We're not concerned.
Yeah, you can start hearing a bit.
Good morning, everyone. We are going to get started here. Our next presenter is Mr. Jan Loeb with Acorn Energy. Enjoy.
Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining the Acorn presentation. My name is Jan Loeb. I'm the CEO of Acorn Energy and the CEO of its only operating subsidiary, OmniMetrix. Today, I also have in front of me Tracy Clifford, who is the CFO of Acorn Energy and the COO of OmniMetrix, and Bill Jones, who is our investor relations outside investor relations expert with Catalyst IR. I've known and worked with Tracy and Bill for over 20 years, so we know each other very well. For some odd reason, they still like to work with me. Just to give you a one-minute background about myself, I'm a Wall Street guy. I started in 1980 as a library grunt boy at Grunt Oil and Company looking up old stock certificates.
I went to Ella Frost, Charlotte Thunderbird, Tobin, Legg Mason, Washington, Perella, Jefferies, all as a special situations analyst. Then Eliot Spitzer kind of changed the program for analysts, and I joined Chesapeake Partners and then started my own fund, which I ran for 10 years up until 2015. That's when we made an investment in Acorn Energy, which was basically a bankrupt company at the time, and cleaned it up and brought OmniMetrix to where it is today. I would say my greatest epic failure in my career so far has been my inability to convince Dan Loeb that I'm his long-lost brother. Okay, so OmniMetrix is our subsidiary. Acorn Energy is the holding company. What OmniMetrix does is we have two lines of business.
Really, one is 90% of our business and the other is 10%. Ninety percent is power generation, what we call PG, where we monitor generators. Predominantly, we have also pump jacks, air compressors. We sell enunciators. That is our main part of our business. The second part of our business, which is approximately 10% of our business, is we sell a monitor for rectifiers. A rectifier is a product that goes on gas pipelines, bless you, and controls the current on every gas pipeline to prevent corrosion. We monitor the rectifiers. OmniMetrix sells a product, and then we also monitor that product, which is really the key to our business, the monitoring part of our business. Yes, we make money on the hardware, but monitoring is really what is key to our business. What we do is we sell our products mainly to dealers.
That's how the business started. We actually, not me, but prior management founded OmniMetrix, sold it to Acorn. The founder of OmniMetrix, Harold Jarrod, founded this industry. Meaning the monitoring of generators, he founded. We used to make all the generators, every generator monitor. Every generator monitor that Generac used to put on their machines was made by us until they decided to make it themselves and become our biggest competitor. We are the largest independent monitoring company that's out there, and we have hands down the best product. Not that I'm the person saying that, but that's what the industry says. We have the best product in the marketplace. I would say that hands down every dealer of every generator dealer in America would rather have our product than anybody else's product for two basic reasons. Number one is our product is agnostic.
We can go on whether you have a Generac, Kohler, Cummins, Briggs & Stratton, our monitors can go on anybody's product. Number one. Number two is that there's a tension between the dealer and the OEM as to who owns the customer. The dealer feels he's the guy who sold the generator. He services the generator. He's the guy that owns the customer. The OEM wants the customer because the OEM, it's a Generac, for example, generator that they own. They want to sell them parts. Therefore, there's a tension between the two. We only service dealers. We don't care about who the end customer is. We don't sell to an end customer on the residential side. We also on the commercial side, which is really today where a significant amount of the growth is.
We will talk about that after we look at this little chart. That is our recent stock price. That is our range. As you can see, we have a clean balance sheet. We have cash. We have no debt. We are, in my opinion, and maybe many others, hopefully after today, significantly undervalued. I draw your attention to the last line, OSSIF, which is a company that maybe some of you know about, OneSoft, which is a Canadian company that was just bought by a Blackstone entity. We think that we are similar in size. We once looked at OneSoft a number of years ago because they sell a product into the pipeline business as we do. They are similar size. They actually do not make money right now. We do. That is an interesting comp that I draw your attention to. Insider ownership is 35%.
I own 20% of the company. Therefore, this might be a little different than your typical CEO because I will try my best not to make bad decisions. We just recently, back in June, we announced this. We got a very large contract for one of the top cell phone companies. We are monitoring. We are putting monitors. I do not say we are putting, but they are putting our monitors onto their generators that control their cell towers. It started out, the contract started out a little less than $5 million. They have added to the contract. Now it is approximately a $5.4 million contract. That is for our hardware plus first year of monitoring. When we sell our product, that is how we sell it.
The hardware plus first years of monitoring, every other year of monitoring is not part of the $5.4 million contract, but everybody continues to renew. We have a close to 95% renewal rate on all the products that we monitor. This company has significantly more cell towers than they've let out in the contract to date. Hopefully if we do a good job, there will be more behind it. That is what our product looks like. There is a new version over there. We have a newer version, updated version coming out in the next month. This is a tried and true. It is a great product. That is the picture of our new product. Has many more features and has GPS. We think it is going to do very well. We have software, which is what drives our monitoring side of our business.
People say, "Don't view us as a SaaS company." In essence, I kind of say it, maybe we're a HaaS company, hardware as a software. That's what we are. We have our own software, Omniview. We have our own firmware that goes into the product. I would say that, again, best product in the marketplace. Also now we've focused on cybersecurity. We feel, and many of our customers feel, cybersecurity is very critical. We have spent significant dollars over the last six to nine months on cybersecurity. This is how our product works. We can do it. It mainly works under cellular. We can do it through satellite. We could do it hardwired. Any way the customer wants, we can do. Let's understand a little bit about the model and why remote monitoring really works for our customers, for us.
Right now there's an intersection that we are sitting in. That is, number one, the grid operators and the grid itself is somewhat antiquated. It is difficult for them to, on a very efficient basis, deliver electricity. Electricity demand is going up significantly. You read about AI, EV, etc. Also, really just the home. People want to make sure that they have electricity at home whenever they need it. Generators in general are growing at a very fast rate. Certainly monitoring is growing because people today, call it Nest, whatever, people are much more comfortable and want to have whatever equipment they have to be monitored. We have growth in electricity demand. We have growth in monitoring. This slide kind of shows about technicians. There is a large shortage of trained technicians today in America.
Remote monitoring helps the dealers significantly in reducing costs on the technician side. To send a technician out today on a, we call it a truck roll, costs at least $300- $400 on any trip. If they can do away with a trip, it is significant cost savings for the dealers. By having remote monitoring, they know in advance what is wrong with the piece of equipment. Sometimes they can clear it from their desktop. For example, if there is an overcranking situation, they can do that. If it has to be a call, they can send the technician who knows what for that particular issue with the right equipment on his truck at that time. Therefore, it saves a significant amount of money for our dealers. Our customers, we have a very large and diverse customer base. Pedemonte is obviously on the pipeline space.
Everybody else here is on the power generation side. I've mentioned a bunch of the growth drivers here. Regulatory and compliance is something I've not mentioned. We have been leaders in coming up with software that helps our customers on their usage of generators. For example, there are now municipalities that fine companies or individuals for running a generator on bad air quality days. If anybody here has a generator, you know that your generator is usually exercised once a week. Wednesday at 2:00 P.M. is when they exercise. What happens if it's a bad air quality day and your generator exercises and you're subject to a fine? We have software that does not allow your generator to turn on if it's a bad air quality day. Again, we are, at least today, we're the only company that has that software.
Now, again, not every municipality has these rules, but it is a growing trend among municipalities not to allow generators to kick on on bad air days. We have talked about electric grid and demand response. We will talk about it in a minute, but the problem with our electric grid today. Let's move on. Here you see the size of the standby generator market and its opportunities. Natural disasters, we have significant growth in whether it is storms, hurricanes, wildfires. Again, people need to have electricity. More and more pieces of equipment are running on electricity. Nobody wants to be without their cell phone for less than 30 seconds. Everybody wants to make sure that electricity is running. Demand response. Demand response is something that at least a year ago I was very up on.
Today, I'm still up on it, but the timeline has expanded significantly for how it's going to impact us. Demand response is the utility needs electricity. The system's overloaded. They try to do things to reduce your electricity demand. I'm sure many of you, your utility says, if you in the summer raise your thermostat one or two degrees, they'll give you a $10 credit or something like that on your bill. That is a simple demand response type product. Since we remotely control generators, if for example, there's a need for electricity in a certain area, we can remotely turn on generators to cut the requirement of electricity by the utility or the grid operator. That's demand response. Our customers who have the generators get paid for it, and we get paid for it.
The ERCOT, which is the grid operator in Texas, was paying a significant amount of money to their customers who signed up for this program. We have an agreement with a company called C Power, who has an agreement with the grid operators. We get a signal from them that they need power. We remotely turn on the generators, and money changes hands. ERCOT and a lot of the grid operators today are somewhat confused about how much they're willing to pay for people to be in the program. We have made a little bit of money, but we have not made the money that I think we're going to make out into the future. This is something to watch, and we are leaders in this area. Again, because not only do we monitor the generators, but we can actually control them as well. We have some patents.
We started this industry, so we have industry leadership. Everybody in this industry knows OmniMetrix. As I said, we have a partnership with C Power. We have a deal with a company called PowerNow in Texas. This is a chart of, obviously, our financials over the last few years. Since I took over, a couple of things have happened. The first couple of years going from close to bankruptcy, cleaning up, selling off some assets. In 2020, we have COVID. In 2022, we had 3G sunsetting. What happened was that 3G went away, and everybody now is using LTE. 3G, since we were the first in this industry, we had a lot of monitors that were 3G monitors. All those turned over.
While I said we have a 95% plus renewal rate, when there is such a turnover, our biggest competitor, Generac, came in and basically gave away free monitors during that changeover. That impacted the growth rate of our company between 2021 and 2022 and kind of a little bit in 2023. That now is pretty much behind us. We have said that we think we will grow revenues, or at least our target is to grow revenues at least 20% a year out into the future. This year, it is going to be more than that because we have the big contract. You will see that in the forthcoming quarters. There is a summary balance sheet. Let's just talk a little bit about our net operating loss carryforwards. On a gross basis, we had about $70 million of NOL carryforwards. On a net basis, it is about $14 million.
We took in, in this last quarter, in the fourth quarter of last year, we took in about $4.3 million onto our balance sheet as a deferred tax asset. For people who have not followed our company, in 2024, we were reporting earnings without any tax impact. Our earnings per share was higher in the last couple of quarters. Just be aware that now, although we do not pay taxes because we have the NOLs, on a reported basis, we show that there is an income tax expense, which is the proper way to account for this. That is Jan and Tracy. Basically, this is the investment summary. While you are looking at that, really the key and why this, I believe this company is a very cheap stock or inexpensive stock. What people do not understand is the monitoring side of our business.
Out of the last year, we did approximately $4.5 million out of the $10 million that you saw there, approximately $4.5 million, $4.6 million of revenue was from monitoring. Monitoring is very high margin, gross margin above 90%. If you took a net margin, it's most probably close to 80%. We've said that we want to grow at approximately 20% a year. If you do the math, figure $5.5 million roughly of, and I'm not saying that this is the number, but I'm just saying if you do the math, $5.5 million at an 80% margin gives you a 4 point something, $4.6 million of net just coming from monitoring.
The way I think about it, which by the way, doesn't necessarily mean it's the way anybody else thinks about it, is if you think about a shopping center today, a good shopping center, which has a grocery store anchor that's a good tenant, trades at a 7% cap rate, which would mean 14 multiple. If you do the math and our 2.5 million shares outstanding, you'll see that our stock is very cheap just on monitoring alone. Forget the growth aspects. I believe that versus a shopping center, yes, a shopping center has long-term contracts. We don't have long-term contracts, but we do have, but everybody seems to renew. We have a better renewal rate than most shopping centers. We also are tax-sheltered like real estate is.
That's kind of the way I think about it as monitoring in one bucket and value in the other. I'm being told that I only have five minutes left. Anybody have questions, please. Yes. this big sales customer today is driving a lot of the business of our company. That's number one. Number two is that every year we've been growing. On monitoring, what happens is the base keeps on growing every year. It's the big customer, and plus our normal growth is what we think gets us 20%. I would say that for every dollar of hardware sales, on average, your monitoring sales is about 5%. Yes. The answer is no, we don't. I don't really think C Power is the problem. I think it's the grid operators that are really the problem who are dragging their feet.
I think C Power has the same problem that we're having in determining what the dollars are that the utilities are giving. I just would like to say one other thing that's important because it's a question that if I was sitting in your chair and I have for many years, sat in your chair, and the question is, okay, I have this big contract today, and who's to say what happens post the big contract? Is there a cliff that this company is going to fall over? The answer is one never knows. I'll tell you why I think that this will not happen in this company. Number one, I mentioned that the company has many more cell towers than our contract has allowed for. I think that there's potential growth after that.
Plus, I had mentioned that we have the best unit out in the field. We are in preliminary discussions with three OEMs who would be interested in private labeling our monitoring system for their products. Again, it's preliminary. One doesn't know. It could take a while. The key is that the fact that we have the best system out there and we are a monitoring company. We're not a metal-bending generator company. That's the only thing we do is monitoring. We have software, IT people, firmware people that all these other companies, including Generac, that's not their business. This is our business. We live and breathe monitoring. Therefore, I feel very confident that post this contract, there's no cliff. Yes, sir. Is that baked into a $5.4 million? Okay. Just can you repeat the question again? Okay. Tracy says it is baked in.
If Tracy says it's baked in, it's baked in. Yes, sir. The business is in North America, U.S., Mexico, and Canada, mainly U.S. and Canada. We've been approached internationally. We have not found that it makes, at least right now, monetary sense, meaning there's a language difference. There's an hour. We have customer service people. We would have to man customer service for much more significant time. We just so far have not thought that it made good economic sense. It is certainly something that we think about, and we've been approached by international companies for a product. Yes, sir. We get asked that question a lot because they're a big user. We do not really monitor data centers. Here's the reason why. Most data centers have their own 24/7 guy or guys who are monitoring the data center. The data center is too important.
Generator is just one aspect of the data center. There are many aspects to the data center that require monitoring. Most of them have their own kind of what they call NOC who are monitoring the data centers. Therefore, we do not really believe that we have a big opportunity in data centers. I am not saying we do not sell anything to data centers, but remote monitoring in data centers is really not a thing because they have their own 24/7 monitoring. Okay. Thank you very much for coming. Appreciate it. If you have further questions, you can see me around or one-on-ones or in the men's room, whatever. This presentation has now finished. Please check back shortly for the archive.