All right, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining. Next up, we have Lilium, which is building a vertical electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, or eVTOL for short, for the regional air mobility space. With kind of notable tech choices expected to enable Lilium to target the somewhat kind of longer range opportunity than most competitors are targeting. I should note that kind of the founders, including the Chief Engineer, Daniel Wiegand, are still with the company, and both the CEO and CFO were responsible for the very successful A320neo program. So a lot of talent and expertise in this team.
With us today, we have Rama Bondada, the VP of Investor Relations, and I think also in the audience, we have sitting with the audience and getting some time off here is Matt Broffman, who's the head of U.S. Public Affairs and Government Relations at Lilium. With that, I'll turn it over to you, Rama.
Thank you, Savi. Thanks for having us here. So let's get started, and you know, questions, just jump in. We don't have to wait till the end. So fun legal disclaimer that you guys are all aware of. Kind of starting out with, you know, what's the problem we're trying to solve? So we're looking to solve for regional air mobility. What does that mean? Metropolitan to metropolitan transportation. So think New York metropolitan area to Philadelphia metropolitan area, not necessarily within the urban environment, so not urban air taxis, as a lot of people kind of lump eVTOL all in kind of that category. We're trying to do it through speed, through safety, and zero operating emissions, and with minimal investments in infrastructure.
Obviously, we know how much trains and highways and all those things cost. So our aircraft definitely is different than a lot of the other aircraft out there. Speed-wise, about 155 miles per hour. Economically speaking, the biggest portion is 6 passengers with plus one pilot, so 7 people on board. This is no shoulder-to-shoulder seating, so think very much like a business jet or a front-of-the-cabin, premium cabin experience. Our initial range, when we enter into service in 2026, is 110 miles, so JFK to Center City, Philadelphia. We are certifying to the highest level of safety, which is called 10⁻⁹ or ten to the ninth level of safety.
This is the same safety level as a large commercial aircraft, so think Boeing 787, Airbus A320. And that is mandated by our regulators. We're headquartered in Munich, and that would be EASA as our regulator. So this slide here, I think, is one of the main differentiators with us and a lot of our peers. This slide is really what, after 12 years on the buy side, what brought me to Lilium back in September. And our Chairman is the former CEO of Airbus from 2009 to 2019. He saw arguably the best decade run that Airbus had. Our current Chief Executive Officer ran the A320 line for about 9 years.
During this time, the A320 went from 30 aircraft per month to 60, a doubling of production, became the best-selling commercial aircraft in modern aviation history. Klaus, along with our CFO, Oliver, set up the production lines in Alabama and in China for the A320. Our Chief Technology Officer has run every AW101 helicopter variant for AgustaWestland since the late 1980s till 2018. So extremely knowledgeable in project management and being a chief engineer. Our COO was the head of supply chain for Airbus Commercial and Airbus Military later on. And our Chief Commercial Officer, Sebastien Borel, comes from Honeywell, where he led their Middle Eastern efforts, and then also Airbus North America commercial efforts. So, I mean, this is basically a who's who of European aerospace, engineering, and management talent.
As Savi mentioned, all four of our founders are still heavily involved in the engineering side. They all were PhD students at the Technical University of Munich when they developed the electric propulsion engine that drives our aircraft. We're about 950 full-time employees now. Actually, I think we're at closer to 1,000 now. More than half of that is engineers. So turning to our business model, we are focusing on the OEM side, selling our aircraft, and on the aftermarket side. You know, when you take the stack in aerospace and look at ROI and margins, the network is the lowest margin, OEM then is in the middle, and the aftermarket tends to be the highest margin.
Klaus actually ran the Airbus Commercial Services business for a couple of years, saw the margin potential that occurs at companies like TransDigm or the Engine guys and their aftermarket businesses. So we wanted to make sure we captured that. The uniqueness of our aircraft, where we have the proprietary IP around the engine, and also around the battery packs, and also around the high voltage the high voltage harness, gives us a lot of opportunity to create aftermarket services here and high margin reoccurring revenue as the fleet grows. Then when we look at our go-to market, we're focusing first on the premium market. We look at this as a market that already exists... This is, think, executive helicopter, business jets for shorter range. This has a higher price point.
So as we're going through the learning curve of producing this aircraft, it gives us that opportunity. It also gives us some time to start generating revenue while building the backlog for the mass market, which is more for the commercial airlines, who look at us more as a last leg of their business class cabin versus kind of a last mile, which I think is what a lot of the urban taxis are kind of going for. On the TAM side, we look at the regional air mobility market, and this is, you know, we're a German company, we're an engineering company, so we don't put out numbers unless it's both vetted from an engineering perspective and vetted from a German perspective.
So this is a very deep dive that's been done alongside of McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, Porsche, on what we see as the global market and the annual demand. We see about 500 on the premium market per year, 3,700 on the mass market. This is kind of 42,000 aircraft total by 2035, with the largest market being North America, followed by E.U. And then you can see on our cabin, it's a very different experience versus some of the more helicopter-like cabins that you see within eVTOL. No shoulder-to-shoulder seating. It actually. We can actually stretch the. Not really stretch it, you actually can add extra seats. If you don't do the shoulder-to-shoulder, we can fit eight passengers in the cabin, and that would be more for the airlines version.
Some of the kind of sample routes that we could do on our first iteration. You know, we are signed with CITIC, the largest helicopter operator in the China Greater Bay Area. And really, when you start thinking about regional transports are, well, we have a 110-mile range right now. By 2030, as the batteries upgrade, that becomes closer to a 175-mile range, and it starts increasing the amount of metropolitan areas we can connect, which is much more effective outside the U.S. and Europe, where you have a lot of cities that are 2 million-3 million people within 100-200 kilometers of each other. And then kind of the attractiveness around the aircraft really comes from, first, the pricing. So $2 per kilometer to a seat pricing.
In English, that's $2.75 per mile. And that includes a 20% operating margin for the network, whoever would be the operator. So really about $2.25 in terms of cost. So you're looking at about the cost of an Uber, on a per-seat price basis. We have the most spacious cabin within eVTOL, low noise, and low vibration because we're a jet, not open propeller. And also, we're certifying to the highest level of safety, and this is a major differentiator as we kind of look at it, the global TAM for eVTOL. This is our current order book. We have about 685 aircraft under MOU, including NetJets, you know, Azul, Saudia, some of the bigger airlines, and we have 45 firm orders.
These are primarily premium class, premium class aircraft, so this would be biz jet type of aircraft. And we have deposits already placed for these aircraft for their production slots. We announced in November that we are partnering with Lufthansa on eVTOL in Europe. This has probably been one of the... You could take two German companies, put them together, they're going to go through every single detail, down to, you know, Lufthansa was counting the number of buses that they have on the ground, the distance of their partner hotels around airports, versus using another partner hotel that's further away and that's cheaper. Because with an eVTOL, you don't need to be right next to the airport. You can actually bring your passengers to the airport from a further away airport. This is all the things that they were studying.
This was an 18-month process of them going through everything eVTOL, and how that would get them to 50% less emissions by 2030. They really are looking at this, again, as a last leg. So think you're traveling from Frankfurt, you're headed to Philadelphia, you fly into JFK, pay $5,000 for a business class ticket, and then you get stuck on a Bombardier or an ATR prop jet for that last leg, versus for $275, you're flying a business jet experience, a premium class jet experience, directly from JFK to Center City, Philadelphia, or whatever corporate campus you're going to, and skipping the whole airport experience. And so that's kind of how Lufthansa and a lot of the airlines, the global airlines we're talking to, are kind of looking at our offering, for them.
Because, as a lot of you guys know, majority of the profit, if not all the profit, for airlines come from that front of the cabin. And if you can make that experience better, and you have a value proposition there, that's where the airlines really are going to get intrigued. Looking at our technology, why did we do ducted engine fans? It's, you know, the 95% of all commercial aircraft are jet. And I think everybody here who's flown a prop jet understands jet is faster, higher range, higher capacity, higher comfort, higher safety, lower noise, lower vibration. It's just a better experience for the passengers. And that same flight physics translates directly then into eVTOL too. Then our batteries, you know, for a long time, this was a big question I think a lot of the investment community had.
We're now receiving a couple thousand per month from Ionblox . We're partnered with the AMAT, Applied Materials, with our ownership on Ionblox to create silicon anode batteries. It's the same technology that GM and Porsche will be using next year in their EV batteries. The advantage of our battery is that it can be produced on an auto production line. So we're actually using Gotion High-Tech to produce our batteries, one of the largest in China. They are building a 4 gigawatt factory in Slovakia that will be providing 80% of Volkswagen's batteries, and we'll be using their production line. We'll start receiving batteries from that production line later this summer. Right now, we are using custom cells, which was partnered with Porsche, to receive our current batteries.
And so we have the production already done, redundant, and also with dual source, and we're going through the testing and certification process. Our first manned flight will be at the end of this year. Our production test bed for our batteries will be up and running in a couple of weeks here. We just went live with our propulsion test bed, so the next one would be the batteries. And this is kind of how the battery technology works. Given that the range is only about 50% of what the current battery usage is, the reserve and the vertical landing is that remaining 40%-50%, and that doesn't change. So as our batteries get more powerful, as our power density and energy density increases, you have a 1 to 1.8 relationship.
So a 10% increase in battery power and energy density is an 18% increase in your range. And so that's how you can get, by the time you get to 2030, a 175-mile range. There's kind of like a Moore's law when it comes to battery technology. It's been growing at about 6% energy and power density per year over the last couple of decades. If you assume 4.5%, that's kind of what we are assuming as we do our forecasts out. So a much more conservative approach to it. We, Daniel Wiegand, our founder, he travels the world, remote villages out in China, where they have massive gigafactories, trying to find the newest chemistries.
CATL is actually already has an aerospace-grade produc ion facility in China, in a town that has, like, 1.2 million people, which is a tiny town in China, and they're already building a 500 megawatt kg battery for aerospace. And so we're kind of looking at that and saying, "We don't want to do it for our current iteration of our aircraft, our current battery certification." Let them develop that production, let them develop that technology, then we'll look at it in a couple of years down the road after we're already certified and flying. But this is essentially where we look at our technology. Our technology is being developed on a propulsion side, on the battery side, on the electric management side. The bottom is the EVTOL that we're looking at.
So once you get out to 2040, about 500 km, that covers about 50% of all current business trips that are taken by airplane. And the same existing technology can then be scaled up for conventional battery aircraft. And as you again, you kinda go through that growth within the battery technology, once you get out to 2050, 2,000 km, that's 80% of all commercial flights right now. So you start covering a significant portion through battery technology, which, given our IP around that and around electric ducted engine fans, kind of puts us in the forefront of this next generation of growth within aerospace. So why did we go with battery versus some of the other propulsion fuels out there? You know, kerosene, which is what we use today, and e-fuels, they're gonna have a higher range.
There's no doubt about that versus battery technology. And it costs us somewhat, you know, similar on kerosene versus battery today. E-fuels will come down the learning curve as we go through the years. Hydrogen, well, just based on the primary, the energy efficiency of a hydrogen fuel cell, it's gonna be lower energy efficiency than a battery, and this translates into cost. And therefore, even if you have a 50% reduction in your cost, which would be a significant improvement in your efficiency, energy efficiency, you're still looking at a cost that's much higher than what you would have with a battery-powered aircraft. And this is kind of why we have always been focused on the battery side of aerospace. So kind of looking at where are we?
So as I mentioned, we are expecting our first manned flight at the end of this year. We are going through EASA certification, not FAA. We do have a bilateral agreement with the FAA, and that's through EASA. EASA started the eVTOL process back in 2019. So we actually have all of our certification plans submitted. They have been co-validated with EASA. We have received our Design Organization Approval, which is a four-year audit, to prove that we know how to build an aircraft, have traceability, have testing capacity, and have the knowledge base on how to then certify the aircraft. And so because of that, we can actually say that we're gonna need 800-1,000 certification flight hours to receive our certification for this aircraft.
There is no other eVTOL company that can provide that because the FAA hasn't provided that information and probably won't for anywhere from another, call it 9 months to another year and a half. This certification, again, is taking place at a 10⁻⁹ level, 10 to the ninth level, and just very simply, mathematically speaking, 10 to the ninth means one failure every billion flight hours. FAA is still working on whether they're gonna do 10⁻⁷, which is what helicopters are certified at, or 10⁻⁸, so one failure per 10 million flight hours, or one failure every 100 million flight hours. Big numbers, what does that mean? So put it in context, the A320, best-selling aircraft since 1987, the entire family, that means the A319, the 20, the 21, has about 320 million-...
flight hours in the entire family program. So if you're certified to a 1 in 10^{-7}, that means you would have 30 fatal crashes caused by the aircraft's components, subsystems, parts, by now for that program. And this is why it is a big difference going to a 10^{-9} level. Our aircraft will be certified at 10 to 100 times more safety than any other eVTOL aircraft that's going through the FAA process. Not ten or a hundred percent, 10 times to 100 times. So there is a major difference in the certification level that we're doing. This translates also globally, which means if you're an FAA-certified aircraft, you may not be able to fly in Europe or any other region that is looking to use EASA certification methodology.
This is, we received the DOA, so we're the first company to receive full Design Organization Approval by EASA for an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And by full, there's other ones like Volocopter and Vertical that do have some level of DOA, but not from soup to nuts, kind of from the whole design to the actual end process. We've been flying our scaled-down model for about 5 years now. It's about 70% scaled model of our current aircraft that's flying unmanned, and we've been primarily using this to test the flight physics, the disc loading of the aircraft. You know, this is, this is applied physics, so it doesn't change if you go from 70% scale to a 100% scale. That portion doesn't, doesn't change. So a lot of that portion has been already tested out for us.
Given that we're going through our test beds now, we're working towards that 1,000 flight-certified hours already. We're kind of moving up that ramp, even though we don't have a manned aircraft flying. And that's something that I think that's not fully understood. And it is really a philosophical difference between how EASA approaches it, that the aircraft itself has to have a certain level of safety, not just around the operations and adding level of safety through pilot training. It has to be the aircraft itself. So this is actually our first aircraft that's going through the production line, MSN 1, our first test aircraft with the wings and canards. We just started building the second aircraft in our production facilities at Munich.
At fully tooled this, and with all the jigs up and running, this facility would be able to produce about 400 aircraft per year. We have all of our testing at this aircraft, design labs, and full final assembly. The building across is where the battery pack production line is going in, and we'll start that serial production later this year, probably in early summer. So we're about the build to make or the buy to make ratio is about we buy 90% of our components from our major suppliers, which are basically everybody kind of knows who they are, Honeywell, Astronics. All these guys who are very deeply steeped in aerospace know how to certify. Honeywell and Denso are doing our engines.
Denso, being an auto parts company, doesn't have experience in certification at an aerospace standard, and so Honeywell is running our aerospace certification process for our engines. A lot of these components, we're not certifying. Our suppliers are going to do the certification process for us. So that, again, de-risks the entire aircraft and the entire design. The portions that we are doing are the battery pack and some of the software, but even the software, we're doing it along with Palantir and Rockwell Collins. So the value proposition: last year, when we came into the year, we had guided that we wanted to start getting fixed deposits for our aircraft. We started doing that, start final assembly of our first aircraft. We started that, received Design Organization Approval. We did that.
We raised $292 million. In total, we've raised $1.4 billion so far. As we go through 2024, first manned flight at the end of the year is our goal, and then we also put in some steps that kind of get us to that goal. So it's not just you're just waiting to see if, when, when we fly. The aircraft final assembly line will be, probably in the next couple of weeks, we'll be able to give you more information on that. The propulsion unit starts, the battery pack productions will be both of those are probably early summer. Ground testing will start in June-July timeframe, and we expect to receive permit to fly in the fall. Usually, it's a couple weeks after that when you, you actually can go out and start your first manned flight.
So we're making progress towards all of those goals with the idea that entry into service will be in 2026, and obviously, type certification before we get there. So the value proposition, you know, we have the proprietary technology that's differentiated, that provides to a different TAM than a lot of our peers are going after. We have a very seasoned aerospace team. This is an aerospace engineering company, first and foremost, so safety stays at the top, and that's what we're doing for certification. And we think right now our shares have a very attractive entry point. You know, we said in our call last week that we ended the year with EUR 200 million cash on hand. We're guiding to EUR 170 million cash usage for this first half.
We are at advanced conversations with the German and French governments who see the U.S. DOD subsidizing our peers and have really started taking much more interest in that. And so between that funding, our current backers, who are very deep-pocketed... I mean, the annual profits of our largest investor is greater than the market caps of most of the companies that are backing the eVTOL sector. They continue to be engaged, and they continue to want to scale up their investments. And so we have multiple irons in the fire. We're not too worried about the fundraising side of it. We've shown time and time again that our technology and the value proposition it presents becomes very attractive to strategic investors. I'll leave it there and see if you guys have any questions. Yeah, of course.
And so when you think about it as well, or you think
Yeah, so I think that's a good question. There's a couple of places. Right now, you know, obviously, our first goal is to get the first manned flight. That actually unlocks pre-delivery payments of about $500 million, not all at once, but over the next couple of quarters. And so to get to that is like a first trigger point to start bringing in cash in a non-dilutive way. And as we look at that, and then I think on the call, Klaus had mentioned that probably our biggest risk point at this point. It's not execution, but it's not, you know, it sounds like kind of a cop-out when I always thought it was a cop-out when management would say that, but really, it's around the supply chain.
You know, we are getting a lot of our suppliers to certify their parts, some of the parts we need to get and then go through the certification process before we get, we prove safety of flight to get our permit to fly. So that's probably making sure we're getting the components and parts on time to reach first flight by the end of this year. That's probably our biggest risk at this point. We have enough guidance, and we have been given full visibility by EASA on the certification side, so we know what we need to do. But really, that's kind of where we see the pressure point, really, at this point, in the next 12-18 months.
You talked about the panel you called out earlier a lot, that a lot of it is much better than Europe.
That's right.
Pretty easy things where the regulators are at, I think, are you?
Yeah, I think Europe is gonna be one that's gonna be one of the early ones. After that, it really, you can kind of go through and look regionally on who's using EASA certification versus FAA, and the ones that are using EASA, given that we already have guidance, and they're ahead of a certification process, you probably have a little bit of those areas. The issue that you run into is that there's only gonna be a handful, if even that, maybe three, that will be certified to fly in Europe and EASA-dictated areas. So that's where it kind of gets tricky when you look out on who's got which region is gonna be the first. And there are some regions where, you know, safety may not matter as much, and, you know, they could go tomorrow.
I think the larger areas where all of us and our peers are looking to operate in will be the ones that are gonna be more regulated on a safety standard. Yeah. So we had said that based on our estimates, which is, you know, making an assumption on fleet size, what our production rates could be, we expect about a $5 billion revenue business in aftermarket by 2035. And then you can kind of back into what aftermarket EBITDA margins are and kind of go through that.
We have said in the past that by the time you get out to the middle of part of that decade, about sort of it's becoming about a third of the revenue comes from aftermarket, but the profit dollars start becoming even because the profit's much higher. And actually, you probably end up with more profit from the aftermarket than the OEM side, by the time you get out to that area.
We're out of time, so, I'd like to thank Rama for sharing his story, and if you have more questions, we want to bring back then. Thank you.
Thanks. Thanks, everyone.