All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome once again to the ThinkEquity Conference. The next company up is NetSol Technologies, Inc., under the Nasdaq symbol of NTWK. Presenting is going to be Najeeb Ghauri, Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO.
Thank you so much. Thank you for coming. Hello, everyone. So, Najeeb Ghauri, I have a few words to say before we run some slides there. NetSol used to be a private company when we founded the business back in 1996. Four brothers, myself and three other brothers, got together and invested in that private company, started a business. Prior to that, I had a corporate career with an oil company for 12 years. So this opportunity was exciting to me after working for a big blue-chip company in the U.S. By the way, I'm a Pakistani American, a very proud Pakistani American. I've been here for many, many years. So what we did was we invested. I pulled all my 401(k) money from that company I worked for 12 years, almost $500,000, and I put it in that IPO, pre-IPO.
It was a very risky journey, but we took the risk because we realized that there was a technology possibility to create something from scratch, so we invested, and a year later, I was able to do an IPO in the U.S. It was, again, a risky decision, but we did it, and maybe somebody was watching over us from up there, and the IPO happened against all odds because we didn't have much business at the time when we did the IPO, so the IPO went through the process, and 18 months later, we got the IPO done, so what we did with the IPO? We created a global footprint. We were building, investing in technology. We'll talk more about technology in a minute.
The whole idea was, really, how can we leverage that platform and create an opportunity to build a customer base, to bring the technology, new platform. And then from four employees, NetSol employees, family employees, became 1,700 family of our employees, four brothers, including myself. And now we have 1,700 strong. The majority of them are in Lahore, which is the most incredible technology-growing sector in that region. I speak with a lot of pride because it has an amazing ecosystem, a lot of energy, our engineers, a lot of people there who support our customers worldwide. We built that on a 10-acre facility. Lahore, Pakistan, is a home. I'm a Lahore-born American for the last 45 years. So we've transitioned to build this company in a way that we can create opportunities for customers that you'll see in a second.
The whole idea about this IPO was to really do something different, take risk, and it paid off very well. So as you can see, it is a global leader in asset finance business in all three regions, Asia-Pacific, China being our biggest market in terms of revenue right now. China means about 40% of our revenue for the last 20 years. Top Tier 1 customers, finance companies, banks, auto manufacturers, and so forth, and about 30 institutions, I think, in 30 countries. Basically, customers are spread out in many countries, but China is our biggest market. Again, it was founded in 1996, and the IPO was done in 1998. If you look at the numbers, the numbers are quite staggering. It shows the growing industry in our space, which is almost $1.5 trillion global leasing and finance.
Those numbers are really big, bigger than I imagined, which is the whole globe, three regions, leasing and finance businesses. Growth over the last decade is 70%, and the expected size of equipment finance that we operate in is about $3 trillion. I mean, these are really big numbers, almost 10% CAGR, which is the compound annual growth rate. I believe this market is very unique and still a very niche market because there are few players like NetSol. It's very competitive, but you have to be really good at what we do. Of course, we've been doing it for the last 25 years and created an amazing business model that customers are dependent on NetSol. Customers like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, large Tier 1 customers all over the globe, especially in Asia-Pacific. Here you see our established presence in key markets.
APAC is the biggest market right now, which almost 70% of our revenue comes from the Asia-Pacific market, not China, Japan, Bangkok, Australia, and so forth, all those 12 key markets. Very strong position in Asia. A lot of people working in China, local Chinese, programmers, developers, software engineers, and some of our international team based in Beijing offices and other locations. We have strong presence in the U.K. markets, which is about the second biggest revenue. Again, these customers are spread out, whether they're finance companies, auto manufacturers, OEMs, or their in-house finance companies and who we deal with. We also have experience in digital growth. So now we'll talk more about it in a minute and increasing SaaS revenue. I mean, this is the beauty of our model that we are almost, it's not just a license, a hybrid model, but we also have SaaS business.
SaaS revenue has become, we call it ARR, annual recurring revenue, almost 50% of our revenue on a growing basis. So our cash balance is pretty strong. We maintain a pretty good balance sheet. We have not raised money in the last 12 years, so we don't need to raise money. We are in good shape. We have grown organically a lot in the last 12 years. We did a few M&As in the beginning of our career, like 15 years ago. Those M&As are a good part of our company and pretty much integrated in different regions. We delivered positive results. Bottom line is strong. We've given our guidance, which will drive another double-digit growth. By the way, last year, we grew about 19% revenue, and EBITDA was strong, net income 48% gross margin. So the margin is pretty strong.
We continue the same journey into the next fiscal year. July 25 is the fiscal year. We have given double-digit revenue growth guidance also, and we maintain the bottom line. You can see that AI is a big driver. We are investing a lot in AI. Everybody's talking about it. By the way, here's my son. He's better looking than I am. UCLA MBA, very proud of what he's done. He's a Chief Strategy Officer. He'll talk about the story about AI, what we are doing. You can see we're just trading one time the book value. Okay?
Thank you. So Faizaan, I'm Chief Strategy Officer at NetSol. I'm going to talk a little bit more and give you more clarity on our business. So really, at the core, NetSol has built what we call the Ascent platform , which is an AI-first unified platform for how assets are sold, financed, and leased. So we cover a number of different components and customer segments in the whole finance and leasing world. Namely, we've built a lot of traction in the auto captive space. So if you're familiar with the world of auto manufacturers, typically, there is a financial institution created by the automotive company that backs that company and does all the financing for any vehicles you go out there and lease. So our technology, which is known as Ascent Finance , is really the lifeblood of that system there.
Now, on top of that, we've actually, it looks like we have a software update here that needs to, if we can, maybe I can do that. Okay, great. Sorry about that. Yeah. So we've gone quite horizontal and vertical. So in terms of horizontal, we started in the asset finance space, but now we've moved into the digital retail space, meaning that from first working with the auto captive companies, we now work directly with the auto manufacturers and basically have digitized the whole dealership process. So whereas before you would spend hours going into a dealer, you can literally, using our software, buy a BMW or a MINI Cooper on your phone, on the device, and go into the dealership just to pick up the vehicle. So our software powers all of that capability. Now, the big buzzword is AI. This is not a buzzword for us.
We've been on an AI journey since 2019. We've been building out our AI practice. We have two MIT PhDs that actually support our AI practice. And as Najeeb mentioned, by being in Lahore, we are sort of the Google of Pakistan. So we get the best and brightest talent available. They come out of school, and they come work with us. That's a country that's got 70% of the population under the age of 30, about a 270-million-population country, very tech adept, very focused on tech. And really, we're bringing that sort of innovation engine to the rest of the world. So along with our digital retail side, we have a marketplace, and I'll talk in more details about that.
Essentially, if you're familiar with a company like Stripe or any payment gateways or APIs, we basically offer an API-first strategy that allows us to go for Tier 3 and Tier 4 financial institutions as well. Then finally, we have a consulting and AI practice. We just recently announced our Ascent AI Labs, which is essentially our AI practice. Every CIO we talk to needs to define an AI strategy. So they're working with us to help them basically how they can use AI and bring efficiency and automation into their businesses. Just moving on, just to give more detail, again, as I mentioned, Ascent Retail Finance Marketplace, Consultancy, AI Labs, that's really our core business. We've got about 150-plus customers around the world.
Really, the vision is with these customer relationships where folks like Mercedes-Benz have spent hundreds of millions of dollars with us actually building out the software. The vision is to be able to actually cross-sell them all the different capabilities within our organization. These tend to become lifetime relationships. Mercedes-Benz has been a customer of ours for over 25-plus years. In terms of our AI practice, really, we've sort of, there's like three phases to the AI journey we've been on. First is really the consulting phase. Many of our customers, due to their data warehousing issues, they have sensitive financial data that sits on their side, sensitive customer data. We work as consultants that come into those organizations, and we basically help them build different AI use cases. The second phase is really the chatbot phase.
I'm going to show some details on what we've done with the likes of BMW and MINI in terms of really digitizing, using generative AI, digitizing the whole dealership experience by just simply talking to a chatbot, and then finally, over the next two to five years, we're going to be moving to agentic-based AI, which is essentially, whereas today these C opilot systems or ChatGPT, you're probably all familiar with, you have a Copilot system that works with you to basically drive a result. Agentic-based AI is the future. That is really when two AIs basically talk to each other to drive a result. And so we're preparing for that. That's going to have massive implications for our industry, for most enterprise SaaS companies as well.
So just to give you an example of our technology set, I think I can, so this is showing what we've done with the BMW and MINI side of business, so imagine going to a chatbot and being able to put in that you're looking for an electric vehicle. You've got a budget, let's say, of $50,000. And essentially, it's going to go and crawl the different inventory stores of the dealerships there, find you the vehicle that meets your requirements. Because we built the whole financing interface as well, it's actually going to be able to go and run credit checks for you and be able to give you the right financing, but of course, you can customize the vehicle. You can pick what kind of sunroof you want, et cetera, et cetera, and then it will run a credit check.
Essentially, through that process, without ever having to spend the half a day we've all spent in a dealership, now you can all just do this online and talk to a chatbot rather than a dealer. So these kind of systems are starting to come into the world of even complex assets like the auto industry here. Our technology is not just auto finance. It actually speaks to any kind of equipment. So we work with tractors, solar panels, all different types of equipment there. But in the interest of time, I'll move on and share this deck. But this just shows you some of the AI use cases here. So Najeeb mentioned APAC has traditionally been our strongest market, but we've really evolved now to focus on North America. So we have a strong pipeline in North America.
Namely, over the summertime, we started this whole process, the digital retail side, which I just showed you. Originally, we won a deal with MINI Cooper USA, and that's a sister organization of BMW, and we deployed that to about 50 dealerships around the country, well, over the summertime, we actually won BMW, so we're going to be deploying it to all of BMW's dealerships. That's about a $16 million deal, and we beat many different players. We beat the likes of Tekion, which is a $2 billion valuation company today, Cox Automotive, I can just name them, and they worked with NetSol because we offer that full stack, because we understand the retail side, we understand AI, and we understand the finance side as well, so it's a big deal.
It's a big market for us because it opens up not only the equipment finance space, which Najeeb shared with you, but also opens up the digital retail space and the auto tech space to our technology. And yeah, so just a quote from one of our customers here, the vice president of MINI of America. He was able to implement our software within seven months, which is virtually unheard of in our industry. Since then, MINI Cooper has seen a 500% increase in lead flow by having this whole digital capability to actually drive. So it's actually driving direct revenue impact for our customer base. So in terms of our business, we've really sort of evolved from the sort of traditional license and maintenance business. We are moving to hybrid SaaS and SaaS generally. So right now, our revenue is about $60 million.
Nearly half of that is coming through SaaS. And what's exciting about our business is that not only is it predictable revenue, but we have a very low churn rate, so less than 5% churn rate in our business. Typically, when a customer implements our software, it becomes a lifeblood of their business, and they stay with it for generations on end. So Najeeb mentioned our global presence. So APAC, namely China, we have a 75% market share in China. About $44 million of our revenues came from there last year. Europe, we do about $12 million. North America, we did about $6 million, but we expect double-digit revenue growth, particularly in North America. There are a lot of game-changing deals in the pipeline, specifically on the digital retail side that we see closing imminently. So a huge focus on North America. I'm based out of Austin.
Eric Wagner here, he's our Chief Marketing Officer, also based out of Austin. So our corporate headquarters has always been based in Los Angeles, but Austin has become really our delivery center, and our sales and marketing teams. So we invite you, anyone who's down there is welcome to visit us. We have a beautiful view of the Texas Capitol there. Just some numbers around us. So as we really turn the corner in 2024, double-digit revenue growth coming out of really the pandemic where enterprise SaaS, while the general economy may have flirted with a recession, enterprise SaaS was in a depression, and we really navigated that. We've navigated through a number of different challenges, but navigated that, went to double-digit revenue growth, also increased our profitability because really what we've been able to do is our technology has matured over the last two decades.
So we actually let go of about 400 of our technical staff because now our technology is less resource-intensive to actually implement. So we're able to really grow our operating margins from 32% to about 48% over the course of that time. And besides that, shareholder equity is growing. Cash, we have a good cash position, good working capital. As I mentioned, I mean, we are trading at right now one times recurring revenue, one times book value. Right now, if you look at the peers in our space, there's only a few of them. None traded in the U.S., but they trade at least five times revenue right now. So there's a big story here. There's a big value story here, and there's also a big growth story with all of our AI investments. So I'll stop there, and then we'll open it up for questions. Thank you.
Please. Yeah, just curious in terms of your OpEx, how much of that is onshore versus offshore? Thanks for that.
How much of our OpEx is onshore versus offshore?
Well, it's mixed here. Offshore, obviously, we have 1,500 programmers. 95% of the work is done in Lahore simply because they're trained software engineers. We have a lot of, like you mentioned, young talent there who have been with us for many, many years. And they committed. They support all our customers from there. And then, of course, we have onshore companies like U.S., for example, China, and other places. And you heard, we are now really investing in the U.S. By design, we focused initially more in the APAC because we were doing so well. Thank you.
Where is it?
We initially focused on APAC for many, many years in Europe. But now we're looking into - do you hear me?
Now we're looking into North America as the biggest market for us in terms of the market size, our customers, potential finance companies, so this is where we're putting a lot of energy and effort. We started Austin office a year ago, a year and a half ago. We brought in Eric from other companies and then a lot of employees showing up, working in that office, so Don is based there, so I think we're in a good position in terms of spending more money in North America because this is where the future is. This is why I call it the most strongest and the massive market opportunity for us, so the US is the focus for us,
so our OpEx breaks down about 50% of salaries are global, 50% in Pakistan.
But due to the cost arbitrage in Pakistan, even though 95% of the employee base is there, of course, the 5% outside of Pakistan tends to be more of our cost. Because, like you mentioned, we do understand the capability, the talent we have in Pakistan, but there's a big difference in the cost than the U.S. or other markets. Even China is pretty expensive. So that's where I think we spend a half.
That's where I was getting. You're paying the employees in rupees and then you're invoicing in dollars.
Dollars and euros, primarily.
Dollars and euros.
Yeah. Yeah.
Your 2024 over 2023 growth segment-wise in your business units, where did that come from?
Sure. So I think most of the growth, I would say, is primarily from our China practice. So we won a couple of major deals.
Ford China was a big win that we won in that period. That was some Europe also. Some Europe. And then in the U.S. as well, I think the 2023, 2024 number has a little bit of the BMW revenue in there. Most of that is going to be reflected in this fiscal year.
And by product, is that more SaaS?
Yes. Yes. I think they were all SaaS deals, actually. Yeah. And the Ascent Finance product, I'd say, of that revenue growth, 70% is in the Ascent Finance product. 30% came from the Ascent Retail product.
We recently now started reporting SaaS as a separate revenue, like ARR, annual recurring revenue, which is SaaS and support. So we're pretty much 50-50. And actually, it's a growing side for the SaaS revenue for us.