Dear investors, dear analysts, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon, good morning, wherever you are. This is Gunter Erfurt speaking, the CEO of Meyer Burger. I welcome you to this presentation on the occasion of our today's announced securing of our debt financing for the further expansion of our cell and module production. Two housekeeping advices. Number one, you can ask questions via the chat function in the EQS tool. Should be self-explaining, I would presume. In terms of timing, we are planning to hold this meeting for, this webcast for one hour. The presentation part will be approximately 20 minutes, and then I'm hoping we will have enough time that I can answer your questions. We have this morning announced that we secured a EUR 185 million debt financing for the further expansion of our cell and module production, to start production from 2022.
The structure of this debt financing is a syndicated loan of EUR 125 million. It is provided by a consortium led by the Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden in Germany. It matures on June 30, 2027, and the purpose is the expansion of the existing sites in Bitterfeld-Wolfen for the solar cell manufacturing and Freiberg, both Germany, for the module production. In addition to the EUR 125 million syndicated loan, we have secured a factoring facility from a specialist bank from Germany, which matures on June 30, 2024. Purpose is working capital accordingly. The agreement was signed yesterday. It is 80% guaranteed by the Federal Republic of Germany and the state of Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.
The credit facilities come with standard market conditions, including the usual financial covenants and we have a disbursement condition of the syndicated loan agreement, which requires Meyer Burger to raise additional financing in the amount of EUR 100 million, by June 2022. This financing package will enable us to accelerate our expansion plans and, I would like to take the opportunity to walk you through the reasoning behind why we believe the acceleration makes a lot of sense. The cornerstones of our strategy, which we have communicated in the course already of our last year's share capital increase remain unchanged. We are seeing a continued growth of the global solar markets, with an expectation for the upcoming years of a CAGR of 13%.
The momentum has increased as of today and based on our technology advantage, we believe in conjunction with the captive business model which we are executing such that the technology we have developed is being used by Meyer Burger only, and we are not providing the equipment any longer, the technology to third parties. We are strengthening this model now by adjusting or revising our previously communicated strategy, such that we will entirely use the solar cells produced for the production of our leading heterojunction SmartWire modules. The difference compares to the previous communication was or is that at the time we had communicated that together with the next growth of to 1.4 gigawatt cell, we would see a module capacity of 800 MW and would have a 600 MW cell capacity to be sold into the markets to third parties.
We have decided that we will change this and use the solar cells entirely for our own production of solar modules. Speaking about the market momentum, what we can again confirm, is that solar PV levelized cost of electricity, i.e., the cost per megawatt hour or kilowatt hour, continue to be among the lowest for solar. Looking at the utility example here, large installations. Wind is slightly more expensive, but in a similar range and cost-wise outperforming all other conventional sources of electricity. Even without the aspect of fighting climate change, solar energy makes a whole economical perspective and the expected growth in the upcoming years I already spoke about. It is even stronger than what we had seen in last year's projections. That brings us to our revised growth pattern or growth plan.
We are, as I already explained, revising our previously communicated strategy and will use the in-house produced solar cells entirely for the production of solar modules. The target is to achieve capacity of 1.4 GW already by 2022. The goal is to increase the capacity in our existing Bitterfeld-Wolfen site to reach 1.4 GW of solar cells and 1 GW of solar modules at our site in Freiberg, Germany. That means we have a gap, if you will, of 0.4 GW to reach the 1.4 GW of module capacity. We are currently planning to set up a second module factory, for which the selection process, for the site, for the location is ongoing, but not yet decided. The market approach, in terms of our value-oriented segment strategy, remains unchanged.
We are currently introducing our residential products in Europe and in the U.S., as we have communicated. We still plan to also include Australia and Japan in the years to come. That is also a reasoning for the purpose of the planned second solar module factory. Our position enables us, in terms of the technology, to serve not only rooftop, so the residential and small commercial segment, but also the large-scale utility segment. We plan to enter this segment as soon as possible on the basis of competitive levelized cost of electricity, generated through our heterojunction SmartWire modules. What has changed, though, is not the approach, which we have already communicated last year, but the anticipated market share, because number one, of an earlier entrance or entry into the utility segment. We are pulling this in from originally 2024, now into starting from 2022.
That's the plan. We also see, in connection to the increased momentum in terms of the market growth, but also in our target markets, the total addressable market has increased as well. These are all good signals and provide us tailwind with regards to this changed strategy. We already received now, having done our market entry, with our existing products, we have received inquiries from also the utility sector, and we are currently working with selected customers on piloting first projects, and in order to prove bankability and the high energy yields per area in practice. That's, as we have explained already last year, required before one can enter in the utility segment, and that is what we are doing. The products we have introduced or launched into the market end of April are currently three variants.
A black product, a very aesthetic product for the residential market, a white product with highest power, the marble glass product, which is a bifacial module with the highest efficiency, currently with 21.8%. Certifications are on the way. We are on track. We are planning more certifications for specific purposes. For instance, energy rating IEC 61853 is pretty important also in conjunction with our utility plans. Speaking about utility, we are also planning to introduce a new product or two new products from 2022, specifically designed for the utility sector. These products will be based on larger wafer sizes. Our current residential product, in order to meet standards, formats for the installers, which they are used to, are based on so-called M6 wafers, 166 x 166 mm. For our utility products, we are planning to use so-called M10 wafers, which are larger, 182 x 182 mm.
What is quite of use from the comparison that you see on the right side, if we again compare the planned product with currently existing utility products of similar nature. All bifacial product variants, we again see, as expected, a 1.5% gap in efficiency between Meyer Burger and the currently sold products in this segment. The module factory, the second one, which we are currently planning and doing the site selection, is expected to produce these utility products up to 400 MW. Depending on market demand, we could also use this additional line and factory to produce rooftop modules. This can be arranged in a pretty flexible way, and this is what we are currently planning.
In terms of the conditions in the market, what we currently see is that despite many announcements in the market for the introduction of specifically N-type technologies, we can conclude from the data we have on hand that the vast majority of newly announced production capacities by Tier 1s is still based on PERC technology. There are a few companies, to give you two names, Jinko as a Tier 1 and Jolywood as a smaller player, but as a pioneer in TOPCon, which has limited capacities as a flagship product. We do not see that TOPCon today is the technology of choice, which is announced in mighty gigawatt capacity amounts for the years to come. It's mostly PERC what we see as announcements.
Panasonic, as one of our competitors, has announced in 2021, in February of this year, exactly the same day when Meyer Burger produced the first product, the first module, that they will leave the manufacturing of heterojunction product, which, in our opinion, is a good signal for Meyer Burger because with the capacities we are building up, we are leading the heterojunction league in terms of product performance and also volume once we have done this capacity increase that we are discussing today. We have SunPower and LG as IBC players, and the vast majority of PERC players unchanged, and these few players which are doing TOPCon. One might argue that this is changing over time. Maybe this also as an update here, also nothing really has changed in comparison to what we have communicated previously.
We included TOPCon as another option, from what we know about the achievable cost structure in terms of silicon use, in terms of the manufacturing yields, and also the achieved energy yields of these products, we believe that it is not comparable to the high-margin product we are selling. If we look at today's share of technologies in the market, we assume this is now a forward-looking expectation, 170 GW of end installed PV this year, out of which almost 160 GW, or exactly slightly above 90%, is based on PERC or the previous technology, which is BSF, back surface field technology, which is currently fading out. This was the technology before PERC was introduced, only a few players are still using it.
The largest portion of a different technology other than PERC is nowadays cadmium telluride thin film, basically done by one company, which is First Solar. The remaining other technologies are accounting for less than 5% of the expected global final installed solar modules in 2021, with TOPCon, IBC, a little bit of heterojunction, and PERC. If we analyze all announcements which are at least publicly available and take into this analysis, especially the players of the Solar Module Super League, tier ones from Asia and Jolywood as the largest TOPCon player, then we also see a pretty interesting situation which I already explained. The vast majority of the existing players is continuing to introduce PERC. Out of the 100 GW of announced new production capacities from these players, about 80% or 78% is PERC.
First Solar has made an announcement last week that they will build another factory in the U.S. 2.3 GW. We have announcement of 4.5 GW for TOPCon from LONGi. They have no track record yet in producing it. Jolywood has a track record and has only announced 1.5 GW additional capacity, which is also interesting. If we look into the heterojunction space, we have Meyer Burger with the largest announcement. We have announced a plan of building 7 GW until 2027, which leaves 6.6 still to be built. Risen has announced 6.5 already in 2019. The project was announced to be ready in 2021, now it's postponed to 2023. Only a very small fraction of the 2.5 GW has been built so far.
There are other entrants, new entrants, which we have not taken into account here, which announced factories of 10 GW size and nothing yet has happened. There are reasons why we believe Meyer Burger is now emerging as a player with a very solid and technologically validated technology expansion strategy, and why it's maybe a little bit more difficult for our competitors to get there. As you may know, in the solar cost structure for crystalline solar modules, there are especially two materials which are the most expensive one in the BOM list, which is silicon, number one, and silver for the contacting paste, number two. One of the reasons why heterojunction and also TOPCon has still not made it into mass manufacturing, also a reason why we believe Panasonic has left manufacturing or decided to leave manufacturing, is the use of silver.
For a heterojunction solar cell, unless you have the right technology like we believe we have, you need to use way more silver than today's mainstream technology. At this left chart, you see 100% line for the PERC silver paste amount, which we see nowadays and which is projected until 2028. Data taken from the International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaics, which is published by the German Verband Deutscher Maschinen- und Anlagenbau, VDMA. It's publicly available from itrpv.org. What you see here when you look at the relative difference between the technologies that the announcements, and again, the data in here are collected from the global players and companies. What you see here is that for both competitor heterojunction and also TOPCon, the silver amount is actually not reduced relative to PERC.
In Meyer Burger's case, we have a pretty strong plan for how we can reduce silver even further, and it has to do with our proprietary combination of heterojunction and SmartWire that we can reach such low levels, and already today are at par compared with the best-in-class PERC players. Also for silicon, which is, as I said, the most expensive item in the BOM of a crystalline solar module, also relative to PERC, we are already today way below the standard average in the industry and have more options in future to reduce the thickness of our wafers. This is an inherent technology feature. Why is this so important?
It's not only important for the successful introduction of a new N-type heterojunction or TOPCon technology, but it is also important to become, out of Meyer Burger perspective, as less influenced by volatile prices in the supply chain as possible. You may know that we currently see spiking, especially polysilicon prices in the markets and also silver has gone up. The must do for a manufacturer is to find ways to reduce the use of those materials to the lowest levels ever possible. Again, this is something very specific with Meyer Burger's technology, our heterojunction SmartWire technology, in comparison to other technologies. We believe that we have less influence from volatile prices, which matters a lot in order to safeguard the modules. Speaking about our product, I think I would only repeat what we have already communicated. We have introduced it.
We're currently ramping our two factories, starting shipments from July. What we now see in the market by having signed framework agreements with our wholesale, our distributor partners in Europe and also received orders accordingly. What we see by analyzing current offerings on the market is that the trend for residential PV systems is to optimize self-consumption. 10 years ago, the optimization was to put a lot of solar on someone's roof and basically repay the investment through the feed-in tariff that was guaranteed by the government. As this is now fading out and the technology as such is pretty competitive in terms of the levelized cost of electricity, the target clearly is to optimize self-consumption. When you look at today's offerings, then in most of the cases, residential PV systems are sold together with a battery system in order to exactly optimize the self-consumption.
What we can observe is that you achieve the best economical solution if a product is used that provides the best energy yield and can fully use the size of someone's rooftop. We have done a comparison here or an example calculation of a system size, something standard, 8.9 kW installation on a 42 sq m rooftop, and together with an optimal battery system. When we look at the net lifetime value that can be achieved, we see that, in this example, that using our product and of this system size, this net lifetime value of EUR 18,600 can be achieved. This is possible with our system.
We put that in perspective to a Tier 1 system, i.e., coming from Asia nowadays, also connected to a battery system, we clearly see due to the lower energy yields, the net lifetime value of the system is lower. We have a value-based pricing strategy for our product, providing the higher energy yields, we can also price it accordingly. That's what we do and see also orders coming in at the prices according to business plan. The additional investment is there. This is clear. We have an additional lifetime which can be generated if a customer decides for our system.
At the end of the day, because of the better optimization of the system and more kilowatt hours that can be harvested, we see for the Meyer Burger system, the better economical package compared to Tier 1s from China, which is a pretty important statement I'm making because this also tells you that Meyer Burger is selling our products on a pure value-based pricing scheme. If we compare now also with others than the Tier 1s, what we can clearly see, there are Tier 1 players which are also providing good products. Looking at the average, and this is what I showed already to you, we have a very competitive offer. Looking at other premium providers, in the footnote, we have all the details listed here for you. This is essentially LG and SunPower in comparison.
We already see today that we have the better offer in terms of this comparison. When we look at European suppliers, we are even better than those competitors. We again can make the statement here that we are selling at this value-based pricing, and don't need a soft premium to charge in order to achieve the best economic offering for the customer. Speaking about customers, our direct customer, as we have communicated through our three-stage approach, are wholesalers from Europe. We have the entire list in here. I'm expecting that we need to update this chart very frequently. It can also be seen basically in real time, the changes on our website. You also see that we are already present in many different countries, including the U.S., and continue to sign strategic agreements or framework agreements with more distributors.
Now they are placing orders and as I said, prices confirm our expectations per the business plan and already mentioned that we are currently selecting large commercial, industrial, and utility pilots. I'm saying pilots because we don't have the ideal product. This is now the plan for the second module factory. In order to propel our entry into this segment, we believe it makes a lot of sense, and it was always embedded as a part of the business plan already in 2021 to do so in order to get the foot in the door of the utility market. Last but not least, I'm also very proud to report that besides building two factories and securing the additional funding, we were able to continue working on our, or executing according to our communicated R&D roadmap.
What you see here is a real module, which we built in Thun, in Switzerland. It is a 60-cell full-size prototype module for our next generation heterojunction technology, which is the Interdigitated Back Contact, or IBC technology. We have also achieved another pretty remarkable result, which was externally confirmed by the ISFH Institute in Hamelin in Germany, a small aperture. This is not a commercial product, but a laboratory product, a SmartWire module using this technology of 24.7% module efficiency, not solar cell efficiency, module efficiency. We believe this is the proof of concept that will also in future enable us, once we have introduced the product, it's not yet ready to achieve module efficiencies of even exceeding 24% in mass manufacturing. That's what we believe.
Thanks to, I believe, the most interesting slide in our webcast today, we have adjusted our financial targets accordingly. We increased our revenue expectation for 2023, given the fact or based on the assumption that we are executing the 1.4 GW capacity increase to achieve at least CHF 550 million in revenue at an expected gross profit margin of at least 40% and EBITDA margin of at least 25% and net debt of 1.5. For the long-term goals, the 7 GW by 2027, the guidance that we have communicated remains unchanged. With this, I'm ending my presentation and kindly ask for your questions. We have received already a few, and I will go through them one by one. If we cannot answer all of them in today's call, we will get back to you in writing.
Question number one: Can you please explain why you have chosen to fully integrate the cell delivery into your own modules instead of selling some into the market? The better margin product clearly is the solar module. This answers the economical and the financial side of it. The reason why we had introduced this concept a year ago was based on the assumption that entering the market could be easier if we would not sell solar modules entirely, but also sell solar cells to third-party customers. Selling solar modules is requiring more efforts at the sales marketing side, whereas selling solar cells is a B2B business.
We have the strong belief and good reasons to entirely absorb the volume for the own product, because the rationale I explained, Meyer Burger can sell the module at a higher price because of the higher performance of the product, and the better energy yield is supporting this concept of selling solar cells only. Is this based upon commercial demand for full modules or more a reference to capture the full chain? I would say it's both. The full chain, I have explained this. We believe that now putting the solar cells also under the captive business model umbrella makes a lot of sense to capture the entire value inside Meyer Burger and only sell the solar modules.
We have started selling the product from late August, so it's now eight weeks or so, and we are pretty happy with the response from the market and have a good reason to believe that this is a good strategy to focus on selling solar modules only. What clarity have you received to allow you to pull forward your volume shipments to the utility sector from 2024 - 2022? We have last year communicated that we had started discussions with customers already before we did the capital increase in summer of 2020. The response was pretty homogeneous and clear that if Meyer Burger can prove that the product's performance is what we expect it to be, that the market is pretty interested in the product because of the compelling levelized cost of electricity opportunity.
This is what makes us believe that it makes a lot of sense to also enter into utility ASAP. It will also, of course, help us to optimize our cost structure because it brings volume up. It helps us in terms of procurement power in manufacturing, and is another good reason to enter the utility area. Among your distributors, there does not seem to be coverage of Spain, which is a major solar market. Is there a reason for this? As I said, we are working on signing more agreements and will, I would presume, not leave Spain out. Do you have coverage for the U.S.? We are working on it. Are you expecting significant volumes into the U.S. for the first rooftop development phase? We have communicated already this year that we are expecting a significant volume also in the U.S. already this year. Moving on.
What utility scale market will see your first pilot projects? I'm not commenting this. Do you have an updated estimate of volumes to be sold into the U.S. market versus Europe? We will not provide clear figures, but as I said, we expect significant volume already this year. Next question. We can assume that further capital raising will not take place via a diluted capital increase, but rather via a convertible bond placement. I'm not commenting this. What we have communicated is that it is a disbursement condition for the debt financing. Next question, can you please explain how the market environment has changed with the strongly rising transport costs for you and for the competition? That's a very good question.
It has definitely eased our market launch or market entry this year, because we see an increasing pricing level for solar modules, both in residential and utility, which has not led to corrections until so far, at least, of the market expectations. We still see a pretty strong demand in all the markets, simply because of the fact that solar is super competitive, regardless of the fact if it's slightly higher in input costs or not, if it's not reaching a critical level, which we don't expect. The transportation cost is something that we don't see, at least not for the product in Europe. Selling in the U.S., we have to see and we have to optimize it. It's definitely a tailwind for Meyer Burger that we are producing in the markets where we are selling, speaking for Europe, and it's a disadvantage for our competitors.
What are the expected margins of utility scale versus residential? We are not providing the share. May you provide us some insight on which possibilities you are working on regarding the disbursement conditions to additionally raise financing of EUR 100 million needed by June 2021? I already commented it. We are not providing this. Are there likewise opportunities for the new module site, 0.4 GW to revive dormant assets as you did with the plant in Freiberg? Here we are in the process of site selection, and will inform as soon as we have made a decision, or as soon as we have something more tangible to say. If not, initial CapEx to set up the new site might be significantly higher. Depends on how we approach it.
There is either the option of doing a project brownfield as we did, which is very preferable, saves a lot of time and CapEx. If not possible, there would also be the option to do a lease project that we are not investing our money in concrete, but just lease buildings which are owned by someone else. These are options we are having. Again, we'll inform as soon as we have more tangible things to report. Is there a reason why there are mostly public banks involved in the current debt financing? I think we did not communicate that there are mostly public banks involved. What visibility do you have over 2022 and 2023 order intake such that you can guide your annual sales up to today? We are not providing information at this point in time. Will do when we communicate financials.
Maybe a comment here, because we are receiving the question also very often. Why is there not a big order announced? Some market participants even assume that there are no orders because we are not announcing it. It is, number one, very unusual for the residential segment that a company, regardless of Meyer Burger or someone else, receives, whatever, a 50 MW order or something, a 50 GW order or whatever size. What is happening here is that the wholesalers are filling their warehouse in order to be ready on demand for their customers, which are the installers. According to their turn rates of the product, they are doing the replenishment on a rolling forecast basis. That's what's currently happening.
It is very unusual that a company communicates every little order that is received from a wholesale, and this is also the reason why we are not doing this. When would you expect to be fully free cash flow positive given the acceleration of timelines? What we have said in the long-term guidance is we have provided the required additional financing to get to the capacity of 7 GW. We have communicated previously that we expect this, from what we see today, that we are reaching this at a level of something between 3 GW and 4 GW. Can you elaborate a bit on your ideas of how to organize the additional EUR 100 million financing? We spoke about it. Go-to-market strategy for utility, start key market reference projects bankability. The reference projects I already commented. We are currently in the selection process.
Bankability is, on the one hand, achieved through third-party testing. There are special certification or test institutes which we are working already, or in touch already, and we'll start these processes ASAP. You can also already do this with the products we have in place right now, because the technology will be the same and the yields in terms of kilowatt hours per kilowatts are pretty comparable when we looked to the utility products. That's why we have started this. Key markets to be seen. It's a strong business, I think globally, about 50% of the totally installed capacity is large-scale utility and some 25% or so are large C&I commercial industrial. It is the larger part of the market pretty much everywhere and we'll see what the best market to start will be.
The markets we have announced with Europe, U.S., one can assume that this will also be pretty important markets for the utility sector for us. Will the second module plant be in Germany, Europe or even in the U.S.? Again, we are in the middle of the selection process and we'll inform as soon as we are ready with this. Another question, to clarify your 2023 sales guidance is based on an assumption of distributors asking for more product in the 18 - 24 months rather than any actual orders on utility scale or actual orders from the distributors themselves. I think I explained how sales in PV is working. There is no distributor who gives you orders for 2023. For no one. It has nothing to do with Meyer Burger being a new entrant.
It depends on how successful the product is and then the replenishment taking place. What you have to see is that even with the amounts or with the volume we are now increasing and the sales volumes we are planning, maybe going back to this slide, our global market share is still very tiny. Because what you see here, with less than 1% in 2021, this is reflecting the market share in our target markets, not in the global market. For this year, just to give you a number, the small volume we are selling is less than 0.1% global market share. If you put the numbers in perspective, our market share will be very small, even with an accelerated growth plan based on a leading product with the features that I explained, which provide the end customer the best economical package.
It is more expensive in terms of the investment, but it's the better package in terms of the value generated. We believe this has a very good prospect. The same, of course, also for utility, because that is actually the metric used in utility since ever. All that matters is levelized cost of electricity. Nobody really cares for if it's a Swiss technology product. We believe we have the best means here and best technology in our hands to conquer these segments and these markets. When can we see a new ESG rating? I think probably related to that, we have appointed a chief sustainability officer a couple of days ago. We will be reporting accordingly once we have something to report on ESG. If it would not be, then we would not have appointed the chief sustainability officer.
It's a very high priority topic for Meyer Burger. Will the EUR 60 million factoring cover all the working capital needs for the 1.4 GW capacity sales for the next generation highlighted at the end of the presentation? It will cover the 1.4 GW, the 1 GW module sales we are doing. It depends a bit on how we are structuring also the additional second factory. It depends a little bit on what company inside Meyer Burger is doing the sale. It could cover the working capital needs for the 1.4 GW. That's the right answer. For the next generation highlighted at the end of the presentation, more than 24% efficiency, can that be made with the capacity announced today, or is that planned for the follow-on capacity planned for 2025?
It's not the technology that we are using now for the anticipated 1.4 growth. This will be based on the current technology, which also has continuous improvement potential, so we are not at the end of the possibilities, rather at the beginning of the technological life cycle. What you have seen from the announcement of the utility product, reaching almost 23% module efficiency, this is already a big step we are making. The next expansion is not based on this next-gen heterojunction technology. Maybe also add a comment, there's no necessity for a company to introduce a new technology and product as soon as you have it available. It's important to introduce it into the market as soon as you need it. The latter will be our guide, if we will, to decide when we are going to introduce it.
What is the assessment how the polysilicon discussion in Xinjiang will end, and what impact will this have on the price? As we have communicated, we are receiving our polysilicon from the companies who make the wafers for us. That's the correct term. They are receiving their silicon from Wacker in Germany. Reason is that N-type silicon requires the best polysilicon quality, and Wacker is among the undoubted leaders in terms of silicon quality. Wacker has confirmed to Meyer Burger that their supply chain is not affected by any forced labor. The overall impact of the current discussion, it is probably too early to comment, or to already know how it will impact.
It's definitely, in our opinion, providing us tailwinds, because it also emphasizes how important it is to an independent supply chain, as good as possible for a PV product, because one can deem this a consumer product. We believe that we are providing a critical infrastructure into the market, and this makes a lot of sense to think about more resilience. When will the announced IBC module come to the market? As I said, no decision made, not with the next expansion. Again, the product is not being launched as soon as we have it ready, but as soon as we need it. Working on the industrialization elements, building the equipment to produce it under our captive business model.
This is done in stealth, if you will. No one can see how we do this. We will come up when time is right with this super product in the years to come. This was the last question. If there are no further questions from you, I thank you for your interest and for listening in. We will speak soon and talk soon and have a superb day. Thank you.