Good morning, everyone. Our next presenter today is Desmond Wheatley with Beam Global. Take it away, Desmond.
Good morning. Thank you very much. I'm not used to getting a round of applause before I've even said anything. Let's see if I still get one once I'm finished. So yeah, I'm the CEO of Beam Global. We are a San Diego-headquartered sustainable technology innovation company, which is a bit of a mouthful. But that means we invent, we take through the patenting process, we design, engineer, and then we actually manufacture a suite of products. They all have certain things in common. They're all sustainably energized. They all generate their own electricity. They all store their own electricity. And we are focused on the electrification of transportation and on energy security. On the right hand of the picture there of the slide there, you can see one of our mainstay products. That's our EV ARC, Electric Vehicle Autonomous Renewable Charger.
This is an electric vehicle charging infrastructure product which requires no construction, no electrical work, no engineering of any sort, no permitting anywhere. You never get a utility bill. We are immune to blackouts and brownouts. We are, as I said, headquartered in San Diego. We also have facilities in Chicago, Illinois. Now recently, due to an acquisition that we just made, we've broken into what is the largest market in the world for our product, Europe, by far the largest market, 405 million cars in greater Europe, 290 million in the United States, 319 million in China. You can see it's a very large market for us, just broke in there towards the end of last year. We're in Serbia, where the economics are very good for manufacturing our product and for growing. As I mentioned, we make a suite of products, renewably energized.
We have a good patent portfolio on those products and excellent customer base. EV charging infrastructure is growing very dramatically. In our wildest dreams, we will never keep up with the demand that's coming at us, 300% year-over-year growth last year. I'll show you a chart on that in a second. Just an incredible amount of growth. Forget everything you've heard from the media about the fact that EV sales are not growing right now. They are. They may not be growing as quickly as they were from a percentage point of view towards the end of last year. They're still growing very dramatically. Then energy security, simply because we all rely on electricity more than at any time in our history. Yet we have more blackouts and brownouts than at any time in our history.
So we make products which continue to supply electricity even when the centralized grid fails. From a competition point of view, there's really no direct product competition. We're very confident in that because we've won a lot of very large. U.S. Army is our largest customer. That was a competitively let bid. We were the only company that met specifications. New York City, where we are today, one of our largest municipal customers using our products to charge their fleet vehicles. They're all over the five boroughs. When you leave here today, you will see them now that you've been alerted to what they are. Again, competitively let. No other company could meet the specifications required. But that doesn't mean we don't compete with anybody.
We compete with the ecosystem of service providers who are required to dig up your parking lot, take you through permitting and electrical work, and all that sort of stuff that, frankly, most of our customers would rather have their teeth cleaned than go through that process. We're the easy button. We solve for that. You don't need to do any construction work. You don't need to do any electrical work. As a result, you don't need to go through any permitting or anything else. From a financial condition, very, very clean. We are debt-free. We're well capitalized. We have a very low float, 14 million shares outstanding. Compare that to any of our peers or near peers. You'll find that we've got six or seven and sometimes, in some cases, 20 or 30 times less shares outstanding. I'm an old-fashioned guy.
At the end of the day, this ought to come down to EPS. We just have a hell of a lot less S into which to divide our E than any of our peers do, which by that metric alone makes us a great value. We're liquid. We trade on NASDAQ. We do not SPAC, I hasten to add. We IPO'd in 2019 the old-fashioned way, 18 months of lots of shouting and screaming and all-nighters, but came out on NASDAQ in April 2019. We do have some warrants trading right now as a result of that. Most of those have exercised. They expire on April 18 of this year. So there won't even be the BEEMW ticker; it will no longer exist. This is really the money slide right here. That's the same product that you saw on the first slide, charging a car.
You can see it here in this image, folded down for transportation. Our products are like satellites. They fold in on themselves. You put them inside a shipping container, ship them anywhere in the world. We just announced a major contract win with the U.K. Ministry of Defence to deploy these products in their overseas bases, not because I'm British. Actually, it was the U.S. Marine Corps, who's one of our major customers, who recommended that they joined us. We'll be deploying that out of our European offices. You can see here, putting an EV charger in the ground in New York City takes about 24 months. By the time you do environmental impact, permitting, zoning, engineering, construction, electrical work, and all that sort of stuff, we do the same thing in under 1 hour. Same charging experience. You never get a utility bill. Same charger, in fact.
We are agnostic as the provider of the charger. I'll show you that in another slide. The Californians do faster than New Yorkers, about 18 months in California, so we're told. But you can see it's a very lengthy and time-consuming process. It's only going to get more complicated as the low-hanging fruit locations are eaten up connecting to the grid. So in other words, we are thriving at what will probably be the hardest time in our history to do well. It's only going to get more compelling to use our products as more and more of the grid locations are queued up. Very important to point out that we do not compete with the EV charging companies. In fact, we make them work. We enable them. So ChargePoint, Enel, Blink, any of them that you may have heard of. Some of these are publicly traded. Some not.
They are operating on our products. The image that you can see on the bottom of there is four of our EV ARC products. Each one of them has a different EV charger with a different service provider. New York City, where we are today, is on the ChargePoint network. So when we come here, the chargers are delivered to our factory in San Diego. They're factory integrated onto our product. And then we ship the entire product to New York City, ready to charge a vehicle in under one hour. The important thing to remember about us, look at the right-hand graph there. That's our revenue growth there since 2019. The green was up to the third quarter of last year. That was the green column. Those are actuals up to third quarter of last year.
What I can tell you now, because we just announced this, is that that would go off the chart. We did about $67 million, over $67 million in revenue in 2023. So six, 9, 20, 67. And those are all U.S. numbers. We haven't even started in Europe yet. And as I said, Europe will be a much larger market for us. So we're in great shape where that's concerned, although you wouldn't think so if you look at the way our stock trades. But I think that might be more to do with the Fed than with Beam Global, not making excuses on anything. Total pipeline, actually, that number is more like $150 million now. We have a very good pipeline to backlog conversion ratio. In other words, we kill a lot of what we shoot at.
And that's partly because we just don't have any competition and because we're solving so many problems for people. It's not a difficult and complicated thing to understand once you get over the question of whether or not it works. Well, clearly, it does. New York's been buying from us since 2015. And as crazy as New Yorkers are, they are not crazy enough to keep buying the same shit year after year and spending millions of dollars on it if it doesn't work. I won't bother going into the details on this. But suffice it to say, record after record, quarter after quarter, more revenue. We're a very multiple company, by the way. We buy stuff. We make stuff. We turn it into products. And we sell those products. It's not complex. You can easily understand our filings if you read them.
You don't have to read the same paragraph over and over again to try and figure out who gets what under what circumstances. Very, very simple. So revenue growth, that chart that I showed you back here is a proxy for production. That just shows you that we are producing a hell of a lot more product, 3 times more product last year than the year before, 2 times that the year before that, and 1.5 times the year before that. Our team has demonstrated that within the same facilities and with very little capital expenditure, we can dramatically increase our capacity. And the good news is, I've still got a whole lot of capacity overhead in my facilities in San Diego and Chicago. I will not need to invest heavily in capital to improve on that.
And then my European facilities, I have five times more square footage under roof in Europe and another six acres of land to build on. I own all of it. No lease liability or anything else. We've got it all with the acquisition, the best deal I've ever done. I've got just a big enough ego to think that I've done a couple of good deals in my life. And this was the best one yet. Great products to get you, great customers, and great contracts. This is just a couple of them. We have a GSA contract in place with the federal government. U.S. federal government is the largest fleet operator in the world, 675,000 vehicles in its fleet, the largest consumer of diesel and gasoline in the world today, largest consumer of EV charging infrastructure tomorrow.
We have a GSA contract in place with them and a blanket purchase authority, which is just like point and click. It's like Amazon for the federal government. They just point and click. We ship product to them. The federal government is today our largest customer. They won't be forever. It just so happens that that's where it is. Prior to COVID, commercial customers were our biggest customers by far. But that kind of evaporated during the no-one-going-to-the-office thing, coming back very quickly now, though. Then California, who, frankly, matching the Feds in terms of spending on EV charging infrastructure, they're a very large customer of ours as well, and other states, and so on. Lots of patents. I'm not a patent junkie. I don't get patents just to brush my ego.
But we do think they're an important barrier to entry and also in terms of adding value to the company. So we have lots of those. Certainly, first mover advantage. We've been doing this. I'll show you how crazy I am. I started making solar-powered electric vehicle chargers back in 2010 when there were only about four electric vehicles on the road. And I don't mean models. I mean absolute numbers. So it was a bit of a desert for the first eight years that we did this. But we've got lots of experience. We had lots of time to learn, lots of energy for it. And now we're seeing the just tremendous growth that you can see. And again, lots of room for capacity increase without heavy investment. Just a few things in case you're not an EV believer. Electric vehicles are coming.
Europe has announced a ban on all but the sale of zero-emission vehicles in 2035. U.S. auto manufacturers cannot make internal combustion engine vehicles for this market and EVs for the rest of the world, not profitably, not anymore. That means we will electrify by 2035. That's why GM and others have committed to having all electric fleets by 2035. The news you've heard about EV sales in decline, nonsense. Last year, it was about 50% year-over-year growth. This year, it's forecast for over 30% year-over-year growth. But in the first two months of this year, we had about 69% year-over-year growth. Ford, who's one of the companies that's often cited as having their EV sales dropped, just announced 89% first quarter year-over-year growth in EV sales. It's a hell of a way for a market to be blowing up.
I mean, I wish the microcap stocks were blowing up like that. We're going to need an awful lot of EV chargers in the next couple of decades. Those 300 or so million cars, we'll need about 60 million chargers in the United States. The entire industry has deployed 160,000 over the last decade. So clearly, something's broken. We have the fastest deployed, most scalable, lowest total cost of ownership, and most robust charging infrastructure platform solution out there. By far, nobody can compete with us on that level. I challenge any of you find anybody that can come anywhere close to them, please get in touch with me. I'd like to have a look at them. And then there's nowhere near enough capacity on the grid. The grid, as magnificent as it is, was never designed to replace oil as transportation fuel, just to beat physics.
There's nowhere near enough capacity on the grid. We all know how long it takes to build power stations and transmission and distribution infrastructure, not in our lifetimes. Our products, again, rapidly deployed, highly scalable, add capacity without any requirement for a centralized infrastructure. Then the last thing I'll just talk about here, and I don't want to ruin your day, but grid vulnerability. The Chinese have hacked the grid. The Russians have hacked the grid. The Iranians have hacked the grid. We know that for certainty. We also know that homegrown people have taken down sections of it. Our products are immune to those types of interruptions. So just quickly going through what we make here, EV ARC, I already talked about.
The electric vehicle autonomous renewable charger fits inside a standard legal-sized parking space, does not reduce parking in any way because the vehicle can park on it, as you can see in that image. Lots of patents in its makeup. It tracks to follow the sun, gives us about 25% more electricity than a fixed array. That's patented and many other patents. It generates electricity. It stores electricity in our own proprietary batteries. We make our own batteries in Chicago as a result of an acquisition I did in 2022, which was another really good deal, frankly. It's wind rated to 160 miles an hour. It's not bolted down, not glued down. There's no on-site work at all. It's a ballasted system. And yet, we survived 185 mile an hour winds, stamped for 160 but have survived 180.
It's floodproof to 9.5 feet, which is a big deal for electrical infrastructure. Next to it, its larger sibling for full-size buses and Class 8 type vehicles. And then, as I mentioned, we make our own batteries. I'll show you in a minute what we put our batteries into. As a result of our acquisition in Europe, we're now the fourth largest streetlight manufacturer in Europe. It'll become apparent to you why that's important to me in a minute. Streetlights sound really boring. But just imagine when you start deploying infrastructure on every street that you can put sensors, cameras, batteries, generation, and EV charging onto. That's where we're going, folks. And then just coming down the pipe, this EV Standard is a curbside EV charging product. I have it patented in the United States. Just got a new patent on it in Europe.
This will allow us to provide charging at the curb without having to do trenching or any kind of electrical work. Why is that important? Because lots of places, like New York, don't have large parking lots to park their vehicles. In fact, New York doesn't have enough parking lots to park its own fleet vehicles, far less all the other vehicles on the road. So the ability to charge them at the curb will be huge. We can do that with this product without doing any civil work. It generates and stores all its own electricity. And then a drone recharging product right after that, same thing, generates and stores its own electricity. If you look at what's going on in Ukraine right now, you'll see why drones are so important.
And then eventually, from a commercial point of view, package delivery and that sort of stuff, they're going to need to recharge while they're out en route. We can provide that for them. And we will. I mentioned we'll run any type of EV charger. We'll also charge any type of vehicle. That gives us a very large TAM, right? We're not just concentrating on sedans. We charge any type of vehicle. Even if you see bottom right-hand there, a couple of years ago, we set the world record for the longest flight of a production electric aircraft. That was a lot of fun. I flew that thing. Don't have a license, but I flew it. Bought our own battery company in 2022 to defend supply chain. That was really important to me to recapture margin, batteries are the largest single-cost contributor to our products.
So owning the battery company made a lot of sense for us and then got us into a lot of other really interesting markets as well. That was a very well-crafted deal, no cash, all stock. It really kept the sellers very engaged in the deal. And I can tell you what, they hit their earnout. I'm very happy they did because it was a really good acquisition for us. It saved us a lot of money. We're putting batteries into all of these things. I'm a big believer in the future of electrified world, not just electrified but untethered electrified, right? You don't plug it in. It's electric, but it operates without that. All of those things require batteries. We make commodity battery cells safer, more energy-dense, and faster charging. That's what our technology does. And that's why we're in all of these things, submersibles, drones.
These are all just robots, if you think about it. Yet just last week, I was at Heathrow, London Heathrow. And there's a robotic cleaner going around. It's just everywhere you look, more and more robots coming. They're all going to need the same things. And then I acquired this company, Amiga, in October of last year, which got us into Europe, 200 employees, 35 of them advanced degree engineers of exactly the kind of engineers I'm trying to hire right now in the United States. The difference is that these people I'm going to say this and lower my voice. I'm paying them less than I'm paying welders in San Diego. Very good work product, very well-educated, English-speaking, very hardworking. And dare I say it, none of the sort of nonsense that we have to deal with in terms of well, perhaps I better not go there.
Anyway, just a fantastic acquisition, profitable. And I got the land and the buildings and everything else. And I paid less for the company than the hard assets that I acquired, the land, the buildings, and the machines. I had them all independently appraised for more than I paid for the company. So why did he do it? Because I'm giving him two earnouts, really attractive earnouts. If he hits some very, very high bars in 2024 and 2025, then he'll do much better. But again, all stock, capped at 19%. He can never own more than 19% of the company. And just like with my all-sell acquisition, he can never sell more than 4% of our weekly volume forever. So we don't have to worry about him trading out. I'm not worried anyway. He's a believer. He's in for life.
So I actually think that our center of gravity will shift a little bit towards Europe because the market's so much larger there. But the war in Ukraine is really helping us because Europeans are worried about energy security. We have products which are not vulnerable to grid failure. So that's obviously going to be a big thing. And then fingers crossed, the right guys win. And before too long, and when they do, we will be there for the rebuilding with products which they're not going to build gas stations when they rebuild Ukraine. They're going to go all electric very quickly. And we will be there with our EV Standard and our EV products to do that. We don't need that. But it'll be another piece of icing on the cake, not that one wants to exploit these situations.
This will just give you an indication of what our kind of coverage is. You can see our facilities there and also where our products are deployed. We are indeed a global organization, lots of patents, as I mentioned already before. Again, not patent junkie. But we do get really important fundamental patents which prevent or cause barrier to entry for competition and make us more valuable. Some people think we make solar-powered EV chargers because we're in Southern California. That makes a lot of sense. Look at where we're deployed. And again, we've been doing this for a long time. The product's very well vetted and works really well. Here's a smattering of our customers. We didn't give anything to anybody. Everybody pays full retail. And I'll tell you my favorite New York story.
When we were negotiating the deal with New York in 2015, they said to me, "You've got to give us your products." And I said, "Now why would I do a thing like that?" And they said, "Well, because New York's the biggest marketing win in the world. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, just like the old song says." And I said, "I'll tell you what I'll do for you. If you find a competing product that can do what our products can do, then I might consider negotiating on price with you. Otherwise, you pay full retail." They pay full retail. And that's the case with all of the other customers here as well. Very much of the U.S. Marine Corps is a customer, not our largest. U.S. Army is actually our largest customer.
But, Marine Corps, the reason that this is interesting is because today, all of our military deployments have been non-tactical, meaning sort of fleet-type vehicles, white fleet, they call it. However, you can see this is an image of future warfighting exercise that we conducted at Camp Pendleton. I can tell you that warfighters are trying to get liquid fuels out of their lives for a whole host of reasons. They're expensive dollars, expensive lives to deliver. And also, you get heat signature from them, generators and things like that, very easy to target. Our products don't make any heat. They don't require liquid fuels. And we can power any type of electric vehicle. And everything at this future warfighting exercise was electric. And we powered all of it for them with a one-hour deployment in the middle of a remote location.
That's important because that's where we're going next from a point of view of I've been told to go slowly. That can't be right. You mean hurry up, surely. Wrong sign. At any rate, it's clear that that's where the future warfighting environment is going. We have fantastic products. They won't be painted white. I hasten to it. I didn't know those types of environments. I'm not spending a lot of time on this because we've already covered this. EVs are coming. If you don't think they are, you shouldn't be listening to me, although you could probably do some good technical trading with us as well if you don't care about that stuff. Disaster preparedness and energy security, we're very good at this, making electricity that doesn't shut down during the grid failures. These are real applications that we're showing you here. During COVID, we powered emergency test centers.
We did all sorts of other stuff just because our power supply continues even during times when there's no grid. Still looking for inorganic growth opportunities. We had 300% year-over-year growth organically last year. We intend to continue with that trajectory. But also, there are some other things that we can do. I'm a total bastard where acquisitions are concerned because I'm very demanding. I want things to be exactly right for Beam Global. And that's what we end up getting. And if you look at the acquisitions that I've done over the last couple of years, you'll see that that is all we get. That makes it difficult. I have to kiss a lot of frogs. Don't get along with everybody. But at the end of the day, the ones that we do do, we do really well. And they're sustainable. Lots of media coverage because we're publicly traded.
We obviously care about that. We do have both IR and PR. We put out press releases, but no fluff. It's all contracts, patents, and that sort of stuff. So if you want to go to our website, you can read lots of news about us. And you will find that none of it is fluff. OK. I think we may have a couple of minutes for questions if anybody has any. Yes. Just on our fully diluted basis, in that you use stock for your acquisitions, if everyone earns their earnout in three or five years, whatever it is, how many shares would be outstanding? So that's an excellent question. Thank you for bringing that up. Today, we have 14 million shares outstanding.
Fully diluted is not very different because I've got a few warrants left over from the IPO that I did in 2019, by the way, not a SPAC, traditional IPO in 2019, most of those exercised. So fully diluted, we're under 15 million shares. That's warrants and options and everything else like that, 14 million of them common and out in trading. If everybody hits their earnouts, we'd still be under 20 million, I think, more or less. I'm doing that very quickly in my head. Now, put that into context. Look at any of our near peers. You won't find anybody that's got less than 60 or 70 million shares outstanding, and many of them 300 or 400 million shares outstanding. So even with everything done, I'll still be just a little tick on the bottom of the hound.
In fact, if I was going to presell the negative here, maybe a lot of the larger institutions think that we have too few shares outstanding, not too many. Most of the encouragement I get from larger shares or larger institutions is to get more shares out on the street. I just have the Scottish attitude to money, which is I'm very, very careful with it. And to me, equity is money. I don't segregate the two things, cash, equity. Careful with both of them. Yes, sir. Just address your gross margins a little bit and where you expect them to go as you scale up. Yeah. We improved our gross margins throughout last year, gross margin positive for the year. We also announced that we had identified several ways to save an awful lot of money in our bill of materials while increasing the quality of the product.
We also announced last year, for the first time in our history, an 8.25% increase in our selling price, which is the same as a COGS reduction where gross margins is concerned. All of that combined tells you that in this year, we will be in the north of 20% gross margin point of view. If you do very quick back-of-the-napkin calculation, which you can do, if we did the same revenue this year with that level of gross profit and we burned the same amount of cash that we burned last year, which is very little because we're very careful with cash like that, we would cash flow. To add, that would be in our discretion. If we decide to make other investments or things like that, then we can change that. But it will be in our discretion.
It won't be something that we can't hit. This would be a crazy time to take our foot off the accelerator, not a good time to stop growing. Thank you so much for your attention. We'd be happy to answer more questions. I'm going to be here all day, folks.