Overview of the business for our participants. Today's presentation is going to be led by Cody Slater, CEO, who's also joined by Robin Kooyman, CFO, and you also see Stefan Eftychiou with Bristol on the phone. We're going to break for questions at the end of the presentation. When we do break, we encourage those questions. As a reminder, we're only taking questions through the webinar portal. If you're listening over the telephone, please access the web link that we sent earlier to ask a question. You can submit a question using the portal at any time. I'll ask the questions on the air for everyone to hear, and management will then answer. I'm not going to reference any names, but simply read the questions asked.
As we have a very large audience today, if I can't get to your question online and in time before the call is over and it has not been addressed, I'll come back to you by email. I'm not going to read the forward-looking statements, but I do state they apply, and I referenced them on page two of this presentation. And I also wanted to let everybody know that for some reason our internet provider decided to go dark today, so I'm using this over my mobile. If for whatever reason I drop off, Stefan's going to manage the Q&A. With that said, once again, thank you for joining us. Remember, this is fairly informal, and we do encourage questions to help you better understand the business and its growth path. And now I'll turn the call over to Cody to start his part of the discussion and presentation.
Thanks very much, Glen, and welcome everybody. As Glen said, we're going to be talking about Blackline Safety today and really this context of driving the future of the industrial workforce, which is what Blackline's been doing for the last seven years and continuing through into the future. So Glen referenced our disclaimer. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that there's forward-looking statements here. So you can see the disclaimer two pages here of this. I don't know if we can flip through. It's very exciting, but getting on to the real purpose of today, talking about Blackline, and every company you listen to talks about things like their purpose and vision. And I think often they're really just words. For Blackline, I look at it very differently.
This really is what drives this business, that purpose to ensure every worker has the confidence to get the job done and return home safe. What we do is really very different in the context of industrial safety. For the first time, we're providing products and services that allow companies to see a worker in trouble or in a hazardous situation and to respond to it live and in real time. There are literally people who are alive today because the company they work for chose Blackline. So that purpose is truly part of the heart of the company and what really drives us. But because of that connected nature, every one of these devices is a connected device, sending data constantly all the time. That data allows people to better understand their workforce, their environment they're working in, process, efficiency.
It's that data that's going to allow us to transform enterprise workforce through that connected safety technology. And I mentioned those customers. We have over 2,250 customers around the globe. We protect over 165,000 workers today in over 75 countries. And when you think about that data that's going to allow us to work with these companies to make them more efficient, more effective, we have over 265 billion data points in our data lakes right now. Talked about this. This is the company's business model is a hardware-enabled SaaS. So everything starts with that hardware. There's different devices that then feed data into our portals and into our operating systems. And what's key really in this world, if you want to represent and want to support or protect an enterprise-style customer, is that you need a broad range of products and services.
What you see here in the black are a range of different devices, mostly gas detection, single gas devices, multi-gas devices, devices with pumps, work-alone devices. The big device you see there is what's called an area monitor for emergency response or for plant construction, those kinds of things. A broad range of devices and gases we can monitor, all feeding into those systems you see there, the different aspects of the portal, allowing you to do live monitoring of your personnel, of safety, but also all of that data of your operations and your sites as you go forward. Really what is, so when you look at that in a little more detail, that Blackline platform we call it, how this distinguishes ourselves from our competitors. The competitors, this is the core of our market is gas detection around the world.
There's a lot of good companies in this space. There's Industrial Scientific, there's Mine Safety Appliances, Crowcon. All make devices that tell the worker that they're in trouble. They'll beep and flash and let you know that the air you're breathing is in trouble. The difference that we bring, again, is that somebody else knows you're in trouble. You can take different reaction, different outcomes from that. We're both cellularly based and satellite-based, so we can work really anywhere around the world. All that data feeds into our Blackline Live platform, which allows companies to sort of see that operation on a daily basis, manage things, but also you start, once you have that connected world, you can start adding layers of services on, push-to-talk, voice call management, all kinds of things like that. All that steps up to our safety operations center.
This is our own operations center where we will respond live to an incident in the field. Customers can use our portal and do that themselves, and different customers take different approaches to this. But if they want, we'll actually be the ones who are calling 911 in North America or 999 in Europe and dispatching that emergency responder to that worker in trouble. And again, all that leads into this data and data analytics, and that's something that's becoming more and more of a driver of why these enterprise-style customers are buying our products versus those of the legacy competitors. So just taking that down a little bit into the real world. Some of us, most of you probably out there today haven't spent decades.
We've spent many decades in this world of gas detection, but one of the contexts of that is, as I mentioned before, we protect people who work in environments where the air they breathe can kill them, so it's a very legislated, regulated marketplace. Lots of competitors in the space that don't do what we do, that just have that base connected device. It's easy to think about the safety, but there's a lot of other aspects that it brings. With the context of being connected, every one of these gas detectors in the field, you're legislated to keep a maintenance record of how often they're tested, what's called bumping or calibrating, how often they're used, is a worker wearing them, are they turning them on. That's a huge manual process and a big expense. We do that for them through that data side, through that connectivity side.
So we actually reduce the cost of their operations, even though they're paying those service fees. Again, in a prior world, you had no visibility of your workers. Now you do. Layer upon layer here is just giving you a better visibility, better operation, and better safety, and that's what's really driving that customer adoption from Blackline's side. So that boils down to how the system works. You see, again, the products we talked about in the corner there, that connect, every single device we provide has a service plan attached to it. So you can't purchase one of our products without purchasing a service plan, but that Connect is how you do that. That starts at a base level, but moves up from there. It's how we do things like two-way voice.
It's how we do things like gas detection and response in that detect, respond allows us to get out there in the field or the customer to get out there, people out there in the field and respond to those emergencies. Prevent is where you're actually taking that data and you're allowing people to utilize the data to better understand their workforce and so prevent these accidents before they happen and improve is the drive to sort of use that data to make my company more efficient, more effective. How do I make a better steel mill? How do I make a better oil and gas operation? We're giving the people that information that they've never had before and what happens second by second with their workforce on site in areas that helps them go down that path.
All this sounds great, but there's a real world behind this, and we love to tell these real-world stories. This is an individual working in the oil and gas world was knocked down by hydrogen sulfide. H2S is something that's a core risk in that marketplace, in that environment, in that workplace. In this case, the worker's wearing a G7. The G7 sends an alert right through to the portal. We were able to actually find the local responder, dispatch that person on site, and reach Nick in time. The reality is, the way I like to look at this is not necessarily solely about Blackline, but if that company had chosen one of our competitors that's a disconnected product, Nick would not be going home to his family today. It's that powerful of a decision for these companies to make.
Speaking about companies, you touch on the oil and gas space. I mean, we are a Calgary-based Canadian company, and obviously we do safety devices. A lot of people think that means energy. Energy is a core market for us, and we provide safety and protection to some of the top names in energy really around the world. But it's far deeper than that. When you look at the vertical, when you look at the diversity from the different verticals we're in, in industrials, it's everything from utilities, water, wastewater. BAE is a company that makes nuclear submarines. FedEx, it's their people who work in aircraft entry tanks. FedEx runs the fourth largest fleet of aircraft in the United States. Again, all these people are that varieties across that whole board. Consumer goods, you don't really think about this, but places like Amazon, they're dealing with refrigeration.
Refrigeration uses ammonia, and an ammonia leak can kill you. So Amazon, every one of their facilities that has refrigeration uses our products to protect their personnel. And when you think about all these different verticals, the verticals are driven really by the product and the services. So fire and hazmat's an interesting one because we just really, a couple of years ago, brought out those area monitors. We've now brought out a version called the G7 area monitor for the EXO 8, which has more capabilities to deal with emergency response. And that's sort of what's driving us into that market. If you go back two years ago, I think we had three fire departments as customers. Now it's well over 100, excuse me, it's well over 200 fire departments that are customers today.
So it's really that, again, the ability to change the product, add features, add value, gets us into new markets, allows us to move that software services stack up, all driving that growth in the future. So when you look at that vertical space, again, mentioned energy is still one of our biggest markets, but an industrial fire and hazmat. Key here really, when you look at these logos, is 100% logo retention. We've never lost a customer in the field. Once customers adopt us, we do provide a better level of safety. We provide lots of integration with their systems, and it's a very sticky business model. So we talked about the vertical diversity. I think geographic is just as important. Again, Canadian-based company, Canada's a good market for us, but it's one of our smaller markets. The United States is our single biggest marketplace at 46%.
The rest of the world at 9% is our fastest, is going to be our fastest growing for the next year or two. Europe has right now been the fastest growing for the last year. All of these are core segments for the company. Again, mentioned we're in 75 countries around the globe, and key to this is not only our own people in those areas, but our channel partners, and you see those dots all over the world that are channel partners that help us support customers, help us sell into those markets, and again, you're going to see that grow as we go forward, so back to the basics here. The business model is a hardware-enabled SaaS model, so that means, again, we sell hardware devices, but every hardware device has a service layer attached to it.
The monthly service there is called your ARPU or your average revenue per unit. And really, this is a market we're creating. Again, the competing products don't have this, but you start with every device has this basic service plan, which allows me to do my compliance, see the people using devices, all those kinds of things. Then I move up to real-time alerts where I can see people in the field and respond to those alerts, do a voice communication, 24/7 monitoring, push-to-talk radios, data analytics. All of these are layered services that expand that ARPU on the device. And as we bring out new devices and new features, you just keep adding into that. So that's why we like to say the Blackline platform's an ARPU machine, because we can keep adding new value propositions to those customers. And the key is value.
If you look at that stat on the left-hand side, 127% net dollar retention, that says customers see value in what we do. Every time they re-up for service, they're opting for more service, more devices, protecting more of their people. So that's really a key when you're thinking about a service world, is that net dollar retention. And that's a world-class number at 127%. So when you look at that, delve into the business model. Again, we sell hardware. The hardware right now, we make about a 40% gross margin on it. If you go back two, three years ago, that was in the teens of a margin, but that's really reaching scale, manufacturing capabilities. It's in a good position now at about a 40% gross margin. But the services are really the key because that's that recurring element of the business. So we sell the hardware once.
We look at this as we call this a five-year life cycle. This is sort of an average of what we do with the G7. You sell the device for around $800, but that will generate around over $2,000, $2,200 worth of service over that five-year period. That service is generating a 77% gross margin right now. So you can see when you look at that right-hand side, the core of the contribution to the bottom line for Blackline is coming from that recurring service revenue. And I'll point out one thing here. We talk about a five-year life cycle. That's really because the hardware has a five-year lifespan. At the end of four or five years, it's getting pretty beat up. It's time to replace your hardware. But a customer life cycle is far, far longer.
I mentioned before, we've never lost a logo at this point in the company's history, and we really, if we're doing our business right and we're supporting our customers properly, replacing hardware just becomes something you do on a regular periodic basis. It's not a new decision as to changing provider. You're using those services and you want to stick with those services, so really, you could look at that as a 10-year, 15-year life cycle on that first sale, so really, to me, it's a really exciting business model. Again, we talked about an aspect where you're talking about somebody who's exposed to gas, but one portion of the business we don't always talk about a lot is just pure lone workers. These are people who work out of sight and sound of others for hours or sometimes the full day at a time.
This is an individual using one of our satellite-based products who on a quad had an accident or broke down on a quad, but you can have an accident. You can have a problem in the field before he'd had this happened and you were sitting there for an entire day before somebody even knows you're gone or could submit a rescue. We've had people who are lost because of that at the end of the day. I think I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Robin's concern about this is an area where there's grizzly bears. There's lots of things happen in these spaces. But in this case, Leo pulls his latch on his device and he says, "I'm in trouble." Through the satellite network, we know something's happening. Again, an emergency response is sent out right away.
These are all things where you look at these companies. The value proposition is so defined to them. It's so direct. And it's not something they're going to shift out of.
Perfect. Thanks, Cody. Blackline has a very large total addressable market and it's growing. On the left here, we have the multi-gas device market today. This is the number of devices currently in service. And Blackline has about 4% of that market we estimate. We are the pioneer and the industry leader for connected software as a service in this area. As we look forward to 2032, what we expect is actually the biggest part of the market is going to be in that connected safety area. That's the red half of the circle there.
That's where Blackline is really creating an addressable market and then positioning ourselves to be successful there. We expect over the coming years that we'll grow not only by taking market share, but also by dominating the additional addressable market that we're creating ourselves. Blackline's different from the competitors. I think Cody talked a lot about this already. We really believe that the difference is some of what makes us better. One of the things I'm going to pick here from the kind of capabilities chart to really highlight that is down near the bottom. It's that concept of customer success. This comes from the software world where there's teams focused on engaging the customers, making sure that they have all the training and tools they need to successfully use our products.
We built from the ground up a customer success team, and they deal with our larger customers. What that helps us do is not only make sure that our products are really sticky with our customers, but then as those customers, as Cody talked about already, come up for renewal, help put additional products with those customers that they see real value in. That's part of what's driving that net dollar retention at 120% or 127%. This is an example of an individual that was wearing a G7 on an industrial site, and they took a fall down a substantial set of stairs. The G7 has fall detection on it. We were triggered, and our safety operations center then tried to contact the individual. As you can see here, this individual essentially was woken up by us contacting them.
And so he comes to and says, "I think I fell and I'm okay." And Blackline was able to say, "Stay where you are. Don't move. Help is on the way." And this is a great example of the difference that we can make in a safety incident. We know exactly where they are from a GPS perspective. We know when they fell and we're able to get help en route as soon as possible. I'm going to jump into the financials now. Cody talked already about how our hardware-enabled SaaS business is driving revenue. And what I really want to illustrate here is that that hardware sales is then driving that service sales. And so you can see on a five-year basis that actually service revenue growth has outpaced that product revenue growth. And we've delivered 31 consecutive quarters now of year-over-year revenue growth.
ARR, or annual recurring revenue, is a great way to gauge the value that our customers see from our sticky, recurring, high-margin software revenue. And we've delivered 30% growth over the last four quarters on that front. Scaling the business or growing overall revenue for the business is also helping drive gross margin expansion. So what you can see on the top is our service gross margin. We've managed to deliver great expansion over the last eight quarters. And then the bottom line there is the product gross margin. And that has gone from 21% to over 40% over the last eight quarters. And so again, we are delivering substantial gross margin expansion in the business as we continue to scale. And at the same time, we're delivering very disciplined cost management.
And so, scaling the business, but as a percentage of revenue, decreasing operating expenses from 90% down to 63% over just eight quarters. And we're very much focused on this, and we'll be continuing to look at ways to really deliver KPI improvement in this area. This is a slide I'm incredibly proud to present. Achieving positive EBITDA is something that has been a goal for the company. And I'm delighted to say that for two quarters consecutively now, we have achieved that, CAD 2.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. We'll be looking to build on that in 2025. There will be quarterly gyrations, but we're excited about the outlook for 2025 for sure. What I want you to take away from this slide is just that every single one of those arrows is going up. We delivered higher product revenue. We delivered higher service revenue.
We increased our overall gross margin, and all of that then is supporting that growing annual recurring revenue, that sticky, high-margin service revenue, so the business performed very well in 2024, and finally, I'm going to finish with a case study from an EV battery factory, so I think a lot of us have probably heard about or seen photos of an electric vehicle lighting on fire, but obviously, an electric vehicle battery factory fire is something far and above that, and so in this case, the French Fire Brigade leveraged our area monitoring solution, the EXO, and it was placed around the perimeter of the factory to monitor the air quality, and they were able to use the data they gathered through that to determine that they didn't need to evacuate the 120,000 people living in the local community.
I believe there's an opportunity for every single fire department to have this type of technology available to them in order to protect the communities where they're serving.
Thanks, Robin. Just a couple of comments here around the leadership team. I mentioned before, my background is gas detection. It's a company called BW Technologies. You see the little logo there. BW was also a Calgary-based startup, became the single largest provider of gas detection in the world. It's now a Honeywell company for a number of years. You can see some of the strength in both the management and the C-suite and the board come from a background within BW.
But across the entire leadership team here, I'd really like to look at, in my world, I've been doing this for decades, never been with a better team from the C-suite level, backed up by an excellent, excellent board. But it's really the depth in Blackline that is, for me, something that's so unique. It's that C-suite level, the VP level, the director, the whole company is made up of people who are really trying to achieve something. I think that's part of what drives us down to that purpose that we were talking about before, about making sure workers have the confidence to get the job done and return home safe. Just touching on a few of the core numbers here. I mean, you can go through the deck and see all the different cases, but I pick out a couple of quick things.
We're very much an institutional held and a lot of insider holdings in the company as well, too. So very tightly held, long-term holders in the company. Superbly strong balance sheet, CAD 90 million in available liquidity at this point in time. Strong analyst coverage as well, too. We have a good series of analysts covering us, all with eyes on the company, all looking to see that future growth going forward. I'd really just like to sort of finish up here today with the presentation, talking a little bit about, you see that top-line comment there, leading provider of mission-critical hardware and software for the industrial workforce. One of the questions we always get with people is like, "Well, what about iPhones? What about this? What about that?" The areas we work in are called intrinsically safe environments. So these are heavy-duty industrial applications.
You can't take a commercial phone onto the site. We are the sole company really doing what we're talking about here, providing that mission-critical hardware connected to software for that industrial workforce, looking at both safety and about, again, efficiency, operations, communications, everything else like that. And that's really what's driving all the numbers you're seeing here. That $127 million in revenue, we started in this world really seven years ago, the gross profit being driven. Robin mentioned us moving into positive EBITDA. That recurring revenue, to me, is still a real key because that, again, talks about that software model. But that 127 net dollar retention, that really is talking about what customers see as value.
Every one of our customers adopts for either more devices or more services, which means we're doing a good job of providing something that actually gives them real value, which means we're going to be with them for years. These are really, it's a partnership relationship with these companies. It's a solid team. It's a solid business model, and it's driving forward. You see those charts on the right. We look forward to seeing those charts just keep going for year after year here. We've got a lot of market opportunity, and we've got a lot of scope to grow in. So looking forward to continuing to see the success for the next number of years. And with that, I think we'll bring the presentation to a close, and we'll open it up for questions.
Super. Thank you, Cody and Robin.
To our audience, remember, use the Q&A text box down at the bottom of your portal to ask a question. We do have quite a few questions in the queue already, but this one seems to have been asked a few different ways, a few different times. So I'll just start with this one. Given your Canadian headquarters and the significant U.S. market presence, how could potential tariffs on your Canadian exports to the U.S. impact your cost structure, your pricing strategy, and your overall profitability? Are there contingency plans in place to mitigate potential cost increases?
Thanks, Glen. If I was a betting man, I could have pretty much bet this was going to be the very first question we got. Pretty clearly, this is a topic of hot concern today in the world. First, what I'd like to say with Blackline is we control our own destiny.
We manufacture our own products. We do manufacture in Calgary, but we're already in the process of an expansion of our manufacturing just simply because of our growth, looking at adding on what's called a new surface mount line, a new assembly, and new manufacturing. So as we look and see, as clarity comes with what those tariffs wind up being and how all this works, do we look at moving some of that manufacturing or that expansion of our manufacturing into the United States and then become a U.S. manufacturer at that point? Jury's out as to where we'll really wind up there, but entirely it's up to, it's in our control to decide how that works, and we'll do that on the basis of what's best for the company and what's best for the customer base at the end of the day.
So really no long-term impact from profitability or market access at all from Blackline's standpoint.
Okay. Thank you. How difficult would it be for Honeywell, MSA, or ISC to catch up to your products or services?
One of the points we try to make here is this breadth of product. Honeywell, ISC, MSA all manufacture a whole broad range of product, but they've got to take all that product up to be connected. Then they've got to build the portals. They've got to build all the systems behind it. To Robin's point, when she talked about things like customer care, etc., it's really a different business model. So for them, I think the bigger challenge, as big a challenge, is I can't sell through my same sales channels.
That's a very different sales channel, just selling a piece of hardware that's similar to everybody else's to selling a much more technical product with service attached where I'm dealing with data privacy, all kinds of other different aspects, etc. So it's a big lift is what it comes down to. Those are big companies. Could they do it? Yes. But at this stage, it becomes very, very hard. They're so far behind. We have such a large install base. If a company is looking at saying, "We're going to go down that path of wanting a connected product," you want to go down with the leader, and in this context, Blackline really is the leader. We've had one competitor in Mine Safety Appliances bring out a connected product. It's what they call the io4.
But it competes a little bit in that bottom end of the market where we talk about that compliance space, but they don't actually have things like two-way voice. They can't win those enterprise-style customers without the breadth of product. So it's always something we're aware of. These are good companies. But from our standpoint, the risk was really three years ago when we were small and had no penetration in all these different verticals. Today, the risk is much, much smaller.
Okay. Thank you. What portion of your sales are replacing an existing solution versus a first-time adoption of a safety unit?
Yeah. Interesting question. I'll separate a little bit into the two marketplaces. So the core of our business is gas detection. So 90% of our business is gas detection. Maybe 10 or 12 is that work-alone space where there's no gas detection involved.
In the gas detection space, it's basically 100% that we're replacing. What we do find is that once the customer adopts us, they expand their gas detection coverage of their workforce just because of those added values, say things like the two-way voice, other things like that, mean I'm protecting more of my workforce. But we're starting off always in the gas detection with replacing one of those incumbents. In the work-alone, the incumbent is really a call-in system where I say, "I'll ask my workers to call in so many times a day," or at the end of the day, it's really a box-checking exercise. It doesn't really provide any safety. So in those markets, it's all greenfield. It's all new customers. It's new adoption that base.
And then I'll just add to that.
Part of what I was talking about in terms of the addressable market and how we are essentially creating an addressable market is that when we sell a piece of hardware, whether it's net new for a customer or replacement of something that's already out there, that service element that we're selling, that's unique to Blackline. And so that is kind of a net new offering that we're giving that customer to help provide that top level of safety for their customers.
Thank you. Can you comment on what your current customer churn is, both voluntary and involuntary?
Really, churn for us is just maybe 2-3% would be a churn number. And the churn happens from sometimes it's very small companies that either get acquired, go out of business. Mostly, it's workforce reduction.
So we will see sometimes a reduction in customers' use count solely because they've reduced their workforce at the end of the day. But as far as what people really think of as churn is companies stopping using our product and shifting to use another product, we don't have that.
Okay. Thank you. I think you answered part of this question with the very first one regarding tariffs, but I'll ask it entirely, and then you could add on it if you feel appropriate. What is the CapEx outlook in Canadian dollars for 2025 and updated thoughts on U.S. manufacturing expansion?
So 2025, the core, I mean, from the standpoint of Blackline, our CapEx is pretty nominal in a normal basis. This year, we are talking about an expansion of, as I mentioned, our surface mount lines in the production facilities.
You're talking about a sub-$5 million spend and something like that. And that would include looking for that, the real core costs of that are the equipment, whether we locate that equipment in the United States or in Canada. It's a pretty similar base at the end of the day.
Okay. Thank you. Is there a meaningful difference in the average revenue per user by customer, vertical or geography?
That's a good question. I'd say the companies that are on plant site, it's a better way to answer that would be it's a bit more which of those stack of services companies like or want. If you look at something like, say, our safety operations center, firstly, that is something we offer only in the North American environment.
In Europe, we offer it through third parties, and that's not. We don't get quite the same level of adoption, but as an example, if I'm talking about a refinery where I have on-site emergency responders, they won't adopt our safety operations center because they'll use their own people to dispatch, so it's really a bit more of a fit and function kind of thing, so I'd say across the board, we wind up getting most companies. We get very few companies except just that very base level. Most companies will take a series of those different upper stacks and wind up being in a relatively similar view.
Okay. Thank you, and same theme, but different individual asking the question, is the service ARPU for the area monitor different than for the area?
What is the product ARPU for an area monitor, and what is the service ARPU for it?
Yeah, that's a good question. It's a very different kind of a product. We don't actually publish ARPU stats from a competitive standpoint, but the hardware devices themselves, if you look at it, the mentioned G7 sells maybe an average is around $800. Those EXO products might carry a similar amount of service when you looked at that service run rate of those devices, but they sell for $6,000-$8,000. It's far more hardware-heavy, the area monitor product, but the hardware also carries a much higher margin on it. It's a much higher margin piece of hardware at the end of the day. What we do find with the area monitors is the area monitors are part of a system.
So usually what you're finding is customers are buying them as part of a package where they're also deploying portable devices for the workforce at the same time. So think about it more as an enabler to get onto the site when I'm talking before about being able to do everything for that customer so that they can see all their equipment, all their operations in one portal.
Thank you. I'm assuming that data is a very low revenue number, but still, what kind of potential do you see there coming in from data in future years?
Yeah. Today, data is not. I mean, we have a series of different data reports that come with the devices. We have a series of custom ones that we also sell as well. I would think a bit more today is a customer acquisition value.
Customers, because of that data, take our systems and look at the whole service stack. In the future, as we get more sophisticated with manipulating and value propositioning that data, I think it will be a big driver of a future revenue base. Think about knowledge of efficiencies on a steel mill, and you can look at 20 different steel mills around the world, and you can start to understand why one is maybe better than the other one and then start to market and proposition that data. To be clear, that's a longer-term goal for us over the next couple of years. Everybody talks about AI today. The point I'd make with AI is any AI system is only as good as the data on which it's trained.
If you think about that industrial workforce environment where you're talking about visibility of low levels of gas, of heat, of temperature, of workforce placement, we're the only company in the world that has that kind of data at that granularity. If you're going to be training those kinds of things, it's going to be with this data.
Thank you. You just answered one of the questions. One second. Can you speak to the typical duration of the sales cycle? What proportion of your new wins come in from direct sales versus channel partners?
Sales cycles really the thing I think that's interesting about sales cycles. If you go back to when we first launched these products, all of this, every adopter we had in every vertical was the first adopter of a connected safety solution in that vertical.
So you were talking about a one-year, two-year sales cycle of trials, of work, of going through all the different business change process within those companies. Today, it's probably more like a three- to nine-month sales cycle, depending on the scale and depending on the particular environment and particular customer base. So the velocity of that sale has picked up quite significantly. And I think that's something you're going to see continue as this becomes the standard in the industry, as people understand, as each industry decides connected is the standard. We've seen that in things like the water wastewater industry in the U.K. There's 12 of these different organizations that manage water and wastewater in the U.K. In the last four or five years, there's been seven companies who've gone to RFP to replace their gas detection fleet.
We've won every single one of those at this point in time. We look forward to winning the remainder of them over the next few years. And again, when you talk about sales cycle, the first one probably was a two-year sales cycle. The last ones have just been almost they're going to buy our product. They want this system. We're the only ones that can provide it.
How big is your revenue associated with non-portable devices, i.e., area devices? And how fast is that growing? And is the competition there different? Yeah. So the area monitor bounces up and down a little bit quarter to quarter, but think about something in the range of like 15 to the hardware side, about 15%, maybe 20% some quarters, a little bit up and down. And that really, we don't see that varying dramatically going forward.
We do see with the area monitor, with the launch of the EXO-8, we are now expanding into more markets. I mentioned talking a little bit about Fire and Hazmat, but we're also bringing out a gamma detection or a radiation version of that device, which is another new market. So there'll be sort of market expansion on that area side. But at the same time, we're seeing the volume of the G7 units increase as well too. So I don't see those ratios changing to a great degree. When you talk about competition in that space, again, there's a lot of area monitors out there. It's interesting in that space. We compete on a number of different aspects. The biggest thing, of course, is that connectivity. Again, ours are drop and go.
That's why you look at something like Robin mentioned, the French Fire Brigade using our devices around an emergency response. If your devices aren't cloud-based, you can't really do that. You can't set up all these different devices and have people staring at them. So that connectivity is still the core differentiator. But when you get into the product itself, the other big thing on area monitors is what are called other applications, plant turnarounds or construction sites. And these are ones where one of the key elements is battery life. We have a 100-day battery life on that device. Our typical competitors is 7-10 days. So every aspect of the product is better than the competition in that space.
Thank you. When you connect with dispatch services, are you directly contacting first responders, or does the call go through to the company's internal safety team first?
If first responders are contacted, how do you ensure that they can respond quickly, especially in remote or hard-to-access locations like mines?
So when you're talking about the Safety Operations Center, we do a bit of both in some respects. With some customers, we're dealing with their emergency response teams that we're contacting. There'll be a protocol set up for every customer. So that protocol says, in this case, do the following things. When we're dealing with a dispatch of emergency response, whether it be 911, we're part of that call the whole way through. So it's not like we just hand it off and then walk away. We stay in contact. We're staying in. We're tracking that. We're managing that all the way through.
So we're able to see that from beginning to fruition and make sure we're delivering that best response possible.
Okay. Thank you. What would you say are the biggest bottlenecks to you taking more market share?
Bottlenecks, I think it's the biggest thing for us we view is there is a time scale to all of this. Companies, as we mentioned with the gas detection fleet, you're replacing it every maybe four or five years. That means the companies that just bought last year or the year before, they're not even up for a new sales cycle for a reasonable period of time. So just the natural cadence of the market is one of the biggest things in looking at gaining market share.
Presence throughout the world, we've been really focused on building that over the last number of years, putting people on the ground in the right locations in the right places. I think most of the real roadblocks are gone. A few years back, you could say we didn't really, we had nobody in the Middle East and much of Europe, etc. Now, that's changed. The depth of our channel partnership has changed. The depth of our product mix has changed, but there's still inertia. These are big industrial companies. It takes time for them to make change, so nothing happens overnight, and I'd say still one of the biggest things is just the natural cycle of the industry we're in itself.
Thank you. Can you talk a little bit, and I know you already touched on this, Cody, but I guess expand on it.
Where your devices are manufactured and the, I guess, composition of your supply chain?
Sure. So our products are manufactured here in Calgary. And when we say manufactured, that is when you think about electronics products, the very base level is what's called surface mount. So that's when I have a printed circuit board, and I'm putting all the tiny little components on it with machines that can place tens of thousands of these things an hour. That's done here at our facility in Calgary. The core components going into these are primarily on the electronic side. They're almost all US-supplied components. In the context of the sensors, the chemical sensors, they're mostly European-based companies. Those are the best in class. So it varies a little bit. But really, primary input costs would be that the operation is here within Canada. The materials are primarily US-based.
And then some of the specialty elements, we really buy those from where you can find them the best in the world.
Okay. Thank you. If you do go into an RFP process and lose it to a legacy player or, I guess, a more modern competitor, what are the typical reasons why?
The biggest reason, and we're not losing to what you're terming a more modern competitor. We don't have someone that competes in the context that we do. So if we're losing it, I think we're losing it primarily because of that customer. Often, it's really the case that when you're looking at a purchasing decision, I've not made the wrong decision if I bought the same thing the person before me did. That's the easiest cadence to do is I keep just buying.
If I was a customer of a particular gas detection company before, I'm buying the same. I think that inertia is something you have to overcome. So are we getting to talk to the right touch points? The other question is, are we talking to the right customer? There are customers that are really interested solely in the absolute base minimum of what they can do on those safety programs. And those really aren't our customers. We want the customers that want that additional value and, in fact, want to move up that stack of value base. So it's a mix of cases. Every one that we lose, we look at, and we go through to understand where we can do better the next time. But when we reach that point of RFP, you're talking about conversion rates in the 80% range.
Super. Thank you.
You may have answered this part of this question, but I was looking at some other questions in the queue. If you didn't, how does pricing compare to your competitors in that process?
Yeah. Good question. If you think about the hardware pricing, we tend to be very similar to our competitors in the hardware world. There's companies that are more expensive than us, and there's companies that are less expensive to us when I'm talking about buying, call it a four-gas gas detector. The services, though, are really unique. You have to look at that really differently. A company is spending more money with us than they are with one of our competitors, absolutely for sure. There's a lot of internal costs that we're removing from them.
I've mentioned that compliance cost where I'm having to manually or have my own internal structure to determine are people using these devices, are they maintaining them. So there's costs that I'm saving the company, but they're paying that fee to us in that service space, and then there's new value propositions. Like when you talk about being a push-to-talk radio working like a walkie-talkie, that's just something totally new, so companies are spending more with us than they are with our competitor, for sure.
Bless you, Robin. Aside from tariffs, what are some of the key factors you're considering with respect to where to expand manufacturing?
Yeah. It's really about customer service. How are we best to serve our customer base? And I think as you look at this naturally way down the path, from the manufacturing standpoint, one facility, easier quality control, easier overall management of purchasing materials.
But if you look at the future at a point of saying, well, maybe there's a manufacturing facility in the U.S., maybe there's one in Europe. And that's really because of just the ability to support those local customers to a greater degree, I think, is going to be the drivers in those aspects.
Okay. Thank you. A few questions around this topic, which is M&A. So maybe if you could outline your current M&A strategy, opportunities that you may see for Blackline. And if you were to get involved in M&A, what sort of products or services might make sense for you to do a tuck-in acquisition?
So right at the top level, I'd say we look at this all the time. And I think the reality is, Robin mentioned this, we have 31 quarters of year-over-year growth. We've been averaging 30% for the last few years.
Really, we feel the best place to put our capital is internally. If we can speed up that internal growth, it's better margins, it's better market protection, it's better moat against our competition. For sure, we'll keep an eye out whether there'd be acquisition opportunities in the future. I will say if there are, it's going to be in the software side, in the services and software side, not in the hardware side. We do a better job of hardware than anybody. And so there's no real value to look down that path. Maybe some small acquisitions in that service side. But the core thing would be to think about, as a company, investing internally is really where we want to be.
Okay. Thank you. You recently completed an equity deal. I guess this question's been posed several different ways. So number one, what was the strategy behind it?
And number two, how do you see the use of funds from that? And I guess the third is, how do you view your current cash and need for any additional financing?
Sure. I'm happy to take that. So we're really excited about the strategic investor that we've brought into the.
Robin, I think you're sort of breaking up a little bit. Is that any better?
I think it's at your end, Glen.
Cody, I think. Oh, it's on my end. Okay. Then you keep going, and I'll just.
Okay. So we're excited about the investor that we've brought to Blackline. So their strategic investor, we were very impressed by the level of diligence that they had done on the business before ever having a conversation with us. And we believe that they offer substantial experience on the technology side of things.
Additionally, that strategic financing was supported by our largest shareholder as well. So we're excited to have that vote of confidence as well. As we look to 2025 and use of proceeds, what we'll be doing there is continuing exactly what we said we would. So we'll be scaling the business. We will be investing in that surface mount line. We will be accelerating the timing of the purchase of that equipment. And that will give us good flexibility as we continue to work through what the different scenarios of how 2025 and beyond can play out to best position Blackline for continued success. And then we'll also look at the balance sheet. The way I think about it is we have three different ways of continuing to grow the business. The first is that cash and short-term investments. The second is our senior secured operating facility.
The third is that lease securitization facility that we have. We're focused on having good access to capital at competitive rates that's flexible to help us grow the business. The strategic financing really just continues to complement the strategy that we set out on a long time ago.
Super. Thank you. I'm assuming you guys could hear me. I took my video off to have a better audio there. Next question. Why can't a deep-pocketed competitor, example, Honeywell, replicate your infrastructure setup and offer a similar set of capabilities to preserve their installed base?
There's no question that I don't think any company that says nobody can compete with us is just wrong at the end of the day. So our competitors certainly could. The question is, is it to their benefit? Right now, if you think about it, they're hardware manufacturers selling through those channels.
This is all new, so I don't want to underestimate the tech stack you need to do to get to where we're at. You think about even people think about everybody being connected. Everything is, so it must be easy. AWS is an example. I think we currently use 176 AWS services to make our systems function and work. There's a lot of investment they're going to have to do. There's a change in how their sales channels work they're going to have to invest in. They're going to have to build all the systems we've talked about. And at the same time, they're going to their current world where they're just selling this hardware, they make a much higher margin on the hardware. One of the points, one of the questions earlier, it's a good one, is what's the price point differential?
Again, I said we price our hardware pretty much the same. The reason we make a 40% gross margin and our competitors make 55% or more is because we have a cell modem in our device. We have microphones. There's a lot more tech in our device, and that costs money. So when you're looking at it as a Honeywell or an Industrial Scientific, etc., you're going to say, "I'm going to lose margin on my hardware, and over the long term, I'll gain it on the software." It's really a question each company is going to have to answer as to if they go down that path and when. We've been doing this now for we launched the G7 really seven years ago. We've seen one competitor launch a product that has a portion of the service stack we have, but it really is just a portion.
It's a big market as well, too. One thing I'd be really clear on is if two, three years down the line, one of our competitors builds a similar safety stack of products, we're still going to be the product of choice. Because if I'm in this industrial world, one of the things you are is very risk-averse. And if you're talking about a company that has. Look at it today, it's 165,000, but look a couple of years from now, it's 250,000-500,000 devices in the field with 1 trillion data points that have been doing this for 10 years. Or the new guy on the block, it doesn't matter if they've been making gas detection for 20 years. I'm not going to choose the new guy on the block.
Okay. Thank you.
Can you just provide a little bit more color on the current makeup of your sales organization, both by region, how they focus on business development, customer retention, and then, I guess, the geography of your sales force?
Yeah. That's a great way to phrase all that because all those are part of the element. We have a business development team that looks at the higher level. So they're looking at really that enterprise level almost down, and they're more talking about the software and the services. We have a customer success team. We have an onboarding team that helps onboard the customers, then a customer success team that actually is working with them. And we can see the usage every day. We can see their access to the portal. We can see everything.
And so that's part of that team's approach to making sure that we're keeping those customers happy and we're seeing that net dollar retention increase. The core of the hardware sales come from our regional sales manager networks. And so those are RSMs that work directly for Blackline that are in all the different geographies we talked about across North America, Europe, Middle East, and different areas throughout the world. And then those are all supported by our channel partners at the end of the day. So it's a very thought-out complex structure that really is there to make sure that we're supporting that customer decision from one end to the other.
Okay. Thank you. What is the duration of your average software service contract? Does this vary by customer type?
It varies by geography, really, more than anything. North American customers, primarily, they're one-year customers.
So they'll sign up for a one-year service contract. We also sell our products through a leasing element. So the leases are a four-year contract. So that is a bundle of hardware and services. So that's a four-year contract. Our European customers, it's just a different mindset there. They tend to be three- to five-year service contracts in the European space. Probably average in Europe would be three years, and average in North America would be one year.
Thank you. Do you use direct sales everywhere, or do you ever use third parties for some of your sales strategy? Could partnerships in certain geographies help you grow even faster?
So primarily, I mean, it's a combination for us. It's always a combination, though, of direct and that channel partner base. And primarily, it's because the channel partners aren't out there right now who sell our kind of product.
So, who can talk about data security to your IT department? Who can talk about the you need that individual who has the better understanding of the entire value prop and the different questions or challenges that make it up from a customer standpoint. Longer term, we see some of that moving into being more and more distribution-based, where the distributor can handle the entire sales channel, and then there are certain channel verticals, like when we talk about things like radiation or other things like that, where we will look, maybe, at certain partners who could help us get into those verticals that we're not in right now, so a bit of a mixed bag depending on the area of that particular market vertical you're looking at.
Super, and I'm just doing a time check here, Cody.
I see we still have a number of questions in the queue, but I do believe you've addressed most of them, and there's a lot of overlap. So if I haven't gotten to your question to our audience, I'll make sure to come back to you by email. Cody, I'll ask you this last question here, and then maybe you guys can give some closing remarks. So when you talk of the opportunity for years, is there any vertical or geographic area that stands out for your team?
Really, when I look at the future here, it's across the board. I mean, what you're seeing in our success in the United States over the last while is you're seeing the success where the investments first went into the United States and to Europe and then into that rest of the world. All of those are going to keep driving forward.
I would say when you look at it as an individual space, later, over the next year or two, you're going to see a lot of growth in that rest of world segment, as we call it. It's very small right now, though. So it doesn't reflect that there's less opportunity in the other markets. It's just that that's where we are in that space. So I look forward to all of these different ends. I think the verticals are sort of more interesting. There's more interesting opportunities in some of those different verticals as we bring out new feature set and new gases like the gamma going into radiation. The other thing that's underlying all this, though, is that ability to add new services.
And I think that's going to be the real exciting story for the next few years as you see us evolve our product to be able to surface more value to the customer in the field. And that'll start moving that RPU up as we bring on more and more feature add.
Super. If you want to leave any closing remarks, happy to have them. If not, we'll end the call.
Yeah. I just want to thank everyone for their attention today. And this is Blackline is something that I believe is really we are pretty unique in our world. And it's an exciting time for the company. We've reached this point of really of scale and maturity where the company is shifting into EBITDA. This is no longer a question about does the market like what we do. It's obvious the market likes what we do.
And it's really how we handle that going into the future to make sure that those curves, those lines that Rob has just put back up on the screen here, just keep going forward for year after year from now on.
Super. Thanks, Cody. Thanks, Robin. Thank you to our audience. This concludes the presentation.
Thank you.
Thank you.