Greetings to all of you, and a warm welcome to today's ABB E-mobility Capital Markets Day. My name is Andrea Wüest, Head of Investor Relations and Business Development at ABB E-mobility. I briefly would like to draw your attention to these important notices, especially our use of non-GAAP measures and any forward-looking information that you may hear today and could contain uncertainties. Today, we will hear about the market environment of ABB E-mobility, its product offering, go-to-market approach, technology and R&D, business strategy, and a financial overview. There'll be two Q&A sessions giving you the opportunity to ask questions. To submit a question, please use the chat tool in the window of the webcast. We aim to finish the event by around 4:30 PM CT. Now, we come to a short introductory video after which Frank Mühlon, CEO of ABB E-mobility, will continue.
The future is electric. A very warm welcome also from my side. Today, I'm joined by a very international team. My colleague, Alex Hall, CFO of ABB E-mobility. Andreas Müller, heading up the product portfolio line. Waqas Arshad, our Head of Technology, coming here all the way from the United States, and Andrea, whom you already met. Why are we doing what we do? What is the purpose of our business? It's all about making this planet a better place, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and tackling the climate crisis, which is one of the biggest challenges we have in this century. Driving electric really reduces greenhouse gas emissions significantly. Like you can see on this graph, which is actually data from the IEA, not our data, from pure driving, you save about 70% of greenhouse gas emissions.
From driving plus production of the vehicle, so the overall life cycle, about 50%. We believe this is really significant. Now, looking at the facts and the figures, the size and the shape of the business we talk about today to give you an insight here. Over the last few years, since 2017, we invested in this business $256 million. About half of that is investment into R&D. We had last year $323 million in revenues, reflecting a top-line growth of 60%, 61% over the last few years, compound annual growth. To date, we sold more than 650,000 AC chargers, more than 30,000 DC chargers globally.
Globally means we're in more than 85 countries with more than 1,000 employees, of which more than 350 working in R&D, and also created more than 350 patents. This puts us, we believe, strongly into the number one position in the EV charging industry. Our business is nicely diversified. About 50% of the business is in Europe, about 25% in the Americas, about 25% in Asia, Middle East, Africa. When you look at the customers, we have the largest customer group is CPOs, charge point operators, with 34%. Followed by OEMs, means car manufacturers, public transportation, destination and home charging, and fleet charging.
Our business is structured in three pillars. The first pillar is really our core business, where we are strong at, where we're coming from, is our history and our present. It's the AC and DC charging hardware. Together with this hardware, we have B2B and B2C digital services which are connected to it and, which we grow. On top of that, we put advanced energy and advanced fleet management as the third pillar, but more about that at a later stage. This business is also a business which has a long history for us. We are in this business actually, or in this market, when the market started to exist, so more than 10 years ago, which really puts us in a unique position, and it's a solid history like no one else.
We started in that business alone as ABB, but then we acquired a company in the Netherlands called Epyon in Delft in 2011, which then was basically the heart of the business from where we grew it. We were the first ones to roll out nationwide networks of DC fast chargers back then in Estonia, in the Netherlands, in Denmark, and so on and so forth. We had a lot of first-to-market with a lot of new technologies, and I spare you all these history details because the industry is moving extremely fast. Let's rather look at what were recent achievements and recent topics we wanna communicate with you. This is a mix of own development and of M&A.
I like to start with the first high power charger with liquid-cooled cables in 2018 already. We had then in 2019, 2020 an acquisition in China of a company called Chargedot, where we acquired 67% of share back then, and this put us on the map in China and for AC charging as well. Bidirectional charger we launched 2020, 11 kW for residential. We also bought a company in 2021 in Belgium, Enervalis, which helps us to work on energy management and virtual power plant, but also here much more later. Just 2021, we launched the Terra 360, the world's fastest EV charger as a single unit, 360 kW for outlets. You will also hear more about that later.
We're very proud about that. Just a recent announcement from last week is that we acquired a majority share in a U.S. company In-Charge Energy to put us stronger on the map in the United States and for fleet management. Now, looking a bit at the ecosystem we're in, it's a complex market, and we're at the crossroad between the automotive industry and the electrical industry. There is a lot of fields we're working on. The blue bubbles that's basically our hardware focus, and the green bubbles is the software focus where we also build it out. It's a lot of playground, a lot of play fields, and we really develop both of them. The important thing here and the important message to take away is that we are at the centerpiece between automotive and energy.
If we look at our business case, why it's a good business case, why we love this business, is tons of good reasons. Here is seven of them, which we believe is the most important ones. Well, first, it's a very interesting market. It's a growth market which we can address. Second, we have a global leadership position in that market. Third, we are a tech innovator. Number four, we have a nice high-growth outlook, and talk about that later anyway. Fifth, we have an optimal setup synergistically with ABB, which really differentiates us in this market. Number six, we are an ESG business through and through. Number seven, we have a very clear, precise strategy which will win.
With this, I come to the next section of the presentation, talking you through industry, market, and the competitive landscape, and to show you how that market is nicely growing and how we are positioned in this market. First, let's look at the drivers. What is driving this market? What is making it interesting? Again, I start with the emissions. Transportation is really one of the major sources for greenhouse gas emissions. According to studies, 27%-29% of all total global greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. To take this out is a major contribution. Secondly, because of this, there is a lot of regulation in place. Regulation and also social push to reduce this emission and then consequently to shift to EVs.
Another driver, like in every industry, is if the affordability is there, so if the cost goes down of a new technology. This is happening as we speak, so for the EVs because of the batteries. Here we clearly see another driver so that the total cost of ownership, of owning and driving an EV will become much more interesting going forward. That also means there's a rising demand for EVs. The OEMs respond to that. We really see a lot of EVs hitting newly the market. If you have more models to choose, the likelihood that you will choose your next model to be an electric one is much more higher. Then, of course, there is significant investment in infrastructure, and this is what's driving us. This is all the drivers we see.
If you look at this investment, so to put some numbers to it, the total investment into infrastructure, and when I talk infrastructure, I mean the hardware plus the installation. This has, to date, till end of last year, been roughly estimated at $43 billion, cumulative obviously. That will cumulate to 2040 as an estimate up to $590 billion. That is a significant market, and I think for everyone playing in this market can be happy. Structuring this market a bit more, segmenting it to understand it a little bit better, is this slide. This is data from a study from Roland Berger, and it's showing that the market end of last year, total market was at $3.9 billion, and it's growing to $11.1 billion by 2026.
Now, this is revenues or revenue potential as a total market, and it shows that the categories of high power charging in DC and regular DC charging are the drivers for that market or the largest portions in that market, followed by AC charging, and then on top all you need for servicing and maintenance and the software, and also the software for the energy management around. We believe this is really significant and happy to play in this market. Overall, 23% as a growth rate in this market. You might ask, "Yeah, shouldn't that be more?" I mean, what you hear about how EVs are growing, that's higher numbers than what we project here. The understanding here of the logic is that going forward, the utilization rate of EV charging infrastructure will be higher.
At the same time, you also will see more urbanization, meaning that not every car will go with the charger. You might see more charging hubs and also chargers get more outlets. Looking at the market, you can also segment that market geographically. That's the circle on the top. Still China is playing a major role, really significant as a very large market, followed by Europe and then North America and then rest of world. Looking at how we see the markets to extent. What is making the market wider? It's actually we see two buckets here. One is the energy and fleet management, that is a significant market size of about $7 billion by 2030. Obviously including lots of stuff, not only our stuff, to be clear, but that's very important, that's growing.
The other piece is we do not only talk about on the right side of that slide, we do not only talk about cars or buses. Now, we also talk about aircrafts, so vertical take-off and landing. We talk about small boats and yachts. We talk about virtual power plants or automated connection devices. Now, it's a very interesting market. It's not only us as ABB seeing this, lots of others see that as well. We have here on this slide show, like, without names, the 12 next peers in the market. We all play in this market. But what is differentiating ABB, I think the biggest differentiator is that we really play across all these verticals.
We play in all geographies, we play in all the segments, and we also play AC and DC, and on the software side, we play energy, we play fleet, and we play obviously asset management service and maintenance. That is the biggest differentiator. It's the size, the footprint, and the offering. With that, I close that section. Thank you. I have the pleasure to tell you a little bit more about our offering. Our offering is mostly structured in three main pillars. It's the hardware, it is the digital offering, and it's services. All these three together we can in a modular way combine to drive and give the most value to our customers. This offering, as explained by Frank previously, has been built over more than a decade.
I'm very excited to now give you a bit more details on it. ABB E-mobility is leading the way to zero emission in the future. We enable this with this offering portfolio by making it possible to do charging. Charging is not equal to charging. We have a lot of different use cases, and you see here on this slide a couple of examples. We can charge at home with AC charging. We can charge in the office with AC or DC charging. On the routes, on the highway, but we can also charge fleets and buses on either opportunity charging or in depots. All these different segments have different needs, and we are actually building our portfolio to be able to modularly tune our offering for these specific segments.
ABB is present in all these key segments, but we are also cautious to not play everywhere. We are in these segments when they are large enough by scale and when we see a benefit from going in there with our platforms and our technology. I will give you now a couple of examples of our offering on the next slide.
Again, on this Slide, you see here on top the use cases, but now you see here also our offering a bit more explained. In the middle part of the Slide, you see our widest hardware portfolio, and on the bottom you see the different digital enablers combined with these hardware solutions that really go into these different use cases. If I explain you a little bit the structure of this offering, at the very left you have our wall box offering, which consists of a DC portfolio and an AC portfolio.
In this segment, we also have our latest addition to the wall box family, the Terra Nova, which is a bi-directional 11 kW charger, which is, by its technology and by its use case, very innovative because we really believe that V2G charging is going to be extremely relevant in the future as well. In the middle, you are seeing our very vast range of DC fast charging, where we have started 10 years ago with our first multi-charger, so 50 kW, the Terra 51, and we have gradually grown this portfolio up to 360 kW. You can also see that there are two flavors. There's a split portfolio and an all-in-one portfolio. Split meaning where the power cabinet and the dispensers are separate from each other.
In particular, that split portfolio we can use not just for high power charging on highways, but very often in bus depots where the space constraints are not allowing to put bigger chargers. The third range is the so-called pantograph-based charging. We have the opportunity charging use cases, so charging a bus along the route with very high powers, and we can do this both panto up or panto down, which are two different flavors of this use case. We do this up to 600 kW, but actually 600 kW will not do the job for the next step in this portfolio, which is shown at the very right of the slide, which is about megawatt charging.
We already see very firm commitments and prototypes of e-trucks coming to the road that will need megawatt range of charging, and we are going to launch already this year first prototypes and pilots with selected OEMs to step into that megawatt plus range. On the bottom, you see again these digital enablers, and depending on the use case, you will need more or less of these digital enablers to get the most out of this hardware. I will now deep dive in a few of these use cases more specifically. 'Cause if we abstract away from the product, you can say there's a group of generic key features, and these generic key features are relevant for some of these end markets, more or less relevant. Key features can be user experience, customization capabilities, the flexibility due to modularity.
Saying you can upgrade power over time, or you can have multiple outlets. It's about supporting global charging standards. As mentioned by Frank earlier, we are globally present. We can do GB charging to a CHAdeMO charging or CCS charging to be a bit technical here, but you can cover all these regional standards. We have several payment and authentication options, but also we can integrate this charger very well with various backends. Our own technologies, but more importantly, also compatible technologies from other providers in this space. We have a future-proof interoperability between the charger and the car. Last but not least, the whole capability of digitally diagnosing and monitoring these chargers and to provide energy and fleet management.
If we go to one of these end markets now, to explain a little bit more how specifically we drive the value for our customers, I would like to start with the segment of charge point operators. CPOs, they have one main mission. It's at the best possible user experience to sell as much as possible energy to their customers, and this at the lowest possible total cost of ownership. The expectation of CPOs towards ABB E-mobility are very product and service-oriented. Typically, charge point operators, especially the larger ones, have extensive own IT infrastructure, payment solutions, that they want to tap into, but they need to have the right hardware and service to do so. What you see here are our two main portfolios in this segment.
We have, again, the split charger on the left and on the right side, the high power charger, the all-in-one 360-kilowatt, which is the last addition to our fast charging family that we have just launched last year, which has created a lot of excitement. Just yesterday, again, we have opened up a very nice site in Germany with this product. We are one of the few ones who can really offer both type of products in this segment. We actually let the customer choose what they prefer. The benefit of the split solution is quite obvious. It's about lower noise and low footprint close to the parking area where the EV is charging because the power is detached and it's somewhere else.
The benefit of the all-in-one charger is that the total cost of ownership might be slightly more attractive because you have only one foundation and one cabinet to be installed. At the end, there are, however, a lot of commonalities. It's about user experience. We have LEDs, the display, very long cable reach, so that we can really make charging as comfortable as possible. I would also like to highlight the modularity. As you can see on the charger on the right, but we can also offer the same technology on the left, you can have up to four cables served by one power block. We can distribute the power very flexibly, and that allows the operators to use this product in a very modular and flexible way. Another segment that I would like to highlight is the segment of OEMs or car manufacturers.
OEMs are almost a bit more like a partner in the ecosystem rather than just a customer. Partners because they are actually also driving new standards and launching new cars. Together with the OEMs, we are collaborating on this process. We co-develop, we make prototypes, we validate the technology, we drive standardization often together, and we bring products to the market. A good example is our high-power charging portfolio, where we have started with selected OEMs very early in the process. Due to that tight relationship, we're the first ones to launch liquid-cooled charging at 350 kW, both in the U.S. and in the European markets. Another domain that is very important with OEMs is interoperability.
Interoperability, not just between the car and the charger, but more and more due to the latest development on the standards where we have also so-called Plug & Charge. Plugging in as a customer and then an automatic launch of a payment transaction. We need to consider the back-end system in this process as well. We do a lot of work there in our innovation labs in Delft and in other locations to make that work smoothly. The third area where we're obviously working with OEMs is OEMs as a customer for our products. We are selling a lot of products, and one of the key interests for companies like car manufacturers is that we can offer all these different standards. When an OEM works with us, they can get chargers for all their geographic markets. We can also customize these chargers. We see here two examples.
We have made the Porsche Wallbox in the past, the Denza Wallbox, which is a BYD company. We can also customize more on the display level, but overall, we can really package our products in a way that are very attractive to OEMs. The next segment is about fleet charging or public transport. That segment is very special and is a bit different to the previous two because actually it is more about the solution rather than just a product. The EV or the vehicle, the bus, the logistic fleet, becomes part of the solution, and that is very specific then also from a domain know-how that you need to bring into this market. There are a lot of operational aspects in this. As you can see on the slide, there are different types of charging a fleet.
You have this opportunity charging en route, as I've mentioned previously, where we are really leading and have a very large installed base of several hundred of these pantograph chargers in the world already. You can also charge at a depot. If you charge at a depot, you're obviously extremely concerned when multiple buses together are charging at the same time. You have all these fleet management aspects coming into play, and ABB can offer fleet management and energy management to optimize the processes around these depots. Just to give you a bit of a flavor of how special some of these use cases are. If a bus needs to leave in the morning, it needs to have the right temperatures.
There are certain markets where it's even possible for the bus driver to refuse to enter in a bus when the temperature is not at the right level. If the bus has to be preheated or pre-cooled, it, however, means that it's drawing energy. To draw that energy from the battery, you want to avoid. You are actually in parallel charging again this bus to make sure that it's fully charged when it leaves the depot. Now, to do this, after maybe few hours of charging at the early part of the night, and then much later to wake up again the infrastructure and the bus to do that preconditioning in a good way, are just a few of these very special use cases that are creating, first of all, kind of a boundary for others to come into this market.
We have been able to establish a lot of capabilities in this domain already. Definitely, also service and support plays a major role in this segment. Now, a bit away from the products, let's focus a bit on our digital offering. Our digital offering is split into three main areas, asset management, energy management, and fleet management. On asset management, we have two flavors. We have a flavor more also that we use together with our AC charger, which are use cases where consumers, like the drivers, in their garage or at work, want to interact with the charger. For this, we have apps. We also have mobile apps for installers that need to configure and install these chargers.
For the fast charging or for very large fleet, we are using more web-based asset management, and we have there our own platform where we have more than 20,000 chargers connected. All these chargers are delivering information that we can use, and they are allowing us to interact with these chargers. This can happen completely in parallel to an interaction between the back ends of the customers with these chargers. We are very agnostic there in the approach. Some of these features that we are offering in the B2B space are around remote support and monitoring, software updates, but there are also a couple of more specific examples that I would now like to deep dive a bit. One example of this IoT platform is that we can see all the charge sessions from these chargers.
Often, this information for large operators can be kind of redundant because they might have the same information on their payment and back-end systems. There are a lot of customers that do not have such an infrastructure, such as fleet operators, and they are using our tools to get information about the sessions, how they have been stopped and started, how much energy has been delivered. Also, customers with the back-end often use our info in our charge session data to align with us on KPIs, on performance and SLA delivery and just to monitor and get executive summaries more as of how the network is doing. There are also specific features in this asset management domain that are much more about having a strong, tight connection between our specific hardware and embedded software and architecture and the back-end system.
We have some advanced actions that we can trigger from this platform. We can reboot subsets of the charger. We can trigger self-diagnostics. Obviously, in this domain, there is a whole range of innovation that we are partially working on, this coming in the future in the aspects of predictive maintenance, et cetera. This offering is very strongly tied to the hardware and embedded software know-how we have. This is quite unique and adds a lot of value to our customers as well. At the end, it's all about reducing the total cost of ownership for all these equipment in the market and installed outside. The next example that is also in the domain of asset management is related to our displays.
We have spent a lot of effort over the last years to make our display extremely configurable, and we are launching now with the latest software release, the capability to go from our standard display to a customized display, where we have just made here a bit of a mockup to show what you can do with this. This process does not involve any IT specialist, special tools, special agreement. You can actually do this on your desk with a couple of clicks, changing text, then changing screen savers, changing content on the screen, and deploy this to either all chargers or subset of chargers. You can even have customized HMI specific on the sites, at the co-location partners you have, et cetera.
This is a good example of really a value-adding service that we enable with our technology, where we have end-to-end control from digital over embedded to hardware. There's a lot to come in that domain, including dynamic content triggered by OCPP, et cetera. There's a very exciting path we are on here with the displays. Another very interesting domain is energy management, the second main pillar of our digital offering. What you can see here on this slide is a bit of a technical representation that's actually, on the one side, a schematic overview of a complex site, but it also shows a little bit of a trajectory over time. In the early days of charging, it was mostly about having a charger and making sure this charger charges with all the vehicles. It was about interoperability, about the hardware, and that's it.
Over time, this, let's say, mission-critical approach changed into complex situations where the number of chargers exceeded actually the total installed power on that site. You needed to have some kind of logic on the site, a local site controller that arranges the power between these different chargers. This use case we call don't blow the fuse, because you just want to avoid that your infrastructure is not overstressing your grid connection. At some point, okay, you have 12, 16 chargers, more and more like the sites are increasing on both depots and fleet charging, as well as in the public space. You can not facilitate the charging with the given grid connections. Then more and more BESS systems or battery storage systems are deployed as well.
If you combine these two, we are in the second and the third pillar of the process, which is what we call peak shaving and optimizing the cost of your grid connection and of your energy consumption. The step number four is to also take other consumers and other sources of power into account that you might have on-site. Here, it's very important also to say that this offering is really hardware-agnostic. We can actually do all these processes with the site controller, integrating a BESS, or integrating all the devices or all the chargers, because we have technology that is based on open standards.
Also here, very important can be the contribution of other ABB units that are in the domain of distribution systems, where the ABB mobility pillar and the ABB pillar together can really offer a very nice package solution. Now, the fifth step in this charge is a very exciting one. It's about not just considering what happens on-site, but also introducing other aspects like weather forecast, fleet schedules, I will mention that later again, and to just predict in a much more advanced way with predictive mechanisms, how the load on that depot will develop. ABB, with the acquisition of Enervalis, has the technology to do all these five steps today in practice, in operation.
We are having in a European country, for instance, already a so-called virtual power plant in operation, where we are using 20,000 AC chargers from a large charge point operator, and we are throttling or increasing the power of these chargers based on what we see is happening on the grid. With this flexibility that we can offer to the grid, we can actually deliver and tap into a new revenue stream, which is called energy services or frequency reserve services. Very exciting that we have all this in place, and we are able to play on all these different levels of use cases. Now, the third pillar of our digital offering, which we are really also very excited about, is fleet management. In fleet management, we have put the EV at the heart of the offering.
Why is that important? Because the EV at the end for every fleet operator is what drives the value. A fleet manager does not care about charging infrastructure. He cares about goods being delivered or people being brought to a location they need to go to. Conventional perspectives have always excluded this fleet aspect, and have really looked at the charging on site more from an infrastructure point of view. Now how do we do this? We have developed an offering where we can use telemetry information from the fleet, either via APIs from car manufacturers, via a beacon that we can deploy in the vehicles that collects information about driving patterns, or if these both are not applicable, we can also use apps from the drivers where we can collect information.
With this information about where the EV is, what its driving patterns are, etc., we can optimize a lot of things. Among others, we can optimize how you operate your fleet, but we can also predict much better what energy need you have. We charge EVs, not to the full 100% SOC, but we are charging them only to the level that are needed for the EV to do the job it needs to do. There is a very tight connection between energy management and fleet management. This offering is, per definition and from the way we have built it up, completely agnostic, and we can now combine information from different sites and the information from the fleet into one overall value proposition. We have two main offerings now launched and in the piloting phase in this space.
One is a so-called charge planning algorithm tool, ChargePilot. I will demo this in a minute. The other one is an EV transition tool. Because before you can even optimize, you need to convince fleets or sometimes support fleets in this step to go from conventional fleets to electric fleets. This transition tool allows fleet operators to take the telemetry from existing combustion engine fleets, upload them to the system, and the system will propose what type of EV they may be possibly able to use to do the duty cycle of this fleet, where should they charge or invest into charging infrastructure, but also give KPIs about how much CO2 they will save, which is often one of the key drivers in the process of convincing fleet operators to take the step from conventional to electric cars.
Very excited about this. Now let's go into the demonstration video where we are highlighting our very fleet management-centric tool, showing a bit the life or the afternoon of a person managing such a fleet. You can see here a charging plan on various chargers on a depot, and they represent the total power usage at the bottom. Here, the energy management comes into play because we can optimize obviously that curve in a way that allows to avoid that we have grid problems. Now let's go a bit into the daily life of such a fleet manager. Here you see the charging park. Some EVs are coming back from their shifts, and they are charging on various locations.
The fleet manager can now get a good overview of where we are, and if a fleet manager wants to, we can dive in some of these assets. You can look at chargers. For instance, here, an AC charger can be of any brand. You can see transactions that have happened. You can operate firmware, you can stop charging, et cetera. But most importantly, you can also dive into the EV, which is actually different to many of the other solutions that are out there. You can see the schedule of this fleet over time and how it is charging at the moment. Now what is essential is that you can actually manage exceptions in the process because you want to just run the fleet. You don't want to micromanage. The system here has given a warning that one of the chargers went offline.
You click onto it, and you can see that what should be the recommendation, how to interact now with this situation. It actually proposes to reboot the charger on-site, and hopefully, after that reboot, you could get the charger back online, and then the fleet manager can more or less lean back again and check what's happening. There's another alarm. There's an EV that has been charging unexpectedly. This can be a big problem for your charging plan because it can disrupt your schedule. You might wanna stop the charging now from the tool, or you might wanna intervene on-site and instruct the driver to do something differently. Another probably most typical use case or situation on such a fleet is that an EV might be delayed. Here I feed a scenario.
It's 9:30 PM, and one of the EVs is not yet back. At some point, this is now not so critical, because it's just delayed, but the charging schedule is not yet at risk. The tool just gives you a warning. At some point, that delay will increase, and eventually, you will go from a warning threshold to a alarm threshold because you could not achieve the targeted schedule of charging anymore in this situation. The tool now proposes you what to do, which could be either to reallocate that charging from an AC charger on that site to a central DC charger, maybe a public DC charger, or to change the EV. Also here, it's all about managing the exceptions so that the fleet manager can act where he needs to and is not disturbed by all the rest.
We are really excited about these offerings, and we are looking forward to launch more in this space to the market. Now let's wrap up the digital offering. We have asset management, and in this category, also some basic e-mobility service provider solutions, such as payment and authorization. We have energy management, and we have fleet management. Most of the customers need a subset of these different offerings, or maybe some even of all three pillars. What we have done, and that is what we believe is so special about our approach, is that we have modularized this offering in a way that different customer segments can take a bundle of these different modules, typically from at least two, but sometimes also three, to make a full digital end-to-end offering. I give you an example.
If you are, for instance, a hotel, you might be very interested into asset management, some basic, authorization capabilities, maybe even a bit of payment. You definitely need energy management because your site has not been thought of originally to have also chargers there. Probably you don't need fleet management so much. If you, however, are a company with a large, fleet of service cars, for instance, or salespeople being on the road, you might actually need exactly the first two as well, but then you add the fleet element to it as well.
If you now combine this digital offering with our leading hardware and our huge, installed base of several ten thousands of chargers, in the DC space and hundreds of thousands in the AC space, we have a huge addressable market for this digital offering, and we have even more so an opportunity to grow because, as explained earlier, in particular, energy and fleet management are completely hardware-agnostic. Now let's go to the third pillar of our offering, which I've mentioned in the beginning, which is actually service. Not a single charger in that world will deliver any value if it is not commissioned and if it doesn't operate.
It is very critical for many of our chargers and for our customers, and we have seen that our most experienced operators have matured a lot over time by expecting more and more a very stringent uptime management and availability. To do so, you need to have a backbone in service. We have a structure, again, here a modular solution where we have some digitally enabled services like remote diagnostics and monitoring, but also more conventional services such as preventive maintenance, training, spare part management, et cetera. We can put this together in quite a standardized way for a large majority of the customer. If there are large operators, we can also do a very tailor-made approach here.
Due to these remote capabilities, we can really avoid a lot of traveling by fixing things before even traveling there, and this really reduces total cost of ownership. If we have to deploy someone, we can do that also in a very efficient way with more than 200 service centers, consisting of own ABB E-mobility personnel, ABB personnel, or third parties. We have been able to scale these operations in the last 10 years, where in some countries we had barely more than 20 chargers and still needed to do service, up to today, where we have sometimes 1,000 to 2,000 chargers in one geography. We are very excited about what we have been able to establish here, and it really helps us to support customers in lowering total cost of ownership.
With these three pillars, hardware, digital, and service, I hopefully could give you an example and explain a bit why we are so excited about our offering and what we're doing, and why we are also successfully been able to take a leading position in that market. With this, I would like to hand over to Frank, who will explain a bit more how we will bring these different products to the market.
Thank you very much, Andreas. What a wonderful introduction in our portfolio, and I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you could really see how wide this portfolio actually is. Thank you, Andreas. Now we wanna have a look on how do we bring this to market, and I wanna give you a rough overview of this. I will just introduce you now on the segment approach, how we look at it, on how we are clustered by countries, how our collaboration with ABB is in that regard, and finally, on where we produce our hardware. When we look at the market itself, and you saw it on one of the earlier slides, in the segmentation, we look at five different segments, the CPOs being the largest ones.
Here I'd like to just give a few examples, for those of you who might not be that deep in the industry because I think that really helps a bit better to understand. Charge point operators, so that is, customers we have, like IONITY, like Shell, like GRIDSERVE, like many, many others, who are specialized in offering charging services for the people, who are usually on the road and, wanna charge there. How do we go to market there? It's usually a direct business. It's a direct sale, and in a few cases is also via distribution as a channel approach or via EPCs. With CPOs or with, international CPOs, we work extremely well because we're scalable and, have really the power to support over different geographies.
That's about 34% of our order intake from last year. When we look at the second segment, it's the OEMs, car manufacturers. Here we talk about car manufacturers, we talk about truck or bus manufacturers. Again, it's a direct business, and there's a couple of examples here. One would be PACCAR, a U.S. manufacturer for trucks. We just launched a press release yesterday, as we signed a frame agreement with them to support them when they roll out trucks and infrastructure, so that we are a supplier for this infrastructure. Or with car manufacturers, we talk about giving wall boxes, usually AC wall boxes, also as a white labeled approach. The third segment is public transportation. What does it mean? Public transportation is transit. In U.S. terms, it's basically e-bus.
This is an offering where you have an E-bus, charge it in a bus depot or charge it on the route, like with an overhead charger. Here, good examples or use cases is the city of Hamburg, where we have a huge depot for overnight bus charging, which was an end-to-end solution build out. What we are just in the build out phase right now is in Qatar for the whole fleet, bus fleet in Doha. Just as some examples. Again, this is a direct business usually, but it can also go together with a utility, for example, so that is really quite flexible. The fourth segment is destination and home. Here, usually we go either together with utilities or we go really with distributors, with wholesalers as a channel.
This can also be shops and retail shops and so on and so forth, because it's then also partially as destination and it's more the low power segment. Number five is the fleets. Here we really talk about delivery fleets. Examples here on the smaller vehicles is the Austrian Post. More than 2,000 vehicles driving around Austria to deliver the post each and every day. Or Zasco, a larger delivery fleet or Albert Heijn in the Netherlands. This is also examples. Could be a direct business, could be a distribution business, could be an EPC business as a channel, so could be different. What is important to understand that while the first three categories is usually a product sale, the last two categories are more like end-to-end sales.
Now, how are we set up in doing this? How is the sales force looking like? Who is doing that, actually? We are serving 85 markets, and obviously we do not have our own legal entities in 85 markets. What we do have is we cover about 16 countries directly with legal entities, and that reflects north of 80% of our revenue, which we can tackle directly. In the other markets, we can go through ABB and using ABB as a channel. Also in the countries where we do have our own legal entities, we can also work with ABB on the channels, and that is a significant advantage. As mentioned earlier, we're about 50% Europe, about 25% Americas, about 25% Asia, Middle East and Africa.
Now, on the partnership with ABB, it's also very important to understand that because when we have our 16 legal entities and our own sales force, that's nothing compared with ABB as a whole, where we can tap into more than 10,000 salespeople, more than 500 locations, and really have ABB signed up to many distributor channels and that is also where it makes sense for a distributor to shop from one instead of for many, many smaller suppliers. Also ABB is much larger than E-mobility, obviously. We can use the partnership within electrification, for example, to work together with our colleagues on the distribution solutions when we talk about a larger electrification of a site, like a larger bus depot, if medium voltage substations are needed, we work hand in hand to make that happen.
The same is when we go, like, smaller, when we go into buildings, we talk about building management systems and solutions in smart buildings. We, again, here we can work hand in hand together with our solutions from the charging side, especially also when we talk bidirectionality, et cetera. That is a huge advantage. We co-share locations in all the countries also where we have our own entities. We can tap into services of ABB, which could be finance, IT on site, purchasing on site, HR on site, and so on and so forth. The beauty of that is that we can really focus our teams on working with the customers. Last but not least, ABB is a strong brand, and we wanna keep ABB in the name going forward in any case.
that also means that, this is strong for employer branding, but is also well known in the industry. It's kind of a mix. We use best of both worlds. This one, so to have such a footprint and such a partnership is kind of a strong barrier to entry as well. Now, how do we bring it to market in terms of production? As we have a really nice offering, as Andrea has explained, majority of our revenue, however, is generated from hardware. Where do we produce it? Majority of what we produce, we do in Italy, where we just ramped up a new production site, tripling our output, compared to what we had before. Then we work with contract manufacturers together in Hungary and in Poland.
In China, also together with the Chargedot acquisition, we have our footprint mainly for the AC chargers. In the United States, we work with a contract manufacturer for being Buy America compliant. However, as we speak, we are in discussion and finalization of some decisions to set up our own production facility in the United States as well. We have right now about 700 employees engaged in manufacturing, and this is without the employees working in the contract manufacturer, so that would be then even more. To give you a bit of scale, we produced 300,000 AC units last year and about 12,000 DC units last year. To our strategy, I think it's also important to understand that and to elaborate a little bit on this.
We do not follow a pure strategy of everything in-house, nor do we follow a pure strategy of outsourcing everything. We follow a mixed strategy to really have, again, the best of both worlds to understand what we do through and through. As we are an engineering company, we really wanna understand what we do. If the process is stable, if we understand it, then we work together with contract manufacturers, giving us the ability to scale fast and also to do it CapEx-lite. Also a beauty of that setup is that, with our footprint in China, we really can tap into that market as well, both on the market side, obviously from customers, but as well from the supply chain side. That's it on the go-to-market strategy in a nutshell. Now I would hand over to Waqas for technology.
Today I would like you to take three messages from my part of the presentation. Number one, a flavor of the most innovative products that we have brought to this industry. Secondly, how we have been able to achieve this. Finally, our commitment and promise to deliver the same and beyond as we move forward. Starting from this multiple firsts that we have brought to this industry, from the first European charger, 50 kW 10 years ago, to the high-power charger. Where we were the first to bring it to Europe and U.S. roughly five years ago. It had liquid-cooled cables. It really increased up the power of a charger from 50 kW to 350 kW.
It's really providing a factor of 6.0x-7.0x and really helping with anxiety that people had, that how much power the chargers could deliver. There was a lot of innovation, innovative steps there in terms of the power, in terms of the liquid-cooled cable, and really putting all this together. Plus, the first to be on the market. To more recent examples. We have launched our bidirectional charger, which is really with the most innovative technologies. It is IP65. It has silicon carbide, and it has already been launched in Europe. To my favorite, where we had acquired energy management technology company, Enervalis, in Belgium.
They are really in the forefront of what can you do when it comes to energy management with the charging and providing new use cases, user experience, and so on. Here we have been able to show how with the coordinated control and optimization of thousands of chargers, we are really able to provide to our customers commercial megawatt scale, virtual power plant, which actually are supporting the grid. As you see here, both in the bidirectional charging as well as with our energy management, we are trying to provide support to the grid rather than being a burden as perceived. Finally, the latest and the greatest, the Terra 360. Terra 360 is the fastest charger for cars out there in the market. It is really providing 2.0x 500 amps.
It is really the power that is needed for most of the cars out there with the amperage that it can provide. It has been globally launched, so it is not a pilot or a prototype and so on, and it is already been deployed in multiple locations. There are three aspects for these chargers. Number one, the innovation, where we have really worked very hard on the advanced thermal management as we try to get 360 kW out of this charger, and also up to 1,000 amps, 2.0 x 500 amps that this charger can provide. Really going for the switch matrix technology, so which means the 90 kW of power level can be dynamically allocated to the different outlets, up to 360 kW.
Going to more of the user experience, where the feel and the look, the user-friendly HMI screens and the cable, the long cable reach are some of the things that provide comfort to the users as well as to the use cases. By providing this ability to have up to four outlets, ability to have even multiple screens and even those split, as well as providing client-specific branding capabilities are really providing. As well as the switch matrix which allows this power allocation from 90, 180, 270 and 360 kW. It really allows a multitude of use cases which are really helping our customers. This is the first part, examples of some of the innovative products that we have introduced over the years.
To the second part, how we have been able to achieve this. As Frank mentioned earlier, so it is through significant R&D spend early enough in this business and globally. We have really invested in innovative capabilities. We have developed an integrated global platform, it is a global team with a global platform and finally cutting-edge facilities. In terms of these facilities, we have eight R&D sites starting in U.S. where I'm based, where we work a lot with the U.S. government, the U.S. customers, the U.S. universities around topics like innovation in energy management, cybersecurity, and so on. This is also where our InCharge team is located, and this is the location that will continue to grow in near future.
To our heart in Europe, in Netherlands, where we had acquired this company, a small company 10 years ago or so, Epyon, where it is the core of our innovation. It is one of the largest and most advanced innovation hubs in this industry has to offer. It is here where we have a lot of our software, firmware, control platforms built and developed and deployed across the globe. In Netherlands, we have a base where we can get up to three cars and a bus or a truck inside the building, doing the test with the OEMs, working on the standardization. Really its location at Delft University helps us with the recruitment of the next generation of the talent that is really needed here.
In Belgium, where we acquired this Enervalis, the energy management technology company, which is really pushing us into another, let's say level, going from the chargers to the energy management, as Andreas was explaining. We have in Italy, where we have our large controls, power electronics, mechanics, R&D teams. This is where we have produced the most or developed the most products in this industry, as well as we have provided innovations like the Terra 360 I was explaining. We have the three additional labs in Germany, Poland, Switzerland, having their own peculiar and particular focus and how they are contributing to this global platform. Finally, in China. This is where we have significant R&D. This is where we are doing our AC charging for local and global market.
This is where we do our power electronics development for global markets, and also we provide, we are developing a lot of integrated charger products. For example, the bidirectional charger that was introduced earlier is developed in China, and here we are in multiple locations in China. Of these eight facilities, there are six really focusing on the innovation part. What it means that this innovation part has really resulted into a very strong IP portfolio. We have more than 350 granted patents in this industry. We spoke about the cutting edge facilities going to the platform approach. We have really been able to develop a global platform which is structured and disciplined, and it is global.
Giving an example for the Terra family here, going from Terra 53's launch to the next generation, which was Terra 54. We could really use 70% of the work that was done in the earlier generation. This meant that the amount of efforts that were not needed for developing a product from scratch could be applied elsewhere, like for the high power chargers, the liquid cooled, with the liquid cooled cable, as explained earlier. Going from Terra 54 to Terra 184, we really needed to have a step change in terms of high switching frequency, power electronics, thermal management, really going to four times more power from the same volume.
We could still do it using the same platform, still utilizing 70% of the efforts that were done earlier in terms of the control hardware, the firmware, the platform mechanics, and so on. As we had to make this generation change, we realized to move faster, a lot of this power electronics and other stuff was going much more advanced in China. As you can see, the first two products were developed in Italy. The Terra 184 was developed in China. Our having a global platform allowed us this agility to really have the different products developed in different sites, and of course, still combining the benefits of the teams wherever we could achieve. Going from Terra 184 to Terra 360, again, as you can see, using 60% of the reuse.
Here, we had to go for a new mechanical platform. It is a slightly different size. We are integrating all these outlets, the dynamically switched matrices and so on. As you can see here, this platform approach allows us to go very fast, so we could really launch a new product here in this generation within one year. Interestingly, this Terra 360 we could still do in Italy, and then the team in China could work on the next generation of power electronics intensive products like the bidirectional charger, which was introduced earlier. This platform approach really allows a staggered introduction of new technologies, which means things can move faster. There is more R&D dollars.
There's more R&D dollars efficiency, so we are spending less R&D dollars to get the next generations out. The staggered technology approach allows really this to help with the reliability, so we are not introducing all the new things at the same time. Going to our technical capabilities. The third pillar is really the people. We have enlarged our team from less than 100 people to more than 350 in a span of four to five years. We have the right in-house competencies. We have developed the capabilities, like you take it, power electronics, energy management, firmware, which really help us to deliver on the promises and the next generation of products that we are working on.
Here we have also been acquiring talent as needed, as an example of the energy management with Enervalis. In addition to the competencies which allows us to hedge, explore, and determine these new areas, adjacent technologies, adjacent markets and so on. Here, the examples are like interoperability, where we have really developed strong competencies which allows us to go faster into other segment as we went from vehicles to buses, and now going from buses to trucks. Cybersecurity is another example. Fleet management is another example where we could really develop an internal incubator to really have a focus on the fleet management. Moving to the third part of our continued promise to deliver on the same and beyond. We have a strong IP portfolio enabled through the early R&D investments.
As you can see here, in addition to 350 patents, we have about 400 pending applications or inventions that are in the pipeline. We roughly submit 6 patent applications per month, which is unique in this industry. We have a global portfolio, so we have coverage in Europe, in Asia, in U.S. This is a key point here, to have coverage in China is critical. It helps us to be competitive there in China, as well as work with the ecosystem that is in China, which is the largest of the market. There's a lot of happenings there. Having a good portfolio and a significant R&D team is one of the differentiation that we provide to this industry as compared to peers.
Plus, we have a diverse portfolio in terms of technology on power electronics, on charger design, on system design software and so on. A glimpse into what's coming in near future. I would emphasize this is near future. We have much more that is in the pipeline coming beyond these. We are working on the megawatt charging system with truck OEMs, with the standardization bodies to be really able to launch up to 3 megawatts of these chargers for trucks. We already have the first order sold with the truck OEMs, and these chargers will be launched towards the end of this year, early next year. We are working on expanding the vehicle to grid function offering. At the moment, we have offering in Europe. We will expand it to other markets.
We are also building the energy management part to it so that the charger plus the energy management part, as was discussed earlier by Andreas, are really providing new use cases here. We are working on the two-phase liquid cooling in China, which means that we have this mechanism where the liquid can change to gas and then back to liquid without the need of pumps to provide this two-phase cooling in the charger. Plus all the benefits that are around there with the high power charging. Finally, to the advancements that are allowed by energy management in terms of smart charging, eco charging, site management, site energy management, plus the asset management that is enabled by the charger hardware we have.
This combination of energy management, the chargers we have, asset management, it is here where there'll be new use cases and new differentiated offering that we will be providing against our peers. Thank you.
We now come to the first Q&A session. As a reminder, if you would like to submit any question, please use the chat tool in the webcast window. We have here a question for Frank, from Gregor Kuglitsch. Did you see any problems last year regarding the supply chains, specifically on the side of semiconductor chips?
Yeah. That's... I would love to say no, we didn't. Obviously we're part of the industry like everybody else, and so there is no exception to us. We also saw problems in the supply chain, and we still see continuous problems in the supply chain, again, like everybody else. The good news is, even seeing these problems, we had longer delivery times. However, we did never come to a position that we needed to stop production based on that. Hopefully we see some light at the end of the tunnel by end of this year.
Thank you. Here we have a question for you, Waqas, on the Terra 360 charger. How do you see that differs compared to competitors today?
Mm-hmm.
As a follow-up question there, how do you protect your IP?
Terra 360, as mentioned, is really providing this 2.0 x 500 amps to which is what's needed by most cars out there. It is a unique charger. We have really worked very hard on the thermal management, so it allows 360 kilowatts in the charger, but it really allows the interfaces or the sites of the customers at the ambient temperature. We have worked on the switch matrix technology, and then we have worked on really combining four outlets, different HMI screens and all the relevant user experience. It combines the hardware parts, which are really power electronics, the switch matrix, the thermal management, really user experience, like cable management and so on. It combines the best of three classes.
Coming to the IP part. As shown, we have really a very strong IP portfolio that is diverse in terms of technology, that is global, so is in U.S., in China, in Europe. This is really a good foundation as we move forward to protect us globally from global peers, as well as in terms of the technologies as compared to others.
Very good. Here's a similar question from Felix Remmers, zCapital. I think this could go either to you, Andreas or Waqas. I think this time we'll take you, Andreas. Many convincing technologies and innovations, but on which KPIs exactly would you say that ABB is clearly ahead of competition? Where do you see the main difference to top competitors? This is maybe more broader question than the one before.
Thanks for the question. It's quite difficult to answer that in a simple way because as mentioned, the portfolios are quite, the portfolio is wide, and the use cases are quite diverse. I think what really drives our decision-making and when we develop products is always this element of total cost of ownership, user experience, and flexibility. I think what really is unique that we can offer these key elements across the different segments, different standards, different product portfolios. We have seen in the past that obviously there are also competitors that might have a value proposition with their product, but we can always.
We have always been able to either launch something early, like in the domain of liquid-cooled charging, or to really take a next step by going to a 360 kW all-in-one charging, four cables in parallel, as was mentioned before. We can also mention the V2G charging technology in the residential or semi-residential area. There are a lot of elements where we can play on the hardware, and then we have this digital element on top. I think this is really the holistic and complete approach that we have, which really makes us stick out from the peers, from my understanding.
If I can just add to Andreas. I think one of the key KPI where we believe we have significant advantage or is really be the first. If you take the many examples, we are the first, and not only in one country or one market, but globally, especially in China as well, where there's a lot of competition, and there also we try to be first in many of the things.
Very good. Here for you, Frank, a question from William Mackie, Kepler Cheuvreux. If you look at the past two years, and you talked about your end markets, CPOs, OEMs, public, and fleet. What in the past two years drove the growth in these different end markets, and how do you see that going forward?
I think as you can see, the largest segment is CPOs, 34%. If you break that down to our revenue, that is significant, plus bus and transit and the OEM. These three are really dominating. We see what drove the trend was really this wish of many charge point operators and of many cities for the transit to electrify and to get rid of greenhouse gas emissions. That's stipulated by, I mean, by the Biden administration, what is about to come, by the European Green Deal in Europe, by individual subsidy programs in different countries. We can talk about the UK and AC charge in every home.
We can talk about subsidy programs, which we had in Germany, and so on and so forth. It's, I would say it's a mix of this push and the will also to continue into a business, and especially for charge point operators, we see this land grab where really also to be the first and to be on the map is very important, which is drawing a lot of revenue actually towards the charging manufacturers.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you. Something, by the way, I wanted to also add to the audience. We have received some questions which we'll address in the second Q&A regarding financials. I guess this also goes to either you, Andreas or Frank, so from Sebastian Kuenne, RBC. Tesla has a similar AC, DC charger portfolio, but also including batteries.
Mm-hmm.
Other battery makers are also out there. They also have chargers and batteries. How do you see competing with them and, without having access to a specific, battery system, and, what do you do about that?
Let me take it. I think Tesla for sure is a lighthouse for everyone in the industry. No doubt about that. They have the whole range. We are not the next Tesla, that's not our. That's not what we will do. However, when it comes to batteries, it was explained nicely by Andreas on the energy management piece when you come towards peak shaving, et cetera. Their batteries is a good use case. Also in the residential space, batteries are a good use case. We do have technology, and we did that together so far with our partners in ABB, who do batteries also as backup power.
We team up together and can offer an end-to-end solution, including that, both for residential as well as for large rollouts.
Another question from William Mackie, Kepler Cheuvreux. I think this also probably goes to you, Frank, as you talked about it. You spoke about current production capacity of ABB E-mobility on AC and DC. You mentioned the numbers in 2021.
Mm-hmm.
300,000 AC volumes, 12,000 DC. How do you see the additional CapEx needed going forward to address the future anticipated growth?
I think we have on the financials later on, we address the CapEx. The good thing is, we just ramped up our new production site in Italy, so there, the CapEx is spent, and we budgeted CapEx now for the next production site, which will come in the United States. I will not give numbers now. That will come later, but it's nicely incorporated in our plan.
Thank you. Here's a question, certainly for you, Andreas. On the product offering, why are you so focused on DC? One could ask, and so is this asked here. Is there synergies between offering both AC and DC?
I seem to have done something a bit wrong then because it was not my intention to create expectation that there is a focus on DC. I think with the acquisition of Chargedot in China, which is, like, one of the major players on AC in China, working with a lot of OEMs, a lot of charge point operators, we have an extremely strong base to bring that portfolio now also into the other markets, which we are already doing in Europe, where we have now in year two after the launch a lot of traction, and we are extremely happy with the figures, and we will now bring that portfolio also further out to the U.S.
Now, why I believe this is so important is because a lot of charging will happen at destinations, either at home or in office locations, and we are absolutely convinced that there is a large market for this AC charging use case next to the DC fast charging use case. What is quite interesting, where are the synergies? Integration, OCPP, the base use cases are very similar. We can also apply exactly the same digital technologies on top. Whether you make a depot with AC chargers for maybe logistic fleet, or you make a depot with 200 kW chargers for a bus fleet, you have the same energy management principles, the same fleet management principles, the same service type of structure that you need. We have a lot of synergies on technologies from the digital side and from the operational support side.
We don't see this as a secondary or appendix offering at all. This is, for us, really one of the two main hardware portfolio pillars that we're gonna have, and we have today.
Well, thank you for the clear explanation. Question for Frank from Anders Roslund from Pareto. In which market or end markets actually do you feel you have a stronger market position versus maybe in others there is more intense competition?
Mm-hmm.
in your view?
I think the beauty is really that we're globally present, right? Where probably we have a weaker position to start with that is still in China, because there it's difficult if you're a non-Chinese player. We hardly had any position before we acquired Chargedot. Now we're building out our position. I think this is worthwhile mentioning. However, in Europe and in the Americas, we traditionally have a strong position, especially when it comes to DC charging. With AC, we are not yet present in the United States, but we will get there, so we're preparing this. I think there is also room to build out more. Yeah.
Okay, we will take one more question in this session. Again, there'll be a second session at the end of today's event. I guess this will also go probably to you, Frank, from Tansy Aganwal from Barclays. Your software remote monitoring offerings are quite value-adding, especially for fleet management customers.
Mm-hmm.
Understood. How do you see that compared to what our customers, your customers want to do, specifically the CPO, their own software?
Mm-hmm.
Do you see any? They might want to use their own back-end.
Mm-hmm.
offerings, so how do you see, how do you deal with that situation?
Yeah. Oh, that's a good one, and thanks for the colleague of Barclays for raising that. To be very precise, we do not wanna come with a software offering into the space of a CPO. So we do not wanna create a channel conflict here. We know the CPOs, they have their own back-end software. We know also a lot of them are doing their own software, and this is not the space we wanna get into. I think Andreas explained it nicely. We have asset management, energy management, fleet management, and for the service. This is not for a public commercial back end. This is not what we do and not what we intend to do. Therefore, there is no channel conflict with the OEMs.
Most of that software which we're offering, as I mentioned in the go-to market, is not so much on the CPO segment. It's much more on the fleet segment, and then where these fleets really want to have an end-to-end solution. From that point of view, our customers can pick and choose whether they would like the full or they would like to have part of the solution, and like this, we're very flexible.
Thank you. We now thus conclude this first Q&A session and do a five-minute break, after which we continue with the strategy presentation.
Good. All right. Hope you enjoyed the break. We're back with the strategy session. Let me guide you through how we will bring that all together and how we look at that going forward. What is our strategy? As I said, it's quite simple. Our strategy is like three pillars. First, we are strong in the hardware business, where we have a leadership position, and obviously we wanna maintain this and grow that going forward. Second, we have a software offering which we build on top of that and offer together with the hardware to really have end-to-end solutions in that offering for our customers for good service and, a good remote control of the assets. Third, we wanna expand that market, and we wanna expand it with new software into adjacent, pieces of the market, and also with new business models.
All of that is to use our backbone, our strong R&D and technology. When we put that into market and looking at our growth leadership, we have Europe as our strongest market with about 50%. In Europe, which we have a strong market share, is a market which is continuing to grow. Here it's all about retaining the strengths we have and make sure we cement that. In the Americas and Asia, Middle East, Africa, we still have potential to grow and to do more. The recent examples where we then had inorganic growth underlined exactly that. In the Americas, we did the majority acquisition of InCharge for fleet management mainly. In the Asia and Middle East, Africa, basically China, the acquisition of the remaining shares of Chargedot now up to 80%.
This is a strong commitment also to grow stronger in these markets. In general, to grow from a strategy point of view, we invest and continue to invest organically to grow our sales and especially our service team. We grow our R&D, we do selective M&As, and we continue to build out the manufacturing to support our customers in the individual markets. Now we can also look at a strategy in terms of the value chain. Looking at the value chain, it's actually from hardware to EPC, site maintenance, application software, digital services. Then you break it down into all the nice sub-segments, where you have been guided through, already in our offering. There's also some white spots.
There are some white spots where we can improve going forward, which we see, one is the planning and engineering where we have room to improve. In the application software, especially when you look towards fleets or retail, et cetera, in the front-end services and in the commercial back-end. This is the dashed boxes and there we wanna continue to grow. By the way, also on the hardware, you see battery energy storage because that was a question earlier. Of course, we see that as part of our offering for larger sites. Now when we did the InCharge acquisition. Can someone click that? Now here we go. Okay. If we look at the InCharge acquisition and look at it, where in that strategy does it fit?
You see that actually three of the three boxes of the six InCharge boxes are boxes which were dashed. It's the planning and engineering, it's also the site maintenance and the control software as well. In that area, actually, we can do a lot more together with InCharge to offer for fleets. Now, in general, how do we wanna evolve our business model? Come on. I think we need to change the battery. Okay, here we go. If you look at the value chain and at the growth, the total accessible market. In the hardware, which is the large piece, remember the $3.9 billion is split into $3.5 billion hardware, $0.4 billion in software. That's the total market.
The hardware piece grows from $3.5 billion to $8.6 billion. The software piece will grow from $0.4 billion to about $2.5 billion. The growth rate is much higher. As we all know, also, the marginality is much higher. This is why we invest in this and then why we wanna grow this further. Now, talking a little bit about M&A. Now, because our strategy is really a combination of organic growth and inorganic growth. Therefore it's important to understand, do we have a good track record in M&A? Because a lot of, I mean, you hear it a lot of times that acquisitions easily suck, yeah. In our case, they're actually quite successful.
That whole business started for ABB in 2011 when we bought a small startup in the Netherlands, Epyon, on the campus of Delft University, being the first one to have DC fast chargers which were cloud connected already before the industry started. From there, we developed the business. Chargedot acquisition, very successful, 2020. Enervalis, we just did last year, but so far what we see from a potential integration and potential business upside, as explained in the energy management, looks promising. Now InCharge. InCharge is a partner of us since many years, actually. It's not that we don't know them and just acquired. We owned already 10% of InCharge from the start, and now we've stepped it up to 60%, so it's not a huge surprise probably.
On top of that, we also have other ventures where we invest into, so and, which is part of us. We invest, for example, you might be surprised also a bit in, on the hydrogen field, but when it comes to hydrogen for infrastructure. When you have low grid capabilities or have no grid available, but still wanna do charging, like high power charging, you need some sort of energy generation, which you cannot only cover by a battery, but really need generation on site. We think it's the right way to do that on green energy with green hydrogen, and in that case, based on ammonia, because it's available everywhere and, is also a much cheaper way of producing it. If you use green ammonia. AFC Energy in the UK is doing that.
We partner up with them for that, and they also do data center, backup power, et cetera. We look at the Indian market, which is still very nascent in its nature for e-mobility. There, we're invested in a digital company, Numocity. In the United States, we teamed up already a while ago with a small investment in FreeWire, which is more like using a battery in the charger, fully integrated, to do actually some peak shaving. On top of this, we also recently invested in GO TO-U, which is not even on the slide, which is a digital company and very good in reservation functionality, especially for the hospitality sector.
From there, we also look into what is available in the market, and it's about a set of 50 companies we looked at. We do constant screening and really to see from the screening, from the analysis, whether we do more acquisitions in the future. Don't be surprised if more will happen than that. With that, I hand over to Alex to talk a bit about ESG.
Thank you, Frank. Having talked about our business strategy, let's now briefly look at our approach to the future from a sustainability perspective. Sustainability is at the heart of both what we do and how we do it. Every line of code we write, every product that comes off our production line, is directly contributing to the zero emissions value chain. E-mobility has the ambition to be a leading ESG player in this sector. Now, there are four pillars to our sustainability strategy, and we can borrow with pride from ABB, who is a very well-respected player in this sector and has provided this overall framework for us to work with. Firstly, enabling a low-carbon society. Secondly, preserving resources. Thirdly, promoting social progress. Finally, fourthly, integrity and transparency. Let me walk you through some of our initiatives in these areas.
Firstly, ABB E-mobility chargers are a key part of the EV value chain, enabling emission reduction. How do we make that tangible? Our R&D people alongside with our sustainability team have put together a model which can measure this using algorithms, looking at the number of charges in our in our installed base usage and the percentage of renewable energy that's used in the overall system. The number they came up with is 12 million tons of emissions avoided through our contribution to the overall value chain. Now, what does this mean in reality? How do you explain that to your daughter when you go home in the evening about the work you've done? I was wondering how to make this tangible. A few weeks ago, I was back in my home city in London.
I logged on to Transport for London, and I saw that in London there's 2.6 million cars who have an average number of journeys per year of 690, and each journey is around 10 km. You run that into our model, you see that our current installed base effectively is helping avoid three cities of London. That gives you the idea of the scale of operations. We want to increase this by at least five times. It makes us all feel really great when we're going back in the evening explaining what we're doing to our families, that we're kind of helping contribute to this kind of achievement. It's not just what we make that counts, it's how we do this as well.
One of the other key targets we have in this area is about reducing emissions from Scope 1 and Scope 2 by at least 80% by 2030, hopefully even before that. That leads into the second column here, which is around preserving resources. How are we gonna do that? Well, one thing is we want all our production globally to be 100% powered by renewable energy over the coming years. Secondly, we want 100% of our own sites with energy management systems. We want zero waste to landfills. Finally, it goes without saying that we want 100% of our commercial fleet to be EV. If you move to the third column here, promoting social progress, we want a diverse and engaged workforce. Clearly, we want at least 25% of women in senior management positions.
We're currently around about 20% today, and there's a clear commitment that our Board of directors will have at least two female members out of the seven. We're also targeting a top-tier employee engagement score, and then also we want to have 80% of supply spend in focus countries covered by supplier sustainability frameworks. This means that all our suppliers will sign a supplier code of conduct, and we will do an audit on that. Finally, moving across to the fourth column, integrity and transparency, led by our new independent board of directors. The board of directors will have four independent members and three from ABB. First point here, zero tolerance approach to discrimination. Secondly, our sustainability targets will be embedded in management incentive targets. Thirdly, all progress against those targets will be measured and communicated.
Let me just show you a few examples then of these in practice. Here you see three of our key sites around the world. On the left-hand side, we have Delft in the Netherlands, our R&D center, which is a state-of-the-art eco-building. We have geothermal heating and cooling there, which really acts in a great way from an ESG perspective. We have solar panels on the roof with 86 kW peak, which allows us also to charge the building using renewables. Thirdly, I get really excited about this. We use recycled power from EV chargers back out to the grid. You would have heard earlier how we use this center here to charge up cars, to test all our chargers, etc., and we can recirculate that energy we've been using back out to the grid at the end of the session.
A great example of circularity at work. Fourthly here, in the future, we'll have a battery energy storage system, allowing us to do product developments, store solar energy, and also work with grid stability. In the middle column here, we see our gigafactory down in Valdarno in Tuscany. In Tuscany, it's obviously a bit sunnier than the Netherlands. There we have 500 kWp, which allows us to charge most of the building using solar. We have an optimized heating and cooling system there to really work in an innovative way around the building to make sure it's all done in the most efficient way. Again, we'll be using a battery energy storage system. Then finally across in China, where we have 700 kWp solar alongside our heating and cooling systems.
Now, what I love about the Chinese situation is it's a great example of how business meets sustainability. Many of you would have heard about the power cuts in China in Q4 last year for many reasons. We were able to keep our factory going using our solar capability when many of our competitors are facing problems. As a great example of going eco can also help you from a business perspective directly. To conclude this brief overview here, sustainability is at the heart of what we do and how we do it. We have the ambition to be a leading ESG player in this sector, and we are all super excited about this opportunity. With that, this is a good segue into the final section. We've been talking about measuring the impact of sustainability for our business.
Now let's talk about measuring our financial performance. To kick off, we've spoken about a lot of things today. I thought it'd be a great way to kind of bring everything together here. It was my favorite seven numbers. If you remember nothing else from today, remember the following: 23%, the estimated growth rate of the market from 2021 to 2026, showing we have a large growing market. $584 million, our order intake in 2021, making us a global leader. 14%, our R&D investment as a percentage of revenues, making us a technology innovator. $323 million, our revenues in 2021, proving we have a high growth outlook. 10,000, ABB's electrification sales FTEs there to help sell our equipment around the world, showing great synergy with ABB.
80%, our target for reduction in own emissions, Scope 1 and Scope 2 by 2030, even earlier. ESG is in our DNA. Finally, number one, becoming the global number one end-to-end solutions provider. Our winning strategy, number one today, number one tomorrow, leading our industry into the next decade. With that, let's take a look at our financial performance over the last few years, and then we'll look forward into the future. Let's start with order intake and current backlog. Here we've seen a very strong order growth and sizable backlog, which provides visibility for our targeted future growth. We've seen our order intake move from $169 million in 2019 to $584 million in 2021. That's an 86% CAGR.
This leaves us with an order backlog at the end of 2021 of $376 million. Just to be 100% clear what we mean by order backlog here, these are the orders that are remaining to be delivered in subsequent accounting periods. We calculate it simply from taking the order backlog from the end of 2020, plus the orders we took in 2021, minus the revenue we delivered during that period. Now let me give you a little bit of visibility on the movements here but year-on-year. In 2020, we saw some quite significant growth in the North American region. We had the Chargedot acquisition, which added volumes as well. Order input intake was of course impacted to a certain extent by COVID-19.
Of course, it depends on the installation cycles of our large customers, whether or not an order hits in a particular period. Moving into 2021, we saw very strong demand across all regions and across all products. We should point out there was a sizable order from Qatar in Q1 last year for about $47 million in relation to electrifying the whole of their bus system and ready for the World Cup in 2022. We also benefited from the rollout of the Terra AC product, particularly across Europe, which was very successful. This left us with an order backlog at the end of the year, as I said, up around 236% from $112 million in 2020 to $376 million in 2021.
Now just a little highlight here of this small little circle you see in the middle of your screen here. This is the breakdown of our orders by end markets. What I like about this is how balanced it's looking now as we're going forward. We have 34% CPO, 26% OEM, 17% public, 16% destination, 8% fleet. A really nice balance across different end segments, and just highlighting the contribution of the Qatar order to the public transport section and our AC products in the destination and home segment. Orders pays the bills for tomorrow, revenues pays the bills for today. Let's have a quick look at what's happened with our revenues. Here we saw significant revenue growth in 2021 as orders accelerated and capacity increased.
Our revenues increased from $182 million to $323 million in 2021. 33% CAGR through that period. In 2020, we saw an increase in DC-based orders across that period as we saw our revenues grow fourteen percent to $208 million. We also had strong demand, obviously from China with the Chargedot acquisition. I said previously, there were certain dynamics around the installation cycles of certain large customers. Moving into 2021, we really saw our revenues accelerate by 56% up to $323 million. We saw a significant order intake across many segments. We saw very strong growth from the AC charging area and solutions, also following the Chargedot acquisition, and we were helped by significant capacity ramp-up in Italy and in China.
Now, our supply chain pressures were constrained from full growth potential by the dynamics we've seen over the last 12 months. Clearly, there was a topic around critical components, but we should also point out that goods in transit were very high at the moment as we've seen logistics taking much longer for our product to get from factory to end market. Still, overall, a 56% increase is significant and congratulations to all the operations team for delivering this also as we move to a new factory through year-end. Again, sorry, one final point here in the little circle in the middle. We have pretty good balance across our different regional sectors, so 50% in Europe, 27% in Americas, and 23% in EMEA.
Now, moving from revenue through to operational gross profit, we're very happy with the development here. Operational gross margin expansion has really accelerated. We see a doubling of our gross profit from 2019 through to 2021, from $48 million to $94 million, and our gross margin's gone from 27% to 29%. Now, a little bit of words around the dynamics here, because obviously you see a dip in the middle into 2020. That dip was generated by, of course, 2020 being the key COVID-19 year, so quite some costs we had to absorb there. There were some short-term effects from the Chargedot acquisition as the gross margin there was slightly below our average in general.
We were building up to get ready for our expansion as our own operations following the separation from the solar business. Previously, we're co-located with the solar business, which got sold, and we had to build up our own operations. We're very happy to see how that has now grown out then from 2020 onwards. We've seen great volume increase, which has been driving operational leverage. We've seen an improved mix in our DC portfolio, which has helped our profitability. Finally, bringing the AC product to market has also helped from an overall portfolio point of view. If you go then from the gross profit down the profit lines, we have SG&A. SG&A here I think is pretty consistent year-on-year from a percentage of revenues perspective.
Stable development growing in line with revenues. We've had obviously an increased own dedicated sales force that we've been building out during the course of this period. It also had the increase due to the Chargedot acquisition, and we've been having increased investments, particularly in 2021, in fleet management with Panion and with energy management in Enervalis, and as we've been building up our business to be independent as well. Overall, a very stable position. As we've been bringing more legal, more finance and more audit capabilities, we've been offsetting that with higher revenues. Moving to non-order related research and development expense. Here we've seen a continuous R&D spend to further strengthen our competitiveness.
Here, again, we're very proud to see an almost doubling in SG&A expense in dollar terms from 2019 through to 2021, from $24 million to $46 million. Again, keeping roughly on a 14% of revenues overall. Let's point out here that $46 million in dollar terms is more than many of our competitors have in revenue. Key dynamic here is that, clearly in 2020, despite COVID-19, we continued to invest with particular focus on software and firmware development. Of course, we had the onboarding of our Chargedot team.
Moving into 2021, we've really seen this investment accelerating, and we think this is absolutely the right thing to be doing at this point in the cycle, as we've kind of been investing across many sub-segments, but particularly in relation to our software build-out, both in Panion, in Enervalis and elsewhere. That rolls down to our operational EBITDA, which we're very proud to say has moved into positive territory in 2021, from negative 4% in 2020 to up to positive 2%, +$5 million. A break-even operational EBITDA in 2021. Clearly in 2020, we did have some impacts from our COVID situation and the gross margin dynamics I spoke about previously.
In 2021, we had higher gross margin due to volume, but also due to our portfolio developments. At the same time, we have been investing quite significantly in trying to build our organization. The accretion there, you could have said, could have been a little bit more, but we feel it's the right thing to be doing now to be investing here to build us up for the next section. If we move on then from profit to free cash flow. Now as ex-treasurer, this is my favorite bit, of course, and what I've tried to do here is simplify the overall setup, so you can fully understand what the dynamics are around this.
The key message is that investment in growth is a priority for us as we scale. What I've done here is break down some of the cash flow statement to make it really clear what the drivers are. On the one level, we have obviously turned positive from a net income perspective, so that's one key driver. The two important pieces here are around our CapEx and our net working capital delta year-on-year. On the CapEx side, year-on-year, we've been investing significantly in building out our production facilities in China and in Italy on one side. On the net working capital side, we've been investing heavily in net working capital from two perspectives. One is to ensure that we can meet our backlog and really deliver our growth. Secondly, we really see this as a strategic asset now going forward.
We have the balance sheet to invest here. We can do this now to make sure that we get ahead of the curve. While there have been quite some, let's say, headwinds in relation to, for instance, finished goods which have been held up to an extent, sitting in goods in transit, our delivery times or the transit times have gone from 4 weeks to six weeks up to 10-12 weeks. Despite that, we're still investing in a very positive way to try and drive our net working capital line as an asset. B etter have negative cash flow and deliver than positive cash flow and not at this stage. Having gone now through our financial performance over the last few years, we now focus on the future.
Here we want to talk about our guidance from 2022 through to the midterm. First thing I wanna point out here is that there are two kinds of sets of KPIs. First set is around what we'll be talking about as we describe our business going forward on a regular basis. So revenue growth, operational gross margin, operational EBITDA margin. The gray KPIs here, I'd say, are more like data points, enabling you to understand where we think we're gonna be this year, and then where we'll be in the midterm. With that, let me just take you through the guidance 2022 and midterm. Our guidance focuses on two different time periods, the current year, 2022, and the midterm, which refers to the end of our midterm period of four to five years, unless specifically mentioned otherwise.
We also differentiate between guidance items which we plan to continue to disclose as part of our future reporting, and guidance items that we will only disclose for the purpose of the CMD. Furthermore, our guidance fully reflects the acquisition of InCharge Energy, which is fully consolidated within the business plan. Our guidance does not include, and is therefore not dependent on, any future acquisitions. We've identified 10 KPIs which we consider relevant for preparing financial projections for our company from an outside-in perspective. We want to provide you with our short and midterm expectations of these. Annual revenue growth. For the current year, we expect continued strong revenue growth of around 40%-45%, or total revenue of more than $450 million for the year. Our forecast is supported by our current visibility in order intake and backlog.
By the end of the midterm period, in four to five years, we expect a convergence towards growth rates of 25%-30% per annum, which is above the estimated annual growth market growth of 23% between 2021 and 2026. We expect elevated growth rates for the next two years and thereafter. We expect revenue growth to gradually converge towards our midterm guidance. Operational gross margin. For the current year, we expect a margin of 25%-30%. In the midterm, increasing operational leverage and the increase of the non-hardware content of our portfolio is expected to support our margin profile, and we target operational gross margins above 30% by the end of the midterm period. Operational EBITDA margin.
For the current year, 2022, we expect similar operational EBITDA margins as in 2021, i.e., around break-even, as we continue to make investments in building out the standalone business to support our growth trajectory. For the midterm, we are targeting an operational EBITDA margin of 15%-20% as a function of scale and portfolio evolution towards a higher non-hardware share of total revenues. Non-hardware as a percentage of total revenue. In line with our communicated strategy, we expect non-hardware revenues to increase meaningfully and gradually over the course of the next four to five years. We estimate that by the end of the midterm period, 20%-30% of total revenue will come from non-hardware solutions. Please note that as stated before, our guidance excludes potential contributions from acquisitions which may substantially boost our non-hardware share and revenues. Tax rate.
In the medium term, and once our profit contribution turns positive, we expect a tax rate of around 25% over pre-tax profits. Net working capital. Net working capital is expected to be on an elevated level in 2022 at around 40% of revenue. This is a function of our strategic inventory build-up to meet future demand and help mitigate potential supply chain shortages. In the medium term, we expect net working capital as percentage of revenues to gradually normalize towards 20%. CapEx. For the current year, 2022, we expect CapEx at around 8%-9% of revenue. To support strong growth trajectories throughout the medium-term period, we expect elevated CapEx levels for the next two years in absolute terms, and a gradual decrease towards 2%-4% of revenue in the medium term to support our medium-term revenue target of 25%-30%.
Our current negative free cash flows to turn positive towards the end of the midterm period. Funding need. Based on our current growth ambitions, we have a funding need of around $750 million. 70% of our funding need is related to M&A, and 30% is related to our organic growth plans. Finally, capital structure. On capital structure, please note the following. We expect to convert the majority of our short-term debt owed to our parent company in the near term. This excludes $140 million short-term debt relating to the InCharge acquisition and small working capital facilities which fall under our funding needs. To conclude, we've covered a lot of ground today to give you an insight into the business from a financial perspective. I started with my favorite seven numbers. Numbers always tell a story.
Our story is simple. We have an exciting journey of profitable growth ahead as the global number one today, tomorrow, and into the future. With that, we take questions.
We now come to the second Q&A session. We will start with a question for Frank.
What?
How do you view the risk or perceived major risk of commoditization of chargers in the near future? How would then ABB be able to differentiate to be the number one going forward in such a volatile environment?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think we had earlier the question already, how do we differentiate on the product side, so I will not repeat what was said earlier. I would rather say that our products are far away from being a commodity. You probably understood how complex it is to build a charger, to connect it, to evolve it going forward. We have fast development cycles and so we also see that really completely new entrants have a hard time to gain ground. I would tend to believe there is no real commoditization in that segment yet.
Thank you. Alex, for you, from Daniela Cota from Goldman Sachs. She asks, "So ABB mentioned that you turned profitable last year, Q4 on operating level, profit level. So if you look then at the guidance you just presented going forward, why only break even on operational EBITDA given such a growth profile?
Yeah. Okay, Daniela, that's a great question, huh? First thing, this is the first year when we're flying solo. Obviously we're kind of working our way into this and working through the different cost structures that implies. I think there's probably three reasons why I'm guiding to a kind of a break-even level. Firstly, obviously we have just done the carve out, so effectively there will be some more costs we have to take on board as we kind of build out independent activities to be part of an independent company. As an example, we'll have an independent audit we have to pay for, we'll have more legal costs, we have investor relations and other areas which we have to build out now as a kind of as a separate company.
Secondly, we're continuing to invest a lot. We talked a lot today about R&D. We want to keep on investing there, and so we're going to have another incremental step up to really kind of again, get ahead of the curve to try and drive this area. Finally, there are a number of costs which we obviously are running through from the build up we've been doing over the last year or so. Some of the fixed costs we've been taking on board and building out the factories as an example, and some of the new service personnel we've put in place to really get that service offering going in the right way. I think this is the right place to kind of position it. Of course, if we can do better, we'll drive it.
I think for the time being, we're focusing on that number.
Another one for you, Alex, from both Joseph Giordano from Cowen and Company, as well as from Richard Frei from Zürcher Kantonalbank. First question here is, how do you see the split on both sides on revenues between hardware and software, but also on R&D spend between hardware and software?
Well, thanks for raising the question. That's actually one thing I forgot to mention in the presentation earlier. If you look at the revenues in 2021, you can break them down by products as following. Roughly, approximately three-quarters of our revenues came from the DC products, and then of the remainder piece, roughly two-thirds were to the AC products and roughly one-third to software and services. Just give you a bit of a dynamics around that. Then when it comes to the breakdown between hardware and software, when it comes to our R&D spend, I mean, clearly we're expanding our spend in for the Panion and the Enervalis teams there because they're building out software platforms.
I don't think we disclose a particular number in relation to the software versus the hardware, but just to say that probably still the majority is on the hardware side, but we're looking to obviously scale up on the software piece.
Mm-hmm.
Let me probably add to that, Alex. When we talk hardware versus software, of course, in the software, we would need to differentiate between embedded software, which is kind of part of the hardware and really a digital offering. Even if you talk about the largest portion of the R&D is hardware related, it intrinsically means that there is also a huge portion in that software related for the firmware, for the embedded software.
Well, thanks for the clarification. Here's a question where we can stay with the topic from Guillermo Peigneux Lojo from UBS. Your R&D spending, how does that compare to what the industry does overall on average? How does that compare, say, to other players in the market? Maybe this is for you, Alex.
I'll start. Maybe I'll say my view. I mean, getting transparency, clear transparency across our market is quite tricky because you've got lots of different players and quite lots of small players who are not public, so you can't really get the numbers, but on the other side, you've got some kind of SPAC players where there's business plans out there. But again, we haven't really necessarily got full visibility. It's a difficult question to answer. I'd say, we've been spending consistently 14% or so of revenues. I'd say at least that in 2022, probably maybe even a little bit more. It's many multiples of what ABB does.
Whether it will still be that number in five years' time or not, I mean, we're gonna be at a pretty large dollar number in five years' time, so I can see some synergies there.
Mm-hmm.
coming out of that. That's the way I'd see it. Frank, I don't know if you
Yeah, I think you explained it, Alex. I mean, as much as we can say. It's the important thing is if you look at the breadth of the portfolio. It's also difficult to compare. When you look in individual buckets and then part of the other peers, they also don't play in all the markets. It's the breadth of the portfolio plus the geographical coverage, which requires some special R&D for some markets. I think we're pretty competitive in that environment as well. It's just a huge amount. Absolutely. We're also the largest, so I think that's fair.
For you, Frank, Damien Burkhardt from Lombard Odier asks the following: Apparently, there have been some large-scale tender wins by your competition. For instance, if you look at what Tritium did with Shell or exclusive contract with ChargePoint, apparently. It appears like your competitors are gaining more traction than you are, and maybe you're even losing market share as CPOs. How do you view that?
That is an interesting view. I mean, what I can say is that most of the larger customers drive their supply chain with two or three vendors. Like in these examples, we're also vendors in there, so to me, it doesn't sound exclusive. I can, of course, not comment on what others win, but I see what we win. From that point of view, I do not see us losing. No.
We come to another topic of financials pricing.
Mm-hmm.
which a few people have raised, both in the past and also going forward.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe we'll start here first, for you, Frank, or if you want to chime in, Alex. In the past, how have prices evolved?
Mm-hmm.
past few years?
Mm-hmm.
How have they evolved in your view?
So-
What would you say about that?
I think, yeah, we've seen in the recent years some price declines, which are normal in a fast-growing industry, nothing surprising. Actually, that came to a halt now with all the shortages. We were even able to raise the prices in a couple of aspects throughout this year. Going forward, we look at a decent decline, which we modeled in, but low digit.
Okay. Thank you. Follow up here. This relates to this, again, from Daniela Costa from Goldman Sachs. Alex, you mentioned 23% market CAGR going forward as an assumption. What does that mean in terms of pricing?
Yes. To be 100% clear, that 23% is not our assumption. This is an independent market study by Roland Berger, to be 100% clear.
Important one.
Yep. If I understand correctly, that Roland Berger study, they factored in, I think it was low single digit price decline over the period in question, which from our point of view, seems more or less ballpark from our perspective.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you. Here from Dick Ingvarsson, a very different question in its nature. For you, Frank, what will the name of the company be?
I can only say we're in the middle of a process here. There's nothing to disclose yet. What I can say is that we are so closely affiliated with ABB, and these statements were made a couple of times by ABB, also by Bjorn, by our group CEO, so that ABB stays very close, and it's in the heart. That means we will keep ABB name inside any potential future name.
Alex, so from Sebastian Kuenne from RBC, if we look at the order growth, which you presented in your slides, how much of that was organic? Because it must include consolidation effects given the acquisitions you've done. Can you maybe talk about the contributions from Chargedot and InCharge in 2021?
Yeah, sure. You can pretty much say that almost everything in the order intake is effectively organic. Chargedot that we bought in March 2020, you can say that broadly, the contribution from them in 2020 to our results was around about, say, somewhere between $13 million to $15 million in revenues and orders, so a fairly small amount. We can also say that we've grown that volume significantly of their own volume in the Chinese market. Then, of course, we've used that business to build out a great AC business globally as well, which is ratcheted up there. That piece I will not say is inorganic. That's us building that business out. I'd say very small in the total.
If you then look at InCharge, we just completed two weeks ago. There's nothing in 2021. Enervalis we completed in Q4 last year, but I'd say the amounts are not material for our financials in 2021.
Thank you. Going forward, I'm gonna combine two questions here now on the midterm growth. First question is, how much of your midterm growth guidance does include M&A, or is it purely organic? And then related to this, is this based on your current product portfolio, or does it also mean include future solutions such as megawatt charging or maritime or VTOL? How can you maybe clarify a bit the midterm growth guidance?
I say the first one, Frank.
Yeah.
No, I think Alex made it very clear earlier that our guidance is based on organic growth and includes the InCharge acquisition. That is already in. If you do any further acquisitions, obviously that is not in. Everything organic is in. That means the megawatt charging solution, for example, for us is completely organic.
Mm-hmm.
That is included. Yeah.
Thank you.
Wanna add?
No.
No? Okay.
Alex, a question from Tanu Agarwal from Barclays. R&D spending, how is that in the P&L? How do you account for that? Is anything being capitalized of R&D spending? Or is it a fully expensed? Or what is the ratio here?
Our accounting policy in R&D is that we fully expense in the year it's incurred, unless it's related to a particular software development which we productize. I'd say the vast majority of our R&D spend is expensed in the same year that it is incurred.
A more conservative approach.
We follow U.S. GAAP.
Exactly.
You don't get a choice.
Question from Felix Remmers on how does it work with your customers in terms of the projects or project wins or tenders? How much of the sales are more from bulk orders or tenders? How does it work then with what do you have to do to win then a tender?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, that's. It's more or less a standard market in that term. When you look at the CPO business, when you look at the bus and transit business, when you look at the OEM business, most of that is really direct business, and most of that is tendered business. That means in order to win that, I mean, it's different for each and every tender, but usually it's a mixture of complying from a technology point of view, being able to service and to serve in the right geographies, and of course, also being competitive in the pricing. I think this is the mix, and also being able to deliver, obviously, end of the day. Yeah.
Maybe on going forward, the relationship between ABB Group and ABB E-mobility. How will that work with leveraging the sales networks? First of all, how will the ABB... You mentioned these 10,000 ABB FTEs in sales, how will they be incentivized-
Mm-hmm.
to sell the ABB E-mobility products?
Mm-hmm.
This is a question from William Mackie. What does it mean in terms of the costs, where they are allocated to?
Effectively, that works similar like a channel. For us, ABB is then like a channel. That means they can resell our product, and they offer our product. Now, the offering of what they have in their portfolio is very wide. You go from small circuit breakers, big circuit breakers, contactors, substations, whatever. It's a huge wide range, and we are part of that range. The incentivization question is then obviously has to be broken down. Even where we probably also worthwhile mentioning, where we do not have own legal entities, does not mean we do not have own persons. Persons which work there and for our business.
We can very well in a country, which is small for us without a legal entity, have three, four, five people working on our business and driving it, then of course they are 100% incentivized. Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Thank you. Another question from also William Mackie from Kepler Cheuvreux about your M&A pipeline. You mentioned, Alex, as you mentioned for this, the funding needs, what they're for, 70%, 30%. How does your M&A pipeline look like? Do you have any visibility on targets there?
Let's give target number one. You don't think I'm doing that, right? No, of course, we cannot disclose that. It's I think it's very obvious. I mean, we have as mentioned, we have constant view on potential targets and yeah. That's all we can say at this stage.
Well, thank you. We'll take two more questions. For you, Alex, can you say anything about. You mentioned InCharge. Is there anything you can disclose on the acquisition cost, or is this something...
Yeah. On the acquisition cost, we didn't disclose it in our press release. However, I obviously mentioned about our funding needs and how our capital structure will be looking. There we said we'd be repaying $140 million of debt to our parent. Clearly, the majority of that $140 million is related to that acquisition. To be clear, we bought 46.8%.
Okay, we'll come to the final question of today. For you, Frank, looking at the residential end market, how do you see the role of ABB E-mobility there? How do you see the differentiation of competitors going forward?
I think the residential space is a very interesting one for us as well. I mean, we can, for example, partner up with our other sister division in electrification smart buildings, so that also gives us a unique access to the markets through the ABB channels. That's for sure a differentiator. We have a good product which has even won some prizes recently. We will build out that product portfolio further. Especially in the residential space, what we can also do is really look at the load management, at the energy management, and how to combine that also including bidirectionality, which is the product we explained earlier on 11 kW bidirectional. That's a perfect use case also for residential.
I think that is something where it's not only AC residential but also DC residential, where we differentiate.
Thank you. This concludes our second Q&A session. With that, I hand over to Frank.
Okay. Thank you very much then. I think my task is only to conclude this session, and someone could click at the next Slide, Andrea. Oh, here we go. That was much too much. Okay. That is kind of summarizing the day. It's these seven highlights which we believe make it a great business case. I will not run you through the seven again, but please remember, I mean, we're the market leader. I think we've shown significant barriers to entry. We have a very attractive financial profile. Alex explained that. And on top of all of that, what you probably got a glimpse of today from a few of us on stage, there is many more behind.
We have a great team behind supporting and really in all the countries and all the geographies, in our sales, in our service, in our R&D. They do a fantastic job every day in our manufacturing plant to fight the combat to get the stuff out. I think with this, I like to conclude, thank everyone who contributes to our business. Thank our customers for the trust they have in us. Thank you very much for listening.