Good morning and a warm welcome to the Sensirion Capital Market Day 2024. It's really our pleasure to welcome you here in the room, but also our online audience who have joined in via the GoToWebinar, and to welcome you to our second Investor Day. It's our second Investor Day, but it's the first Investor Day here in Stäfa. And I just wanted to emphasize that Stäfa is a special place for Sensirion because it not only hosts our headquarters, the global R&D organization, but also one of our major production sites. So with that, also a warm welcome to Stäfa. Before we move into the presentation, I wanted to let you know that this event will be recorded. And I also wanted to let you know that we will be taking pictures of the presenters. I would also like to draw your attention to the disclaimer statement.
It's a capital Market day, and the nature of such a presentation is, of course, that we will use forward-looking information, and this type of information contains risks and uncertainties. So therefore, please take a minute to read the slide. Thank you. Looking at today's agenda, we basically have grouped it in two sessions. We have a morning session. The morning session ends with the Q&A, and then after the Q&A, we move to lunch. During lunch, the audience here in Stäfa also has the time to visit the product show, but also speak to the Sensirion management team and ask additional questions. The afternoon session also holds a Q&A part, and how does the Q&A session work? Of course, it's very simple here in the room. You just raise your hand. You will get a microphone, and you can ask the questions.
For the online audience, I kindly ask you to use the Q&A or the chat functionality in the GoToWebinar. Write your questions down. I will then read the questions out. With that, I would like to introduce the presenters of today. Maybe I can ask you to stand up and turn around. We have, of course, with us today our two co-founders and co-chairmen of the Board, Moritz Lechner and Felix Mayer. Of course, also part of today is always Marc von Waldkirch, our CEO. Matthias Gantner is here, our CFO. Then, Franziska Brem, our vice president of operations, will also present. Johannes Schumm, vice president R&D, is here. Then also Lukas Bürgi, director R&D Sensor Innovation. I would also grab the opportunity and introduce Simon Sonnleitner, who is our new VP Marketing and Sales.
With that, I would like to kick off the presentation and hand over to.
Ladies and gentlemen, also a warm welcome from my side. Thank you for taking your time being here and trying to better understand Sensirion. I think it's important for an investor to understand our company. The sensor business is a long-term business built on a lot of knowledge and trust. New applications in new Markets cannot be acquired in very short time. Quickly, it takes long-term development, long-term approach. This must also be firmly in the roots of the company, this basic understanding. That's important, and we also need to keep our nerves if there is a short-term decline of the revenues because of different reasons and to stand over that and keep our track. In this context, two points are very important, and I firstly want to talk about that we have to keep our compass if things go down sometimes.
There are economic cycles, opportunities for ups, but also risks for downs. The important thing is the underlying long-term growth. Perhaps, and maybe let me make three examples out of our last 17 years of revenue where we saw such things. Maybe you remember the financial crisis in 2008. Most companies in the industry, microelectronics, had a downturn in their revenue because the economy went down for everybody. We were in the lucky situation that we had started several projects long before that, developed new products, and exactly in that year, this revenue added to our overall revenue, and therefore you don't see any dip in 2008 in our curve. So there, it paid off to have these projects and to have growth to outgrow such dips. My second example is in 2013, we had the chance to supply to one of the largest volume mobile manufacturers in the world.
It was also planned that we will supply in 2014 for the successor phone, but very shortly before the first delivery, the producer of this phone decided not to add any more humidity sensors in the phone, mostly for cost reasons, but also for other reasons. However, our production setup was done in such a way that we could not only have managed to step up, but also the downturn. It was not easy, but we managed it. We also see the underlying growth of the company outgrew that short downturn after a few years. By the way, all over this mobile phone business brought a lot for us because we learned a lot and we were kind of put in a new level of production, especially in highest volumes. The third example I want to make is Corona. Corona certainly caused various distortions.
Firstly, it gave us the opportunity to win new customers in ventilators. We were already suppliers for ventilators, but the demand went up dramatically, and our competitors were not able to manage this growth, and this was a good chance for us to win new customers. And they were extremely happy, and they still stayed with us because we saved them a lot during these turbulent times, so still, highest management of these companies visit us and are very thankful that we could help them out in these difficult times, but there was also another effect during Corona. Electronics boomed, and the supply chains had a problem. We were in a setup that we always could deliver, also during these shortages, and this helped a lot to strengthen our reputation.
But the flip side of the coin was that when the economy went down again, all the stocks of our customers were fully loaded with our sensors because we could deliver during the crisis. And therefore, we were one of the first companies seeing the downturn because they first, when it went down, they first tried to empty their very loaded stocks. However, even these distortions in our long-term sales curve will soon appear smaller again. You see on the very last in light gray the midpoint of our guidance, and you see the growth is coming back again. Why am I trying to say these three examples? We think it's very important to keep the direction according to the compass once set, also if the weather is becoming stormy.
Structures and capacities need to be adapted, but future projects, this is very important, must be kept even in stormy times to secure the growth in the future. And with that, I hand over to my co-founder, Moritz.
So Felix talked about keeping the compass through disruptions in the Market. I talk about the second type of keeping the compass, and it's about innovation. So innovation is a bit of a strange animal, you know, so it's worth talking about it. And maybe before I started, it's very important to be aware of innovation in our area is not just about the cool feature somewhere on the device. It's also about how you can produce a device. It can also be how you make a smart device, which is very powerful, very good, but much lower cost to produce. That's also innovation. Often in our area, that's very important.
So when we go to innovation, innovation is not just a bright idea. It maybe starts with a bright idea, but it's not done with that. It's a lot of work to bring this idea to work in real applications. And I can give you an example. One of the famous examples of innovation is the iPhone. I recently had a chat with somebody about it. That's why it's in the top of my head. But if you look at the iPhone, when Steve Jobs presented the iPhone, it was a disruption. It was innovative. But it was important. It was not standing there and saying, "Hey, I have a cool new mobile phone." Many of you maybe remember, I have a cool new version of a mobile phone. It has a touchscreen. And there would be apps, but currently there are no working apps.
The battery lasts for two hours. In two years, three years, we have a new version which lasts for a whole day or two, but it's a cool idea. It was not why the iPhone was successful. It was successful because the first day it hit the Market, it worked. People took it and it worked, and they liked it. That's the same in our area. From the idea to make innovation work, it's a way to go, and you have to finish that. That's very important, especially in sensing. Sensing is a complex thing because you have a device or a part of it which is reacting on the environment somehow, the sensing part. Then you have electronics with it, which has to fit to it. You have to develop that too.
And then you have to develop the packaging, means you have to protect all this from the environment, and at the same time to expose it to the environment. It needs a special way of you cannot buy that off the shelf. And then it needs the application, this is sensing. So it's quite a chain to go through. And that takes, again, time, and that's to be done properly. And it's not just an idea. I can give you an example there too. When we founded the company, there was a huge American competitor, a huge company, I think somewhere in New Jersey or so. And there was this big company, and they were ahead of us. They had all small innovative startups, and they had the first humidity sensor on the chip.
And they had the first flow sensor on the chip, both in the Market before we founded even the company. Now, what was the problem with it? You guess. It was not finished. It worked somehow. But it was like the iPhone just crashing every 10 minutes. And what happened in the Market, we came, we were behind them, but we kept innovating. We made our products better and better, and we kept them out of the Market. Nowadays, they're a good customer of us. They buy the sensor from Sensirion because we kept innovating, we kept doing it better. So it means really innovation means to bring something which is good and finished, and then to keep on for the next and the next and the next.
If you look at the iPhone nowadays, it's not the same device anymore as when it was presented the first time to the Market. That's important to understand in the innovation of sensors. So of course, I now tell you innovation takes time. It needs a compass to keep the line and the direction when doing innovation. But of course, you want to be quick too. That's a bit of a trade-off. You try to make it as fast as possible. And there's sometimes some races out in the Market, and we're ready to challenge or accept these challenges. There was a case when we started to make the first concept for our new CO2 sensor, the smaller one which we have now.
We started to make the concept, and then we realized a big German competitor brought out a sensor on the Market, announced it, announced it on the Market, which had the same features. It was the first shock. It happened at the end that we started shipping to customers our sensors, the new sensors which we then developed before this competitor was able to ship the first sensors in the Market, so it's also about speed, but still, if you speed up, you have to do a lot of things in parallel and to make them properly that the product works, and in that case, I also have to admit we had to do some rework afterwards to get things all right as we wanted them to be.
It's not the contradiction that you say, "Okay, innovation only takes ages," but it takes time and has to be properly, and we try to make it as quick as possible. Now, innovation is also about the risk because it's about something new, something nobody has done before. Otherwise, it's not an innovation. So it means things can go wrong. It means you have some headwind, you have some problems, you have to overcome them. You have to stick to your goal and keep fixing things. Not give up the first moment. That's, again, absolute things can fail. And then comes the point. Of course, sometimes innovation fails. That's part of it. Otherwise, it's not a real innovation. It's not really a big goal you had. And sometimes innovation fails, and then you have to stop it. And we do it, and we stop it.
But we stop it because it's the right thing and because we don't believe that this innovation will do it anymore. We don't stop it just because the quarter was bad in financial terms. And that's what we stand for, and we thank you for supporting us on this mission. Thank you very much.
So now it's my pleasure to start with Sensirion at a glance. I will provide you with a few facts and figures while my colleagues later on then come with more details financially and also technically. We make the difference in sensing for a better world. I'm very proud to present you here our new mission statement of the company. And we are convinced that we can make a difference. We can make a difference with our products. We can make a difference with our people here.
And I hope that after this day and when you might have the chance also to go through our production line, that we also can make a difference for you. Sensirion, from the beginning on, had actually the unique advantage to combine the world of sensors and the functionality of sensors with the world of semiconductors. By integration, the functionality of the sensor on wafer level, this story began. And we want to be the leading component provider, sensor component provider, and we integrate those components further into modules and also full solutions to finally create a clear added value for our OEM customers. Sensirion is and stays a pure-play sensor company driven by megatrends and made for long-term growth. We're having a leading position in environmental and flow sensors, and we're also, since a year now, starting to enter the Market of leak detection.
As our founders have been mentioning, it's in our DNA, this mindset of innovation, and we're also brave enough to challenge our own products and technologies with disruptive technology again. We're highly diversified since a while in the end Market, and also we're proud to keep in a long-standing customer relationship with the top players in all fields. Our quite unique company culture, we call it the SensiS pirit, is actually still attracting and retaining the top talents, and here we're also profiting from the universities, quite renowned universities here close by. We're producing 200 million sensors a year, and what is even more impressive, we're having already 1.5 billion sensors out there working. In June, we counted 1,235 full-time equivalent Sensis, and at the end of 2023, we had a revenue of CHF 233.2 million.
The global Market share in humidity sensing is 61%, and we reinvest more than 20% back into our R&D. It's all about miniaturization. Miniaturization is actually our core competence. When we started in 1998 with this humidity sensor, it was large. It was huge. It was 11 centimeters. Then with this functionality integration on wafer level, it could be reduced to 1 millimeter. And when you might remember the wafers we had at the IPO, there were 25,000 humidity sensors on one wafer. Now, with the fourth generation of humidity sensors, we're already having 75,000 chips on one wafer. So this makes us very scalable. We are made for mass production if the Markets allow for it. And that's something which is in our core competence is to really get the functionality of a full module miniaturized on component level.
That's actually something we want to repeat, and we also put a lot of effort in it. So you see here several examples, the differential pressure, but also the newest hit on the block, this particulate matter. Here you see a clear difference when you look at this size of the full module, which has now become integrated on component level, which is very impressive when you look at the footprint of that. Also for our CO2 sensing generation, where we already are now heading for the third generation, you see a clear miniaturization ongoing. As mentioned, we're spending around 20% of our revenue back into R&D, and there we're actually driving innovation along multiple layers. Of course, we want to directly solve customer problems or also regulations of the Market.
These are rather short-term appointments, and here we profit a lot from the existing platforms and the base of technology we already have. Timelines here are around one to two years, and here, as Moritz was mentioning, speed is actually counting. It's time to Market. We want to directly solve a problem which is already existing. And for that, we also have to put a lot of effort, and this is the 60% actually into platform development. There we put the most of effort in order to keep and build up new core competencies. This is actually what is made for scalability and also operating leverage. A nice example, as already mentioned, our humidity and temperature sensors.
Then, of course, in order to challenge again and again our own technologies, but also stay in a long-term Market leadership, we have to put efforts, 10% of our efforts in the long-term innovation. And there we see a monetization within the 6-10 years, can even be longer. And it is a risk, as Moritz was mentioning already. One of our biggest advantages is this full integration we have within Sensirion. And we have actually, we are based on value chains, and we have a fully integrated value chain, and all the Sensirion competencies are meant to optimize our value chains. We are starting with a triangle here in Stäfa, where we have a strong triangle of ASIC, MEMS, and packaging, where we design our chips.
We actually make the full sensor functionality on wafer level in our clean room you might visit later on, and we have the packaging competencies. Only for the manufacturing of the wafers, actually, we profit from the scalable large fabs for wafer manufacturing, and for a few manufacturing and assembly steps, we also work together with external manufacturers. But all the rest, actually, from the development design, the packaging, towards the calibration expertise and the application expertise, in all that, we're fully integrated, and this actually creates very fast feedback loops within the teams, and we can optimize our development teams also according to our value chains. I was mentioning that Sensirion might also make a difference in your daily life, and here I can give you a few examples where you might even don't realize that we already make a difference for you in your daily life.
So when you get up in the morning and pick up some milk from the fridge, there might be a Sensirion sensor in it. If you then commute to work in your car with these Sensirion products in order to optimize the car's emissions or also to heat up your seats, optimized ventilation and indoor air quality could be at work in your normal office atmosphere, and if you get home at night and you actually are having some quiet family time, there might be air purifiers or heating systems containing some Sensirion products, and then also for, say, people who suffer from apnea or have to be in hospital or also just to assist the normal sleep, it could be that you are using a CPAP device or one of your family members is using one or needs one in hospital.
As mentioned, we are already covering a wide range of solutions across diverse end Markets. Our environmental sensing solutions go into the automotive Market, the medical Market, the industry Market, and also the consumer Market. Our flow sensing solution actually also enters automotive, medical, and industrial. They're not in consumer Markets. And our leakage detection, so this is quite new, is already now in automotive and mainly industry. So this gives us stability through strong Market and customer diversification. And you see here that we're having this diversification in the Market, but also geographically. And when I come more to our footprint, which also ensures our customer proximity, this is actually with the sales offices here indicated in green. We have a customer proximity all over the world. And the black spots here, these are actually our operational sites. So we make the difference in sensing for a better world.
Something I'd like to mention especially is actually we make the difference also by our teams and by our people. So we have the three company values. This is fair and honest, together, and top performance. What is really, really important for us is this company culture, and we live this value every day. It is my pleasure, and I'm very proud also to be part of this team and this company. I hope that my enthusiasm for this company and for Sensirion is also radiating towards you today a little bit. Now I hand over to my colleagues.
Welcome from my side. The main focus today will definitely be to give you more insights about the future, about the next years to come.
Nevertheless, it's always pretty easy to give any statements, look forward-looking statements, as long as you have not to look back to say, what have you actually said last time and what have you achieved in the meantime? And therefore, I'd like to spend the first 10 minutes now to look back, to look back to the last four years since the last capital Market day, which took place in March 2021. I think there are main strategic achievements. On the one hand side, this is probably the most important one, is at that time we had the strategic focus called number two, which was the pretty challenging and ambitious goal to become Market leader in environmental sensors. I will give you some more insights afterwards. Then we wanted actually with focus three, we wanted also to lay the foundation for the next growth cycle by developing new products.
And then there was also kind of a commitment to extend our operational footprints in order to reduce the exposures to the Swiss francs, but also to the Swiss labor Markets. And last but not least, additionally, in our DNA, it's not about innovation only, it's also about agility in order to grab all Market opportunities, even if they come up on pretty short notice. And I'd like also to say some words about that. First of all, about the focus two, as it was defined three years or 3.5 years ago about environmental sensors. I think there is not any doubt that we are today one of the top two environmental sensor manufacturers. I'm somehow hesitating to claim that we are by far number one.
I'm not sure about all the details of our competitor in China, but at least we are on the very same level. That means one of the two top manufacturers for all the environmental sensors without humidity, by the way. Humidity were anyway number one. So including humidity, then we are by far number one. But without humidity, we are among the top two. It's also pretty impressive to see how much these new product lines of CO2, particulate matter, formaldehyde, but also volatile organic compounds already contribute to our top line. So it was a steadily increasing portion from 7% in 2017 to 21% in 2020. These are the same figures as last time in the Capital Market Day, and now we are already above one-third of our revenue coming from these new children in the company.
When it comes to the next products, I'd like just to highlight shortly what is in the pipeline afterwards in the new strategic focus we are going to present afterwards. We'll definitely lose more time on these topics. So on the one hand side, it's about the miniaturization of environmental sensors. There are many new products hitting the Markets in these weeks or months. Secondly, we have laid the foundation for the next product families. It's about leakage, but it's also about kinds of data-driven business, which is already on the Markets and is growing at a very small portion at the moment, but it's growing steadily, and we look forward to new, very exciting applications driven by megatrends like autonomous driving and electric vehicles, and last but not least, there is also a lot of new products in the pipeline about medical.
We'd like also to strengthen our medical footprint. And also there we are going to lose some more words later today in the afternoon. Thirdly, it's about the global footprint, operational footprint. Back in 2017, so shortly before the IPO, the vast majority of all the products were actually produced here in Stäfa, so 96%. In the meantime, we changed the company in a way that we have almost 40% of revenue, which is generated outside of Switzerland, either in our production center in China, in Shanghai, but also the one in Hungary, which was opened three years ago, and also in South Korea. South Korea, by the way, is just focused on automotive products for the local Market there. So the main strategic production centers outside of Switzerland is Hungary, but also China in Shanghai. Nevertheless, 62% of our products are produced here.
This is mainly component business and some very sophisticated modules. You will see them this afternoon in production. You have here also some pictures of all the sites. This is the one, the new one in Hungary, where we are already in a construction phase to extend it for the next cycle. And last but not least, if we are looking back, this was pretty crazy times in the last Capital Market Day. There was the pandemic, there was the allocation phase, the supply chain disturbances, but also the destocking afterwards. And I'm pretty proud that we could, on top of all the strategic achievements in the last couple of years, we could already also grab some additional opportunities that were actually not planned. On the one hand side, it was all about the pandemic.
We are, and we still are, one of the by far largest manufacturers of sensors for ventilation, for medical ventilation, and at that time, looking back in March 2020, we got a call by the highest procurement boss of one of our leading medical customers, and he called me up and he told me, "Look, can you expand your production for our medical ventilator sensors by a factor of 10 within six weeks, not months, weeks?" At the very first moment, my reaction was, he got completely crazy, and secondly, this is a typical American way to communicate a factor of 10. It's completely ridiculous. It doesn't make sense. At the end of the story, we achieved to expand the output of medical ventilator sensors within six weeks by a factor of 11, but this was just, this was also kind of make the difference.
This was only feasible due to the spirit of the company to say, "Okay, we are in a lockdown situation." It was end of March 2020. We are in a lockdown situation. We are all pretty concerned about what's going on with this new coronavirus. But nevertheless, so many people, they spontaneously agreed to come into the company without any home office issues and say, "Okay, we like to support that because it makes sense. We do hear a difference for a better world." That means to save a lot of patients in the world. The very same happened afterwards in 2022. With CPAP, there was a quality issue, a severe one with luckily the same customer at the end of the day. They faced a severe quality deviation, which was, and they were asked by the FDA to call back millions of CPAP devices.
It was not linked to our sensor. This is also important. The quality deviation was with the foam, not with our sensor. But there was an additional business to ship additional sensors to these very customers within a very short period of notice. And last but not least, after overcoming these two challenges, there was a third one. This is about the allocation. And we faced a lot of customers or potential customers. They reached out to us and said, "Okay, we cannot get any material from your competitors because they have lead times of more than one year. What's going on in the Market?" And we told them, "Look, you can switch to us.
Our lead times are slightly higher than normal, but we can still keep it lower than 20 weeks." And thanks to them, we could also increase our Market shares in many, many applications, not just for the time of allocation, but even today, they stick with us and say, "Okay, this is a good and reliable supply. We like actually to go with you for the future." And last but not least, also a short review of the midterm guidance we gave out in the capital Market day of March 2021. There we stated that the CAGR revenue top line growth rate on fixed foreign exchange rates should be low to mid-tens. If we look back now, it's 12% without all these one-off effects, just the core revenue development. Unfortunately, the Swiss franc is actually too strong.
So including also the changes of the exchange rates, we go back to 10% only. Gross margin was indicated to be more or less stable at 52%-54%. The average is 56%. Definitely, we also benefited on the one hand side from this very high utilization during the allocation phase. On the other hand, we also suffered from the very low utilization in 2023. And last but not least, the EBT margin, which was indicated to be a bit too high teens, means we ended up with more or less 20%. But we can actually state that even after all these challenging years with a lot of headwinds, but also tailwinds, we could overachieve the guidance we gave to you, the midterm guidance we gave to you in March 2021. Well, that's all about looking back. Now we like to look forward.
We like to give you an update about our growth strategy, also to rephrase the strategic focus for the next journey of three up to five years. I will do a short introduction. Afterwards, I'd like to hand over to Johannes Schumm to give you more insights into this newly defined focus number one.
What has not changed dramatically is about the megatrends, so there are plenty. I would even say we couldn't make a slide you can't read in the last rows because there are so many different megatrends we can summarize here. I just selected the most important ones and especially those we are going to give you more insights in terms of applications, and applications they are driven by these very megatrends, so it's about energy efficiency. Doubtless, one of the most important megatrends for a lot of industrial companies. It's about environmental production.
It's about health and the aging in society and the increasing health expenses in all the well-developed countries. Last but not least, it's a lot about safety and regulations. Many of our sensors are driven by new regulations, either regulations by the governments or by the authorities, but also sometimes regulations by industries that they say, "Actually, we like to be on the safe side. We like to have a sensor inside in order to be compliant with any kinds of regulations they have actually defined within the industry only." That brings us to the rephrased stack of focus. The representation is more or less the same as you might be used to from our last capital Market day. The content is different. The foundation is the very same. The Sensirion spirit, our cultural baseline is and will keep also the same.
Based on that, we have redefined the three focuses. Focus one is now to drive and to expand our strong Market position on the one hand side in environmental, including humidity, and on the other hand on flow. So roughly spoken, you can say this is where we are doing the revenues today. We also earn our money, and it's not just a kind of a stable Market. We like even to drive it to growth. Johannes will do some more works on that. On top of that, there are a lot of growth opportunities already in focus one, but we are not happy just to focus on these core Markets. We like also to go beyond, to leverage our strong Market position, that means to be very close to customers.
On the other hand, also our technology in order to grab additional opportunities beyond the core Markets, we have already a pretty good position. These are new Markets. So you can say here we have the revenue today and we have the profit. This is the field we like actually to contribute additionally to growth in the next couple of years. And last but not least, and this is more or less the same as before, the third focus is again to focus on long-term innovation. Long-term innovation was actually the basis to show you today all about strategic focus two and one. Because they fueled these opportunities today.
And we like actually to continue exactly this journey, not just to focus on the short and midterm potential, but also to lay the foundation for long-term potential and to be ready in three years again to be here and to say, "Okay, we have done a lot here in order to fuel the opportunities we see from 2027 upwards to the next cycle, three to five years." That's the way how we think internally. With this introduction, I'd like to hand over to Johannes. And before lunch, we would like to navigate you through this focus one.
Thank you very much, Marc. So also from my side, a warm welcome to the Capital Market Day. And it's an honor and a pleasure for me to present you this strategic focus number one, which I believe is really important to understand, Sensirion.
If you understand this one, you will understand Sensirion, and that's why you're here. So yeah, let's follow me during this strategic focus number one. As Marc just mentioned, it's to drive and to expand our strong Market position in our core Markets of environmental and flow sensing. And here, to position that, to bring this into context, what does it mean for Sensirion? I'm going to introduce you a diagram that you will see later on also when we speak about strategic focus number two and three, and the diagram looks like this. On the Y axis, you have on the bottom, you have the components. This is what also Franziska mentioned before. These are the small sensing devices. You have the ability to look at them later in the exhibition we have in front of our door here.
These are the small sensors that we deliver, that we produce, that we develop, that we sell in high volumes. This was mentioned before by the previous speakers. If you go up, it's a forward integration into modules. So we can grow here into modules. Modules are the matchbox-sized sensors that are not so small, that are bigger with a different cost structure and a larger size, also mentioned before. And even going up to solutions, which will be part of the last focus, where we deliver not only hardware, but we will also want to deliver algorithm or cloud-based web application solutions, not part of focus number one. And on the other, on the X axis, you have the product portfolio. So for a growing company, we do not grow only with existing products, but we develop new products all the time. And this is the example.
If you understand this kind of diagram and you look how we position the focus number one, it's in this corner. It's base, it's the core of Sensirion. It's the high-volume sensor components that we deliver, like Franziska mentioned, with a technology known from the CMOS world. And we are able to produce sensors with this kind of technology. And the focus one represents our growing core business. Marc mentioned it. It's not a stable business. It's still growing. And we have a lot of opportunities that you can grab. Some of them were already mentioned. And it builds the base for our profitability. So we earn a lot of money here. And we can also grow further with new future opportunities. The focus number one has two sections. In the second section, I'm going to speak about the flow sensing.
In the first section, I'm going to speak about the environmental sensing, and this was mentioned before. I want to invite you to go on a trip here, how we transformed from humidity sensing to environmental sensing. How did this work? Because it shows the way we are growing and the way we approach this on a strategic point of view. Let's start here. Environmental sensing, how this evolution of environmental sensing worked out. And environmental sensing, you heard about it. It was all the beginning was humidity sensing. So we established ourselves as an undisputed Market leader. Marc also mentioned it before for humidity sensors. We have different generations. I'm going to speak about them in the next slide. Different generations of humidity sensors. And here we established a very good close collaboration with our customers and a good reputation for our customers.
Based on this reputation with our customers, it was not based on our technology yet. Based on this reputation with our customers, we were able to expand, to introduce into the Market a first generation of environmental sensing parameters, new sensing. All of them you can see outside, beyond this door. The CO2, PM2.5, formaldehyde combo sensor was to increase our customer contentment for existing customers. You also already learned, yeah, this is one way to increase, but our core competence in operations and in development, also from our sales, is the miniaturization. It was mentioned before. The second generation we did there is to miniaturize. Miniaturize the modules we developed in the first generation, miniaturize them to a second generation. This is more or less where we are standing now, where we are entering the Market.
Marc mentioned it for the new sensor components. These are now the components for left bottom, really high volume components, where we believe with these kind of sensor components, we enable fully new applications. We bring fantasy to our customers. They never saw these kind of products before, so here can really grow something out of these new miniaturized sensing components, building the basis for further growth of focus number one. We established as a Market leader for environmental sensing, so Marc was a little bit doubting if we are number one or two. Yeah, we have the ambition to be number one in environmental sensing and to catch all the opportunities that will come up in the future, so starting with the beginning, starting with humidity sensing. What about the Market here?
The important for us is we are dominating this humidity Market and we have the self-confidence that we say, "Yeah, this is our Market. We want to be the one and only humidity Market driver." We have long-lasting customer relationships with all the major players, and also here, it's a Market still growing. It's a still growing Market in humidity. Also, sometimes we get the question, "Is humidity still growing?" Yes, it's still growing in humidity, and so it's consolidating the Market. Some of our competitors, I named some of them here, were exiting the humidity Market. They were saying, "Okay, no, we give up. We are not able to be number one or number two," and this is also important. If you go into the component business, you need to have economy of scale on your side. You need to have the volumes on your side.
And if you're not able to do so, yeah, they made the decision that they stop. They did risky, they stopped. For example, I can call here the ST because it was published, announced by them. They even mentioned on their homepage to use now Sensirion sensors for development boards for integration. So they really also supported us to increase our Market share. So we were able to grab the Market they had before with our products. And you can see this number was already mentioned before in the humidity Market. IPO shortly afterwards, we stated 52% of Market share in the humidity Market. We increased it over time to more to 61%. But when speaking about this, it's also important. It's not a sit down and relax and everything is going fine. So if you play Champions League and if you are in point, you need to invest.
You need to invest also here in the humidity Market, and this is I want to show you here with the second part of the slide. We do also here continuous innovation. We did not stop with the first humidity sensor that we brought to the Market. This was already a success story, but we continued this success story and we innovated until at the moment, the latest generation is the fourth generation of humidity sensor, where we even made 70% size decrease again from the third generation. And by this, I spoke also to one of our competitors, one when I met them at a conference. They mentioned they were having a copycat of this one and they were thinking about investing now in third generation. And during this management meeting, they saw that we already announced the new ones.
They said, "No, we cannot speed up with the development speed Sensirion has for these humidity sensors." I told you this story before. With the fourth generation, it's not only that we entered a new cost efficiency target. We are really having a good cost efficiency there, but we also managed to have a top performance. It's not only the most cost efficient one, but it's also the best performing sensor we developed so far for the humidity sensor. There we open up new applications. I mentioned this before and I'm going to mention it later on. If you bring a product into the Market that was not there before, it opens up new applications. It opens up, it creates creativity from our customers and you can create new Markets.
These elastic Markets, yeah, they are sometimes confronted with price downs because you have to do a price down and we are able to do this price down. But in humidity, and this is very important for me, we are also doing premium applications. So we do not focus only on the low cost side. This we need to do in order not to let anybody enter the Market. We are also having premium applications like, for example, individual calibration certificates. So we have now here in Stäfa a certified calibration laboratory that enables us to deliver to our customers a calibration certificate once he has a sensor and he reads out the serial number of the sensor.
So each sensor has an individual name, serial number, reads out. He can download from a cloud a calibration certificate saying, "Hey, this sensor was calibrated." You can see it later in the operations tool, calibrated on this date, with this operator, with this accuracy. And another one, specialization. So to keep here the Market specializations, and I'm going to speak about here one example on the next slide. It's in the automotive sector. So Marc mentioned these mega trends. One of them for sure is autonomous driving and electrification. There, a lot of electronics enters the car, even more and more and more each year than the car is going to be electronics on wheels driving around. And if so, there's one danger that if the electronics fails, and one failure could be humidity ingress, water ingress in the electronics. It gets corrosion and it just fails.
And there are different ways to tackle this one. One is, and some OEMs did it, just duplicating the electronics, having twice the electronics. If one is failing, the other one is seeing, "Oh, something's failing," and then you go to the garage and you replace it. There's another way, another solution we are proposing and we have already first designed in that you put one of these new humidity sensors specialized on this application for the automotive, also having the automotive safety level required for this application. It's a standard from the automotive world to be able to detect water ingress before the vehicle electronics fails. And then you can also go to the garage because you know, "Okay, there's something not good, there's small water ingress." This is one of the applications, yeah, where we also differentiate from our competitors.
Where we still see, I promised before, humidity is still growing. Yes, it is growing by this, for example, by this mega trend. Summarizing for the humidity story, we consolidate the Market leadership. Yeah, we have a customer focus and we do Market understanding. We deliver solid results. Last but not least, and I want to lose a few words about this one, we also ensure a resilient supply chain. You know, you're all aware about the geopolitical dangers we are facing at the moment. Nobody knows what's coming in the future. Unfortunately, like we saw in Spain, also the disasters from the environment that could happen. We are well aware that this is something, yeah, we are not, we could also face in the future. Therefore, we do dual sourcing for critical materials and our production sites.
We do this together with our customers so they are informed. They even request for it, and we do really a clear dual sourcing strategy here to stabilize and have a resilient supply chain, whatever happens in the future, to be well prepared for this Market. This was for the humidity sensing, and if you remember the slide before, humidity sensing is the basis. The customer, we have automotive customers, we have liquid customers, we have air purification customers, different customers, and based on these customers, we made the step into the environmental sensing world. So we developed new sensor parameters for our existing customer base. It was not something totally new for our customers. They sometimes even had these sensors from our competitor, but we replaced them by delivering these kinds of modules that I mentioned before.
For the example for the air purifier, we started with humidity sensing. Nowadays, we're delivering humidity, VOC, volatile organic compounds, PM2.5, fine dust, formaldehyde, and CO2 in the very same application. We really extended our customer content here. The priority, why we how we did it was, Moritz mentioned it before, time to Market. It was really important for us to have a fast Market entry with innovation light. We call it innovation light. We brought these kinds of modules. We were not the first one providing these kinds of modules to the Market. We used our customer intimacy to introduce them. We focused on being really fast Market entry in order to test the Market and gain Market share quickly and also for sure to earn money. We earn money with these modules.
Our approach there was to use existing technology platforms, not to invent totally everything new, but use existing technology platforms to accelerate these kinds of developments. And if this is innovation light, yeah, you may, and I already mentioned it before, the second step, second generation was then the innovation where we brought our technical core competence from operations and development into play to build out of these parameters the miniaturization strategy and to have a second product generation, which is about to launch. Some of them were already publicly announced. Some of them are all announced, but not publicly available. Next week, we have a conference in Germany where we also show one of them. And this unlocks new applications. So we're not just doing this because it's fun and we can do. It's fun to do it. Yeah, I'm the development guy.
It's fun to do it, but we do it because we believe and we are convinced and we showed in the past that it opens up new applications and it drives volumes. If you have a different size, a small size, and if you are able to make a step in cost structure, you get new volumes, you open up new applications. This was the priority here by this miniaturization to decrease the size and to improve cost structure to open up these opportunities. The goal was here. This was important for us, and Moritz mentioned the success story for the CO2 to be the first one, the first moving industry partner to give these sensors to the Market in order to start with the economy of scale. If you are the first one, you have the first volumes.
If you have the first volumes, you can provide better prices to other customers. And here we are the first one. The approach was to leverage. So we had this component competence in operations and in R&D to leverage and to combine these components from this competence from the technical point of view with the Market know-how. We did not do it purely without knowing what the Market is required. Therefore, the first generation was very important. It was really, as you mentioned, it was Market insight. We got to know the Market with the first generation. We knew what the customer is needing. We knew how to specify such a product. And therefore, we were able to specify and to develop these new kinds of sensors. How does it feel like?
I want to take out the success story of the carbon dioxide, of the CO2 sensing and speak with one slide about this success story where we have an intermediate. You can call it either 1.5 generation, second generation, or you call it second and third generation. I don't mind, but we have three generations there. And the CO2 sensing Market, it was also a Market increasingly growing during the COVID pandemic or shortly afterwards because CO2 is the main index for indoor air quality. If you are in a room and I hope it's not too bad here, but we're going to open up the window soon. Yeah, the indoor air quality is something that people care, that people were aware after the COVID pandemic even more than before. That is a very important aspect. And there we started shortly before 2018 with the first product.
This was our first product, the big one, the matchbox size CO2 sensor, and we increased our Market share up to, we believe in 2026, we are able to increase it up to 26%. And interestingly, you see here the different generations. They are not cannibalizing themselves. They are fulfilling even though different Market requirements. If a customer has the need of a very high accuracy CO2 sensor in order to ventilate room, in order to, for example, there are also regulations where you need to fulfill some kind of accuracy, he still is buying this one. He's able to also buy the price for the big one because he needs the accuracy. We are still selling this one.
And the second generation was the one that we launched during the COVID pandemic, enables for not regulated Markets, also in HVAC buildings where you have not regulation to even optimize your ventilation system. And there it's all about optimizing energy saving. You could do the ventilation all the time, but it's better you do it only when it's needed. Therefore, you need the sensors to save energy. And this one enabled, let's say, this opportunity for lower cost, lower regulated Market. And you maybe remember also these kinds of traffic lights that we had or probably all the schools had where you had green, red, and yellow about the air quality. This was the one enabling this application for CO2. And the new one, it's not yet available or some lead customer already have it on the table.
The new one is now really a chip-based component sensor where we believe, yeah, with this one, we can even more in smart homes, wearable devices, and there will come much more opportunities. We have some customers of ours already developed some applications. I'm not allowed to talk about them, but there will come also a lot more with this new small CO2 sensor regarding price and scalability. I made here a question Marc. You can move it around the question Marc. We are now established as the CO2 player also in the Market. We are checking the Market requirements continuously. And once we believe that there's a Market opportunity that we need to grab, we are ready to develop also here new sensors in this triangle, for example, if it goes to low power. And by this, I finished for the environmental sensing section of strategic focus number one.
On the one hand side, we are very well positioned with our customers. So we are not only seen as a humidity sensing company, but as an environmental sensing company, and on the other side, and this is also from our R&D research and development point of view, we have really now a broad product portfolio with totally different technologies during the time. We have this now available, and I choose here, let's say, this kind of puzzle in order if there are new requirements coming, new applications coming. We are well positioned. We know the customer. We know the technology. We can combine these two worlds in order to react very fast to new Market opportunities that may come in the future. This is now, let's say, the case for the environmental portfolio, for the flow portfolio. I have less lights, so you spare your energy for the lunch.
It's coming soon. Nevertheless, flow. Flow sensing, for me, it's the main message. We are stronger than before the COVID pandemic. We heard about this COVID effect on the flow sensing Market. In general, the flow sensing Market is very fragmented. We also heard about the CPAP, the continuous positive airway pressure that you need. Franziska mentioned it for the sleep apnea. We have here a Market share that's incredibly high. Yeah, we challenged again our Market guys here. We believe we have a Market share of 90% in this Market segment, for example. In another segment, in the more in the medical ventilation segment, we have a growing Market share of nowadays, we believe, 50%. There I mentioned this stronger than before. Marc mentioned it also.
I'm not going to repeat it totally, but the ability to deliver during this pandemic really brought us new customers to this stage because with us, yeah, we were delivering these sensors to the Market. In the medical Market, it's a fragmented Market also here. Also, new applications are coming up. For example, NO dosing, it's something I was not aware about. The NO, nitrogen oxide, is a gas that is toxic if you use it too much. But if you just use it in very small doses, and our customers are the experts, I just learned from them, it helps during surgery. It can help to bring your lungs into a better shape. So they put it for the newborn babies, but also for other surgeries.
It's a totally new Market coming up with this NO dosing where we are entering now with our sensors. Another Market is increasing for us, heart-lung machines, so also here, there's a continuous future growth in the medical Market. But it's not only about medical and CPAP, this flow sensing. I choose three different applications where we are present in the flow Market. One is the HVAC building control. Also here, if you have these HVAC pipelines, you need to measure the flow during running the airflow running through these pipelines, and we still get new customers, so we have a lot of customers. It's not the fastest moving Market. Yeah, it takes time, but we have the time and we still gain new customers in this HVAC building control, and we increase our customer content, so we have the flow sensing.
We already have the real estate in the pipe. You can now add our environmental sensing portfolio or the customers can add our environmental sensing portfolio to increase here the quality of the HVAC building control to save energy and to deliver good air into room. On the gas metering side, you may know that we are quite, if you go to Italy for holidays and you look about the gas metering in the houses and you see the smart meters there and you open it up, don't do it, it's not allowed, but if you would open it up, you would see a sensor inside. And here also new applications come up with the power to gas.
So the energy transition that is happening, all this renewable energy forms, they at the end, they produce hydrogen often, they pump it into the pipeline, and there we are also well prepared for this power to gas initiative to measure with our technology compared to some competitive technology to measure this gas flow, even though it's not a pure gas in fact, but it's added with hydrogen. And another one that I like very much, it's a smart metering for clean cooking in Africa and India, for example. So you may know that there's a clean cooking initiative from UN, UNICEF, and all these organizations because they're the poor people. They don't have access to clean cooking facilities. They still cook with wooden stoves inside some cabins. And then the air quality, you can imagine, is really good. A lot of particles in the air and they're dying.
I don't know the number. A lot of people eat here just because they don't have access to like clean gas cooking possibilities, and they don't have the money to afford to buy this whole stove. So they can rent a stove, a clean cooking stove, and they can do a pay-as-you-cook application. And therefore you need a sensor, and we are already in there. We're delivering the sensor already to Africa. So you have a gas flow sensor, and they pay $2, $3, whatever, and then they get the gas to cook for a day or for a week, depending on the model they make. And last but not least, this is a smart kind of a teaser so that you come back with a lot of energy Markets going to show you more than flow.
The combination of the two words that I just presented to you, environmental sensing on the one side, flow sensing on the other side, and if you combine it, it enables totally new applications, which Marc will reveal in strategic focus number two after this break. Doing a summary here, what you just learned from myself, and I hope that you have now got to know better too since here what we achieved. We increased our content for existing customers. We grew with customers, and we implemented the strategy, and the strategy was presented in the last capital Market day, already the miniaturization strategy as a forward-looking strategy. Now we can say that we implemented our strategy and that now these sensors are able to hit the Market and to also monetize here and to enable new applications, as I mentioned before.
We are now ready also to leverage our technology portfolio. You remember the one with the puzzle. So we are now able to get new growth in both fields, environmental and flow sensing, because you can also use this kind of new technology that you have for environmental sensing for flow sensing. So we have really a broad portfolio here on the technical point of view, and we can even combine these two worlds for new applications. Yes, with this, I'm finished. I hand over to the Q&A session.
You are moderating or Lars?
Yes, Lars is taking care of all the remote questions. So before you have the chance for lunch, it's now your turn, actually, to ask questions. So thank you all to all the presenters.
Lars will take care of all the remote questions, but I'd like definitely to give you the privilege to start with your very first questions. And so we start probably at the very last row, so Sandy, please.
My question is, can you show at the beginning of your presentation? Okay, don't wait for the microphone, otherwise we cannot be the last row. Thank you. You showed in your first presentation that your environmental sensors as a percentage of your revenue has increased very significantly since IPO. What is the driver from here in terms of all these new sensors? What is incremental in terms of growth from here in terms of environmental sensors or of the flow sensors going from here? And my second question is actually more topical rather than what was in your presentation.
We've seen in the Market at this point that the automotive end Market has had considerable weakness as such, really. We've heard from many companies. Maybe you can make any short-term comments you see in terms of what is happening in the overall Market environment at this point.
I'm not sure if I got your first question correctly. So you mentioned about the 38% of environmental sensors, what are the main drivers for that.
No. The future products we're looking for [and] how. Again, which are the products which will drive it to increase further?
Okay, good point. So on the one hand, I think. Oh, I have to stay here for that. I will be closer to you. So I think this one, if it's okay with. Thank you, Chris.
To make a kind of a bet for the future, I have the most ambitious expectations with CO2 sensors. I think CO2 is still a very important gas, not just for indirect application, but there are also some of CO2 applications I'm going to talk about this afternoon in medical applications, and last but not least, there are many of them also in cars, in automotive cars, and I think we are just at the very beginning of a new journey there, and what is the limitation today not to apply CO2 sensors more? It's typically about costs, and it's typically about form factor, and this is exactly what Johannes outlined. We are now at the very starting point of the next generation to come, and this will take some years. They will not hit the Market within one year.
If you're looking back to humidity, all the generations, they took some years to be adapted by the Markets, especially in all these cases, the application has to be developed first. But at least you have actually to make the first step in monetization in order to give all your customers the creativity, the insights to say, okay, this is possible. We can shrink it down. We can provide you sensors on a high level of accuracy with significantly lower costs. But now it's your turn to think about applications. But this will also take some time. But looking forward for the next three, up to five years, I think the main driver is very well, very likely to be expected by CO2 sensors first. The other story about the drivers there is all the other ones, particulate matter, formaldehyde. Also, they can actually do the same journey.
But honestly, I don't expect the very same dynamics as in CO2 sensing thanks to the miniaturizations. And on top of that, there are a lot of also requests from the Markets for any other kinds of gases. So Johannes, for example, shortly commented about NO. And there, I think the other driver we have is now the portfolio of technologies. So I come back to this point this afternoon about A2L. A2L, it's leakage, honestly, but at the end of the day, it's also kind of a gas. And there we had the huge benefit to have three different technologies in-house in order to benchmark, in order to pick the one we are most believing in before we start production and product development. And that's also looking forward about new gases.
It's a great opportunity to have these technologies internally in order to pick the one you need and also to be fast enough in terms of time to Market because we have the technologies already at hand. Second question about automotive, short-term comments on automotive. Yes, definitely. We do also see some kinds of reduced forecasts, especially in our module business. That means the tier one business where we are closer to the OEMs. They have sometimes significantly reduced their forecast for this year or the remaining part of this year, but also the next year, and because of some kinds of reduced Market growth expectations. And on the other hand, honestly, with the components we are up to now, at least, I'd like to emphasize up to now, we don't see significant reductions in the forecast.
Can also be linked to kinds of inventory management in a way, but at the moment, we see the weaknesses only with the direct tier one business, so the direct business with the OEMs. And this is mainly a question of Germany and of Korea.
Yes, thank you. I just wanted to pick up on the CO2 sensors. So when I was looking at the chart, so miniaturization means in CO2 sensors that the accuracy is going down. And I think when we were talking about the humidity sensors with miniaturization, you could even increase the accuracy. So in CO2 sensors, since it is a strategic growth field, now what is the game, costs, accuracy, Market growth, Market opportunity? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Good point that you mentioned here, and I expected these kinds of questions. Yeah, the accuracy at the moment is going down. What you need to remember, this miniaturized version is the first version of the miniaturized version. So it's kind of the starting point of new generations coming up. We will not stop here like we did for the humidity sensing. For sure, at the moment, it's less accurate as the one that we have, the big one, but we will continue also to bring their innovation. Regarding the growth, it's difficult to say hard numbers. What will be the growth for this one? I believe, personally, I believe that this miniaturized sensor in CO2 will enable a lot of new applications in the smart home world because now you could not build a matchbox sensing device with a matchbox-sized sensor.
So I believe that there will be a lot of volumes coming due to the price down that we can deliver to our customers and that it's not, let's say, a limiting factor, or this is also what the customers we are talking to at the moment, they accept this less accurate version by having a smaller size and a cost-efficient version. To semiconductor, am I correct? Yes. This is the first version now based on semi, and that might be the step change that the accuracy just is on this one down. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Okay, thanks. Fully right. It is the final step for the semiconductor now. We have now a chip-based humidity sensor, which is really a revolution for the Market. CO2, CO2, sorry. Chip-based CO2 sensing. Yeah. And I'd like to pick one further question here before I hand over to the remote colleagues. Yes, please.
Thank you. One question on the, if you could comment on the pricing dynamics from one generation to the other and across the lifecycle of the products. I assume that you have a price erosion on existing products, and then you have a step up again with new products. What is the risk that you do not bring next generation to the Market on time and have a sort of a dip in between two generations in terms of price volume?
Yeah, indeed. I think this is always a race to be ready on time. Well, I think there are different price dynamics depending on the Market. So in consumer, typically you have negotiations, even sometimes per quarter about prices.
On the other hand, you have automotive, which is typically kind of a well-defined price and volume roadmap for the next three up to five years before you start negotiations again. So this is completely different in those terms. But nevertheless, I think it's important to come up with the better cost-structured new generation. I think roughly speaking every four to five years. There is a good indication also on the Market price is not just done between you and your customer, but also, unfortunately, it's also influenced by your competitors. So whenever our competitors are ready to copycat our latest generation, then it's a good indication that we should actually come up with the next one as soon as possible. So this is typically, it's not just out of the blue from today to tomorrow that the price drops significantly.
The second challenge is always not just about the next generation to have ready, but also to convince your customers to switch, so there are some customers, especially in medical, they don't like to change their products, but then you definitely, at least you have the product ready, you have a pretty good position for negotiations to say, okay, we do have a sensor which is significantly cheaper than the one you have designed, but then you have actually to switch to the next generation, and the good story there is they cannot go to a competitor because also then they have to change the system, so at least either they stick on the one they have already designed in, then it's fine in terms of changes, but then they have also to be willing to not participate on the price erosions, or they go to the next generation.
That works pretty okay, but nevertheless, it takes some time also to bring the new generations into Markets depending on the dynamics of the respective Market segment. Then we hand over to the remote colleagues. Lars.
Okay. Okay. Then next questions here. At the beginning, for the smartphones that you want to implement their sensor humidity sensors, CO2 sensors, are you still following these projects?
Yes. Well, honestly, this was not a plan to go with the CO2 sensor in the smartphone. If we look back at the smartphone industry, it was extremely dynamic in terms of new sensors to come in to make next steps in sensors 10 years ago. This was the story Felix told before to say, okay, 2013, 2014, this was the golden era of sensors and smartphones.
And at that time, also during the IPO, we talked about the potential opportunity to come in with volatile organic compounds. That means with a kind of air quality sensor, not CO2 at that time. Because honestly, at that time, we were far away from shrinking down CO2 to a level which is even thinkable to bring it into a smartphone. Because for a smartphone, you have actually to reach more or less price, not cost, but price level of one buck. And on top, you have to be very, very tiny. That's more than obvious. Otherwise, there's no chance to come in there. That means CO2 was not on our roadmap for smartphone. In the meantime, it turned out that smartphones today, they are less dynamic in terms of innovation.
Secondly, they are fully focused on a pixel size of the touchscreen combined probably with the camera quality performance. Sensors is not anymore just a very high focus. Nevertheless, it's not a strategic goal to be very clear on that, but at least if any of the smartphone manufacturers are inspired to say, okay, now there is a CO2 sensor around, which might be even fit into a smartphone, and they reach out to us, it will be the very same reaction as we did 2013 to say, okay, we are the leader in CO2 sensors. So there will be no application coming up anywhere on the globe. We are not in. And then definitely we do it. But it's not our strategic goal.
Yes. Quick question on the HVAC end Market. Your colleague touched upon it before. He mentioned that it's there, but it's adopter. ut at the same time, Markets are doing very well, especially the American ones driven by the commercial data center demand. Can you just clarify to me why you don't benefit fully from the boom in that Market? What are the hurdles as a component provider?
Well, I think the comment of Johannes not to be the most dynamic one. HVAC industry is typically a pretty conservative one. So it takes just longer in order to come in because they have actually to go through different certifications. They would like also to be very sure that this works. And also, they have not that many different product starts again and again. Nevertheless, we come back to this point this afternoon. At the moment, honestly, HVAC is one of the most dynamic ones in terms of potentials for the company, namely linked to this A2L opportunity in the U.S.
But we have to be very honest on that. This was driven by authorities. This was not driven by the manufacturers to be innovative in a way. So they have actually to do a change. And therefore, they do. And this is a good opportunity for us to come in. So this is not a kind of contradiction, but at least the Market itself is not that open for innovation. If they have to do so, they do. And if I got your question correctly, you also referred to data centers, for example. Data centers definitely are an application we are looking into. It's not just limited to HVAC only. There are also a lot of cooling issues. But up to now, this is not yet a key focus Market of Sensirion.
But we are at least looking into that in order to identify good opportunities for the future because we have already identified this is an unsolved problem, how to get rid of all the heat of these increasingly powered chips. And there might be future applications for Sensirion. This is for sure.
Waldkirch, one follow-up question on automotive. So for your tier one business, it's the German OEMs and the Korean ones that are important for you, but the Chinese OEMs are rapidly gaining Market share. So if you could just kind of talk about how that Market share is kind of evolving, a couple of design wins, new success stories with Chinese OEMs specifically. In general, our Chinese footprint for modules is pretty weak.
And I think this is also very unlikely to happen significantly in the next years to come because we see there probably a three-layer headwinds or we're facing some headwinds in three different layers. On the one hand side, up to now at least, these local domestic, we are not talking about joint ventures. There we are pretty strong. But with all the locals, BYD and all the domestic, there are many of them. There are more than 80 different car manufacturers domestically located in China. And most of them, they are fully focused on price, cost downs, cost downs, cost downs. They are not as it used to be in automotive in the Western world to be on a high-quality level. Typically, for a particular manner, they are even happy with an LED base, which is more than obvious that they don't measure particulate matter properly.
But at least they are fine with that. So this is the first layer. We feel some headwinds because this is not the business we like to do, just to ship around some plastics at the end of the day because we like to be paid also for performance and for innovation and not for just commoditized product. Secondly, honestly, there's also some geopolitical issue in China. Most of the car manufacturers in China, they are at least asked. We have not the full insight to focus on local suppliers. And local suppliers does not mean that we are going up to produce this product in China. It has to do about the owners of the company. And this is a strategic question of the government in China. And also there we feel some strong headwinds.
Last but not least, typically a lot of car manufacturers in China, they are not yet on EV cars and they are not yet on the level to have such a high content of sensors as we used to have in the Western world. This might change in a couple of years. I think there is, not even for the third point, but also for the first one, we do see, or we hope at least to see some kinds of mindset shifts. On the one hand side, the large domestic manufacturers in China, BYD and some others, they like also to enter the European Market. I'm pretty sure that they have also to increase the performance level, the reliability level. And this might also change their mindset of looking only for cost, but not of performance.
And secondly, also about the content of sensors in the car, they might also change in the future because they have also to go for more autonomous driving. So they're also facing some security safety issues in terms of water ingress and so on. And there is also a good chance for us. But coming back to existing solutions today, we have a better footprint either with joint ventures. So for example, the growth we have shown in the half-year result 2024 in automotive was mainly driven by particulate matter sensor for a joint venture in China, but the joint venture together with a German OEM. And secondly, what we see is we have good chances to expand our footprint on components level. With components level, there, for example, for humidity, we are not the only one, but at least the most dominant one.
And secondly, we are not facing the same headwinds of geopolitical strategic decisions to be local in China. So these are our chances. The normal modules we are going to sell to Western companies, there we have a pretty hard cookie to eat.
Just to follow up, if I may, on the production footprint in the U.S. currently, you do not produce. And now with the election, let's see how it turns out, but tariffs might be an issue. So is there any kind of optional plan to build out the production footprint in the U.S. as well?
We do already, but it's not our own operation center. We decided actually to go with a manufacturing partner, an outsourced manufacturing partner for the module manufacturing of some, at least of the A2L products. So they are now ready to ramp up in these couple of weeks.
And they are located in Mexico. So they are in the NAFTA region in order to be very close to these HVAC manufacturers. Most of them are located anywhere in the south of the U.S., for example, in Texas. So they are pretty close geographically. And in terms of tariffs, we are in the NAFTA region. So this production, but the reason why we are not starting up our own production center is just at critical mass. So we like to be close to the customers, like to optimize the tariffs, but it doesn't make sense for us to start up an additional operation center in North America because otherwise we are facing some other critical mass situations for the different operation centers.
But is it the same for your competitor or would this, in case tariffs do come, it would be a pressing disadvantage for you?
No, a lot of our competitors, they have anyway a kind of a partial fabless model. That means they are doing more of their manufacturing together with OEMs and not on their own. So that means we are more or less on the same level as they do.
Thank you. R&D, how important are R&D actually? Are you doing some of these new R&D? Your single source supply for most of your clients. So how is that going to develop over time? You're entering new Markets, you're going to the Market with new products. Are you still trying to be the single source for your clients over time or is that going to change over time? Thank you.
Good question. So answering maybe the second question first, for sure, it's our goal to be a single source supplier.
For some strategic partners like in the automotive world, and we are very proud about this one, we are still single source supplying for humidity sensing in the automotive world there. If we go in the tier one level, sometimes it doesn't work out because just the OEM decides, "Hey, I need to." And then, yeah, we have a second source or they have a second source compared to us, but we want to reach at least the highest Market share for sure for these kinds of applications. The question there is, yeah, it's our goal to be single source. We have the reliable footprint of more than 14 years being a single source supplier in the automotive field. So we have this footprint, but it's not always manageable because of the customer's requirements.
The first one regarding the collaboration with the customers, I would say there are two different kinds of collaborations. For sure, it's in the focus of our development. The one is if we do a component, it's always a standard component for the different Markets. We have one component where we try because the development cost, it's quite high. The operation cost is quite high. We need high volumes. We need to make a standard component for different Markets. There we have on the sales side, we have the different key account managers and the product managers. They try to get a common understanding of what could be the common basis for a component. There we work really close with the big customers. We have this relationship to get the requirements. It's really about the requirements and understanding the application of the customer.
So even though the customer sometimes doesn't know the requirements, as soon as we know, understand the application of the customer, then we can provide them with the best component. And we do a standard component for different Markets. So it's not a customized component in normal case. For the module level, yeah, there are the requirements of the customer regarding communication protocols or adapters and so on. And there we do customization directly together with the customer. So we really want, we are a technology company, but we are customer-driven. So we really want to develop together with the customer. And all this miniaturization, we do not do them just by our own without speaking to our customers. We speak to the customers. We get their understanding. We get the requirements. And we work together with them also in how to integrate a sensor.
This is different from a lot of other components or chip sets. If you want to integrate a sensor into a device, you need to have a lot of know-how how to integrate it, how to have the opening, how to have the venting to get the environmental sensing to the air. And there we have a very good sales network also being close as the customer with the field application engineer to provide this kind of support to our customers. Just two add-ons, a strategic comment to this last point. Therefore, it's so important for us to closely serve with the OEMs directly, not to be just a component provider to any module manufacturers, but to be strategically very close to the OEMs. They run the business.
They know about the application because this is the source to fuel our innovation pipeline and also our application know-how at the end of the day. So this collaboration is extremely important. Another comment about the dual sourcing. So sometimes it happens with automotive modules that we are unfortunately only one out of two. But the other one is module manufacturers, which is based on our component at the end of the day. So the OEMs, they don't realize, or they probably realize, but they can't do anything against it that at the end of the day, the core of the sensor is single source to gain. That means with Sensirion. That happens also, by the way, A2L. Sometimes it happens this way that the other competitors serving the same HVAC manufacturers is based on our sensor. Well, we have probably time for one last question.
Again, the question is there any from the remote audience? Well, so who likes to have the privilege to close the session this morning with a last question? Obviously, it works also here. That's always my offer during our town hall meetings to say, "Okay, is there any very important question to close the session?" And typically in Switzerland, it's already over, so enjoy the lunch. It's in front of the door, and also take the opportunity to have a look at our product show in order to give you a touch-and-feel opportunity for all the products, at least for the very tiny ones. It's a good touch-and-feel opportunity. There are also some product managers around, so you can also reach out to them if you have any further questions about products, but also about Markets, and also we are definitely available over lunchtime.
So when is the start for the next session afternoon? 20 to 2. So 1:40 P.M., we come back here in this room for the second part of the investor day. Thank you.
I hope you could enjoy the lunchtime and you had also good inspiring discussions during lunchtime. So I'd like now to come back to strategic focus two. To shortly wrap up it again, focus two is newly defined as additional growth fields. They are beyond the core of environmental sensing and flow sensing. So the base is our core. We like actually to expand and to grow. This was already explained by Johannes this morning. And additionally, we like actually to grab additional opportunities outside of our core, but definitely linked to our core in a way. And this is also the first slide to illustrate that.
It's not the way that we are jumping to any completely unrelated new fields. We have actually to develop all the technologies from scratch. We have to develop customer bases from scratch. It's not that way. It's more that we do see the more or less same secular backup trends supporting our business combined with a Market position in our core and the customer base. So typically, we have been working many years with all the leading customers or players in all the respective fields, from automotive to medical up to consumer and appliances. So we are in very close relationships to them. So there's a good chance to leverage this customer base in order to offer more completely different things based on the customer base we do already have. And third of all, there is also a pretty comprehensive technology box.
Combining all these three elements, mega trends combined with the customer base and the toolbox, we do see additional Market opportunities. I like to pick out three of them in order to give you more insights about the next years they hopefully will come. First of all, it's about leakage, not just related to A2L. There is plenty of other opportunities beyond A2L only. It's about breath in medical. This already teased idea of combining flow and environmental sensing in medical applications. Last but not least, it's all about industrial solutions, on the one hand side about methane, and secondly about high-end gas analytics. Start first with the very same sketch as it was already introduced this morning by Johannes Schumm, Y-axis components module solutions, and on the other hand, the product portfolio.
As you see, there is actually both dimensions, or even in the mix of both, there are growth opportunities in the focus two. Here, the leakage sensors are more located anywhere between components and modules, but more the industrial solutions are mainly focused on full solutions. I will come back to this point later, what we mean with this name full solutions. And medical can be either typical modules, medical modules, as we used to have with all the medical ventilator sensors, but it can even be more. It can even reach out to full solutions applications rather than modules only. So let's start first with leakage. And here, honestly, I reuse a slide. I have already shown 95% at least of this slide three years ago in the last CMD.
It was more kind of an outlook at that time as part of focus three to say, "Okay, we like to work on the technological foundation in order to be ready to catch opportunities in leakage sensing." This was three and a half years ago. I reused the very same slides, just shortly updated in some specific points. That means on the one hand side, we have the drivers of environmental protection, but also safety and regulations. We drive a lot of new applications in the area of leakage sensing. On the other hand, we can reuse our sensor portfolio. We have already been developed for many, many years, either in the context of environmental sensing or in the context even of flow, so even longer ago. Start first with the drivers on the one hand side. So we have new regulations in place.
You might be already pretty aware of that. For these new refrigerants and ACs, they are lower in GWP, so in the global warming potential. That's the good story. That's also the reason why the American authorities have now defined regulations in order to have a complete transformation of AC Market to the new lower GWP refrigerants. But they come, unfortunately, or from our point of view, fortunately, it comes with a higher flammability. Or even in case of A3, that's a next story to come in some years. They come even with an explosive risk. And in both cases, especially the U.S. Market asks for additional leakage sensors in order to mitigate these risks of flammability or explosion. Second opportunity driven by mega trends is all about CO2-based heat pumps.
So today, in the EV cars, you have to take care of energy efficiency because at the end of the day, in contrast to combustion engines, in combustion engines, whenever you can save energy, it's good for the environment. But there is not a big feel effect on the feeling you have as a driver. In case of EV cars, it's directly linked. All the energy efficiency is directly linked to the range you can drive around without charging the battery again. There is a huge difference of your personal interest in having a highly optimized energy consumption in a car. Heat pumps is a great thing in order to heat the cabin up or even to cool it down in case of summertime with a lower energy, with higher energy efficiency or with a lower energy consumption.
In cars, typically, these heat pumps are based on CO2 or in the U.S. with propane. In both cases, CO2 is not dangerous, but if you have too much CO2 in your cabin, it will get difficult for you as a driver. In case of propane, probably this is more than obvious that this is an intrinsic risk whenever there is a leakage. Third example is about the mega trends of the energy transformation to batteries in general or even to hydrogen-based systems. Hydrogen is one of the best candidates to store energy from summer to wintertime. We do produce enough energy with solar cells, or we are going to produce enough energy in summertime in future. But we need it in wintertime, especially in all our climate regions where we have a lot of heating systems in wintertime. They are electrified in future.
We need the energy in wintertime, not in summertime. There are two possibilities to store it, either by hydrogen, which is not that efficient, but at least it works, or by water in the mountains, so this is a good chance for Switzerland, but it's not that a good chance for the Netherlands, but therefore, hydrogen is one of the best storage technologies for the future. Additionally, it's about batteries. I will come back to this point later on again, and last but not least, there are increasing regulations for methane. I will also show you some figures on that term. Here, I will come back, not in this section, because it's linked to our data business, which is part of the industrial solutions. Well, starting first with refrigerants. Most of you, at least those, they have regular discussions with me in one-on-ones.
We have already covered this topic several times. So this is definitely a very big chance we are facing in the next couple of months to come. The U.S. has to change the whole AC Market to the new global lower GWP refrigerants by beginning of next year. They have additional 12 months to sell the old systems, but they are not allowed anymore to manufacture the old systems from February 1st next year onwards. That means they have, on the other hand, there will be a regulation in the U.S. to integrate a leakage sensor for all systems. They are higher in charging than a specific volume. So all the larger ACs, they have to include at least one leakage sensor. Additionally, this is just for the U.S. Market.
Additionally, the A3 category for refrigerant, that means propane and all the other ones with even zero GWP, they will come and hit the Markets in some years. First starting in heat pumps in the next couple of years, and probably five to 10 years, they will also be included in air conditioning systems. First of all, very likely to happen in Europe, and then with some years of delay also in the US. So this is a longer journey, not just the transformation which takes place in these very months now, but also down the road, there are many, many additional opportunities in the next years to come. The good story about technology, and if you just remember back on my very first slide this afternoon to say, "Okay, we are not going to fields.
They are completely unrelated to what we have done in the past." We are reusing the very same technologies as we used to have for environmental. So this is about technology of thermal conductivity, but not of photoacoustics. These are two technologies they are already applied for CO2 sensing. Probably for some of you, it sounds strange that you can use the technology of CO2 sensing to be applied for leakage sensing of A2L, but it works. So this is the miracle of physics at the end of the day. But you can believe us, that works. The addressable Market potential is pretty hard to estimate at the moment because the Market is still in the process to emerge, but it's assessed to be more or less CHF 100 million. A2L is definitely in front of us.
It's the immediate ramp-up which takes place in the next couple of months. We are pretty well positioned there. So we could convince five out of the top six HVAC manufacturers in the U.S. to rely on our technology. It's not always single source. Some of them are. Some others, they have decided to mitigate risks to go with two or three of the manufacturers from the very beginning. It will be our task afterwards, and this brings us also back to a question in the last few days session. Our ambition is definitely to kick the others out, but this will not happen in the next couple of months. This will hopefully happen in the next years to come. A3, so the next story afterwards is the zero GWP refrigerants. There, the first design-ins are ongoing. It's a pretty demanding task for R&D to measure A3 properly.
It's more difficult than A2L, but this is actually a good story. Typically, we prefer sensor challenges. They are more demanding because also if you can fix it, if you can tackle it, you have also higher entry barriers for your competitors because they have to solve the very same as you have hopefully already solved. So that means for us, it's actually a good story that it's a demanding sensor application and that the Market has just to emerge in the next couple of years. It's not yet a large Market today. This will come in the next year or so. Some words about CO2 leakage in automotive, but also in the industrial Market.
Again, the drivers are the energy efficiency, but also safety and regulation issues driven by the fact that we have to reduce our energy efficiency, to increase the energy efficiency, to save energies by changing to heat pumps. A lot of heat pumps are based on A3. We have already discussed before. Some others, especially in automotive and in some industrial applications, they are based on CO2. And also there, you need a kind of a safety leakage sensor for safety reasons. Again, the same story as before. CO2 is more obvious that whenever you like to measure CO2 levels, you might even be able to measure CO2 leakage because at the end of the day, leakage is nothing else than detecting any CO2 molecules in the air where there shouldn't be any. This is actually nothing else than that.
So therefore, there it's more obvious that we can reuse the same application technologies we have already developed. The rest of the Markets, 20-40 million. Also, this Market is not yet here today. So it's not a Market where we go in to squeeze out some competitors. We develop the Markets together with our customers, driven by mega trends, and we are going to pioneer the technology as the same as in A2L to offer the very first industry-first solution in order to address this emerging Market. What is the position today? First, nominations in automotive have already been won. We have a pretty broad existing customer base we can reach out to. We can convince to take our solutions. Some of them have already started the nomination process. Some others, they are still in the evaluation.
And last but not least, we definitely benefit also from our large experience in CO2 all in all because at the end, it's the same molecule we are going to look at. Hydrogen. Hydrogen, there are two different applications within the same application. That means on the one hand side, I have already shortly summarized the importance of hydrogen to store energy. On the other hand, it's about batteries. Batteries today, they are especially larger batteries, either the ones in EV cars, but also the ones you have typically in your basement in order to store your personal solar energy for nighttime. All of them, they have one potential risk. They might end up with a thermal runaway. So there is the danger that the battery has a malfunction which ends up with a burning or a burning down effect of your battery, which cannot be stopped by water.
So it's not that easy to stop it. You might have already read some newspaper articles about the risk of EV cars in those terms, especially in the Asian region where there are many, many, much more EV cars driving around. The whole industry, the automotive industry, but also all sensor companies, they are looking deeply into this topic in order to find a solution. At the moment, it's pretty hard to find good indicators to indicate early enough that such an event might happen. The best candidate today is hydrogen. So that means the chemical reactions in the batteries, the malfunctioning reactions in the battery, they produce hydrogen. And this can be detected. This leakage can be detected and gives a good indication that the battery is very close to start a thermal runaway event. What can we do? On the one hand side, it's thermal conductivity once again.
So the same technology, which is already applied for A2L, but also for some parts of the CO2 sensing. But on top of that, we have also metal oxide, another technology. Both can address a hydrogen with some drawback, but also some drawbacks, but also some advantages. The Market, also this Market, we are looking forward. It's not yet fully clear how large it will be. And we assess it today at the level of CHF 30-50 million. Also here, we have already won the first nominations with automotive car manufacturers or their battery partners in order to monitor their respective batteries in automotive applications. Also there, we can leverage the customer base we do already have because we are so present in these Markets. That's about leakage.
Again, methane leakage. I will come back later with industrial sensor because there is a kind of crossover between industrial sensing and leakage sensing. But first of all, I like to pay attention more on the medical solutions. Also there, we like actually to combine different skills and positions we do have already worked on in the last couple of years. So on the one hand side, in breath, we are the by far dominating player for all kinds of breathing or flow rate measurements in breathing situations for patients, either breathing in or breathing out of patients. So for example, CPAP 90% Market share, ventilation medical applications 50% Market share, but also anesthesia. Secondly, we do have this comprehensive technology portfolio of measuring all kinds of molecules, CO2, O2, or even some other ones. So typically what comes out of a patient, it's O2 and it's CO2.
And we can measure that. Thirdly, we are in long-lasting relationships with all the key medical ventilators in the area of breathing or giving breaths to patients. And last but not least, and this is a new element, we are working on algorithms. We have seen already some years ago that sensor data is not just a great story when it comes to hardware business. Sensors also generate data. And based on data, you can provide higher sophisticated, higher comprehensive analysis to your customers. You can create added value to your customers when you are skilled in taking the data and to run some algorithms on top of that in order to give a higher level analysis and interpretation of these data. We have been working on these algorithms already since some years.
What we do now is actually to combine all these four positions together. The dominant position in breaths with the gas technologies, the customer ways we do have, and the algorithms. And that brings us actually to two different, or there are many, many more, but I selected just two of them. Some of them cannot be disclosed yet. Two applications. On the one hand side, it's about smart resuscitation. This is actually the kind of emergency mode you have to give air to any patients, especially in emergency situations outside of the hospital. There, the measurement of flow and CO2 gives you a very good indication of whether you do it correctly. A lot of events, it's not the experts that can ventilate the people at that moment. There are just normal people that have to do so.
So there is a huge demand of the industry to support these ventilation effects by hand or manual ventilation effects by more sensors in order to give good indications to these less skilled people that they do it correctly in frequency, but also in the way how they apply this ventilation. On the other hand, it's about respiration exchange rate. This is more an application which comes with the hospitals. There you go to analyze the ratio between CO2 and O2 combined with the flow rate in order to get more indications about the metabolism and the lung functionalities during surgeries. This is an indication especially for the anesthesia people in order to get good care to the patients during surgeries. So again, here we combine flow and CO2. And the other one, we combine even flow CO2 and oxygen in the very same application combined by algorithms.
I can assure you, there are even more ideas around. They are not yet on a mature level we can talk about. This is always a problem with innovation companies. You have a lot of pipeline you cannot talk about either because it's too shaky at the moment. It can also fail. It's too early to talk about. Or in another way, we cannot talk about because of our competitors. We don't like to trigger our competitors to start a similar development already today. So we like actually to be that close to customer engagements that we can already talk about without running into the risks that our competitors do the very same and they can even catch up. That's the reason why we can just disclose these two applications. Last but not least, it's about industrial sensing.
And again, I like to start with more or less the same slide as before, but with different content. Here, again, we start with the fact that we do have this comprehensive gas technology information. Secondly, we have acquired a smaller company, Qmicro, back in 2021, which comes up with a very sophisticated gas chromatography technology. This is actually a technology I will come back later on to explain also shortly what is the advantage of that. And it's not just the technology, but also the founders are still on board. They have a deep understanding and experience in exactly these kinds of highly sophisticated gas analytics. Again, the algorithms I have already talked about. And again, we have Market synergies. And we are deeply engaged in gas metering.
This typically comes with these kinds of applications or with flow applications now, not in medical, but in different applications in industrial Markets. We can re-leverage the very same base of customers. Starting first with methane leakage. You might already heard about that. So to give you some figures about the urgency of methane leakage detection, methane accounts for more or less 16% of all global emissions. And methane, at least short term, is significantly more harmful for the climate than CO2 itself. It's just on short term, that means the first 20-30 years. Afterwards, you have a faster reduction of the molecules or destabilization of the molecules in the air rather than CO2. That means longer term, 100 years, 200 years, CO2 is more or less equivalent. But at least for the first 20-30 years, this is the most harmful one.
And we have to change our attitude in admitting these kinds of harmful molecules as soon as possible so we can actually start with those molecules that are even more critical in short to medium term. Secondly, about almost 15% of the methane, it's not all about cows. It's also about our own human-made oil and gas industry. They have unintentional leakage of oil and gas because nobody takes care of it. They are not even aware of these leakages. So this was also one of the main topics in the last climate summit last December in Dubai or somewhere there. And this is one of the big hot topics in all the international discussions about climate protection. There are now also additional regulations in place. The Environmental Agency of the U.S., they have brought additional regulations in place recently.
In the U.S. itself, there are more than 50,000 oil wells, highly active wells around. They should actually be monitored in the next couple of years. You see, the Market is huge. There are just two problems. On the one hand side, there is not yet a convincing solution on the Market. And secondly, and this has changed now in the last couple of months, it was not a regulation to push the manufacturers to install these kinds of monitoring. What have we done? We came up now and we have already one and installed and deployed the first systems in the field. We came up with a solution. You have had probably also the chance to see it in the product show during lunchtime. This is a box of this size with solar cells.
So this is a kind of a full solution where we are not going to sell our sensors, component or module-based to OEMs to bring it into their devices, but we solved the entire problem. That means we are coming back to the customers and say, "Okay, we go to install these sensors on your side." And afterwards, we can provide you not just the hardware, but also the full solution. That means we indicate to you, is there a leakage? How large is the leakage and where is the leakage? And this is indicated by this sketch here. You see there are many of these sensors around this oil or gas field. By measuring the methane leakage combined with flow information of wind, you can go back and identify where is the leakage coming from and how large is it. This is exactly the information the customers need.
So what are we doing here? We take leakage sensor technology. It's nothing else than environmental technology combined with flow information, with algorithms in order to solve the full problem for our customers. Where do we stand today? We have already won different customers in the U.S. They are now in the deployment phase. Even larger ones, they are pretty well known, but there will hopefully come significantly more in the next years. Last but not least about gas analytics, what is the situation today in gas analytics? We do have a strong footprint to measure all kinds of molecules, but with some limitations. All the sensors we do have, they are pretty optimized in costs, size, and scalability. But they are somehow also limited in kind of highest level multi-dimensional gas analytics. They can't do it.
Whenever you take such a kind of a thermal conductivity principle, you can't measure each molecule individually. Then you need to apply different technologies. This is exactly where Qmicro's technology kicks in. So typically today, our technologies are great for scalability. They are great in sensitivity, but they are not that great in selectivity. To be very precise, to give you an indication about so much percent on this molecule, so many percentage of this molecule, and so on. So you get actually kind of more an indication rather than a very detailed information. The gas chromatography technology of Qmicro is exactly doing that. What they do is actually they take a probe of the air, they push it through a small capillary, and based on the capillary, all the different molecules, they are translating through this capillary at different speeds.
That means at the end of the capillary, you have a very proper distinction of all the molecules. First, it is the fastest molecule that comes first at the end of the capillary. The slowest one comes at the very end. So you have a pretty easy way to identify the portion of each individual molecule. This is not at the level of one to one centimeter that comes with a box, which is already pretty small. But we are talking about the box of probably 10 to 10 centimeters today. Definitely, although here we try actually to miniaturize it further, but it will not come down to a chip. But it can address additional applications in different Markets. They are more sophisticated and have more demanding requirements compared to the ones we are already serving today. So it's about gas, natural and biogas today in gas metering.
You are not just challenged to measure the flow rate, what you are already doing in gas metering, but you should also get indications about the composition of the gas because in older times, it was just natural gas. Today, it's a mixture of biogas, hydrogen, natural gas, all these kinds. They have different calorific values. So you should actually get information for your customer, for the paying customer. That means you, at the end of the day, you have a gas heating system that you are just paid. You are just paid for the calorific value rather than for cubic meters of gas because the gas can be completely different depending on the mixture. This is a technology which can address this topic. There are many different ones. It's about LNG, topic liquid natural gas, which is of higher importance since the Ukraine war started.
It's about hydrogen, but there are also a lot of applications in factory automation. You need additional information in chemical processes. Last but not least, we come back to environmental monitoring, fence line monitoring in order to monitor not methane, but all other kinds of molecules. They are emitted by any kinds of industrial parks, and they might harm either the environment, but also human beings. These can not only be measured. You cannot focus fully on one gas only. You have actually to be pretty broadband and give an indication of all kinds of molecules there might be in this emission. To summarize shortly the focus two, what we are doing is actually we take the customer base we do have, we take the technology we have already developed, and we combine them with new megatrends and new upcoming applications. Typically, they are not applications.
They are already dominated by other guys. We are developing these applications together with our customers. And we have definitely already pioneered the A2L application, where we are in a very good position to grab the opportunity next year. And we have already established this data business, data-driven business with methane leakage, but we are just at the very beginning of this new journey. We are pretty optimistic on the one hand side to become the leader.
This is also one of the strategic goals for the next three to five years to become leader in the whole area of leakage sensing, not just limited to A2L, but in the whole area of leakage sensor, and to become a solution provider for all these kinds of medical and industrial solutions where we combine more than just one or two sensor principles, but to combine it, the hardware, so even together with algorithms to offer higher level sensor information to our customers, as I have shortly presented.
Before I hand over to Lukas Bürgi about the focus three, I'd like actually to give you a short insight into the A2L success story, not from a business point of view, but more actually to take some takeaways before we start with focus three, because I think it's pretty good lessons learned how important focus three is for the development of the company. So this is a short wrap-up of the whole journey from the very first idea back in 2016 up to the very moment of this year or next year to ramp up the business and to get the money back. It's a journey of almost eight to nine years. So back in 2016, we decided to kick off the first internal technology development in order to be ready for any kinds of leakage sensing.
2017, I can pretty well remember I was in Japan, and we learned there about a potentially upcoming regulation in the U.S. about A2L. Honestly, I had no idea how should we measure it. I had no idea whether this Market is really emerging and how big it is, but at least we get the indication. 2019, we benchmarked four different technologies, all of them in-house. We could actually have a very open benchmarking who is the best to address the problem of A2L leakage detection. The kickoff, by the way, 2016 was not kicked off due to the A2L. It was kicked off for other applications. We are already in production. So we leveraged again technology which was kicked off by different topics. 2021, we decided to go with thermal conductivity technology, which was not the most obvious one. For our competitors, they decided for different ones.
We did this one because we were really convinced that this is the best mix of cost-effectiveness and performance. Then afterwards, we spent two years with production application development. We were one of the first ones to pass the UL certifications. So this was a great milestone, by the way, because many, many players started this journey. Some of, or most of them, they failed in passing the UL certification. So after the UL certification, we are facing now two major competitors only. All the other ones, so there are three in the field, Sensirion and two other ones. And all the other ones, they failed in this very process. And again, now we are actually ready to ramp up with five out of six manufacturers in the US. So what does that learn also for the future of Sensirion?
On the one hand side, it's so crucial to have a broad Market presence in order to get early indications about upcoming new applications, about new regulations, about new sensor problems. Therefore, you have actually to sit at the very same table with your long-lasting customers. I just spent the whole last week in the U.S. to visit some leading customers. Whenever we met there, the CTOs or the C levels of these big customers, they are significantly larger than we are, and they have interest in a strategic relationship with us. That's actually the best what can happen because then we propose typically to arrange innovation workshops together to bring their engineers together with ours and just to spend a half a day, a full day to brainstorm about new applications.
This is a huge benefit for us to learn more about our customers' problem today, not already the solution, the problems first, because then we can kick in, we can start developments in order to give them better products for the future. Secondly, whenever we have the indications, we have to start early enough to kick off the technological foundation. Technology is not done within one day or overnight. This was already the topic of the keynote this morning by Felix and Moritz. Last but not least, whenever the Market is tangible or more tangible, that means it's more concrete at the customers are asking for very specific products. You have already been ready with your technology. Otherwise, you are anyway too late. So whenever we would start here, this was at the moment we had the first discussion with customers about A2L.
If this was the moment to kick off technology development, you can forget it. You should not even start to think about it because it's already too late. Either you can do the very same as others are doing, or you just forget it. So that means you need an early start in order to be ready for product development at the moment the customers are asking for. And this gives me actually a good platform also to introduce again Lukas Bürgi. He's our Director of Sensor Innovation. So he's actually responsible that we are ready on technology level for the product developments later down the road. And it's great that you are here today and give some more insights about the way how we develop technologies.
Thank you, Marc. So I'd like, well, I'm going to go, as Marc said, to elaborate a little bit more on how we deal with such strategic focus three topics. But I'd like to start with a little quotation by Voltaire, and that says, "Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is ridiculous." Our process here and what I'm going to try to elaborate is exactly to find the right balance of being ridiculous, not taking any risk, and of being entrepreneurial risk-taking. Yep, I also would like to pick up on the industry first number that Franziska showed, 10% we are spending kind of in this long-term innovation endeavors. Yeah, part of my salary is paid from these 10%. The whole of innovation takes up quite a bit of these 10%.
My goal here today is to kind of show you what we do with these 10% and try to convince you that these 10% are well spent. With that, yeah, focus C, lay the technological foundation for long-term growth. I have kind of four slides, four topics. One is going to present you how we strategically, so systematically approach these topics. The second one is we take a look back at what came out of this funnel, of this process. The third one is then, and this is tightly linked, how do we do M&A? The fourth slide is going to show you which M&As did we do in the past, and I'm going to quickly comment a little bit on that. Here is our process for innovation. We have a whole team working in innovation, which is pre-development, consisting of business developers and R&D engineers.
I'm heading the R&D part, so we are about 25 in total. It all starts, of course, on the left-hand side with ideas, which are kind of going into the direction of the megatrend arenas that we have been talking about this morning. Health and aging population is a big one there. Regulatory and safety, but of course, also environmental protection. Ideas ideally come out of these arenas, but they are not limited to those. Where do we pull ideas from? We have these business developers, megatrend, Market analysis. They do nurture our ideators. Customers, ideally our customers, also give us clear indications where their Market is going and where we should navigate, but importantly, also our sensor collaborators are a source of ideas.
We do have, for example, yearly a conference internally where every sensor collaborator can bring up his or her idea into this funnel. So this is the starting point, this whole list of ideas. The result of the process, the innovation process, is a business plan and ideally a small team that we then propose to take into the normal product development process. So it's important to realize here, from here to, and that's what Marc has been highlighting, from here to start of production, typically it's still three, four, five years, depending on the complexity of the Market and the problem. So what we do, we take care of these topics at the very stage before. And therefore, we establish this structured process where, as I said, the result is the start of real project.
And you see, well, our goal actually is we have a lot of seedlings, these ideas, and we are kind of the gardeners. We weed out those seedlings, the weak ones, and ideally the strong ones survive. And this we do with a very, very close interaction between our Market side, so the business development, looking out what is needed on the Market, and the technical engineers in my team. So we work very closely together in a kind of a high-agile, in a way, iterative process where we always, all six, eight weeks, sit together and ask ourselves, is this assumption about the Market, about the technology still true? If yes, are we going on? If yes, which are the biggest questions to the Market and the technology we have? And then we try to address those in the next iteration.
So, looking kind of at the actual state, what is in the pipeline? So, in this pre-development phase, B and C, that's actually the phases we call them where we realize prototypes, start testing. So, prototypes are kind of already in sensor technology, and we test whether the use case, the application works with our technology. So, we iterate here, and we do have several projects. Actually, the number of points here indicates roughly how many projects we have in these phases. They are, as I mentioned, targeting these megatrends, but as Marc already indicated, it's too early at that stage to reveal which real application and which technology they address. Then, further on here, blue already handed over. So, already in the development phase, we have a handful of prototypes.
They are targeting our focus three topics, so in particular, medical solutions projects where we, well, I can indicate flow, of course, as you know, we are very strong, as indicated by Marc and others before. We have an ever-growing portfolio of measuring gases, gas concentrations very accurately. Of course, lung breath monitoring is, of course, a topic where we think we can play additional cards in the future. Importantly also, here again, I kind of tie up to Marc's statement about selectivity before. We do have a large portfolio. We do have Qmicro, these micro gas analyzers for selectivity, but we also want to extend these capabilities by, in particular, exploring more and more and going more and more down the line of infrared spectroscopy for gases. Here, of course, we leverage the know-how that we have brought into house from this company, IRsweep.
You know we have been kind of buying them. They are now part of Sensirion. And we also leverage our know-how of miniaturizing and making such complex systems cheaper and cheaper and making them available for higher volume Markets. So now, so much for what is in the pipeline here. On this slide, you have seen all these sensors before. So what we do now is kind of make a time travel back five, ten years. And I try to, well, if you buy an example or proof of induction, that's the process we live actually results in very good opportunities that we then can harvest. So I don't go through all of them. I want to pick three examples that have been talked about before.
So, CO2 here in the innovation department, so pre-development, we have been working within Innosuisse projects together with ETH on quite sophisticated CO2 sensing principles that go in complexity even beyond what we now have in this sensor here. During that project, that was very interesting and we learned a lot, but we also learned that we actually should start simpler and spin off kind of first product generation, which is this around a simple product, a module, but we realized we have a chance in the Market and we wanted to explore this chance. We wanted to go out with the first simple product with a module, which typically comes at clearly lower investment costs in terms of NREs and also equipment. So we said, let's go. We did, and this product was very successful. And this was the proof for us, yes, we have to continue the journey.
And then also starting in innovation in this department, we started working on the next generation, getting it smaller, more compact, lower cost. So this is one example. Then the second one here, so the formaldehyde sensor. This is a nice example of the intertwining of Market pull and kind of technology push. We always were in touch with our sales and they said, hey, there is this customer, Dyson air purifiers. They had a new technology to actually spot the formaldehyde out of the indoor air. And they wanted the sensor to show that their technology works. So they needed the sensor urgently. And we always said, extremely difficult problem to solve. We are talking about ppb, one part per billion of molecules we have to measure. We kind of said, okay, we take it, but we are not so hopeful. But still, we screened the landscape.
We looked at companies and, well, they X. We found this company in California, a small tech startup, collaborating with them, testing with them, and well, what resulted is that sensor, which really is able to solve the customer's problem, and since it's a success journey also here, not depicted, but the business unit gas has been working on the next generation, and yes, as you have probably seen on the web page, we have launched this product. We're going to launch it next year, so a small version of this formaldehyde sensor. Also here, kind of this journey of miniaturization, and last but not least, here, Marc has shown this. I just want to kind of give you a review of what happened before, so this nice box had this whole solution. 2021, we were still kind of in the innovation department.
Within a few months, we actually did construct, design, develop the sensing element, which is in here. So it's a complex laser-based infrared type methane sensor. So we did that. We had already; it didn't look as fancy, but we had the box around with all the connectivity, sending the data in the cloud, making the algorithms, doing the calculation. And then our engineers went into first field tests. Griffin's here on a farm. They had a methane bottle to emulate a methane leak. And very quickly, we saw, okay, that looks quite promising even with such a prototype. Actually, it's a pre-development in that case. We are always in the danger zone. So even with that, we could localize and quantify that leak quite well. And this was then the conviction we needed to say and take the decision, yes, we go forward. We go for this.
We want to explore solutions. And this is one of the sensors, the sensing solutions we take to explore this path. Good. So this was kind of to give you an impression of how we work in retrospect. And the same kind of process we are in now for many focus three topics. Good. So then we turn to M&A. And here it's important, as I mentioned already, this is actually part of our innovation team. So Markus Geiser, he is our M&A specialist. He is actually part of the innovation BU. He leads this business unit together with me and Moritz Lechner. So that kind of shows already how important M&A is for innovation and our strategic path. Now, very importantly, as you know, we do not do M&A just for the sake of being a venture capitalist.
Financial profit or turnover alone is not what drives us. Much more importantly is that we have a strategic fit to what we do. Either an M&A activity has to enhance or bring us into a new technological area or with and/or actually with an M&A, we are able to enter into a new Market. This is how we combine M&A to our activities. Actually, in all our projects in innovation, we have been on board. And he, for what we do organically, what we develop, he also looks outside. What are others doing? Is there potentially a startup that we could actually win to join forces and then solve the problem together, as in the example before for the formaldehyde? Yeah, we do three different, of course. Either strategic acquisition, where we really buy the company.
As I mentioned, this must bring us direct Market access for technology. IPBU, we kind of like this. We just buy part of the knowledge of a company to advance us technologically, and then in some cases, we do minority share holding, so this is kind of more future looking into potentially interesting future fields for us, but fields that are about to be developed and where the technology typically is not that mature yet, so here's the overview of the M&A activities in the last 10 years. So you see it's 10 activities that we have. They are sorted strategic acquisitions, so if we just highlight a few of them, so AIC, an Auto Industrial company, a Korean company that we bought in 2017, and here clearly the goal was to become a tier one OEM module manufacturer for the automotive industry, then Qmicro, as Marc mentioned, 2021.
This is kind of our first move into full solutions. Next to the Nubo Sphere, so the methane solution, we acquired Qmicro and had access to their technology and also to their applications, which are in natural gas sensing and so on, as Marc summarized. Importantly, maybe here to say, I mean, the core of their technology. So here we have kind of the Market interest. But on the technology side, we have synergies. They have a micro machine core. And what we're doing here is, at the end of the day, a lot of micro machining too. So there is a synergy on the technology side as well. IRsweep. So this is kind of our, well, booster for infrared optical activities. We did merge them into Sensirion in 2023.
So all this know-how is here and we can leverage on that for our journey into further infrared technologies and applications. Then AiSight. This was our acquisition in the direction of machine diagnostics for the rapidly growing field of condition monitoring and predictive maintenance. So here the situation, you probably followed this closely. The situation went down a direction where we had to decide we need to close this activity. Now, very briefly, the background is the following. So our initial Market assessment turned out to be wrong in the sense that we didn't take the geographical Market dynamics into consideration sufficiently. So we had the European Market, which we want to conquer.
We learned down the line, one, two years into actually running this business, that the European Market, I mean, here we have well-maintained machines, very good maintenance service teams, which at the end of the day have no interest to be driven out of the game. So we then refocused on the American Market, but there we learned it's highly fragmented and other players, in particular also other kind of younger companies like Augury, they had a very strong traction in the meantime. So for us, at the end of the day, we had to decide it's too risky. The Market is too fragmented. It takes too long until we get into there. So we had to come to the conclusion. We stopped this business. Very hard decision. We had to lay off people.
So it was difficult, but importantly, again, here risk-taking is part of the innovation game and we have to be prepared to take such decisions in order to keep our risk balancing at the right level. Okay, then we had IP deals. They are overall very successful. So Clarity for particulate matter. So that was the starting point. SPEC Sensors was the starting point for the formaldehyde. So yes, here we are very happy with these IP deals. Minority shareholder, nobody pays for the optical technology. So here, yep, that's a very interesting future technology in the realm of data com. So as you know, the amount of data that is transmitted every day increases rapidly, not least due to AI. So the gigabits per second we have to transport through optical lines increases. And they have, let's say, a promising technology to keep up with that speed.
100 giga, 400 giga, or even 800 gigabits per second. Yes, very interesting technology for us because it integrates on the chip silicon photonics, electronics, and a secret material, so this polymer that makes a very fast optical switch out of this technology. And that's the promise they have. And they try to conquer the data center Market, whereas we have the possibility here to use that technology for sensing applications. So we are looking into possibilities to use this very promising technology for further optical sensing. And then last but not least, MaxWell B iosystems. So they have single-use sensors for cell characterization going down the line of drug development. Again, very close technology, CMOS sensor, and a Market that is potentially becoming interested also for us.
Okay, with that, I hope I could give you an impression on how we go about this problematics of risk-taking. I hope that I could convince you that we have a good plan to kind of mitigate the risks and to balance them, and well, with that, yeah, we have, of course, innovation in our DNA. We want also in the future embrace challenges. We have, I guess, a strong track record, as we just pointed out this morning, in different facets in innovation, and we have a full pipeline of various projects to keep up with that speed of innovation to access new Markets, and yeah, also M&A supports these activities. Okay, and well, I'm very optimistic that in the future, not least, not last year to innovation, we will keep the curve rising like that. Thank you a lot for your attention.
I'm happy to discuss later on with you over coffee.
Good. Next topic on the agenda is our sustainability journey and business. As I'm also the timekeeper here of this meeting today, I'm aware that we are a little bit behind schedule. So I will take you through the main messages, but there are also more detailed slides, which you then can also read on your own time. Franziska introduced this morning our mission statement. We make the difference in sensing for a better world. I can assure you that Sensirion is committed to our environmental responsibility, but also to our social responsibility. Let's start with the social responsibility. The Sensirion culture, which we refer to as Sensirion spirit, is basically the foundation also for our social responsibilities. All what you can read here on the slides is embedded in our Sensirion culture.
When it comes to our environmental commitment, of course, we have a very high focus on our own operations that we minimize waste. We want to use the materials as efficiently as possible and also the natural resources which flow into our production process. We are mindful in how this is being used. The products and Johannes and Marc, they have walked you through the product portfolio. Our products, they all support some of the megatrends we have highlighted. Energy efficiency, but also to support our environment. So the products help our clients to create eco-friendly products and even decarbonize their own operations. Last but not least, as a smaller company, we have kicked off in 2021 an ambitious journey, which we'd like to provide you an update. Let's move to the products.
Everything what we have talked about, we have seen in the strategic focus one and two slides before. So I don't want to spend too much time on it. We increased efficiency in cars with our humidity temperature sensors. So we extend the range of EV cars. So this makes it hopefully a more eco-friendly product, depending on what kind of, if you fill the car with eco-friendly energy, of course. Then Marc talked about the air conditioners in the U.S., where you switch from traditional coolants to newer, more eco-friendly coolants with a lower global warming potential. This is being designed in the new air conditioning devices in the U.S. And of course, we also opened the door that A3 coolants, that we are there, that they can be deployed in these devices.
And last but not least, the Nubo Sphere product, which you saw out there during the product show, is clearly a device which creates a lot of interest in the oil and gas industry because what they can do today, they can fly over the field with drones or with a plane. They do that once a month, twice a month, once a week. Our system here monitors methane emissions constantly, and it's also traceable. And this in the long run, I think, is also a very good argument for oil and gas companies to invest in this solution. Our journey towards decarbonization, I mean, our promises we pledged to the Swiss federal government, net zero target for 2025, but our ambitions are even higher. Therefore, we have in 2021 kicked off an ambition journey to decarbonize our own operations. Below here, you see our achievements so far.
We have reduced our CO2 emissions by around about 60%. And we have also been able to lower the energy efficiency. Another important milestone is that we have heavily invested in solar energy. And 100% of our global electricity consumption is linked to renewable sources. And a little bit more out in the future, we expect to join from the local district a lake heater, a lake water cooling project, which will help us to decarbonize our own operations even further. This is the journey. As I said before, our journey started in 2021, but Sensirion has already been active before that. Even though we kicked off our journey, Sensirion has taken significant steps. And here you can see all what we have achieved, not only in Switzerland, but also in our production sites in Hungary and Asia. And we are not going to stop here.
For 2025, we have announced partnerships with two carbon removal projects to invest in direct air capture technology. Here at the end, you see also this project for district heating and lake water cooling, which we hope to go live in 2026. It's more a detailed slide, but I just wanted to highlight. Here you see the green one, electricity renewable. You see the development from 2019 all the way to 2023. We have come already a very long way. Our official journey started 2021, but what I said before, we got active much earlier. At the same time, we are reducing our GHG emissions. I think also it's important to get a picture, not only here from headquarters in Stäfa in Switzerland. This is the site which I'm possibly going to visit here in the afternoon. This is the roof.
That's how it looks from the top. But also here in Debrecen in Hungary, that's what Sensirion has built established there, we even won a grand prize for sustainability on the operations which has been established. And I think we can be very proud of this achievement. Our ambitious journey to decarbonization doesn't, of course, stop here. When you look into our own operations, you see that, of course, for our production process, for making the sensor on microchip level, we use something which is called process gases. And they are accountable for the majority of our CO2 emissions of our own operations, which we currently incur. This is not only a problem which goes for a challenge which goes for Sensirion. This goes for the whole semiconductor industry. Sensirion is actively pursuing technological possibilities in order to bring down these CO2 emissions via filtration.
Of course, here we also have technological challenges. So there is no technology out there which guarantees us that it is a better solution, a better filtration solution than what we currently have in place. And therefore, we have decided to invest in high-value carbon removal projects to basically offset the emissions which we still incur in our production process. So our goal is to complete our journey on our so-called Scope 1 and 2 emissions. And when we have completed this journey, then of course, we will start to focus on our Scope 3 activities. Of course, as a small company, we are followed by a lot of agencies, MSCI, Sustainalytics, and CDP. We report regularly to these agencies. And I am also then proud to state that we receive good scores from all agencies.
Just to be very transparent for the CDP carbon disclosure project, we've been a non-responder, but in 2024, we have completed the submission for climate and water. We receive also external recognition for our operations. We get certified by RBA, Responsible Business Alliance. We have the silver status, EcoVadis, we have the bronze status. And you probably all know that from a people point of view, we get regularly the stamps, great place to work. And Sensirion is clearly very proud of the external recognition we received. With that, thank you for listening to Sensirion's sustainability journey. With that, I would like to hand over to Matthias. Yes, after all, very impressive explanations about strategy and R&D and innovation power. Now, how derives that on the financial for the next years to come?
Some words on that about the key parameters, how we look at the financial setup for Sensirion. So yeah, as described from my colleagues, I think we all understand Sensirion as a company where innovation drives the growth. So the starting point, definitely, there is innovation. And with all we have heard, reflecting different maturities of innovation projects. So today, I think we state that we are confident of achieving double-digit % growth over the cycles for the next few years. So here we indicate growth low to mid-teens %. So that is an ambitious goal, but we see that as feasible with organic growth, really, with substantial inputs from our R&D power that we have.
In addition to that, of course, it also helps if we have this loop in creating a lot of operating cash flow out of our Market performance, which definitely then gives good funding for all these R&D activities, then also to grow over time. I think, of course, it helps a lot that we talk about in terms of good cash conversion rate with a representative day's DSO of around 50 days. So I think the money, the cash definitely comes back quite quick to the company. A second perspective and topic that might change over the next few years, I think we also heard about that, that with our expanded product portfolio, we will also see a Market performance with a slightly different product mix. There will be more weight on modules business over the next few years.
I think we talked at several meetings already about that. So by the characteristics of the modules or within a module, we have several components. Only one component in general is the core sensor component, but there are other components like housings, like cables, etc. And these are procured components. And of course, calculating those, we can't get the Marcups we can get for our own developed products. So overall, here we achieve with these modules a slightly lower contribution margin. Now, also elaborated today on that topic, why do we then overall invest in being active in this business as a module supplier? I think three arguments for that.
The one is, of course, we want to serve the OEMs as a tier one supplier and with that generating also a good intimacy with those customers, really to be there with our innovation teams where the music plays in terms of technology. This is especially valid for the automotive Market. On the other hand, we have then the opportunity also to show up with combo modules, bringing several of our sensors together on one PCB, on one platform, which also then generates a module, and last but not least, as Johannes has mentioned, a first-generation product module opens us the door then to be part of the game for certain applications and then to continue with ongoing work on miniaturization. Let's refer here also with CO2 and then coming in the best case to a component over time.
So all in all, it makes sense and pay really then the premium for a slightly lower contribution margin. But if we really calculate it top down, really top down to EBITDA, then of course, we also can state clearly that for all those components and procured portion of our material we have and the module overall, there is a reduced R&D effort and reduced R&D costs needed to produce and to bring the Market performance there. So all in all, if we calculate it down in our final planning, we see that the overall profitability for the portfolio is still intact and in the dimension as we see this also for the prior periods. A few words on CapEx and the cash out, the cash spending of the company below the operating cash flow, what we have as free cash flow.
Based on what we are doing here to support the normal growth, we typically spent, and this will continue, about 6%-8% on CapEx for production equipment. That is what we also calculate to see that in the years to come. A part of that, we also see one-off CapEx here. We talk about buying land. We want to drive further our idea of having the campus here in Stäfa. I think just if you look out of the window, this land next to here, we have bought. Our plan is to have there built a second clean room. The most of this cash outflow and this CapEx will materialize, I guess, in 2026. It's in the early stage still. So on the one hand, it's expanding the capacity. On the second hand, it's really the campus to have all the disciplines, all the experts here together.
And third, to have a second clean room here is, of course, a big element for our risk mitigation program in terms of being secure and having a separate second clean room in Stäfa in a separate building. That is our ambition, but it's also required by some of our customers. So all in all, we can say this one of our ideas is that about financing that could be the first ideas are around doing it with a mortgage loan. I think if we talk about dimensions here, I think if we talk about leverage and net debt situations that could show up temporarily, but we will be in the dimension of EBITDA times one or EBITDA times 1.5 when it comes to what we see as debt volume there.
So all in all, I think we can strictly rely on a solid balance structure also with this supporting this midterm growth. Last but not least, the tax situation for the group, keeping in mind that almost all the taxable assets definitely are here in Switzerland. I think how do we run our global business? Our global business is set up that we have low-risk distributors spread all over the world, meaning they are only remunerated by commission rates. All the invoicing is orchestrated from here and recorded in Switzerland, in Sensirion AG. The same is true, there is a quite well set up transfer pricing system when we talk about our working places in Hungary, in Korea, in China. Also here, we are tax optimized. And so we talk about the tax substance here mainly in Switzerland.
Of course, we participated and took the initiatives that came with the tax revision, Unternehmenssteuerreform 27. So of course, we took all the opportunities that we have, the elements that are in there. We're working with patent boxes. We're working with R&D expenses that can be deducted from the income. So all in all, what is the outcome? Our expected tax range will remain in the area of 11%-14%. I think what is now on the agenda for Switzerland, the minimum or for Europe, the minimum tax rate of 15%, I think we are below the limits of the CHF 750 million turnover for our planning horizon. So I think we can rely and continue to calculate with these dimensions. I think that is in a quick run, the main financial parameters.
I will hand over to Marc for then some of this with the outlook.
Thank you, Matthias. Shortly to wrap it up, once again, we have growth opportunities in the core we are in anyway. Thanks to the miniaturized versions of environmental sensors and with upcoming applications with humidity and flow. Beyond that, we like to grab opportunities. They are closest to our technologies, but also the customer base we do have and we can leverage. And last but not least, we are working not just on the growth journey of the next few years, but also the one which hopefully kick in in the latter years of this decade. Shortly to wrap up, most of the elements have already been disclosed about the midterm guidance. It's a pretty boring story because it's the very same as we have already disclosed three years ago.
That means we expect more or less to grow on average level between low and mid-teens also for the next years to come. Again, these figures are based on stable foreign exchange rates. Unfortunately, this is an extremely important aspect whenever you are in Switzerland, and especially if the accountant, the balance sheet, the P&L is in Swiss francs. And on the other hand, we expect more or less the same profitability levels, EBITDA, in the range of mid to high teens. And once again, the dilution of the gross margin due to the higher portion of modules will be balanced out by a reduced R&D spending, which is not jeopardizing our innovation power thanks to the fact that modules come typically with a lower intensity in R&D compared to components. So this is directly linked to each other. Well, that brings us to your turn again.
That means to the second round of questions. I think we have the same setup as this morning. So Stefanie, hand over the microphone to the respective people asking questions. Who likes to start first? I'll start with him first.
If you would go to page 73, I would have a question concerning the stability of that idealized curves. And three. Yes. I mean, this is a hypothetical kind of map. I would wonder whether the costs and the timelines do change over time because of rising complexity and other factors, or whether that idealized example is steady state kind of.
I think on one hand, I would challenge you on the whole portfolio and also portfolio looking into the early stages of new ideas, because whenever you start a new idea, it takes you three, four, five years to come to this end in order to be ready for a product development. That means on the one hand side, we like actually to be very sure to have it filled up all the time. Secondly, I was also the economies of scale in R&D whenever the company is growing. And there definitely is always some kinds of leverage effects in the economies of scale. That means lower R&D intensity for the same innovation power. But we have also to be aware that sensing technologies are always very focused on the specific parameter you like actually to measure. So it's not the same as electronics.
This is exactly reflected also in the world of electronics compared to sensing. In electronics, typically you have these large guys like TI, STMicroelectronics, Analog Devices. They are really big. It doesn't exist for sensing companies. Definitely, there is Bosch, there is ST, but this is always a small portion sensor. The most part they are doing with normal electronic components. The pure play sensors companies like LEM, Sensirion, but also Cubic, our competitor in China, Senseair in Sweden, or Melexis, they are always focused on some pieces of the whole huge sensor Market. What is the reason for this change or for this difference between the electronics industry and sensing industry is exactly that at the end of the day, the underlying technology of sensing is always different from sensor parameter to sensor parameters.
You have to figure out first which physical effect or chemical effect can be used in order to measure this target properly. And this also limits the economies of scale in terms of R&D. It's not about production, but it's about R&D. And therefore, we cannot expect that whenever this company is growing up, we can keep the same innovation power by keeping more or less the absolute R&D spending similar, but we have actually to follow also in R&D spending more or less, not fully, but more or less compared to the growth of the company. I mean, I assume it would start in phase B to really ramp up or go up massively.
And before the paper studies and the ideas that is, is that correct? And is there a change in the future of that cost curve?
Well, that's correct. I mean, this is highly idealized.
Our product portfolio is very diverse. So we have projects, some of them we have discussed in detail. We have been going from idea stage to start of production in three years. So that's a record. But we had projects where we have been in phase B for several years to realize that our Market assumption or technology assumption were not correct. So you have to dive deep sometimes to understand, in particular, well, for projects where the chances on the Market are typically higher. So you have to understand the Market and the technology. That takes time. So yes, back to your question, this is highly idealized and it's not a linear process. And yes, the costs typically in the beginning are rather low. So it's one, two engineers, and then typically it rises drastically. And this is why we try to weed out as early as possible.
But sometimes you have to go a bit further to understand. So it's this balancing that we try to keep. And this is our everyday job.
I would have some questions on the financials or clarification on financials. In terms of the reduced R&D intensity, is it correct to assume then that your gross margin is going down by the same amount, so four percentage points on average versus your previous guidance?
This is correct. We assume to have the kind of dilution by few percentage points, so three, four percentage points. In the gross margin. Okay. And then on your one-off CapEx, could you give us an idea of how much that is, CHF 5 million or CHF 20 million or? No, we are talking about the whole investment in the production build is not yet fully defined, but we are talking about CHF 40-60 million. CHF 40-60.
40 million-CHF 60 million all in all. Not all of them might be financed by mortgage. It can also be financed by cash flow, but this is not yet decided because it's two years that the main cash out will be hopefully in 2026, also depending on any kinds of discussions with neighbors, which is not yet through. Perfect. And then you mentioned the DSOs, but net working capital, I think net working capital intensity used to be 20%-22%. Is that still the number you're working with or? Yes, because also here a little bit comes into the game, the bound capital with the modules, because there is definitely this higher material portion. So I think you can calculate in this range. Okay, perfect.
And then maybe just the last one, sorry to monopolize on the Market potential for A2L.
Could you give us a timeframe for when you expect that full potential or full addressable Market to be there? And maybe how much sort of revenue contribution potentially you see for 2025?
I think this is the most answered or the not answered question I have ever asked for in the last couple of months. No, coming back to your question. Well, so it's the addressable Market, which is estimated to be CHF 100 million, not our potential next year, to be very clear on that.
On the one hand side, it's still not yet clearly defined and well defined how large is the Market at the end of the day, because at the end, there are some regulations in the U.S. about the charge of new refrigerants to be in an AC in order to be obliged to also design a leakage sensor. There are some manufacturers that say, "Okay, that's too complex." We actually start to design these leakage sensors even in lower charged devices. Therefore, the size is not yet fully defined. What we expected six months ago, I answered the other question about 2025 in a way to say, "I'm a physicist as you are," and typically physicists just thinking about orders of magnitude. Therefore, I can disclose the potential for next year's revenue contribution to be between CHF 10 million and CHF 100 million.
But I'm fully sure you are not happy about this answer. Now, to be somehow more precise, I expect to be anywhere in the area of CHF 30 million to CHF 50 million additional revenue next year in this area. But about 2025 guidance, we are coming back in March all in all, but this is the potential we see today.
Thank you. Just on the EBITDA margin target to get back to mid- to high teens over the next cycle, can you give us some color on the proportion of what is needed to happen to reach that target and by when given that the most recent numbers are far off from this?
That's a very good question to give more insights into that. So at the end of the day, to understand Sensirion, we have actually on the one hand side a pretty large portion of fixed costs, which comes typically with components. That, by the way, will be better with modules at the cost of lower gross margin. But components, typically they come with a pretty high fixed cost portion. And this is pretty easily to see whenever you are going to the production area afterwards. There are many, many of equipment. They are highly sophisticated and you need maintenance engineers, process engineers in order to keep them running all the time. But it's not so challenging to load them with 20%-30% more load at the end of the day.
That means as the whole semiconductor industry, you benefit significantly from high load, high utilization in your equipment or production area, process lines, but you also suffer from a lower utilization. So what happened in the last couple of years, and I think that demonstrates your question also looking forward, is in 2021, 2022, there was a pretty good run in high utilization. Honestly, it was too high. So we run the production here at the level of more than 100% utilization with four shifts even over weekend. This is not a healthy situation longer term. But this was definitely great in terms of gross profit and EBITDA. On the other hand, now 2023, it was the opposite. So we had underutilization. So coming back to your question, what are the preconditions to come back to normal EBITDA levels?
It's on the one hand side, a normal utilization of our component manufacturing. And secondly also, and which cannot be adjusted so quickly because it's fixed cost. And the second is about coming back to the very first statement done by Felix and Moritz this morning. R&D is a significant cost block of the company, which cannot be modulated. It doesn't make sense to adjust it according to each good or bad year. So also there we should actually come back to our guided R&D intensity of newly 18%-20%, which is now above that. And not because we have to hire too many people in R&D, but because the top line has been decreased in the last two years.
If these two elements, so normal utilization of the component process lines and also combined with a realistic reflection of top line compared to R&D spending, then we are also back on the EBITDA levels as we have guided. It can also happen the other way around as it used to be in 2021, 2022, that we have a good run in top line. Then we have actually too low R&D spending because it also does not make sense to hire people, engineers without looking at the quality of them just in order to stabilize the R&D intensity. And on the other hand, also the utilization then goes to the other side. That means we benefit from a very high utilization. So that can happen in future. That means this is the normal run.
Also the next year is very likely that there will be some years with lower EBITDA margins than the guided one, and there will also be some years with a higher EBITDA margin compared to the guided one. Just to give you some more insights about the dynamics of our P&L. There are further questions also directed at you. Are there any remote questions? Okay, they're already sleeping. Hopefully, we see pet devices.
I have a question concerning acquisitions. On the slide, you showed that you have been very active in acquisitions, IP deals, and minority shareholdings in the years 2017 to 2021, 2022. Since then, it has been very quiet. Is there a reason behind it or several reasons? I mean, your field has been becoming more complex. You may have many more complex products and innovations.
No, that is not a fundamental reason. I think on the one hand side, as Lukas has pointed out, typically in innovation, when we see a good opportunity, we like actually to lay the foundation on technology base, then we actually go forward in parallel. That means on the one hand side with organic development, but also by scanning the potential M&A Market. If we have a short look there in the years of 2016 up to 2020, probably we laid a foundation for environmental sensing. So we had actually to look around for technologies to measure formaldehyde, particulate matter, and all this. Some of them, CO2, was done organically. Some others were boosted by M&A, especially IP deals in these years. What have we done in the last two, three years? We worked on the miniaturization, but the technologies at least was already part of the company.
So there was no need to do so. There was also new things. We actually started off, for example, A2L, but there we leveraged the technology which was already organically in the company developed. That means also there was no need to do so. We looked into this topic. So we have also scanned some other technologies in order to support the A2L opportunity, but it turned out not to be the best technology. So we have not to close a deal in that term. So at the end of the day, it's not the fundamental reason. It's more probably the cycles of developments. They are in early phase. They are also boosting our M&A activities. Sometimes it's more the way that we see good technology we should acquire, and some other times we see, no, it's not worthwhile. We can actually do that better in our internal development.
Can you give us a feel how big these investments were in those years in total?
It's highly depending. So IP deals typically we're talking about some millions, more single-digit millions, while strategic acquisitions are probably in a double-digit way. Those, by the way, if you'd like to have more precise information, just look into our balance sheet or all the financial notes. There are some indications on that, especially for strategic acquisitions. The other one, minority and IP deals are typically on a pretty low level. But then with IP deals, by the way, you have also to invest in R&D internally afterwards. There's not already the turnkey technology which comes from your IP partner. You have actually to develop based on what you have acquired.
Thank you. Quick follow-up on the CapEx. You mentioned the special CHF 40 million-CHF 60 million clean room investments. Isn't there more to come here in Stäfa? And secondly, what would that mean then for the return on capital employed? I guess capital employed gets a bit up. What's your target here on your medium term?
The first question, no, at the moment, there is no planning to expand the footprint here in Stäfa further. There is a kind of expansion in Hungary, but this is not invested by us. There is the same collaboration as we already used to have for the first building. That means we are going to have a long-term rental agreement with local investors. But here, it's a different story because at the end of the day, we are looking into clean rooms. And clean rooms is highest end in terms of also the building requirements in order to run the clean room activities.
And there, it's worthwhile investing on our side to these buildings. By the way, also to give you some insights about, it's not just a clean room, it's actually a production building which is initially used for a clean room. But there's also some spare parts we can use for any purposes in production in the next couple of years. And so we have the same approach as we used to have in 2011 with the first production building. So when we opened the first production building, Building C, you are going to visit afterwards. This is now fully booked. But at that time, it was not more than 50% of utilization. And all the other rooms were just left in raw status in order to keep the agility, to adjust it according to our needs down the road.
And it took us now not 13 years, but at least 10 years to fill it up. And we expect more or less the same journey with the new building. That we start first with more or less 50% of use, and then afterwards we fill it up with the additional growth in the next probably 10 years to give you more insights. About the capital invested, this is KPI. Honestly, we are not followed. So we have also no targets on that at the moment. This might be coming in the future, but at the moment, it's not in our focus.
And probably a last question before we close the session. I have a question on the thermal runaway growth initiative for EVs. I mean, and I guess it's somewhat related to my previous question on automotive because I don't know what the main customers here are, but if you look at the headlines from Northvolt, for instance, it seems that the European manufacturers are also struggling quite a bit, and it seems like you kind of need really to be doing business with the Chinese here as well, and somewhat related to this is similarly headlines from Philips, which seems to be struggling against Chinese competitors a lot, so the question is really, are you in business with the right kind of customers?
I would definitely hope so. No, there is actually two different levels we can serve. On the one hand side, there are some opportunities with battery monitoring systems that come with the OEMs, not with the battery manufacturers.
This is typical on system level that they like to have one module, then it's more a module in order to monitor the battery conditions, and on the other hand, this is the one I have highlighted to have already first nominations won. This is more on OEM level, and there, despite all the weaknesses of the German automotive industry, they are not yet dead, so it's not just a business for China, and secondly, there are some opportunities. They are not yet on the same level of maturity to come into the battery packs, and then it's more a kind of component or a very small module. They are less high in content because it's a smaller solution, but on the other hand, it's in higher volumes. Also, this is of high interest for us, and this comes typically more with the battery manufacturers.
But then we are back in component business and not just module business because you cannot afford a full module. So a matchbox-like module to bring into the battery pack, that's by far too large. So then we have actually to go back to components, which is also affordable because the volumes are driven by battery packed monitoring systems. But this is not yet at the moment. Most people in the industries are looking into solutions. They are more on module-based and system level. And then it's driven by OEMs.
Can I get one last question? It's your privilege. I mean, getting closer to year-end, can you give us a better idea of where within your guidance you will be landing for year 2024?
I would be surprised not to be asked this question. I think it's a good final question. No, actually, definitely, we are at the beginning of November.
And therefore, it doesn't make sense already to talk about the financial results of 2024. But what I can confirm again, we are, hopefully you have also this view to Sensirion that we are a very honest player. That means whenever we have seen in the last couple of years that either the guidance is missed negatively or positively, then we're also coming up early enough in order to give a guidance revision. We haven't done so far. That means also we are still very optimistic to be in the given guidance. I don't like to give a kind of a second guidance to give it to the upper end or the lower end. I think the guidance is as it is. And you can be relaxed that we will be in the guidance as we have communicated already in March back.
That's a great last question coming from an investor, which looks forward to the next three to five years going down to the end of 2024. I'd like to hand over back to Lars for most of you. They also registered for the production tour, and you give some guidance for this tour now. Yes. First of all, I would like to thank for all the questions we have received here in the room online. Of course, we did not get too many questions. With that, I would like to thank the online audience for dialing in. With that, we close the online part of our session. Thanks. With that, over to the audience here in the room. A lot of PowerPoints, a lot of indoor air. It's time to stretch our legs, get some fresh air, walk over to our production building.
It's around five minutes' walk. There's sunshine. We will pass by the new production building, the new clean room. You will see the shape of the building. It's going to be interesting. Some details. You will put on a disposable coat with a shoe cover. That's important. It's clean. We bring some bacteria. So therefore, we need to be covered up so that we don't pollute the production environment. Another important topic is, of course, you can bring your phones, but don't take pictures inside the building. The guides which will walk you through the building. We have four guides, so four groups. So also the idea is to ask questions and really take a close look. They will all answer your questions, but of course, they will repeat this again. Please don't take pictures. With that, before walking over there, you have the opportunity to leave your belongings.
Any bag.