Bring them there too as well. It's quite unusual for Southern Californians, you can no doubt imagine. But we also have, oops, we also have operations in other parts of the world as well. We have a battery factory in Chicago, Illinois, and then we have our European headquarters office in Belgrade and a much, much larger factory in Craiova in Serbia, and if you want to know why Serbia, because the economics are absolutely fantastic there. It's in Europe, but it's not in the European Union. We get to trade like we're in the European Union. We have no tariffs or anything like that, but we don't have any of the compliance issues over there. With the acquisition that I made to get us into that part of the world, I picked up 35 advanced degree engineers.
I'm paying those engineers less than I'm paying welders in San Diego, and the quality of their work is absolutely fantastic. So we're really delighted to be there. About 364 employees, that number fluctuates across the country. And we make products in the United States, which is really important because we sell to the federal government and state governments, amongst others. We sell to lots of corporations as well, but having a made-in-America product is really important. And we're basically concentrating on two verticals. The first one is the electrification of transportation, which is a massive and, as yet, just hardly beginning industry. And then energy security, by which we simply mean a more reliable source of electricity than that which you get from the utility grid, which is, of course, prone to blackouts and brownouts. Trade on NASDAQ, rather confusingly, our ticker is BEEM, even though we're Beam Global.
That's because somebody already had BEAM, so BEEM is the ticker you're looking for, and a couple of really nice metrics there. We have a very, very clean balance sheet, no debt at all, and we have a $100 million line of credit priced at SOFR plus 300 basis points, untapped. Haven't used it, but it's there for us in case we need it. Sufficient cash on hand and working capital to not have any concerns about that either, which is not bad considering the way the microcaps are trading at the moment. I'm sure you are all very aware of that, but the green on the map just shows you nations where our products are deployed, so we definitely are a global company. We're not called Beam Global for nothing, so I'm going to take you through the products.
Most important thing about what we do here, and I'm going to start with this one. This is our flagship product, EV ARC, electric vehicle autonomous renewable charger. We're converting sunlight into electricity up here. We're storing it in batteries that we make ourselves and a whole bunch of other clever electronics and stuff underneath this can of beer. And then we're delivering that electricity to anybody's off-the-shelf EV charger. We do not make EV chargers, and we do not provide the services behind them. We make everybody's EV chargers work without construction, without electrical work. And as a result, we don't need to go through any permitting or environmental impact studies or anything else like that. That's a deliberate strategy for us. I don't know who's going to do well in that industry. I've been watching it for 10 years, and I still don't know who will survive.
I don't know who will offer the best services, but they'll all need a mounting asset and a source of electricity. And that's what our products provide. So from a TAM point of view, we service the entire market, not just cars, motorcycles, even airplanes as well, whichever those companies do. Now, we do this without construction, as I already said. We do it without electrical work, no permitting, no costs where that's associated, no utility bill. So there's no unit cost for the energy delivered to the vehicle. Imagine being a fleet operator who no longer has a unit cost of energy to put into their vehicles. And then some other fantastic things too. We're adding capacity to the grid, which has nowhere near enough capacity to electrify transportation. We're doing it without centralized infrastructure, transmission and distribution infrastructure, build-outs, which take decades to do if they ever happen.
And then the other thing we're doing is we're doing it without vulnerability to blackouts and brownouts. We just put out a magnificent press release two or three weeks ago showing our products operating in the middle of Hurricane Helene, eight and a half foot storm surge. Our product is floodproof to nine feet, continued operating even though it was in eight and a half feet of salt water. Believe me, our customer over there was U.S. Army or Veterans Administration, whoever it was, pretty happy about that. All of our products continue to operate throughout the southeast, throughout Helene and Milton and any other downstorm that's come up that coast recently as well. So it's a magnificent cost-saving product. It fits inside a standard legal-sized parking space.
And this piece here is at once the dumbest and smartest part of the product because it's this ballast and traction for our engineered ballast and traction pad, which allows us to deploy it in that parking space without doing any construction work. It's not glued down. It's not bolted down or anything else. And the result of that is we do a one-hour deployment that in New York City takes 24 months to do if you're doing the grid-tied stuff. So you can spend two years digging trenches, or you can deploy us in an hour and get the same results. Just released this fantastic new product. Very excited about this. I've had a patent on this since 2019, but we just released it. This is called BeamSpot. This is a curbside charging solution. We're taking light wind generation. We're taking tracking solar generation using our patented tracking.
And then we've put our batteries inside the pole. Remember, we make our own batteries so we can make cylindrical batteries. We put them in the pole here. And then we also do the streetlight circuit. So this is a streetlight replacement product. It is a streetlight, but it's also a very effective EV charging product because we're combining not just the circuit for the streetlight, which is enough to run a light bulb. There are companies out there putting chargers on streetlights, but it's a very, very small amount of energy. And of course, if there's a blackout or something, it doesn't work. We're taking that streetlight circuit and we're combining it with the wind generation and the solar generation. And we're putting all of that in our batteries. And then we're charging from the batteries.
So think of three hoses filling one bucket, and the bucket fills up and then into the car, and then the three hoses fill it back up again. That's better than one hose, which is what the streetlight circuit would deliver to it. Also continues to work during a blackout or a brownout, and most of the charging will take place thanks to the renewable sources. Brand new product, just announced it. And this morning, if any of you are paying attention, we put out a press release announcing our first order for this product. So that shows the marketability of it. We literally announced it a couple of months ago, and we've already got the first purchase order from a very large publicly owned utility company who we're not allowed to name yet, unfortunately. But certainly a discerning customer placed the first order for this.
We will make the structures of these things in our European facilities. That company that I bought happens to be the fourth largest manufacturer of street lamps in Europe, and then we do the electronics and the batteries in our American facilities and combine them together, mostly in Chicago. Again, same things with the EV ARC. Don't need to do a grid connection. No vulnerability to blackouts and most of the energy coming from renewable sources, so very low or no cost for the unit of energy. This might make you smile. We call this BeamBike. It's obviously based on the EV ARC platform. I won't go through all the other things because it's the same as the EV ARC, but what's crucial about this is this is for charging electric bicycles. Why are we doing that?
There's a tremendous growth in electric bicycle usage across the world and even in the United States. This, like all of our products, has come about as a result of requirements from our customers. Our customers, big cities, are telling us people are charging their e-bikes in their apartments and burning themselves and their neighbors to death doing it. We need outdoor EV charging facilities to do this so that if there is a fire from this battery here, the damage is less. Again, it's a customer-driven thing. You'll also see us deploying these in tourist-type locations, in large hotel complexes, and also for facilities. Lots of large facilities operators now getting people out of vehicles and onto two-wheel transportation to move light stuff around. It can be moved. All of our products, by the way, these all fold upon themselves, kind of like this.
They go inside a shipping container for transportation. So we can go anywhere in the world with them. You can go down the highway with them. And then when they get to site, they fold out like a satellite arriving in space, ready to operate. This one is the one I'm absolutely most excited about right now. And we just announced this product as well. And this makes the hair on my forearm stand up, frankly. This is, again, based on the EV ARC platform. I'm a big fan of this. Basic set of engineering principles and patents, and then lots of layers of value added to it. What you've got is the EV ARC platform. And then here, fantastically, a desalination plant. We're taking saltwater, brackish water, or dirty water, and we're turning it into clean, potable drinking water.
We're also providing electricity for cooking and for refrigeration of medical devices, and then on top of that, we're adding e-mobility with these ruggedized e-scooters. This product is for war zones and post-disaster environments. Okay? I can tell you that I will be flying to the Middle East next week with the aim to deploy this over there. Places where there's quite a lot of saltwater, but because their infrastructure has been destroyed, there's no fresh water and there's no electricity, and people are starving to death and people can't cook and they don't have drinking water. Beyond that, the NGOs, the donor organizations who solve for the water and for the food, can't deliver it to the people that need it, so we have solved that by putting these ruggedized electric mopeds. Fits inside a shipping container, deployed in an hour.
You have water, you have electricity, and you have e-mobility. Again, war zones and post-hurricane-type zones and those sorts of things. This is called BeamWell. I'm thrilled to bits with this. Will it be our biggest revenue product? No, it won't, but some of the deployments that we do with it will certainly be the most exciting, and of course, we're aiming to get major press for those, which can only be helpful for the rest of the business. Your own imaginations will tell you what I mean by that. I mentioned we make batteries. I won't go a lot into the technology we have, except it's very exciting. Mostly, it's about thermal management. We have a passive thermal management solution, which allows us to get more energy into batteries, more energy out of batteries faster, without them catching on fire, is ultimately the goal here.
And here's a smattering of the types of things that we are deployed in: drones, robots, submersibles, and a whole host of other things. And of course, our own EV charging and energy security products. And then finally, smart cities infrastructure. So there's a lot of talk about smart cities. You're probably yawning hearing me say it, mentioning it. However, because we make a lot of infrastructure products that go into the built environment, our ability to layer on intelligence, to listen, to see, to smell, to know what's going on in the environment, and then make use of that data for our existing municipal customers. New York City is our largest municipal customer to date. Again, we're serving municipal and state and federal customers in 17 nations around the world.
So our ability to add these layers of intelligence to the existing hardware and infrastructure that we're deploying makes it very valuable for us. And we're already doing a lot of that. We don't have a lot of patents, but we have really important patents. I have a great discipline where patent is concerned. I have a sort of suspicion anytime I meet a CEO or a founder that has a lot of patents on the wall in his office. First question, I always ask him, how many of those are actually making you money or will make you any money in the next 18 months? And the answer, you won't be surprised to hear, is more often than not, none of them. We're not like that. We go the other end of the direction.
We look for patents which are fundamental barriers to entry for the competition in which we will monetize in the next 18 months. And almost all, but I think all but one of our patents is doing exactly that for us right now just because we haven't produced the last patented product. So they're really fundamental barriers to entry and quite a few of them as well. People often say, "Oh, you make a solar-powered electric vehicle charging station." That's not surprising. You're based in San Diego, California. Here's how they're deployed around the United States. You'll see the biggest concentrations up here in the northeast. Our products are charging New York police cars in January. Okay? So get out of your head that you can't use renewables to fuel vehicles. You can actually very effectively.
Do they work less well in January in New York than they do in San Diego in June? Yes, they do, but it doesn't matter. Perfect is the enemy of good. As long as they're supplying sufficient fuel to make the customer's mission work, they're doing what they're required to do less expensively and more reliably than the grid. Okay, some numbers for you. Share price looks like dog shit, frankly. Hey, I'm a microcap. Microcaps are trading at 24-year lows right now. We are not immune to that at all. Our share price has gone down as our operations have gone up. Sales have gone up. Gross profitability improved. Everything about our execution has been not exemplary. We make lots of mistakes, but we're a hell of a lot better than we were when we were trading at $75 a couple of years ago. Okay?
We had a $750 million market cap a couple of years ago. We were not even one-thousandth of the company that we are today. I believe in cycles. I believe this will come back. If it's not going to, that's not a bet I'm going to make today. And what I'm telling you is that we, the Beam team, just keep working hard on the fundamentals, making a better company, better products, better customers all the time. So you could say, and be careful how I put it, it's a buying opportunity. So trading at $5. Oops. Trading at $5 there. Market cap around $17 million, a tenth of what it used to be. Look at the growth in our revenues. And then take a look at a couple of these numbers over here. As I already mentioned, we have no debt. We had 630.
We had $9 million in cash, $16 million in working capital, but that was with some intangible. I've got a piece of knot or something stuck in my throat. Thank you. In fact, our working capital is about $21.4 million net of non-cash stuff. And if you run a business, cash matters. Okay? So what that tells you, we've got a great deal of runway there because our cash burn is very low because we're incredibly disciplined with cash. We're also incredibly disciplined with equity. 14.2 million shares outstanding. You will not find any of our peers or so-called peers who have less than 100-plus million shares outstanding. I'm an old-fashioned guy, and I happen to believe in EPS.
The simple fact of the matter is I have a hell of a lot less shares into which to divide our earnings than any of our peers do, which on that level alone makes us a great value. I happen to think we have a better business model and products as well. But nevertheless, so great discipline all the way around balance sheet and cap structure and everything else. Just look at our filings. Sales. So I can tell you second, first half of this year about flat with last year. Last year was up 300%. So that across five years, that still looks like incredible growth for us. The big story here is these improving gross margins here. We continually improve. I think we were GAAP. We were about 15% in the second quarter of this year gross. We were 3% same period last year. What changed?
Engineering, better practices, more efficient, more buying power, more volume, all these things. Now, that's a trajectory that we're going to continue on. I am targeting 50% gross profit with this company. That might make you smile, but I can tell you what, the demand is only increasing, and we're getting better and better at what we do. And while it costs more and more to dig a longer and longer trench and pull longer and longer wires, it costs us less and less to do what we're doing while our products get better and better at the beginning of a massive growth market. Let's see, year to date, first half is 15%. And again, there's some non-cash items that impact that because we do make a couple of acquisitions. So we get amortization of intangible assets in particular, which impact our growth.
But from a cash point of view, better and better. And of course, gross ends up hitting the bottom line after we've made enough of it to take up our operating expenses. And our operating expenses are almost unbelievably low because we have tremendous discipline. I invite any of you, come and visit me, come and see me in my office in San Diego. You will not find a plush environment. You will not find foosball tables or fancy coffee machines or M&M dispensers. What you will find is blood, sweat, and tears. That's what we grind out. And you'll find great products and great processes. And I'd be delighted to show you around. Give me a bit of notice because I do travel an awful lot. Okay, pipeline. Let's talk about lexicon here for a second. Pipeline.
That's a qualified customer with budget who understands the product and has a need for it and has told us that they're moving towards a purchase order. That's what you need to qualify to get into Beam Global's pipeline. I wish that was true of all the companies I look at and invest in. Contracted backlog, of course. These are people who have actually issued us the purchase order, and we have not yet delivered. Once we deliver, it becomes revenue and then cash once they pay us. We always get paid. We have no bad debt. We generally get paid fairly quickly, even though we have some very large government customers. Sometimes they can tarry a little bit. You're not going to do anything calling them. They will pay. Sometimes it takes a little while. So pipeline's a great number. Actually, it's over 200 million now.
But in a way, pipeline's an indictment of our inability to convert pipeline into backlog. And just to give you the full disclosure, we have seen some slowing. The election next week has caused slowing in federal purchasing of EV and that sort of stuff. We had a buyer the other day said to me, "If Donald Trump gets in, EVs will be illegal on November 7th." He's wrong. No U.S. president can prevent the electrification of transportation no matter what they say. But nevertheless, that's the perception. It slows them down a little bit. They're not pulling out, though. They're in the pipeline. No one's canceling anything. So I think what we're going to see is first quarter of 2025. We'll see a return once all the dust settles on all this, no matter which way the election goes. Nevertheless, it does cause a bit of slowing.
What we're doing to solve for that is we're moving into Europe. We're moving into the Middle East. We're moving into Africa. That's why I'll be in Ethiopia. I'll be in Addis Ababa in two weeks from now, and I'll be in Amman, Jordan the week after that because our products work anywhere they can see the sky. So we're broadening our market. We're bringing more products to base. So if we have a lull in U.S., it picks up in Europe. If we have a lull in Europe, it picks up in Middle East and North Africa. It's a global company with global products. So we're solving for that. Never at the expense of any of those markets, though, because actually the U.S. will continue to be one of the largest markets in the world for us by far. Just mentioned quickly, we did make a couple of acquisitions.
I bought a battery company in 2022. That was a smart move, if I say so myself. We got to do all the margin recapture. We've been buying batteries because all of our products have batteries in them. So I bought the company that had the technology I liked the best, got to capture all the margin, and then also get into these other markets that we're in and defend our supply chain, which at the time was really important to us. So very, very happy with that Chicago-based acquisition. That was an all-stock deal. I encourage you to look it up. It was crafted with a lot of discipline. Fourth quarter of last year, I acquired Serbian-based Amiga. That's the fourth largest, as I mentioned, streetlight manufacturer. They do a lot of other stuff as well.
They are now our Beam Europe headquarters, and they are manufacturing the products I've showed you on the sheet in Europe now. We did our first deployment into Cyprus this year for the British Army. Not because I'm British, because actually the U.S. Marine Corps recommended to the British Army that they buy our products. That's how they're working together. Marine Corps is one of our largest customers. So we're already executing well there, and then we just finished another acquisition on a power electronics company. Our product's still a mixture of our own in-house manufactured components and others off-the-shelf stuff. I'm vertically integrating. That means we spend less on margin. We get better packaging, and we get products which are actually tailor-made to make our products operate the really special and specific ways that they need to, and so that was what this one was about.
We're not finished.
We're still acquisitive, but I can tell you this. For every 10 deals I look at, and I use a big funnel to get to 10 deals, it's amazing if I do one of them. Some people think I'm a pretty unreasonable bastard when it comes to M&A. I just think I want the best thing for my shareholders and my employees and my customers, and we get it, and that means you've got to walk away from most of them, but we are still acquisitive, and we will look at doing other deals. We're public, so we get media. We care about that. We have a PR firm. We just brought in. I want you to meet Luke Higgins. Stand up, Luke, please. Luke Higgins is our new IR in-house guy. I want you to get to know him.
He's here to tell our story and get it out because not enough people know what a fantastic company this is, and he'll be working with Core IR, who's our external IR people. We also have internal PR, external PR. They get us news, but we don't put out fluff pieces. It's contracts. It's patents. It's that sort of thing, and then here's a smattering of our customers. Don't give anything away to any of them. Everybody pays full retail. We do give some slight discounts for large volume purchases for federal government and for others, but we don't give product away. All of these customers bought, frankly, on the merits of the product. I don't even think we sell. I think we just explain.
And someone can either make a decision spending two years digging a bunch of trenches and getting a utility bill, or they can deploy us and have it done in an hour without going through any headaches. I don't call that selling. That's just explaining. And then I think this is the last slide. Just important to point out, as I said, Marine Corps is one of our largest customers, mostly for non-tactical stuff at the moment. But in a tactical environment, and this is a future warfighting exercise at Camp Pendleton, everything on this site was electric. We powered all of it with our products. Even this thing's electric. The Marine Corps, like all militaries across the world, are trying to get away from liquid fuels. $1,000 a gallon and human lives to deliver to a forward operating environment in Afghanistan. Okay? We have no heat signature.
We don't have an exhaust. We don't make any noise. We're not targetable in that sense. And we don't require liquid fuel. So we're a fantastic rugged product. And you can see how the DNA from this has gone into that desalination plant that's going into war zones in the Middle East and that sort of stuff. Same DNA. They will not be white when they're deployed in a tactical environment, I hasten to point out. But these are a great customer for us. And it's because of them that we won the British Army and so on. So a lot of growth coming out of that. And that's it with two minutes and 50 seconds left for questions if you have any. Yes, sir.
What do you look for in acquisitions?
I’m interested in vertical integration, geographic expansion, and excellent teams, and people who have a realistic idea about their valuation, and people who believe me when I tell them I’m going to take them to be a billion dollars. They need to believe that because I’m going to do most of this using equity. And they need to understand that I don’t consider our current valuation to be a good valuation for our company. So I need to be able to sit down with that person and tell them, “Join us. Don’t think of it as selling. Just exchange your equity for our equity, and we’ll take you to a billion bucks.” What’s the cost range of those three acquisitions? The least expensive one was around $1 million, and the most expensive one was just under $14 million.
By the way, the one I did in Europe, I paid EUR 10 million for that. I bought the land, the buildings, and everything else, and I had them independently appraised before I made the acquisition. I paid EUR 10 million for the company, the land, and the buildings, and the other hard assets. I had independently appraised at EUR 13 million. That's why some people think I'm unreasonable, but I'm going to make them rich. Yes.
Are there other industrial companies in your category that we could use to benchmark? Where do you think your gross margin can be of the business once you get to a certain critical mass?
Yes, and I'm not benchmarking this on any competitor, but I'm telling you we're going to get to 50% gross margins.
And the way I'm doing that is I'm assuming that I'm not going to have to take a big top-line hit because the demand is increasing so dramatically for the product. And then I'm looking at what engineering improvements we can make and what other things we can do in terms of acquiring the components to make our product. And I could walk you around our factory in 20 minutes. I could show you how we get from where we are today, which is heading towards that sort of 20% gross net of non-cash stuff, to 50% gross. And I could do it in 20 minutes, and you would not need to have an advanced degree to understand me. Yes, Brian.
The BeamWell has a 3,000-liter water tank. How long does it take to fill that?
So the desal plant that we're putting on, there's 750 gallons a day. I'm sorry, I'm mixing gallons and liters here for you, not very helpfully. Suffice it to say, Brian, that we believe that the amount of water that it will produce will be adequate for its hyper-local use. Remember, we've only got four scooters on it. We don't intend to put one of these units in Gaza and solve everybody's problems. We're going to have to put a lot of them over there. Any other questions? We've got 16 seconds. Hurry up, sir.
Can you say something about the charging capacity of your standard unit as far as how many cars, typical cars, how frequently? I'm assuming a sunny environment.
Good question. So the EV ARC product, our flagship product, and BeamSpot will have a similar performance.
It's going to give you about 265 driving miles in a day. In New York in the winter, it might be half that. Okay? But let's put that into perspective. Average U.S. sedan drives 30.4 miles per day. Fleet vehicles typically drive between 20 and 30 miles a day. In fact, our larger federal fleet operators, less than 10 miles a day. So we're actually able to do the daily range replenishment, which is what we target, DRR, daily range replenishment for multiple vehicles every single day from a single unit, even in the winter. Forget empty and then go to a gas station and fill up again. Nobody that owns an EV does that. It's more like you charge your cell phone. Thank you very much for being here.