with many different bus manufacturers. We have some proof points. We have won some projects with customers. We are showing here or I'm showing you here how many bus makers are active in the European market.
If you remember, if you recall the 15,000 vehicles, city buses per year in Europe, then the market leader is supplying 700-800 of these buses. So that's a proof point how fragmented that business is and that we really can address and enter new suppliers as well based on our success history. One of our customers told us that if they need a power battery so if they need a battery where they get a lot of energy, a lot of power out of the energy, then we are the supplier. We call that the NMC supplier because NMC is the chemistry where you get high energy densities, and you get a lot of power out of your batteries. Another customer of ours told us that we are or they see us as the leading supplier for small e-buses and e-trucks.
These are now the voices of the customers. I don't want to comment, but at least this is how we are seen with our partners. This is the pack we are offering at the moment, and this is the base for the developments we are taking over the next month. We have a Battery Pack which can be charged within 40 minutes to 80%. We have a Battery Pack which is on the road. In all the BMW i3 at the moment, there are still 200,000+ vehicles on the road. If every vehicle is just driving 10,000 km per year, then this is more than 2 billion km driven on the road, and there are no severe incidents with that battery. So this is really proof that this battery is high-end quality. And this is also why the bus makers are purchasing these batteries from us.
You can combine these batteries, and you can adjust the energy capacity per vehicle by putting them in parallel or in series so you can achieve 400-volt systems or 800-volt systems. That's the status quo of the electric board infrastructure of the vehicle infrastructure so we can serve these 400-volt and 800-volt architectures. This battery can be cooled. It is easy mechanically to be installed in the vehicle, and we are also giving integration support that everything is done properly and in the right way. In addition, our battery management system, so the BMS, is giving intelligence so we know how the health and the state of charge of our battery is, and we also can do quite accurate power predictions. We give 10 years of guarantee and warranty to the battery, which is usually what is needed by the bus makers, and we can guarantee this.
This was the first deep dive. In the next deep dive, I would like to go to the electric trucks, especially in the U.S. and Canada. Sorry. And to drink quickly something. For the electric trucks, we have decided to go to the smaller classes like Class 2 or Class 3- 6. Here, the reason why we have been choosing this section and this segment is similar to the buses. It is a very fragmented market at the moment. There are many players, smaller players, and they are not able to develop their own packs. They usually cannot invest in setting up their own production. And also, they need a Battery Pack which is road-proven, which is high quality, and which is ready to use. Also, long-term availability is something which is important here.
In the beginning of the year, my team and I were visiting the Work Truck Week in Indianapolis. What was interesting at this Work Truck Week is that this is a relatively conservative expo, and also the mindset is more in the direction of we like diesel. However, and that's the important thing. There is a growing community which is electrifying the work trucks. It's a very fast-growing niche. In one of the breakout sessions, the NTEA was stating that in 2022, there were 1,000 chassis sold for the EV market. In 2023, it was already 3,000 chassis. And I was talking to some of our partners and our customers, which were telling us that they are fully booked out for their EV production over the next years.
This is proof that this growth, which is shown here in the EV niche market, is staying like that over the next years, at least until 2026, 2027. The chassis market itself, with 450,000 vehicles produced and sold in 2023, is quite stable. It is even growing slowly at 2%-2.5%. The American market at the moment is quite developing in a good way. And also, the truck business will pick up again over the next years, and especially over the next month. Especially the small buses, trucks like Class 3 will grow fast. And the vehicle manufacturers, which you see here on the right side, are participating in these markets, and we are in contact with these customers and these partners.
One of the keys and one of the specialties of that market is that everything is built up, as you can see it here in the picture. Usually, these vehicles have two rails. In the front is the cabin, and then you have the wheels on the sides, and that's it. And that's how these vehicles are sold to the upfitter market. And at the moment, the diesel engines are running in between the rails, and everything what the upfitters are using is the space on the left and the right side of the rails. So there is the strong demand that the battery and also the electric drive system fits between the rails. And there is, in our opinion, and I'm convinced by that, offering such a narrow pack which fits between the rails will boost the market.
This is where we want to be placed and where we want to be accessed. Our narrow pack is in the development at the moment. It will be a high-power battery pack again, the same like the existing i3 pack at the moment. It will serve perfectly the small and medium-sized trucks. The third deep dive, which I would like to talk about now, is an example from the stationary Storage market. We have good business at the moment in Europe. We would like to grow, and we would like to establish such a business also in North America. As discussed before, we have identified three pillars in the stationary Storage market. One is commercial energy storage. It's behind the meter. One is industrial energy storage. It's also behind the meter. One is the uninterruptible power supply.
The example which I would show now is a mixture between commercial energy and uninterrupted power supply. What you see here in the picture is a canopy. These canopies usually are used as charging stations, as big grocery stores, rental cars, you name it, where people are driving to park the cars and then go shopping or do whatever they need to do. These canopies will be equipped in the future also with battery storage possibilities. The reason for this is there are ideas of putting solar on the roof. That's one point. But also the second point is if you put this battery storage under the roof, then these canopies can be very rugged.
Even if you have a harsh environment and you have flooding or storm or whatever, and everything is flooded and the energy grid is maybe offline, you still can charge your cars with this because it's off-grid capable. Such projects, for example, you usually have a design-in-window of 12 weeks. These customers would like to have a ready-to-use solution with good quality. They don't want to have a lot of headaches where they have to find solutions. They want to be in the situation that they can, with limited resources on their side, bring that function to their own solution and application. Key is a competitive pricing. The EUR 150 per kWh, which you see here, is, of course, always the target of the customer. If you add additional services, of course, this is what we will do. We drive the price a little bit higher.
Nevertheless, you see that the volumes are growing fast as soon as you are integrated in such a solution. There will be a first year where there will be customized pilot projects. Then you will have a ramp-up phase, and then you will have a steep ramping up over the years where it's regionally growing over the different states. And if you translate this, what is the need of a battery capacity which we have to produce in our own production site that would then be going up quickly into the megawatt-hours range just for one project? And the revenue also will then be in a two-digit region. What we need to make sure to address this market over the next month is we need to offer competitive pricing.
We need to think about how to make it or assemble it in America to be future-proof for our customers, to be IRA compliant. We also should think about customized cooling systems which we can offer off the shelf so the customer does not have to think about this. Last but not least, now we were talking a lot about mobility and about stationary storage in e-Trucks, e-Buses, e-Off-Highway, and behind-the-meter applications. But there is an additional market potential, which is the Immersion-cooled battery. We were talking a lot about that in the recent years and also in the past. We had many concept studies with different partners.
What is different this year is that we are now having had battery on test benches at a bigger German OEM and that these tests on the test bench were successfully passed, and these batteries are now going into the cars, and they will be driven on the road. I expect that we will have a first RFQ for a series production within this year. However, if you are looking on the Immersion cooled battery a little bit from the distance, Immersion cooled batteries are not only able to address sports cars as it is today. You can also think about applications where you have very high power requests. So for example, if you are in the harbor and you have to lift up a container, you need a lot of power at that situation, but only for a limited time.
And then if you bring down this container again, you can recuperate that energy back into the battery. But also this will be a very fast recuperation. And the same thing we can think about in the uninterruptible power supply. If you need to have a lot of power available right away until a long-term battery system is ready to take over. But I would like to focus now on the electric hybrid sports cars because this is what we are focusing at at the moment, because this is also driving our innovation at the moment. We have two typical requests coming from our partners and potential customers here and also concept customers. One is plug-in hybrid EV cars where you would like to have a high-power battery for additional power.
So for example, if there is a car which has 500-600 kW of normal power by an ICE or a normal engine, a gasoline-driven engine, then you would like to have additional power which is coming from an electric source. So what you have here is small batteries with, for example, 15-30 kWh energy, but power rates of 250-400 kW. In the end, this will result in plug-in hybrid sports cars with 1,200, 1,400, 1,500 horsepowers or 1,000 kW. The second application where we get interest and where we get requests are fully electric vehicles, sports cars. So here the battery is bigger. So also here, you have 100 kWh, maybe 120 kWh. But also here, the car should provide 1,000, 1,200, 1,500 kW on a regular level, so not just only peak, but really being able to drive it in a sporty way.
So Immersion cooling here really reveals the full potential of a high-energy NMC battery technology. This smaller energy capacity with a very high power, this is what we call high C-rates. This is where we can realize this with our Immersion cooled battery. These are small and lightweight batteries, by the way, which is also supporting, of course, the sports cars when being driven on a test drive or in a sporty environment. The third thing which is really important is that with Immersion cooling, you also can stop the propagation of each cell. So it's also very important from a safety point of view. A typical customer project of such an application is, for example, 1,000 vehicles per year. If it's a bigger OEM, it goes up to 3,000-5,000 batteries per year.
If we get the RFQ in the second half of that year and we can be able to win that one, then we expect that a series production will be possible in 2-3 years, and then with 3,000-5,000 packs for the first project. After the deep dives, I would like now to come back to our product roadmap. We sent today in our product roadmap at the point that we have a very rugged and robust product where one is available for the stationary Storage market, and another one is available for the Mobility market. Both batteries do have a nominal energy of 42 kWh and normally a cycle life of 2,500 or better, depending on how you drive the battery or how you use the battery. This is the foundation and the base for the future developments now.
So what we realized is that for our storage applications, we need a higher cycle life. So what we are now doing is we are introducing the LFP technology to this pack. We are optimizing the pack a little bit, and then we can achieve 8,000 or more cycle life, which is status quo at the moment and which is also requested. So by this, you can realize storage applications where power is not so much needed, but where more the price is needed, a better cost position is needed. On the mobility side, we are also upgrading and individualizing our product portfolio. Here we go to an energy upgrade. So we are increasing the energy density per pack. So even by keeping the same outlines, you get more energy out of a pack.
So you can achieve a higher range with, for example, the bus or with the truck without changing the mechanics, without changing the mechanical or the thermal or the electrical interface with the vehicle. Besides these packs, we are also offering modules where you can create customized pack designs which can be optimized to the application of the customers. And last but not least, we are also pushing the LION LIGHT battery, which is the immersion-cooled battery, forward. And we are driving the industrialization and also the robustness of this technology. This then leads to a target roadmap which is shown here. We will have three or four rows of batteries. The first row is our module portfolio. We will have a module with 4.2 kWh with high cycle life. We will have a module available 5.3 kWh, which is the actual module.
We will have a module with 6.6 kWh, which is the upgraded energy density. Samples will be available in Q4. The ramp-ups are planned for Q1, and then we will be in series production with the modules. For the packs, this is taking a bit longer because this is more complex. We also need to develop and optimize the battery management system. Here, we will have a 42 kWh solution available, which is the pack which is in production today. We will be able to send out samples in Q1 with the upgraded pack, which is one-to-one the same pack as it is today. We will ramp up end of Q1, beginning of Q2. Then for the truck business in North America, where we need to fit between the 30-inch rails, we will have samples available in Q1, but we will be in series production in Q2.
The LION Smart Storage portfolio will consist of four battery solutions in the beginning. The first one is a 33 kWh solution, samples available in Q1. The second one is the 42 kWh solution, which is in series production as of today. We are also offering a high-power solution in the storage market. This is important for the uninterruptible power supply and also the high-power applications in the storage market. We also will be offering a 100 kWh solution. Also here, samples will be available in Q1, and the series production will start in Q2. As just mentioned before, also the LION LIGHT battery, which is the immersion-cooled technology, is in pre-development. The first RFQ and then also the nomination is targeted for Q4. If we are then going in the industrialization, we will have full focus on doing so by end of Q4.
So to sum it up and to be a bit more operational, what does that mean for the sales team and all the other functions in our company? First one is we are growing our sales team. We started with a small team about a year ago. By end of June, we want to be up and running with nine people. They will be based in North America, and they will be based in Europe, in Germany. We are planning to do sales sprints per market. I have shown you a couple of deep dives today. There are more on the way. We will relaunch the LION website. This is planned for June just before the Smarter E Expo. We are restarting the LinkedIn communication also to explain more in detail what we are doing on an everyday communication.
The website and the LinkedIn communication will be focusing on the LION Smart activities. So this will not be the investor relations communication. We will be attending two major trade fairs this year. This will be The smarter E in Munich in June, and this will be The Battery Show in Detroit in the U.S. in October. In general, we are more than seven times or we will attend seven times more expos and conferences than last year. So we will go to 30+, 35+ expos and conferences, and we will talk to everybody. We will talk to partners, clients, potential customers, and we will spread the word, and we will spread our plan and our strategy. We will update our product portfolio as seen in the slides before, but we will also communicate this portfolio and also our initiatives more aggressively over the next months.
This is now very operational, what we are doing and what we are planning. To summarize it, also maybe to give a little bit of a feeling how many customer interactions we are having at the moment, we are following up with more than 20 leads at the moment. We are very sure that we are also winning some new customers over the next months. This leads now to an outlook and also to the sales targets for the next month and also for the next year. In 2024, I think this is already communicated, we target to have EUR 60 million-EUR 65 million revenue. This is a slight increase and a slight growth compared to last year. The reason why we cannot grow faster at the moment is because we are just finalizing a transition, which we were doing over the last years.
In the first page, I showed you that we just started production in Q1 2023. Before that, we were a designer, a concept maker, and also an integrator. But being a production company is a next level of company. Growing our team, growing the sales team, growing the engineering team, integrating everything together with the production side, this took time. Now we have a much wider customer base already. We will grow the customer base as well. With this, we can participate the market growth much better. Based on the new portfolio, we then also will be able to outperform the market growth. The Q1 will be a soft quarter. This we have already observed over the last years. Q1 is always not easy.
In our special situation, there was a little bit of our customers were producing diesel vehicles again, which was not planned. Also the Storage market is relatively slow in the quarter one. However, we expect that the market is picking up and that we will have very strong quarter three and quarter four. We have seen that the addressable market is growing by more than 25% year-over-year on an energy capacity level, so on the gigawatt-hours side. We expect a price decline of 9% year-over-year. However, we think that we can grow by 25%. This is our target, and we want to win additional market share with this year-over-year market growth. Our ambitious target for 2030 is we want to have a 10% market share for the addressable market. This is the big target.
What you need to have in mind is that we are also striving and targeting big new customers. There are some big fish out there. This is additional potential. This is not included here. Last but not least, I would like to give a short outro from me personally. I was asked what keeps me awake at night. So in other words, what is the threat to our business? And to be very honest, if I look at the news and if I hear from our customers, we have quite a lot of overcapacity in the European automotive market at the moment. And the automotive OEMs are pushing the obsolete modules into the market. This is one-time available products. This is spot-buy usually. So the second topic, which is keeping me awake, is that you can read in the newspapers, China is flooding the market with products.
Usually, it's very cheap products. So can we be replaced easily by other pack suppliers? The last thing, which is keeping me awake, two years ago, we had the situation that our biggest customer was backwards integrating. Out of a sudden, there was a big market going away, and we could not address it anymore. But what lets me sleep again is then the answer to the threats. What is motivating me is that we are talking to many different cell suppliers, and we will be able to participate with the cell price decline. We don't have to worry about that because we don't produce these cells at the moment. We produce very high-quality products.
Especially when you're looking into the immersion cooled pack, here, the know-how, the innovation lays in the thermal management, is in the battery management system, in gaining information about the battery. It's also about the mechanical integration of this battery. So we cannot be replaced so easy. We are also increasing our customer intimacy. So we are owning the customer. This is where we come from. We are interacting with our customers. We know what drives our customers. We know where the pain at our customers is. So we are providing solutions and not just cheap products. We are focusing on attractive niches, and we are offering optimized products and services here. Last but not least, and this is something we should not forget, we have 16 years of experience. We have a very strong understanding of battery testing, of battery know-how.
Where is the limit of batteries? How to optimize these batteries? We have a state-of-the-art production. Every customer who visits us is impressed by the production, and we are providing best-in-class service support. With these final words, I would like now to close my session on sales plans, on sales strategy, and also on the sales initiatives.
Thank you very much, Michael. I think this was very impressive to see how far we are with our already existing battery portfolio and also to see what we are doing for the improvement both in LFP but also in NMC Plus for the Storage market, but also for the Mobile market. There's one other thing we also would like to mention now. This is our status of the Immersion cooling. Where are we now at the Immersion cooling? I think some of you may know that we have been talking since a few years on this technology. We will hear now from Michael Geppert what is the state. Only from my side, a comment. We have already supplied prototype samples to one of our car manufacturers.
We have accomplished all the tests on the test benches with them, and they are building now the car into test vehicles to make test drives and demonstration drives. And what we have heard from one of the OEMs is this is the best-performing battery that is available in the market now. And this is something that you should know that we can supply for our customers the highest C- rate. That means the highest energy output that is for the time being possible in the market. And now, Michael Geppert gives us a little bit the reasons why. Thank you very much.
Hello, everybody. Thank you, Joachim. As already announced, I want to give a brief update of the status of the Immersion cooled battery here at LION Smart. On the first slide here, we put together the history and the history of Immersion cooling at LION Smart. To give a general concept and understanding of Immersion cooling at the beginning, so everybody who's not aware, Immersion cooling means that we surround the battery cells inside the battery with a fluid to enable the highest possible cooling performance that you can achieve. In general, there's three concepts of cooling in battery packs that are used today. There's bottom-plate cooling, there's side cooling, and there's immersion cooling. They all have their advantages and disadvantages and differentiate each other.
And as you can see on the bottom left, typically, the bottom cooling and the side cooling are used for applications where there's either low or the typical medium requirements for performance. But as soon as you enter the range of ultra-high performance, meaning you want to enable high power output or high power intake for a long time, you get to the limits of each of these technologies. You can get very far, but there are certain applications that you just cannot enter with these kinds of applications and with these kinds of technologies. And this is where immersion cooling comes into. Now, Immersion Cooling, as I said, means we surround every battery cell in the Battery Pack with a fluid, with a Dielectric fluid. And we circulate this fluid around the cells to bring out the heat from the Battery Pack as efficiently as possible.
With this technology, you can enable cooling rates, or we can enable cooling rates that are not possible with other technologies like bottom or side cooling. Now, for the use scenario, for use case, this is clearly something that is required for any application that needs very high power for a long time. The most important one for us is super high-performance sports cars, either full electric or hybrid. What combines these applications is that you want to have as much fun as possible on the racetrack, and you want to be as fast as possible on the racetrack for a long time. This means you want to avoid thermal derating, which is a problem of, let's say, of a classical cooling system in technology. Derating means that if you have used the battery for some time, it will heat up significantly.
Then you have to limit the power that you are able to use from the battery because you want to avoid overheating. This problem only occurs if you have not enough cooling performance available. Therefore, we think with immersion cooling, we have a solution available for all of these applications. Now, Immersion Cooling, as I said, means we surround every battery cell in the Battery Pack with a fluid, with a Dielectric fluid. And we circulate this fluid around the cells to bring out the heat from the battery pack as efficiently as possible. As you can see in this slide, LION Smart has now more than five years of experience with this technology. As we've shown here, we worked on different concepts with different customers, starting with an 800-volt application somewhere in 2020. In 2021, a 400-volt project at a tier one supplier.
Now, in a different project, we are talking about a 400-volt in an 800-volt application on the test bench at an OEM. As you can see below, on the bottom, we are also working on the next generation of this technology already. It's our module for OEM-based platforms. It's a 400-volt and 800-volt solution that we are currently developing with.
Next slide, please.
What I want to show you here is when we develop this new module in our design, we use all of the tools and methods we have enabled here at LION Smart. We put in all of the experience with Immersion technology that we built up over the last years. You can see from the specs already that we are targeting very high-performance applications. As you can imagine, the example pack that we show you here with the 400-V configuration is able to bring out 350 kW of power from a pack that is just 117 kg heavy on the module side. Basically, targeting very high-performance applications, sports cars, race cars, etc. There's also 800-V applications available where we can target 500 kW and more.
We even have applications where we go into the megawatt range, meaning electrical output to the drivetrain of more than 1,000 kilowatts. This is highly interesting on an engineering side. It's a lot of fun to develop in this area, of course. We think with Immersion technology, we have a solution available to tackle the thermal issues that typically arise in these applications. What you can see here is that from the engineering slides is that even at very high C- rates, even at very high performance levels, we're able to keep the batteries cool, to keep each individual battery cell cool, and this target below 60 degrees, for example. We can keep the cells in a very even state.
This means we don't have a very high distance of temperature between the individual cells in the Battery Pack, but each of the cells is cooled evenly, which is very important to enable the performance over a long time. Last point I want to mention here is we have our in-house BMS system that we combine with this technology. So we not only provide a high-performance cooling system that enables a high-performance electrical system, but we at the same time provide a BMS system, a battery management system that is able to diagnose and measure the system on a very sophisticated level. Namely, we provide a EIS system, an electrochemical impedance spectroscopy technology inside the Battery Pack that is quite unique and is not very often found in these batteries.
With this technology, we can provide so much more info to the BMS and to the driver to make the maximum usage of these cells and of these batteries and really go to the limit of what the technology is capable of.
Okay. Thank you very much. I would like to also add a comment to this. With this electronic control system that Michael just mentioned, we are even able to control the state of health of the battery. So we know exactly what the battery is doing, and we can make sure that even if, for example, a used car is sold, everybody knows exactly how healthy the battery is. We can control this. So please let me come now to our joint venture with TÜV SÜD. TÜV, technical governance firm, that means the technical control company within Germany. I think one of the highest-ranked control companies that we do have in Germany. We have founded a joint venture with a company with TÜV SÜD in 2009, very successful.
We are holding a 30% minority stake at the joint venture, but it helped us a lot to build up all the technical expertise together with the TÜV SÜD. This is something that we are doing not only in the automotive area, but also in the heavy-duty area, energy storage, and also other applications. The services are testing. The service is also equipment. I think you all know that the test demand is basically on crash stability, performance, but also to make sure that thermal propagation demands also coming now from more and more legal obligations are fulfilled. The company is running quite well. It's growing in an average by some 15% per year. It's a healthy company. The EBITDA margins are quite well above 25%. This is one of our very success stories.
Together with the TÜV SÜD, we are on that company, as I mentioned already, it's a 30% minority stake. The numbers XX that you show there, that you see there, is we do not know exactly the financial results of the company. We will have the shareholders meeting next week. After this, the numbers will be published on TÜV on this. So thank you very much for your attendance. I think we are now being running through all of this. A comment from my side. I think the company is impressive. We have a lot of know-how, especially on the battery, but also the BMS systems. We have a state-of-the-art production facility in Hildburghausen and in Southern Thuringia, not very far from here, with a very well-motivated team knowing exactly what they are doing there.
We are working also on state-of-the-art future business with LFP, but also NMC+ cells for our current customers. We are developing the market also for immersion cooling. Maybe that we should, at the end, coming back to the immersion cooling issue, I would like as a final comment to ask Ulrich, who is an expert of the automotive industry, to give a certain comment on Immersion cooling. Why is Immersion cooling now in the right time and not two or three years ago, where we have been maybe a little too early?
Yes. Thank you very much, Joachim. I hope everybody can hear me through those speakers. As we have seen a rise in power, both for the plug-in hybrids and hybrids in general, and for the battery electric vehicles, the issue is not so much the range anymore. We can provide 400-450 km of range, but it is how fast we can charge and also how fast we can discharge. The ratio of these is the C-rate that was mentioned before. So to get the right amount to get a high amount of power out of a battery that has a certain capacity or energy stored into it, that is the C-rate. You have seen on some of the charts, C-rates up to 20. That means that you get out of a 100 kWh battery, you would get 2,000 kW, which is a lot.
That would be about 2,500 horsepower. But we are actually seeing cars already announced, some already on the road, that have this power. However, the ones that are on the road only have it for very short sprints. So you can only use the 1,000 horsepower or whatever they're rated at for one sprint, maybe two sprints from 0- 100 kilometers per hour. And then you get into derating or power management because the batteries are overheating. And that is exactly where Immersion cooling comes in because the transfer of heat into a liquid is always much better than into air or gas or through transmitting it through other cells as it may be.
So just to illustrate it a bit more, if we're looking at 1,000 kW, maybe in accelerating the car or also in charging, even at the high efficiency that we have in batteries, let's say 98%, although that isn't always delivered. But even at a 98% efficiency, that still means 2% loss. And 2% loss out of 1,000 kW is 20 kW, or in other words, 20 cooker plates like you have in the kitchen. Now, I don't want to encourage you to turn on 20 of these at the same time and leave that running for several minutes. You know what that will cause. So that is how to get the heat out of such a system. And that's exactly what Immersion cooling is doing.
This is important, as I said, because we're seeing more and more very, very high-powered cars that also want to be used that way, be it uphill, be it in repeated acceleration, or be it on racetracks or for very sporty cars like some projects that we are currently working on. The other point that also was mentioned by Michael before is other applications where you have the same situation. You do not need a very large battery, but you need high power peaks. The crane was an example, or also mining trucks that have to go uphill under a lot of load, then have to go downhill, and in between, have to stand for a while. But they don't need very much in terms of range, but they do need a lot of power. Same thing. You don't want the batteries to overheat.
So this is where Immersion cooling comes in. And that is also the reason why we are getting more and more requests for that technology. We've been working at that for a while. We have achieved a good state of technology, as Joachim has already mentioned. Our battery, and only our battery, has passed the prototype tests with an important German manufacturer. And we are just supplying the next stage of prototypes that will then go into the car and get some real-life testing in the development environment of that car company and on a certain racetrack that some of us know very well. So it is a technology that enables comparatively small batteries for high power peaks or, on the other hand, very large power outputs for sustained applications in cars without getting too heavy and too expensive.
Okay. Thank you very much, Ulrich, for your comment on that. I think this shows that we are on the right track, and now we are on the right time. We would take this as our entrance into the automotive OEM industry. The good thing is that with the numbers that we are talking now for these batteries for the next years, we will be able to build up our automotive system, the OEM system. Thank you very much. I think we are now coming to the Q&A.
Thank you. We will now begin our question-and-answer session. If you have a question for our speakers, you can use the question button next to the presentation to send a written question. For a question by phone, please dial nine star on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. 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 can dial nine star again to cancel your question. If you are using speaker equipment today, please lift the headset before making your question. One moment, please, for the first question. There is a written question. New Karsan deal brings up to EUR 12 million revenue, which is nice, but the revenue growth in total is expected to be EUR 4-9 million only. That basically means decay of the other revenues.
How come and why is LION not growing with the other customers?
So this is Michael Reich speaking. I would like to comment quickly. First is the official numbers will come next week, so I cannot comment on the 2023 and the actual progress. What I can say is that we have this new Karsan deal, which is great. There was already quite a good business with the customer last year. So this is not showing that the other customers are not growing. We are planning to have definitely more than five key customers this year. And the key customer for us is when it is more than EUR 5 million turnover.
Next question. What aspects of production that technology applies are protected by IP?
So this is Michael Geppert speaking. First of all, for production, the BMW production is licensed from BMW on the contract. Currently, the IP and the license is with us. We have the rights and the know-how to operate this line. This is belonging to us under a license agreement. For the technology of immersion, we have patents surrounding the immersion technology that we use.
Okay. Next question. Could you please give a broad overview of the total addressable market for Immersion cooling?
The market for Immersion cooling is just evolving. So in my opinion, this would not be the last bar. It's not really a very good it would not be good to give a total addressable market as of today. What I can tell you is that the partners and customers we are talking to are usually talking about projects of 500-5,000 cars per year. So we are targeting to win one first project within this year. And I'm very convinced if the first customer can be announced, that other customers will follow. And this is how we are stacking up the business for ourselves. How big the total addressable market is at the moment, this is really very difficult to calculate. And also, there is little data available, which could be used for doing such an estimation.
Okay. The next question. You mentioned offering used i3 batteries to customers. How will that work in detail? Where do you get them from? Who do you sell them to? Do you have to refurbish them?
So this is Michael. I will start now. I can just comment from the customer point of view. We have requests, and we have discussions with some of the customers who want to buy batteries from us, which are refurbished, which are coming back to us from the automotive business and then being used again in the storage business. We are in discussion how this can work. From a technology point of view, I would like to hand over now to Michael Geppert.
Yes. From technology point of view, I think we can offer a great deal here because we have the ecosystem to use these specific battery types in stationary systems. So, for example, there's a dedicated software version available to use these batteries in a stationary system with some additional functionality that is required in this use case. We have additional control units available that enable the usage of these batteries in stationary systems. So I think we are well prepared on a technological side to use batteries that are coming back from their mobile use case and to use them in a stationary or secondary application.
Another written question is regarding the payout of dividend. Is this planned for 2024, 2025? And is there a plan to buy shares from the executive board?
Hello. This is Jörg Hahn speaking, Head of Finance. No, it is not planned that we pay dividends out in this and next year. We are reinvesting quite heavily in, as we explained before, in our technologies. Regarding the purchases of the board from the legal side, our board was told not to buy shares in this circumstances right now.
So the next question. When could we expect to reach operating break-even at EBIT line? And what can we expect as a recurrent EBIT margin from first 2025 onwards in terms of CapEx? What can we expect for the period 2024, 2025, considering the efforts in the new product lines?
We will cover financial details more in our investor call in roughly one week.
All right. Now we have no more questions on the line.
Yes, one more.
Now there is one question. Now they come. Okay. Thank you very much. How confident are you that patents protect your Immersion cooling IP? Can another company develop a similar immersion technology using a different fluid? As you can see, I'm not an engineer.
Thank you very much for this question. No, it's not a silly question. Thank you very much for that. Basically, the fluids are not protected by IP. There are various different types of immersion fluids available, and we are also looking very closely at different versions. There is, of course, competition available, and we happily take on them. We think this also shows that there is a healthy market for these kinds of solutions. We are confident that with the way we do immersion technology, we are protected by our IP.
Okay. And a following question. How much are you spending on Immersion cooling per annum? How many people are working on this?
For the financial data, Joachim Damasky speaking. This is something that is, of course, at least a certain portion of our development budget. But on the other side, we are partly refunded by our customers. They pay for, for example, the prototypes. So this is not easy to tell what the total amount is and how many people are working on this. When we look, including our Großbettlingen , we are talking about at least 5-6 people working on our batteries, that means immersion cooling batteries. And we also use currently for the design external capacities from designing companies outside where we are currently doing this together with the OEM. So I think it's quite impressive what we are doing for this, and we really believe in that. As also Ulrich mentioned already, this is now the right time for that. Thank you.
There is a question regarding the team. How big is the team today, and how big should be the team at the end of the year?
Currently, we are roughly in total some 70 people, and we are growing. We have hired three new experienced engineers. We are also hiring people for our service technicians to be out in the field. At the end of the year, I think we will be something around 80 people.
There are two questions from a person. The first one is, how do you expect the competitive landscape to Immersion cooling to develop as the actual EV market from liquid into solid-state batteries, or do you expect Immersion cooling to be particularly resilient? And the second, can you give us already a flavor of future Immersion cooling battery packs pricing compared to NMC or NMC Plus?
I think it's, let me come first to the second question. What is the pricing? We are using here NMC+ cells. We are using round cells. And the only difference for these is we have high-performance cells. They are designed for high C-rate, and we are cooling them with liquid cooling. So in addition, we need pumps for this. But in our normal pack, the BMW i3 pack, we have also already cooling with refrigerant integrated into the battery. So we think it depends really not on the Immersion cooling. It depends on that, what our customer wants. So I think we will be in the same area like NMC+. Plus, that's what is needed for this kind of Immersion cooling. And coming back to that, what was asked before, that means what is the market in comparison to other technologies?
We think that for the future, this kind of batteries will be needed again, especially for the high-performance cars. We know that for the other, if we look to LFP, LFP modules are already more and more introduced into the normal passenger car business, especially, let's say, the A-class, B-class vehicles. We have NMC, NMC+ for the C and D-class vehicles and performance car vehicles. And for the high-performance cars, we will need NMC+ with Immersion cooling in future as well. What we are hearing here, especially for the solid-state batteries, natrium batteries, and others, this is mainly for the base batteries. They have some advantages, especially when we are looking to the thermal propagation. But for high-performance cars, we see the Immersion cooling batteries also in the future.
Shall I say a little bit on how we do the calculation for Immersion cooling? Because there was the pricing question. The way the business works with OEMs is that you define a specification first. Based on the specification, which is defined, you then can do the bill of material. You can do the investment plan. You can do the other material, which needs to be developed, and tooling. The thing at the moment is that the specification is not finalized. So there are several variables which need to be finalized first before we know which price level we can achieve. Of course, it will be, in the beginning, due to lower volumes, more expensive than standard NMC+ batteries.
Okay. The next question. You have assumed 9% pricing erosion annually in your revenue projection. How did you arrive to 9%? Why not 5% or 20%?
This is by talking to the market, talking to suppliers, talking to customers. This is what we see. There is a target where the customers want to come to. There is a trend being seen coming from suppliers. There is news data. And if you just so this is data, which we have gathered. And based on that, we come to 9%. As said in the beginning, there is a lot of price erosion coming from the cell market at the moment. This will lead also to cost-down potentials in the Battery Pack. And this is what we anticipate. In the beginning, at the moment, the pressure is really high. We think this will come to a bottom by the end of the decade.
The next question. What are the latest in terms of possible North America plans? Is supplying electric trucks in U.S., Canada, out of Europe a cost disadvantage?
That's a very good question. Thank you very much for asking because I forgot to mention that when I was showing my slides, especially for the Storage market but also for the Truck market. When you go into the narrow pack design, the customers are asking for a made-in-America solution. You can do the ramp-up with a solution coming from Europe, but there must be a roadmap how to enter the American market. We are, at the moment, evaluating several scenarios and possibilities. One possibility might be that we do a three-step approach, that we start with assembly first. So we are using the modules, which are 100% automatically produced in Germany, that these are shipped to America. Then you have the assembly, the testing, the storage, the service there in a first step.
In a second step, you will then insource the material as far as possible from American suppliers. So, for example, the housing of the pack could be sourced from America. Long term, also, we could think about sourcing the battery management system in America. In the third step, then, this would mean that we are establishing a full-blown North American site where also the cells, the modules, everything is produced and sourced in North America. Is there a disadvantage in cost? I just read that here as well. It's always a question of quality and specification. There is a market where our batteries fit very well and where no solution is available at the moment in North America. Of course, we need to progress, and that would be also becoming more American.
But at the moment, the disadvantage of sending the packs can be countermeasured by quality and specification. Last topic is we would like to become IRA compliant for smaller vehicles. This is going together with the production plant strategy, which is ongoing, or the plan, which we are evolving. On the other hand, what you need to know is that trucks, which are built in America, this is under a different article of the IRA. So it does not need to be produced in America at the moment. It needs to reduce the CO2 footprint, and it needs to provide propulsion of the vehicle. But these batteries can also become outside of America. Of course, you never know how long this will stay like that. So it needs to be accompanied by a story and a roadmap how to enter the American market, also from a production point of view.
Next question. With regard to Immersion cooling Battery Packs car content, how big is the difference between a hybrid plug-in hybrid versus EV?
So this is Michael Geppert speaking. Of course, as always, this heavily depends on the use case. But in general, you can assume a hybrid plug-in hybrid battery is somewhere in the range from 10-15 to 20-25 kWh. So, of course, smaller than a full BEV battery. And there's some dependency where to put in this range depending on the use case.
At the moment, we have no questions in the queue. Thank you very much. There are no questions anymore. Back to the speakers.
Okay. So, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time. It's more than 1.5 hours, and I think the number of questions has shown that there is a certain interest in what we are doing. I hope you get confidence into the management team that is, I would say, a good mixture between new people, experienced people, and people who have very broad technological know-how. We will bring even more know-how into the company we have already built up and are still waiting for people to come in for the sales team. So I think we are well prepared for the future. So thank you very much, and have a nice afternoon. Thank you.
Thank you. Bye-bye.