Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining H.C. Wainwright's 27th Annual Investment Conference. On behalf of H.C. Wainwright, it's our pleasure to introduce Mike from Blink.
Great. Thank you very much, and thanks, everybody, for attending today. My name is Mike Battaglia. I'm the President and CEO of Blink Charging. And today, I'd like to provide a bit of an update on the company, where we are currently, where we see ourselves going in the probably short to medium-term environment. So before we jump in, I will start with the safe harbor statement. I promise I will not read it. I will trust that you will either scan it and/or look it up afterwards. And then secondly, the risk factors of the company. And we are still, for all intents and purposes, an early-stage growth company and probably appropriately fall into that categorization. All right, so let's talk a little bit about Blink. We're not a new company. The company has actually been around since 2009.
From 2009 up until 2019, the company generated very little revenue. So as an example, in 2019, the company generated about $2.7 million in revenue. By 2023, we had hit our high point at $140 million. So we really had tremendous growth between, call it, 2019 and 2023. 2024 saw a little bit of a contraction down to about $120 million in revenue. And then I will talk about, in a moment, 2025, how we began the year, where we are currently, and where we see things going. So first of all, Blink is an EV infrastructure company. And we go to market multiple ways. Number one, we sell EV charging hardware and software services to customers across vertical markets. So things like automotive dealers, municipalities, parking garages, electrical distributors. So if you're familiar with large national electrical distributors like Graybar or Rexel, companies like that are partners of Blink.
We sell both Level 2 and DC Fast Charging hardware through those channels. Secondly, we support, and what that means is that we manage charging stations. So if someone were to purchase a charging station from Blink, we offer the software and services that layer on top of those stations, and we generate revenue largely on a subscription basis for things like software, cloud-based software network services. Then the third piece of the business, which is really what we feel the most valuable piece of the business, is that we own and operate charging stations. So currently, about 65% of our revenue is generated from selling hardware and associated services, and about 35% comes from owning and operating charging stations. We currently own and operate about 7,000 charging stations globally. That's principally within the United States, as well as the U.K. and Belgium.
Those are our two strongest markets within Europe. Now, that 65/35 split that I talked about, over the medium to long term, we would like to see that completely flip. The value of the business is in the owner-operator model. It is within the recurring revenues that occur from consumers using publicly accessible charging stations, where they, we like to say, live, work, and play. So we don't do much in the consumer space. So don't think of Blink as somebody that provides a bunch of charging stations to garages, like somebody's personal garage, let's say. But a nuance to that is that we do do quite a bit, for instance, in the multifamily apartment building space. Okay? So that's how we think of the home market. We are currently the third largest EV charging network in the United States.
You've probably heard of companies like Tesla, perhaps ChargePoint. We are third behind those two companies. That is according to the U.S. Department of Energy. That encompasses both what we call AC Level 2 charging stations as well as DC fast charging stations. As those stations are connected to a publicly accessible network or semi-public network, that gets counted in that number. Then, as I mentioned, we have a significant presence in Europe as well. We have international diversification within the organization. Oh, there we go. Oop. Okay. No. Try it one more time. Got a bit of a lag. Can you guys advance me? Keep going. Right here. Thanks.
So we often get asked, "What's your target market for EV charging?" And in some ways, it's a difficult question to answer because there is an expression within the industry of every parking space is an opportunity. So in other words, it can be very vertical agnostic. But there are certainly areas where we play that make up a significant portion of our revenue and where we have a lot of corporate focus. And those are things like fleets. So the largest contract in the company's history was with the United States Postal Service, where we provide charging stations and associated network services for their fleets that they're going to deploy as they electrify across the country. I mentioned multifamily, so apartment buildings. I think the statistic is that 30% of all Americans live in an apartment complex. They often don't have access to charging in those buildings.
We more and more are providing charging hardware and software within those facilities. Hospitality, things like hotels. Commercial is kind of all-encompassing, but think of things like shopping centers. Workplace is another big market for us. Government in terms of municipalities. Not necessarily the NEVI program for Blink. We never really went after the NEVI program in any material way. We do a lot of business with local municipalities, cities, states. We have multiple state contracts across the country. We leverage those for EV charging infrastructure. We are also very strong in the automotive segment. Several of us at Blink come from automotive backgrounds, have spent our careers within the automotive industry. If you think about automotive OEMs, whether it be a Ford, a General Motors, whoever it might be, they have dealer networks, typically thousands of dealers.
And as they bring electric vehicles to market, they need those dealers to be ready to sell those vehicles. And so those dealers are installing EV infrastructure. That was a big part of our business in 2023, not so much in 2024. And we see some business continuing into 2025 and actually getting a bit stronger in the second half of the year in that segment. Okay. So I've been with Blink for five and a half years. I took over as President and CEO February 1st, technically. It was actually a very measured transition. It was actually announced in July of 2024. So there was kind of a nice transitionary period until February until I took the role. Now, when I took the role, there were a few things that I wanted to accomplish. And number one, it was how to get this company to profitability.
There is currently not an EV infrastructure company in the U.S. that is publicly traded that is profitable. And that's a problem. And it's a problem not only for us as a company, but it's obviously a problem for investors. And when investors are looking at Blink and they look at our balance sheet, they look at our track record, our history, they want to know when we are going to achieve profitability. So first and foremost, it was how do we get this company to profitability? And I felt like at that point in time, we needed a plan. And to execute that plan, we needed a new management team. So beginning in February, I hired a new head of sales, and his name is Chris Carr. He's highlighted up on the slide.
What was interesting about the timing of that is that our first quarter in 2025 was our low point. We did about just over $20 million in revenue. We considered that to be totally unacceptable for not only our historical performance, but also for where we wanted to be as a company and where we needed to be going forward. Chris came on board again in February. On the first quarter conference call, I talked about our expectation that the second quarter was going to be better than the first quarter. It was. Our second quarter revenue was up 38%. All segments of our business were up double digits. We delivered on that. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. The second hire was a new Chief Financial Officer. Michael Bercovich has extensive experience in turnaround situations, restructuring.
He's made a couple of exits successfully with some startup companies, etc., and I had interviewed a number of people for this role and really felt like I found the guy when I had hired Michael Bercovich, and he's been on board for about 60 days now, and I can tell you, I sleep well at night with Michael Bercovich as our Chief Financial Officer. He is extremely operationally focused. He is relentlessly pursuing cost reductions at the company, and that was a core tenet of what I wanted to accomplish. It was clear that the company needed to reduce its operating expense base. We've made progress over the last 18 months or so, but not enough, not enough, and not fast enough, and in the last few months, we have accelerated those efforts, and we have more to go, so Michael Bercovich came on board.
Then, similarly, I wanted a fresh set of eyes and thinking within the CTO ranks and came across a guy named Harmeet Singh. And Harmeet is unique. He actually was one of the founders at a company called Greenlots, which was one of the original EV charging software networks that were founded in the industry, grew that. That was acquired by Shell. And he ran all product for Shell Recharge while he was there. And then he left, and he actually started his own EV charging company called Zometric. And as I was interviewing Harmeet, I definitely wanted him on board. But the problem was he owned an EV charging company. And I'll talk about this a little bit more. But as we peel back the onion on that company, we realized it was a perfect fit for Blink. So in some respects, I got a twofer.
We have a new CTO on board who is highly talented, and we were able to absorb Harmeet's company into Blink, which is working out extremely well, so let's talk a little bit about Q2, so as I mentioned, we did about $20 million in Q1. In the second quarter, up 38% sequentially to $28.7 million. The year-over-year comp was still negative, so if we look at the second quarter of 2024 versus 2025, we were still down a bit if we look at it that way, but what we were really concentrating on is where was the bottom in the business as it relates, especially to not just Blink, but also the market in general had had some difficulties, let's say, over the last six, seven months prior to that, and so we feel like we found that in the first quarter, improved things in the second quarter.
Now, you'll see the $2.1 million in gross profit and 7.3% gross margins. Blink historically has been between 30%-35% gross margin. We took some charges in the second quarter specifically related to obsolete inventory adjustments, accounts receivable write-down, write-off, things like that, to the tune of about $6.4 million. Again, non-cash. If you on a non-GAAP basis, the margins would have been just about 30%. So within the range of historical numbers. Our service revenues were $11.8 million. That was a record. They continue to increase quarter over quarter at double-digit growth rates. So year-over-year, we were actually up 46%. Sequentially, from the first quarter to the second quarter, we were up 11%. So sequentially up 11%, year-over-year up 46%. And we've had similar type increases in quarters past, and we anticipate strong performance in that segment going forward. And that largely includes our owner-operator revenue.
As we own and operate charging stations, network fees made up $3 million in the quarter, up 55% year-over-year. So again, when someone buys a charging station, if they sign up for the subscription of network services, which enables them to manage their charging stations, it enables them to enable payment at those charging stations. That is what that $3 million in network revenue entails. And then 49 gigawatt hours went through all Blink networks globally. So that's the amount of energy that went through those networks in the second quarter. And that was up 66% year-over-year. So again, strong growth in terms of energy disbursement. Now, this is largely what I talked about on the right side. As you see the bar graph, that is our charging services revenue growing from, you can see, $8 million in 2024 in the second quarter of 2024 up to 11.8 today.
But again, that segment of the business is what we feel like is the real value at Blink and what needs to grow significantly. So part of the Blink forward plan that I mentioned that talked about profitability, one of the key tenets of that is for Blink to grow its DC fast charging network. It's owned and operated fast charging network. And if you look at Blink's portfolio, we have about 7,000 stations, roughly, we own and operate globally, but only 250 of those are DC fast chargers. The rest of them are level two charging stations. So as we have added DC fast chargers and we have seen the contribution of revenue and the growth that those have provided, we quickly realized that that is where we want to concentrate our efforts from this point forward. It doesn't mean we won't do Level 2 . We absolutely will.
But when it comes to CapEx deployment, we're going to be focusing that CapEx deployment more on the DC fast charging side. 56% year-over-year growth in charging revenue. Again, small base, but over 300% revenue growth in our DC fast charging network. We currently have a very large backlog of DC fast charging projects that we could deploy. But we finished the second quarter with $25 million in cash. So we have scaled back on those CapEx deployments until additional capital can be brought into the company that is specifically focused on that. All right. Now, in terms of operating expense reduction, we are turning over every stone in this company in order to get it to profitability. We year-over-year saw a 22% reduction in compensation expense. I think we're going to see further reductions in that side.
We also eliminated $8 million on an annualized basis of operating expenses in the second quarter. Just in that quarter, $8 million on an annualized basis in operating expense reduction. But this isn't just about reducing headcount. This is a company that is looking at every single area of the company, turning over every stone to find cost savings, to find efficiencies, and the mantra of the company becoming doing less with more. We do not think that a lower expense structure is mutually exclusive or dependent mutually exclusive from growth. We think we can lower operating expenses, become a more efficient organization, and continue to grow our top line. And again, that is the path to us eventually getting to profitability.
One of the interesting recent developments we just announced last week is we are now, by the end of the year, we will be accepting crypto payments through the Blink Network. So why did we do this? Well, it was really for a couple of reasons. Number one is we want to become a company that makes it as easy as possible for a consumer to pay for a charging session on a Blink charger, regardless of the method of payment that they use. So obviously, common forms of payment are credit cards or the Blink Mobile App. But these emerging payments, these emerging payment streams, especially within the crypto space, are growing, and we want to be there at the leading edge of that and see that grow over time. It's not just going to be about crypto.
It's going to be about enabling other payment methods so that it allows consumers to pay for their charging session however they want to pay for it. But again, we think this is an interesting development, and this should be live by the end of the year on the Blink Network. Secondly, there was a bit of a, I'll call it a cloud hanging over Blink, which was that we had a $21 million obligation on our balance sheet stemming from the acquisition of an EV car-sharing company called Envoy that we had acquired about two and a half years ago. And the provision of this $21 million was that we could satisfy it either in cash or in stock. We certainly did not want to satisfy it in cash.
We came to an agreement with the former shareholders of Envoy where 10 million of stock was issued immediately. The other 11 million to make up the total 21 was issued in a series of warrants that get triggered at different stock price achievements. Again, above where we are today. There's one, I think, at $1.40, and then it ratchets up into the twos, and then ultimately, I think, in the $4 million range. Where we had this $21 million obligation, we had 10 million issued immediately and then 11 million over time in the form of warrants with stock price achievements. This removed that liability from our balance sheet, and Blink is debt-free. This was a significant development for us, which we were glad to close. I talked a little bit about Zometric.
And on the second quarter call, we were asked quite a bit about Zometric. And first of all, Zometric was a small acquisition for Blink. It's really quite a small company. But what they brought to us in the form of a product is that we were working on a lower-cost charger that was specifically designed for apartment buildings, fleets, things like that. And we were handling that internally. And that development process was going to cost money. It was going to take time. And it was probably an end-of-year to first-quarter launch of that product. And as I was talking to Harmeet and as we looked at Zometric, their product was essentially ready to go. So we decided to accelerate that process to bring that product to market faster. And it was exactly what we were working on.
Then we could forego those development costs and get to market quicker. They also brought with them some interesting software capabilities that we believe we can leverage and a very small team. It was 13 people in total. We got three very, very talented people at leadership levels in Harmeet, and a woman named Bonnie Datta, who is now going to run global operations for Blink, and Kapil Singhi, who is going to run hardware development for us as well with our teams in India. The integration has been extremely fast, I think faster than any of us would have ever expected. We're happy with the results. Another thing that we're working on is an SPV, off-balance sheet special purpose vehicle, with a private equity firm in the U.K. called Avolt. This is previously announced.
We can actually, it's set up for at most GBP 100 million. And this is in conjunction with Blink, specifically with the U.K. government's LEVI program. So the LEVI program is similar to the U.S.'s NEVI program, if you're familiar with it. But the government provides a subsidy to install EV charging stations in municipalities throughout the country. So the assets or the projects will be built within this SPV with Avolt. Blink will manage them, and we will also receive a small revenue share. And we've already begun this process with Avolt. And we would like to do more of this type of financial structure in the future here in the United States. So that's the story at the moment. A lot of interesting updates, a lot going on in the last six months. Bottom line is we've done a lot in the last six months.
We still have a lot to do. We finished the second quarter with $25 million in cash. We anticipate needing more as things go on. But again, the company's focus is to get us to profitability as fast as we can to manage those operating expenses appropriately and to take advantage of the market that we see as significant in front of us. So I'm happy to.