Welcome everybody to this strategy update session by StrongPoint. For those of you that do not know StrongPoint very well, I will present StrongPoint in one sentence. We are a retail technology company focused on serving the resilient and stable grocery market. In today's session, we will go through a very exciting agenda, and to help me with this agenda, I have Hilde Horn Gilen, our CFO, as always. In addition, we will have members of my executive management team, in addition to the Pricer CEO, Magnus Larsson. So hang on. But first, what is StrongPoint today? StrongPoint is a company with 500 people, 500 dedicated men and women across eight focused countries. We delivered a revenue of about NOK 1.4 billion last year, so 2022. Secondly, we are, as I said, focusing very much so on the resilient and stable grocery sector.
That is very important for us to underline in today's environment. More than 80% of our revenue stems from grocery retail customers across Europe and North America. Lastly, we have been growing our retail business by 67% the last three years, taking advantage of the ever more demand from our retail customers, grocery retail customer days for technology, but also technologies that help achieve the sustainability targets that all businesses into society today and grocery retailers in particular need to adhere to. So this is StrongPoint today. What about StrongPoint that used to be? I am saying this because in 2020, we announced the strategic ambition for 2025. Going back a couple of years in time to February 2020, we were a quite different company than what we are today. I would like to illustrate that by a few examples.
Firstly, we used to be a company with three business areas. Not only retail technology, but also cash security and label production, so physical label production. We used to do that across 16 countries, including Malaysia and Russia. Today, we are a razor-sharp focused company within retail technology in eight countries or focused countries. So we are a lot more focused today than we were in 2020. Sorry. Secondly, we were focusing principally on selling hardware with some service agreements. Today, we are selling solutions to grocery retailers with a big opportunity for recurring revenue and for professional services. Thirdly, we were looking at an organization that had not renewed itself in many, many years. Today, we have a leadership team that I am very, very proud of.
Recruited some of the top-notch executives out there, and we have put in place training programs for our staff, whether that is in sales or in service or support. An organization enabling itself to renew itself, sorry, to renew itself and be proofed for the future. Another example is that we were serving in 2020, the Scandinavian and Baltic grocery retail clients that were to serve, having pretty much a 100% penetration with these customers. That is something to be super proud of. But on top of that, we have taken a major step in not only serving the best grocery retailers in the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, but really into the Premier League, really. Serving the best, biggest grocers in the U.K., in Spain, and also in other parts of the world.
Lastly, as an example, Hilde and myself were often confronted by investors about the risk profile of serving three, four customers in three countries, really, or three regions. Today, we are serving the major bulk of grocery retailers and retailers in general across a wide geography like the eight countries that we represent do. So we have a much more balanced portfolio in terms of geography, and we have a much more balanced portfolio in terms of solutions that we offer to our customers. With that backdrop, having taken a long, long, or gone a long, long journey from 2020 till today, February 2023, what does that mean going forward? Well, today we are operating at a run- rate, a pro forma, you can say, of the ALS business in U.K. that was included into StrongPoint in 2022.
We are operating at a run- rate of NOK 1.5 billion turnover. We are also operating at just south of 6% EBITDA for the full- year. As we will talk about today, how are we going to achieve the ambitions that we set forth for 2025, the ambitions of reaching NOK 2.5 billion turnover and 13%-15% EBITDA? Let me just conclude this part of the session by saying we feel very confident about achieving these financial ambitions. So hang on and we will explain how this will be happening. The first point we need to understand when talking about how to achieve our ambitions is what's happening in the market. What are the mega trends driving the opportunities for our customers, and as such, for us as StrongPoint? We have often talked about the double opportunity for StrongPoint, and that double opportunity still holds true.
Number one, we are seeing in the market across the board that there is a massive shortage of labor. That massive shortage of labor will continue to lead to technology needs, where we will be reducing the labor in the business. Labor today constitutes the, by far, biggest cost item apart from COGS when you look in a grocery store. So being able to reduce the labor dependency, reduce the labor cost, is going to make a major difference to the grocers. Secondly, discounters are growing. In today's markets, you can say discounters are growing at a massive rate. In Norway, we are used to the discounters being the major part of grocery business. That has not been the case elsewhere, but we are seeing that happening. Aldi just took the position of the fourth-largest grocery retailer in the U.K. as an example.
Again, our customers, whether that's supermarkets or grocers in discount sector, need to continue working on how to reduce the operating expenses, and we have the solutions for that. Thirdly, the ever-increasing customer demands to make the shopping experience faster, simpler, more efficient, and certainly, we do have the solutions there. So when you look at the double opportunity that is arising for StrongPoint, that is really the challenges of grocers that need to be tackled, whether it's in-store or in e-commerce. We need to be more efficient, and our customers will have to undertake a massive amount of actions to both capture these opportunities and withstand the challenges that arise from this. But technology will be a major part of solving that and or those challenges, and that is what StrongPoint do.
With that, let me introduce to you some of the solutions that StrongPoint offer to actually capture these opportunities. Taking the roof off the grocery store, what are we looking at here? I won't be going through all the solutions we have, but rather try to link some of those solutions to some of the trends we just saw. Starting with the labor shortage. Electronic Shelf Labels is a brilliant way of getting rid of the experience of seeing grocery staff walking around the store with big stacks of paper tags that needs to be changed in order to change the prices. Clearly, with an inflationary regime like we have today, those changes will not diminish. They will actually accelerate.
The need to introduce something like Electronic Shelf Labels to get rid of that cumbersome manual process that we haven't seen in Norwegian grocery stores in many, many years, or Swedish for that matter, is going to be very important. Secondly, if you look at the online world, we have developed the world's most efficient picking solution. Actually, if there was a Guinness World Records for picking solutions, we would be in it. StrongPoint would be in that. So our solution is so efficient, it will massively reduce the amount of people needed to perform exactly the same job. We also talked about how discounters are going. Funny enough, if you go into a Rema 1000, a Kiwi, or a Coop Extra in Norway, you will most certainly see a CashGuard. You will most certainly see a Vensafe solution.
A Vensafe solution to protect high-value items from theft. So we're seeing also cash management and tobacco purchases, the challenges with handling that being tackled through technologies. We're seeing that in Norway, and most certainly, we will be seeing that elsewhere as well. Lastly, with regards to customer behaviors and customer demands to grocers increasing, let me bring the attention to our Self-Checkout solution. Firstly, the Self-Checkout solutions you do see out in a Norwegian market or the Swedish market, those are not StrongPoint solutions. Why do I emphasize that? Well, I think a lot of you, including myself, would have been really annoyed or are being really annoyed when you go to the grocery store, to the Self-Checkout, and you purchase a bag of kiwis.
If you're going to purchase a bag of kiwis today, you have to start look up the kiwis on the screen, whereas with a StrongPoint solution, where we have integrated our Self-Checkout with an item detection tool that automatically identifies the items you have on scale. In this case, automatically identifying you have kiwis on the scale and the transaction goes through. Much more efficient and exactly what customers of today would expect from a solution like Self-Checkout. I could go on about all the solutions that StrongPoint have, but I'm going to rest there with the solutions. I do want to share with you a little bit of what is other parts of the ingredients to the secret sauce of StrongPoint. Because the secret sauce of StrongPoint is achieving operational leverage. Yes, in the eight countries we are at, but also by serving the entire value chain.
Because we are not only selling products or solutions, we are attaching professional services to that. Installation, service, support, aftermarket. With all of these ingredients together, we are achieving not only stickiness with customers, long-term relationship with customers, but also a superior return on investments for customers and StrongPoint. With this section, let's talk a little bit about how can we now take the technology solutions that we have grown accustomed to in Norway, in Sweden, in the Baltics, for that matter. How can we take these Scandinavian solutions out to the rest of Europe and the world? To help us here, we have made some references to these guys, knowing me and knowing you. Aha. That's not me trying to make an entrance on Norwegians Got Talent, but rather to make the parallel to one of the greatest exports that we have had in Sweden with ABBA.
Exporting the amazing sounds of ABBA to the world. That's really what we are trying to achieve here with the StrongPoint solutions. To help me out, please come on stage, Benny Andersson , AKA Magnus Rosén, our Managing Director in Sweden. Magnus, please come up.
Thank you, Jacob. Thank you. As Jacob said, I am Magnus Rosén. I am the former Business Director Online at ICA being the leading grocery retailer in Sweden. In that role, I have known StrongPoint for a long time, and I can testify to the reputation of being a trustworthy partner and a strong innovator in the retail space. Here in Scandinavia, we have a long tradition of embracing and incorporating innovations into grocery retail. For example, Jacob mentioned that ESLs, we have the highest ESL penetration in the world. We have the highest efficiencies in in-store picking, we could be a part of the Guinness World Records book. We have the largest Vensafe market in the world. About 50% of all online grocery orders are click- and- collect.
We have the lowest volume of cash in society, but still, we have the highest penetration of cash management solution, CashGuard, across the countries and across the retailers. We have the best conditions for Self-Checkouts mainly due to the fact that we have a high trust level in society, and we have a low level of fraudulent behavior, and we have also a quite widespread usage of self-service solutions across the society. Last but not least, we are also the birthplace of the world-leading warehouse automation solution from AutoStore. You might wonder, why is that? Well, of course, there are many reasons for it, but I think that the main reason is cost of labor. Cost of labor in the Scandinavian markets have historically been much, much higher than in the rest of Europe. There is no such thing as low-cost labor in Scandinavia.
In a low margin, high turnover, and extremely labor-intensive industry, such as grocery retail, even the tiniest increase in labor cost will seriously hurt or even kill your profitability, and much more so here than in other countries. This has meant that we have had far bigger incentives to find efficiency savings, and as cost of technology has come down, it makes financial sense to make these investments in this part of the world in cost efficiency and efficiency-saving solutions. This also means that demands from our customers in terms of efficiency savings is much higher than compared to other markets. For example, as the previous business director of online, we managed at ICA to reach the world's highest efficiency in in-store picking of online grocery orders. That was mainly due to technologies and solutions from StrongPoint, as well as the collaboration and cooperation with StrongPoint.
At StrongPoint, we are obsessed. We are obsessed with efficiency, we are obsessed in helping clients like ICA becoming world-leading. We are obsessed not only with delivering super-efficient solutions, but we want to deliver ultra-efficient solutions. This is why we in StrongPoint have a great opportunity to export our solutions and technology to other retailers across Europe, and especially so to the U.K.. The U.K. has experienced quite a lot of turmoil the last few years, and I am handing back to you, Jacob, to explain a bit more about U.K..
Okay, thank you so much. I should say Benny, but Magnus, sorry for that.
Thank you.
I'll take this one if I may. You're right. Exporting the solutions that StrongPoint has into Europe and now U.K. in particular is really the reason why we pursued the acquisition of ALS . ALS has a fantastic reputation with grocers in the U.K. and Irish markets, but it's also a great platform to be able to bring new solutions to the market. ESL or Electronic Shelf Labels is still a very rare sight in the U.K.. We're starting to see the market move. We are also seeing that solutions like the Vensafe is seeing great opportunities in the U.K. market. Order Picking, not least. The U.K. has been a market where, or is the market in Europe with the highest penetration in e-commerce. Yet the solutions that are being used for picking, to a large extent, is from a different century.
Actually, from the late 1990s, these solutions were developed.
From the observations that we have been able to do in the market, our solution for in-store picking is absolutely superior. Another feature about the U.K. grocery market online has been a history of unprofitability, where traditionally grocers were offering same- store prices online whilst also offering for free home deliveries. That is certainly not a viable business model. I'd say that the grocery locker penetration that we've seen in Sweden, the grocery locker adoption by customers is something that would and should be really, really attractive also for British grocery clients of ours. Lastly, just because the sheer size of the market is what it is, there are also certainly customers of ours today that should be ripe for automated solutions that we've been lucky and skillful enough to get through the AutoStore partnership.
We have great hopes for what we can achieve in U.K. and Ireland, and I would almost be disappointed if we don't get some of these solutions through in 2023, having spent the latter half of 2022 integrating the Air Link Group operations into StrongPoint and preparing the organization to start selling, installing, and servicing these solutions. Great hopes for that. I'd like to thank you so much, Magnus, for helping us with what we see in Sweden.
Thank you.
I also wanted to just say that this is not something new, exporting technologies to other parts from Scandinavia. We have two great examples of that. One being TOMRA, the recycling company, where clearly the recyclers that TOMRA represents is visible everywhere in, again, in the Nordic market, and increasingly so, and much more so than any StrongPoint solution today in the rest of the world. A more near-term example is also AutoStore, the great company from Nedre Vats, taking the world by storm with its automated storage and retrieval solution that we also represent. This has happened before, and we aspire to be like these companies, taking the Scandinavian solutions out in the market. Moving on then to, let's say, another ABBA analogy.
When I saw our latest product development, I said, Mamma mia, or, Mamma mia, here we go again. Let me introduce to you Lorena Gómez, our Managing Director of Spain, to take us through some of the exciting things that is happening in the Spanish market and where StrongPoint solutions are very much ripe for that market. Lorena, please.
Thank you very much, Jacob. Well, although in Norway we would say cash is dead, in many other countries at the Eurozone, almost 60% of transactions were made in cash during 2022. In my country, in Spain, we are at 66% today. In fact, I am very thrilled to be here in Norway, where I have been able to see CashGuard solution almost everywhere. Like Mark Twain said, "The rumor of my death is greatly exaggerated." 66% of cash transactions in Spain today means we are like Norway at the latest '90s, meaning that for grocery retail, there will be plenty of opportunities in the 20+ year time to come. This brings me to introduce our latest product innovation, tailor-made for grocery retail, our new CashGuard solution.
In many grocery retailers in continental Europe, and in particular in Spain, cash is manually removed from the till and sent to the back office, where the money is manually sorted and stays on waits for the cash-in-transit collection. This new product development started last year with a very big grocery retailer in Iberia, where they have a very specific need. They wanted a real closed cycle solution where the money came from customer hands directly to the CIT company. We started together this development, and the result is a solution that, first of all, fasten checkout queues by reducing the number of seconds per cash transaction. Secondly, enables that the money goes directly to the bank account, already the next day, by just reading the money from the back-office machine.
It improves a lot the security for all the employees. Finally, reduce drastically the cost of the CIT companies by reducing the number of stops in each store, simplifying their manual processes, and by recycling the cash handling in store. This was my part, Jacob. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Lorena. Normally, we don't present products at that early stage where the product is not yet in the market. Why are we doing that in this case? We're doing that in this case because this opportunity is so vast, has a potential which is great, really, not only for the Iberian customer, but also for customers beyond this one customer. As you will see in the Q4 reports, this is a project which has been ongoing for a year, impacting our cash flow for the last year by NOK 14 million. We're expecting this solution to be out in the first pilot store in the second half of 2023. Again, it's a vast opportunity that we are really excited about sharing with you all here today.
I wanted to end off this part of the presentation by talking about what opportunities lies ahead for StrongPoint, or what are the white space opportunities for us. If you, on the one hand side, look at the eight countries that we are represented in, the traditional StrongPoint countries, Norway, Sweden, and the three Baltic countries, we've had pretty close to 100% penetration amongst the grocery retailers. That does not mean, however, that there are not opportunities there. We have a lot of opportunities. As in the case of Norway, we are still to see any of the StrongPoint solutions regarding Self-Checkout out in the market. We have still to see most of the e-commerce solutions being out in the market. Even though we have lots of Vensafe solutions in the Norwegian market, the opportunity is still vast. Those are the, call it traditional StrongPoint countries.
Spain, that we just went through, is a massively bigger market than the Norwegian, Swedish, or Baltic market. The penetration amongst grocery retailers is tiny compared to what they should be, or compared to the Nordic and Baltic customers. It almost goes without saying that there are lots of opportunities to introduce new solutions to the Spanish market. Lastly, with regards to the U.K. market, the most advanced grocery retail market in Europe, and at a size which is just immense. Just to put it a bit into perspective when we talk about opportunities, Electronic Shelf Labels in the U.K. is probably where Norway and Sweden were some 10, maybe even actually closer to 15 years ago. That market is starting to move now. The e-commerce market in U.K. is massive. U.K. has the highest penetration of grocery online.
Actually, the entire online market for groceries in U.K. is bigger than the entire market of groceries in Norway alone. This is a massive market. So rather than necessarily introducing products and solutions to grow with the market, the big opportunity in the U.K. is penetrating the market, the big market, with our solutions, whether that is Order Picking solution for in-store picking, our grocery lockers, or the AutoStore solution to enable automated picking. Then, that's a great segue from U.K. into our super troopers, Pricer and AutoStore. Because when StrongPoint concluded and announced its acquisition of ALS, one of the very first things that happened, and which made us really proud, was to see that not only does StrongPoint believe in the opportunity of bringing new Scandinavian technology solutions to the U.K. and Irish market, but so did our esteemed partners, Pricer and AutoStore.
To start with Pricer, what happened? Well, Pricer and StrongPoint have a long, long relationship that stems some 20 years back in time. Today, we are one of the top partners of Pricer, and we have a deepened relationship, deeper than, I'd say, ever. We are in continuous discussions and meetings with Pricer to provide feedback from the market to the product development that is happening at Pricer. With the acquisition of ALS, we were granted the distribution rights for Pricer in U.K., in Ireland, and also a more expanded partnership in Spain. Magnus Larsson, the CEO of Pricer, is not with us here today in studio, but he has recorded a short video to explain more what the partnership between StrongPoint and Pricer means.
Hello, everybody. My name is Magnus Larsson, and I'm the CEO of Pricer. I'm extremely happy to be with you guys today. I would have preferred to be with you in person, of course, but this will actually have to do for now. I would like to start by saying a big thank you for a fantastic 2022. I think that over the years, we've had a lot of great cooperation, and I think this year we have actually worked closer and we've managed to strengthen what we do together in many different ways. I think this was now in November, we were actually announcing that we are actually taking our partnership one step further, deeper, which means that me and Jacob and the management team are working on a regular basis. We are discussing how to develop business jointly.
I also know that in the different markets that you are working with my colleagues to actually win more and do a lot of cool things together. From a business point of view, I was, of course, really happy for the Maxbo announcement. Great. I think there is much more to come as well. Addressing the market, we have been extremely successful in the Nordic market over the last years, in the Baltic market. Now we have U.K. and Ireland as part of the StrongPoint group, and we have a distribution agreement with Pricer, just the same as for Spain. Of course, I hope that we can take the good collaboration that we have had and all the best practices that we have from the Nordic countries and actually share it with yourselves in these markets.
Our key account managers, [Steve] and Manolo, they are up to date. I know they have been working on go-to market plans together with yourselves. I expect this close cooperation and the success that we have had in Nordics to continue also in your markets. It is critical for my growth and it is critical for your growth. I believe that jointly, and now I have spoken enough, so now this is the concluding part. I think that what we do jointly is that we bring the retailer, the customers, the chains, the individual store owner, the guys that have a number of stores, we bring something that the other guys cannot. Jointly, we give them the opportunity to get efficiency in the store, to lower their operational costs.
We also help them to make sure that they get more products in the shopper basket, that they get a higher value of the shopper. We make sure that we can actually, with the help of computer vision, with the help of all the technologies that you have, that we actually fill the shelves when they are empty. We make sure they get what they want. There is no surprises when they come to the store. With the signage package and the integration with ECR, we will also be able to, in a different way, addressing the CPG markets, the consumer packaged goods like Unilever, Coca-Cola. How can we help the retailer to communicate with those guys, make sure they can do advertisement campaigns and maybe even sell it in a different way?
All of that, I think, is something we do jointly and we can do it extremely well and add a definite value to the shopper. Having said all this, thank you very much. I hope that you have a fantastic day, and I look forward to, of course, fantastic sales. Thank you very much.
That was Magnus Larsson, the CEO of Pricer. Thank you so much. Now on to our next esteemed partner, AutoStore. We have had the privilege of being a distributor of AutoStore since 2021. In 2022, we started selling actual solutions for AutoStore. I believe that with both the actual sales that we did to ColliCare and to DLVRY, along with the very strong e-commerce portfolio that StrongPoint represents, AutoStore was also very excited to hear about our acquisition, making or paving the way for us into the U.K. and our market. With that, very quickly after the acquisition, we were granted also the distribution rights for AutoStore in U.K. and in Ireland. I believe that with AutoStore believing in StrongPoint in this manner is because they also see the product market fit that these solutions represent in the British market.
I would like also to remind you all or present to any new listeners the world news that we announced late last year, and that is the very first three-zoned AutoStore grid from having ambient only to ambient, chilled, and frozen. StrongPoint is the first distributor to introduce this new product line of AutoStore into the market. The product is exciting, clearly, because you don't need to separate between the different kinds of temperature zones, but it's also highly relevant and exciting from a cost-saving and environmental impact. We're estimating some 30%- 40% energy savings when introducing this solution.
Needless to say, we have a very exciting customer, we have a very exciting AutoStore, and not least, we have a very exciting executive management team ready to go out and get the AutoStore three-temperature zone solution out in the market, not only in the U.K. but also elsewhere. Enough about solutions. It's time for financial overview and money. How are we now getting to the ambitions that we set forth some years ago? The ambitions of NOK 2.5 billion turnover and 13%-15% EBITDA. Well, let's take a short look at what we have achieved to date. Looking at the revenue, we have achieved an 81% growth or 22% CAGR from 2019 till to date, including 2022, when including the entire ALS full- year, so pro forma ALS.
Going from just north of NOK 800 million turnover in retail technology to close to NOK 1.5 billion this year. Looking forward to 2025, we're really looking at maintaining the similar or same kind of pace in terms of revenue growth. Is that going to be easy? No, certainly not, and maybe not in particular in today's uncertain environment. But serving the resilient, the stable grocery retail sector, I feel more confident than ever that we will be achieving this ambition that we set forth. That is the revenue ambition, maintaining the same pace that we have up until now. What about the profitability or the EBITDA? I should say very quickly, we are costing all our expenses directly. Well, if you look at the profitability that we are achieving in our in-store solutions, that is about 10%- 11% EBITDA margins.
We have communicated that range or that EBITDA margin in a number of quarters, and that seems to stay pretty much at that level, 10% - 11% EBITDA in the in-store solutions that we offer. Why are we not, or why are we achieving today, in 2022, 5.5%? There are two main reasons for that. The first is the e-commerce investments that we have and are doing, the deliberate e-commerce investment that we're doing. We believe in the long-term trajectory of e-commerce, but we also believe in the probability of success with our solutions, in particular in the U.K. markets, which are so highly penetrated already. The e-commerce investments in 2022 were dragging down our EBITDA overall. Secondly, Spain, although lots of prospecting opportunities taking place, 2022 was still a year where we had to transform the business or continue transforming the business.
We were going from, honestly, a terrible 2021 into a 2022, where we very systematically were looking at improving profitability. At the beginning of the year, we promised the market that we would be reaching break-even run- rate as we were exiting 2022. I am very pleased to say that we did not only achieve that, but in Q4, we actually also achieved a profit in Spain. But for the full- year, Spain was dragging down the EBITDA, not contributing, but contrary to that, dragging down the EBITDA figure. So getting us to 5.5%. With that backdrop, how are we going to get to 13%-15%? Here is the reason. First of all, if we just for a second assume that we will be achieving the same kind of operational leverage and profitability in the in-store solutions in our traditional markets.
Also in 2025, we are looking at 10%-11% EBITDA margin. That might actually be conservative. Clearly, we are working to both looking at how we are introducing more value-creating prices, but also at how do we operate across the geographies we are currently present to be even more efficient and achieving more operational leverage. But let us for a second just assume we are achieving the same level of profitability in in-store solutions that we have historically, 10%-11%. Then there are two things that have been dragging down our EBITDA margin that will be contributors. One is e-commerce.
Again, I would like to stress that the way that we are getting e-commerce to contribute to our EBITDA is not necessarily by growing so much with the market that currently is a bit at a stall, but rather to be succeeding in the markets and with the customers that have a high e-commerce penetration. The U.K. being a very important market in that respect. With our Order Picking solution for stores, with our lockers, and with automated picking through AutoStore solutions. So that is making e-commerce contribute positively to the EBITDA margin. Secondly, it is Spain, and let us just call it special projects that Lorena was explaining. The new CashGuard solution that we are offering has such a great value proposition for this one customer and for other customers that we feel very confident that the returns to StrongPoint also will be very, very positive.
These two aspects together on top of a very solid platform will bring us to 13%-15%. For those of you that have managed to read the quarterly presentation or quarterly report, we are again restating our ambition and our confidence in achieving 13%-15% EBITDA margin on a NOK 2.5 billion turnover. With that, I basically need our beloved CFO to come in. Hilde, please, what do you have to say to this?
Well, for once, Jacob, I think maybe you are a bit conservative. That should be my role, right? Yeah. Because if you look at the 10%-11% margins that we operate with today in our in-store solutions, you are not taking credit that we have also other things we are going to achieve, hopefully. Let me explain this.
Please.
Thank you so much. We are always striving for efficiency solutions for our customers. We are also thinking about how to improve our own profit line, obviously, with our ambitions. The four areas that we have on the slide, we are trying to explain how we are focusing on margin contributors that also have a very good drop-through to our EBITDA. First, the software. You all know, and we have presented many times our Order Picking solution, world leading, a Guinness World Records has been mentioned today. It is a fantastic software, and as you all know, software is very scalable. The investments we have done in Order Picking software the past years has been to generate a generation 3 version that is highly scalable outside of Sweden, where we today operate.
Obviously, a high gross margin and a lot of contribution to our profits when we increase the revenue on that. Secondly, StrongPoint is very proud of offering the full value chain of services for our customers. Jacob talked about it in the start of this session, and we are not only selling and installing, but we are doing service and support on the products. We do have areas today where we are not offering the full scale. Spain is one of the areas because we are selling CashGuard through RoadRunners, and then the service is taken care of by them. If we are to increase the solutions in Spain, we also have ambitions to increase the service and support revenue from that area. It shows our lifetime commitment to the customer when we have that focus in all our markets. That will contribute to the overall profit.
Thirdly, we haven't talked too much about our professional services, but I must say we are immensely proud of our people with the knowledge that they have. Our contribution to our customers' competitiveness and efficiency by looking at how they can extract the benefits from our solutions, not only when we are installing it, but after. We promise that our solutions will gain efficiency for the customers. We are there to prove it also after the installation. Finally, we have high scale projects. Lorena has explained one new that we have ambitions for in Spain. But this is something we know from Norway with all the ESL rollouts. From the Baltics, when we have rollouts of our Self-Checkout solutions, we know that when we are able to install and facilitate larger projects, our EBITDA is positively affected by that.
These are four areas that you should be rely on that StrongPoint will focus on also in the next years to come. Secondly, we have talked about, in our previous strategy update sessions, our ambitions for recurring revenue. You will see that the growth of our recurring revenue is not as big as the whole company itself. It has grown by 27% from the start of this strategy period, 2019. Recurring revenue consists of the service revenue that is mandatory service agreement, our support, our rentals, which is an area that we hope we can expand to other solutions, and obviously, our software licenses. Please remind that ALS does not have any recurring revenue in their current portfolio. I know the local management in ALS are working to see how they can implement recurring thinking into their service offerings to their customers.
But as of today, we do not have that. We also have what we call reoccurring revenue. We have not mentioned it on the slide, but if you look at the history of StrongPoint, we installed high base of ESLs in 2015/ 2016, and we did it again in 2020. Even though we are not talking about the big scale of recurring revenue for StrongPoint, we have reoccurring which contributes to the commitment we have to our customers, the long relationship that we feel is also beneficial when we come with new solutions. We like to say, and we believe we can prove it, we have never lost a customer in our core markets, and this is because we continue to serve our customers in the long- term. I would like to also go a little bit deeper into the portfolio that we have.
In our previous sessions, we have used a waterfall bridge to show how we are going to grow per product segment from 2019 to 2025. What you see on your left column here is the 2022 share of revenue per solution. On your right column, there is our ambitions for 2025, the full- year of 2025, to be evaluated at the strategy update session in 2026. We know that this is not going to happen like this, but we want to show you that we have a wide portfolio of solutions, and we have shown it a bit different every year, and we will continue to do that because we are adjusting and adapting to the market conditions that we are working in, both locally per geography, but also in the competitive landscape for our solutions. There are three areas with a CAGR that is quite high.
I will talk a bit more about them, but you also have some that has more normal CAGR. Please remind you that it is not a walk in the park to achieve these figures either. But we have shown that and proved it the past years, and we believe we can continue to be as relevant for our customers as we have been in the past. The three areas that you will see is a very high on our growth rate should be linked back to what Jacob has already presented. It is the payment where we have ambitions for our current CashGuard in Spain, especially Iberia, and also other countries. And we have a very strong partner in Bullion IT, who is working in South Africa. On top of that, we have also the new developed project that Lorena explained. So our CAGR of 21% is high.
But in addition, we know that our service revenue is declining, as we have talked about before. It is declining as the number of CashGuard in some of the more mature cash markets are declining. So it is a bit more than 21% that we hope for from this solution or segment. Secondly, it is the checkout solutions. It consists of our Self-Checkout solution, our Vensafe solution, and also new solutions like technology for autonomous stores, which we are looking at how to grab a market and be relevant also in that space. We have talked about it before, about Self-Checkouts into the Norwegian and Swedish markets. We know it is relevant for the U.K. markets, and we have a fantastic Self-Checkout position in the Baltics. We are also looking at how Vensafe can be exported out of the Scandinavian markets.
Thirdly, which I hope that Jacob also have presented quite thoroughly for you, is the area with the biggest CAGR, and that is e-commerce. The e-commerce solutions is, just to repeat, it is Order Picking software, it is our click- and- collect lockers, and it is our AutoStore partnership and solutions. And with the announced orders we have from 2022, none revenue taken as of 2022. We know that the orders are bigger than what StrongPoint usually do have. The projects are bigger, and that is very much contributing positive to the growth ambitions within this segment. So this is how we evaluate the future as of today. We know it will be new information after next year or even after the next six months, things will happen. We have seen that and learned that the past year, but this is how we see the future as of now.
And I think the most important part is to understand that the geographic footprint we have with the eight core markets and the different solutions that we can build each geography to be stronger in, is why we believe that we are going to achieve the NOK 2.5 billion. We are also proud of some other financial aspects of StrongPoint. We have a very strong growth, which is not influencing our CapEx too much. We are costing all of our development that we are doing, and we are outsourcing all production of hardware. So our ambitions about 2025, it does not require huge CapEx investments. We have resilient margin levels, a bit hurt in 2022, which we explained earlier in the quarter presentation. But if you look at it over the years, it is very stable and resilient on the margin levels.
We are very proud to say that we are debt-free, and we have traditionally have a very high cash conversion rate. A bit down in 2022, and that is due to the shortage of component situation and the supply chain issues we have experienced. We have utilized our strong balance sheet to ensure that we have delivery capacity when we are getting the components then. So that will be a big change going forward. We are also very proud of having a dividend history. It takes a lot of time to build up this trust to be a dividend company. We have for 11 consecutive years, we have paid dividends, and the Board proposed for the General Meeting to increase it also for 2022 to NOK 0.9 per share. The ambition from the Board has been continue to pay and increase the dividend forward.
We said that in 2020, we have repeated it for the two past years. We are really, really happy that StrongPoint can show that we are able to pay out dividends in the pace that you see on slide. Finally, on the M&A. We have our ambitions for the organic growth, and we have partly done an acquisition now that is contributing extremely good, both to the short-term StrongPoint results in 2022, but also for the long-term opportunities in a whole new market for StrongPoint, the U.K.. I showed the exact same slide a year ago, and I think it's a strength to show that we are focusing, we know what we are looking for, but we are not making acquisitions. That is not something that we can calculate home as the best benefit for StrongPoint shareholders. We are looking for Denmark, Finland. It's very natural.
It's close to us. We know that we have to strengthen our core markets. We have been into the Spanish situation. We want to expand into the service operations, can be done organically, or it can be done through M&A. We are looking for technology add-ons, because we want to ensure the AutoStore support that we can fulfill our obligations as an AutoStore partner, that our trust from the customers is that we have with us the necessary competence to do so. We have partnerships today. In the long term, of course, we want to do more of that in-house. With this potential and what has happened in the past years of the pricing, we kind of hope that more on the technology side can be relevant and also affordable for a company like StrongPoint.
With that, I would like to say thank you, and I think Jacob will take us further.
Thank you so much, Hilde, and I hope that gives you more understanding of our financial both position and how we will be developing forward. I want to start wrapping up this strategy update session by introducing the StrongPoint sandwich. We talked about the StrongPoint sandwich last year to illustrate how we are both serving the grocery market, but also what profitability levels we're looking at in the different parts of the business we do. As any Scandinavian person would know, if you want to make a sandwich, you start with the bread and butter. The bread and butter of StrongPoint is really the in-store solutions that we offer. Self-Checkouts, the Vensafe, the cash management solutions, et cetera. These are the traditional StrongPoint solutions that we have out in the market.
The entire bread and butter segment, if you will, the in-store solutions that we offer, have traditionally yielded the 10%-11% EBITDA margins. You can't have a sandwich without any topping. The topping for StrongPoint, or at least a StrongPoint sandwich, that is the e-commerce solution portfolio. That is the highly scalable Order Picking solution we have, the lockers, the AutoStore solutions that we offer. We have been going through years now of heavy investments. We're expecting those investments to really pay off in the years to come, and also then contributing positively to the EBITDA that we have overall as a company. Lastly, if you really want a good sandwich, you need some sauce on top. We don't talk too much about it, but this is important also beyond 2025.
These are investments that we are already doing, and costing them, by the way, also. But investments that we are doing in not only Self-Checkout, but manless stores, complete manless stores, is also about the investment we're doing in robotics and with the Norwegian technology company, Halodi Robotics as well. These are solutions that we will hopefully or barely start contributing in 2025, but that will place us in a much, much better position to serve the grocery retailers also in the years to come. So I hope you take with you the StrongPoint sandwich to provide us with both profitability today, tomorrow, and also for the future. Rounding it all off, creating this NOK 2.5 billion company, achieving 13%-15% EBITDA, what does that mean for you as investors?
I think what you need to believe in is the ability for us to showcase operational leverage in the eight countries that we have shown you and that we are present in today, and also developing this operational leverage, being even more efficient across eight countries, in the traditional SG&A activities that we do. We talked a lot about how we are exporting the Scandinavian hyper-efficient technologies into other parts of the world and Europe, and not least the U.K., Irish, and Spanish markets specifically. That is going to be key for us in the next few years to showcase. We will continue keeping up the pace of product innovation and M&A to an extent that fits the market needs. We have adapted the e-commerce investments already this year. We have invested and are investing in the new cash management solution that Lorena presented earlier.
As Hilde just stated, we are constantly pursuing and exploring M&A opportunities that will be as profitable to StrongPoint as the ALS acquisition has been. With that, I would like to round off today's session. Thank you all for listening. Now we will open up for Q&A that I believe can be posted on this session. Okay. Then it's time for Q&A. To help me out here, Hilde, come on.
Okay.
Let's see if we have any questions. Dominic, please.
First question, do you expect the gross margin to increase in 2023?
Very good question. Thank you. You know that we never guide in 2023. It has to be said, a couple of things about the 2022 performance. First of all, ALS has a different service portfolio, so their gross profit is normally lower than what we have achieved traditionally in StrongPoint. Secondly, 2022 was a turmoil year with component shortages, and we have bought components in the spot markets, increasing the price, obviously, and we have had some negative currency effects, especially in Sweden during the year. Obviously, we hope that these two issues at least will normalize into 2023.
Next question. What you describe is the vast opportunity in Iberia, would it be relevant in other markets?
Okay. I can do that. We are developing this next-generation cash management solution for a specific Iberian major customer. Yes, absolutely, this is a solution that will be available in the market for other grocery retailers or retailers in general at large. Of course, the most relevant kind of customers will be centered around some of the cash-rich countries that Lorena showed earlier. Spain, of course, but there are other Mediterranean countries in particular where cash usage is still absolutely the preeminent way of doing payments where the solution will be relevant. Yes, it will be relevant for more customers than only this vast one client.
Next question. E-commerce is supposed to grow substantially in the next coming years. Do you really believe it will happen? I understand that will be grocery e-commerce is what we are referring to.
Yeah. I think I understand the question because not just in Norway, but in many countries, e-commerce in groceries have been hit with the economic turmoil in the market. I think it is important for us to get across the message that where we now are looking at growing our e-commerce sales, that is predominantly in markets where the e-commerce penetration is already high. It is difficult to disregard the U.K. in that sense, where the e-commerce penetration is a lot more than 10%. As I said, the just the e-commerce grocery market in U.K. alone is bigger than Norway itself, the entire grocery market that is. That is number one, approaching predominantly the existing big e-commerce markets. Secondly, the solutions we offer are really, we are not shy to brag a bit about those. The Order Picking solution we have is second to none.
It is the most efficient solution, and it is also highly relevant in a market environment where, say, U.K. grocery retailers need to be more efficient. That is our Order Picking. The last mile solution that we offer with both drive-thru solutions but also lockers, again, is something that we absolutely see a market for in the U.K. for the same kind of reasons. Lastly, with AutoStore and with StrongPoint being the distributor delivering the first three temperature-zoned AutoStore facility. With the U.K. market being as penetrated as it is, the market is clearly also ripe for those kind of automated solutions. Yes, we are very positive about what we can achieve in the U.K. and also beyond that.
That was the last question.
Hilde and I, myself, would like to thank you all for listening, watching. Hope you have a great continued day. Thank you.
Thank you.