Welcome, everybody to this Q4 presentation. My name is Jacob Tveraabak. I'm the CEO, and with me, as always, I have our CFO, Hilde Horn Gilen. Well, normally we go straight into the Q4 results, but what a morning. Of course, we have to talk a little bit about the acquisition that we announced that we are in the process of doing in the U.K. last night. Air Link Group is our first acquisition since we announced our 2025 strategic ambitions. We said back then that we would be growing to NOK 2.5 billion. During the 2 years, we have divested our cash security and labels business, and we're now substituting that with other retail technology business, and ALS being the first of those.
I'm very proud that this is making StrongPoint go significantly and materially into the U.K. market and the Ireland market. If we're using the 2021 financial statements, we will be adding some NOK 240 million to the revenue, and that with a 10% EBITDA margin. It's a nice and decent-sized operation that we're now adding to the StrongPoint business. The really important thing for us is that we're now expanding into a country in which we are seeing very good product market fit. We know that a lot of our solutions are in high demand in the U.K., and we are expecting to build on the amazing relations that ALS has in the U.K. market.
ALS has been around for 25 years, serving some of the finest grocery retailers in the U.K. and beyond. We want to continue that, build on that, and also introduce our own solutions to ALS's operations. The price we have been paying for ALS is what we would say fair, given that this is a service and installation company. We will be talking more about ALS's business and the acquisition that we're in the process of doing now, later today in the strategy update session. Very, very pleased about this acquisition and welcome to the ALS team. To the normal agenda, the Q4 results. As always, I'd like to provide a short introduction to StrongPoint. At StrongPoint, we believe in the double opportunity.
This double opportunity is stemming out of the growth of e-commerce, that all other things equal are taking volume away from the stores, putting it online, and thereby making a margin pressure on the stores. Costs are rising in the stores, and when revenue are not increasing as much, that provides this margin pressure. One of the solutions to solving this margin pressure is technology, making the stores more efficient and making the shopping experience more attractive. That's the solution or the opportunity number one. Opportunity number two for StrongPoint is the growth in e-commerce in and of itself, whether you are just about to grow your e-commerce or grow into e-commerce or expanding your e-commerce operations.
StrongPoint now has the full range of both fulfillment or picking solutions and last mile solutions, from manual picking in store and dark store to automated picking with AutoStore to all the last mile solutions you can imagine, with the Click and Collect Lockers, both mobile and stationary, pickup in store, and of course, also last mile home deliveries and quick commerce solutions. We're very, very strongly positioned in this respect. At StrongPoint, we believe in retail technology being an important part of making the shopping experience for a smarter and better life for people, both in store and online. Exactly that purpose is what we are bringing with us to our retail customers, and in particular, our grocery retail customers.
We have for a number of years now been serving all the major grocery retailers in our core markets, Norway, Sweden, the three Baltic countries, and increasingly so, in Spain. We're going to continue to do that with a breadth of more solutions that we're adding to our portfolio. As we're having a longer session afterwards, or immediately after this session on our strategy update, or strategy update session, I'm going to just restate the ambition that we'd set forth 2 years ago, namely achieving a NOK 2.5 billion revenue in 2025 and achieving EBITDA margins of between 13%-15%. Restating that ambition again. Now to the highlights of Q4.
We really have, as always, the three pillars, the financial results. We're going to take a short look at some of the customer stories, and then lastly, what else we're doing to achieve or go in the direction of achieving the 2025 financial ambition. The Q4 revenue. Well, first of all, we should remember that last year's Q4 was extraordinary. We had a 35% growth in the revenue, which was really driven by an extraordinary ESL or Electronic Shelf Label project that was rapidly deployed. Normally, we try to deploy these kind of large-scale projects over time. Last year, that was very different, and most of that big order came in Q4. When we're achieving a maintained revenue this year, that is really extraordinary.
Norway, of course, being the bigger part in this equation, did an amazing job in filling in with other solutions and other projects to both grocery customers, but also to some DIY customers. The growth really was driven by Spain, a 44%, that is 44% increase from last year. The turnaround that the new management team in Spain has put forth is really paying off now. This maintained record revenue comes in addition to the fact that we are being exposed to the global component shortages. We would have achieved some tens of millions of NOK more in revenue if we'd only had the components to fulfill the orders that we are actually trying to deliver on. The component issue didn't help these figures.
Actually, on the contrary, it reduced the revenue that otherwise would have been. On top of that, we have the currency effects. Whereas it looks here as we are having a 2% negative or a reduction in the revenue, it's actually currency-adjusted, a +2% revenue. This chart really doesn't do justice unless you understand the drivers behind it, and I'm just incredibly proud of the entire StrongPoint team that has, again, maintained a record-high revenue. Looking at the EBITDA, we are moving from a 6.9% EBITDA margin to a 7.1% EBITDA margin, a relatively stable or maintained EBITDA margin. Again, I'd like to emphasize what's behind these figures.
Comparing with last year's, we're doing an incredible amount of investments also in this quarter, this Q4 2021, that we didn't do one year ago. Those of you following StrongPoint will know we expense all the investments. We don't put that into the balance sheet. All the investments that we have been doing on the Order Picking solution to make it production-ready for Carrefour and Glovo is a part of this. The next-generation Click & Collect Lockers is part of this. The introduction and crafting of the MFC or micro-fulfillment work where AutoStore is a major part of this is included. The work with Halodi Robotics, which is a year-long journey for us with Halodi and some of the major grocery retailers to deploy actual humanoid robots in store is also included in this.
Despite that, we're achieving the 7.1% EBITDA. Again, very strong performance by the entire StrongPoint organization. Looking at the segment percentages or relative shares of the revenue, this might be one of the areas in which I believe we still have a large upside. Throughout the year, we have maintained the e-commerce portion of 11%, same as last year. Clearly, with the investments that we have been doing and are doing, we are going to expect to see this increasing towards 2025. To some of the customer stories that I believe it's important for investors to be aware. Number one is just prior to Christmas, we had Coop Sweden again renewing and expanding its five-year agreement with StrongPoint.
Order Picking is a key part of this deal, making sure that we are still maintaining that 100% retention rate with our customers on the Order Picking, 100% retention rate. We're also seeing the fruits of the long integration work between Glovo and Carrefour coming to a production time.
Just after or in the end of Q4, we were finalizing the integrations, and we're now in Q1 starting the real production of the Glovo and Carrefour works that we are doing that we keep on doing in Spain, and that we will be continuing with Glovo, and we believe also with Delivery Hero as those two companies eventually find together after Delivery Hero announced its acquisition of Glovo. Lastly, we find it also extremely interesting that a player like Gordon Delivery in Sweden, a transportation company that also handles the last mile solutions for a number of the big grocery retailers in Sweden and now also beyond, are choosing to use StrongPoint lockers to provide that added flexibility to its customers for pickup of groceries.
A very exciting development there to see not only direct customers of StrongPoint, but also integrators such as Gordon starting to deploy StrongPoint lockers in its offering to customers. Finally, what else have we been up to to make investors clear about the path towards the 2025 financial vision? As many of you hopefully would remember, we announced the AutoStore partnership in Q3, becoming the first ever grocery retail-specific partner for AutoStore. Then now in Q4, we expanded that partnership by joining forces with Hörmann Logistik in Germany. Hörmann with its excellent track record in setting up AutoStore facilities, and in combination with StrongPoint and the grocery experience we have, we could not think of a better date, not marriage, but date than Hörmann.
Also encouraging to see is that immediately after this announcement was made, we have started to work on concrete requests from customers in the Nordics and Baltics to make sure we get the first MFC up in place in our region that we have AutoStore distribution rights for. Very encouraging. With those words, I'd like to hand over to Hilde, please.
Thank you. Thank you, Jacob. As normal, I will go through some of the other key financial figures that we will present. Starting off with what we usually have as our rolling 12 figures. These are, of course, for the full year. 2021 came out with a 4% growth compared to 2020. We will elaborate a bit more about the development of the revenue in the strategy update session following this session. I'll just not go into too deep into that. I will focus more on the EBITDA. We ended at 54 million NOK as EBITDA. This is down 15 million NOK, and we ended at a EBITDA margin of 5.5%. The deviation from 2020 can actually be quite explained by the extraordinary write-down in Spain that we announced in Q2.
Jacob was mentioning the investments we are doing. We have put up a EBITDA bridge starting at 2020 of NOK 69 million. We had a good development of our gross profit in the year, added NOK 32 million. Remember that the write-down in Spain actually hit the gross profit margin mostly. In total, the gross margin increased by 1.6% in total for the year. This can be explained by a different product mix of more of our own solutions distributed in 2021. Our payroll of NOK 14 million can be split in two, explained by 15 new people in the StrongPoint team, and of course, the normal salary adjustments.
When you look from towards the right of this bridge, you see we are investing in research and development, mainly towards e-commerce. We have took a step up on IT security that is needed due to the global focus on cybercrime. We have done our internal share on that. We have been focusing a lot on marketing, and we hope you have seen us in many channels through the year. This brings us down to the NOK 55 that we have announced today for the full year of 2021. The earnings per share, if we are looking only at the continued operation, ended at NOK 0.22 in the quarter itself.
Normally, we do adjust also for the amortization of intangibles, and then we ended at 0.26 NOK per share. For the full year, the same figures are 0.51 NOK and 0.67 NOK adjusted for intangibles. If we include the discontinued operation and then the gain from the divestment of labels, we had a earnings per share of 4 NOK and 32 øre per share. The two divestments that we have done obviously has made us into a very good cash position. We continue to be cash positive and even further, of course, with the labels divestment that was closed in Q3. We have a total gain and profit of discontinued of 168 million NOK that come on top of the 54 million NOK in EBITDA. We have smaller changes in working capital and CapEx.
We have invested in Halodi, so that's the three that you see on the screen. We have repaid debts, we have paid dividends, and we have had a buyback of shares in Q4 to a total of NOK 14 million in share purchase. We ended in a cash position at NOK 174 million. Looking at them, this is normally the net debt, but we are then in a net positive cash position, and we have NOK 16 million in IFRS liabilities, and we have a total of NOK 116 million in positive cash compared to a net interest-bearing debt equity. We have a financial calendar for 2022 coming up at the twenty-eighth of April. We will have the annual general meeting.
In that meeting, we will be proposing a dividend of 0.8 NOK per share. That is explained in the quarter report as well. It follows a trend from the board that we are going to pay and increase the dividend year on year. It might be on the next slide. No, it was not. Sorry. The slide slipped. But it is focused on. This is going to be presented more also later on in the strategy update session. The dividend proposed is 0.8 NOK per share. The financial calendar, 28th of April, general meeting and Q1, we look forward to see all the investors in meetings.
Please, contact me, if you would like to set up separate, sessions, and we are more than happy to do so. Thank you.
Welcome back to this strategy update session with StrongPoint. As always, I would say I will be joined by our CFO, Hilde Horn Gilen, and also today joined by the latest member of the StrongPoint team, Chris Mackie, our new SVP of eCommerce and MD of U.K. For those of you that are new to StrongPoint, I will be going through a little bit the background of what StrongPoint is all about, and then moving into the 2025 strategy and the strategic ambitions that we have set forth. Firstly, StrongPoint. We are a retail technology company focusing in particularly on the grocery retail sector. We're providing a number of eCommerce logistics solutions as well as in-store productivity solutions.
With the home base out of Norway and Sweden with high labor costs, efficiency is and needs to be in the core of everything we do. As a macro trend, we're seeing more and more grocery retailers, even the very big giants, pouring millions, if not billions of kroners and euros into driving more efficient operations and having more or better customer experiences. Exactly this mega trend, and in particular, the growth of eCommerce, is driving what we at StrongPoint call the double opportunity. eCommerce is driving two important opportunities for StrongPoint. Number one, with the growth of eCommerce exceeding far the general grocery retail growth, we're seeing a massive pressure on the margins in the stores. Cost levels are continuing to increase, both in terms of salaries, electricity costs, rental costs, et cetera.
With a portion of the revenue being moved away from the stores onto the e-commerce arena, we're going to see a massive squeeze in the margins. The solutions for the grocery retailers, obviously, is to invest in technology to be more efficient. E-commerce in and of itself is driving growth for grocery retailers. Said in a different way, e-commerce is driving existing players that are already in the e-commerce space to grow even more rapidly than they have been in the past, facing fierce competitors that are pure players. You're also seeing the few players that haven't moved online yet needing to move online. Clearly for both of those e-commerce scenarios, you would need the best technology out there to really succeed in the market. As we'll talk about, StrongPoint provides those.
A bit more background on where StrongPoint is coming from. We are about 400 employees in today six countries, Norway, Sweden, the three Baltic countries, and Spain. We have recently announced our satellite office in the U.K., which is now going to be more than a satellite office with the acquisition announced earlier of Air Link Group. We'll talk more about that later. As of now, we're in six countries and getting one more where we have a proper organization in place. In total, our solutions are in more than 20 countries, and we have about NOK 1 billion revenue as of last year. A bit more about what does StrongPoint offer to its customers. We're producing and delivering a number of in-store solutions and e-commerce solutions.
I think the best way to illustrate this for the new investor is to show a grocery store we basically take the roof off. On the left-hand, or sorry, right-hand side of this picture, you'll be able to see the Electronic Shelf Labels that we are a proud distributor of in all our markets. We have the Self-Checkout solution, where StrongPoint owns both the hardware and the software, and we're the market leader in the Baltics. We have cash management position, which is very strong in our home countries and growing very rapidly in Spain with the pandemic situation now being more under control, so to speak. We have our Vensafe for select and collect solution to dispense tobacco and other high-value items.
We have a partnership with Reflexis, acquired by Zebra on the task and workforce management side to ensure we have very efficient use of staff in store when they are supposed to be in store. Lastly, somewhat further out there in the development phase is our partnership with Halodi Robotics. We'll talk more about some of these solutions later today. Furthermore, when we're leveraging the store to also take advantage of the e-commerce growth in the market, we have with a number of customers already introduced our order picking solution and the range of pickup solutions in the store, either through a grocery locker, through going to staff directly to home deliveries, and even mobile lockers.
We've also invested significantly in making sure we have a Q-commerce or a quick commerce capabilities that our customers can leverage either by themselves or with third-party providers like Glovo that we have a partnership with. Lastly, which we will also talking more about today, is our partnership with AutoStore announced last year, which allows StrongPoint also to offer automated picking facilities at or close to stores in association with the general e-commerce offering. We have a very large base of trusted grocery retailers using our solutions. We have virtually all the Nordic and Baltic grocery retailers using one or several of our solutions, and we are getting an increasing number of retailers using our solutions in other countries, in particular in Spain.
As we're seeing, we have a number of pilots in other countries as well. To give you a little bit of flavor of how important are our solutions, I'd like to pull out Dagens Industri, the Swedish financial newspaper, and one of our customers' use of our e-commerce solutions, Axfood. Axfood is actually making a big point out of reaching break even in e-commerce. This has been one of the big conundrums in the industry. Seeing Axfood going out and saying, "We are achieving break even, and we're doing that with the very important click and collect service with our click and collect lockers playing a major role in that transformation," it makes us very, very proud.
I was actually reached out by investors asking whether we had written the script for the newspaper. I can assure you we did not, but it makes us even more proud. Our solutions are making a dent on the P&Ls of our clients, and nothing else makes us more proud. Since we announced our strategic ambitions, and I'll get back to those in a second, in 2019 we've had a solid growth of 19% on the revenue side. Our e-commerce revenue has doubled, and we're expecting these growth engines to continue also in the future, which we'll talk about in a second. StrongPoint also have a significant recurring revenue base.
About 1/3 of our business we are generating is recurring in nature, whether it's service, support, rentals, or specific software as a service revenue from, in particular, the e-commerce operations we're managing. We have promised to existing investors that we would be sharing additional information about our e-commerce offering and its revenue impact. Clearly, a lot of the revenue that's being generated in e-commerce is project-based with the rollouts of click and collects, but is also being the software revenues based on revenue or number of order picks.
I'm very pleased to share with you today that NOK 30 million of the pure e-commerce offering that we generate or are having is software as a service revenue, with 100% customer retention on the Order Picking solution. Clearly with the future ahead, we're expecting this recurring revenue base to grow significantly in the years and quarters to come. That was shortly about StrongPoint. Now, allow me to take a recap of our 2025 strategy and the strategic ambitions we have set forth, and also to give the crowd a small update on how we are progressing on exactly those ambitions. First and foremost, we have set forth a revenue target in 2025 of NOK 2.5 billion.
We've also said that we are going to achieve an EBITDA margin of between 13% and 15%. How will we achieve this? Well, we're using a T-shaped strategy to explain this. On the one hand side, we're going deep and broad with our solutions in a number of markets that we are present, and that specifically being the markets where we are really present, so Norway, Sweden, the three Baltic countries, and Spain. With U.K. being the latest addition, of course, that will be part of exactly that stem of the T. In addition, we have a overlay. Those are the solutions that we own 100% that are proprietary to StrongPoint, either directly or through exclusivity agreements. That means that our e-commerce logistics solutions is something we wanna bring out also beyond the countries mentioned.
Our Self-Checkout solution is also one of these solutions that we want to bring to other geographies and have proven to do so already. Cash management, likewise. Although we're in Norway and Sweden, which are relatively cashless countries, the majority of transactions in the southern parts of Europe are still cash-based, so still lots of potential there. Lastly, we also have the Halodi humanoid robot to support the future store out there. I'm going to go through a few of the numbers now to talk about how we have been progressing and how we are expecting to be progressing towards the 2025 financial ambition. First and foremost, we have a 19% growth on the revenue base. It's said that history is probably the best indicator of future performance.
That said, we at StrongPoint are investing heavily into the future, and that is going to give us, or it has given us an impact on the EBITDA. We could have stopped doing all the investments we have done and would have increased our EBITDA significantly. Of course, we're not. We're investing for the future. It should be said also in that context, we are expensing all our R&D and all our expenditures on that that otherwise could have been put in the balance sheet. Also to be noted is in 2021 we had a significant negative impact from the Spanish operations. In total, for 2021 the Spanish operations had a negative impact of NOK 37 million on the EBITDA, out of which almost half of that was an extraordinary write-off of the business.
In total, all these investments we are of course expecting to give a much faster and more rapid growth, both on the revenue side as well as on the EBITDA side. To our overview, which those of you who have followed StrongPoint will recognize. The build-up from the 2021 revenue to the 2025 revenue. E-commerce stands out as being very important. We'll talk more about that. M&A being also important, and as we have just showed earlier, in the last 24 hours, with the acquisition of Air Link Group, we are now closing more than half the M&A ambitions. Lastly, we will also be going through the key elements of the in-store solutions we have to get us to the 2025 financial ambitions.
Looking at the year that has passed, I think this is sometimes useful to reflect on what has happened in the last one year. When we stood here about a year ago, we had recently divested the cash security business. Immediately or close after the strategy update session, we were presenting the very, very significant and important strategic deal with Glovo, the Spanish unicorn and delivery platform that was recently announced acquired by Delivery Hero. An acquisition that we see as beneficial for StrongPoint also in the future. We announced a partnership with Halodi Robotics. We'll talk more about that today. Later in the summer, we made the step to become a pure retail technology company by investing successfully and very favorably for the StrongPoint investors, our labels business.
In the early fall, we announced the partnership with AutoStore, the second-largest IPO in Norway since Statoil or now Equinor. We shortly after announced an additional partnership with Hörmann Logistik, the AutoStore partner out of Germany and the DACH region, where we're joining forces to take StrongPoint's grocery experience and combining that with Hörmann's experience with AutoStore, making it really a strong combination. As announced last night, we have also now made the first acquisition of Airlink Systems. We'll talk more about Airlink Systems today. As an introduction, allow me to show you this short video of our new U.K. friends.
ALS Global is a family-owned business formed in 1997. The business started as a cash tube business working in hospitals, working in supermarkets. The business then quickly developed into checkouts, and then we actually took the step into deploying self-scan machines into food retailers. ALS today, we've developed now into delivering complete projects. We are a main contractor. We are electrical contractor. We are a fit out contractor. We continue looking at innovation.
One of the ways that ALS Global are unique is that we like to facilitate relationships between innovative technology providers and potential end clients. We call this the tri-party agreement.
We're looking at market-leading companies that we can partner with and then to be in a position as ALS to roll out solutions for our clients. ALS Global is now from the U.K. through Europe and through into Australia. Our business method has been that the center of excellence and the know-how and the knowledge sits firmly in the U.K. We can actually share that knowledge and experience with territory managers. We understand different places will have different cultures, and different people will be needed. There will be a standard, a structure, and a way of working and set up by the center of excellence, which is in the U.K. As is any business, the main part of a business is its people. ALS Global is all about the quality of the people, and the people make the business. We see it as a family.
Innovation and technology is driving the markets of today. ALS have some really nice products in their portfolio today. We've now got Click & Collect Lockers. We've got ambient, refrigerated, and frozen lockers. We've also got car charging points where we could control what people do via app or reverse vending machines for plastics and bottles, all becoming the latest technology in the U.K. and Europe today. Innovation is what will drive this business in the next 10 years. We can't stand still. Retailers can't stand still. We need to embrace technology. We need to embrace new ways of shopping, and we need to help retailers find those solutions.
I hope that gave you a short and good introduction to Airlink Systems, ALS. We are extremely proud to have been given the opportunity to join forces with ALS. It's going to strengthen our presence in the U.K. and Ireland significantly. With ALS, we are getting a really trusted partner with the grocery retailers in the U.K. We know we have solutions that we'll be adding on to the service, support and installation capabilities that ALS has, both through our click and collect lockers, our self-checkout solutions, our select and collect, or Vensafe as we call it in Norway, solutions as well. We are hoping to continue to piggyback on the excellent relations that ALS has with Tesco, Asda, and the other major grocery retailers in the U.K.
We're very proud, and we're looking forward to joining forces with ALS as soon as we have completed the due diligence and gotten into operations together. I'm going to pause here for a second, talking about our priorities, and we'll go through these in more detail now. We will be continuing to capitalize on the e-commerce opportunities that are out in the market with the growing e-commerce market. We're going to continue to execute on our in-store strategy, the providing the solutions that will help withstand the margin pressure in stores. I will also talk about how we will continue to build on the momentum within M&A.
On the first bit, e-commerce, what better opportunity is it than to offer our newest member of the team, Chris Mackie, welcome to help take you through what are the key trends moving in the e-commerce space. Chris, welcome aboard.
Thank you, Jacob. My name's Chris Mackie, and I recently joined StrongPoint. I've had a long career in grocery commerce and e-commerce in general, and I'm incredibly proud to be joining StrongPoint to represent their solutions to our grocery retailers. I'm gonna talk today about a number of strategic trends that I don't think any grocery retailer can ignore. The pandemic brought the grocery industry many challenges. Thankfully for us, its consumers, it rose to the challenge to keep us supplied with food. 2 years on, and the grocery market has been changed permanently as a result. In many markets, consumers went online. Established grocery retailers and pure players benefited. Just so did smaller entrants to the market who enabled smaller stores to reach new customers. Most responded to the opportunity by doing whatever it took to meet the consumer's demand.
However, this has left a legacy of suboptimal processes and misaligned supply chains, which are both inefficient and unprofitable. There has been a sustained shift in consumer preferences, and retailers are now having to adapt to the new world around them. I live in the U.K., where grocery has been online since the late 1990s. At the time, I was implementing dark stores for a major U.K. grocery retailer. Back then, I'd order a weekly shop days in advance. It took me almost as long as a physical shop to place my order. Today, I place my weekly grocery order in the morning in less than 10 minutes, and it's delivered the same evening. If I've forgotten anything or my plans change, I'll use a quick commerce company to order from my favorite local store.
The world has changed and is evolving at pace, and different markets are at different levels of maturity. Even in less established markets, it often only takes one grocery retailer to move online for others to follow. The entrance of one or more quick commerce players into a market poses both new opportunities as well as new challenges for the incumbent retailers. Today, I want to highlight three trends that can't be ignored by anyone in grocery commerce. The first is a focus on operational efficiency and profitability. The second is that quick commerce is continuing to grow and is now a channel in its own right. The third is sustainability in the last mile. Let's take a closer look at each of these trends in turn.
Everyone who's in online grocery retail knows it can be an expensive business, and this can also be a barrier to entry for some. However, it's a 20-year-old problem, and it can be solved by both technology and operational process design, and this is StrongPoint's opportunity. Even without the acceleration of e-commerce challenging the profitability of grocery retailers, they're facing multiple cost pressures throughout the supply chain. They are facing downward pressures on prices led by the discounters, increased manufacturing and supply chain costs, labor shortages, and inflationary pressures. There are several things, however, that a grocery retailer can do. Whether they are new to e-commerce or an established player, they should optimize and simplify their operations and their business processes. Retailers don't need to offer the same size assortment online as they do in store.
They can and should offer a smaller range and ensure they include a higher proportion of easier to pick higher margin items. They should optimize their stores for home delivery and click and collect, and they should review their pricing process and their picking processes. We believe pick rates of between 200-300 picks an hour can be achieved, which is well above the industry average. Anything less and implementing a modern, hyper-efficient picking solution from StrongPoint will have a quick return on investment and will soon bring cost savings to the retailer. Retailers may want to consider implementing a dark store where the store layout can be optimized for picking rather than customers. We have the expertise and the solutions to deliver this capability. They should consider automation to improve both the capacity of their store and to reduce their reliance on labor.
An automated fulfillment center is many times more efficient than in-store picking. Our automation solutions from AutoStore are market-leading. Another option is to mitigate their costs and their cost exposure to the last mile by either partnering with a quick commerce aggregator or a specialist carrier. If retailers wish to reduce the cost of delivery, they should consider incentivizing click and collect. If CapEx costs are of concern, they may want to consider our innovative new Locker-as-a-Service. If they have their own delivery fleet, they may want to benefit from using our delivery route software to calculate optimal routes for their drivers. If a retailer is considering offering faster services, they could consider a trial with a quick commerce aggregator to learn from their experience, or we can advise the retailer on setting up their own. It's not, however, enough to simply optimize and upgrade their systems and their processes.
They must also incentivize their consumers' behavior. Quick commerce players have many of the same challenges as retailers, but they are magnified partly due to the need for speed, but also because of their phenomenal growth, which has often led to inefficient and costly processes being employed. As they're newer to the market, they are faced with huge customer acquisition and CapEx costs, especially for the aggregators moving into retail. My advice to a quick commerce player is also to mitigate costs. As legislation starts to make it harder to open new MFCs in certain geographies, they may want to consider sharing real estate with retailers. A large proportion of their costs are related to onboarding.
StrongPoint solutions are quick and easy to train and enable retailers to be self-sufficient, both with regards to onboarding their stores and products, but also their employees who can be picking in less than five minutes of training. If implementing a micro-fulfillment center, they should design profitable processes and layouts from the beginning. A good MFC layout should be unrecognizable from a store. Adding automation can also reduce their reliance upon labor. They should explore using lockers for both driver for collections and to provide consumer choice. They may also wish to consider our new Locker-as-a-Service and incentivize consumers to collect. As online profitability grows, even the discounters are now moving into online. In the U.K., Aldi now offers click and collect from hundreds of stores.
In summary, StrongPoint is uniquely placed with its industry expertise and its hyper-efficient technology to produce a profitable solution from the outset or to increase the profitability of any existing operation. Fast delivery or quick commerce as it's now known has been around for a while, but the pandemic has accelerated its growth, and it's now a channel in its own right. In the U.K., the market opportunity is estimated to be GBP 3.3 billion pounds. The most common reasons consumers want fast delivery are for food to go, an evening meal, and a grocery top-up. COVID has encouraged consumers to use these services, and once they start, they don't go back, and that's why it's the new trend. In the U.K., there is activity across the industry from aggregators, quick commerce pure players, and from retailers. All major retailers have a strategy, and many have more than one.
Profitability will only come from scale as you need the volume and customer density. However, customer acquisition costs are initially high, especially for the quick commerce players. However, their marketing costs are reduced as their presence increases due to the word of mouth. They initially focus on the higher margin, quick-to-pick convenience market. However, to fuel continued growth, all verticals and store sizes are being targeted in more mature markets. For a grocery retailer, it's an opportunity to expand into a new channel and to access new customers. But it's also a threat, as quick commerce players are now focusing on increasing basket size and are taking the higher margin sales. Can a retailer afford to ignore how the market is evolving? My advice to a grocery retailer who is thinking of getting into quick commerce is to firstly develop a playbook. They should start by evaluating their market.
For it to be profitable, they should focus on large cities and towns with a high urban population, smaller households, high employment, and low vehicle ownership. The top three European markets are the U.K., the Netherlands, and Germany, which are also target markets for StrongPoint. Retailers should consider partnering with aggregators in less densely populated areas. They should consider launching their own service via dark stores in more densely populated locations with an assortment of between 2,000-3,000 SKUs. It may also be an opportunity for them to invest or acquire as the market today is crowded with new entrants. There is expected to be a lot of merger and acquisition activity over the coming year. The market, however, is moving quickly, and they should regularly reevaluate their decisions. My advice to those already focused on quick commerce is to expand quickly and profitably.
They should establish partnerships that are building what's required to enable retailers to operate dark stores and should buy rather than build to accelerate their strategy. Our solutions have taken 20 years to perfect and can be a short route to achieving their strategy. In summary, StrongPoint has the building blocks for an effective quick commerce strategy. We're talking to many retailers about quick commerce, and we are forming partnerships with quick commerce players who recognize that we have best-of-breed solutions and unrivaled grocery expertise. My last trend is sustainability in the last mile. Grocery retailers and the industry are under pressure to reduce their environmental impact. Many have made bold commitments. Consumers are also becoming more environmentally conscious, and it's becoming more and more important for a retailer to align with their consumers' values.
The last mile is usually the most energy-intensive stage and typically generates more CO2 emissions than all the upstream logistical activities combined. The pandemic inadvertently made the last mile greener through the use of more localized fulfillment, lockers, dark stores, and greener modes of delivery, such as electric vehicles and cycles. My advice to a grocery retailer is that they should consider fulfilling more locally to their consumers by repurposing stores to operate as dark stores. They should change consumer behavior by developing incentives that encourage consumers to select sustainable options. For example, they can highlight which delivery slots are already close to their customers and offer lower rates. They should also encourage click and collect as the greener option.
They should offer greener delivery methods, either by investing in the cleanest, greenest fleets and utilizing route management software for a lower last mile carbon footprint, or they can partner with urban specialist carriers or aggregators who use cleaner modes of transport. They should look for opportunities to share infrastructure. Developers, councils, and carrier companies are installing lockers on commonly used commuter routes, in marketplaces, at train stations, in offices, and in residential areas. We are seeing significant interest from non-grocers to deploy our lockers. Before committing to a location, you should consider testing it out using a mobile locker, and we offer that solution. In summary, StrongPoint has the expertise to advise and the solutions to enable this sustainable strategy to help retailers, carriers, developers, and councils meet their commitments. Thank you for exploring these trends with me.
We have an unrivaled solution set and are well-placed to capitalize on these trends. I will now hand you back to Jacob.
Thank you so much, Chris. It's very good also to hear from an outsider, I still should say three weeks in, that the trends that we have seen being shaping the industry also being confirmed by you. I'm going to continue from where you left off, Chris. Of course, we are expecting, and as we've shared in the past, the e-commerce in grocery to continue growing. Sometimes it's sort of easy to put up a graph showing, in this case, 15% CAGR on the e-commerce growth. To the hesitant people out there, I would just like to show this one graph. This is U.S. data, but still very relevant. This is just gravity at play.
E-commerce in grocery has been and is likely to be at a much lower penetration than many other retail sectors. That said, it is only going to go in one direction, and that one direction is up in terms of penetration, and that penetration will lead to the double opportunity for StrongPoint. When we start looking at the addressable market, it's huge. The number of orders being fulfilled with the solutions that StrongPoint offer is going to grow rapidly.
Whether it's the picking solutions that we today offer with our order picking, either in stores or in dark stores, or it's the Click & Collect Lockers, which offer the environmentally friendly and very easy-to-use pickup solution for customers, which happens to also have a major dent on the operational cost of the retailer, or whether it is in the micro-fulfillment space that we have partnered with AutoStore on. I will touch upon the solutions that StrongPoint have to show you just how world-class our solutions are. First and foremost, it's our order picking solution. We have time and again highlighted the extreme efficiency of our solution, where we're seeing more than 240 items being picked per man-hour being the general rule rather than the exception. Some retailers achieving actually more than that.
Very high precision in terms of quality, picking the right items that need to be in the basket, which you know you would expect, but it is highly important, and it can also be used in combination with the micro-fulfillment centers or in dark stores on a standalone basis, which many of our customers are doing. I'd like to give you all a small touch upon on what our solution offers by showing this short video. I think this is a really great system. Pretty easy to handle and pretty quick to learn. Once you get used to it, then it will automatically flow. You can pick up your speed.
I think the system is great. It helps me a lot. It beeps if I put the wrong products and put it in the wrong bag.
I hope that the short video there gave you a little glimpse into what our picking solution can do in the stores that are being used with our customers. Very quickly also, regarding our Click & Collect Lockers. As you've seen, earlier today, our solutions are being hailed in the press by players like Axfood. We have a very large base of Click & Collect Lockers being installed, and we're constantly evolving the development of the click and collect solution to be even better than its earlier generations. As some examples, you will see on the slide here that we have developed a app-based interface which allows both the customers and the personnel to load or unload the grocery lockers with an app.
We have also integrated with age verification tools which allows for age-restricted items to be handed out. When we're looking at the solutions out in the market, we're seeing there is a rapid growth of the Click & Collect Lockers being installed throughout our core countries and beyond. Similarly, it goes for the picking solutions that we have out in the market with some of the major grocery retailers, either as an in-store type of solution already being used in production or in pilots. Final point on our e-commerce offering is the automated solutions, the micro-fulfillment solutions that we have developed specifically for grocery with AutoStore. We were very proud and still are very proud to be the first AutoStore announced grocery-specific partner.
We have developed, alongside HÖRMANN Intralogistics, a specially made solution for the grocery sector. I can even today say that even though the partnership is relatively new, we are already responding to concrete inquiries from customers in the market. Very exciting there. Again, I'd like to show you a small video, not of what AutoStore is. I presume many of you already would know, but what AutoStore can do for grocery retailers.
Shopping online is redefining the grocery industry. The customer just wants to go online, pick, order, pay, and collect their goods where and when it suits them. Fulfill orders in minutes, not hours. Whether you want order fulfillment in store, in the back room, or in a dark store, AutoStore has been disrupting order fulfillment for two decades. Some of the world's biggest and most famous brands use our technology. Why? Because it just works. AutoStore is the fastest, densest, and most flexible order fulfillment solution per square foot. If you need more speed and capacity, simply add more robots or extend your system. It works in big scale and small scale. After more than 500 installations in all sizes all over the world, an award-winning green mindset.
An unrivaled uptime of nearly 100%. We are ready to redefine your grocery store, free up your aisles, and offer a new and better experience for your in-store and online customers, and offer other profitable services like home delivery or curbside pickup. AutoStore, built for tomorrow today.
I hope that video did show you of what AutoStore can offer to the grocery retailers out there. To take a step back summarizing what do we have to offer to the players out in the market that wants to either embrace e-commerce much more than they have done already, or just start, we have the solution for you. Whether it's a brick-and-mortar player about to start the e-commerce journey, to step up its e-commerce journey, or it is to serve pure players, and of course also the Q-commerce or quick commerce players in the market. I wanted also now to go to the second pillar, the in-store productivity or efficiency solutions that StrongPoint offer. We have, at StrongPoint, one of the best, if not the best, Self-Checkout solution in the market. We have a very big dominance in the Baltics.
We've seen our solution go out to Poland through our partner, Partner Tech, and we're seeing more and more of the solutions coming through to our established markets, Spain being one of those markets, and I hope many more in the not too distant future. We're doing that by using and leveraging the in-house technology of StrongPoint and also combining that with the best of third-party solutions that are out there. I in particular like to mention our partnership with Agilysys in this respect. I want to move on to something which sounds a bit more out in the future and maybe science fiction, and that is Halodi Robotics.
I cannot think of a better way to introduce the Halodi Robotics solution than to have the Halodi robot to join us here on stage today as well. Hello, Mr. Robot. How are you? Good to have you with me here today. Thank you. Would you like to say hi to the crowd as well? There you go. Happy as always, I can tell. This might seem like science fiction. Yes, it still is a few years out in time until we actually see these robots being industrialized and a regular sight in the regular grocery stores, but it is happening.
We are on a journey with Norwegian robotic company Halodi Robotics in cooperation with some of the leading grocery retailers to develop the use cases that will be solved using the Halodi Robotics. In 2023 too, we will be doing this in a lab environment, 2023 still at the experimental phase, and in 2024 we're hoping to see the first robots starting to make their way out in the grocery stores. To get some help here, not only with you, my friend, but to show you as investors what the Halodi Robotics we're hoping to see them do in the future, we're showing this short video.
Around one-third of grocery store staff time is typically spent on restocking shelves and keeping the store tidy. Along with everything else, these routine jobs need doing. StrongPoint is a retail technology company built on the belief that technology is key to boosting in-store efficiency and productivity. Our goal is to pioneer and enhance the modern store experience. After successfully launching several retail innovations, StrongPoint has now partnered with Halodi Robotics and their humanoid retail robot to assist staff with mundane tasks, such as restocking and inventory, freeing up human staff to take care of customers. These are only a couple of areas where the robot could potentially help and support staff. Halodi builds robots from the ground up for safety and human interaction. Working alongside her human colleagues, she's quiet and no stronger than required. Not long ago, smartphones, electric cars, and drones were all considered science fiction.
Soon, humanoid robots will become a part of the grocery store landscape, the same as forklifts, trolleys, and laser scanners are today. We believe awesome shopping experiences come down to exceptional service by real people, motivated people who can spend more of their time helping customers. When the store shuts and the staff leaves for the day, our grocery store helper continues working, even in the dark. StrongPoint, retail technology for a smarter and better life.
Okay, from high tech and almost science fiction videos to very down-to-earth business, cash management. Cash management and CashGuard still is a important part of the offering StrongPoint offers to retailers, maybe in particular in the southern parts of Europe and other places like South Africa. We are just also astonished by the fact that cash is a very resilient payment method also in the Scandinavian countries. I think that's been proven as of last year, also somewhat to our surprise, that continuation of cash management solutions being used in grocery stores. We recognize that even with a low single digit number of transactions being handled with cash, that cash still needs to be both handled and stored appropriately.
With the pandemic now, hopefully at its end, we're also seeing the cash transactions in terms of percentage starting to increase again from low 40% penetration in Spain, which was half of what it was pre-pandemic. It's now back up again far beyond 50%. Cash management solutions, in particular in Spain and the other regions, still going to be a nice cash cow for StrongPoint. Then over to some both happy news for StrongPoint and ALS, but also in more general terms, mergers and acquisitions. Hilde, please.
Thank you, Jacob, and very nice to meet Mr. Halodi Robotics. Really enjoyed that. I will be talking a bit about mergers and acquisitions, and obviously some of these slides, some of you have seen before, but it's important for us to repeat the message for you all. We are continuously evaluating mergers and acquisition candidates as part of our 2025 strategy, and we have evaluated quite a few targets through the past years. We have established a thorough routine in StrongPoint, where we are using both internal and external resources to help us identify the best targets. As we have said before, we are looking for targets within the three areas, the geographic expansion area, the technology additions to StrongPoint, and of course, strengthening our core markets that we have talked about before.
Why haven't we bought any companies so far, despite the message yesterday? There are multiple reasons for this, and price and strategic fit are the two dominating reasons. What seems to be a good candidate on the paper does not necessarily be that when we are looking closer into the target. That has nothing to do with the target or the identification process. It's more that it's not a perfect match. Through the years, we have evaluated over 60 companies, and when I say evaluated, we are going further than just identifying the target. We have learned a lot through these years about the market, the players, and actually what we are looking for.
With the announcement yesterday, the Airlink Systems in the U.K., it really proves that when we are looking and we know what we are looking for, we can find the right targets. As Jacob mentioned, the Airlink Systems are a company that matches several of our key identification areas. They are established in the U.K. They have more than 95% grocery customers. They have a fantastic customer relationship, and they actually know quite a few of our solutions, which we find as a very good fit for StrongPoint. We really look forward to building on the Airlink established business in the years to come. I will talk just a bit more about Airlink in just a second. Through 2020 and 2021, we have also divested the labels and cash security business areas.
We have now established ourself as a retail technology company, which eases the way of looking at M&A candidates. The good situation we have on the cash position and strengthening balance sheet, of course, enables us to do more M&A activities going forward. We promise, and we will continue to look for good targets and candidates as we move along further down the 2025 path. A little bit more information about the Airlink Systems acquisition that we just announced. We are buying 100% of the shares in Airlink Systems in the U.K. and their sister company in Ireland. Airlink has over years had a quite stable and good revenue position of around GBP 20 million.
If 2021 were to be the one, the revenue position going forward, we would add some NOK 240 million revenue on top of StrongPoint's current revenue base. Airlink also provided 10% EBITDA last year, which we find to be very relevant. It's a profitable company and has been so for many years. We are not revealing the enterprise value, but we believe that it will be evaluated as fair. When we are looking at transactions in the service and installation market in the U.K. The purchase price will be paid as a split between cash and shares in StrongPoint, securing continued ownership and collaboration with the current owners. We will come out with much more information when due time comes, and we can share that towards the end of the process.
We have already identified our team to help us out as of the legal and financial due diligence, and we hope to close the deal in good time before the exclusivity period ends at the end of April this year. We really look forward to moving the process ahead towards the final negotiated agreement. I will then finalize with a slide on the dividend. As in previous years, the board continues to have an ambition to pay and increase dividend year on year in StrongPoint. The board will propose a dividend of 0.8 NOK per share to be voted for at the general meeting at the end of April. The positive cash position that StrongPoint currently has is going to be used for the growth that Jacob has explained more about earlier, and also further M&As going forward.
Jacob, can I welcome you up to the stage for the final outlook and priorities before we end the session with some Q&A?
Thank you, Hilde. Well, finally, to round things off, where are we going now towards 2025? We started with NOK 1 billion revenue in 2021. We're going to grow that to NOK 2.5 billion as a combination of organic growth and inorganic growth, as we just showed. We are growing our e-commerce share. We used to be 5% back in 2019. Now we're at 11%, and we're going to grow that increasingly to 25% or a quarter of the business in 2025. Lastly, as we've shown, the current EBITDA margin is a result of massive investments that we are doing in the areas which will bring us to the NOK 2.5 billion turnover. With that, we'd like to open for Q&A.
Q&A.
Welcome back. Now it's time for Q&A. Dominic, you have a microphone. You can help ask a few of the questions that have been coming in.
Yeah, we have a few questions. First question, how many new shares will be issued in connection with the acquisition?
I can answer that. Of course, the whole transaction is dependent on financial and legal due diligence and final negotiation of the share purchase agreement. We are expecting that the share part of the transaction will be in the lower range, single digit, and that we also have some part shares in treasury already. The dilution should be in the lower range of percentages.
You might have mentioned it, but did you do the math on the two CashGuard orders from NorgesGruppen and Bullion in Q4? How should we think about delivery on these two orders in 2022?
Okay. First of all, yes, we've had, as the rest of the world, component issues or lack of components. In Q4, we had a very much lower delivery on CashGuard orders that we had than we were expecting. I would say a very, very small percentage of those orders have actually been delivered, and we're expecting the deliveries to happen throughout 2022. It's still challenging with regards to components, but we're doing whatever we can to attract those. Very little deliveries in Q4, much more to be in 2022. I'm sorry.
Next question, why does a write-down affect EBITDA?
The write-down in Spain we are talking about was related to inventory. When you do adjustments to inventory and write-downs, it will be part of our COGS, cost of goods sold. That is why it's above the EBITDA line. We do not use the extraordinary in StrongPoint, even though we are talking about it as extraordinary, which it was. We are booking it above the EBITDA.
Next question, what are the next steps with Glovo?
The Glovo deal is now in production with Carrefour. There are just two things to say about Glovo. One is, now is the time to start expanding the sort of number of stores and partners of Glovo being affiliated with the quick commerce offering they have. That's number one. Number two is, of course, Glovo is announced acquired by Delivery Hero. That acquisition is pending approvals. I think a natural step for StrongPoint will also be to see how we could also capitalize on exactly that deal in the context of us serving Glovo.
Next question, you target 13%-15% EBITDA margin, materially higher than your current margin. What do you say to those that argue this margin looks challenging?
Okay. There are two things about that. Number one is, in this quarter and in the quarters that I've been in 2021, we've been doing significant investments, and all these investments were expensive, so it's hitting the EBITDA immediately. We're not putting that into the balance sheet. That is all the programming to be done on the third-generation picking solution for Glovo, for instance. It's the next-generation click-and-collect lockers that we're continuously evolving. It's the AutoStore and MFC concept we're building. It is the Halodi Robotics solution that we're exploring. You know, there's a number of investments we're doing today, but we are expensing that rather than putting it in a balance sheet. That sort of keeps the EBITDA artificially low.
In addition to that, we're also expecting, as you will see from the 2025 buildup, a significant part of the growth coming from e-commerce. We know that within e-commerce, whether it's our SaaS-based order picking solution, AutoStore solutions with our MFC concept or our click-and-collect lockers and other solutions, we have a higher profit margin than we would have in most other solutions that are kept in store.
Final question: What are your expectations on AutoStore?
Well, first of all, we wouldn't have engaged with AutoStore unless we believe there is a significant potential, and there is significant potential. As I said earlier today, the AutoStore partnership along with the Hörmann partnership, we have to make sure we have a proper implementation partner right now in place, is starting to bear fruits in the sense that we have been receiving a number of inquiries from customers, and we have started working on proposals for delivering such facilities. There's a long way to sort of a sign or a signature, but we started working on that, and that keeps us very optimistic about the partnership.
That was the final question.
If that was the final question, then, I think we can go back to work.
Yes
in other ways. Thank you everybody for listening, and have a great day.
Thank you.