Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Energy Recovery's Virtual Investor Day. We are thrilled you took the time to join us today. My name is Lionel McBee, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Energy Recovery. Please note you'll find a copy of the team's presentations today on the Investor section of our website. T oday marks an important opportunity for us to share our vision, strategy, and expectations as we continue on our journey of growth and innovation. We are excited to share with you insights into our business, our market positioning, and how we plan to drive value for our shareholders. We have an exciting agenda planned for you. I am joined today by several members of our executive team: President and Chief Executive Officer David Moon, our Chief Financial Officer Mike Mancini, our VP of Water, Rodney Clemente, and VP of CO2, Ricardo Freitas.
Following the team's presentations, we will also hold a Q&A session. As we reflect on the year so far, we are proud of what we have accomplished, but we are even more excited about what lies ahead. Our commitment to innovation, market leadership, sustainability, and creating shareholder value remains strong. We believe that the strategies laid out here for you today will position us well in the market. Before we jump into the presentations, first, I would like to take a moment to thank you, our investors, for your continued support of Energy Recovery. Your insights and engagement are invaluable to us, and we look forward to fostering our relationship with you further.
And lastly, a little housekeeping item: I draw your attention to our Safe Harbor Statement on this slide and note that during today's presentation, we may make projections and other forward-looking statements under the Safe Harbor Provisions contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company. For more detail on forward-looking statements, I would refer you to our Form 10-K and 10-Q documents filed with the SEC. These forms may also be found on the Investor section of our website. Once again, thank you for being here today. Let's get started with our first presentation, which will be led by David Moon, our CEO, who will discuss our strategic vision. David.
Thank you, Lionel. Good day, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Before I start the presentation, I want to reflect on what we have accomplished in the last 12 months. We have rebuilt the leadership team, reinforced innovation with the launch of our second-generation PX G and a wastewater low-pressure PX, achieved two critical milestones, and started playbook execution with our manufacturing transformation and cost reset. I am proud of what we've accomplished. We are well on our way. Let's talk about what we want to accomplish today. We want to share the results of our playbook work, update you on the forward-looking guidance and long-term targets, introduce the key enablers that will allow us to execute our strategy, and detail our execution strategy for our three business units.
We've developed a playbook that is an ambitious but achievable blueprint for growth and profitability, a balance between revenue growth and cost reduction. We will be demonstrating proof points along the way, addressing culture gaps required for alignment and execution, and creating a new organization structure to create even greater accountability. The playbook builds upon our historic strengths, which are our market leadership in ceramic pressure exchangers and tailwinds in high-growth markets. We have the right to win in the pressure exchanger space. Our long track record of innovation in this space, the strong customer response, and our market leadership position are all evidence of us winning. CO2, given we are utilizing the same core Pressure Exchanger technology, becomes a natural market extension for us, an expansion of our core.
Added to this, our selected markets of desalination, wastewater, and CO2 have large TAMs, high growth rates that are one and a half to two times of GDP, and are backed by major environmental and sustainability m egatrends. We will execute our playbook with discipline and profitable growth, transparency, and accountability by a leadership team that will deliver. Therefore, our core markets will continue to be desalination, where we will be fortifying our share and profit position, wastewater, where we will be building upon our wins in China and India with laser focus on five industry verticals, and CO2 refrigeration, where our white paper provides us a step closer to OEM PX G system integration, all three of which are driven by megatrends ranging from population growth to decarbonization.
We have an industry-leading ESG program led by 100% of our revenue, either addressing environmental challenges, reducing emissions, or both, generating approximately $6 billion per year in energy savings for our customers. And we will continue to innovate. This is in our DNA. Ever since our founding in 1992, ERI has been at the forefront of ceramic pressure exchanger development. With our more than two billion hours of field runtime and 140 awarded patents, we will continue to be a leader in ceramic pressure exchangers. Now, as part of the where-to-play phase of the playbook process, we began with a comprehensive market map of opportunities across multiple growth factors, including expanding within pressure exchanger markets, growing with the water and CO2 value chains, and playing in energy recovery more broadly.
Given our deep capabilities in product engineering and precision manufacturing, we determined that continuing in pressure exchanger markets was the trajectory with the highest opportunity for differentiation and value creation. As I said previously, we have the right to win within the pressure exchanger space. Additionally, we reviewed multiple opportunities within pressure exchanger applications and new markets such as heat pumps, data center cooling, ammonia refrigeration, and mine cooling. We determined that the broad areas of water and CO2 present the best opportunity for ERI to gain access to growing markets and favorable macro trends such as water scarcity and decarbonization, and enable value-accretive pricing with highly differentiated products. Other applications will continue to be monitored for opportunity, but will likely take more time to develop. We are targeting to be a $255-$295 million company by 2029. That's a CAGR of 12%-15%.
As I said previously, we will be executing our playbook with transparency and accountability on performance. This not only includes communicating financial targets, but also critical milestones so that you may be able to follow our progress in the short and long term. You should expect the practice of us providing clear milestones to continue so that you may track our progress as we move towards 2020-2029. Now, I want to pause for a moment and review previous targets for 2026 that were originally provided in 2021 and updated as late as 2023. The previous target was $310-$570 million. Our new target is $166-$183 million. There are several reasons for the difference. First, in desalination, we saw approximately $40 million of NPD project pipeline moving out of 2026 into 2027 and 2028.
We remain bullish, as you will see later on our slides, that even with the timing shift, our desalination mega project pipeline is very strong for the next five years. Secondly, as part of our playbook work, we have renewed focus on disciplined profitable growth and therefore are being selective about the sub-markets we are targeting. In wastewater, for example, we have mostly been focused on China and India, building reference cases. That geographic focus, combined with our decision to focus on the five most attractive wastewater verticals, has us growing at a slower pace, but with a greater chance of success. We've also been cautious to hire until we built a strong portfolio of reference cases. As you will see in later slides, we've now done so in China and India and will begin to add resources in 2025.
Finally, for CO2, the market adoption of CO2 refrigeration in the U.S. has been slower than originally expected, but our work over the last few years has given our team a better understanding of the barriers to widespread adoption and the specific channel dynamics in the commercial refrigeration space. This led the company to alter our commercialization strategy with a heightened focus on OEMs rather than the prior focus on end users only. To that end, and in recognition of the requirements of OEM partners, we embarked on our M&V validation process to validate the PX G's value proposition and continued making technological improvements to the PX G. Our new targets now reflect the new commercialization strategy. I would also add that we've only had the second-generation PX G for approximately six months.
Additionally, our CO2 refrigeration targets only reflect supermarkets and cold storage, and we will be assessing other CO2 verticals in 2025. Our 2026 $166-$183 million target is ambitious, but achievable and is grounded in a six-month top-down and bottoms-up playbook development process. As a part of the playbook process, we took a hard look at our CO2 strategy and progress made to date. Had we made enough progress to justify continuing? Do we have a product we are confident in? Did the white paper validate our energy savings and capacity extension, our value proposition? Would success in supermarkets and cold storage open the doors into other CO2 verticals? And could we meet or exceed our financial hurdle targets? The answer is we've made tremendous progress this year, more progress made in the last 12 months than we made in the first two years.
We really like our chances for the following reasons. We expect significant growth in the CO2 market in the next five to 10 years. The CO2 refrigeration market, particularly in the U.S., is underdeveloped, with significant growth expected over the next five to 10 years. We have continued to improve the overall reliability of the PX G. Our recent white paper confirms our value proposition, and the technical expertise we've acquired while developing the PX G can expedite product development for other CO2 verticals. And as you will see later in the presentation, financial returns are expected to meet our hurdle rates. And finally, we expect to achieve higher margins pursuing CO2-based pressure exchanger devices versus expanding into other products in the competitive water space. We are acting successfully to execute the playbook. We are driving discipline and profitable growth through laser focus on the right products and the right verticals.
We will provide increased transparency in our goals and update you on our progress. We have a reinvigorated management team with incentives both short and long term that will be aligned to playbook performance. We've already begun playbook execution by kicking off our manufacturing transformation project starting in October. Phase I will focus on optimizing our existing manufacturing footprint. This phase will take a clean sheet of paper approach to manufacturing processes to maximize productivity, minimize scrap, ultimately instilling a lean, continuous improvement culture in our two factories. We expect our manufacturing optimization roadmap to be completed by the end of this year, with execution completed by the end of 2025. Phase I will add approximately 300 basis points to gross margin. Phase II of our manufacturing transformation will be to make the right products in the right places.
This phase will entail developing a footprint strategy that will maximize network profitability and will begin this phase II in 2027. In addition to manufacturing transformation, we have begun a cost reset in operating expenses. Operating expenses as a percent of sales will be approximately 48% this year, excluding one-time costs. Now, looking at our peer group and realizing that the carrying cost of such an operating expense level was becoming prohibitive, we had to take action to preserve future profitability. We announced a 30% reduction in the salaried workforce this month to be completed by the end of this year. This reduction represents $5 million net annual savings in 2025. Our playbook process generated many milestones, but these are our most critical. Execution of these milestones will deliver long-term growth in revenue and profitability. Rodney and Ricardo will be talking about each milestone in detail in a moment.
As milestones are achieved, new ones will be added. And finally, I want to talk about my leadership team for a moment. We have added several distinguished leaders to our executive team. These individuals bring a wealth of experience from highly respected companies, coupled with exceptional leadership and functional expertise. Their backgrounds will be instrumental in driving ERI's success and expanding our capabilities. Our new leaders have already begun making a significant impact, aligning with our strategic vision and propelling our company forward. They are committed to maintaining our unwavering focus on quality, efficiency, and safety that is synonymous with Energy Recovery. Additionally, I will be adding a new member to the leadership team in early 2025. I'm splitting the water business into separate desalination and wastewater business units. Rodney Clemente, who has built our desal business into the market leader it is today, will continue to lead that business.
A search is currently underway for a wastewater business unit leader. Rodney will continue to lead the wastewater business in the interim. In collaboration with our dedicated energy recovery team members, we are continuing to evolve our company culture to better serve our diversifying customer base. Our new leaders are pivotal in fostering a culture that builds on our innovative legacy and ensuring nimbleness in addressing the unique needs of our customers in desal, wastewater, and CO2 markets. Now, I will turn it over to Rodney to take us through our exciting water growth plans.
Thank you, David. I'm honored to be able to speak to you all today about our core desalination and emerging wastewater business units. For those of you hearing from me for the first time, I'm Rodney Clemente, Senior Vice President of Water for Energy Recovery.
I've spent my entire 26-year career at Energy Recovery, and I'm passionate about our role in addressing the world's complex water challenges. It has been an amazing ride thus far, and I'm excited for what the future holds for our company and its stakeholders. Let's dive right in and start with our core desalination business. Our PX pressure exchanger technology was focused on addressing the Achilles heel of seawater reverse osmosis desalination, its energy intensity. The PX saves up to 60% of the power required in the reverse osmosis process by shrinking the size of the main high-pressure membrane feed pumps. The PX does this by directly pressurizing low-pressure seawater with otherwise wasted high-pressure concentrated brine energy in a very elegant and highly efficient manner. At the turn of the century, we brought to market our game-changing technology. In 2008, we had a very successful IPO.
Today, we currently hold a dominant market position in the global desalination space. We have an unmatched track record of consistently meeting our customer commitments with respect to performance, quality, and delivery. We have earned the trust of our customers in the desalination market. The results speak for themselves. We have over 175 mega desalination plants, 1,700 overall installations, and have delivered 30,000+ PXs operating on all seven continents, helping to produce over 10 billion gallons per day of potable freshwater. We are building this company with a strong desal business serving as its foundation. We have achieved a decade-long run of top-line revenue growth, industry-leading margins, and continue to hold a commanding share of the mega project landscape. We have established a new normal of $120+ million in revenue, which is approximately three times more than the decade-long average following our IPO.
The desalination universe continues to revolve around the Middle East. Also, North Africa is a market that is currently evolving and experiencing significant growth. The MENA region has proven to be a relatively stable and predictable market for us. We have not observed any saturation within the region and are monitoring risk and challenges in the area. We are also actively monitoring territories of interest outside of the MENA region to ensure our pipeline of opportunities remains robust and diverse. Desalination is a demand-driven market, and that demand continues to be fueled by the continued divergence between available freshwater supplies and the world's growing demand. That demand is driven primarily by strong macro drivers, such as population growth, industrial expansion, global climate change, and pollution. There is an undeniable correlation between these demand drivers and the growth observed in the desalination market. The future of water scarcity statistics are daunting.
If water fails, all of the world's sustainability goals will fail. Our desalination business is in a strong position to help the world quench its growing thirst by continuing to make desalination affordable. Our five-year outlook is strong. We are tracking over $500 million in mega project activity, and from a contracted capacity perspective, 2026 and 2027 are looking to be unprecedented in size. It is noteworthy to mention that our market intelligence with respect to identifying and tracking mega project activity is world-class. A majority of the $500 million+ pipeline consists of identified named projects. These are projects that are part of governmental plans, publicly released tenders, and/or are projects that we are actively negotiating. It is also worth mentioning, while our visibility over this five-year period is strong, gauging project timing remains a challenge.
We are projecting a double-digit CAGR over the next five years in the range of 10%-12% for our foundational desalination business, while expanding on our strong gross margin profile. We have identified critical initiatives to ensure we can meet this outlook. Our organization is designed to support three distinct desalination sales channels. Our Mega Projects Division, or MPD, which supports large-scale desalination infrastructure projects of greater than 50,000 cubic meters per day, has been a channel of transformational growth. We continue to work with large-scale EPCs, project developers, engineering consultants, and end users in this space. We have cracked the code in this market segment and have enjoyed a 95+% market share over the past decade. We have a strategy in place to ensure that our strong performance and market share trends continue into the foreseeable future.
Our original equipment manufacturing division, or OEM, represents projects of 50,000 cubic meters per day and below. Our OEM business continues to be solid, and we continue to work with system fabricators and integrators to implement our solutions into their designs. We also have a strategy in place to grow this segment. And finally, our aftermarket division, which offers a range of products and services to owners, operators, and end users around the globe. Our aftermarket revenue is strongly predictable, reliable, and has a strong correlation to our install base. Our service and aftermarket team members provide commissioning and on-site services to our valued customers. Our market leadership framework has proven to be a winning formula for us. We understand that having the best energy recovery device on the market is core to our continued success.
We define best as having the lowest life cycle cost of any energy recovery device available in the marketplace today. That means the PX must be the best performing, most reliable, most durable, and have the highest availability of any solution out there. We have also built a trusted and highly qualified team of advanced water treatment experts. We consider ourselves the consultants of choice for all things energy recovery devices, and we will leverage our thought leadership position to expand our strategic partnerships and innovate new applications. As previously mentioned, our operational leadership will focus on cost optimization and operational excellence initiatives that will help position ERI for growth for years to come. At our core, we are a technology company, a technology company that lives and breathes innovation. We have a robust product roadmap that strategically plans the development of new technologies and the launch of new products.
We have continuously demonstrated our ability to launch new industry-leading products for the advanced water treatment sector. For nearly a decade, we've leveraged the success of our flagship model, the PX Q300, but since its adoption, we have continued to push the boundaries of physics and continue to strive for more. We are extremely proud to have advanced our technology. We have made the Q300 better in just about every way imaginable, and we're pleased with the early-stage rapid adoption of our recently launched PX Q400. We continue to actively listen to our customers and industry partners and are developing the next iteration of PX technologies as we speak. We are also looking at more advanced services and solutions and look forward to updating you all on new technology and product introduction progress in future calls.
We remain bullish on where our technology can go and how far it can take us. Continued investment in our IP will be the core to maintaining or even increasing our competitive edge. A valuable component of our blueprint for success has been our ability to establish and now leverage our operational leadership position. We strive to be able to make pressure exchangers better, faster, and more cost-effective and of higher quality than any other competitor that may exist in the market. With an aggressive yet achievable 10% cost reduction per year over the next five-year initiative in place, we believe we will be able to maintain and/or expand our current position in the global desalination industry for years to come. We commit to using a disciplined approach as we grow our profitability.
Strategic partnerships are the chosen avenue to grow our profits in a disciplined way as our partnerships are geared towards helping us do what we do best: sell PXs. We will leverage strategic partnerships that will allow us to either sell more PXs, sell more PXs faster, and/or improve the buying experience of our customers. Lastly, we will continue to expand into new applications, verticals, and markets by partnering with thought leaders in the advanced water treatment space, and we look forward to updating you all on these partnerships as they develop. The desalination market is strong, and we anticipate achieving our fair share of the rapidly expanding market. We are improving our line of sight to our five-year targets on a daily basis, and we now have the strategy in place to achieve our growth plans.
We plan to fortify and expand our market position through our leadership framework and strategic initiatives. Again, our strategy will focus on innovation, partnerships, and excellence in operations. To summarize, we will achieve our plans by focusing on several short to mid-term milestones. We will strive to increase our competitive edge by continuing to invest in new technology and new product introductions while further enhancing our IP strategy. As our customer needs and industries we serve continue to evolve, so must our product offerings. Strategic partnerships will focus on helping us sell more PXs and/or selling PXs at a much faster pace. And lastly, our aggressive cost reduction initiative will ensure our performance is sustainable in the long run. Our goal is to remain the market leader by furthering the distance between Energy Recovery and any and all competition. Now, let's turn to our wastewater business.
What do you notice about this installation? Typically, when you see installations of our PX devices in SWRO desalination facilities, you can observe large arrays with up to 1,000 PXs in a single installation. If you notice, the wastewater landscape is quite different in this regard. For example, a typical 100,000 cubic meter per day seawater RO facility would require approximately 100 PX Q300s, whereas a 100,000 cubic meter per day wastewater facility may only require 10 or so. This difference is primarily due to membrane recovery, which is a function of feedwater salinity. The higher the membrane recovery, the lower the concentrated brine flow. The lower the concentrated brine flow, the fewer number of PXs required. Wastewater is a rapidly emerging business for us. We are quite pleased with our early-stage success, and our strategy in this space is coming into focus.
We define wastewater as effluent discharge from municipal and industrial facilities. These facilities can use reverse osmosis technologies where we can deploy our PX pressure exchanger technology, and we will focus our energy initially on specific territories and verticals, as this will allow us to be most efficient in converting opportunities to revenue. We will have a much more diverse product offering for our wastewater applications as the fragmentation in the market results in applications with a wide range of flows, pressures, and some with challenging feedwater chemistries. We are poised to execute our product portfolio, and our product portfolio aligns well with these diverse applications, and our value proposition remains strong. We have doubled the business in three consecutive years and continue to focus our wastewater strategy on accelerating our path to achieving our five-year revenue targets.
In fact, our newly launched wastewater business is tracking to be the first business unit outside of our core desalination business to achieve double-digit millions in product revenue. We are on track to hit this milestone by the year's end. We will focus our efforts primarily in China, India, the Americas, and Southeast Asia. These territories diversify our business in a positive way outside of the desal-MENA-centric focus. The wastewater industry is primarily a regulatory-driven market that is currently underserved and underreported. A majority of the wastewater produced in the world is left untreated. There are sustainability development goals and targets in place to dramatically limit and/or eliminate the amount of wastewater effluent entering into our environments. Regulations are the key driver in the push for water security, decreasing pollution, global sustainability, and a vision for a circular economy.
We are committed to a disciplined and strategic approach in expanding our wastewater business. To date, we have successfully secured commercial contracts across more than 15 industry verticals. This early-stage success has validated our value proposition, enabling us to align our efforts and concentrate strategically on our top five priority verticals. We are confident that by focusing on the municipal, mining, chemical, textile, and heavy manufacturing verticals, we will best be able to add shareholder value. We will be opportunistic in approaching other verticals and will adjust accordingly. We have a team and process in place to evaluate new opportunities quickly. This flexibility will allow us to focus on our top five while ensuring we do not miss any potential opportunities of interest. Our go-to-market approach is to align our solutions with our top verticals within our top territories and to build the team to attack the marketplace.
As we develop the knowledge and further our strategy on the markets and applications of interest, we will rely on our business developers, sales teams, and distribution channels to help us further understand the ecosystems in which we operate and ultimately execute. To optimize cost and leverage operational efficiencies, we have developed a robust matrix-style organization to support the expanding wastewater business as well as desal. Technical product, service, aftermarket, all these resources will be initially shared amongst the desal and wastewater BUs. Growing our brand in wastewater by leveraging the gold standard we have set in desal will be critical to our sustained success in these emerging markets. Our go-to-market actions are centered around our first-mover advantage. We are setting the bar for all things energy recovery devices for the rapidly growing wastewater markets.
We are entering the wastewater industry with a robust PX-centric product portfolio that continues to evolve and expand based on our customer needs. The PX technology is complemented by various pumps and turbocharger product lines that have the potential to expand our revenues in this space. Our actions also include deep organizational design work. We need to have the right team with the right structure in the right place and at the right time in order to execute efficiently. We are well underway with further building out our team and separating the desal and wastewater business units and thus defining focus for each. Clear metrics will drive transparency and accountability across the organization. We continue to listen to our customers and we're delivering solutions that they need most. Expanding our product portfolio is nearing completion.
We have launched our Ultra-High Pressure PX line for RO applications with pressures up to 1,800 PSI. We have also launched our Low Pressure PX line for applications below 450 PSI. Our ability to fill out our product portfolio with solutions that cover a broad range of flows and pressures will allow us to serve these markets well. We are confident our sales team will have the tools they need to execute. We will be disciplined and deliberate in building our teams. Our hiring plan will be based on territory and vertical strategies while being grounded in performance. We will open or throttle the hiring valve based on what we observe and achieve in the market. We have a strong foundation for growth and have already developed references in the verticals and territories of interest. We are primed for growth.
We are confident that these references will serve as a catalyst for growth as these case studies will serve as strong testimonials to the value we bring in the form of energy savings, carbon footprint reductions, and driving sustainable operations for our customers. There is also an existing brownfield sector in the wastewater space that is beginning to excite us. We have developed a strategy to tackle this part of the market. Using PXs in wastewater applications is somewhat of a new concept. We will need to get back to the basics as the new kids on the block and demonstrate how the PX works and why it's beneficial for your operations. This will require a very technical sales approach. We will need to have a strong process engineering design function to accelerate adoption.
Our early-stage success was achieved by initially investing in the suite of products needed to attack the wastewater market. An example of our product strategy working in real time is our rapid development and deployment of the Ultra-High Pressure PX line. We were able to meet an aggressive customer schedule and supply our newly launched technology for a lithium battery facility in China. With this early proof point, we have since increased our lithium references to over 30. We will shift our investment strategy to building out the team required as well as the competencies to accelerate our revenue conversion in both green and brownfield opportunities. With our products and people on the way, we will leverage our good start to meet these aggressively yet achievable targets and gross margin performance. To summarize, we will achieve our goals by focusing on several short- to mid-term milestones.
We will continue to build and invest in developing the wastewater organization and structure. Building references and, more importantly, critical relationships will be the catalyst for growth in the territories and verticals of focus, and we will work alongside our customers to provide the technical competencies and tools required to support the ecosystem. Thank you all for allowing me to discuss our water business units with you, and I'll hand the call over to Ricardo so he can provide some valuable insight on our CO2 business. Ricardo.
Thank you, Rodney. First, I would like to say how happy I am to be here at Energy Recovery and say thank you to David Moon for the opportunity. I have been in the refrigeration business for over 20 years, including with industry leaders like Carrier and Lennox.
I joined Energy Recovery because I do see the tremendous potential for pressure exchanger technology to create significant economic and environmental value to the refrigeration industry. The CO2 pressure exchanger is a real innovation, and I'm excited to help bring it to the market. This is a photo of a PX G, or a pressure exchanger, in a skid on a supermarket rooftop in Japan. The skid was designed and manufactured by the OEM. It's one of our several PX Gs running in the field. A skid would typically be installed when an existing CO2 refrigeration system is already in place. This is what we call brownfield sites. The majority of our currently installed PX Gs are in skids at brownfield sites in the United States and also in Europe. However, as you see in the following slides, we are transitioning from skid only to direct PX G integration into the OEM refrigeration systems.
In other words, the PX G will become an integral component of a highly engineered-to-order transcritical refrigeration system. At its core, a CO2 pressure exchanger improves the efficiency of a transcritical CO2-based cooling system by recovering high-pressure energy from the exit of the gas cooler that would have otherwise been wasted and utilizes it to reduce work done by the main compressor rack, thereby reducing the energy consumption and also increasing the system stability. It is similar to our core water pressure exchanger. Interestingly, part of the reason we entered the CO2 market is because the technical requirements, ceramic, and the thermodynamic properties are quite similar to the core water product we've been perfecting for decades. We are currently laser-focused on commercializing this technology in the supermarket and the cold storage segments, where cost and environmental impact are a primary concern of the customer.
Additionally, we also see significant opportunities to increase our addressable market in adjacent CO2 verticals like heat pumps and data centers in the near future. Global regulations are pushing all refrigeration markets to transition from the incumbent HFCs to lower GWP natural refrigerant. This transition is already happening in Europe and is just beginning in the United States. Considering all the natural refrigerants available on the market, CO2 is the main choice for supermarket and cold storage segments due to performance, environmental friendliness, and safety reasons. Europe started its phase-down program in 2015 through a quota reduction program. The United States applied a similar program launched in 2020. The CO2 adoption rate is moving very fast. The installed base in Europe represents around 20%-25% of the existing supermarkets. In the United States, the adoption rate is already close to 5%.
These regulation drivers will continue to drive significantly the CO2 adoption, thus increasing the opportunity for the PX G. Refrigeration is a very, very special market, and the users and OEMs are the most important stakeholders. This is why our CO2 team is working with both of them to introduce the PX G to the market. However, we believe that the best way to drive adoption of the PX G is to work hand in hand with OEMs. The OEM market is highly concentrated in the United States and a little less in Europe. This provides us with an efficient go-to-market approach. The focus of Energy Recovery at this moment is to validate the value proposition with the OEMs and move the integration step whereby the PX G becomes integrated into the t ranscritical rack.
Like any other critical refrigeration system component, the PX G should be a standard option in the OEM sales catalog going forward. The next slide, I try to summarize the path needed to commercialize the PX G in the market and define clear steps to accomplish our goal. To reach these customers, we must work through the established process of how new products are adopted by the market. In the last 10 months, as David Moon said, we have moved through field trials and, in some cases, value propositions with the key OEM customers. This is more progress than we have ever made in the previous two years. Successful field trials and defined value propositions have already been catalysts for further market penetration. In Europe, we have three OEMs testing the technology in advanced stages and five others in initial conversation.
These three OEMs represent approximately 40% of the CO2 market share. In the United States, we are approaching the same number, three OEMs with excellent progress. CO2 is starting to get traction, and these three players represent approximately 85% of the market share. As part of the commercialization path, defining the value proposition was a key step to support our go-to-market strategy. Knowing that, we chose six sites in Europe and the U.S. to apply what we call M&V, measurement and verification. These six sites allowed us to get technical data during the summertime to validate and quantify the PX G value proposition. To support Energy Recovery in this activity, we hired an external engineering company, DC Engineering, who is very respected in the refrigeration market, to support the data collection process and assist us with developing our white paper, which was recently released.
The M&V process confirmed three main value propositions. The first one is the energy saving. Peak COP lifted up to 30% with the PX G, depending on the system configuration and weather, and projected annual savings of up to 15% based on the M&V campaign so far. The second one is the capacity increase. The PX G can provide safeguards against heat wave impact by reducing flash gas going to the medium temperature compressor, boosting the system capacity up to 15% at 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Heat waves are more common nowadays, and several supermarkets have had problems with this critical situation during summertime. The last one is the OPEX reduction. There are many sites today that use water or adiabatic systems to improve the efficiency and protect against heat waves. With the PX G application, we can, in most cases, eliminate water usage or reduce water consumption.
This can result in a significant reduction in the supermarket's operating expense. Customers are very excited about this opportunity due to the water scarcity in some regions in the United States and in Europe. There may also be an opportunity to eliminate the need for an adiabatic system altogether. In summary, three important value propositions to support our go-to-market strategy. To track the PX G competitiveness in the market, we have mapped adjacent technologies that offer similar benefits. Making a comparison considering criteria valued by customers, we prepared a table comparing PX G performance versus adiabatic systems, parallel compressors, and ejectors. It's noticeable clearly that the PX G is the best solution in the market. The PX G not only has the better performance, but importantly, offers three dimensions of value proposition, as I said before, and the competition does not have this broad value scope.
We also did a market assessment to estimate the PX G addressable market. This analysis only considers supermarket segments. There are approximately 82,000 supermarkets and hypermarkets in the U.S. and Europe. To calculate the addressable market, we applied the square footage requirement. Any store less than 10,700 sq ft in size is considered small to apply the PX G. Applying this filter left us approximately with 65,000 supermarkets. These 65,000 supermarkets become our core TAM, or our PX G eligible. 41,000 of these supermarkets are in regions where the energy saving value proposition is high, meaning there is a high ambient temperature, energy cost is high, or both. This is our core TAM. However, given our better-than-expected summer in M&V, we believe our TAM has increased in including these 24,000 stores in colder climates given by the PX G capacity increase during the high heat load days.
With a 65,000 supermarket count, 1-3 PX Gs per store and a 12-year replacement cycle, and even growth in the store count, we do see a large sustainable TAM for PX G in the segment. To have a successful go-to-market strategy, our CO2 team developed a list of actions to be executed to reach the full PX G commercialization. As you can see on the slide, the actions are: engage OEMs to expand PX G deployment, continue product development to sharpen PX G competitiveness, and exploring new end markets to expand PX G addressable market size. Also, it's important to highlight that our team developed clear KPIs to track the PX G deployment. This is the same slide we previously discussed that is showing the steps required to commercialize the PX G in the supermarket.
The information is similar, but the new message here is that I want to highlight our priority over the next 12 months. We are now working with OEMs to integrate the PX G into their systems, the racks, and perform pilot tests with end users. These pilot tests will include at least one summer season of testing. This will be the final validation step before supermarkets formally specify Energy Recovery as a critical component supplier. Only as a clarification from an OEM perspective, there are two main important steps or moments related to the field test. The first one is the skid test. In the slide, you can read field trials, where the PX G housed inside a skid that was installed in a supermarket with a CO2 refrigeration system already existed. We call these installations brownfield.
These skids were installed alongside an existing CO2 rack and allowed the OEM to validate the PX G value proposition. The second stage, which we call pilot testing, a PX G integrated into the CO2 rack, will require a new design by the OEMs. PX G will now become a critical component housed in the rack itself. This is different than the skid. OEMs will want to test their new integrated PX G designs over the course of a summer season with their supermarket customers. We have defined a clear goal of being specified into at least four large supermarket customers by the second half of 2026. Getting the PX G specified into systems is the key to our commercialization growth story and, as such, represents a major milestone for the business. We have high confidence, given our progress to date, that we will achieve this milestone.
Following our strategy of continuous improvement, we are working to develop the third generation of PX G. With a release date of the second half of 2026, field tests are scheduled to begin in the first half of 2025. The picture on the slide shows the difference between our current second generation PX G and our future third generation PX G. The third generation PX G will have higher capacity, greater efficiency, a smaller footprint, and lower cost. Exploring the other CO2 verticals is one of the main priorities for the CO2 team in 2025. In this slide, you can see two segments: heat pump and data centers. Under evaluation, that could be very interesting markets in the near future. CO2 technology is present in both, and more investigation related to market size, product specification, and channel dynamics are important to measure the opportunity.
However, we are encouraged by the three factors regarding these segments. The first one is they are likely large, fast-growing markets with long-term mega trends they win. The second, the value proposition of pressure exchangers increases meaningfully as the size of the underlying systems increases. Given the size of industrial heat pump and data center cooling requirements, we think the marginal value of PX G could be quite high. And the third, but also important one, the technology development required to enter in these markets is likely to be relatively low. They will require larger versions of the existing PX G, and it's much easier to scale up a PX G than to scale it down. Mike will provide more colors about the numbers, but in a nutshell, the sales projection for 2025 will stay between $1-$3 million.
It will be a year with pilot sites running to have the final OEM validation. In 2026, we expect better sales traction with full commercialization, with revenue between $5-$10 million. In the following years, onboarding more OEMs and end users, we expect to reach $30-$40 million in 2029 for supermarket and also cold storage segments. Our gross margin target is 45%. My last slide highlights that we have implemented clear milestones to drive the CO2 long-term growth. Additionally, I can ensure that we have the right tracking to avoid any deviation from the plan. The three critical CO2 milestones to drive the long-term growth are: develop business case for industrial heat pump and data center markets, third generation PX G product release, and become specified at four supermarket chains. Thank you so much. I will now turn it over to Mike for the financials.
Thanks, Ricardo. First, I'd like to thank our investors for their continued support of Energy Recovery and for their belief in the opportunity ahead of us. My goal for this presentation is to provide the details of how the playbook strategy work translates into expected financial performance. I'll talk about guidance for the next couple of years, then spend time reviewing each business's long-term operating model, and then wrap up with some thoughts on capital allocation. A key theme you will hopefully see is balance: balance between top and bottom line growth, balance between capital investment and capital return, and an overall balanced approach to analyzing and making business decisions. Now, getting into the details. We reaffirmed 2024 guidance on our recent earnings call, and that has not changed.
We are very focused on growth here at Energy Recovery, but we are also increasing our focus on the conversion of that growth into EBITDA and cash flow. To that end, we will constantly be reviewing how and what we report regarding our financial performance. So, stay tuned as next year progresses for some potential reporting changes that better align to our internal KPIs. As a start, we've added some guidance metrics to help paint an EBITDA and cash flow picture for you. We expect 2024 stock-based comp expense to be $10-$11 million for the year and depreciation to remain at current levels in the $3.5-$4.5 million range. 2024 will be another efficient year of capital expenditure, with total CapEx in the $1.5-$2.5 million range. We think this additional information will help investors evaluate how the company is converting its revenue profitably.
You've seen a lot of these numbers throughout the presentation today, but here is our official 2025 full-year financial guidance. Overall, we expect revenue between $152-$164 million, or about 9% growth over 2024 at the midpoint. This growth reflects a slower-than-average growth year in desalination as the macro environment over the last three years has pushed out projects to later years. Wastewater is expected to grow 20% from 2024 as the business continues to ramp and our renewed sales efforts begin to take hold. CO2 revenue reflects a growing base of sites deploying the PX G and the beginning of the fully commercialized product late in the year. Our efforts on cost will translate into improved gross margins, increasing at least 100 basis points compared to 2024. We do see some upside here, although CO2 revenue will impact the blended margin a bit in 2025. Now, on to OpEx.
We expect 2025 operating expenses to be between $70 and $74 million. There are a few factors at play next year. First, there's a positive impact to OpEx of the reduction in force David announced earlier. This is a meaningful first step in our commitment to controlling OpEx and increasing EBITDA conversion. Second, we will incur expenses related to these cost-cutting efforts, both the staff reduction and the manufacturing transformation, although we may see a lot of the headcount restructuring costs come here in Q4. And lastly, we are reinvesting some of the cost savings into growth, particularly in wastewater sales. We have set a slightly wider guidance range for the year as we may have additional cost-saving opportunities that it makes sense to invest in. Our goal is to have our efforts in 2025 set us up for an efficient 2026 and beyond.
Stock-based comp expense and depreciation are expected to be in line with prior years, and CapEx will tick up some as we maintain existing equipment and begin to invest in some additional expansion and factory improvement projects. We see 2025 as the beginning of this company executing on top-line growth that converts well to profitability and cash flow. Moving on to our 2026 high-level targets, we expect overall revenue to grow at around 10% at the midpoint in 2026. This growth reflects what we believe will be the final year of the macro environment impact on desalination growth. As Rodney mentioned during his remarks, the desalination pipeline is strong and growing stronger as the pent-up demand for desalination projects begins to convert to PX deliveries in late 2026 and 2027.
We expect wastewater revenue growth to accelerate some as the new sales team ramps through next year, growing at 25% for the year. 2026 is an important year for CO2 as we expect it to be the first year of the PX G being specced in OEM and customer transcritical rack systems. It is difficult to predict the exact adoption curve of both overall CO2 installations and the PX G. However, we feel confident that given the current momentum, we can expect a meaningful jump in 2026, generating revenue between $5 and $10 million. In 2026, we expect to see another 100 to 200 basis point increase in margins, or 66%-70%, as our focus on manufacturing efficiency continues. In this year, we will also begin to see the impact of the CO2 business on total company margins, but overall margins will continue to increase.
Now, moving on to our expectations for long-term operating model targets for each business. As we look out five years in the desalination business, we see a bright future. The pipeline of projects continues to grow, and our product portfolio and unmatched reliability will maintain our strong position in the market. We expect long-term growth in this business to remain in the 8%-11% range for the foreseeable future as the overall trends for water continue. As mentioned before, we do see under-indexed growth in 2025 and 2026, followed by accelerating growth beginning in 2027. These projections are based on the tangible pipeline of projects we see in the market today. Desalination margins are expected to sit comfortably above 70% as they have in the past and as we continue to drive factory efficiency. We also expect desalination to remain a highly capital-efficient business.
The go-to-market dynamics allow for strong leverage on the sales and support operating expense base. Additionally, the overall capital required to increase factory capacity is limited, as I will discuss later. Now, on to wastewater. We see the wastewater business growing at an average of 25%-30% over the next five years. As Rodney mentioned, our approach here will be to add sales and support to specific markets as they develop and grow. With this focus on core markets and geographies, we will be able to measure the sales efficiency and deploy additional resources where we see the best returns. Gross margins in the wastewater business are a little bit harder to predict than in desalination. Variations in product mix, in particular, can drive a wider range of outcomes than in our other businesses.
However, generally, we see wastewater gross margins, on average, being a few percentage points below desalination. Given the go-to-market strategy for wastewater, the OpEx efficiency of the business is not as strong as desalination. So, while there will be operating leverage, the wastewater sales expense will grow as revenue increases. Currently, the wastewater business is near Adjusted EBITDA break-even. We think about returns in this business in two ways. First, as individual IRRs on investments in sales team resources, but then also as an overall return on invested capital of the business. We are targeting a 25%+ ROIC contribution from the wastewater business. Now, on to the CO2 supermarket business. As you know, projecting a business during its first years of commercialization is a difficult task.
We approach the challenge from both a top-down and bottom-up approach, looking at individual supermarket chains, OEMs' internal plans, and geographic trends to reach a target of $30-$40 million of revenue by 2029. We feel this is an aggressive and achievable level of revenue for a new product in the refrigeration industry, especially if we see continued success along the adoption path with OEM customers. We expect the PX G to generate at least 45% gross margins at scale. The supermarket business will most likely generate the lowest gross margin of all the potential CO2 opportunities. The reality of the supermarket industry is that it is a cost-first, low-margin business, which drives us to be balanced with the price relative to the value proposition of the product.
Now, given the small number of total OEM customers, we expect operating leverage in CO2 to be more like the desalination business than the wastewater business. We could be very efficient with the OpEx as revenue scales, driving solid EBITDA margins. Interestingly, the market dynamic of concentrated OEMs and large supermarket chains also means that we should be able to meaningfully increase our projection clarity as we move customers along the PX G adoption process. To that end, we view the CO2 model as a dynamic tool that we will update constantly as new information flows. A very important point to make here: we are laser-focused on generating a strong return on the supermarket business and have set a minimum IRR target of 25% for incremental investments in the business.
We may not be able to control the exact adoption rate of the PX G, but we can control the cost and the amount of capital we continue to invest in it. We've set an aggressive target of breaking even in the business by the end of 2026 or 2027. This will require a significant reduction in OpEx to achieve and a clear focus on milestones, both of which are in our control. We are committed to continued reviews of the business to ensure strong returns on capital. Now, moving on to how these businesses all roll up, here are our full company targets for 2029. We expect revenue to approach $300 million, producing 12%-15% annual average growth rates over the next five years.
Overall, company gross margin is expected to remain above 68%, and you can see how strong margin expansion in our water businesses will be somewhat offset by lower CO2 margins. Importantly, we have set aggressive goals of limiting OpEx costs required to achieve this growth. As we have said throughout the presentation, our focus is on profitable, responsible growth. We believe strongly that we can not only increase our revenue meaningfully over the next five years, but that we can drop a significant portion of that revenue to the bottom line and convert it to cash flow. Supporting this cash flow conversion is the fact that we do not require a large amount of capital expenditure to achieve our growth. We estimate that the company needs to spend less than $30 million over the next five years to achieve our production target.
This implies an average of $6 million of CapEx per year, although the actual CapEx schedule will be lumpy as we do scale capacity and step functions. A key final point here is that this long-term model only considers the supermarket and cold storage segment of the CO2 opportunity. As we develop our business cases for data centers and heat pumps, we will update the long-term model appropriately. To that end, I'd like to make a quick comment on how Energy Recovery will evaluate new business opportunities. There's no rocket science here, but I wanted to point out that in addition to thinking about the qualitative strategic reasons for making investments, we will be rigorous with our focus on returns and invested capital. Any new venture we plan on investing capital into will have to meet our return and break-even targets.
We currently think about those return hurdles as 25% for entering new businesses. This is a higher hurdle rate than a typical capital investment, which we feel is appropriate given the risk. We will also look closely at the timelines required with these investments and ensure prudent and realistic expectations on capital outlays. This leads us to our overall capital allocation strategy. Generally, the result of our strategic playbook work was that we should invest in the organic growth we've outlined above and that inorganic investments should not be a focus at this time. Given the level of capital required for this organic growth, we are left with excess capital available to return to shareholders. As such, we are announcing today a one-time share purchase program, as well as a commitment to return capital to shareholders going forward. So, we are officially launching a $50 million share buyback program.
We believe in the long-term value creation opportunity of this company and intend to return a meaningful amount of capital to shareholders at these price levels. We will also commit to regular reviews of our cash holdings and will be quick to return additional capital to shareholders in the future should we not require the cash for growth. We are very grateful to our long-term shareholders and are happy to be able to not only lay out an exciting and achievable plan for top and bottom line growth over the next five years, but also to be able to return excess capital the company has generated to date. We think our mix of both growth and capital return potential is unique in the market and look forward to reporting our progress going forward. With that, I will turn it back to David.
Thank you, Mike.
As I said earlier, the playbook builds upon our historic strengths, which are our market leadership in ceramic pressure exchangers and tailwinds in high-growth markets. We have the right to win in the pressure exchanger space. Our long track record of innovation in this space, the strong customer response, and our market leadership position are all evidence of us winning. Added to this, our selected markets of desal, wastewater, and CO2 have large TAMs, high growth rates that are one and a half to two times of GDP, and are backed by major environmental and sustainability megatrends. We will execute our playbook with discipline and profitable growth, transparency, and accountability by a leadership team that will deliver. Thank you for your time today. I'll now turn it over to Lionel for Q&A.
Thank you, David.
All right, for this Q&A session today, I'll be posing the questions to the team here. Just as a quick reminder, you can enter your questions into the Q&A box on your screen. And we already have a number of questions queued up, so let's just jump into it. The first question is regarding the playbook itself. Did the board approve, and how involved was the board in the playbook process? And then additionally, what are the biggest strategic risks or concerns from the board coming out of the growth playbook strategic review?
So, thank you, Lionel. Good day, everyone. This is David. So, the board has approved the playbook. We've had several interim checkpoints with the board over the summer to present our approach, and we've made many refinements based on their feedback.
We also involved the board early in the playbook development process through interviews to ensure their perspectives and expertise were taken into account while developing our own independent perspective as a management team. The main strategic items that the board pushed us on during the process were, number one, pressure testing the attractiveness of the CO2 market, and then secondly, ensuring we can execute at a pace and with discipline over the course of the next five years.
Okay. Next question is also playbook-related. Did the playbook process contemplate Energy Recovery being a water-only business? And what were the underlying criteria, frame, and data used to make this critical decision? What were the metrics you used to evaluate water-only or water-plus?
So, good question. So, for us, it's all about value creation.
We see a higher long-term intrinsic value for Energy Recovery if we focus on water plus CO2 versus staying as a water-only business. Entering CO2, it provides us access to markets with large TAMs, as we've talked about in the presentation, and high growth rates as well. This begins with the retail supermarket market, but also can extend to other attractive CO2 applications that we'll be looking into as we get into 2025. And specifically, those are industrial heat pumps and data centers. I'd also add that given our technical history of developing pressure exchanger products, we're very confident we can build a high-value product for CO2 customers. We've done it for water. We believe we can do it for CO2. And we expect to achieve higher margins pursuing CO2-based pressure exchanger devices versus expanding into adjacent products in the competitive water space.
I'd also add that, you know, we've got a new team now as well, and this new team has been involved in startups. They've got strong refrigeration background, so we feel like we're well poised to be a water-plus business going forward.
All right, I've got one more playbook-related, so I guess we'll go ahead and get that out of the way. Given all the work on the playbook over the last few months, why did the playbook not expand the ambition or scope of growth for Energy Recovery? It seems we're still talking about the same three businesses.
So we are still talking about the same three businesses. As I said in the presentation, hopefully it was clear in the presentation, we've got a right to win in the PX space.
Our long track record of innovation in this space, our strong customer response, and our market leadership position are all evidence of us winning. So, again, we have the right to win in the PX space. I'd say secondly, we have already selected attractive markets to focus on. So, desal, wastewater, and CO2 are those attractive markets due to their large TAMs, their high growth rates, again, one and a half to two times of GDP, and they're all backed by major environmental and sustainability megatrends. So, within these broad markets, the growth playbook fleshed out a set of incremental opportunities to investigate, you know, which we're not pursuing today, again, like data centers, like geothermal, like heat pumps, but could add value in the medium to long term.
Okay, the next question: what early milestones, if achieved, will help investors gain confidence that the playbook is on track?
Yeah, so there are several that I think are very important that we talked about as part of the presentation. For desal, it's achieving the 10% annual cost reduction for the Q400 product line and ensuring that our next generation product is released by 2026. So, those would be the two critical milestones for desal. For wastewater, it's building out the sales team in the prioritized geographies and verticals that we talked about as part of the presentation, you know, resulting in a sales team that is going to be two times, you know, 2X the size by 2026 and four times the current size by 2028. And then I'd say for CO2, most importantly, it's getting specced in those four supermarket chains by 2026.
Here's a desal-specific one. As you look at the pipeline in desal, do you see the heavy concentration of MENA region becoming a risk?
Hi, thanks for the question. This is Rodney. Yeah, when we look at, you know, I mentioned in the presentation, you know, 2025, 2026, 2027 are looking to be pretty large, you know, unprecedented in size, really, when you look at a contracted capacity perspective. I also mentioned that the desalination universe revolves around the Middle East. We see that trend continuing out, you know, in this five-year forecast period. The GCC alone is going to give you about 2.5-3 million cubic meters per day on average over that time period. The MENA region, when you look at North Africa, Jordan, Israel, et cetera, et cetera, is about another 2.5-3 million cubic meters per day.
And then the rest of the world, you know, other territories like South America, Southeast Asia, et cetera, will contribute about 1.5-2 million cubic meters per day. So, overall, you know, we're looking at about 6.5-8 million cubic meter per day of installed capacity out to about 2028, 2029. And the breakup there with the Middle East is starting to be more spread out. So, less emphasis in the Middle East, but it's still a very important market for us.
Okay, thanks, Rodney. Here's one on share buyback. How large will the upfront share buyback be?
Yeah, thanks, Lionel. This is Mike. So, we're going to start out with a $50 million share repurchase beginning this week. That will be out there in the market for up to 12 months.
But as I tried to clearly signal in the presentation, we don't view that as a one-time-only event, and we'll continue to look at our excess cash and return things quickly. So, we look forward to that.
Thanks, Mike. Okay, here's one. You recently cut headcount by 30%. Did I hear that correctly?
That's correct. So, we announced the reduction this month with the plan to have it completed by the end of December.
Can you talk more about how you intend to form the partnerships in desal and how they will help your expansion plans, given how much of the market you already touch?
Yes, we think about desalination in three distinct sales channels. So, in megaproject desalination space, we're, as I mentioned, I mean, we're pretty dominant there. So, not much to do in the form of partnerships outside of market intelligence, marketing-type relationships and partnerships there.
But when we talk about partnerships and what we do well, is manufacture pressure exchangers. So, there's a lot of components in the ecosystem of desalination plants that may make sense for us to partner up with to help, again, sell more PXs and/or sell PXs at a quicker rate. So, we're thinking about our OEM division, you know, plants of smaller than 50,000 cubic meters per day to really develop the partnerships and to leverage those partnerships from a thought leadership perspective in that space.
Thanks, Rodney. I've got another desal question here. In the desal revenue target for 2029, do you anticipate the Middle East to still be the dominant source of demand?
Yeah, I mentioned this a little bit earlier. I'm looking at just the GCC.
You know, you're talking about a 2.5-3 million cubic meter per day of contracted capacity, you know, out to 2029, and then the MENA region is another 2.5-3. But we'd like to separate the MENA region and think about, you know, the Middle East and North Africa, and, you know, case in point, you know, last year, just in North Africa, Algeria did about 5,000, or excuse me, five megaprojects on the order of 300,000 cubic meters per day. Morocco was a territory or a country of interest for us, and that's now popped into kind of our top 10, so, we're seeing a lot of movement in North Africa that's going to support, you know, the growth in the Middle East.
But we're also, you know, looking at places outside of the Middle East and North Africa, and territories like China, India, Peru continue to pop up into our pipeline. Australia is coming back in a big way, as well as, you know, island nations like Taiwan. But yes, in short, the Middle East will always be an important and large sector for us. It's a very good market for us.
All right. Here's another. Can you give us some sense of how the $30 million in CapEx will be parsed out over the next five years?
Sure. This is Mike. So, I would think about it as our maintenance CapEx is about 1%-2% of revenue on average. And then the way we scale capacity, we don't need to add any square footage necessarily. So, think about CapEx as adding equipment, specifically kilns, in a step function.
As we look out, we'll probably do CapEx about a year in advance of the requirement. The first one probably in 2026, and then maybe a year or two later, we'll see a bump in CapEx. You'll see that kind of right about a year in advance of the demand.
Okay, thanks, Mike. There's been a significant emphasis on cost reduction. Bearing in mind the very short payback period for users of the PX and desalination, why is cost reduction of 10% per year necessary to maintain or grow Energy Recovery's market leadership?
Yeah, thanks, Lionel. This is David. As we talked about in the playbook, we're striking a balance between revenue growth, top-line growth, and bottom-line growth. Cost reduction is going to be one of our tools in our arsenal going forward to drive operating margin improvement.
It'll also give us some extra cushion should we need it for pricing, should we have to sharpen the pencils in later years.
Thanks, David. Here's one that is CO2-specific. It seems that out of the four European OEMs, you've not made any progress with the market leader. Why not?
Yeah, thanks for the question. This is Ricardo speaking. For sure, we are approaching very strongly in both regions the OEMs. And in Europe, we are in a very, let's say, advanced stage with three OEMs, three important ones. One of them is the big one in the market. And we have in the initial phase five other OEMs that we are working together as well. So, having said that, if you take a look in these eight OEMs, we are talking about 80% of the market share.
So, it means that the total approach, considering the initial stage as well, we are getting a large part of the market share.
All right. Thanks, Ricardo. Next one. In hot parts of the U.S. and Europe, there are more office buildings than supermarkets. Can you talk about the PX G for cooling offices?
That's Ricardo again. Thank you for the question. That's a very interesting question. I think that for sure the HVAC market that we're talking about is bigger. But there is a technical limitation. Today, we're applying the PX G in the CO2 refrigeration. And the big advantage of the pressure exchanger is really to be applied in systems with high pressure. So, the pressure of the HVAC systems is not at the same level that you have in the CO2 refrigeration.
So, we are not going to get the full value proposition that we have with the CO2 application in HVAC that we have in refrigeration with the CO2 refrigerant.
Thanks, Ricardo. Here's another. Can you talk about potential sources of upside that could drive higher revenue for water or CO2 versus what you're expecting through 2029?
Sure. This is Mike. Yeah, look, I mean, we look at a bunch of different scenarios as we came out with these numbers for our operating model. I'd say starting with CO2, there's a couple of sources of upside. One is that, as we mentioned, the go-to-market channel is very efficient. And so, when you get specced into OEMs, there is an opportunity to have a faster ramp than you expect.
As we march through the path that Ricardo outlined of adopting OEMs and then customers, we'll be able to really sharpen our pencils on what the OEMs, what the supermarket chains' plans are that drive the OEM chains, that drive the demand for PX G. So, that could be some upside. And then, as I mentioned, we have nothing in there for revenue from the other markets. Ricardo has talked about heat pumps and office cooling. Data centers are super interesting. There are some really big good markets we think that we can get into. We just need to refine our model of how and when we think we can get into them.
And then on the water side, I think that what we could see in the wastewater, especially, is as we ramp our sales team, my expectation is that we will see some hotspots of where we can really add more resources. And so, we can kind of turn that into a machine where we're deploying resources where we know there's high capital return. And I think our commitment here is that we'll be fast to do that when we see a formula working.
All right. Thanks, Mike. This one is another desal-specific question. Can you fill in specific macro factors moderating desal growth in, or I guess, between 2025 and 2026?
Sure. This is Rodney. That's a great question. So, just to recall from what David presented in the deck here, we did derate or have re-rated our growth expectations in kind of the short term.
In the past, what we did was we looked in the past to project the forward. We saw a 15%-17% CAGR out, you know, about a five-year period. What we've observed in the past, you know, 12-24 months here is that we've seen inflation cause about an 8%-10% increase in the global water tariff, if you will. We've also seen that interest rates have increased for large good, large quality developer. In the past, we've seen about an upwards of two to three times increase in interest rates there. We've seen some of the supply chain gridlock, you know, post-COVID, et cetera, et cetera. All this to say that this 15%-17% five-year CAGR that we saw previously in the past is now looking closer to about an 8%-11% rate.
Yeah, and this is Mike just to add on, right? Think about the desal business. These are two to three-year projects. So, essentially, the increase in inflation and interest rates is coming to fruition now. And so, that's why Rodney mentioned the pipeline is getting stronger now because there's a new normal out there. There's a lot of pent-up demand for desalination plants and water generally. And so, that's why we're going to see the contracted sales start to increase. And then that'll drive the actual revenue when we deliver the products in two or three years, given the timeline of the product here.
Okay, thanks, Mike. Moving from the planning stage to the execution stage, how do you keep the organization focused on executing the plan and hitting the milestones laid out?
So, the execution phase has already begun. And then the answer is with laser focus.
So, we have a meeting cadence on a monthly basis where we're already talking about critical milestone execution.
Okay, I've got two here related to the new administration coming into office. So, I'm going to combine them. With the new administration coming into office, do you see any risk that, sorry, do you see any risk? Do you see any risk that the HFC phase-down regulations or the AIM Act might be in jeopardy? And then here's the second question. Do you see tariffs affecting the business at all?
Yeah, this is Mike. I'll take this one. So, I think there's a few factors at play. First of all, from the new administration, impact on environmental things. Look, 99% of our revenue comes from outside the U.S. today. So, that's a good thing for us. We're limited in the U.S. Where it would impact is on the CO2 business.
And I think there's a few things there. One, the ship has sailed on Europe. There's already momentum there. That's going to go forward. And then we think that's largely true in the U.S. as well, where, you know, there's other pressures on these supermarket chains to drive their economic, sorry, their environmental friendliness. And that this train has left the station momentum a little bit. It may impact the timeline, but we do expect continued adoption of CO2. And then a quick reminder that, you know, the AIM Act was enacted under Trump's administration and the EPA. So, we feel pretty good about our isolation on environmental impacts from the new administration. And in terms of tariffs, I mean, the short answer is yes. We do source from places like China for some key components. We saw an impact in our cost structure from the tariffs last time.
We have a playbook to run this time around. We know how it impacted us last time. We think with our cost reduction efforts and some other supply chain plans we have in place that we'll be sufficiently insulated.
Yeah, I would just add to that that under the first Trump administration, there was healthy growth and clean energy adoption.
Okay. Can you update? I'm guessing this is desal. I guess it could be across the board. The question is, can you update competitive landscape? Are there any new entrants, et cetera?
This is Rodney. Another great question. Competition is nothing new for us. Competition has been around since day one, really since the founding of our company. We've been in a competitive, very competitive ecosystem with respect to energy recovery devices. What we can say is that, you know, competition is good for us.
You know, it helps us innovate. It helps us drive new technology and new product introductions. It benefits the overall market, et cetera, et cetera. But as I mentioned in our presentation, you know, we've developed a market leadership framework that's pretty robust in nature. I can't go into all the details, obviously, for competitive reasons. But when we look at our market leadership framework, it does encompass product leadership, you know, having the best product on the market, operational leadership, you know, being able to make pressure exchangers bigger, better, faster than anybody else on this planet, as well as thought leadership, you know, having the right team in place to continuously deploy our technology out there in the market. So, our market share remains robust. I would say there aren't any meaningful or material changes to our market share.
We anticipate or we have built initiatives to help us maintain, if not expand that going forward.
Okay, here's another one. With the change in the operating model between the original model for 2026 and the new one in 2029, would the new operating model, which is being presented as a more conservative outlook on the CO2 and wastewater market, is it a more conservative outlook on the CO2 and wastewater market? Would there effectively be higher upsides on the CO2 and wastewater markets?
Yeah, so this is Mike. I'll take that one. Look, modeling out businesses in five years, especially ones that are sort of on the cusp of commercialization, is quite difficult.
I would say our job here was to lay out an aggressive but achievable plan as opposed to putting out very aggressive high-end targets. Our goal is to put out numbers that we think we can go hit. Then there are, of course, upside components, as I mentioned earlier, that could come through as well. I think a bigger point here is our commitment to continual updates. As we refine things, especially the CO2 model, as we walk through the adoption path, we will continue to update as our projections firm up.
All right. Thanks, Mike. Can you please talk about the potential for cooling data center s?
Yeah, so for both data centers and heat pumps, we've just now begun to start the work on the business case. We'll have more to come in 2025.
Okay.
What is the profitability give and take between the engineering headcount reduction in force and the planned introduction of 40 technical-driven salespeople?
Yeah, sure. This is Mike. I'll take that one. So, yeah, look, the reduction in force is us taking a look at our OPEX, really, that does not drive sales, and taking a very hard look at ensuring we're allocating capital to things that are efficient. And so, the counterpoint there is, as we grow a wastewater business, it will require a sales team to do that. A couple of things at play there. One, we mentioned that we will be targeted. And so, as we grow the sales team, we'll deploy them as, you know, in places where we're getting a strong return. And then also, as Rodney mentioned in his comments, we can actually leverage the technical team that is already out there in desal.
We have a lot of technical staff already there in these markets. And so, we can just, you know, add to those. But I would say that the overall sales team in the wastewater business has been taken into account in the overall operating model for wastewater, not in the engineering side of our OpEx. So, it's all kind of captured in the EBITDA of the wastewater business.
Okay. Here's one we get frequently. How will you protect your IP while doing business in China?
Yeah, this is Mike. Look, IP in China is always a difficult task. I think what is really interesting here, as I've come into this business, is that China and all of our potential competitors have had pressure exchanger devices in their hands for 30 years. And no one's been able to really replicate what we've been able to do.
And I think there's a reason for that, right? It's not just the design of looking at a PX. It is how we manufacture our ceramics and the technical know-how of the precision manufacturing of those ceramics operating for 25 years nonstop and not breaking. And so, that is a clear moat that's been around and we expect will continue.
Okay. Are there any new verticals in development? Can you indicate timing of additional verticals?
Yeah, so at any given time, we've got 10 verticals, 10 new verticals that we're looking at. And that's the case now. I'd say the verticals that are in the most advanced stage of planning at this point, and we've still got more work to do, are heat pumps and data centers. And as we said in the presentation, we'll be presenting, we'll be developing the business cases for both of those verticals in 2025.
Okay, here's another. Are there maintenance/service or other recurring elements of your targeted future revenue guide? If so, what magnitude?
Yeah, so I think this would be a good opportunity, you know, for us to talk about our sales channels, you know, our sales channels in desalination specifically, and you can draw some parallels there to our wastewater business as it evolves, but our sales channels in desal are broken up into three. You know, as I mentioned, there's an aftermarket division there. Aftermarket, you can consider a very predictable, highly correlated to installed base sales channel. It's nominally about a $20 million business growing at a pretty steady rate, right, and we've seen this steady growth in aftermarket over the past five, ten years, so very steady, very predictable, again, correlated to installed base.
OEM, the OEM, original equipment manufacturing division for us, systems smaller than 50,000 cubic meters per day, is roughly a $20-$25 million business for us. We see opportunity here. We do not have a dominant share in some of the segments in OEM, particularly the very small-scale systems. So, the way to grow this business is really to look at, you know, how you can partner with potential equipment suppliers and ancillary equipment that surrounds the PX, how you can develop different products for that industry that has a better value proposition where cost may not be, where first cost is a much more important piece of the puzzle. So, we're looking to grow that. And then mega project division has been the division for immense growth for us over the past, you know, four or five years or so.
That's a boom and explosion in the desalination market as we observe, and as I mentioned, the dominant share there.
Okay, we've got time for one more. Let me give it just a second to look through here. Okay, does a focus on the PX market imply that there will be less focus on pumps and aftermarket service?
Another great question. This is Rodney. Not at all. Not at all. You know, as I just mentioned about the breakdown between our different sales channels, we give equally importance to all these, all three of these sales channels. Aftermarket, again, is a very robust, predictable, steady stream for us. The product mix between PXs and others is typically about 90-10. We see this actually growing in different sectors of the business.
So, in wastewater, you'll probably see more pumps and turbos, a higher product mix, you know, shifting to pumps and turbos within that space. And it makes sense because of the applicability and the wide variety, you know, of applications in that space. So, no, I would say that aftermarket, again, is equally important, just as OEM and MPD for us. We will not keep our eye off the ball there. I mean, we plan to grow it as we've continued to grow it in the past decade or so.
Okay, thanks, Rodney. Thanks to all four of you, gentlemen. That concludes our Virtual Investor Day. Please feel free to reach out to me with any follow-up questions in the coming days. I'll make myself as available as I possibly can be. And again, we thank you all for joining us and for participating today.
Have a great rest of your day.