Awesome. We are excited to introduce to you our next presentation from Beam Global. Let's please welcome Desmond Wheatley, who is the President, CEO, and Chairman.
Thank you very much for that rapid introduction. They've asked me to speak into the microphone today, which, if any of you who know me will know, that's not easy for me because I like walking around while I'm talking. I'll just try and maintain my energy in front of this thing here and go through some of this stuff quite quickly. Just a quick who we are. Beam Global is a San Diego-based sustainable technology innovation company. That means we invent, design, engineer, and actually manufacture a whole suite of different products. I'm going to go through those in a minute to show you what they are. We're headquartered in San Diego, but we also have facilities, a factory facility in Chicago, where we make batteries. We make our own batteries here in the United States.
As a result of our expansion into Europe in the last couple of years, we now have a factory facility in Belgrade and another in Kraljevo in Serbia. Absolutely fantastic move for us. One of the best M&A deals I've ever done. Just a super place for us to do business. Very excitingly, most recently, we've just also expanded into the Middle East with the creation of Beam Middle East . Beam Middle East is a little bit different for us because we don't own it 100%. We own everything else that we do 100%. In the case of the Middle East, having lived and worked over there for many, many years, as I did back in the bad old days, I learned that you need to have a good partner in that part of the world. We have created a joint venture with Platinum Group .
Platinum Group , I encourage you to look them up, is chaired by His Royal Highness Sheikh Mohammed Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan. There are lots of sheikhs in that part of the world. More sheikhs than you can shake a stick at, some Americans might say. They come in various different shapes and sizes. Sheikh Mohammed is absolutely at the top of that pyramid. He is the son of the former leader of the U.A.E . We're very well positioned there. Some people think it's a bit odd that I'm doing business in a petro state. I can tell you that they have committed to spending over $1 trillion in the next decade on sustainable infrastructure products just like ours. It's an absolutely fantastic place for us to be.
It's also a gateway to Africa, which will certainly be one of the largest markets for products like ours in the coming years. We're very happy about this. In fact, I'll be flying back over there again in just over a week and displaying at DriftX and doing a whole bunch of other stuff over there as well. Truly a global company. Just quickly on our products. Our flagship product is called the EV ARC, Electric Vehicle Autonomous Renewable Charger. This is a rapidly deployed infrastructure solution, which allows us to put other people's EV chargers. We don't make the chargers. That's an appliance and a commodity. We don't do that. Our products allow them to operate without doing any construction or electrical work. As a result, we don't have to do any permitting, environmental impact studies, or anything else like that.
We never get a utility bill because, although all of our products are capable of connecting to the grid, none of them need to. They generate and, importantly, store all of their own electricity. They work daytime, nighttime, or during periods of inclement weather, as I'll show you in a minute. What's most important about this is we can deploy this in under an hour. New York City is our biggest municipal customer. It takes an average of two years to put a grid-tied charger in the ground there. We do it in under an hour. It's not hyperbole. It's fact. We have several thousand of these things deployed across the United States and across the world. Each of them is capable of supporting between one and six electric vehicle chargers. We've deployed masses and masses of infrastructure and done it faster than anybody else.
It will produce and store enough electricity to drive a car to the moon and back and back up to the moon again. That's something that most people will never try to do. It just gives you an idea of the tremendous amount of energy that these things are producing. Part of our value proposition is not just that we're able to rapidly deploy infrastructure, but we are also a disaster preparedness asset because we generate and store electricity without relying on the centralized grid infrastructure, which is, of course, prone to centralized failures. The lower image that you can see there is a deployment of our products for the U.S. Army, our largest customer. That photograph was taken during Hurricane Helene. Take a look at the palm trees up there. That's what palm trees look like in 140-mile-an-hour winds.
What you see underneath our products, the lights are still on and still working. What you see underneath, it's seawater. That was about eight foot of storm surge there. We continue to operate during those types of events. The Army told us that our products were the only things operating and generating and delivering electricity during Hurricane Helene at their Florida installations there. It is a phenomenally robust and very well-engineered product that's able to put up with just about anything that you can throw at it. We do deploy them with the emergency power panels as well, and those have been used notably during COVID and these types of events where the grid goes down. We continue to provide electricity. Now, that's sort of important at the moment because politics is not on our side in the United States of America.
Electric vehicles, renewables, and all that sort of stuff are definitely out of flavor with the federal government here. Our energy security products and some of the other things that we make using the same technology are very much in flavor. I still have robust and excellent conversations with the Department of Homeland Security as a result of that. This is a product that we've recently introduced called Beam Bike. We sell this product either naked, as we say, or with a dozen electric bicycles on it. This is a product which allows us to, again, rapidly deploy infrastructure to support electric bicycles. Developed originally for New York City, where lots and lots of people ride delivery bikes there, they buy cheap bikes with cheap batteries. They plug them in their apartments, and they burn themselves and their neighbors to death while they're charging. Tragic, but true.
New York City asked us to come up with a solution for them, which would allow people to charge their bikes outdoors. The bikes will still, of course, catch on fire, but they just won't kill anybody when they do that. That's why we came up with this. It turns out there's a very robust market for this product. You will see us deploying these things internationally with bikes and with our own app, as well as just selling the product to people very shortly. It's already deployed in the United States and in Europe. In fact, that picture is taken in Europe there. This one I'm very proud of. This is called BeamWell.
We developed this product actually for NGOs in Gaza who contacted us and told us that they have no water and no electricity and no means to deliver food, water, or medicines to people who need them. This is a combination of four highly ruggedized electric mopeds here for the delivery of the medicines and the food. We're turning sunlight into electricity, storing it in our onboard batteries here. Very importantly, this is a desalination plant. We're able to take salt water, brackish water, or dirty water and turn it into clean drinking water. Gaza does not have a water problem. It has a salt problem, surrounded by, it has the sea all down one side. Even the wells in Gaza are full of brackish water. We can take that water and turn it into clean and fresh drinking water. In fact, I'm very proud of this.
Just yesterday, this is a deployment with the Royal Jordanian Armed Forces. The Jordanians and the Hashemites are some of the only people who can get anything into Gaza at the moment. Standing there, look at the two glasses. The glass on the left is the water that we brought into BeamWell. The glass on the right is the water that people can drink immediately after it's come out of BeamWell. This is a product that we developed largely for war zones. Unhappily, the world is delivering lots of those to us at the moment. It's also an excellent post-hurricane product. It's another one of the sort of things that the Department of Homeland Security is very interested in. When you have a hurricane, you lose electricity. You often lose groundwater, too, because of saltwater surge and all that. We can solve that problem by desalinating.
It's deployed in an hour. It arrives in a 20 ft shipping container. One hour later, you have electricity, you have mobility, and you have fresh water as well. Absolutely unique and patented product. BeamPatrol. This is for law enforcement. Lots and lots of police departments around the world are starting to use electric motorcycles because they require no maintenance, no liquid fuels, and they're quiet. You can get up on the bad guys without them knowing you're coming. Imagine how fun it must have been when you were robbing a bank and the Harley Davidsons were coming. You knew you had 15 minutes after you first heard them. No longer with these chaps here. Police departments want electric motorcycles, but they do not want to be integrators. They don't want to develop infrastructure. What we do is we, in one hour, give them the motorcycles.
We have a partnership with Zero, which is an American electric motorcycle company. We give them the motorcycles, the charging infrastructure, and all the fuel that those motorcycles will ever consume without having to go through any construction, electrical work, or anything else. They can operate their fleets with zero unit costs for energy. It's a fantastic tool for both police and particularly for Border Patrol. Finally, Beam Scoot, derivation of the same thing, but just with scooters. This is for facilities and rentals and all sorts of other things. Beam Spot, same technology, just a different form factor. This is a streetlight replacement product to enable curbside charging. In this instance, we're using light wind up here, tracking solar. It's following the sun. All of our products use our patented tracking solution to follow the sun. Gives us about 25% more electricity.
The pole of the streetlight is full of our proprietary batteries and electronics. This allows us to put curbside charging in without doing any major civil works or electrical works or anything else because we're replacing an existing asset with this thing. It's also a disaster preparedness asset because it will continue to provide light and sensors and all sorts of other things, even during a grid failure. Finally, the third leg of our three-legged stool, if you like: electrification of transportation, energy security, and then smart city infrastructure. We are starting to add a lot of intelligence to this type of built infrastructure. I have a lot of metal and energy deployed all over the world.
Now we're starting to add intelligence to that metal and energy, which allows us to gather data and make it available to our customers, whoever they may be, for whatever purpose they may have. It's like the Facebook of built infrastructure, if you like. We know where everybody is. We know if someone screams. We know if there's a gunshot. We know if air is unhelpful and all that sort of stuff. Because we deploy without construction and without electrical work and because we continue to operate during blackouts and brownouts, we're just able to do that far more effectively than anybody else. As I said, in Chicago, we manufacture our own batteries. We bring some really special stuff to that, mostly around thermal management, which is really important.
We get a lot more energy density, and we get a lot more life out of typical battery cells because of the technology that we bring to this. We put batteries in our own products, certainly. We're a big consumer of our batteries. We also put them in all these other things that you can see here. That is a very exciting place to be because the world is not just electrifying, but it's moving to being an untethered electrified world, too, where we're not plugging into the grid anymore. Everything that you own now is battery-powered. We're in the business of providing those batteries. Lots of patents and IP protection, barriers to entry for our competition. That is chiefly the reason that we do this.
In fact, we just put out some good press releases recently about some of the new technology that we've introduced in the battery space, which is very well received by the street. Sometimes people say to us, oh, you're a San Diego headquartered company. No wonder you make a solar-powered electric vehicle charging station. Here are our deployments across the United States. Thousands of these things deployed and lots of them in places like New York City, where, during the winter, the product doesn't work anywhere near as well as it does in San Diego in the summer. It works well enough. We can still charge five police vehicles in New York City every day in the winter from our product because we concentrate on daily range replenishment, not empty, full, empty, full. Nobody with an EV does that.
We just put back the miles that they use each shift with the product. Even in the winter, we're able to do that. Very robust. This is an industry where perfect is the enemy of good. We're not interested in perfect. We're interested in completing the mission for our customers. Our products do that in a really interesting way. What happened here is the right question for an investor to ask. The simple thing is an election. The truth of the matter is, up till this point, 50%, 60%, sometimes 70% of our revenues are coming from federal government customers. I can tell you that today, none of them are. The administration is not keen on electric vehicles. The administration is not keen on renewables. I think that they're wrong. I think that they're wasting four years of American leadership. That is politics, not what you're here to listen to.
The simple fact of the matter is that we have had to respond, having built a machine that could get this type of growth and get that much product out of the doors. We've had to respond to that. We're doing so. Our growth in commercial sales, our growth in municipal and state sales is replacing everything that we lost with federal. The international growth that we have now will far outstrip it moving into the future, in my opinion. The U.S. will come back as soon as these silly ideas about electric vehicles are behind us. It will come back with greater urgency. Frankly, urgency is good for our business. While our revenues were dropping down, look what happened to our gross profits. That shows the discipline of the company, even with less product running through, so a greater impact from overhead allocations.
We are still dramatically improving our gross profits, and you will see us continue to do that. That work will never end, as far as I'm concerned. We have great products, great demand for the products, and increasingly very good growth as well. That makes our reliance on anything other than the cash that we have in the bank almost nonexistent, which is a great place to be. A couple of other good metrics here. No going concern, obviously. I just sort of covered that. Improving gross profitability. Take a look at our balance sheet and our cap table. Very, very clean. Very low number of shares outstanding. I have tremendous discipline where cash and equity is concerned, and that's reflected in these numbers here. No debt. A $100 million line of credit priced at SOFR + 300 basis points.
A number of shares outstanding, which is less than a tenth of our nearest sort of peers in the industry. Why does that matter? EPS, folks, remember that? That used to be an important metric. I think it comes back to being an important metric in the future. We have far fewer S into which to divide our E than anybody else does out there. That just makes us a great value from a point of view of EPS. Made a couple of acquisitions over the last couple of years. Bought a battery company in 2022. This was a spin-out of CIT, and that's the battery company I was already talking to you about. I grew us into Europe through the two acquisitions in Serbia, which, as I've already said, were fantastic for us. That's both of them that you can see there.
We do put out a fair amount of media coverage, but we don't put out fluff. We're publicly traded. It's important that we get our story out to people, and so we're working hard to do that. You won't see us releasing anything other than new patents and that sort of thing. This is just kind of good. Back to the sort of military applications of this, particularly in this country. Although the federal government's not buying from us anymore, I can tell you that our customers, the Marine Corps and the Army, the Pentagon, Space Force, all of them love the product because it's served them really well. This is an instance of where we're powering a future war-fighting exercise with the U.S. Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton, just up the road from here. In this instance, everything in this exercise was electric.
No liquid fuels allowed at the front. You're talking about robots, drones, vehicles, and all sorts of other stuff. We powered all of it. We deployed in environments out in the middle of nowhere, less than an hour deployed. Our products have no heat signature. They make no noise, and they don't require any maintenance or liquid fuels or anything like that. Just from a targetability point of view, they're very powerful. You are going to see us releasing our drone recharging product, BeamFlight, which is a patented product that we've had for a couple of years. You're going to see us using that type of technology for the same reasons. No liquid fuels, rapidly deployed, highly scalable infrastructure. By the way, we're also very proud of the fact that we hire a lot of veterans.
Our San Diego facility is just about 2 mi away from MCAS, Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, Miramar. They take the uniforms off there, and they come and they work for us in our facility. We're bloody proud to have them, honestly. Just something else. Some of you may have gathered that I'm not from Idaho, just listening to me talking. As it happens, the British Army is also a customer of ours. We're deployed in Cyprus there, but I didn't introduce them to the company. In fact, the U.S. Marine Corps did. U.S. Marine Corps brought the British Army to us. They do a lot of technology sharing, brought them to us, and as a result, we're now deploying in British overseas bases, which are not as numerous as American ones. There's still a few of them left. Here's a smattering of our customers.
We don't give anything away, and that's really important to know. We do offer some discounts for very large orders, but they're 1 or 2 percentage points. When you're looking at these customers, don't think, oh, we did something special to get them. Nothing but the quality of the product sold these deals. It wasn't my charm. We have a great sales team and an expanding sales team. It even frankly wasn't that. The simple fact of the matter is we have no competition at the product level. We do compete with an ecosystem of contractors and electrical workers and all sorts of other people that put grid-tied stuff in. There's no directly competing product. Although there are some people copying it in other parts of the world. I bet you can guess where. No directly competing stuff.
New York City, in fact, when we closed the New York City deal back in 2015, New York told me, you should give us your product. I said, now, why would I do that? They said, because we're the biggest brand in the world. If you win us, you can make it in New York. You can make it anywhere. I said, I'll tell you what I'll do. If you find a competing product, I'll look at pricing with you. Otherwise, you pay full retail. They've been paying full retail ever since. We're delighted to have them as an excellent customer. I won't bore you with the leadership team, except to say that they're all very well qualified. I'm delighted to have them. All very talented people. This is our European leadership team and also fantastic. I made that acquisition in Serbia.
Just give you a couple of pointers on that. The economics in my facilities in Serbia, which are 5x larger than my facilities in the United States, I can manufacture my product in Serbia and ship it to San Diego cheaper than I can manufacture it in San Diego and ship it to San Diego. That just gives you an indication of what the economics are like over there and why we're expanding so dramatically there. Beyond that, when I made that acquisition, I picked up 35 advanced degree engineers who speak English better than I do. I'm paying them less than I'm paying welders in San Diego. That's such as operating a global company. I'm a fan of globalism. It's pretty good, actually. It's done the world really well. Then the board.
There's me and two Americans and then a Greek giving us a footprint in Europe as well. There you go. With one minute and 34 seconds before my time is up, I'm available to you for questions if you have any. Yes, sir.
How did you fund those acquisitions? Was it through cash flow from a company, or a bank, or an equity grant?
Yes. The question is, how do I fund the acquisitions? The first thing I will tell you is that nobody who's ever done an M&A deal with me would accuse me of being easy to get along with. Having said that, I do craft what I think are very good deals. I encourage you to take a look at them. Look them up. The answer to your question is, it's a combination. Sometimes we use all equity. Sometimes it's a combination of equity and cash. I'm not adverse to doing all debt either at the moment. That's particularly true because our stock price has taken a beating, as many others have in our space. I know that some people tend to separate equity and cash and view them differently. I don't. That's why I only have such a small number of shares outstanding.
I'm pretty careful with both and view them the same way. Some of it comes down to negotiation, and some of it just comes down to where I feel the share price is. For example, if I'm very confident that the share price is going to appreciate well next year because of certain things that I know are coming down the pipe, I'm likely to do a debt-based deal and then take out the deal with equity better priced in the future. Yes, sir.
Your business model, how you're generating revenue?
Yes.
Can you explain that? Is there recurring revenue?
Yes. Almost all the revenues that we have generated to date have been simple capital purchases on the part of our customers. You're looking at, we sell a product, we get paid, and we always get paid. We have no bad debt. Having said that, we are now introducing new recurring revenue models. We have a sponsorship model now where we will deploy our EV charging infrastructure. It stays on our balance sheet, and we give the charging away for free. It's fantastic. You drive on sunshine for free. We don't pay any rent in the locations that we are because of the amenity value that we deliver there. We just have that piece of that capital lump to take down. The way we do that is with sponsorship.
We allow others, large corporations, to come and put their branding on it and to name the driving on sunshine network brought to you by your friends at. It turns out that makes a lot of sense for them. It's cheaper than a billboard and a lot more popular. It makes a great deal of sense for us, too. It's very, very profitable for us. That's a great new recurring revenue business stream that you'll see. You will also see us increasingly starting to offer our products as a service or as a financed product. The service part, I like it the best, of course, for some of them because we can offer energy, disaster preparedness, charging, and all sorts of other things in a single bundle.
We're single invoice, single throat to choke, if you like, where they would normally need to gather together a lot of different vendors to solve that problem. Other products that we have, like Beam Bike, for example, you will see us start to retain some of that infrastructure as well. In certain locations, you're not going to see me trying to compete with LimeBike and all that sort of stuff. I have some very good locations globally where we'll be the only show in town. From that, you'll see us taking revenue as well. The forecast, looking at data in the market, tells us that that will be much more profitable than selling the product as well.
How long have the oldest units been out?
Thank you for asking that question. Outside my office in San Diego, I have unit 003. I also have 007. No prizes for guessing why I kept that one. 003, I built and deployed that product in 2011. At the time, I thought, five years, going to have to go in there and do some major stuff, batteries and everything like that. Unit 003, it's been beaten up by that because we moved it around a lot. We used it as a demo, and we rented it to Fiat for a while and all sorts of stuff like that. Unit 003 has been operating now for almost 15 years. No appreciable degradation to its performance. It's still generating and storing electricity the way it did back in the beginning of 2011 when we first deployed it, which is fantastic.
Part of the reason for that, by the way, is because we don't save money on our BOM. We buy the highest quality materials that we can buy. We buy the highest quality solar modules, the highest quality German gears for our tracking. Anything that we don't make in-house, and we make most of it in-house, but anything that we don't make in-house, we buy the most expensive stuff that we can. That is negatively impactful on your gross when you deploy. It adds positive impact to your gross when you don't have warranty costs, and particularly if you sell long-term service plans, which we do as well. We charge for the service plan, and then we hope we're like the Maytag repairman. We just never show up, right? That goes straight to the bottom line. It's a good discipline, one that I learned early in life.
Don't save money on the BOM. Make it on warranty and service costs and reputation. Yes, Brian.
Beam Middle East , is that a 50/50 joint venture?
Yes, it is. Yes. Thank you for asking that question. Beam Middle East with Platinum Group is a 50/50 joint venture. Why am I proud of that? Because they've never done it before. Normally, they do 70/30, where they get the 70. The operating company that comes in gets the 30. They have done one or two 60/40s. They have never before done a 50/50. As I said, I'm not the easiest guy to get along with when I do these types of deals. The result of that is if you hang in there long enough and if you have a good enough quality product that they want badly enough, you get what you want.
With regard to that, then, is their pipeline included in yours? You said you have a $200 million pipeline. Is any of that coming from that joint venture now?
Nothing in the $200 million pipeline I showed you on that slide is coming from the Middle East. Everything in the Middle East is offsite. I would be a fool if I told you that I knew what that was going to be, and even a bigger fool if I told you if I knew when that was going to be, right? I am very confident of this. I have spent a lot of years over there. I know what they like. I know what they want. I know what they need. We produce it.
How long?
You obviously don't know me very well. Jesus. OK, yes, sir. I think we've got time for one more. Yes.
You have no competitors, you?
Look, everybody has competitors, right? I don't have any direct product competition that isn't a direct knockoff of ours. They're knocking off our product in China, just in the interest of full disclosure, right? They even take the language off our website and everything. It's charming in a way. One feels like one's arrived when that happens, right? We have no direct product competition. What are we competing with? We're competing with that ecosystem of general contractors, electrical contractors, and other service providers who, frankly, most of our customers would rather get their teeth cleaned than engage those. Not that there's anything wrong with those people. It's just that nobody wants to walk contractors through their parking lots and dig trenches and do all that stuff. We save them all of that. We don't have to do any of that. I got to stop on that.
Thank you all very much.