Thank you for coming. Thank you for your attention, because I know there's lots of choice out there today, I really appreciate you coming to hear the story. Thermal Energy International is the profitable path to net zero, I say that for two reasons. Number one, we make our customers more profitable. We save them money and make them more profitable with a good return on investment. Number two, we're profitable, we have been profitable for the last three years in a row. That's why we are the profitable path to net zero.
Your standard forward-looking statement disclaimer. Thermal Energy International is the proven energy efficiency partner of major multinational companies, that's by design. Our customers are primarily very large multinational, every household names that you would know: Pepsi, Danone, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb. Primarily 80% of our business is food and beverage and pharma. We do every industry, but 80% is food and beverage and pharma.
We exist because we save our customers money by reducing their fuel use and also reducing their carbon emissions. They really do it because it's a good return on investment. In terms of investment highlights, energy efficiency is by far the fastest, cheapest, and easiest way to reduce our carbon emissions, it often gets forgotten. As a society, we're only about, believe it or not, 30% efficient. If we could just get to be 60% efficient, we would cut our carbon emissions in half right there t hat often gets ignored.
We have a variety of proprietary solutions with short, compelling paybacks for our customers. We have significant repeat business from our major multinationals, we have a track record of growth, both organic and through acquisitions. We've done about three acquisitions since I took over, most of those have been pretty small tuck-unders, almost all of our growth has been organic. Oh, I went the wrong way. There we go. When people think of energy efficiency, they often think electricity, that's natural because that's the easy stuff.
At a commercial building or a residential building, usually about 50% of the energy used is electricity, the other 50% is heat. Usually, if it's heat, it's natural gas. For our customers, it is also usually natural gas, but it could be biomass, it could be oil, that heat energy. In an industrial site, 90% of the energy they use is heat energy, like natural gas, only 10% is electricity. Our customers tell us they've already solved the issue on electricity, t hat part is easy. They can put some solar panels on the roof. Th ey can buy green electricity off the grid.
The thermal energy part is much more challenging, that's what they come to us for. On average, an industrial site is about 50% efficient. We, if they use all our technologies, can make them about 90% efficient. We can capture about 80% of the energy that's being lost, make them 90% efficient. For our customers, improving their thermal energy efficiency is, for them, the fastest, cheapest, and easiest way to reduce their carbon emissions if they have carbon emission reduction goals, m ost of our customers do.
How do we do that? As I said, we can recover up to 80% of the thermal energy lost at a typical industrial site with a strong, compelling payback for our customers. Usually, it's about a three to five year payback on a piece of equipment and a project that's going to literally last as long as that plant is in operation. The technology and the company's been around a long time. We've got sites that, projects that have been running for 20 years now and still running very effectively. How do we do that? Three ways.
The biggest part of our business is recovering waste heat. If they're inefficient, that's because they're losing heat somewhere. It could be a boiler exhaust, could be a dryer exhaust, could be an oven, but they're losing heat somewhere. We capture that heat, we upgrade it, and convert it into usable heat for them. The other way is we stop them from losing it in the first place. We have a technology called a steam trap, which avoids steam losses.
Overall, we're just improving their energy efficiency, either by capturing the heat or stopping them from losing it in the first place. We do have a suite of technologies that we can use. The first one, the company started with the FLU-ACE technology, and that's a low-grade heat capture. That extracts every last little bit of energy out of the heat stream. We had a project that we did years ago with Kellogg's in Memphis, Tennessee. We implemented it. We installed it. Usually, after we install it, we do a commissioning report.
We give them the report back to tell the customer it's working. We went to the customer. We said, "Great news. You're now 110% efficient." And they said, "What are you talking about? That can't be, y ou can't be 110% efficient." The day that we did the test, it was like it is today. It was like 105 degrees outside, and the exhaust temperature from our FLU-ACE was lower than the outside temperature. In theory, we were extracting energy from the outside air as well, but that's not normal t hat was an anomaly. That's the low-grade heat.
The HeatSponge is a higher grade heat. Often when it's coming out of the boiler, we put it through the HeatSponge first to have a higher grade heat. After that, we put it through the FLU-ACE to extract every last little bit of heat. The GEM is the steam trap. Industry still uses steam extensively and will forever because steam is a very efficient way to distribute heat throughout a facility because it's very light. The steam era, even though it started 200 years ago, it's not going away. Every steam system out there has a boiler.
It boils the water into steam, t he steam circulates throughout the facility to be used for process, to be used for heating, and as it circulates, it starts to condense back into water. You have to drain off that condensate, otherwise the condensate builds up. The system can start to plug up, and it can explode, p ressure can build. Every steam system out there Basically, since the steam era began, has something called a steam trap that allows the condensate to drain off while trapping the steam in the system.
All the other traditional steam traps out there are based on a valve that opens and closes. When the condensate accumulates, the valve opens, the condensate goes out, the valve closes again. A lot of different technologies, but one of the common one is a float valve, like the back of your toilet. The float rises, the valve opens, drains out. Now, the traditional steam traps are designed to fail open for the reason I explained earlier. If the condensate builds up, it can get dangerous, it can explode.
They're designed to fail open, and they fail at about 20% a year. They're failed open. It's just releasing live steam. When we go to a site and do a steam trap audit, often we've seen 20%, 30%, 40% of their traps have failed. Our GEM steam trap has no moving parts, and it has a 10-year no-fail guarantee, and it's also about 20% more efficient than the traditional traps. The Rainmaker is a hot water boiler technology, sort of like the FLU-ACE. The LawnRoc is wastewater.
You take hot water that's being exhausted, and you use it to heat water that's going down the drain, and you use it to heat water coming in. We've also got a direct-fired water heater, sort of like instant hot water. We've also got a direct-fired water heater that's also a FLU-ACE. When we've got waste heat, we use the waste heat, when we don't, we use the flame. All kinds of technologies that help our customers reduce their fuel use and reduce their carbon emissions.
Everything is site-specific, so everything is custom engineered to a certain degree for the customer. We deliver our projects either as a total turnkey system, which is about two-thirds of our revenue, or just as a piece of equipment to the customer. If it's a simple project they can install themselves, they'll just take the equipment. If it's a big, complicated project, we'll do it for them. The turnkey projects, we are sole source, right? We won't get involved in a project unless a customer is willing to give us a sole source.
We're not going to do the engineering if we don't know we've got the order. The way we do that is we understand what the typical customer, where a good customer, what a good customer looks like. We've done enough systems. The sales guy will go to them and ask them a few questions, and he'll come back and say, "Yeah, if we could save you CAD 1 million a year on your fuel bill and it costs you CAD 3 million, is that something you'd be interested in?" Of course, they say, "Yeah, three-year payback, that'd be great."
We say, "Okay, I tell you what, we'll get our engineers to come in and do a detailed analysis to deliver to you a fixed price with guaranteed savings. We're only going to do that if you sign a project development agreement with us. If we come back to you with this project, say CAD 1 million with CAD 3 million in savings, and we agree on what the criteria is up front, you have to do the project with us, and that's the only way we'll develop a project.
We come back to them and we show them that we've done it with fixed price, with guaranteed savings, and they almost always do the project with us. Sometimes it's one year or two years later when they can have room in their capital budget. The hit ratio on the project development agreements is usually pretty good once we've done them. I talked about the majority of our orders come from our top 10 customers, and our top 10 customers are all large multinationals, household names.
Like I said, Pepsi has been our top customer probably for 10 years in a row now, although Danone is our second-largest customer. We've done multimillions of CAD with Pepsi and Danone every year for probably the last 10 years. AstraZeneca is our number three customer, but that's only about five years old now. We did our first project in, o h, it's actually four years, in 2022, and we've done two more projects since. Recently, Bristol Myers Squibb has become number four, also it's customers like AB InBev, the world's largest brewer.
Cruise ships, we do a lot of cruise ships for Disney and for the large cruise ship companies. Michelin tires, we do a lot of tire companies. We do Philip Morris, the tobacco company. 80% of our business is food and beverage and pharma, t hat's our key market. Like I said, our top 10 customers represent, on average, it's about 70%, two-thirds of our revenues are our top 10 customers. We've sold maybe 100 sites to those customers. That sounds like a lot, these customers have about 1,000 sites worldwide.
Even with our customers that we've been working with forever, we're still just getting started. As Pepsi as an example, been working with them the longest, probably multimillion CAD every year. So far, we've partially done Frito-Lay in North America. We've done most of Gatorade. We haven't touched Pepsi Bottling, we haven't touched Quaker, we haven't done anything yet in Europe, still lots and lots of opportunity. With Danone, same thing. We've probably done CAD 10 million-CAD 15 million worth of Danone.
So far, that's been three sites, primarily infant formula. We haven't touched the rest of the business with Danone. Lots and lots of opportunity, even with our existing customers. The addressable market is massive. It's literally almost every industry globally. Right now, we're focused on North America and Europe. We have a sales team and engineers in Europe and North America a bout 50% of our revenue is North America, 50% is Europe.
We have engineering and some small production facilities and admin offices in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. This is what the last sort of four years look like. Granted, 2023, we were still feeling the effects of COVID, we're back stronger than ever. 92% growth over those last three years, the last couple of quarters have been very strong for us as well. The profitability you can see dipped because coming out of COVID, we had sort of CAD 2.7 million in EBITDA in 2024.
We decided at that time, okay, we want to ramp up. We hired a lot of staff. We hired a bunch of engineers. We hired a bunch of salespeople. We invested in a new site in the U.K. That was about CAD 1 million in additional growth expenditures, which hadn't converted to the bottom line yet. Well, they were hitting the bottom line, but they weren't adding to the top line. Our profitability dipped, but we're now ramping that back up. We're going to make the most. We have no more investments that we're planning to spend.
We're spending just to get the most out of the team, and we've got a long way to go. We're already starting to show the effects of those investments that we made a few years ago. Profitability is up pretty significantly. EBITDA is about CAD 2 million on a trailing 12-month basis. It's the same with net income, y ou can see we've had positive net income every year for the last three years. It's coming back strongly after we invested heavily in growth. The important thing to note is that we generate lots of cash.
When we have CAD 1.3 million in net income, we've got another CAD 1 million probably on top of that of free cash flow. What have we been using that for? We did an acquisition in 2008. That was about CAD 3 million or CAD 4 million in debt. We also had some COVID loans. We've repaid all of that with our own cash flow. Over the last four years, we've paid back CAD 4 million of all our debt. We now have CAD 4 million cash on the balance sheet and no debt.
That's all been done with our own cash flows. Like I said, we've gone from CAD 4 million and CAD 3 million in losses to CAD 30 million and CAD 2 million in profits without accessing the capital markets. We also buy back shares occasionally. This past year, we bought back about CAD 500,000 of shares, a normal course issuer bid. Like I said, when the company's running the way it is, it generates lots of cash. For the last 12 months, we'd have record order intake, about CAD 31 million in order intake.
Our revenue is usually trailing, but our revenue is always higher than the order intake for a given year because there are some orders we get in the year, and we convert to revenue right away. In fact, even though our order intake is at record levels, our order backlog is down slightly for two reasons, and I'll talk about one. One's a strategic reason where we're doing simpler projects that are quicker to turn over. Number two, as I mentioned, we hired a bunch of engineers a couple of years ago so we can execute projects much faster.
We're executing projects once we get the order faster than we used to. One of the ways we're doing that is an initiative we started just a year ago, is a streamlined turnkey project. Traditionally, our turnkey projects were very complicated. When we go to a site, we got to find out where are they losing the heat? Where's the waste heat? What's the heat source? Where can they use that heat? What's the heat sink? The projects are always limited by the heat sink. They usually always have more waste heat than they can use.
Those can be pretty complicated projects if you're using every last little bit of heat because you've got a heat source here and you might have four different heat sinks over there. The simpler projects is with the HeatSponge technology, which we acquired a few years ago, because it takes the heat coming out of the boiler and puts it right back into the boiler. Those are very simple projects to engineer and to implement. Traditionally, we have just sold that equipment.
We thought we could do turnkey projects very quickly and easily on the HeatSponge as well. We've done four turnkey projects with HeatSponge in the last year with two different customers. We're going from site to site with two different customers now. One is Danone, w e've done two or three sites with Danone. The other one is James Hardie, which is a building materials company. One of the reasons we're executing projects faster is this simplified project with the HeatSponge, which is a simplified installation, faster revenue generating.
The other reason is the extra engineers. In terms of what's next for us, our next stage of growth, as I said, a couple of years ago, we staffed up to be able to sell with the sales team and the engineers in both North America and Europe. We added a bunch of salespeople, primarily in Europe and a couple in North America. Like I said, now we have salespeople throughout.
We have four salespeople in the U.S. regionally, one in Canada, and we have one in the U.K., one in Italy, two in France, two in Germany, one in Poland. We've got Europe and North America covered. We just want to leverage that. What we realized is traditionally it's been turnkey. Big projects, big complicated projects, CAD 1 million plus. That's where we really add a lot of value. We realize we're maybe missing a part of the market where we can just sell the equipment, the simple projects. We don't want our sales team.
It's too expensive for them to focus on that. We want our sales team focused on the large project with strategic clients. That means we're missing a whole other sector of the market, which is smaller equipment sales and smaller companies. For that, we're going to establish a network of reps in both North America and Europe, manufacturer's reps. This is already fairly common for most companies when they're selling industrial equipment. As an example, you're going to have a manufacturer's rep that services the boiler room.
They provide the customer everything they need for the boiler room, where they could easily sell some small, simple projects, simple equipment that we sell as well. Just recently, we've hired a channel sales manager for Europe that's going to establish that network for Europe, and we hired a channel sales manager for North America that is going to establish that channel in North America. That's one thing. We also want to establish HeatSponge manufacturing.
We don't manufacture much of our equipment, but the HeatSponge is one thing that we manufacture ourselves. It's a little bit more complicated than the FLU-ACE. The FLU-ACE, we've already outsourced the manufacturing in Europe, but the HeatSponge hasn't been done yet in Europe. We're going to establish manufacturing of HeatSponge in Europe, not our own, but outsourced, so that we can sell HeatSponge as well in Europe. So far, HeatSponge has been almost all North America.
Then we're also going to develop and promote standardized equipment packages for that network, not only for our own reps, but for that network of reps. All these things are designed. We think we're hitting the mark pretty well on the large turnkey projects with our strategic customers, but we're just trying to simplify everything else to be able to sell more through the indirect channels and more simpler projects and equipment. That's to come. That's just starting.
That'll take a couple of years to implement that, but that's to come. We're pretty excited about it. Summary. As I explained, energy efficiency is the fastest, cheapest, and easiest way for our customers to, A, become more profitable and, B, lower their carbon emission. We can deliver high return on investment projects for our customers. We have significant repeat business. We don't have recurring revenue, unfortunately, but we have a lot of reoccurring revenue.
Like I said, Pepsi has been there every year for the last 10 or 12 years, and we've barely scratched the surface. We have a track record of profitable growth. Like I said, profitable for the last three years in a row with good profits and strong cash flow. Strong balance sheet ready to take on the next growth initiative. I think that is it. I would be more than happy to answer any questions that you have. Right up front, sir.
All right. What's the average size of the project and what's the average length of a project?
The turnkey projects, smallest turnkey projects are about CAD 1 million. The average is probably CAD 2 million- CAD 3 million. The biggest we've ever done is CAD 10 million. It's usually most are around the CAD 2 million mark. It takes about a year to sell them. The sales cycle is long because you've got to do the engineering, and then once you've done the engineering, you present them the project. If you present them the project in March and they set their capital budget in January, you've got to wait for the next capital year.
Usually it's one to two years to get to the order. Once we get the order, it's about a year to implement the whole project. The turnkey projects are revenued on a percent complete basis. We get deposits upfront. The turnkey projects are all from a cash flow standpoint and working capital, they're always cash flow positive. The equipment is much shorter sales cycle, usually 6-1 2 months and 6- 12 months in terms of turning it into revenue.
I'm thinking about it in terms of the backlog declining versus rapidly going sales. If the average is about a year, you're adding more engineers and you're doing a smaller project, that would justify. I guess the ultimate question is, would we expect your revenue growth to slow down a little bit given the backlog or are your dynamics different?
I wouldn't expect it to slow down, but I always tell everybody, for us, because it's big projects, because it's lumpy, don't look at the quarter, look at the trailing 12 months. That's what I do as management. Right now, the backlog is lower. Part of that is because we're executing projects. I think more importantly, it's the orders are still coming in. When we get an order, we convert 90% of it in 12 months and 100% of it in 24. Back here?
You mentioned the Heat Sponge. That's been in your product line for years.
Yep.
Now you're kind of advancing it and I understand that the indirect sales channel is for the Heat Sponge?
It's for the Heat Sponge and it's for the GEM steam trap. Heat Sponge was already sold. They already have an indirect sales channel, but only in the U.S. We want to establish a European Heat Sponge indirect sales channel, and we want to establish a North American GEM indirect channel. Yes. There's two things that we're growing with HeatSponge. Traditionally, we just sold it through the reps. Now, A, we want to do turnkey projects that are just HeatSponge. We've always done HeatSponge in turnkey projects, but it was usually with the FLU-ACE.
We want to do these simple turnkey HeatSponge projects, and we want to expand the rep network to Europe.
Is there something that makes the HeatSponge more timely now? You've had it for years. Why now?
Honestly, we probably should have thought of this earlier. We were doing a bunch of other things. We were growing the team. Our focus was growing the team for the last couple of years, especially in Europe. We could have done this earlier. Nothing has changed. When we bought the HeatSponge, we said, "Geez, Europe would be great because Europe doesn't have this technology." It took us a few years to get our act together. This right here?
Yeah. I know you guys are growing headcount to drive the equipment sales side of the business. Do you anticipate substantial margin pressure, like you faced about a couple of years ago from headcount growth? The second question I have is on capital. How capital-intensive are you?
Yeah. First question, we don't expect margin pressure. We actually expect margin expansion because even with the turnkey projects, we get the biggest margin when we're just selling the equipment. Because the turnkey, a smart customer can say, "Well, you're just running some pipe from here to there. I could get a quote from a contractor and do that," because we outsource all that. The install part has a lower margin.
The equipment has the higher margin. We think we'll get a better margin when we're just selling equipment. The second question was?
Just follow up on that. Yeah, I understand that the equipment side have high margin, in terms of building up that business line.
No.
You're hiring more folks, right? The neutral.
No, the headcount's not going up. We knew this. We hired five or six salespeople. They don't all work out. Salespeople are really hard to hire to find a success. We've gotten rid of a couple and we've added two more. The headcount is still flat, even though we've hired these channel managers in North America and Europe.
Yeah. The other question was on capital.
Oh, no, we're not capital intensive at all. Like I said, we don't work in capital from a turnkey project basis. We get deposits upfront and progress payments along the way, we need no working capital for turnkey. Equipment has a pretty high margin. We manufacture a very little bit, we don't have investment in working capital. We don't really have much investment in plant property and equipment t hat's why we have lots of free cash flow. Right at the back. Yeah. Why did it take so long to penetrate your very best customers? All of them.
Yeah, it's a good question because as me, I was a finance person when I got into this business and just loved it and thought you should be able to go from CAD 10 million to CAD 40 million to CAD 80 million. It doesn't work that way unfortunately.
PepsiCo's a big customer. You want to get in at the corporate level. You have to sell at the corporate level, and you have to sell at the site level. Despite what corporate says, if the site guy isn't in favor, he's not going to do it. Even with these big customers, the best you can hope for is a couple of projects every year, and you work with your corporate guys to say, "Okay, where are we going to do the next ones?" It's not like they do one site one year, and then they do 20 sites the next year.
This takes some time from their standpoint as well, identifying the site, getting the team on board. That's basically been the model for Pepsi, for AstraZeneca, for Danone. Yeah, r ight here.
Talk more about the competition.
I always get in trouble when I say we don't have competition because of course you have competition. Nobody's doing exactly what we do, but who's doing the next closest thing? All of our technology is proprietary, but there are people that have something similar to the FLU-ACE and something similar to the HeatSponge. Ours is better, but ours is also more expensive. That's our model. We want best in class, but that means we're more expensive. Where we don't have any competition yet that we've found is doing a turnkey project.
There's other people that sell equipment. They just sell the equipment, so the customer has to either hire a consultant and then hire a contractor.
We wrap all that up and say, "Look, you can do it yourself if you want, but we can do it all for you in a year with a fixed price and guaranteed savings." That's the compelling thing that our customers love about us. There's no risk from their standpoint. We're just going to execute project after project. Happy to talk to you after. Thanks so much, everybody