Great. I'm Bill Rossi. I'm the CMO of Enphase Energy, and I wanted to welcome all of you today here. Early morning, I realized you can kind of get up before the show opens at 9 So I appreciate that you did. And those of you that have flown from faraway places to be with us today, I appreciate that as well.
Welcome. The agenda today is to have Paul Mahy, our CEO, come up and talk about our 4th generation microinverter system announcement, which we're really excited about. That'll take us until about 8:30. Then we'll open it up for questions from the audience. And we expect to end just about 8:45.
Myself and Chris, our CFO, and Paul will be around after the session today. So if you have any questions, you want to speak with either one of us, we'll be here to answer any questions. Just a reminder, we're a public company, so we won't be making any forward looking statements that will affect our financials. With that, I'll hand it over to Paul Nahee, our CEO.
Thank you. Good morning. For those of you who are here from out of town, welcome. My name is Paul Naughey and I am the President and CEO of Enphase Energy. And I am absolutely thrilled to be able to talk to you about our next generation, our 4th generation generation technology, the next microinverter system.
But before I do, before we go into details on the next generation product, I thought I'd give take a few minutes to give you an update and remind you as to who we are and what we're doing. So Enphase pioneered the concept of a microinverter. In fact, we introduced the 1st microinverter back in 2,008. Today, we dominate the category and not only do we dominate it, but in fact, we designed this category. And we introduced the category not just as an inverter, but as an inverter system.
And by that, I mean, we don't just have the hardware, but we have the software associated with it. This combination of hardware and software, which has the monitoring and operations and maintenance and service all built in, is the microinverter system. Originally, when we came up with the concept of the microinverter system, we had several key goals in mind. 1st and foremost is that we wanted to make sure that the owner of the system had the highest return on investment possible and we would do that by producing as much energy as that system was able to produce. In addition to that, we wanted to make sure that the installer was able to create the most profitable business he could by simplifying and easing the design, the installation and the maintenance process.
And finally, we want to make sure we had the safest system you can have by eliminating all of the high voltage that's associated with traditional string and microinverters. So if we fast forward to today, Enphase has shipped over 3,000,000 microinverters. We did a little over $200,000,000 in revenue in 2012. Today, we have approximately 400 employees all over the world and that does not include about 500 or so employees on the manufacturing line. We employ a contract manufacturer by the name of Flextronics to do our manufacturing, but Enphase is deeply involved in the manufacturing process.
So we view those 500 people on the manufacturing line as an extension of Enphase employees. We currently have offices in 6 different countries around the world. These are sales, marketing and engineering offices. Today, we have over 100 patents issued or pending and these patents cover everything from power electronics through system design, through software. And we're issuing multiple patents and new patents every single month.
And today, we're shipping in North America, in the U. S, in Canada, in Mexico, across Europe and Australia and continue to expand our reach every day. This next slide is really quite staggering. Today, based on the most recent IHS data, Enphase is the number one residential PV inverter supplier in the Americas with 53.5 percent market share. Thank you.
And we're the number one vendor of single phase PV inverters in the Americas with over 42% market share. Again, these numbers are really staggering. I don't think, certainly not in the period of time that I've been in this industry, any solar companies had this kind of dominance in any one particular market, not just inverters, but across the entire supply chain. It speaks tremendously to a couple of things. 1, I think the quality of the people we have at Enphase to be able to execute at this level.
And 2, it is the most tangible, the most identifiable data yet to prove that there is a rapid and very significant migration away from the traditional string and soundproof inverters to micro inverters. And the reason when you think about it is relatively obvious. We provide better economics to the owner of the system by giving them a better return on investment and we provide better economics to the installer by allowing them to have a more efficient business and in the end we create a safer system. By addressing the multiple constituencies in the sales chain, we've seen these kind of numbers. Now remember, when we talk about a microinverter system, we're talking about the hardware and the software.
It is collectively the microinverter. When we talk about the software and the monitoring, GTM Research just came out with a report stating that we are that Enphase is the number one monitoring provider globally amongst power electronic vendors in the PV markets, the number one monitoring provider in the residential PV market segment and the number one monitoring provider for the entire North American PV market. Again, a stunning set of numbers. Enphase day by day continues to prove its dominance in this space and a space again not only that we're playing in, but a space that we created. The concept of per module monitoring didn't exist prior to Enphase.
And today, it's the most prevalent, the most dominant form of monitoring in the PV industry across the world. There's a recognition that a PV system, sitting by itself, either ground mount or on a roof, does need attention. There are products there. There are elements to it that are going to need attention over a period of time. And there's no way to know what's actually occurring without the level of granularity that we can provide.
What's especially stunning about this is the level of technology required to make this happen. In order to be able to monitor a system at the level of granularity we monitor it, requires number 1, a communications technology that allows us to extract the data from all of the inverters and then send that data and that data by the way is not just about the inverter itself, it could be about the inverter, about the module, about the grid, about the entire system. We extract that data regularly and send it to our data center. The ability to do that requires a very unique and proprietary communication technology that sends that data over the existing power line inside of a building. So there's no extra wires and it's as quick and simple as possible for the installer to install.
Now we're collecting that data and that data is being sent to our data center as I said and we're collecting somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 gigabytes of data every day. And we manage terabytes of data. We collect the data. We analyze it. We visualize it, we report on it and we have to do this for every system that every Enphase system around the world almost instantaneously.
That big data management is also a separate and unique technology that requires its own set of engineers in development. But by having the combination of the PowerLine communication and the big data management along with the inverter and by making all of this work seamlessly together, we're able to provide the level of monitoring that's not only unprecedented in the solar industry, it's clearly in tremendous demand. So now, I get to introduce the 4th generation inverter and I feel very privileged to do this. This is obviously a huge team effort with the entire amazing cast and crew at Enphase. And for those of you who are familiar with the Enphase system, these elements are going to look very familiar.
Number 1, there's the M250 microinverter itself. There's the Enlighten software platform. This is the monitoring that I was just talking about. And finally, there's the Envoy communications gateway. That's the device that facilitates the data acquisition from the inverter and then sends it to our data center.
These individual elements are what constitute the microinverter system and each of these elements is unique and distinct That is they have their separate engineering teams, they have their separate roadmaps, they're operating at different schedules, but they all work harmoniously together to provide a very simple, comprehensive, holistic solution to the installer or the owner. So we're going to start with the M250. So the M250 delivers 2 50 watts of peak power. This allows us to support modules up to 300 watts. Now this is very important.
In fact, Enphase has continuously increased the wattage of each microinverter in every subsequent generation. We started at 175 watts, then we went to the M190, then went to the M215 and now to the M250. And we have done that in lockstep with the progression in module power. We do that as a result of a lot of deep discussions with our module partners, so we know where the roadmaps are going. It's very important that we don't deliver either too much or too little.
If we develop a microinverter that has too much power, that forces the installer to pay for watts he's never going to use. Obviously, delivering a microinverter with not enough power leaves WOS on the table. So providing the right power at the right time is essential to making sure we're providing the best and most cost effective solution to the installer and the owner. At 96.5 percent CEC efficiency, we maintain our position as the highest efficiency microinverter in the world. And efficiency is very important for two reasons.
Number 1, obviously, we extract more power, very critical. That's the addresses the return on investment that we had talked about. But in addition to that, by having a higher efficiency microinverter, we produce less heat within the microinverter and this becomes more and more critical as the power of the microinverter continues to increase. We want to decrease the heat generated within the microinverter and increase the reliability. Of course, we maintain our 25 year warranty.
And as we were talking about before, one of the key initiatives, one of the key goals of the microinverter is to make the installer's life that much simpler and that much easier. This next feature does that in a very big way. It's called integrated ground. To date, if somebody had to install a microinverter system, what they would do is take a copper wire and have to string it continuously from microinverter to microinverter in order to provide the ground to the system. However, with the M250, with our integrated ground, that is no longer necessary.
The an array that has an M250 now counts as an ungrounded array, which means that the grounding wire that used to be required is no longer required. This saves obviously both time and money. Clearly, the installer doesn't have to purchase the copper wire anymore and more importantly, he doesn't have to take the time to string the copper wire on the array. Now installing a microinverter is as simple as bolting it down to the rack and plugging it in. We are very excited about this and our installers are extremely excited about this.
Enlighten has really been and become an incredibly popular and incredibly powerful tool. In fact, it's become so important for certain companies that they've built their companies around nLIGHTEN. And nLIGHTEN itself has grown to support multiple constituencies, not just the owner of the system, but the installer or the financing partner as well. And in fact, the needs of the owner are distinctly different from the needs of an installer or a financing partner. As a result, what we've done is basically bifurcated Enlighten into 2 distinct products.
One is focused at the owner of a system, another is focused at the financing provider or the installer for a system. MyEnlighten, which is what the owner of a system will see, provides sort of the familiar energy production level data that our customers are used to. It enables people to compare current performance against previous performance. It gives them the ability to look at historical data to be able to determine how the system is performing if normalized for weather. And we have a full connection, one button click with social media, Facebook and the like.
In addition to that, we have what's called Enlighten Manager. Now Enlighten Manager is geared very specifically for the solar professional, whether it's a financing provider or whether it's the installer. So the installer or financing provider wants detailed performance data, data that may be far more too in the weeds for the owner of a system. In order to manage their return on investment to manage their assets, they're going to want to compare the actual system performance against things like PVWatts. And in order to be able to schedule O and M properly, they want to be able to view what's going on with the system either in graphs or in maps.
Remember, we only we don't only detect whether there's something going on with the inverter. We detect if there's something going on with the module. We detect if there's something going on with the system. We can detect if there's something going on with the grid, any one of which may require attention, modification or simple maintenance. And finally, we have multiple customers who use Enlighten for billing.
They either pull the data directly out of Enlighten or with a via or with a special API pull the data into their billing system. In either case, Enlighten Manager now very robustly supports the generation and transmission of billing data. The Envoy communications gateway is deceptively simple. We talked about the fact that it is critical to be able to get the data from the inverter and that's done with the Envoy. The new Envoy has our next generation of communication technology.
This technology, which there are a group of engineers within Enphase that are dedicated to nothing but the development of this technology, is in fact embedded in our semiconductor, embedded in our chip. And by improving the quality of that communication, we simplified the job continuously for the installer to make it easier and faster for them to be in and out of a site. Obviously, the Envoy supports both residential and commercial obviously for commercial applications. Reliability and service are 2 elements that we are incredibly proud of at Enphase. Great reliability starts with design and in our case, a very advanced semiconductor technology.
We have a very robust and sophisticated semiconductor design team. We in fact have far and away the most sophisticated power electronics semiconductor in the world, which embeds not only the control for the microinverter itself, but all of our communications technology, as I just mentioned. Now by doing this, it allows us deeper insight into the microinverter to be able to manage and control it. And in addition, by having a semiconductor design team, we're continuously integrating different elements of the inverter into the chip. This reduces the part count, reduces the size, reduces the cost and increases the reliability.
Our product verification and quality group will not release a product unless it passes 1,000,000 unit hours of very rigorous, very stressful testing. Without that, we don't ship. And this testing is actually borne out of the testing environment is born out of years years of experience. In fact, Enphase has an unprecedented level of field experience and data collection. Clearly having shipped millions of units since 2,008, Enphase has more experience with microinverters than the rest of the industry combined.
But in addition to that, because of our monitoring, we know what's happening at each and every microinverter across the world in real time. This allows us to constantly analyze these inverters and feed that data back through product verification into engineering to continuously refine and enhance and improve our next generation products. This is a very unique characteristic of Enphase and it's a characteristic that we've been able to exploit tremendously to our benefit. And of course, we have the 1st class, the best in class field application and customer support. And when I say best in class, I'm not talking about the solar industry, I'm talking about the tech industry.
We continuously receive accolades congratulating us on the quality of people and the quality of support that they receive from Enphase. So finally, in terms of availability, the M250, the next generation software, the next generation Envoy will be available in North America in September of this year coming up, available in Europe and Australia in 2014. Clearly, all the data you need, the data sheets, white papers and everything else is available on enphase.com. And today at 9 am and 1 pm in the Yerba Buena Room, there'll be a training session on it. So we are clearly thrilled and excited at our next generation product.
It does exactly what we had hoped it to do in terms of pushing the envelope forward on technology, providing a better return on investment for the owner, providing an easier, simpler installation process for the installer. And I think that the market share numbers that I shown to you demonstrate the excitement that the solar industry has towards Enphase and towards our products. So with that, I'd like to thank you all for coming and now open up the floor to questions and Christine has a mic in back that she will hand you. So if you could just raise your hand.
Good morning, Paul. My name is Ron Zagari. I'm a private investor. You talked you touched on the labor savings for the installer by eliminating the system ground requirement. That makes me wonder why the installer would even want to go on the roof to install the microinverter versus attaching it to the panel on the ground?
And I guess a related question, there's a lot of confusion about what an AC panel is these days. And you seem to have blurred that distinction even more. And I'm wondering if you're looking at relationships where the microburger is installed at the factory?
So that's a great question. In fact, we do have multiple customers who will do exactly that. They will attach the microinverter to the module in the ground and then bring it up to the roof. So that actually is happening today with Enphase. In addition to that, we are working with multiple companies to produce a microinverter sorry, an AC module.
In fact, Phono Solar is selling an AC module with their module and our microinverter that is attached to their module in their factory. In addition, we're working with multiple module manufacturers to provide sort of an AC module kit, which is a microinverter with a module that can be attached either on the ground or on the roof. And we have multiple module partners that do that with. So your the assessment that there's a blurry line and not a hard definition of an AC module, I think is exactly accurate. And I think that's okay.
I think different installers have different requirements. Some have a process by which they're very comfortable installing it on the roof, others would rather do it on the ground and then move it on the roof, others just want it all attached. The key for us is that it's an Enphase system, it's the Enphase monitoring, it's the Enlighten system. How it's implemented, however the installer wants it implemented, they have an avenue with Enfys. Any other questions?
Cost pressure? Sure. What I can say is that Enphase has historically reduced our price to the field approximately 8% to 10% year over year. We do charge a premium over a central inverter because of the advantages that we offer. We're not seeing any unique or differentiated cost pressure now that we haven't seen in the past.
We've already announced that we've done one cost reduction this year already and we don't afford to announce pricing, but we're not seeing anything unique that's occurring right now. The question was on the cost of the M250. What I can say is that every generation of every new generation of product does several things. It increases performance, it adds features and it reduces cost. And it reduces cost through a number of different methods, one of which is semiconductor integration and a decrease in component count and there are other things as well.
So this has the M250 is following the exact same pattern that we've seen in the past and the exact same pattern that we expect to see in the future for the next several years. It's important to remember that we're still very early in the life cycle of the microinverter. There is a tremendous amount of development that is ongoing. We're announcing our 4th generation right now. Our 5th generation is already up and running in the labs.
It's on roofs and that will be that will also be another exciting announcement that again forwards all of those goals. Eric?
So 53.5 percent market shares tend to go down rather than up, right? I mean, that's a gaudy number. How do you and there are a number of new microinverter entrants at the show this year or alleged entrants into the market as you would put it. What do you see on the competitive side? And I know you're not going to mention them by name, but what do you see on the competitive side?
Sure.
So that we are seeing that we have seen competitive microinverters simply doesn't surprise us. With our market share, as you correctly pointed out, a market this size that's clearly going in the direction of microinverters is not going to go uncontested. We absolutely expect to have formidable, great competition. I can't right now tell you where it's going to come from. It doesn't it's not obvious, but it's very clear that a market a $7,000,000,000 inverter market that's going in the direction of microinverters with our dominance is going to create competition.
And we're okay with that. We think that that's sort of inevitable. As to again, as to who specifically that may be or when they may come out or what impact we're going to have, it's impossible for me to say. What I can say is that with the existing entrants in the field, we haven't seen them having a very large impact.