Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the conference call of LION E-Mobility regarding the Q4 and financial year 2024 results. This call will be recorded. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. My name is Jens Hecht, and I will be the moderator today. On the call, we have the LION Management Team, Dr. Joachim Damasky, CEO, Jörg Peter Hahn, CFO, and Michael Reich, Global Head of Sales. We will kick- off the presentation of the financials and then give an operational and strategic update. Jörg Peter Hahn will present the Q4 and full year 2024 financial results. Afterwards, Joachim Damasky and Michael Reich will give you an update on the business development and the market potential. After the presentation, the LION Team will be available for any of your questions.
You will be able to ask questions via the Q&A chat function, or you can raise your hand virtually, and you will be unmuted to ask your question. Let's start with the presentation, and I would now like to hand over to Jörg Peter Hahn.
Thank you very much, Jens. Good morning, everyone. Dear investors, first, maybe next slide, please. Yeah, thank you. First, I want to highlight some points in Q4 and then change to the full year picture. Q4, as you can see, was a weaker quarter than we expected. Nevertheless, we could sell shares in TÜV SÜD Battery Testing to TÜV SÜD, which improved our EBITDA. Q4 was positive with EUR 1.8 million and the best quarter last year. Going to the operating cash flow, it reflects actually the clearing of the outstanding trade payables, which was a tremendous effort until the end of last year. Next slide, please. Coming to the full year picture, yes, the full year 2024 revenue of EUR 16.99 [million] was well below our expectations. Nevertheless, it shows how difficult the market environment was, and this continued throughout the whole year.
On the other side, we still needed to invest strategically, and this increased our personnel expenses compared to the year before, also shown in the capitalization of the development projects. Operating expenses showed these efforts as well and also included contract development work for the new chemistry cells, especially in the NMC Plus. Finally, we had an EBITDA of EUR -4.2 [million] throughout the whole year. Next slide, please. The before mentioned is also, as you can see, reflected in the cash flow statement. We repaid heavily the trade payables and used our inventory to provide customers with the packs. We used the cash from divesting our joint venture shares and, of course, also the repayment of the connected loans to pay these operating activities. The financial cash flow represents the scheduled repayment of the bank loan. All in all, we kept on investing despite this difficult year. Next slide.
Looking at the balance sheets after the information of the movements and the activities, it shows exactly this reduction of the balance sheet sum by reducing the inventories and the receivables from overall current assets, almost EUR 44 million to EUR 7.3 million. On the other side, the liabilities were reduced, especially by the trade payables, which we could reduce by 95% until year-end. We cleaned up the balance sheet. In the end, the equity remained stable at 19.5% in comparison between these two years. Overall, it was kind of a success story, I would say, despite this bad year. I want to hand over to Joachim on the next slide, please.
Yeah, Jörg, thank you very much. Good morning also from my side, and I'm happy to present what we achieved in the last year. The success story that Jörg already mentioned is we survived. I think we all know what happens in the battery market. We look to big companies on the cell, but also on the battery production. We are still there, and we still have our customers. Of course, yes, the last year was a difficult year, and I think we have seen this on the numbers. We tried to reduce cost. Partly, we have been running in short-time work in our plant for cost reduction. On the other side, we concentrated on the development on two major development projects. We have shifted the priorities, so we did not start with LFP modules, but with the NMC Plus modules for the new battery.
We will supply to our customer the first test samples end of this month so that they can start the integration into their vehicles. We have been also able to develop the next step of our immersion cooled battery. What we did is to send out all the necessary samples to our major OE customer. They have built up the vehicles. We have been able to fulfill all the test parameters, both on the test benches with the OEM, but also in the vehicle. The vehicles have been built up. It's not only one vehicle. It's two vehicles, one with the 800-volt system with very high power of three battery packs, 1.5 megawatts on the one side. This is a high-performance car, but we also have been able to build up a 400-volt plug-in hybrid, what would be then the first serial application for our immersion cooled battery.
The tests are still going on. We have fulfilled everything. Of course, we have satisfied the customer's expectations, and I will come to this later on together with Michael Reich when we are talking about that, what we expect from the market. I think what was also a good success in this year is we have been able to reduce the bill of material for our SE09 battery pack by renegotiating cell prices and part prices so that we are able also to be competitive in the market now. I think we all know that there is a huge pressure in the market because of overstock and other things, but we see ourselves in a position that we also can be competitive here as well. I think we are also now working on additional new products, and this is something that we will hear on later on as well.
We are looking for a cooperation with BESS battery manufacturer so that we can also be in this market as well. We also have been able to win the DHL Deutsche Post repair business for the Street Scooter vehicles. This is currently running. We have been able to build up a remanufacturing line in Hildburghausen in our production facility, also according to the specifications of our customer. We are repairing everyday modules to be shipped back to DHL. We are also now on the negotiation of building up a second life battery pack for all the Street Scooter vehicles because Deutsche Post DHL, they want also to take them in a second battery life, the vehicles, for different reasons, because they are satisfied with the Street Scooter cars outside, but also there is a lack of availability of new vehicles, as you know.
We are asked if we can also then supply them with spare part battery packs, not only modules, what we are doing currently, but also battery packs. I think we all know they have more than 20,000 vehicles out in the field. How much at the end it will be, we do not know. We are just in the negotiation phase when we can start with this, but this is something where we are very positive for the future, also to bring some base load in our manufacturing. I think you also have heard that we have announced a cooperation with a development engineering company, HOFER. This is something that we have been able to achieve with them together. They are also now, because we have been developing together with them also our immersion cooled battery module.
They have also access to other customers, especially in the OE business, in other areas as well. They are now also talking to different customers, not only passenger car vehicles, but also in their industrial sector, where a lot of companies now look for new batteries and for companies who are still stable and available in the market. We are also talking with a big automotive supplier company based in Stuttgart. They also want to work together with us. They would be able to prepare a battery management system for our immersion cooled battery. They are also willing to support us in the thermal management components. We are continuously talking with them, and they are also very positive, and they announced this also to their customers. I think at the end, we are proud on that, what we have achieved last year. We are still there.
We have been able to reduce our liabilities by a really huge amount. That means we did not think that we would be able to come to this low amount of outstanding liabilities, especially to our big suppliers where we get the cells from. We are very positive also for the future. Now I would like to hand over to Michael Reich, who gives us an overview on that, what happens in the market, and I'm happy to answer your questions later on. Thank you.
Good morning. This is Michael speaking. I'm responsible for sales and marketing in LION Smart. Thanks for joining this call. It's a pleasure talking to you again and giving an update on the markets LION Smart is focusing on. As a recap, I would like to start with this slide. Here you see the focus markets and the focus applications of LION Smart. As you might know, we have two focus areas. One is mobility, so the battery is used for getting a propulsion, and one is called stationary storage, where we store energy to have it available later again. What you can see here are the known focus applications, commercial vehicles like electric bus E-trucks, especially smaller E-trucks and smaller E-buses. This is where we have USP in the market. We are also focusing on off-highway vehicles.
What is new here is that we are also having requests now coming from the market, which is more going in the direction of defense, where the need of energy in the field in an off-grid environment is needed. Last but not least, what is very important is that our immersion cooled battery is used for the electric vehicles, like the battery electric vehicles and also the plug-in hybrid vehicles. What we also realized is that this immersion cooled battery is also giving a big benefit for the commercial vehicles. This is something I will focus on later. On the right side, you see the storage stationary applications, the C&I market, and the uninterruptible power supply. This is still our focus market when you need fast power batteries.
What we are evaluating at the moment, what Joachim already mentioned, is we are also looking into the best solutions into solutions where we can participate then in the grid applications. Next slide, you see quickly what was in 2024 and what will be in 2025. I would like to do it quite short here. In a very challenging market, we were still able to achieve some major milestones and also successes. We are a reliable supplier. This is our image. This is how LION Smart is known in the market. What we could see here is as a reward in the end of the last year that we received the supplier award from Karsan. Many of our competitors were not able to continue the business. Some were leaving the market. Others are having difficulties. We are still there, and our customers are well aware of this.
Immersion cooled battery, we successfully finished the integration project and the testing project with a German premium OEM. Here we are quite happy about the feedback we received. We are best in class technology. Last but not least, in 2024, besides difficult situations in the storage market, we were preparing ourselves to come back in that market and to participate very strong in the future here. How will 2025 be? The market is finally stabilizing, and we are seeing some signs of growth. The market is still challenging, but we are much more optimistic than in 2024 how the market will develop now. We see the comeback of some mobility customers, which were quite weak in 2024. This is expected to happen in Q3 2025. We are now executing the actions which we have prepared to counterfight the market difficulties.
Number one is we are evaluating how we can enter the grid market, and we have reached a good status at the moment. We are optimistic to start soon here. We have first orders for the next generation, the energy upgrade battery pack, which we are having, the Power Mobility 53. We are rolling it out now. First deliveries will start in April, and SOP will be then in November with our customers. Very important as well is we are pivoting the immersion technology also to new applications. This is what I will show on the next slide. We are still very confident that immersion cooled batteries are a very big benefit and have a big value for performance cars. Here, especially plug-in hybrids and cars where the battery content inside is relatively small, but you need a lot of power.
This is where we are really bringing value to the market. We are at the moment at a situation that we can show up to 20C of electric power out of our batteries. We do not see any derating while driving, racetrack driving, or on the street. This is important. We also can show a high recuperation and a very fast charging here. Some of you might have heard that there are some press releases out there that 400 km range within five minutes is possible. With our technology, this is also possible, in our opinion. Based on the results we are having now with the OEM, we think we can underachieve this. We will be faster than the five minutes for the 400 km. While the OEM projects, unfortunately, are at the moment delayed, we are using the time we are having to further push the technology boundaries.
We are now evaluating new power cells, which are even giving more power out of the battery, which we are using. In addition, we are also not only focusing on one OEMs. At the moment, we are talking to three OEMs with our immersion cooled battery. The market we see at the moment is in 2030, EUR 2.5 billion per year, and we want to have a big share of this available market. What I mean with pivoting emergent cooling is we are now using this technology and also using it for ultra-fast charging. We were contacted from a German premium OEM at the Electronica Fair, and they were very interested in immersion cooled batteries because of charging. Their motivation is they would like to put 400 km of range into a truck in the same time like you usually need for refueling the truck.
This is below 15 minutes. This concept evaluation is ongoing. We are soon starting also to produce a concept for that. Also along with that goes that we are also evaluating cells now, which are optimized for fast charging. This market at the moment is just for Europe, more than EUR 1 billion in 2030. The truck market is having at least the 40 tons a big impact on the CO2 footprint, and therefore we are confident that an electrification in this market will start very soon and will be relatively quick. On the next page, I would like now to hand over to Joachim again to explain a bit more the technical details. What was the outcome from the German OEM project?
Yeah, I would like to show you the results of the test drives that we had with the German OEM, only to show you the performance of our battery. You can see four different graphs. Let's start with the left side upper one. This is showing a repeated acceleration in the vehicle from 80 km- 200 km per hour. The blue line shows the driving speed. The red line shows the temperature in the battery and the temperature increase. The black line shows the availability of power. That means this is starting with roughly 200 kilowatts, but after 10 times accelerating and braking again, the battery was due to thermal derating reduced to a power output of roughly 50 kilowatts. That means 2/3 have been necessary to reduce because the power was not there. Battery was getting too warm.
When you see that, what you see in the lower graph, this is our battery, not the OEM solution that they had, what shows the upper graph. There you can see we started with a total power output of about 340 kilowatts. We can, up to now, we can do also 520, but for this test, we used only 340. Same situation, same driving situation. You see that the temperature increase in our battery was less than 7 degrees Fahrenheit due to overall driving. There was no thermal derating. The power was available to the end of driving. On the right side, we see what happens if you drive on battery power only with 140 km per hour with the solution that the OEM had already. They started with a power output of about 200 kilowatts.
The car was at the blue line shows again the speed running on 140 km per hour, but the battery that they have currently was not able to drive the car. They had to reduce the power. At the end, they had even to stop driving, what you can see at the blue line because the battery was getting too warm. The temperature increase was roughly 20 degrees, and they had to stop because it was getting much too warm. When you see the lower battery graph, you see the black line, no thermal derating. We were able to have the full power output over all the time, and the temperature increase of our battery was less than 3 degrees. This shows the performance of our battery.
The original comment of the OEM was, "This technology now is the solution for our battery problem." This is only to show the performance and that we are on the right track. The OEM is very satisfied with that, what we have been showing, and we are sure that we will continue with them after they have finalized all the test drives that they are currently carrying out. Thank you very much.
Okay, so now coming to megawatt charging for heavy-duty vehicles, this is now going in the direction charging with immersion cooled battery technology. On the left side, you see the status quo, which is available in the market now. If you can do megawatt charging one megawatt, you need about 30 minutes to charge the truck. This was a German government-funded project. It's called NEFTON project. Here they used a standard battery to do this. It was a special environment to realize this. However, if you know that a truck takes about 110 kWh- 120 kWh per 100 km, then you know that there needs to be a very fast charging to achieve the range you need. Out of this, there is now the idea at a German premium OEM to even improve this charging time.
The target now is really to do it below 15 minutes. The reason for this is every four hours, roughly, a driver needs to take a break in Germany or they change the driver so another driver can continue to drive. You always need from break to break about 400 km of range. At the moment, you need about 11-12 minutes to refuel your truck with diesel. This is what shall be possible also with battery technology. At the moment, trucks and bus OEMs are looking into this direction with 3,000 amps at a high voltage, 850 volt voltage. Within these boundaries, they try to achieve it. We have shown that with our technology, it is possible. We are targeting to build up such a truck as soon as possible.
Now, I would like to talk a little bit about the running business here, what is the status quo at the moment, the already mentioned NMC Plus rollout, which we are now having. The energy upgrade is really fundamentally now opening up the addressable market for us. We are very happy that we are having an automotive-grade production in Hildburghausen, which is really very important if you're talking to the customers that you can say, "This is something we are having." Now based on that, we are developing this BMW i3 pack into the next generation, which is called NMC Plus. With this building block approach, we now can increase the portfolio range and the variance, and we are able to participate in more markets and more vehicles. We have shown and we are seen as best-in-class energy density with our solution now.
Watt-hours per kilogram is where we are really benchmarked now with this technology. The first NMC Plus batteries will be delivered in April. The test drives will start, and the ramp-up is planned for November. On the right side, also to show you some figures, the commercial vehicle markets in the U.S., Canada, and Europe is seen as roughly 5 gigawatt-hours in 2024. It is growing very fast, especially in Europe. The motivation is to make the cities green. The city buses will all be converted to electric very fast. Last-mile delivery is becoming green. Buses for longer ranges and trucks for medium ranges are more and more considered to be electric. At the moment, with our housing, which we are having today, we only can address the yellow form.
With this technology, which we are having now, we can participate also in the dark green, so the narrow pack applications and also the customized applications. I am very happy that we are now having the partnership with hofer powertrain, which gives us a multiplier for acquiring new business and also for developing new projects. It is very helpful that we are getting good feedback from our customers who say that we are a strategic customer and they believe in us and they want to grow together with us. Finally, it is also good to have serious discussions with new customers who are really also trusting in our technology and who want to use our technology. In this case, I am showing here the example for the last-mile delivery, and the customer wants to extend the vehicle lifetime, and therefore they are looking into our solutions here.
This is a rough overview of our running business and how we are developing it. To sum it up, what is the outlook 2025? I still see it a little bit as a year of transition. We have to roll out and to ramp up our mobility portfolio. We have to roll out the product variants, which is giving us the loading in our production. We continue to successfully integrate our batteries into new applications with new customers. We are broadening our customer base again. It was difficult last year. Now we are very much on track again. We are preparing ourselves for the grid business, and we want to win a first-bid BESS project, like a battery energy storage solution project in the second half of 2025 in the DACH region.
For 2026, I expect a year of growth, and I want to be back at the revenue of 2023 at least. This is my last sentence. I would like to hand over now to Jens again for the Q&A session.
Thank you, Michael. We will now begin with the Q&A session. If you have a question for the LION management team, please use the Q&A chat function, and I will read out the questions. If you want to ask your question via microphone, please raise your hand virtually. Once your name has been announced, you can unmute yourself and ask the question. One moment, please, for the first questions to come in. We have a question from Christian Sandherr. One moment, please. Christian, you can now unmute yourself and ask your question.
Okay, good morning. Thanks. First one would be on the EBITDA impact from the TÜV SÜD sale. Can you quantify that? How much that impacted your Q4 EBITDA figure?
Actually, we cannot. We are not allowed to disclose. As you can see, it has a great positive effect despite our investment activities and our costs during the year. It helped us actually as what we expected.
Okay. Second question on cost. Can you quantify how much you spend in one-off expenses? For the, let's say, sale, but also for project development throughout the year?
It was not in that high range as last year, but nevertheless, we needed to invest in the NMC Plus technology quite heavily, as you heard. We are investing this year as well. As Michael said, we have to deliver to our customers the NMC samples in April already. They went up, but quantifying, I have to, as these are preliminary numbers, I'd like to postpone to the final results.
Okay. There was a mention on renegotiated raw material contracts, which obviously impacted your gross margin quite a lot. Would you expect that impact to be sustainable? Would you expect the gross margin level that you had in full year 2024 to be the estimate for the coming years?
Actually, for this year, we see this as a base. With this, we calculate this year throughout the year.
Okay. Okay. Perfect. One final question maybe. You mentioned that there were some delays on the immersion pack topic. What is the rough timeline? By when would you expect a go or no-go decision from the one OEM that you're currently testing with?
Yes. This is my question. This is Michael. The delay is at the moment more than one year. We expect a new timeline within this half of the year, and then I have more clarity. It will be more than a year, unfortunately.
Okay. So would it be fair to assume that it's a high likelihood that 2026 will not be impacted positively by any contributions?
This depends.
Meaningful.
This depends very much because we are now also building up other samples. As you know, serial development from start of development until serial production normally takes at least two and a half years before start of production of the vehicle. Serial numbers then will come in not before 2027. That's right.
Okay. Perfect. Thanks. I will jump back to the queue.
Thanks for your question. We had another question, but the hand is not raised anymore.
Maybe it was covered already.
At least that's probably exactly right. If you have any more questions, please type them into the Q&A or raise your hand. We do have a question here from Torsten Bolten. The supplier you mentioned near Stuttgart would replace the BMS in the LIGHT Battery or only for an own project with the LIGHT Battery as a base?
Would you mind to repeat the question because I?
The supplier you mentioned near Stuttgart, will this supplier replace the BMS in the LIGHT B attery or only for an own project with LIGHT B attery as a base?
No, the thing is that our BMS development that we have currently going on, I think we have two different BMSs. The one is the one for the NMC Plus that we are currently doing with Munich Electrification. For the LIGHT Battery, we have to have a different BMS, as you can imagine, because this has to be much faster. We need a BMS. What we have been building up for the prototypes on our own based on the developments that have been made in the past.
As some of the regulations have changed, especially according to the safety levels, software levels, whatever else, this would be for us a next development for the BMS, and we are just in the phase that we have to decide if we take a given one that is according to all the new demands from the OEMs, but also from the authorities, or if we will upgrade our own one. Therefore, this supplier would then be also, if we decide to go with them, the one who would then deliver the BMS for the immersion cooled battery. For the NMC Plus, the BMS is coming from Munich Electrification, where we are now in the final development phase. We are now doing the prototype software for those batteries that we want to supply at the end of the month to our customer.
I hope this gives an overview on that.
Thank you. There's another question in the chat. Are there any claims from the state of Thüringen because subsidies were paid that may no longer be fulfilled with the job cuts?
We have no job cuts for the time being. We have only temporary short-time work. It depends very much on what we will achieve in the market with the current battery. There are no job cuts for the time being. Therefore, we also do not have to pay back any subsidies.
Okay. Thank you. There are no more questions in the chat. If you want to ask another question, you have the last chance to do it now or raise your hand.
Jens, there's one additional comment I wanted to give. I don't want that there is a misunderstanding. The delay I mentioned with the premium OEM is just by a year for SOP. The discussions are still ongoing, and the RFQ is expected to have a date soon and within this year. This is not delayed by one year. I don't know if there was a misunderstanding. I just wanted to add this.
Thanks for the clarification. Great.
Okay. There seem to be no more further questions. We are at the end of the call. Thank you, everyone, for your attendance. If you have any further questions, please reach out to the LION Investor Relations team at any time. See you next time, hear you next time. Bye-bye.