Good morning. Welcome. Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Sensirion Holding Investor Day 2026. My name is Lars Dünnhaupt. I'm the Director of Investor Relations, and I will be your host today. Before we begin, please note that the event is being recorded, and please also note that we will be taking pictures from the presentation area and the product demonstration area.
Let's take a look at today's agenda. Moritz Lechner will open the session with a welcome address. Marc will provide an overview of Sensirion and our growth strategy. Subsequently, we will hand over to the business, where Andreas Alt will present the Medical area, Niculin Saratz will present HVAC, Maximilian Eichberger, Automotive, and Felix Hoehne, Connected Solutions. Next, Martin, our CFO, will present the financial performance and capital allocation of Sensirion. Afterwards, we will open the floor for questions. For those of you who are here in Zurich, it's very easy to just raise your hand, and we will answer your questions. For the online audience, please use the Q&A function of the GoTo Webinar application. I will read your questions aloud. Finally, we will conclude today's Investor Day with an aperitif lunch and a production tour. Before we proceed, I will briefly introduce the presenters.
I would like to start with Moritz Lechner, Co-Chairman and Co-Founder of the company, of course, Marc von Waldkirch, our CEO. Over to Martin, our CFO, Martin Wirz. Then from the business side, we have with us here today Andreas Alt, Market Director, Medical. We have Niculin Saratz, Product Director, Gas Sensors. Welcome, Niculin. Over to Maximilian Eichberger, GM Automotive. Last but not least, Felix Hoehne, GM Connected Solutions. Finally, with every Investor Day, please note that we are making forward-looking statements regarding future events. For the company's financial performance, these statements involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from those projected. We therefore kindly ask you to take a moment to review the disclaimer. With that, let's kick things off. I will now hand over to Moritz.
Thank you. Welcome here at Sensirion. It's a pleasure for me and an honor to welcome you here. I'm one of the two Co-Founders, together with Felix Mayer, and Co-Chairman. Welcome here at the ugliest construction site in the whole Canton of Zurich. I think you saw it when you came here. You see here a nice picture, but reality outside looks a bit different. Slightly. Therefore, allow myself to make a few comments about that before we get a bit deeper, because it's also a bit about Sensirion and where we are. That will be our new production site there, clean room technology, which we do here. Why are we doing that? For most of our customers, we're a single-source supplier. They don't like that, to have single-source suppliers, because we deliver critical components, and if we fail, they will not ship.
There's always a huge pressure to convince them that we are safe. We've been safe, when you look back, in supply and delivering what we promised to them. Of course, in clean rooms, what can happen is maybe a fire. There are stories. There are many things we do to prevent that and all things around it, and you will see it probably later, but things can happen. Therefore, that's now a kind of a duplicate or extra room where we can balance loads to be safe, that we always can ship to our customers. That's extremely important. Besides that, it's just incredibly full over there in our first building, so we really need extra expansion. We do the core technologies here in Switzerland, and then, of course, all the things around it, we do abroad. Good.
This will be the new site over there when you come back the next time, hopefully, or maybe later. A lso, this building is a beautiful shape. You saw it. Also some words about that. When we bought that building roughly 20 years ago, it was already a bit an old building. I just learned now, it's built in 1972. It was an older building. It's our DNA at Sensirion to invest our money into customer solutions and good products and less into shiny offices for top management. We always did it like that. We bought this building, and we just did some minor things around it. Of course, being from the early 1970s, you can imagine insulation, quality, some issues are around.
It's been in the air for a while, but now in the context of new building we address that we make new facade and new windows. It's all at once the ugliest site in the world, or at least in Canton of Zurich. It will look better. Good. What I want to talk about is afterwards we will talk about where Sensirion is and where Sensirion will go to. To understand Sensirion, I would like to say a few words about where we're coming from and what our DNA is. Looking back, we went through different phases at Sensirion, which are very typical for us. That's the phase one, short after foundation. Here you see the evolution of our turnovers. In this phase here, the green one, it was all about extreme focus. Extreme focus.
We had our humidity sensor component and our small flow sensor components, which you use in some small solutions. It was all about getting world champion in these things, and just in that, extremely focused. It was getting into new markets. We had no market before. Entering new markets, new customers, new applications, winning trust, which was we do, of course, first developing the technology, but then really making it reliable. That was this phase. We won in this phase. We won customers, we won market share. We got clear market leader. In the fields where we focused in, reached very high market share. For example, humidity components, roughly 50% world market share by the end of this green phase. Really, a big part there. Actually, what you see here is also an interesting event here. Something happened there. Maybe some remember the story there.
There was for one year, humidity sensors were in mobile phones or in some mobile phones. Made a huge boost. It was a huge party for a year, and then it hung over to the year after. We could defend our market share. Because we always said, if this happens, it's happening with Sensirion. We managed to keep the competition out there. Okay, that's phase one. High market share, we were there. High reputation in the market, but at the same time, getting attacked by almost, I think it was five, six big semiconductor companies attacking. The whole community was attacking us for humidity sensor components, which they tried to build in their ecosystem, together with their microcontrollers and whatever. That was that phase. Looking forward, of course, we entered a new phase. From being the challenger to being challenged and having a big market share.
Now, the next phase had two big elements, I would say. First, defend our market share against all competition. That was very important in that phase. It was not just taking the money and doing new things. It's about keeping it as our cash cow, defending it, and even expanding our market share. We managed that almost all. One is still left, but they got partners of us, these semiconductor companies now putting our component on their ecosystem or giving up on that race. We managed to defend, but that was an effort. We were fighting for it, we're still fighting for it, and we also keep investing into continuous improvements and into our customer relations there. It's really maintain the market share and expand it.
Besides that, it was about opening up from having a very narrow focus, which was needed to get the clear market leader to a bit broader area. We started opening up for new measurements, most of it with existing customers, some in new applications also. We entered into CO2, formaldehyde, PM2.5, so additional measurements, which are in the context of environmental sensing, which of course, was mainly air quality and mainly indoor air quality around our ecosystem. You could see how this was bringing additional growth but built up on our base where we had, and still have, our leadership. In the same time, we also started developing for the next phase. During these years, it's not something which happens within one year. It's over several years. We developed new technologies, improved technologies to build for higher demand in gas sensing applications, mission-critical gas sensing applications.
We prepared the field there in these years. You see also, again, disturbance. I think we probably talk quickly about it later on. It's about corona, where everybody was calling for our flow sensors for the ventilators in [inaudible] corona ventilation. At the same time, everybody was afraid that the supply chains were disrupted. Everybody started ordering parts, and we always could ship. It was kind of, again, a huge party with some hangover afterwards, where we had to get out again. Good. That's the second phase. We entered the third phase roughly two years ago, where we started also now with these new gas sensing platforms which we have, and also very a bit further than just components, going more into solutions for customers, like with special qualification and special standards needed for safety-critical applications.
We expanded into these fields with these new sensing parts which we have there. This is a journey we just started. This is a journey, again, which says we build up on what we have. We keep on defending, we keep on building it up, but we expand in additional fields. Looking back, what is the DNA of Sensirion? What can we learn? I think we're capable of winning market shares. Getting in and winning and getting into new applications through that. We're capable of defending and keeping market shares. We've done that in the past. We've also went, and I think that's important, at Sensirion, we call it next level. We move on to additional fields. We expand into new areas. We go that, we do that. Of course, we have now condition set with additional technologies and for additional applications to expand into new areas.
This will not happen immediately just as explosion. It's a journey which has started. That's about looking back and our DNA, and with that, I hand over to Marc. Thank you very much.
Well, thank you, Moritz, for this introduction. Well, I like to present you shortly where we are and then all about the growth strategy, and also to lay the foundation for all the deep dives presented by our market directors afterwards. What is Sensirion doing? I think this is pretty easy to explain. We just measure gases. We measure them precisely, we measure them reliably, and at scale. This is kind of a common thread running through all the activities we are doing. We measure gases. Some figures at the very beginning, CHF 340 million revenue last year. We are producing here in this area more than 250 million sensor components. A lot of them are going afterwards to one of the manufacturing center outside of Switzerland to build solutions out of them, but the components are produced here, 250 million, in the very only building.
This is also one of the reasons, Moritz explained it, that we are now constructing the second one. We have almost half of our revenues now generated outside of Switzerland, which gives us also a significant reduced exposure to the Swiss franc, but it's still existing as a Swiss company. What we are doing in markets, we are highly diversified in market, but also regions. We serve four end markets, Automotive, Medical, Consumers, but also Industrial. A lot of them will present today. In all these markets, there is one common sense. This is the way how we approach customers. We don't like to ship what others can ship. We like to make the difference. They make the difference in the way how we innovate, how we solve their complex problems, but especially also how we serve customers.
From the innovation part up to be a reliable, trusted partner when it comes to deliveries. Our business model is actually based on five structural strands, and I'd like to dive into all of them by one or two slides. It starts first with a very comprehensive base of customers, of top brands of the world. There is a lot of top brands, but unfortunately, we are not allowed to disclose all of them. In all these end markets we serve, we have longstanding relationship with. We own the full technology stack in order to serve these customers. We have a proven go-to-market strategy, always targeting to achieve market leadership in the targeted application. We have a structural resilience in the business by a high level of diversifications in different terms. Last but not least, probably the most important, the most valuable part is about the culture.
We have an award-winning culture since foundation. This was actually established already at the very beginning of the company, a kind of a culture of innovation, of entrepreneurial spirit, which also can attract a lot of talents and retain them. Start first with the trusted partner for leading OEMs. I have already mentioned it shortly. We don't like to do what others do. We like to make the difference. To do so, we start first to identify relevant problems at customer side and turn them into scalable solutions. We do that by a combination of innovation mindset. Innovation mindset means also to push limits, to go beyond limits. They seem to be real limits, where you can do more than what is probably imaginable at the very moment. We combine this innovation mindset with the technology stack we have.
Whenever the customer is reaching to us, it's too late to start with the fundamental technologies. You need the technology stack in order to serve the customer at the very moment he's reaching out to us and, at the end of the day, the deep application know-how. The target is always the same. That means to have a product which is superior to those solutions they are all existing on the markets. Again, we make the difference there. At the end of the day, we target to achieve market dominance. There is some examples here, 60% global humidity market share. Moritz explained before 50% back in 2014. Despite all the attacks from other semiconductor, the big ones, we could even increase the market share in the last 10 years.
There is also a lot of other applications where we are already at the very high market leadership, market share. There is also some others. We are still on the journey from solving the problem to becoming the dominant leader, for example, CO2, where we have a market share of roughly 25%, but still growing and where we are still in journey to achieve our goals. About the technology stack, we own the full technology stack from the chip design, in this very building over there are ASIC designers, people they can design these chips in-house, all the way up through the MEMS processes, so all what has to be done on sensor elements on the chip to the sensor design, algorithmics, data analytics, but also application know-how, customer support in terms of supporting customers, how to design the sensors into their application.
This is all internally available, and this gives us a high flexibility to innovate at that level which matters most. Say, okay, in one solution or in one problem and one challenge of our customers we face and we like to solve, we probably go to the component and say, "Okay, the component is the best solution to serve the customers." In some other applications, we go all the way up to a full solution, including data analytics, and serve the customers in a completely different way. We are extremely flexible in adapting our value chain according to the needs of the customers and also application-specific. How do we work to dominate these application fields? Typically, it starts to identify a market problem, a market challenge, which is not yet solved properly. To do so, we need our customer base.
It's so fundamentally important to have this huge base of customers, of top brands, of the leading OEMs in the respective fields. Also, the intimacy with these customers, the trust of our customers, that they disclose what they really are concerned about in order to sell, to support them. Whenever we have the impression, yes, it's a relevant problem, it's a challenging problem, we can make the difference, and we do have the technologies in order to make the difference, then we like to have a kind of a customer engagement. It's by far more efficient to have a kind of a partnership with one leading OEM in order to develop the application, the solution. We can learn from them when it comes to application know-how. They can learn from our technology stack, from our sensor expertise.
After doing this first lead OEM development, we like to scale the solution, to scale by reaching out to all other top five OEMs first, and later down the road, if we have won, hopefully all five of them, also to reach out to all the other ones in order to scale it up, to leverage what we have developed, and especially also to achieve this leadership in the respective market. Of course, the customers are served locally. We do have the engineers locally in all the regions in order to support them, and we have also the manufacturing centers in order to produce these solutions close to the customers. The whole story starts again. If you do this job well, it's the best platform in order to start with the very same customers with the next problem they are facing in order to support them.
This go-to-market strategy is also underpinned by a disciplined and focused R&D allocation. 10% of our R&D budget flows typically in fundamental technologies, where we are investing early in order to be ready at the moment we need this technology. To give you an example, later in this session, Niculin Saratz will talk about the A3 opportunity in the HVAC market. First of all, and this has already been done, we have to invest into fundamental gas-sensing technologies in order to be ready to measure A3 leakage. Afterwards, 30% of our R&D budget flows into platform development. The technology alone is not enough in order to convince customers to be engaged.
You need a kind of a platform where you say, "Okay, I can demonstrate what you need." It's not yet the product, but at least we can demonstrate the technology, and especially it's a platform which is easily scalable and adaptable for the very problem the customers like to be solved. The main part of the R&D, it's working on solutions developments, on solutions where we are in this close collaboration and interaction with lead OEMs in order to learn from them, but also to have a very disciplined focus on the solution at the end of the journey. Based on this go-to-market strategy to scale it up to all the other OEMs in their respective field, 10%, the remaining 10% goes into the customization to serve all the other ones, but based on what we have already developed before. About resilience.
Our business model is intrinsically resilient, thanks to the fact that we have a high diversification in markets. We serve automotive, consumers, medical, but also HVAC industrial applications. We have a very broad base of different customers. They are typically reacting differently, so we are not linked directly to the automotive crisis or any kinds of downturns in consumer markets. On the other hand, we have all the technologies in-house, so we are not strategically dependent on any kinds of other suppliers, key suppliers they own the technologies we are based on. We do have the technology in-house. In operations, we have worked and we have invested heavily in the last couple of years to diversify our global manufacturing network in order to get onto the level to have almost half of our revenue produced outside of Switzerland.
We have also invested into a dual sourcing strategy when it comes to supply chain. Last but not least, since two years, three years, we hold a strategic wafer stock in order to mitigate any intrinsic semiconductor risks linked to the Taiwanese region. Now, you might have in mind, say, okay, the CEO is talking about resilience, but what we have seen in the last couple of years is a high level of volatility. You're right. Our structural resilient business model was heavily challenged by exogenous factors. You can name it factors. It's probably also one factor, the pandemic, and all the following up reasons. This was a challenge, I'm sure for you. It was also a challenge for us to overcome all these exogenous factors. It started 2020 with the fact that. Sorry.
It started in 2020 with the pandemic, with the fact that we are number one in medical ventilators. There is almost no question whether we serve our customers, and whether we do all what we can in order to scale up the production by a factor of 11. Afterwards, the pandemic, as you know, led directly into this, probably the most severe shortage of semiconductors in the last centuries. Also there we said, okay, we are a single-source supplier for all of our customers, or almost all of our customers. We have an extra responsibility also to prove that we are trusted partners. We have to do whatever we can to supply safely to them and to deliver what they need. We did it. Honestly, we were proud to reliably deliver our customers, even in the highest level of shortage in the semiconductor industry.
Afterwards, the hangover came, also hit us. That means 2023, we had these stocking effects. They also hit the company, in the same way as it was boosted before in 2021 and 2022. In 2023, we faced actually a new challenge to say, okay, on the one hand side, we have now this de-stocking. What we should do is to significantly reduce the resources in order to stabilize the profitability. On the other hand, we faced this huge chance of A2L. That we decided deliberately to say, okay, we are continuing to invest into A2L because this is a growth area we like to capture. We like to become market leader in A2L. On the other hand, definitely, we also started efficiency-gaining programs in order to cut costs there where we are not jeopardizing the two growth areas of the future.
In A2L, as you know today, it pays off, or it paid off last year with a significant increase in revenue, but also in profitability. The latest exogenous factor was actually about Trump's trade policy, back and forth all the time. Here we can say we are fully resilient thanks to very favorable commercial terms with our customers. Last but not least, the fifth strength we have is the culture. A culture which is built on innovation, on entrepreneurial spirit, on taking reasonable risks to push limits, to innovate, and to do what is actually not thinkable to be feasible. I can give you an example. When we started the A2L journey, our ambitions were clear to say, okay, there are many players in the field. It was a new field for us.
We said, okay, our target is to be the number one, to become number one. This sound to be crazy, but we did it at the end of the day by a combination of ambitions, together with the technology, with the innovation, and with hard work. It's not just about ambitions, it's also hard work to do so. This all is based and rooted on the culture we do have, which also attract and retain these people, they can do it. Therefore, it's a very high value for the company. Based on these five strengths, I like to present you shortly the growth strategy looking forward. Again, the thread running through all the activities is as simple as it is. We measure gases. Whenever it comes to a challenging problem, to measure gases. We are in a market which is extremely attractive.
This, we call it smart gas sensing, a market which is pretty large and especially fast-growing, mainly driven by a lot of megatrends. There are just four I picked out. It's about health. There are many different applications in the area where we can add benefit. We can create value by our technology, by our expertise in measuring gases. My colleagues will come to the details later on. It's about climate and environmental protection when it comes to a lot of monitoring of critical gases. It's about energy efficiency. In many processes, you have gases. They have to be monitored in order to make the system more efficient. Last but not least, it's about safety and regulations. There are a lot of applications where safety can be increased by monitoring the gases in a system or outside of the system.
Our unique edge is today, and Moritz already mentioned it shortly at the end of the story, to say we are now at the position where we master a very comprehensive set of technologies to measure all kinds of small gases. I have to be more precise, to measure small amounts of any kinds of gases, from high-volume components up to very high-end analytical systems. You see it here on this slide. We run a lot of components, typically in millions, and we go up to very dedicated systems. It would be nice to have them also in millions, but this is not realistic. Very high-end systems, you will see on the back of our product demonstrations, pretty bulky solutions, highly sophisticated to be very precise, for example, in this case, to monitor methane emissions.
This is the base, what we have invested heavily in the last couple of years, this unique edge to master all these technologies, to be flexible, to apply those technologies we need to address the problem of the customer. Based on that, we have the vision to become the market leader, not just in humidity, not just in small flow rates, not just in environmental indoor air quality measuring, but in the global market of high-value smart gas sensing, from components up to high-end analytical systems. How do we like to do so? There is four pillars we like to focus on. First of all, you should never ignore where you are strong today. Our first strategic focus is definitely to defend the market leadership and even to expand the market leadership in all those fields we are already engaged today, mainly in environmental and in flow sensing.
That's the same approach as 10 years ago when we had the humidity market and we say, "Okay, we expand it now to environmental sensing, but we should not ignore humidity." Therefore, we don't like to lose any of the market shares we have won. This is the very same approach we have today. It's not even we don't like to lose any market share. We like even to expand the market shares even further in all the fields we are in today. On top of that, we like to build leadership in leakage sensing. This is a fast-growing market. It's driven by a lot of regulations in different fields, not just in HVAC. We like to expand into high-value solutions, mainly focused on industrial applications and in medical. Some examples will be presented afterwards by my colleagues.
And last but not least, you can never be a trusted partner of your OEMs without paying attention on the resilience of your business model, especially in turbulent times as we are in today. Also, this is a fundamental pillar of our growth strategy. How do we like to tackle that? We do not have to reinvent the wheel. The go-to-market strategy we have applied in the past is absolutely valuable also to go forward in the very same way. That turned out to be a proven and valuable way how to create value and also to achieve this market leadership. That brings me to the end of the growth strategy.
Our playbook is to addressing relevant and challenging problems that have to be solved where we can make the difference, driven by megatrends structurally, and fueled by the technology portfolio we do have, this comprehensive set of technologies to measure gases, and the market access, thanks to the broad base of our customers. Based on that, I'd like to shortly introduce the session which comes now. That means about the deep dives of the concrete growth areas we are working on. To have the whole picture, there is today growth areas. They are still growing. In those parts, we are generating revenue today. This is not the focus today. The growth is not only coming from the growth areas, but it's dominantly coming from the growth areas, but also the existing business will grow in future. This is not the focus of today's Investor Day.
Next growth areas are those where we are very close to monetization, where we are working on now, and they are even sometimes already today in the phase of being ramped up. There is even more. We are already working on future growth areas. Most of them we cannot disclose today due to competitive reasons, but also due to the fact that some of these growth areas are still in a very early phase. I just checked shortly the Capital Markets Day slides of 2021. In this area, we didn't talk about A2L at that time because it was too early. You can be sure we have already worked on that at that time. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible to be now the market lead in A2L. You see there is also potential in the future growth areas, but it's too early to talk about that.
There is only one exception where I'm being asked pretty often. This is about Lumiphase. The company which is located in the next building here, this is one of the future growth area. It's not a growth area for the next one to three years. I'd like to shortly to comment where we are with Lumiphase. So for all of you, they are probably not familiar with Lumiphase. Lumiphase is a spin-out of IBM Research-Zürich, the research center, and they have a unique technology to manipulate light and to provide technology for the next levels of optical communications and data center, mainly driven by AI. What is Sensirion's engagement? Sensirion holds 49% of the shares, and we are manufacturing partner because it turned out that the process that Lumiphase needs to manufacture their chips is pretty similar to the process we are running anyway.
We have there a very high level of synergies together. What is the upside and the downside potential? The company is still in an early phase. They are not yet on the markets today. On the one hand side, there is significant upside because it's AI. It's data center, so it's one of the hotspots of the technological world today. On the other hand, we'd like also to underline very candidly, there is still risks. They are not yet mitigated, the technology and market fit, but also the timing. It's a very dynamic market, and, therefore, you can never be sure whether you hit the markets at the right moment with the right product, with the right customers. This is not yet proven. We are still working on that. Lumiphase, to be very clear on that, is not included in our financial planning.
It's a kind of a dessertIf it works out to be good, it can be huge in future, but it can also fail. So both potentials are possible, or both scenarios are possible. Therefore, it's a kind of a future growth area. The only reason why we are going to present it here is because it's a kind of a stakeholder engagement we have or shareholder engagement. I am asked pretty often what's about Lumiphase, therefore I cause it to come in. All the other future growth areas, we are working in the other levels here, and we are going to present them as soon as they are more concrete. Well, with that word, I like to hand over to my colleagues. It's too fast. First of all, to Andreas for medical. Thank you.
Hello, everyone. I would like to start with a brief introduction to myself and then hand over and dive into the medical market. My name is Andreas Alt. I'm the Medical Market Director. I joined Sensirion in 2015. I have been here a little bit over 11 years now. My background is in electrical engineering. I studied at the Technical University of Munich, did a PhD also in electrical engineering at ETH Zurich. I'm very passionate about medical. To build the bridge from Marc's introduction, I think medical is a very good example of how Sensirion can expand from a very strong core position into the smart gas sensing area.
If we look at where Medical at Sensirion is today, then our solution space spans from ventilation over anesthesia to CPAP in the areas of intensive care, emergency and transport, recovery, and home care. We distinguish between two different areas here. One is the core business areas, which are shown here in black, and then our growth areas, which you see here highlighted in green. We will be diving into two of these, smart resuscitation and capnography, later on today. In our core areas, everything revolves around respiratory flow sensing. In this area, we have built market-leading positions, for example, in ventilation, but also in CPAP. From this very strong position, we are now looking to expand into neighboring fields, into high-value applications such as capnography, smart resuscitation, metabolism tracking, but also gas delivery therapy. This is really important to understand.
We're not chasing disconnected opportunities here, but we are looking to expand from a strong position into these high-value applications, and where our sensor capabilities are already trusted. This gets us to the heart of the medical strategy. Today, we are the flow leader around respiratory care. This means, for example, in ventilation, that we hold more than 50% market share. In CPAP, it's even exceeding 90%. At the same time, the market is shifting towards multi-parameter diagnostics, and this is driven by the increased chronic respiratory disease, the increased use of gas monitoring in clinical settings, and the increase on need of advanced respiratory monitoring techniques. This puts us in a very unique position.
On the one-hand side, we combine flow leadership and our very broad gas sensor technology portfolio, and on the other hand, we have built a lot of application knowledge, and we are able, with our sensor technology, to solve many of these complex problems that exist over here. This together allows us to unlock attractive market opportunities, which we estimate to exceed CHF 500 million by 2035. Now you may be wondering, where are we today on this journey? This throws us back in time around 2021 or after COVID. Since COVID, we've spent a lot of time and effort into investing how we can expand beyond respiratory flow sensing. What you see here is basically a big part of the result.
This is a high-level insight into the expected product launches that span from 2026-2030, and through the applications of metabolism monitoring, smart resuscitation, capnography, as well as gas delivery therapy. Again, it's important to understand our strategy is not built around a single product over here, but is really a product pipeline which allows us to continuously bring products to the market. This already gets us to the first deep-dive application, smart resuscitation. What is smart resuscitation? An important part of smart resuscitation is bag-valve-mask ventilation. This is what you see over here on the right-hand side. There's a mask being placed over the nose and the mouth of the patient, and then by squeezing this bag, the caregiver can force air into the patient's airways.
This is important to support or take over the breathing function which the patient has lost. Now, this happens today without any kind of feedback, and this is actually a problem because you do not know how much air to force or to provide to the patient. The American Heart Association, for example, they report more than 500,000 people in the U.S. alone that suffer from a cardiac arrest every year, and only 15% of these people survive. This low number of people surviving is also due to damage done during CPR. This is a problem that we can address. With a single-use sensor that combines the flow, pressure, and CO2 measurement, we can provide this feedback to the caregivers in order to allow them to provide better care to the patients. This is something where we as Sensirion can really make a difference.
Let's have a look into the current state and where we are heading. Today, the bag-valve-mask ventilation suffers from poor control. It's a clinically at-scale relevant problem. There are more than 30 million bags provided in the emergency care setting alone. These do not provide any real-time feedback to the caregiver, and this leads to an increased risk for poor outcome for the patients. Now, if we can add a feedback component to this smart bag-valve-mask ventilation, then it has already been shown that this feedback is linked to improved outcomes. Patients' outcomes can be improved by this. At the same time, the exhaled CO2 is a very important component and provides a lot of insight into the ventilation effectiveness. Lastly, there are even international guidelines that are now recognizing this and recommending CO2 as a key parameter for the feedback.
For me, this is a very nice application that we are supporting. Today, it's a high-value application, it's underserved, and it's something where we can really make a difference as Sensirion. How does our solution look? Well, this is shown right over here. This is this module that you see. It combines flow, pressure, and CO2 measurement in a single-use module. This means that it is exchanged with every bag or with every patient that it is used on. We envision the use in cardiac arrest over to the transport ventilation. The market size we estimate it can reach CHF 150 million by 2035, and we are in design-in stages with leading medical OEMs, and the first introductions to market are already expected for 2027. That is already next year. This gets me to the second application deep dive, volumetric capnography.
Capnography, the conventional capnography, is typically used in intensive care today. Patients that are intubated, and you see a sensor over here, it measures the CO2 concentration of the exhaled breath against the time base. This conventional capnography today lacks sufficient insight into the efficiency of the ventilation and the way the lung is working. Now let's compare these two capnography details. On the left-hand side, we have the conventional capnography. This basically answers the question, are patients ventilated and are the airways intact? This is already very important information, and this is why today conventional capnography is already installed and used in anesthesia and intensive care. Many modern therapies today, they already rely on conventional capnography, but they could still further benefit from a deeper diagnostic insight. On the right-hand side, we have volumetric capnography.
The difference here is that now we measure CO2 concentration against the exhaled flow. This provides more information. It can tell you where the CO2 from the lung is coming from. This added diagnostic insight is very helpful in assessing the ventilation effectiveness and the lung efficiency. It is increasingly used in emergency procedures and new ventilation strategies, and it requires the precise measurement of CO2 and flow, which has to be synchronized and measured also proximal to the patient, which is a very harsh environment. This is again where our respiratory flow know-how and competence helps us and makes us actually the best person or the best company to address this problem. How does our solution look like? It consists of a reusable sensor head. This is the part that you see over here, different types of airway adapters.
Again, these airway adapters are single-use, so replaced with every patient that they're used on. When this is brought to market, we do not expect it to replace conventional capnography, but more to complement it from the beginning. Because it provides more diagnostic insight, it will eventually take over and be the preferred solution in ventilation and anesthesia applications. We estimate this market to reach around CHF 200 million by 2035, and currently, we are working on sampling to lead customers with prototypes. After the completion of the development, we expect to enter the market or our customers to enter the market by 2028. This gets me already to the conclusion. Why is Sensirion positioned to win in this space? We are the established leader around respiratory flow sensing. At the same time, we see that there is a transition to multi-parameter respiratory therapy.
We can leverage our leadership as a gateway into multi-gas sensing solutions. We have trusted relationships to many of the large medical OEMs, and we've built a staggered product pipeline, which is a strong foundation for our future growth. Lastly, we have moats due to the regulatory entry barrier, but also our strong technology portfolio and the deep application know-how that we have established. With that, I hand over to Niculin for the HVAC part.
Good morning everyone from my side. My name is Niculin Saratz. I'm leading the product management, so I'm Product Director for gas sensors here. We heard a lot about gas sensors. I'm not leading all of the company. That's what Marc is doing. What we have, gas sensing, is part of it. I've been with Sensirion for about 15 years. Before, I did a PhD in physics here at ETH, so I grew up here. Today I will tell you about A2L and some other aspects around this heating, ventilation, and air conditioning industry. Where do we start? The heating, ventilation, air conditioning, HVAC industry, we have four fields that we are active in. One is indoor air quality management.
As we heard, that's where we started five, six, seven, eight years ago, where we measure indoor air quality parameters like humidity, temperature, fine particles, formaldehyde or CO2. Like these small gadgets or devices that you had on your chair this morning, that's an indoor air quality monitor that measures PM2.5 and CO2 and includes our latest generation CO2 sensor, which is the smallest CO2 sensor you can get. Sorry for the online audience. There is some benefits for being here in person. There's gas furnaces and control, where it's all about energy efficiency. You can better control how a gas burner burns to avoid dangerous exhaust gases or increase efficiency.
Here, it's been building ventilation, like when you have these ventilation ducts you see in the building, you can either always blow fresh air in or you can monitor, well, how bad is the air actually, and then depending on how bad the air it is, flow in more or less air so you can save energy again. That's what we mean by demand controlled ventilation. In this case, ventilation of buildings as opposed to ventilation of patients, as Andreas had talked before. The focus topic today will be refrigerant leakage, where we come from a strong growth step in A2L, and I will give you a little bit of insight what the next step in this market is. Good. This is about refrigerant leakage detection. We live in this major megatrend of environmental protection.
It's related to climate change and safety and regulations. Right. If you have such an air conditioning system, as you see here on the right, what is actually refrigerant leakage? Now, what is actually the refrigerant? Inside this air conditioning system, you have a heat pump, and in that heat pump, you have a liquid or a fluid that is circulating. That's the refrigerant. That's what we will talk about. These refrigerants historically were these freons and substances that we banned in the 1990s because they damaged the ozone layer. You may have heard about that. There was a phase out of this very first generation of refrigerants. They were substituted by the hydrofluorocarbons, which we use today. They don't damage the ozone layer, but now we found out that these have a global warming potential in the 10,000s or in the 1,000s.
They really heat up the climate by 1,000 x stronger than CO2 at the same amount. There was the Montreal Protocol, which a global agreement to get rid of these refrigerants with the high global warming potential. By this, the estimate is they can reduce the global warming by almost a degree. The substitution of these refrigerants, that was then the A2L refrigerants. A2L stands for a class of refrigerants that has a lower global warming potential because they degrade faster in the atmosphere. When they degrade in the atmosphere, that's because they are more reactive, which also means they are flammable.
Because these refrigerants are flammable, you want to have a leakage sensor, because if you have such an air conditioning system in your living room and you are smoking a cigarette and there is a leak, you don't want to have the flammable refrigerant leaking into your living room without control. That's the first push to this market is this climate regulations that mandate the change of these refrigerants from traditional ones to the A2Ls into the next years. Now because we have these flammable refrigerants, we want to have leakage detection. On the other side, this whole, why is this relevant for us? Well, it's a new opportunity, an emerging opportunity. On the other side, the need for air conditioning and cooling and heating is increasing, right? Here in Europe, we're moving from fossil-fueled heating systems to heat pumps, so electrifying heating.
We have increasing temperatures in spite of all the efforts globally, so there is an increasing need for air conditioning units. We have huge markets in the world that don't have yet the high penetration of air condition units. They will also need more air condition units in the future. Last but not least, there's also cooling needed in data center and similar infrastructure. There is a growing market, and if we put this together, we estimate the market size of around CHF 400 million or beyond by 2030 by these regulatory-driven pushes just for the leakage sensing in this business. It's not the market size of HVAC. That's much, much, much larger. It's just the sensors that go in there. Good. That's the cookie we go for, and that's what it is about. A short summary of how this works and how these transitions work.
I mentioned the Montreal Protocol and this Kigali Amendment, in case you want to look it up. That's the regulations banning these A1 refrigerants here that had a huge global warming potential. They are not flammable at all, and they're also fluorinated substances. We move to the A2L refrigerants, which are much better in terms of global warming potential, but they're still fluorinated chemicals and they are a little bit flammable. Now, you may have heard all this talk about the F-gas Regulation and PFAS and fluorinated chemicals, the keyword forever chemicals, that we heard that they show up in drinking water and everywhere. Well, these A2L refrigerants are such fluorinated substances. They're not as bad as these maybe, but they're still not super nice. The European Union is leading there to push the move from A2L to even more environmentally friendly refrigerants.
One idea there, so you can use the different substances, but for the moment, the prominent candidate is to use propane or R290 as it's in the refrigerant. Propane, you know that's what you have in your grill on the balcony. That's highly flammable. It's very eco-friendly. It's not fluorinated, but it's highly flammable. You can already imagine what this means for leakage sensing. Good. That's the difference between A2L and A3. That's actually the class in flammability. The higher the number, the more flammable the refrigerant is. Good. How does this look locally? We have these global regulations or conventions about getting rid of these, phasing out these high global warming potential gases, but the implementation is by country, of course.
Each country makes their own laws, makes their own regulations, and their own timelines, and this is where we go. As we say, Europe, the A2Ls are already currently standard and have been so for a while, and Europe is already thinking about phasing out the A2Ls and adopting the A3s over the coming decade. There will be a staggered phase in of this A3, depending on the type of system, et cetera, in Europe. In Japan, also A2L is currently standard, and there is recommendations to move these A3 refrigerants already. In the U.S., we have just introduced the A2L beginning of 2025. This is the A2L boost we talked about in the annual report, and this happened just in the United States, and they will be due to the local set of regulations and architecture of the systems.
We don't foresee an introduction of A3 anytime soon there. Last but not least, we will have other countries like China, who will jump directly from the A1s to the A3s, skipping this intermediate step, because now the technology for these A3 refrigerants is ready and they are more eco-friendly. They are cheaper than the A2L, so there's reasons to skip this step. This gives then a bit of a pipeline of adoption for these refrigerants. This is what we want to illustrate here a little bit. Don't take this too quantitative, but that's where we are today. Sensirion is market leader in A2L refrigerant leakage detection, and that was pushed by this demand in the United States. That's the step function that Sensirion did. We have achieved from 0 to more 50% market share, and our success factors were, again, what we talked about.
Technology leadership. Without technology leading sensing core, you don't get there. Customer intimacy. There was a difficult phase for our customers. Some customers said that was the biggest disruption in the HVAC industry of the last 40 years. We helped them to overcome these problems, and sometimes we have to think behind our customer. We have to understand their problem sometimes even better than they understand it themselves. This application know-how. We're fulfilling this with a globally diversified and resilient supply chain, and we owned or earned a strong reputation for a technically solid, reliable, but still commercially attractive solution. That's the key. You can't sell a watch. This market is expected to grow a little bit. It's kind of a step function for the introduction, but will still grow over the coming years. Now, the A3, and this is important, this comes on top.
It's not that A2L you introduce once, and then everybody has A2L, and then you make no money anymore. No. Heating systems need to be replaced every 15 years or so. There's a continuous stream. That's this gray point. On top comes this introduction of the A3 in the different regions as they come one after the other. The A3 comes on top. It comes a bit slower, it's a bit more gradual. It's not such a step function because it's not just one country, but it will be there in the end. In the end, it will likely be larger than A2L. Again, the push is environmental regulations. It's safety norms that mandate then the use of the sensor. The environmental norm mandates the A3. The safety norm mandates the sensor.
This is supported by the market because everybody sees, well, that's kind of the future, the way to go. There's also a natural pull towards these A3 refrigerants. Where do we stand? Sensirion is well positioned to extend or expand this leadership from the A2L also, or carry this over to the A3 sensors. We have the customer context, the customer intimacy. We have the technological core. It's, again, the picture Marc showed before. That sits inside this device. We have a proven base technology. We have first parts out there for A3. We have started now with this first, this is kind of the early adopters, is these heat pumps for the European Union, which is just at very low volumes. The larger volumes for the air conditioning units will follow in the different countries as they come. We're ready for this.
We're already running, and you'll see the outcome hopefully in some time in the future. Good. Where do we stand? Where are we positioned here? Again, market leadership is important for us. It's still about scaling this, being able to, on one hand, be the technology market leader, but also in terms of volumes, lead the market. How we get there, we get there by customer intimacy, but also by being able then to use our knowledge and experience to provide the tailor-made solutions to our customers that they need to be successful. We have full control over the value chain from the chip to the application. Nobody knows the chips as well as we do. Some customers say, I want to buy the solution from the company who owns the technology. We own the technology. Of course, we are regulatory compliant also there.
If in such a big regulatory change, it's important to be at the forefront of this and always know what's going on. We have a global footprint by now. That's a difference to maybe between 10 years ago, where we have sites, not only sales sites, but also manufacturing sites where our customers sit, so that we can serve them where they need the parts. It's obviously not the same if you ship around A2L sensors that are this size versus shipping humidity sensors that are maybe this size. Application matters. As I mentioned, the deep application know-how, we have to understand the customer's problem very precisely so that we can solve it in the best possible way. We're ready for that. With this, I hand over to Max. Thank you.
Well, we have just heard we are a gas sensing company, and I have request for the technical team to open the doors to let in some fresh air, please, real quick. I sense a little bit of air disruption. For the online audience, hang on, you will not feel the cold. Second, I have a question because we are mid through the presentation to raise some activities. Who has come by car today? Rough guess, 30%, and this is even in one of the best publicly served countries, in Switzerland, you have about 30% people coming by car, and this is why automotive is and will remain interesting. Automotive has seen as a car manufacturing market about short of 5% growth last year, so 2025 was almost 100 million vehicles produced. It's coming back into growth.
I would like to show you and take you on the journey of what we do in the automotive sector to bring our technologies into this market. We come with our very strong footprint in cabin climate and combustion control, which Marc and also Moritz has mentioned. We have shown a global market penetration of above 50%-60%. This is where we come from, but I would like to show where we're going in growing even further. This is one key megatrend is autonomy. Autonomous driving, self-driving cars, self-driving humanoids. It's sustainable and safety. It's bridging what Niculin just said about refrigerant leakage in mobile air conditionings, in MACs, and it's lastly, electrification of the propulsion of the transition from ICE to BEV. My name is Max Eichberger. I'm the General Manager of Sensirion Automotive Solutions, and I will take you through this journey.
Let's first look into advanced driver assistance systems, where we see that these systems, they will pilot the vehicle without you intervening, and they will make sure that the vehicle is not crashing. You trust your life and the lives of your passengers onto this system. What can happen to this system after first bring into place, it can have reliability issues from water ingress, for example. This is something which is beyond self-diagnosis from the typical electrical circuit, so you would need to diagnose this with additional sensors, which measure either humidity or water ingress. This is relevant not only for the electronics, but also for the mechatronics. Mechatronic is, for example, steer-by-wire or brake-by-wire system. It can enable a fail-safe operation of what we call Level 2+ autonomy. Level 5 is full autonomy.
You enter the destination, the car takes you with you sleeping in the car. Level 2+ requires some certain level of alertness and maneuverability of the driver. We see an addressable market of about CHF 100 million starting in 2030, already started, but reaching this market size in 2030. It happens as the market penetration and the adoption of ADAS, advanced driver assistance systems, will follow and come into the market. What is our solution? We have contactless water and humidity ingress sensors, and we have also pioneered this technology by making this function safety certified with an ISO-rated humidity sensor. We have a market position which is standing on two legs, on the OEMs and on the Tier 1s, and we have a design-in and engagement with LiDAR, so light detection ranging sensors and camera providers, and also steer- and brake-by-wire system providers.
Coming to the second growth pillar is, again, bridging the technology that has been already very much in place with A2L, in stationary air conditioning devices. Now bringing this into mobile air conditioning devices, where we see that the requirement for PFAS-free and low global warming potential refrigerants brings a huge demand also in the vehicles. Megatrend here is sustainability and regulation. We see that this change in the refrigerant leads to a new market opening up there. At the moment, focusing on R744. This is a CO2 refrigerant, and then R290, a propane refrigerant, happening largely regulated in China and in European Union. We see an addressable market reaching to CHF 200 million by 2035, subject to the global regulatory approach. What's our positioning there?
We have these automotive-grade sensors in place, and we place this not only a single bet on one technology, but we have basically three technologies in place to capture this market. Whatever suits the customer and the use case best. And we have received two years ago, already first nominations. We're just now ramping up and start of production for one key automotive customer, and we are engaged in several RFQs, request for quotations, from different OEM and tier Xs. So let me focus now on the third growth field in the automotive sector, which is one which I will dive more into detail. This is thermal runaway risk in electric vehicle batteries, and the mitigation of this risk. So you see this is based on this electrification trend.
Globally, we have already reached about 20% and more electrified vehicles last year, and we see that with lithium-ion batteries, if there's a malfunction, this can lead to a reaction where the whole battery catches fire, and this goes very quickly. This is the issue. It happens quickly, and it has a devastating effect on the vehicles, on the passengers, on the surroundings, on the sub-ground parking areas, and so on. We see a market size larger than CHF 200 million by 2030, also driven by the regulatory adoption. Our position here, again, we have automotive-specified gas sensing solution technology there for these kind of events. We have, again, two years ago, received first nominations and currently engaging in several requests for quotations from OEMs, Tier 1s, and battery suppliers, and already preparing the next-generation technology. What does it mean in detail?
In detail means we see that this 20%-25% market share of battery electric vehicles in last year, I said this was a growing year of automotive production, is targeted or projected to reach almost 50% by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. This market is hugely growing. You see on the other side, the problem is growing alongside. We see already about 300,000 vehicle recalls last year in the U.S. based on issues and quality topics and risks associated with the battery of a BEV. This puts risk on not only lives, but also reputation of OEMs, where you can see different OEMs going through the media and having negative impacts on the sales revenues. This is not only based on reputation, this is based on regulation.
There is the UN GTR 20, which is mandating and suggesting a five-minute early warning to the passengers as soon as such a failure is detected. There you see different approaches to the regions, implementing and reflecting this UN global technical regulation. In Europe, you see already an impact now, in China also, Japan and Korea following, and the United States with the recent pivot from BEV back to ICE, a relaxation on the requirements. Nevertheless, there is strong players also in the U.S. focusing on BEVs and also safety. What does this technology do? You have different approaches to solve this. The conventional, where you just measure temperature, is too slow, where you just measure the pressure increase in the battery pack is too slow or too transient.
You cannot capture the full picture because you're going through a tunnel, you have a truck coming, the counterway to you generating a pressure peak, and it's gone. This is not fast enough and a safe enough approach to detect issues with the battery. A more sustainable approach and quicker and reliable approach is to base this on specific gases that will be generated once there is a thermal runaway or a thermal or an electrical malfunction happening in the battery. This is where we focus on because we do gas sensing, and this is what we do reliably and at scale. As I said, we have different technologies addressing this market and these requirements, based on different chip bases and full solution integrations. We have, two years ago, already won multiple nominations. We see first revenue contribution this year.
Last year, we did a SOP, start of production, for one of the customers, and we see a scaling across all the key regions after 2030. What's a very strong value proposition for our product into the market is that we are engaged with all different players from the OEMs, from the car manufacturer, to the battery management system provider, or to the battery supplier themselves. Lastly, why do I believe we win in automotive? It's not only because of this reputation, which is based on a 60% market share in already existing niches, but it's based on the solutions that we have for mission-critical problems in these megatrends. We have our reputation built up over the last decades.
We have a full vertical integration of the key technology. Similarly to the talks previously, we hear a lot from our customers that they don't want to purchase a solution from anyone, but from someone who really deep down knows the whole value chain, the technical specialties, and can solve the problems associated with them. For automotive, an intrinsically strongly moated market, you will have to have different regulatory compliance procedures and certifications in place to engage in this market. What's even more of an importance now is this global footprint that you want to manufacture in these automotive regions globally, so you can ensure safe supply to these customers. On our side, we can ensure access to the right cost structure of our products.
Lastly, the deep application know-how that's based on several decades experience of developing these technologies and moving these technologies forward into the application. With this, I hand over to the last market deep dive, which is governed by Felix.
Thanks. I would like to continue our journey through the markets, from the streets of the world to the desert of West Texas. You can already probably guess it from the picture. We're talking about the energy sector, the oil and gas industry, and I think we've all experienced in the past few weeks and month how impactful the energy sector is to the lives all over the world and also here in Switzerland. We at Connected Solutions, we support our customers in the energy sector to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. I'm Felix Hoehne. I'm the General Manager of Sensirion Connected Solutions. I'm with the company for 13 years, and as my colleagues, I have a background in physics. We help our customers in the energy sector, so specifically in the oil and gas industry, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Specifically, this is methane emissions. We do that by offering a comprehensive portfolio of continuous monitoring solutions, so IoT solutions, to measure and monitor methane leaks and to help our customers to manage methane, to mitigate methane, and in the end, to reduce methane emissions. We address a market in 2030 of more than CHF 150 million. Now to start, why is methane important? Why should we care about methane? If we look at the drivers of climate change, of global warming, the best scientific estimates are that roughly 30% of this climate change is not driven by CO2, but actually by methane, because methane is a very strong greenhouse gas. 30% of the global warming that we have today, since Industrial Revolution, has been driven by methane emissions. These methane emissions come typically from three big sources. One is agriculture, so cows.
The second is landfills, and the most important one is the energy sector, which basically the oil and gas and coal industries. Roughly 35% of these methane emissions come from the energy sector, and thereby, are a major contributor to global warming. Now, more and more operators in this field, so the energy companies, realize that their, and they call it's not my word, it's their word, their license to operate for the next 20, 30, 40 years, is a reduction of methane emissions. This is driven by pressure from different stakeholders. In particular, there are stricter regulatory landscapes worldwide. Their financial stakeholders of these companies are putting pressure on them. The gas buyers, so people in Europe, are putting pressure on these companies, and also the general public. To effectively reduce methane emissions, you need monitoring. You need to know what's going on.
What you need is a fast and efficient leak detection. You need a root cause analysis, and to be able to repair and fix these leaks. You need accurate emissions reporting, and that is what we are supporting with our solutions. Now, if you look a bit more into the global drivers, and in particular the regulatory and reporting drivers, there is a global industry reporting program that is very important, that's very well established. It's a program by the United Nations that's called the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership, or OGMP, and it's basically covering the biggest part of global oil and gas production. Most of the big companies and big household names that you know are members, including companies like TotalEnergies, like Shell, like ExxonMobil, and many, many more. Overall, it's 150 and more members globally.
If you are a partner of this program, if you're a member of this program, you have to report your emissions transparently and based on measurements, and that's where our solutions help and come in. There's also a global regulatory landscape. I want to start to first look at the main market for oil and gas production. That's the United States. There, it's important to understand that in the United States, there are regulations on state level and on federal level. Now, to already anticipate a question later in the Q&A, federal level, United States, what about Trump? There are a lot of important regulations that enforce methane mitigation and methane monitoring on federal level. This is what we read in the media about the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.
These regulations are in place since the Biden era, but they are currently not enforced and are on hold under the current administration. That means on federal level, we lack additional tailwinds that would have accelerated this market, because these regulations are not enforced. They are still in place, and we don't know what the future brings, and political administrations will change again, probably. Let's see. This is, at the moment, not as strong driver as you might have expected. In the United States, we have a lot of relevant regulations on state level, in particular in oil and gas-producing states like New Mexico, like Colorado, like California, and Texas, that are very relevant and enforce methane monitoring. There's a specific interesting example. California is a Democratic state, strong environmental position.
They're planning to put a regulation in place starting in 2028-2030 that requires monitoring of most oil and gas sites continuously in California, so that's a very interesting market potential there. Now, if you look to the neighbor to the north of the U.S., very strong oil and gas production, there, we see a lot of movement just recently. Starting end of last year, we see upcoming much stricter federal and provincial regulations in Canada, which are in effect in 2028, and then fully rolled out until 2030, so that's creating a lot of momentum there in this market. Also here in Europe, and also in partly covering the Middle East, we have upcoming stricter regulations for oil and gas operations in Europe.
Even more importantly, the European Union is one of the biggest gas buyers in the world, and the EU is implementing an import regulation that also has an impact on methane production, and forces people who want to sell to the European Union to manage their methane emissions. Now, where in the oil and gas industry do we want to measure and mitigate methane? We see here a nice picture of the oil and gas value chain, and the biggest part of methane emissions comes from what is called in the industry, the upstream segment, so the production of oil and gas. You see here on the right, a classical picture, these horsehead pumps in the West Texas desert. It's actually how it looks like there. Those are typical oil and gas production sites.
You have more than 100,000 big ones that produce a lot of oil overall and gas, and overall, you have roughly 1 million active oil and gas sites, a lot of them in the U.S. These gas sites are typically the size of a few football fields. They have these pumps. They have tanks, they have separators, and you would put a few sensors on them to monitor them. Now, moving more towards the consumer, there is a big segment that's called the midstream segment. This is the transport and processing of oil and gas. These sites are much more complex, much more equipment, and there are roughly a bit more than 10,000 sites of these worldwide that also needs to be monitored because they significantly contribute to methane emissions. There is a third interesting segment that is offshore production, which has very specific requirements.
These are huge installations, obviously, and there are a bit more than 1,000 of them worldwide that are interesting for monitoring. Now, if you look into methane monitoring, there's a very specific and interesting problem, and that is, how do you monitor such an oil and gas site? I would like to show that, showing a very specific graph of how oil and gas emissions actually look on such a site. What you see here are real measurements from a real oil and gas site, a midstream site, over a couple of months. If you look at this graph, this is a very important realization that is new for most people who have never seen this, and that is these emissions fluctuate wildly. There's a lot of variability. There's a lot of things going on.
You see these huge spikes, these are huge emissions, then you see periods where there's almost no emissions, and then again you see increases. Here, this short increase from one oil and gas site has probably the CO2 emissions of a big village just in two or three days. That's significant what's going on there. Big picture, emissions on oil and gas sites, a lot of variability. There's a lot of things going on. Now, the challenge is the current best practice how to monitor emissions is what is called a periodic measurement. Periodic just means you go there once a year, maybe four times a year. You do a measurement for five minutes for one hour or so, and then you try to understand what's going on on this site.
You typically do that with a drone survey, you do that with a flyover, or you do that by using handheld equipment to monitor these leaks. Now, there's an obvious problem, and that is you can detect leaks quite late. If you go there once a year, you can be 12 months too late. There was a leak that's going on for 12 months. You also miss all these emission spikes. You can't see them. If you want to accurately calculate your total emissions over the year, this can't be accurate by just going there two times a year.
There's a lot of missing in the current best practice of monitoring, and that's why continuous monitoring is very attractive, and we see a lot of potential in there, because if you continuously monitor a site, and this black measurement curve is actually our sensors measuring continuously what's going on on the site, you have much, much faster detection of emissions. Instead of months, you go to hours, and you can accurately report your total emissions over the whole period. Therefore, we as Sensirion, we focus to become the market leader and one-stop shop for continuous methane emissions monitoring. With one-stop shop, we mean that for all these assets in the different parts of the value chain, we have a technology and a solution.
Starting for upstream, we have monitors that you can later also see over there that you put on these sites that measure methane emissions. We have sensors that can be put on offshore platforms that need ATEX or explosion-proof certifications, and we have gas imaging technologies that are very well suited to monitor emissions on complex sites. We also have solutions and instruments that monitor gas composition in the gas stream and the gas transportation. To make it a bit more tangible, I will show you very concrete examples because I'm not sure how many people already have been on an oil and gas site. It's very interesting, very interesting experience. This is an example of one of our technologies. It's a gas cloud imaging technology, so a camera, but a camera for gas. You can see it over there in the back.
This is installed in the West Texas desert on a, it's called a central tank battery, where you collect oil and gas. And what you see here is on the right side, the picture that you would take with a normal camera, a visual camera, and on the left side, a picture that you would take with a gas camera. And in the gas camera, very nicely, you see very clearly an emission from a tank top. And this is actually what we provide as a picture via cloud interface, via data connections to the operator of this oil and gas site. And they can then look at this picture, identify the root cause, and take action accordingly. So what we're offering as connected solutions, that's also where the name comes from, is not only the sensor technology, the sensor nodes. That's the basis, that's our baseline.
We offer a complete solution so that we are able to deliver these insights, these pictures, this information to the end customer, to the oil and gas operator, who then actually fixes the leak. We have as a basis, very accurate sensing technology based on a lot of Sensirion technology. We have designed around that a robust IoT node. You can imagine that these sensors have to survive for many years in the desert in Texas and also in the winter in Canada with -40 degrees. It has to be very robust, very reliable. On top of that, we build a lot of data analytics for the quantification and localization of these leaks. We build the corresponding software interfaces, so it's all the cloud-based infrastructure to support these operational workflows of our customers.
In the end, we also provide customer and field service locally in the oil and gas regions. Where do we stand in this journey in terms of markets and regions? At the moment, we focus mainly on the North American market because it's by far the biggest oil and gas producing region in the world in terms of number of sites, but also production volume. Mainly the U.S. and Canada, but also Europe because of the strict regulations, and the Middle East are interesting markets for us to come. Now in the U.S., the main drivers are, as I said, the state regulations. Hopefully, at some point in the future, again, federal regulations, that would be very helpful. Also we see that all the global players, they have their own midterm agenda.
Someone like ExxonMobil has an emission reduction pledge that goes until 2035 or 2050, and they reduce their emissions over time. We already see that LNG exports to Europe, because of the European import rules, are very important for the U.S., and therefore methane reduction becomes a driver there as well. We have multi-year contracts and big deployments with three of the top 20 oil and gas producers in North America, and we have a lot of pilots to fill our pipeline. Canada, at the moment, is an emerging market because of the new, stricter regulations that are currently being implemented. We are already present in Canada for quite a while. We are field-proven in these minus 40 degrees environments with multiple small-scale deployments, and we see now more and more interest in pilots and testing to be able to address the upcoming new regulations.
We see more drivers in the U.S. There are new regulations, as I said. There's this OGMP partnership that drives, for example, adoption in the Middle East, and there we have multiple ongoing or upcoming pilots. Now to summarize, why are we positioned to win in this market? First of all, we are supporting with full solutions, a megatrend that is reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. We have positioned ourselves as a one-stop shop for continuous monitoring, which is very attractive, in particular for the bigger operators who have assets along the whole value chain, so they need different solutions. We own the whole value chain from the sensors to the complete solution, including the analytics and the software. At the core, we have very strong core technologies, sensing technologies based on the Sensirion heritage.
We have a strong local presence, actually, in the oil and gas markets. We are present in America, in North America, in the U.S., in Texas, and in Canada. This whole business model is an attractive service business model where you typically have multi-year service contracts with these customers. With that, I hand over to Martin.
Thank you, Felix. Now, what does all these examples, those four examples that we have seen, have in common for these market deep dives? Brings us back to our playbook that Marc presented beforehand. We have seen technology ownership. We have seen that we have a broad-based technology portfolio with that we can master these applications that were just presented. We have also seen for all these applications, we do have market access. We work with leading OEMs together to understand their problem, to make sure that the technology portfolio fits the needs of their very specific application. Very importantly, is that we have a structural tailwind because these are emerging applications in megatrends that we can unlock with mission-critical, smart gas sensing solutions. With that, I would like to continue with financial performance and our capital allocation.
First, look at the historical financial performance, then look at capital allocation, and also on return on invested capital. Now, if you look at the financial performance since IPO, that's also what Marc has shown on his slide. We can see that we have growth of 13% in constant currencies over the last years since IPO, supported also by an average adjusted EBITDA margin of 17%. This underlines our business model, our go-to-market strategy on the product side, but it also shows our balanced and disciplined capital allocation in the past. With the growth field that we have presented before, focusing on mission-critical application, having market access, having the technology portfolio, and supported by secular megatrends, we are convinced that we can continue on this trajectory going forward.
Now, also, Marc mentioned that before we had volatility in the revenue given by external forces, COVID, supply chain disruption, and so on, and that definitely also translated on the earnings profile. There it's our ambition also to build resilience into the earning profile going forward, and that's what we have been working on also in the last years. I would like to walk you through some of the levers that we have in that field, and it starts also with the innovation and the strength to innovate, and with that, to solve mission-critical problems, have solutions that create the top-line growth that for us, very important to create that stability and strength in the earnings profile. We can leverage our market leadership that helps us on the gross margin side. Because of dominance, we have strength there as well.
Heard also here often is the full value chain control from component to the solution with the customer. We control that from the supply chain with our suppliers to also where we manufacture. We are also enhancing the cost structure flexibility. For example, our A2L sensors for the U.S. market are produced with contract manufacture in Mexico. That helps us on the flexibility, and we also established and are going forward with that in other places. We heard this also before. We internationalize our footprint. On the manufacturing side, almost half of the revenue is generated with end products not anymore produced here. The core, yes, but the product module and so on, not anymore. Can be Hungary, can be in China, can be in Korea. To internationalize footprint, that helps us on the FX exposure on one side, but of course also on the cost structure overall.
Naturally, we're also going with adoption of AI that helps us to create flexibility in the cost structure, capitalize on that, and of course, continued automation and optimization throughout the whole P&L. Now, another important aspect for diversification is the diversification across markets, the diversification across regions, and also across the customer segment. We do not have a single dominant customer that we rely on or a single dominant region that we rely on. We have there highly diversified setup across these three elements, and that creates stability. It creates resilience, because for example, in the market, there are different drivers, and that helps too to create the stability. We have also seen very different deep dives beforehand, from HVAC to Connected Solutions, Medical, and Automotive. This will continue this diversification, which is important for our resilience.
Important is if you go back to our edge, the technology fundament, they can serve all the markets, all the regions, and also the customers. We have there a fundament from which we can serve in this diversified markets. Turning to cash generation and the balance sheet, and with that, also capital allocation strategy for us. If you look at the past, we had a strong cash generation. We could fund many of our investments through operation cash flow and free cash flow. We have there a significant cash generation, which enables us to fund our growth investment. If you look at our CAS, capital allocation strategy, it's for us important and the focus to use that for organic growth. Organic expansion is our primary capital allocation priority. We also have, thanks to the strength of the balance sheet, significant non-dilutive funding capacity for M&A activities.
If you look at our M&A priority, it could be regarding to technology acquisition if we see we unlock there maybe an adjacent application in existing markets, that we focus on technology acquisitions, but it can also be to enter into new market segment, expand a market segment where we then can make an acquisition in that field, or the combination that we have seen in the case of Kuva, where we gain the technology and also an expansion of the market access. Overall, we are committed to a conservative leverage profile over the cycle that helps us to, on one side, maintain flexibility, but also, again, resilience. Capital return strategy, we will reconsider that when surplus liquidity exceeds attractive reinvestment opportunities on our side. At the end, it's all about value creation, and the return on invested capital is an important parameter for you, but also for us.
When you look at our historic ROIC, we achieved an average ROIC of 17%, which is well above our cost of capital, and therefore we could create there significant value throughout the last year since IPO. Therefore, also our ambition definitely is to strengthen that. We have clearly identified also areas where we can work on to further enhance the long-term value compounding of Sensirion. Predominantly, of course, we can leverage the technology and the market leadership. That's what we have presented to you today, some parts of it, to unlock the growth areas and to capture also eventually the benefit of scale with that. We continue to execute on strategic initiatives to structure the strengths in the earnings profile. I've presented them beforehand to you.
Of course, also there is leverage on increasing the capital productivity by reducing it across the organization, which will free up additional resources on our side. Of course, there is also a potential to refine capital structure to lower cost of capital, while of course, for us important preserving the strength on the balance sheet. That brings me back to our midterm guidance, which we are today reaffirming and confirming. That means that we see a revenue growth in the low- to mid-teens, as communicated already the last Capital Markets Day and throughout the period after, and an EBITDA margin in the mid- to high-teens. What we have done, we have demonstrated ability in long-term growth value creation over the last period. Of course, with an ambition also now to increase the earnings profile enabled by our strategy.
Gross margin resilience is important to us, and it's structurally embedded also in our strategy. Mission-critical, you heard a lot about the mission-critical applications that we serve with the growth field, the regulation-driven applications. Of course, they help us there on the gross margin resilience also by being a market leader. We have a clear capital allocation framework that we employ and that ensures also a disciplined and, of course, value-creating deployment of our capital. We have a healthy financial foundation on the balance sheet, but also a strong cash generation, also to fund future growth of the company. With that, with the confirmation of the midterm guidance, I would like to hand back to Marc. Well, we come to the end of the presentation, and we will like to hand over to you for questions.
A last statement from my side, more probably on a meta level, also to kind of a food for brain for you. If we look forward, there will be one disruptive change in the world, unfortunately not driven by Sensirion. This is AI. AI will not only make our work more efficient, but especially it will also reduce the access, or it simplifies the access to software and to code software that everybody, each engineer, can actually code software, not only the dedicated software engineers. The easier it gets to code software, the more important is actually to focus on those elements where software is actually working on. These are data, and where the data coming from? From sensors and from the hardware. We used to have a time in the past where hardware was actually boring. The new world is about software.
I'm deeply convinced that we will see in future a higher focus on hardware data generation rather than on software, because software will remain important, but it can be coded and produced by almost everybody, thanks to AI. This more on a meta level as my final statement today. Now I like to ask my colleagues to come on the stage to be ready for your questions. I hand over to Lars to moderate the Q&A session.
Thank you, Marc. As I said before, we wanted to start with questions here from the audience, but I would also like to send a message to the online participants. There is a question online. It's a financial question. Marc, Sensirion has never paid a dividend. It's understandable as a startup, but now Sensirion has grown up. Can you please elaborate on the future payout dividend policy?
Indeed. It was shortly mentioned by Martin. We create value, and we create good cash conversion, even last year. We have a very strict or clear strategy how we like to allocate this cash, which was generated. First of all, we like actually to reinvest into organic growth, because organic growth, it turned out to be a pretty good profitability in terms of ROIC. Afterwards, we like also to strengthen our position whenever we see some selective M&As, mainly with market access reasons or for technology ownership. In future, if we see that there is a surplus of cash which cannot be either invested into organic growth in a reasonable and profitable and value-generated way, or invested into M&As in order to strengthen the company's position for the future, then definitely we will reconsider our dividend policy.
Thank you. Maybe another online question. Marc, can you please elaborate on, given the building of the clean room on the CapEx expansion, elaborate on growth CapEx and maintenance CapEx for the years to come?
I can comment on the CapEx requirement for the building that those in the audience have seen is being built. That's cash out this year and next year, a total of about CHF 40 million in CapEx split between those two years. Of course, there is also some part of equipment afterwards that's the part for the construction of the building. The others we don't disclose.
Good. Maybe also here to the audience and Stefan, any questions?
Maybe for the chemistry of the batteries, thermal runaways, you talked about lithium-ion technology. What happens if the market shifts more towards LFP or the solid-state batteries? How are you positioned there?
Yeah, we see this happening also with our key customers, and we are engaged in different sensing technologies on these topics.
It's needed for all of them, or is lithium-ion the most dangerous one?
Lithium-ion is at the moment the most dangerous one and the most prominent one with the problems. Also for solid-state, we are engaged in early sensing demand discussions.
you maybe quantify the huge opportunity with the surge you're alluding to? Secondly, 49%, is there any chance you could raise that higher? That would be the second one.
Well, about the potential, sorry, I can't quantify it because it can be really huge. You might have even more information about investors' view on AI and on the rates to higher bandwidths and optical communications. To quantify that in revenue, it's simply not possible today, especially because it's not just about the size of the market, it's also about the market share you can win, about the technology market fit, and all this. There are so many elements are not yet clarified fully that it's too early to speculate, not even internally. It's not a question of disclosure. It's a question of speculation, which is actually the potential at the end of the journey.
Could you scale the market opportunity?
Pardon?
Could you scale the market opportunities?
What do you mean with scale the market opportunity?
Because you said you're thinking about the market size and the market share, and this is all in motion at the moment, what is the market potential? Because we've seen so many market sizes across different verticals today, I was just wondering whether you could also scale the market size for Lumiphase.
No. It's just too early. That's also the reason why we are not going to talk about the future growth areas, and Lumiphase is an exception because of this shareholder situation. It's too early to speculate on the market potential there.
It's still in the risky phase.
Yeah. It's still in the risky phase.
On the shareholder situation, I mean.
With the shareholder situation, at the moment, we have 49%. We have two board seats out of six board seats. That means we have a real partnership together with the other shareholders and also with the founders, which is extremely important also as a kind of the foundation of the company to have the founders on board. At the moment, there is no discussions about going up to higher levels or going down to lower ones. It might happen in future, but again, it's too early at the moment to plan for the next two, three, four, five years. It's in too early phase to talk about that. All can happen.
I think I saw another hand.
I just wanted to ask about the 51%, but you gave some indications.
Okay, good.
One other major shareholder.
Yeah, a couple of questions on Connected Solutions and also a follow-up on Lumiphase if I may. For Connected Solutions, maybe are you already seeing some impacts from the Middle East war? Firstly, and then secondly, also on regulation, for me, it is quite clear that continuous monitoring is better than these flyovers, but is there a chance that these flyovers are good enough for the regulations? How much more expensive is it for Shell and TotalEnergies to deploy this continuous monitoring? Lastly, also if you were able to give an idea about margins, since it's like a bit of a different business? Given that it's sensing as a service. What kind of margin profile can we expect?
Yes, absolutely. Let's start with the question about the Middle East wars or current politics. We are actually currently in the phase of planning to start a pilot there to test our technologies in the Middle East. This seems to be progressing despite the difficult local situation. There are parts of the Middle East what they told us last week was at the moment, it's business as usual, at least in parts of the Middle East. Astonishing, but seems to be the case. There's obviously political uncertainty in the weeks or months to come. Hopefully, that stabilizes. Hard to judge. Question about margin. It's not a pure software service. It's an IT business model. It has margins that are high, on the higher side of the Sensirion product portfolio, I would say, because there is a strong service aspect there, which makes it attractive.
For us, it's not pure software because it's a combination of an IT product. Continuous monitoring versus flyovers. Commenting first on the regulatory drivers, most of the regulations allow continuous monitoring to be an alternative to periodic measurements. There are a few upcoming regulations that mandate very likely continuous monitoring, the ones in Canada and California. They will be attractive because their flyovers are just not a potential solution. Is continuous monitoring cheaper or more expensive than flyovers? That depends a bit on the type of assets you have. In many cases, if you have very complex assets, like a gas processing plant, you have one asset or two, and then you have to schedule a flyover. That's more expensive than continuous monitoring.
If you have 600 small production sites in the Permian, one flyover or four flyovers per year are typically less expensive than continuous monitoring. Also you lose a lot of information about your site because it's hard. If you actually want to reduce methane emissions, still the flyover does not help us. What we see what people are typically doing, and specifically also the operators where we have scale deployments, is they use the two technologies complementary. They equip most critical assets with continuous monitoring. In addition, they make a flyover inventory over their whole portfolio maybe once a year, maybe two times a year, to get a big picture of all their sites. At the moment, we see more complementary adoption.
Before we take more Zurich questions, let's also take some more questions online. Can you please elaborate on why Sensirion was not exposed to the auto downturn inventory correction?
This is based on the fact that we have a very broad diversification through players, different OEMs, Tier 1s, different regions, and also different stages of the product life cycle.
Thank you. Another question from the online audience. When do you expect to have more visibility on Lumiphase? Is it in two years or longer out? Can you say something about that?
I see it's so tough for you as investors to look into an additional option which is not included in our financial planning without having visibility. Unfortunately, I have to disappoint you once again. If I knew when we know more, I would already know more today, but I don't. No, really. Again, I think the only what you can take with you is we are trying together with Lumiphase to support the race on the next bandwidth in optical communications driven by AI. This can be huge. It can also be a failure at the end of the day. Because it's a kind of, like I named it before, it's a desert. It can be really huge in two years, in four years, in five years.
Nobody knows exactly because the timing, the market, and the technology fit is not yet proven, and therefore you can't talk about the timeline. It has also some risks intrinsically due to the fact that this is real innovation, and real innovation cannot be planned in a business plan. You have to believe in that, and you have to take some reasonable risks. This is exactly what we're doing without affecting the company. It's apart from all what we are doing internally and therefore also not included in our financial plannings, not now, but also not in our midterm guidance.
Back to the room here in Zurich.
I ask you for forgiveness, Marc, but I have one other question on Lumiphase please. It's very interesting, but it's also loss-making, so I wonder if you have an idea on the risk that they might need more capital again, and if so, would you participate and yeah, anything that you could share there.
Also, this at the moment is too early to say. Definitely, they will need some additional capital increase. Whether we are going to participate at which level or not is not discussed. It's not decided, so it's too early at the moment.
Again at the back.
The whole leak detection market makes me think a bit like could you at some point become active in markets that a company like INFICON is, for example? They are supplying semiconductor equipment market, for example, a big supplier to ASML. All semiconductors are done under vacuum. Am I completely off with seeing a certain connection that you also would have to measure gases there?
Also in Sweden. Yeah, there is opportunities for leakage. There is, for instance, many toxic gases used or etch gases, both in industry in general and in semiconductors example. There's others. There's also use cases, again, in the infrastructure, so also there you may have local. It's kind of a continuum also from the refrigeration leakage gas sensors to the, for instance, the device you see over there for the oil sites. Yes, there is potential, but it's one of the many fields we have not talked about, but it's just such.
I know, for example, INFICON checks whether a battery is not leaking when it's produced, so that's not a market you're currently looking at. You would be the continuous monitoring once a battery is in a car. That's where you're focusing.
Exactly. This is the high-volume market.
Okay.
Can you maybe talk about where you see the biggest differences in 2030 end market split compared to 2025? Which factors would you highlight? Where I'm really trying to get with this question is where would you see in absolute terms the strongest growth drivers that could change that mix in the years to come?
It's hard to say. There are some projections, internal projections about the market split and product splits in 2030. And these analysis actually turns out that they is more or less stable. So that means there is no fundamental shift either towards automotive or towards medical or towards industrial applications. And also this is reflected by this pretty broad range of different growth areas that will kick in. Definitely medical is always moving slower than probably the HVAC industry. This is by nature of these two types of industry. On the other hand, all the medical growth areas already farther progressed in their journey compared to some other growth areas. Therefore, our projections tells us that more or less the market split can be on more or less the same level as today.
That also informs your target of a stable margin, or are there any meaningful changes within the end markets that you would highlight?
No. I think already today we do have a pretty large range of gross margins across the solutions and the components. We expect to be more or less on the stable profile as today.
Thank you.
Also there I don't see fundamental changes.
Let's take some more online questions. Will the strong developments in the area of AI and with that also the acceleration of development of software code, will that support drive the sensor business?
I think so. On the one hand side, it gives us the better chance also to reach out to solutions. They are a combination of the core of our components and hardware, combined with software. I think one good example is Connected Solutions today. The core is hardware, sorry, but at the end of the day, there is a lot of software to be written, and this can actually be done easier in future or even today compared to probably five years ago. For us, on the one hand side, it's a facilitator AI to reach out to those areas. We are not the experts, this is the software we need in order to provide comprehensive solutions to our customers. On the other hand, hardware is not that easy to own for those potential competitors of us.
They are the experts in software, but they now have to reach out to hardware in order to provide comprehensive solutions to their customers. We have there a strategic advantage because we are the owner of hardware, and software gets easier. For the software companies, it's hard to gain the expertise in hardware. This is actually the way how I see the future. We will see. Probably in five years, we can look back and say, "Okay, it was right or it was wrong.
Next online question is a financial question. The ROIC has been presented and the question is, does the ROIC calculation include or exclude goodwill given that you report according to Swiss GAAP FER?
I would have to look into the details and we can follow up afterwards.
Thank you. I'm looking at the audience here and Stefan?
Do you see currently an impact from the war in the Middle East and kind of supply chain input costs?
No. At the moment, we don't see direct impacts. There are some concerns about the energy supply in Asia. At the moment, also supply chain is fully stable.
Yes.
One question on A3. I was just wondering, you mentioned that one of the driver is also regulation in the E.U., potentially in the U.S., potentially in China. Nevertheless, you forecast a very gradual ramp up of that business. Why is that? Could not a major regulation in the E.U. trigger much more faster adoption?
I can answer that maybe with the example of the EU precisely. So the regulations stipulate or mandate the introduction of, it's actually the exclusion of A2Ls over time frame between 2027 and 2030. So you start first with the heat pumps above a certain amount of refrigerant inside, and then you go to the next type of systems and so on. So already in the EU, this spreads over several years. If you have these several countries and transferable spreads, so that's why in the aggregate, we assume it will be somehow spread out. I wouldn't say that there could be a surprise that there's kind of a big thing somewhere, but that's all it's still in the generations.
Let's take another online question. Can you please elaborate on the risks from China competition being on the chip side, on the module side, or solution side?
Well, indeed, China is a challenge. China is also an option, an opportunity. I'd like to start first with the opportunities before we talk about challenge. Now, I think China is still today a very dynamic market. We are present. We like also to increase our presence, to serve our customers locally as much as we can. Also in A3, but also in a lot of these growth areas, we do have great partnership with Chinese customers. What it turns out, and this brings me also to challenges, is on the one hand side, also Chinese companies, they appreciate to have real sensor experts at their side and innovative companies. They don't mind to work together with non-Chinese companies. There are some exceptions. If there is, especially in automotive, there are some local OEMs, they don't like to work together with non-Chinese suppliers.
In general, whenever you can create value for these companies, and this is not that different to European and U.S. companies, by innovation, by support, by application and sensor expertise, they like definitely to work together. There is one challenge. We can also become better, and this is a statement I repeat again and again and again. They are extremely fast. We have also to, not we as Sensirion only, whole Europe and U.S., if we like to win in China, we have to be faster and in the iterations to serve the customers. That's also one of the reasons why we shift more support for Chinese customers to the Chinese region in order to match the expectations of our Chinese customers. In general, I see the challenges, but I see even more the opportunities for us in the Chinese market.
Another online question. Could the shortage of helium become a problem for Sensirion's production?
I can comment on that.
Okay.
Of course, we looked into that as well. We are aware of that, but at the moment, we don't see. We also don't consume so much helium on our side. If it's affecting eventually the whole industry, we don't know. On our side, no.
Good. Looking here at the audience.
Maybe another small one on market shares. If there are any market shares, 50%, 60%, 90%, it depends on segment. Speaking about the new segments you're moving in, what is the kind of minimum that you try to achieve, and what's the most likely in all these different growth areas you presented?
Simply spoken, our ambitions are 100%. No. It's highly depending on the fragmentation of the market. Some markets, it's easier to get very high market shares because the fragmentation is low, and you have just to win three or four big guys. In other markets, you have a huge long tail of even small customers you don't like to serve directly because they are too small.
At the end of the day, we always strive for market leadership, and that implies 30%-50% of market share is our target. Whether we are successful in reaching this level is still open, but this is at least our ambitions. Even then, we are not relaxing. Even with 50%, the good example is humidity, we like to expand it even more. At the end, I come back to my very simple answer at the beginning, 100% is the very end.
Just we have another question here on the left-hand side.
Regarding the transaction risk, lower than in the P&L, you're now investing here CHF 40 million, but you want to actually internationalize more the cost allocation, or the cost footprint. How do you do that? What do you have in mind there? I would have a second question on the balance sheet.
Yeah. Here we are committed for Stäfa as a main hub, also where we are, and the second clean room makes sense to have it also next to the other clean to benefit from synergies. Component manufacturing will be here and also like in the past, so of course, we need it for capacity purposes, but also for redundancy purposes as we have heard. Nevertheless, we have seen that we have customers internationally. We are serving them internationally, and with the growth, of course, we more and more serve them internationally. Also we have already now R&D, for example, in Canada, but also another place of the world. That's another part where definitely we can internationalize and then also all the other functions that we can grow into more of a networked organization.
No other large projects like you have the current.
Manufacturing side, Hungary is and will remain an important manufacturing site for that one. Of course, there we are going to invest in future ramp-up of products. We shift either from here to Hungary product lines, but also start new products directly in Hungary. That will be definitely a big and an important location for us for future manufacturing growth.
The second question on the balance sheet is in the financial slides. You mentioned that you wanted to decrease the cost of capital.
Yeah.
What did you have in mind?
Definitely the ambition also to that one, and that we have potential. Today is not the time to lay out the complete strategy there, but definitely the ambitions. For example, also this building here, we can also see how we finance that going forward.
I think the autonomy market in automotive is very interesting. You mentioned this mechatronics you can make reliable with your sensors. Isn't there maybe a chance to also scale that to different markets? In automotive, you have steer-by-wire, right? In airplanes, there's fly-by-wire. There's maybe other mission-critical things that I'm kind of thinking for myself. Why haven't people used that before in other applications, continuously measure for humidity damage to parts? Couldn't there be a market or other markets where you could apply the same principle and just convince customers, say, hey, look, there's this little tiny sensor you put in, and we can then kind of guarantee or measure better that it works all the time.
That's a perfect question, and I hope I put the answer with the humanoid robots there. We clearly focus on the high-volume markets, because the rest will follow. This is one of the bridges we will take looking into one of the next big manufacturing equipments, which will become autonomous. This is one of the adoptions from a clear automotive focus to a broader focus in the industrial revolution.
I'm talking not just on autonomy, just anything that is mission-critical. Couldn't that be a market as well? Is it too expensive?
No, we have this already.
This is already in place in different niches, but it's not that high volume already. We have this, for example, if you do a geo exploration with sonars and so on. You will have h umidity monitors inside these devices to make sure they will function rightly when the explosion happens to scatter the backscattering acoustic wave. This is one of the examples, but it's not high volume, but we have this proof of principle there to scale into the high volume applications.
I want to add there one. These are often a bit niche applications if you address them with a sensor component. If you forward integrate, they can become attractive. That's, for example, the case with Connected Solutions where we don't sell methane sensor, we don't sell a methane instrument, we sell the end-to-end solution, and then it's where we can capture the most of the value.
I'm not an engineer, so I don't know. There's a lot of properties for cloud, and so we're talking about predictive maintenance. I don't know how much of a problem for any type of machine, water or humidity potential is for breaking down. If it is a big issue, then maybe putting a sensor there could provide value. I don't know.
The answer is yes.
Good. Any more questions here from the audience in Stäfa? No, I also don't see any additional online questions. And with that I would like to hand over to Martin.
Quickly to me. Thank you all for participating today. I hope you take some things back what you heard. You also get that to not forget us in your home, that we just briefly touched on it in the presentation on HVAC. It integrates basically a lot of our sensors into one compact device, and it again iterates our playbook. We work with the customer. They know nothing about sensors. We work very closely to make that happen. Everything inside comes from us with our portfolio of sensors and supporting again on this megatrend. It was very difficult to get them. There is enough for today because they are always sold out at the moment. We had to pull some threads to get them even from Germany. That's maybe as a wrap-up message from my side.
With that, I think we can go over to the buffet and continue the discussions there. Thank you all for joining today.