Good afternoon, and welcome to this Q&A. My name is Åsa Hedin, and I'm the Chair of the Board of Tobii Dynavox. Today, we had our first annual general meeting, and a press release has been issued with the details. I'm happy to tell you that there were no deviations, and the full board has been reelected. Thank you for your confidence, and by that, I leave the word over to Fredrik Ruben, our CEO.
Great. Thank you, Åsa. Hello, everyone. Great to see you online and for those colleagues who are here in the Tobii Dynavox office in Danderyd outside of Stockholm. I will spend a few minutes here to talk a little bit about what Tobii Dynavox does, what our product, a little bit about the market we're addressing and how we address that. I will tell you a little bit of the year 2021 in summary, which feels like quite some time ago right now, but also of course some glimpses into what has happened so far in 2022. With that, let's roll. First of all, a very important part of what we are all about is our mission.
I would think it's safe to say that a lot of people that work in Tobii Dynavox or around Tobii Dynavox all do that largely because of what we do, and we formulate that as a vision statement saying we empower people with disabilities to do what they once did or never thought possible. That vision statement encompasses two distinct user journeys. The do what you once did, that is the person who led the normal life until the day she was diagnosed or something happened to her, for example, ALS, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury or the like, and we provide the means to help her do what she once did, meaning interact, use computers, maybe go, be active in work life or whatnot. The other story is never thought possible.
That's the millions of children who are being diagnosed every year with conditions such as cerebral palsy, autism, Down syndrome, and much, much more, where not too seldomly the infrastructure and network around that child puts a label on her saying she will never be able to, and we strongly disagree, and we have tens of thousands of proof out there of children born with that diagnosis, and they are doing what no one ever thought possible. Maybe a very, very telling example is the girl that you see in the picture here on this slide. Her name is Delaina, a cool girl from Florida, USA, and I'll let her introduce herself.
When you're born into a world not designed for you'll learn to roll with the flow. Pun most definitely intended. I'm the co-owner of Fearless Independence, a public speaker, a disability advocate, influencer, lifelong Floridian, and a proud University of Florida graduate. Oh, and I also have cerebral palsy. Hey, can I please have a tropical wonderland? Thanks. Which means communication can be a challenge. The I-Series cracked open the door enough to let me bust through. Cheers. With it, I've chatted with peers, questioned professors, challenged brands and companies to be more inclusive, and told my story both online and in front of a packed audience. The I-Series didn't make me who I am. It just gave me a voice. My name is Delaina Parrish, and I live fearless.
That was just one example of the hundreds of thousands of users who benefit from the type of technology that Tobii Dynavox provides. If I look a little bit at Tobii Dynavox as a company, we are listed on Nasdaq Stockholm as a separate entity past the split from Tobii, which I'll talk a little bit more about later, since December 9th of last year. We roughly have just under SEK 1 billion of revenue, consistently been a profitable company even though we were quite affected by the COVID pandemic, the past two years. We are roughly today 550 employees in the company, and the reason why that number on this slide is a bit lower is because we recently made two acquisitions that increased the size of the company.
We are serving some 65 markets either directly with our own sales force or through a big network of partner resellers. We are the clear leader in our industry. Some 40% of the overall market share of communication aids is held by Tobii Dynavox. If you go specifically into communication aids controlled with your eyes, as we saw with Delaina here, we have an even stronger market position. Speaking about the separation from Tobii founded some 21 years ago, centralized their business around the invention and technology of eye tracking.
However, under the umbrella of Tobii, we operated under three quite distinct business units, one of them being Tobii Dynavox, and the other two business units circling more on OEM and consumer electronics as well as research applications. Because of the quite significant difference in customers, ways of working, but also products, it became quite clear to us that separating these companies, not just in different business units, but actually as separate companies, made all the sense in the world. We jokingly say that sometimes the biggest and last remaining synergy was the Christmas party in the Stockholm office, true or not.
With that said, we embarked on a journey to separate the company, which of course is a fairly big effort for certain parts of the organizations, but frankly probably almost went unnoticed in the day-to-day life of other parts of the organization, namely sales, marketing, research and development, and much more. This concluded in a project that then made us two separate publicly listed companies on Nasdaq Stockholm on December 9th. Tobii listed the full group on Nasdaq back in 2015. Looking a little bit about at the organization of Tobii Dynavox. Roughly 500 employees spread out globally. In spite of being a Sweden-headquartered company, some three-quarters of our business stems out of North America, and specifically the U.S.
That also means that the U.S. is where we have a larger part of our staff, some 350 people or so. We also have presence in a number of markets outside of the U.S. and Stockholm, including U.K., Ireland, Norway, Sweden, China. We also have remote employees in certain locations. The company's run by myself. I've been the CEO for what is today Tobii Dynavox for the last eight-plus years. Together with me I have the assistant management team, but some of them have been in this industry way longer than me, and some of them have joined us more recently. Of course then bringing in a wealth of experience and competence from other industries and other types of companies.
You met also already Åsa. Åsa heads up the board of directors, which also is a new constellation been operational since July of 2021, that parts of the board of directors consist of known faces to us, including Henrik Eskilsson, one of the co-founders of Tobii, and Charlotta Falvin, who's also remains on the board of directors for Tobii. In addition to them, we have Carl Bandhold, and we have Caroline Ingre, who joined the board with their significant industry expertise, in Carl's case being formerly the chief financial officer for Permobil, and Caroline being one of the most well-renowned researchers and clinicians in the ALS community. If we look at the market that we're serving, again, think about the case of Delaina Parrish from Florida.
We estimate that there are about 50 million people living on the face of this earth that are unable to communicate by themselves, either because of a physical disability, a cognitive disability, or a combination. 50 million people, that's quite a large number, and that prevalence and incidence rate is pretty much the same regardless where you are geographically in the world. We then also estimate that some 2 million people are being diagnosed with these conditions every year. The actually horrible truth is that some only 2% of those being diagnosed are actually being helped. The rest are left silent, locked into their own bodies, unable, again, to be their true selves and contribute both to themselves and to this world.
This is of course a huge undertaking for us as the market leader to try to make a change to. The route to do that, we do it largely because of our products and solution, but also through our actions. I'll come back to that in my next slide. First of all, it's important to stress the fact that Tobii Dynavox is not a hardware manufacturing tech company. We're a life science company, and we offer a plethora of solution that kind of spans the entire user journey. It starts on the left on this picture with the content. That's the content, for example, if you're preliterate or never had the ability to go to a normal education, then symbols and symbol communication is the world standard in how you learn communication.
The PCS symbols page set, which symbol set is developed by us, maintained by us, and is really that world standard of symbol communication. It can be found in our communication aids. It can be found in the communication aids by other industry players, but also in mainstream applications such as Microsoft Office. In addition to that, and quite recently, we also acquired Acapela Group, a Belgian-headquartered company who are the world leader in this space when it comes to synthetic voices. The synthetic voice is, of course, a super important part of your personality and who you are. Those assets, similar to the symbols, is something that is also licensed to other industry players, but also other accessibility and non-accessibility applications out there, for example, on trains, cars, customer interaction.
We take that content, and then we put it into a software. The software is then typically tailored towards the user. The user could be a beginning communicator, someone newly diagnosed. It can be a person who just simply needs a means to replace their physical ability to control a computer or type on a keyboard. It can also be the tool for the teacher in the special education classroom. Third step is that we in most cases take that software and we build a medically certified, very rugged piece of hardware that is tailored towards the user. This is a device that is typically, again, very rugged, has specific features, including large batteries, front-facing speakers, the ability to mount it on a bed or a wheelchair, and then in certain cases also interaction technologies such as eye tracking. It doesn't stop there.
Of course, the prescribers or therapists that typically work with our user groups, they not too seldomly need help, both in assessing, is this a tool and a technology fit for my patient, as well as once there's a check in that box, the assistance and help to go through the typically enormous amount of bureaucracy and paperwork to get funding through a public or private insurance system. We do that. In the U.S. alone, we're over 50 people in our team that on a day-to-day basis process funding orders and packages in order to help our users and prescribers through quite cumbersome process. Last but not least, we're there.
We're out there on social media or in call centers or over email and chat to help our users in a number of languages and time zones to be successful, help and guide them through their journey of being communicators. This is also important to stress the fact that Tobii Dynavox is not just the middle part. The fact that we can provide the entire series of solution is what's truly sets us apart, and adding to that we do it on a global scale. Now I'm gonna run back and talk just briefly about the year 2021. Again, here, in May of 2022 this feels like old news, but it's important to stress the fact that 2021 was a very, very eventful year for Tobii Dynavox.
As mentioned, on December 9th, we concluded a very eventful year with the listing on Nasdaq Stockholm. That, of course, was a major event internally for the company, but also sets us on this journey, one of the reasons for example, standing here. We agreed a little bit earlier in the fourth quarter to acquire then our long-standing partner, Acapela Group, who provide then the synthetic voices and voice technologies. This deal was closed formally just a couple of weeks ago. We had a business climate heavily influenced negatively again by the COVID pandemic.
Just to put that into some reality, we operate towards a user group which by definition can be seen as vulnerable or a user group that has largely been locked in because of the pandemic. For us to be able to do the assessment and interact with the users was quite complicated during the course of the pandemic. In addition to that, a lot of our products are made from components that have been scarce resources. It's been difficult for us to source all kinds of components to manufacture and produce our products. In addition to that, the cost structure and complexity of shipping these products has been quite hard.
This means that even though we entered into the pandemic already in 2020 with quite high ambitions and hopes for a much more rapid growth, we saw a year not with decline but with a very, very meager increase in revenue. We're still proud that we're able to maintain just above flat revenue, but of course, we hope for more, and we are really geared to grow more. Specifically, a year ago was extreme, very problematic. We were then standing for over three months without the ability to produce our number one selling product, the I-Series, which you saw that Delaina was using. In that specific case, it was a shortage of LCD displays that made it difficult for us.
Since then, we have also found ways both to produce and secure supply of our products but also built up significantly bigger safety stocks. We feel much more at ease about our ability right now to continue to deliver in spite of a challenging climate, but this is also something we are on a daily basis. Not everything centered around the pandemic. We were also able to develop and launch probably one of our most groundbreaking products in the history, the TD Pilot, which was a consequence of a quite long-standing collaboration together with Apple, which solved probably the number one question that I have received from the market. Does it work on an iPad?
To be able to control an iPad using only your eye gaze has required quite a lot of innovation and technical collaboration between us and Apple to make that happen. This product was then launched in November, and we're now starting to see quite good uptake of that product in the market. If I summarize 2021 as a year, flat organic, and as you can see on this slide, second quarter was experiencing quite significant headwind because of supply chain disruptions. But if we adjust for delivery issues, we grew by roughly 2% in the year, which is below our targets, which I will come back to a little bit later.
We had our gross margin, hampered by the fact of component shortages, increased cost of components, and then, challenges in logistics. That was lower than usual. We had some other one-time costs, associated with separation away from Tobii Group. We had a cost-based comparison on the previous year in 2020, which was also a COVID year, which is difficult to compare with because in 2020 we had quite significant work time reduction efforts. In addition to that, we got government grants in several countries. The cost base in 2020 was actually artificially low. That makes the profitability comparison quite difficult also with the year prior to 2021. All in all, we ended up with an EBIT margin of 7%.
If we do a rough mathematical equation and say we take away some of these one-timers, the underlying EBIT margin was roughly 9%. Still profitable, still growing, but not at the levels that we expect and assume we will be able to deliver in a normalized world. Since we recently issued our first quarter report, we can just say that 2022 is off to a good start. We have launched yet another product, which again was developed largely during a pandemic time, the TD I-110, which is a communication aid but does not have eye tracking, yet it's medically certified. Typical user group for this product is users with autism and other motor functional but non-verbal users.
We made another acquisition this time of our long-standing reseller partner in the Irish market in order for us to better serve the Irish market, Safe Care Technologies. As I already mentioned, we finally closed the acquisition of Acapela Group on April 29, and they are since then now a fully integrated and fully owned division within Tobii Dynavox. We felt in the first quarter and specifically at the end a clear ramp up and improvements related to the pandemic. Less lockdowns, less hindrances, and more open doors. This is definitely there is a pent-up demand that we will be able to hopefully cater for and serve much, much better in time going forward.
Before some closing remarks, when I say that we didn't really meet our targets and what we believe is good during the pandemic time, that should be seen in the relation that our long-term financial targets states that we want to grow the company with more than 10% if you adjust for currency every year, and we want to do that in a profitable way, meaning that we would like to maintain an EBIT margin of 15% or more. We will have a certain debt structure in the company because we believe, given the fact that 80% of our users are some sort of insurance systems and the consistent profitability and cash flow that we have produced, that we should have a debt leverage of around 2.5x last 12 months EBITDA, and that could swing ±0.5x .
Last but not least, as you can see both in the invite and the conclusions from the annual general shareholders meeting, this year we did not pay a dividend. Our focus is to first of all build up the balance sheet for Tobii Dynavox. If there are other strategic matters such as additional acquisitions, that will take priority. Unless those are considered done, we will be a dividend-paying company at some point in the near future. Concluding Tobii Dynavox both as an employee, as a colleague, as an investor, we would like to stress some of the facts that covers who we are and what we do. First of all, our products are life-changing.
With the solutions we provide, they don't just change the life for the user, but typically the people around her and society at large. We are the clear global leader in a very specialized market. We are operating in a market which is underpinned by good trend, accessibility, sustainability, and all the factors that we stand for is something that we of course appreciate, but many with us. We have an unmatched portfolio of solutions and product, not just the hardware or eye tracking that you may know us for, but it spans across the entire user journey, from content all the way to support. We have a solid track record of profitable growth, and we maintain that also in almost like a perfect storm situation that we experienced during the pandemic.
We also believe that the value creation we have, we're creating by separating Tobii into two parts should be a long-standing, long-term opportunity for us to grow even faster than we have done in the past. With that said, I'm concluding this call. Thank you all for listening in. Thank you for being shareholders or just friends of Tobii Dynavox and conclude this meeting. If you want more information, don't ever hesitate to reach out. Thank you.