Proto Labs, Inc. (PRLB)
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Investor Day 2021
May 20, 2021
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm Dan Schumacher, vice president of investor relations. And I could not be more excited to have you with us today for Proto Labs twenty twenty one Investor Day. Today, our management team has a full agenda of topics that they will cover. As they are presenting, please submit your questions through the q and a feature of BlueJeans.
After the presentations, we will have a q and a session in which we will do our best to answer as many questions as possible. If we are unable to answer your questions during our q and a session, we will reach out to you directly afterwards. Before I turn the floor over to Rob Bedore, I will remind you that our presentations today will make forward looking statements. Listeners are cautioned that these statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of Proto Labs. These risks and uncertainties can cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations.
We advise listeners to carefully view the risk factors discussed in our SEC filings. We will also reference certain non GAAP measures. Reconciliations of these non GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available at our website, protolabs.com. Now it is my pleasure to introduce Rob Bedore, President and Chief Executive Officer of Proto Labs.
Thanks, Dan. Hello, everyone. Thank you all for joining us for our twenty twenty one Investor Day. While we had hoped to host you in person day, we're glad you're with us virtually. A lot has changed since our last Investor Day in 2017, and we're really excited to share recent updates on our business and our long term strategy going forward.
Here's our agenda for the couple of hours. I'll start with an overview of who we are, the dynamics of our industry, and the customers we serve. Next, I'll dive into the size of our market opportunity and our long term strategy to capture that market. You'll then get a chance to hear from several other members of our executive leadership team, whom I will introduce shortly. They will provide more information on our platform, our road map and our plan to accelerate growth, followed by a summary of our financial outlook over the next few years.
Following our prepared remarks, we'll host a live Q and A session. As Dan mentioned, please enter your questions in the Q and A section of your screen, and we will address all questions after the prepared remarks. Let me start by outlining our mission here at Proto Labs. We empower companies to bring new products to market by offering the fastest and most comprehensive digital manufacturing services in the world. And today, we're the leader in digital manufacturing.
Two decades ago, we were the first company to make custom parts manufacturing available to order online. We also pioneered the digital thread that automates the front end and other components of the manufacturing process, reducing non recurring engineering and enabling parts to be delivered in hours or days rather than weeks or months. As a result, we remain the fastest manufacturer of custom parts in the world. The manufacturing industry has evolved rapidly, and along with that, the needs of our customers have changed. Further, uncertainty spurred by COVID-nineteen has only accelerated this evolution, putting already strained supply chains under added pressure and creating more opportunities for us to serve our customers.
To capitalize on these opportunities, we're evolving our model to ensure that we are viewed as an invaluable solution for our customers across their product development and production use cases in a way that is entirely digital and best in class. Going forward, Proto Labs is positioned to be the fastest and most comprehensive digital provider of online custom parts in the world. I am excited to share our vision with you today. We have an incredibly strong management team. This team is an experienced group of executives with deep knowledge of Proto Labs' markets as well as the wide range of customers we serve.
And I am happy to have many of them here with us today to discuss our long term strategy. In addition to myself, you will have the opportunity to hear from the following members of Proto Labs' executive leadership team during today's presentation: Renee Conklin, Global Vice President of Human Resources, Ram Deswart, Co Founder and CEO of Hubs, Rich Baker, Chief Technology Officer, Brian Peters, Chief Marketing Officer and John Way, Chief Financial Officer. We're excited to be working as a team to execute on our vision to enhance our position as the leader in the custom parts manufacturing space. Now that we've introduced the team, let's start with an overview of the Proto Labs business. Proto Labs is the world's fastest manufacturer of custom prototype and on demand production parts.
Our suite of services span 16 discrete manufacturing processes, which fall under our four main service offerings: injection molding, sheet metal fabrication, CNC machining, and three d printing. We manufacture over 5,000,000 parts per month, and we operate a dozen facilities across five countries, with over 1,000,000 square feet of manufacturing space. Furthermore, with the acquisition of Hubs, we also work with a network of hundreds of premium manufacturing partners globally. Our investment proposition is unique and compelling. First, we operate in a large and growing market, with a serviceable addressable market of $100,000,000,000 that continues to grow as a result of favorable product development and supply chain megatrends.
Second, our leadership team has deep manufacturing and industry expertise, uniquely positioning us to capture more of this growing opportunity. Third, Proto Labs reinvented manufacturing in 1999 and maintains the leadership position in the market. Our recent acquisition of Hubs positions us further to extend our leadership as we bring together our automated digital manufacturing capabilities and a network of premium manufacturing partners. Fourth, our recently updated e commerce platform provides a more complete, capable, and intuitive user experience on the front end and modern architecture on the back end to enable more frequent releases of new and expanded capabilities. Fifth, we have a diverse and expanding customer set with low concentration.
No individual customer represents more than 2% of our annual revenue, and we serve essentially all customer end markets. And sixth, we maintain a highly profitable business with strong cash flow generation, allowing for investment and growth. We've provided tremendous shareholder return since our IPO in 2012, and our strong balance sheet will support the execution of the next phase of growth and long term shareholder value creation. Our global footprint is a key differentiating factor for us. As I mentioned, we have in house manufacturing facilities and offices across North America, Europe and Japan, which are three of the largest geographic markets where our customers are located.
In addition, our manufacturing partner network resides across North America, Europe, and Asia, complementing our in house manufacturing and providing us with truly global reach. Our digital thread, which is the combination of our proprietary software with the physical manufacturing process, has enabled Proto Labs to reinvent manufacturing. We were born digital over two decades ago, and are the only contract manufacturer that is truly digital from end to end across every stage of the manufacturing value chain. Eliminating the silos of information that have long hampered data exchange between disparate software systems, our digital thread ties together each aspect of the manufacturing process, including three d CAD modeling and visualization tools, proprietary design for manufacturability analysis, computer aided manufacturing, the manufacturing equipment, and the shop floor data collection systems. Digital manufacturing and the addition of the digital thread results in automation that reduces manufacturing and labor costs and increases throughput, enabling Proto Labs to differentiate itself as the world's fastest and most cost effective solution for prototype and low volume production use cases.
Let's take a closer look at what we mean by digital manufacturing. Pictured here is an example of the digital manufacturing process, beginning with a three d CAD model and ending with a finished product ready for market. With the integrated digital thread, data is shared through the continuum of the manufacturing process, from product conception and design upload to manufacturing, inspection, and delivery. This ensures consistency, quality, and a high degree of automation. Our customers upload a three d CAD model to our online portal and receive an automated quote with design feedback and pricing information in moments or hours.
Our proprietary interactive manufacturability analysis creates a digital twin of the custom part and provides a visual aid to eliminate potential manufacturing issues before any of the actual production of the part begins. Once the design is ready and the customer places the order, digital instructions are sent to the production floor where manufacturing can begin immediately. Let me emphasize this. Our proprietary process automates the nonrecurring manufacturing engineering in many of our services, removing time and cost from the manufacturer of the custom parts. As you look at the right hand side of the image, finished parts can then be digitally inspected before being shipped out to customers.
Our digital manufacturing model provides the framework for innovative quality process documentation, reducing time and cost in the inspection step as well. As a result of this automation, we're able to ship parts to customers with industry leading speed at scale. In our CNC service, for example, we routinely ship parts the same day they're ordered. The result is an unprecedented speed to market value for engineers and buyers and an on demand resource throughout a product's life cycle. The value of speed cannot be understated.
It allows our customers to get to market quickly, and it enables more testing and iteration, thus reducing design risk in their new products. In 1999, our company was founded with the objective of providing entrepreneurs with prototype injection molded parts that were not readily available to them at fast lead times. We quickly realized that the online digital manufacturing model we created was valuable to not only entrepreneurs, but all product developers. Since then, we've evolved our business extensively, adding CNC machining, three d printing, and most recently, sheet metal fabrication. Within each of these services, we've increased the complexity of the parts we can manufacture.
The breadth of the services we offer and unprecedented speed at which we can deliver high quality parts provide significant value to our customers in accelerating their product innovation and low volume production needs. Our recent acquisition of Hubs is the next step in the evolution of our customer offering. Our customers will have access to a premium manufacturing partner network, which significantly expands the breadth and depth of our manufacturing capabilities. Our customers will now be able to come to Proto Labs for a wider variety of prices and lead times, more complex and tighter tolerance parts, in addition to the same industry leading lead times and reliability that legacy Proto Labs is known for. An additional element of our evolution as an organization and as a public company is demonstrated by our priorities around sustainability and societal impact.
Now, let me introduce Renee Conklin, Global Vice President of Human Resources, to provide you with more detail about our work in these areas.
Thank you, Rob. We are working to continuously improve our ESG practices, and I would like to take a few minutes to highlight some of the work that we are doing. In terms of the environment, we were recently awarded the 2021 Sustainability Award from the National Association of Manufacturers for our continued effort to reduce our environmental footprint. This includes implementing solar power at our Plymouth, Minnesota injection molding facility, reducing material waste through recycling programs, establishing an internal green team, and making other energy efficient changes across all of our facilities. We're also tracking our utility, energy and natural gas consumption so that we can better understand our impact to the environment and identify areas for further improvement.
There are also several social initiatives in the works that I'm incredibly proud of. First, we've established a diversity, equity and inclusion leadership council to oversee our inclusion efforts. We've also conducted anti bias training for employees and are establishing employee resource groups within our facilities. The goal is to ensure that every employee feels valued and comfortable sharing their unique talents at Proto Labs. Human capital management is another area of importance for Proto Labs.
We truly believe that employees are our most important asset, and we are committed to developing employees and offer many opportunities for training. The mental and physical health and safety of our employees has always been a top priority for our company, and we therefore developed additional training programs to support our employees during the COVID nineteen pandemic. Our Proto Labs Foundation, which is an employee led program, provides financial support and mentoring for STEM education, as well as many other important initiatives to support the needs of our communities. Finally, I think it's important to share that the governance practices of our organization are also a top priority. We have an independent and diverse board of directors that provides guidance and oversight to our leadership team, a strong code of ethics and business conduct policy that employees are required to review and sign upon joining the Proto Labs team.
We also have an anonymous ethics hotline that is monitored by the board of directors. I hope sharing some of these examples with you shows our commitment to ESG initiatives, and I look forward to continuing to build and improve these programs over the next several years. I'll now hand it back over to Rob to provide additional information on the company.
Now, I'd like to address the manufacturing industry, which has evolved significantly over the years and continues to evolve today. Let's delve into this evolution and how it impacts Proto Labs and our long term strategy. We see four megatrends disrupting manufacturing today: SKU proliferation, shorter product life cycles, the shift to e commerce sourcing, and of course, the COVID-nineteen pandemic. It is noteworthy that the first three of these trends were magnified and accelerated due to the pandemic in 2020. SKU proliferation, or the increase in the number of products launched, has been dramatic in many sectors.
LEK Consulting found that there had been a 42% increase in the average number of SKUs launched between 2017 and 2019 among companies surveyed. Further, it is estimated that 50,000,000,000 IoT devices will be in use around the world by 02/1930. New products are launching faster and more frequently than ever before. And they're having shorter lives in the market. Supply Chain Digital found that fully 50% of company revenues are coming from products launched in the prior three years.
These trends have put pressure on traditional supply chains, causing many to adopt digital solutions and begin to invest in digital supply ecosystems. McKinsey found that the rate of this adoption was accelerated by three to four years in 2020 alone, as 75% of companies struggled to overcome challenges in production or distribution brought on by the pandemic. These megatrends are having a profound impact on our supply chains worldwide. Companies are experiencing increased demand volatility, reduced development time, increased variety of products to manage, shorter payback periods in the market, and reduced capital investment per product. Proto Labs is ideally suited to solve these challenges for manufacturing companies.
And importantly, our digital manufacturing processes enable world class speed, low upfront investment, no minimum order quantities, a broad set of capabilities, and great flexibility to adapt to volatility and demand. With that industry backdrop, let's talk about our customers. Throughout our early history, we focused on prototyping, and thus, the design engineer as our customer. Often, their role is to prototype new designs until they arrive at a version of the product that's ready for production. As a product approaches completion, the production buyer also becomes our customer.
These customers are focused on delivering the end product to market in a scalable, cost effective manner. We serve both types of customers, and our digital model is a great platform for the transition from prototyping to production. That being said, design engineers and production buyers have different use cases that they value. Let's review some of those. As illustrated here, prototypes come in many forms, from simple to complex, usually with many iterations from idea to final design.
Prototypes can also begin in one service, such as three d printing, and then ultimately transition to another service, such as injection molding, for final production. Fixtures also tend to be custom parts with varying degrees of complexity. These can be made in plastic or metal in several of our services. Bridge tooling occurs in our injection molding service. These scenarios generally relate to a product that will ultimately be mass produced, but needs to enter the market quickly.
Customers will engage us to help them get their product to market in weeks. Volumes we produce can range from thousands to millions. Another common use case is low volume production. Because of our flexibility to adapt on demand, low cost of entry, and no minimum order quantities, we can be a great production partner at low to mid volumes. Today, we serve a portion of these use cases, and as you will see, our innovation road map, in conjunction with the creation of hubs, will allow us to dramatically expand the set of customer needs that we will serve.
To illustrate this, let's turn to three examples of use cases we have served for our customers. Aura came to us in the midst of the pandemic with a need for prototyping to rapidly bring to market a safe, high quality ventilator that was also low in cost. Our automated analysis helped reduce their start up costs, and Proto Labs' quick turn sheet metal fabrication and three d printing helped the team move quickly through several rounds of iterations to prepare a final design. This product went into market in record time, and their ability to rapidly prototype with us was the key to their success. Corindus is a global technology leader in robotic assisted vascular interventions.
Shown here is the company's CorePath robotic platform for coronary and vascular procedures. Corindus needed a quick ridge tooling solution to meet testing, FDA clearance, and production start up deadlines, and also to mitigate early demand uncertainty. Our on demand injection molding provide high quality plastic parts fast, in low volumes, as needed, enabling a successful launch in a volatile market. Finally, Lockheed Martin engineers had a production need to create a strong, modular storage infrastructure to hold experiments and cargo for future NASA Lunar missions. Our sheet metal fabrication service produced aluminum parts in a matter of days.
Final production parts are currently installed and used in the Habitat Ground Test article at NASA's facilities. These three customer examples highlight a few of the use cases our customers turn to Proto Labs for each and every day. Having framed up the evolution of the industry and our customers and use cases, how does Proto Labs win? Let me walk you through our market opportunity and strategy to capture it. I've touched on our addressable market a couple of times.
Now, let's get into more detail. At the highest level, we currently operate within the global custom contract manufacturing market, where companies outsource the manufacture of parts, components, or complete products to another company, such as Proto Labs. This is a massive market, totaling approximately $2,000,000,000,000 worldwide. The market spans many different manufacturing functions and processes, including hundreds of sub processes within the broad classifications of casting, forming, machining, joining, and additive manufacturing. From jet engines to phone cases, and countless things in between, many of the products you interact with each day were likely produced via contract manufacturing.
Since our inception, we focused on areas where we could automate the manufacturing process via our digital model. Our initial focus was on prototypes. We started with simple parts and have added complexity over time, as I described earlier. We've added services to meet the needs of our customers, which ultimately has driven our growth. We've historically focused on speed as a key component of our differentiation, and customers used us for production where there was a good fit.
This chart conceptually illustrates our place within the global manufacturing market. Our serviceable market is a subset of the entire contract manufacturing market because we've positioned ourselves to avoid routine, high volume, commoditized manufacturing. And to date, we've focused on the four services where we've been able to apply our proprietary software to accelerate delivery times. We've now expanded the gray box on the previous slide. This represents our entire serviceable market.
You've seen this visual before. It represents various customer use cases. We've expanded our envelope over time, but several use cases were still outside of Proto Labs' legacy capabilities. There are instances in which the customer has high requirements, like tighter tolerances, or instances in which the customer wants different price points or lead times, and our current offer does not meet their needs. This has resulted in missed revenue opportunity for Proto Labs in the past.
Our innovation roadmap is designed to expand our offerings to enable us to serve more of these use cases. Furthermore, the combination with Hubs is highly complementary. This is a transformative acquisition for Proto Labs that will allow us to serve our customers more holistically than we do today. Hub's platform and global network of premium manufacturing partners will augment Proto Labs' in house technology enabled manufacturing, creating a highly comprehensive digital manufacturing offering. If Proto Labs cannot make your part, we'll find the right premium manufacturing partner in our network to make it for you.
Once integrated, this will represent a material shift in our position in the market. We'll go from being the fastest and most reliable provider of custom parts to also one of the most comprehensive in our four services. We will have offerings positioned to win across the entire market. Our differentiated business model will allow us to win in a 100,000,000,000 global marketplace, expanding our serviceable market by more than five times. Once scaled, Hubs expands our market reach through a preferred network of manufacturing partners that adds part envelope, lead time options, and specialty services.
Proto Labs' winning digital manufacturing model not only serves, but takes a differentiated position in one of the most profitable portions of the outsourced manufacturing Together, we will deliver prototype and production needs in three d printing, CNC machining, injection molding, and sheet metal across The Americas, EMEA, Japan, and other developed economies. Combining Proto Labs' unprecedented in house digital manufacturing with Hub's broad service offer and wide variety of price and lead time options expands our ability to provide value to our customers and truly differentiates us from competitors. We will now offer a best in class platform and winning combined e commerce model. Our number one priority is to meet the needs of customers across prototype and production to be their one stop supplier of custom parts. Our vast envelope of capabilities and broad range of lead time and pricing options across all our services will allow us to meet the needs of a wide set of customer use cases.
I'd now like to hand it over to Bram Deswart, Co Founder and CEO of Hubs, to provide additional background information on the company.
Thanks, Rob, and good morning, everyone. My name is Bram Desvart, and I'm the Chief Executive Officer and Co Founder at Hubs. Hubs is an online manufacturing platform that provides engineers with on demand access to a global network of premium manufacturing partners. Our highly automated online platform massively simplifies and shortens all necessary steps before manufacturing begins, such as the design analysis and price calculation. Unlike Hubs and ProLabs, in traditional manufacturing, this can take weeks and dozens of emails back and forth between the customer and the manufacturer.
On the Hubs platform, it takes seconds. Customers upload their design and within a few seconds, they get a quote, design analysis and different lead time options. Once they've confirmed the order, their parts can be routed to the right manufacturing partner in just minutes, thanks to our smart order routing system. Besides the easy to use online platform, our global network of manufacturing partners also provides customers with unprecedented breadth in manufacturing capabilities as well as price and lead time options. For three d printing, CNC machining, injection molding and sheet metal fabrication, we can manufacture in more materials, service finishes and geometric complexity than a traditional factory.
Also through our manufacturing network model, we can offer our customers a very broad range of price and lead time options. In line with this expanding offering, which today extends well beyond three d printing, we've recently rebranded our company from three d Hubs to Hubs. Let me share a one minute video explaining the benefits of using the Hubs platform and manufacturing network to outsource your prototyping and production.
As an engineer, you wanna focus on creating great products, not on sourcing parts, juggling quotes, and selecting suppliers. Especially when so many suppliers don't offer the quality and capabilities you need or are just too expensive. Enter Hubs, an online manufacturing platform that gives you instant and risk free access to manufacturing services around the world, allowing you to get your custom parts manufactured quickly and at a competitive price. Simply upload your design, receive an instant quote, and get your parts into production in a few clicks. We'll immediately source your order with the best suited supplier from our global network of fully vetted manufacturing facilities.
Once finished, your parts will be first sent to a hubs facility for customs clearance and quality checks before reaching your shipping destination. Get quality parts in as fast as one day. Get on demand manufacturing for CNC machining, three d printing, injection molding, and sheet metal fabrication. Get your parts into production now.
It's impressive, isn't it? Given the vast opportunity ahead of us, earlier this year, we joined forces with ProLabs to bring our unique manufacturing offering to the industry's largest customer base. By providing our manufacturing capabilities and range of price and lead time options to the almost 20,000 customers served quarterly by ProLabs, we can accelerate our growth and drive more volume to our manufacturing partners. Also, our many thousands of customers can benefit from the lead times that ProLabs provides, which are the fastest in the market. Combining ProLabs' world class speed with Hub's unique manufacturing approach creates the world's most comprehensive digital manufacturing offering.
We are one of the global pioneers in distributed manufacturing and laser focused on providing the leading customer experience in the industry. We achieved this through our best in class online platform, curated and premium network of manufacturing partners and global supply chain capabilities. Let's take a look at each of these areas a bit closer. First, by successfully automating each step of the manufacturing order process, we've been able to create a very easy to use platform for our customers. 95% of ordered parts are instantly quoted through our machine learning approach, while 98% of custom orders are manufacturable, partly thanks to our automated design analysis.
And finally, 97% of sourced orders gets paired to a manufacturing partner quickly and fully automated through our smart order routing systems. As I mentioned, we provide an instant and accurate quote for 95% of parts that are ordered on Hub's platform, which saves customers a tremendous amount of time. We do this by training our deep neural networks with the geometric data, manufacturing specs and sourcing costs of the 7,000,000 parts that have already been produced for our customers. These neural networks are retrained on a continual basis to ensure that customers are always paying the fair market price for their parts. This short video shows how customers get a manufacturing price in just seconds after uploading their designs.
They can also instantly see how changing their material, service finish, quantity or lead time impacts the price. Customers also get instant design feedback on our platform, enabling them to make better design decisions and reduce risk of production failures. This design feedback is provided in our three d viewer and shows if any design changes need to be made before moving into production. Part of the effect of this in house developed software, 98% of customer orders are manufacturable. The remaining 2% may need a tweak to their design before we can move forward with production.
This screen recording shows the real time design feedback provided to a customer on our platform. In this example, the customer is notified of sharp internal corners and cavities in the uploaded design that are challenging to manufacture with CNC machining. Moreover, 97% of sourced orders gets paired automatically to a premium manufacturing partner that is the best fit for the customer. Our order routing system considers both the manufacturing capabilities of our partners as well as the capacity that they have available. For customers, this ensures that their parts go into production quickly and with little risk of issues or delays.
Conversely, for manufacturing partners, this means they get highly qualified, already sold orders in their inbox that are a good fit with their capabilities and available capacity. We have hundreds of manufacturing partners that we have carefully selected and audited. This strategy provides us with more control over the quality and standards of our manufacturing partners, a better understanding of their capabilities, increased likelihood of our orders being prioritized and the ability to build deeper future integrations that improve the user experience. We believe our strategy is better suited to deliver on the reliability and quality our customers expect. We deliberately chose to keep our manufacturing partner network to relatively small, highly curated set of premium manufacturers, but at the same time, geographically very distributed.
Having manufacturing partners in 20 different countries broadens our offer and expands the price and lead time options that our customers can choose from. Furthermore, it also creates a very resilient manufacturing solution as it mitigates risks related to region specific events such as virus outbreaks, escalating trade wars, natural disasters or national holidays. In line with our goal to provide peace of mind to our customers through reliable distributed manufacturing experience, we've developed a broad range of supply chain capabilities at our cost of facilities in Europe and The U. S. These capabilities include managing shipments and customs clearance for our customers, as well as quality checks on orders in a highly intelligent, automated and scalable setup.
In summary, Hubs is providing a leading customer experience through its best in class online platform, premium manufacturing network and global supply chain capabilities. Our manufacturing partner network model create unprecedented customer offering, which can be rapidly expanded and scaled. And when you combine that with ProLabs, we will deliver the world's most comprehensive digital manufacturing offering to world's largest customer base in a significantly expanded serviceable market. Now back to Rob.
Thank you, Bob. The combination of Proto Labs and Hubs truly does present a world class customer offering. This visual depicts the complementary nature of our respective offerings. Together, we will provide a broader selection of materials, tighter tolerances, more complete parts, more finishing options, as well as more lead time options and competitive prices at high volumes to new and existing customers. In the future, Proto Labs and Hubs will be able to fill nearly every custom manufacturing need across the product life cycle, from idea prototype to full end use part production in our four services.
Our value position becomes even stronger, allowing us to increase our customer share of wallet, customer retention and addressable market. Now that I've communicated our many growth opportunities and how big the serviceable market really is, I'd like to give an overview of our five year roadmap to capture more of that market. Then Rich, Brian and John will provide you with further detail. Here's a summary of our five year plan. Our primary objective is to double our revenue over the next five years.
To be successful, we need to further establish Proto Labs as the best in class digital platform for custom parts manufacturing. This allows us to serve customer needs across the breadth of their use cases from product development through production. This will accelerate both our top line growth and increase our operating income. Our five year plan is broken down into three phases: Establish the Platform, Accelerate Growth, and Expand Profitability. Rich, Brian, and John will go into more detail in a moment on each of these, but let me give you a brief overview.
First, we're already well on our way to establish the platform with the launch of Proto Labs two point zero. A best in class customer experience remains our number one priority. To provide that, we'll focus on further expanding our offering through the integration of hubs and continued investment in e commerce. Next, accelerate growth. While we continue to expand our part envelope and offerings, bringing these capabilities to customers will allow us to accelerate our growth in the next four to five years.
We will continue to expand the types of parts we can make and offer customers a wider breadth of use cases, including additional pricing and lead time options. Hubs plays a significant role in this expansion as well. And finally, expanding profitability. We will leverage scale and innovation to expand our profitability. Our objectives here include nearly doubling non GAAP operating income and capturing enhanced operational efficiencies.
Before I turn the presentation over to other members of our executive leadership team, let me quickly provide you with an overview of what I hope you will hear today. First, we are in an excellent position to extend our leadership and empower customers to bring new products to market by offering the fastest and most comprehensive digital manufacturing services in the world in our four services. Second, we're well on our way to establish the platform that will create a best in class customer experience, allowing us to capture a significantly expanded serviceable addressable market. Third, we have a deep understanding of our current and expanding customer use cases, which will support a thoughtful go to market strategy focused on accelerating growth. And finally, this five year plan provides a visionary and executable strategy that puts us on a path to doubling revenue and enhancing our earnings power over the long term.
With that, let me introduce Rich Baker, our Chief Technology Officer. Rich will discuss our Proto Labs two point zero project, as well as our combined platform with Hubs and our technology roadmap focus for the next few years. Rich?
Thanks, Rob, and good morning, everyone. Our platform is critical to strengthening our relationship with customers and therefore positioning Proto Labs for accelerating growth. This part has three steps. Replatforming our software, we call this Proto Labs two point zero, was step one in this endeavor. And I want to spend some time discussing motivations for the project and how it enables us to grow for years to come.
Next, I'll transition into how the integration of Hub's capabilities will take our platform to the next level. And finally, I'll talk about how we will satisfy more and more customers' use cases by innovating and expanding what we offer on the platform. Larry Lucas started this company by taking the process of injection molding and digitalizing it through game changing technology, which improved the speed at which product developers could innovate. This technology and Proto Labs' subsequent expansion into CNC machining and three d printing gave product developers a new ability to get ideas to market faster. Before joining Proto Labs, I'd been a customer starting in 02/2007.
I have a firsthand appreciation for how this technology can change how fast product developers innovate. Over the years, Proto Labs has expanded the complexity and scale of the offerings. It has become a more valued partner to more customers, which has supported our explosive growth to date. As you can see on the graph, the year the company was founded, Proto Labs had approximately $100,000 of revenue, not bad for our first year of a startup company. The number of product developers served grew and with that, the amount of revenue expanded to $126,000,000 when the company went public in 2012.
Last year, the company had $434,000,000 in revenue. Since the beginning, we've had the good problem of experiencing tremendous revenue growth. Our sporting business systems in the early days were flexible enough to handle the early growth and carry the weight of this explosive growth, but started to show their limitations. The architecture of our core technical platform had reached its limits. As Rob mentioned, over the last twenty plus years, we've built an organization that offers four distinct services and now has a much more global footprint, serving tens of thousands of customers across The United States, Japan and EMEA.
In 2020 alone, we served over 40,000 individual product developers. With the additional technologies and capabilities, our customers started to use us in different ways. While in the beginning, customers used us for prototyping, as we expanded what we could do for our customers, they also started to use us for production as well. The buying experience had some modification to it, but in general, our e commerce experience was tailored to the prototype customer. As the services and the geographies in which we offer these services expanded, the system was incrementally refactored and expanded to add functionality as the company's capabilities evolved, creating technical debt.
Continuing down the path of adding to this mounting pile of tech debt would have been painfully slow and maybe even impossible. This is not a unique problem for a rapidly growing technology based company. There's a long list of well known tech companies which had to go through this same exercise, redesigning their systems and system architecture to become scalable and support their massive growth and expanded market opportunities. For many of the same reasons, Netflix, Airbnb, Slack, Snap and many others have all had to make similar investments to reinvent their platforms. Similar to these companies, we needed to make changes to our architecture to continue to grow into the future.
To support our continued growth, we needed a modern, scalable, modular architecture. Proto Labs two point zero is a ground up rewrite of our e commerce platform and many of the supporting systems. As part of it, we've implemented a hybrid cloud microservices architecture, which sounds like a lot of jargon, but is significant and that will allow us to use many other cloud services for capabilities you experience on other favorite e commerce sites without having to develop them ourselves, allowing us to focus our resources on developing unique new things. This is the key to faster advancement of our existing services and new offers. A little history.
We began the Proto Labs two point zero project in 2017 to improve our overall customer experience. Our fully connected digital thread that Rob touched on earlier required that we upgrade the complete backbone to ensure that it was entirely modern, all with the customer experience at the forefront of our design. As illustrated here, our platform connects several key systems, starting with e commerce, our proprietary engineering system, manufacturing execution system, our ERP, financial reporting, BI tools and our CRM. Building these services into one system was a massive undertaking, but it is live and running our business. Proto Labs two point zero has resulted in several immediate benefits for customers.
The new e commerce is more intuitive than the legacy platform with fewer clicks required to place an order and an overall better buying experience. We also added enhancements which make Proto Labs more valuable to our customers as they take their ideas from concept to production. We made it easier for our production customer to fulfill their multipart orders across multiple services and capabilities. The reward for these improvements will be higher customer satisfaction and improved customer retention. The longer term benefit of the microservices architecture is the ability to launch new services and capabilities for our customers faster with easier integration of acquisitions like hubs.
We've gotten great feedback from customers over the last several months, getting one from engineering technicians at Boston Scientific. This is a testament to listening to our customers and evolving our systems to support their needs. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the Proto Labs employees involved in making this new platform a success. Now I'd like to show you a video of Proto Labs two point zero in use and what the experience actually looks like for our customers. The first segment shows the basic flow.
The second half, an example of the new design for manufacturing analysis.
Hello. We're here because we've revolutionized manufacturing once again with our all new digital experience engineered with you, our customer, in mind. At the heart of the system is the all new online quoting and ordering platform. Less time uploading, quoting and ordering parts, more time on things like design optimization, validation and testing. Here's why we think you'll love the new platform.
A more intuitive navigation that makes it easy to manage your projects and collaborate within your account. Molding, machining and three d printing services combine into a unified online quoting experience. You can create projects, which allow for teams of users versus single users. We've kept the overall DNA of our DFM intact from our previous platform but have improved your interactive manufacturing analysis to make manufacturing feedback clear and concise. With injection molding, you can now view and discuss your gate and ejector pin layout before you order your tooling and parts.
With CNC machining, we've drastically simplified threading assignments, allowing you to easily click on any hole features and assign required threads. And with three d printing, we've kept the pricing table intact so you can see real time cost implications based on your choice of additive material and resolution level. Use our built in cost analysis feature to determine when you should move from a prototype to on demand manufacturing tool. And our receive by calendar creates shipping simplicity. Just choose the date you want parts shipped and cost calculate automatically.
Plus, you'll get complete shipping costs and tax provided at checkout, not after, ensuring your purchase order will always match the invoice. There you have it. If you're a returning customer, thank you for your continued business and valuable feedback that made these enhancements possible. If you're a new customer, you're in for a treat.
Our new platform was designed around speed for the developer. This next clip is a fun example of that speed.
We've reinvented our digital manufacturing platform to help you iterate, launch and manufacture custom components faster, improved user experience, streamlined quoting and optimized design analysis, more parts, more projects,
more efficient workflow.
Go from prototype to production faster with Proto Labs.
That never grows old, getting that box delivered. Now let's switch gears and talk about the value of the combined platform of Proto Labs and Hubs. This graphic provides an overview of how our Proto Labs two point zero component systems interact. Our systems integrate our digital and physical factories, taking the manual process out of both generating a quote and manufacturing apart. Customers, as you saw in the video, upload CAD files into our e comm system and request a quote.
Our digital factory will take the CAD files and digitally manufacture the parts, creating digital twins and offering customers feedback on the CAD designs. This is designed for manufacturability feedback, DFM. We provide it so they can adjust their designs to make the parts manufacturable. The digital factory takes engineering time out of generating quotes, working out how to manufacture the parts and lets customers know exactly any differences, if any, between their CAD model and the final physical part. When customers order the parts, that triggers the digital factory to send the information to the physical factory for manufacture.
In services like injection molding and CNC machining, the digital to physical factory connection eliminates the need to have skilled machinists program and operate the machinery. The time from pressing the order button to chips being cut in the factory can be as little as fifteen minutes. Orders are processed through our manufacturing systems and the parts are ultimately shipped to customers. The digital nature of the process generates the fastest and most consistent lead times, fastest from quote to delivery in the industry. It's a real differentiator because no one else has this technology.
As we turn to the next slide, the Hub's architecture is similar, but functions a little differently. Like the Proto Labs process, a customer will upload a CAD file. However, this file is sent through AI analysis, where a price and lead time is established on geometry of the part, service used to manufacture the part, material, historical pricing of parts with similar attributes. When the customer orders the part, it is then routed to the appropriate manufacturing partner for bidding in the partner platform. Once a bid is accepted, the manufacturing partner fulfills the order.
Hub's AI systems are able to match the customer needs with manufacturing partner capabilities. This allows hubs to take the manual process out of generating a quote and the back and forth negotiation with manufacturing partners who could fulfill the customer's needs. This provides a lot of flexibility to offer anything the manufacturing network is capable of producing. With the integration of Hubs and ProLabs architectures into a united platform, we will be able to provide customers a complete offer with a single e commerce storefront. This combined architecture will connect customers to the right manufacturing solution based on their needs.
We will have a range of price and lead time options, providing customers with the most comprehensive custom parts solution in the world. As you can see, Hubs and ProLabs are not just compatible, but complementary approaches to solve our customers' needs. In addition to continuing to refine our world class e commerce, we're going to devote engineering resources to expand our capabilities in order to capture more of the SAM. As I touched on earlier, we have a strong track record of innovation. From 2014 to 2017, the focus of our R and D resources was on speed and expanding the part envelope of existing services and offering new services to fill more and more of our customers' needs.
We expanded our envelope with LSR, insert molding, over molding and lathe offerings to name a few. Through acquisitions, we added three d printing services in The Americas and Europe and added sheet metal and expanded CNC capabilities to The Americas. As I discussed, from 2017 through 2020, our R and D spend was directed to improving our e commerce experience and modernizing our digital manufacturing systems. This has set us up well for the next phase of development. As I mentioned earlier, our goal is to have the best in class e commerce experience for our customers.
The first step, Proto Labs two point zero, has established this foundation, enabling us to better support our customers and our strategy. It also enables us to continue to drive enhanced functionality and create an easier path for new offers to get from Proto Labs R and D to the e commerce platform. Examples of this include offering instant pricing and instant DFM on more of our service offerings. These will help align the buying experience between Proto Labs and the Hubs offerings. Second, we will further expand our part envelope, supported by the addition of Hubs, which with it brings solutions for parts that are outside of our physical factories capabilities.
Our combined road map will expand the offering to include a broader set of part complexities, tolerances, secondary operations, pricing, lead times and other capabilities. Importantly, this opens up our serviceable market, opening up Proto Labs to new business, which we couldn't previously satisfy. Looking forward, as we put Proto Labs two point zero behind us and integrate Hub's platform, we will continue to innovate at an accelerated pace. We will apply our R and D resources to expand our part envelope, further improve the e commerce experience and serve a broader set of customer use cases. This will mean more price and lead time options along with more frequent releases of new and expanded capabilities.
So watch this space. I appreciate you taking the time to learn about us. I hope you understand the major milestone we crossed when we established our platform for long term success and the opportunity unlocked by the integration of Hubs and Labs. I will now pass it over to Brian Peters, our Chief Marketing Officer, to talk about accelerating growth over the coming years.
Hello, everyone. I'm Brian Peters, Proto Labs' Chief Marketing Officer. Now that we have discussed how we will establish the platform, I wanna turn our attention to the customer and accelerating our growth, ultimately leading us to double our revenue by 2026. On paper, this strategy is simple. Be the go to provider of custom parts.
The combination of our market leading brand position, our expanded offering, and the new customer quoting platform will benefit our customers and accelerate our growth. Our brand is the brand in the industry, with twenty years of delivering for customers across the globe. Proto Labs brand is the industry standard and holds the highest awareness of any brand in our segment today. This combined with our new expanded offering and new ecom experience will position Proto Labs as the go to manufacturer for years to come. Over the last two decades, we've amassed a customer database of over 1,000,000 contacts we will be able to immediately communicate updates to our offering.
And many will be thrilled to hear about all the new offerings and capabilities we will be adding as we integrate hubs. We serve a diverse set of customers from over a dozen industries. Industries can be cyclical, and in any one year, some industries may be in a rapid innovation cycle, while others may be reducing their product development. These industries use us for a variety of needs and use cases. And unlike most traditional manufacturers, we are not reliant on any one industry for growth.
The customers within these industries range from small startups to global multinational corporations like you see here. And of course, these are just a few of the over 50,000 companies across the globe Proto Labs has been business with. I'm pleased to say these companies put tremendous value on what we do for them, Whether that's Google, who loves our speed, or Cummins, who loves our quoting process, there's a lot to like with our current services, and soon, there's going to be a lot more to like as we integrate hubs. The other megatrend we're a part of is the continued adoption of e commerce as a channel as engineers move from sourcing parts traditionally to the e commerce experience. As Rob highlighted earlier, this trend continues, and every year, more and more customers make the switch to e commerce to source their custom parts.
Proto Labs is the future of manufacturing. We save the engineer time and provide them instant access to a quote, DFM feedback and outstanding reliability with our infinite capacity model. More and more engineers realize this and make the move to digital manufacturing every year. Let's get to know our customer and their needs a little bit better. We have two customers we focus on.
One is our design engineer, and the other is a production buyer. We will hear from a few of these customers in a minute, but let's get into more on how we serve them today and how our expanded offering will serve them even better in the years to come. Our original customer, and still our largest today, is the design engineer. This customer has been our core customer for years, and their needs have evolved. They tend to be a younger engineer who is digitally native, and they prefer to do business in an ecommerce channel.
And by doing so, we save them time and money. Our typical engineer is engaged in five to 10 projects per year in both prototyping and production use cases. Both the design engineer and the production buyer have the same six dimensions of value. They are reliability, speed, quality, breadth of manufacturing capabilities, ease of use, and price. The importance of these values varies depending on the customer use case.
In the case of prototyping, this engineer primarily values speed and reliability as they're typically going through multiple design cycles and under time pressure in today's marketplace, where speed to market is the primary objective in many cases. Proto Labs' digital thread allows for the fastest turnaround times in the industry. This has served us well over the years, and we lead this segment of the market. Our first growth opportunity is to capture more share of wallet by being a one stop shop for their manufacturing needs. As Rob shared with you earlier, our breadth and depth of offering expands considerably with the Hub's integration.
We are combining our existing digital manufacturing capabilities developed around speed and reliability to get customers' parts in as fast as one day. No one else in the market can compete as effectively as we can, and we've built this capability by digitizing the manufacturing process. This digitization of the process, with focus on speed, often satisfies our prototyping customers' needs, but has limited some of the depth of capabilities we can produce. Very high tolerances in CNC is one example. These quick turn times also come with a premium price as our customers pay for speed.
But there are times where the customer has high requirements, like a tighter tolerance. There are also times where the customer is not in a hurry, and the price points and delivery times we currently offer do not meet all of their needs. The combination of Proto Labs' quick turn offering, combined with Hub's deep manufacturing capabilities and their variety of lead times and price points, will result in a more complete and comprehensive offering. Proto Labs will now be in a position to serve a customer more holistically and provide them with an experience that removes the need to shop around. Ultimately, this will lead to higher customer retention rates as we serve more of their product needs.
Of course, our customers' needs don't stop at prototyping. In fact, we hear more and more about the need to quickly move from prototyping to production from many of our customers. Given shorter product life cycles, unpredictable demand, or the need to get to market quicker, our customers have a variety of production needs. We have an opportunity to stay with our prototyping customers longer and take them into low volume, on demand production. In many cases, this becomes a new production customer for us, and we have an opportunity as we go to market to engage more production buyers.
Let's talk about who they are and what a typical buyer looks like for us. This customer has the same values as our engineer, but the importance of each shifts. For a production buyer, their primary needs tend to be around part quality, total cost of ownership, reliability, and offering a deeper set of manufacturing capabilities. So the ability to anodize a CNC part or have quality documentation becomes critical. In addition, speed becomes slightly less important, while a lower price becomes more important.
Transitioning with our customers to production has been a newer growth strategy for us, and we capture some of this production business today. However, as you've seen, there are production use cases that our internal capabilities do not meet. Hub's network, a premium manufacturing partners, delivers a deeper set of manufacturing capabilities at price points and lead times that will better suit some of our production customers. This will be welcome news to our customers, many of whom would turn elsewhere for production when speed was not the primary importance. In addition, Proto Labs digital quality documentation will position us to accelerate our growth into the low volume production opportunity.
Let's take a minute and hear from a recent customer on their prototyping to production project.
I'm Max Bokharansen, and I'm the cofounder and CEO of Breathe ninety nine, where we are creating a lightweight and sustainable alternative to the n 95 mask. At Breathe ninety nine, we have the unique challenge of needing to fit our high quality respirator to a wide variety of face shapes and sizes. And so we need to rapidly develop these prototypes in a way that mimics the functionality of rubber or silicone, and we need to do that in a range of sizes and quickly and cheaply. But after a couple of years of development, I wanted to bring my product to market faster. And when the pandemic hit, Proto Labs was the perfect group to work with.
A big part of the reason for that is because we were able to work with Proto Labs, not just for our early stage prototyping needs that involve three d printing and form and fit testing, but also we were able to then bring those designs into production and use injection molding to bring our product to market faster when it mattered most. One of the things that we really liked about working with Proto Labs was some of the early support that we received in our come to market strategy. We both learned a lot from engineers at Proto Labs about how best to mold our product, and we also got advice on what type of three d printing might be the best to help accelerate our development process. So not only did we get the support we needed on the actual prototyping and production, but we also got some expertise from from various people within ProtoLab helped us bring our product to market even faster. Since then, we've sold over 25,000 masks.
We even landed on the cover of Time Magazine as one of the best dimensions of 2020. None of this would have been possible without Proto Labs, and so we've been really excited to continue our partnership and relationship with Proto Labs moving forward.
As you can tell, the story is now getting more exciting for our customers, as we will have a more complete and comprehensive offer in the market. And we're excited to serve our customers more holistically. Next, I want to touch on supply chain disruption, something that has become more critical to supply chain leaders. As Rob highlighted earlier, our customers are facing increased supply chain disruption, Whether that be the pandemic, Brexit, international shipping constraints or material shortages, the need for supply chain diversity is a top priority for companies across the globe. The PhotoLabs and Hubs combination provides our customers a reliable, always on manufacturing partner twenty four hours a day across the globe.
The combination of in market Proto Labs digital manufacturing facilities and the Hubs digital network of distributed manufacturing partners across the globe means our customers always have a reliable solution to many of the supply chain disruptions they may face. Here's a recent example of a customer who turned to us for their needs given a supply chain disruption.
My name is Anhis Kuchejian. I'm a mechanical engineer at Loop, and I use Proto Labs for anything related to prototyping, whether it's three d printing or CNC machining or injection molding. An experience earlier this year where our primary supplier in Asia was offline for about a month, and there were some decisions that we had wanted to make regarding our plastic parts. So we were really grateful that we were able to lean on Proto Labs during this time to do our quick turn injection molding parts. So we sent over CAD, got instant DFM where different features were identified that needed to be modified so we could really quickly make those changes to our models and resubmit CAD.
We had technical support on the phone with us within twenty four hours to talk through the finer details and make us feel comfortable with the quality of the parts we'd be getting. And Proto Labs also has a service where they keep our specific blend of plastic in stock. So we could tap into that reservoir to shoot parts in a specific plastic blend that we want and get prototypes in house within two weeks so that we could continue our evaluation uninterrupted. Given that we are a fast paced startup, it's really amazing that we can lean on Proto Labs to keep up with our pace of development, which is really great for hardware development.
Now that we've laid out how we will better serve our customers through the combined Proto Labs and Hubs offering, let's talk about our go to market opportunity to acquire these customers. We have three marketing opportunities to capitalize on. They are growing our existing share of wallet with existing customers, acquiring new production buyers, and capturing new engineering customers entering the digital manufacturing market. The first is reeducating our current base of customers about our expanded offering. Today, we're known for quick turn times and reliability when it comes to prototyping.
The addition of hubs to this offering increases both our breadth of manufacturing capabilities and provides our customers with more options for delivery times and corresponding bite points for those customers not in a hurry. While our customers will see this in our quoting platform as they upload, we will be running a variety of new marketing campaigns to our existing customers, making them aware of our expanded capabilities, as well as a variety of lead times and price point options. This will be welcome news to many. The second opportunity is with production customers. We will educate our existing production customers about our newly expanded capabilities and accelerate our acquisition of production buyers.
We have added a second customer target to our go to market strategy, and that is the acquisition of those new production buyers. Our expanded production capabilities, combined with our digital inspection reports, gives us the capabilities we need to serve these customers. Finally, our new complete and comprehensive offering will be attractive to new customers who have not yet experienced our services. Knowing that we can now serve many more customer needs allows us to more aggressively target and acquire customers to Proto Labs. As our offering expands, we will capture more revenue from new customers, and this will improve the return on our sales and marketing investments.
As an e commerce company, we will market to potential customers through a variety of digital channels and technologies to surround a potential customer and educate them on the benefits of choosing Proto Labs. We aim to target the right customers, in the right industries, and with the right offer. Whether attending one of our webinars, reading up on one of our white papers, or casually out surfing the Internet, we surround potential customers with our value proposition and capabilities. We've been doing this for twenty years and have built an incredible brand and presence online. No one has as many followers or customers as Proto Labs.
Let's take a look at a recent marketing integration with a YouTube influencer who has over 12,000,000 subscribers, many of them potential customers.
So I've machined most of these parts in house, which is great. But this part right here, beyond my capabilities. So I'm gonna take the easy route and get Proto Labs to three d print it for me. Proto Labs offers quick turnaround digital manufacturing services. They specialize in three d printing, CNC machining, injection molding, and sheet metal fabrication processes.
Okay. So let's get an instant quote. I'm gonna choose three d printing, upload by parts, go with stainless steel 16 l because that's what we're using for the rest of the project, choose my configuration, and check out. Great. That should be here in two to three days.
Let's see how PERRLEV actually makes the part.
In closing, the future looks bright, and I'm thrilled we will be able to serve more of our customers' needs with this new offering and online experience. As I mentioned in my introduction, Proto Labs is now much better positioned to be the go to manufacturer for engineers and production buyers across the globe. We have a superior brand, a large and growing customer base, the largest, most experienced customer support team in the industry, the highest reliability driven by our automation, the fastest turn times for parts, and soon, a much more comprehensive offering. Our customers will be more satisfied. We make their lives easier, their work faster, and provide them more choices and options for their prototyping and production needs.
All of this will lead to Proto Labs being the go to digital manufacturer of the twenty first century. Thank you. And now I'd like to turn it over to John Way, our CFO, to take you through our financial profile.
Thanks, Brian. In the following slides, I'll walk through our financial profile, addressing each phase of our five year plan and the financial metrics we expect to achieve as we execute on our long term objectives. I'll begin with addressing our strong track record of financial performance. Since Proto Labs went public in February 2012, we have delivered incredible triple digit revenue, earnings, and cash flow growth as our company has continued to rapidly evolve. As we have described in this presentation, the market in which we play, the tremendous value we deliver to our customers, and our ability to expand our capabilities to serve our customers has allowed us to grow from $126,000,000 company in 2012 to over $400,000,000 in 2020.
In recent years, we have focused expanding our capabilities and investing in building our base infrastructure to support the company's long term growth. We did this while managing through economic volatility, including the COVID-nineteen pandemic. As a result, the recent growth in our profit has not been at the same rate as our revenue growth. Our technology and ability to serve customers through our digital manufacturing model is the backbone of our business and investments in the platform are essential to our long term success. Expanding our offerings is a critical piece of our long term growth strategy and has been a primary driver of our revenue expansion over the years.
Each service we add allows us to better meet our customer needs and expand our market. As we have added capabilities to our manufacturing operations, we're able to provide a broader range of custom parts at unprecedented delivery times. These investments to broaden our offerings, including adding three d printing and sheet metal fabrication and continuing to expand the part envelope in all four of our services have driven over $300,000,000 in revenue growth since our IPO. The financial model of our business has been strong since our inception. This is very different from peers in our sector.
Other companies are fighting for growth with the hope that after they reach tremendous scale, profits will follow. As you can see on this slide, compared with the peer average, our revenues are fairly comparable. However, we have vastly outperformed the group from an operating income margin and a cash from operations perspective. This phenomenon is true not only compared to well established public company peers, but the emerging companies in our space as well. This differentiation is driven by our proprietary technology that automates our manufacturing process and thus delivers significant value to our customers and reduces the cost to operate our business.
Today, have already heard from Rob, Rich and Brian regarding our five year plan. We have clear financial targets in each phase, establish the platform, accelerate growth and expand profitability that we are well positioned to achieve. This plan positions Proto Labs to serve our customers more holistically, which will drive continued long term sustainable revenue growth and ultimately expanded profitability. I'll cover additional detail in each phase in the following slides. I'll start with our financial strategy behind the first stage of our roadmap, establishing our platform, which began with the development and launch of Proto Labs two point zero.
As we establish our platform, our near term focus is on serving our customers to provide a complete experience, coupling our digital manufacturing model with a network of premium manufacturing partners obtained in the Hub's acquisition. We will continue to invest in the customer experience, including the integration of Hubs, as well as executing on the backlog of service expansion projects that Proto Labs two point zero has opened up. We have ramped our R and D investment to complete the launch of two point zero and will continue to invest in R and D to enable further continued expansion of our offerings and enhanced service to customers to drive sustainable long term growth. We anticipate R and D investment of approximately 8% of revenue in the near term, which will contribute to the near term pressure on operating margins. Coming out of this phase, we will have a customer ready integrated offering, which will position Proto Labs for accelerated growth, taking us into our next step of the roadmap.
Our integrated offer and service expansion will provide the platform for our next phase, accelerating growth. Our overarching target during this phase will be to double our annual revenues by 2026. We plan on doing this by leveraging our ability as a one stop shop to offer a full breadth of services to our customers, either through our in house automated digital manufacturing operations or through one of our premium manufacturing partners across our global manufacturing network. Let me expand a little on what we mean by becoming a one stop shop by providing a common example. We have experiences in which a customer is creating a product that might consist of 30 different custom parts.
With our automated digital experience, we may be able to provide 10 of these parts at unprecedented speeds. However, the customer must source the other 20 parts through traditional manufacturing. This has resulted in a customer experience that is not as good as it could be and has left the opportunity for alternative solutions to help navigate cumbersome traditional manufacturing market for custom parts. With the addition of hubs and our continued investment in our services, we'll be able to provide a solution for the remaining 20 parts and along with it, enhancing our value to our customers. This expanded offer will allow us to increase our customer share of wallet, continue to attract new customers and work with more customers from initial prototype through low volume production opportunities enabled by the two point zero platform.
Further, we are well positioned to capture emerging three d printing trends via our market leading three d printing capabilities as the use cases in that technology evolve. These growth drivers will enable us to capture more of our significantly expanded SAM and deliver consistent double digit revenue growth through 2026 and beyond. Turning to the next slide. During our Accelerate Growth phase, while delivering revenue growth, we do expect near term pressure on operating margins driven by several factors. The addition of hubs will help us better serve our customers and drive growth, albeit with targeted margins of 20% to 25% below that of our legacy business as illustrated on the right side of this slide.
In addition, we'll be offering more lead time and pricing options for our customers. These factors combined with the investment in R and D and the expenses related to the depreciation of Proto Labs two point zero will each serve as headwinds to operating margins in the early years of this phase. To mitigate a portion of these headwinds, we'll drive gross margin improvements in our sheet metal service and our European three d printing operations. Taking all of this into account from a pure dollar standpoint, we expect to grow our operating income at a higher rate than recent history despite the pressure on margin percentages. The third phase of our roadmap will be to expand our operating profitability.
After realizing accelerated top line growth, we will drive improved margins through realizing returns on our investments and leveraging our cost structure. Our investments in R and D will create incremental revenue growth and drive efficiencies in our operations. Additionally, as the revenue growth provides scale, we will leverage our cost structure and drive efficiencies across sales, marketing and our general and administrative expenses. As a result, we expect non GAAP operating income to increase 1.5 to two times by 2026. Turning to our capital allocation strategy.
We will remain relatively consistent in our deployment of capital. Our top priority remains allocating capital towards organic investments to add manufacturing capacity in order to maintain our market leading speed and reliability. We will continue to invest in R and D to enhance our platform and the customer experience as well as expand our service offerings. We will also continue to pursue strategic M and A to further serve our customers and extend our market leadership. And finally, we also plan on continuing to return capital to shareholders through opportunistic share repurchases.
We expect our disciplined approach to capital allocation to support our continued track record of strong financial performance well into the future. In summary, I'd like to reiterate a few points. Proto Labs is currently positioned as the market leader, not only from a competitive standpoint, but also financially far outperforming peers on the basis of profitability and cash flow. In the next five years, we will further transform the business and position Proto Labs for long term growth and expanded profitability in three phases. This will begin by establishing our platform and investing in the near term to capitalize on existing market opportunities to drive explosive growth.
And once our revenue base is further expanded, we will leverage our cost structure to drive efficiencies and enhance profitability. Our current strong financial position with strong cash generation and a debt free balance sheet positions Proto Labs to achieve these long term goals and ultimately create significant value for our customers and our shareholders. I'll now turn it back to Rob for closing remarks. Rob?
Thank you, John. Today, I hope you've gained a better understanding of our strategy, our team, and the tremendous opportunity that we are pursuing. Proto Labs is the leader in digital manufacturing. We automated the front end of manufacturing and reinvented how custom prototype and production parts were made and purchased. Now powered by a new digital e commerce platform that better serves our customers and complemented by Hub's best in class premium manufacturing partner network, we are poised to reinvent digital manufacturing once again, serving customer needs with a comprehensive digital manufacturing offer to capture the growth from the megatrends that are reshaping our industry.
I hope you will join us for the journey.
Yes. On the off chance somebody heard some of it, don't change anything.
Yeah. Don't change anything.
We apologize for the, difficult technical difficulties there. We're gonna do a test here just to make sure that our audio is clear. Test. One, two, three.
Sorry for those challenges. Good morning, and welcome, everyone, to our Virtual Investor Day. We sincerely wish that we could be hosting you here live and in person, especially in part because of the technical challenges that we've had. But given the circumstances, we're glad to be here with you today virtually. And I'm joined today by several members of our executive team.
John, Renee, Brian, Rich, and I are looking forward to answering your questions and engaging in dialogue with you about Proto Labs' business and strategy going forward. So we look forward to the first question.
First question is for Rob. Rob, Proto Labs has been the market leader for some time. Why do you believe Proto Labs will continue to lead the market into the future?
Yes. So recall that over two decades ago, Proto Labs founded the e commerce based digital manufacturing space. And still today, we are the most advanced technologically, and we're the only company who has truly automated the end to end digital thread from quoting to DFM through every stage in the manufacturing process. And that has enabled us to be the fastest, the most reliable and have a highly profitable model. In addition to that, with the addition of hubs and that digital network of premium manufacturing partners, that has expanded our capabilities.
As a result, together, we're able to have offer the broadest offering of capabilities to our customers and serve our customers in the most comprehensive digital manufacturing processes that are available today. And you add to that the fact that we have the strongest brand in the industry and the largest customer base. And I think as you look at all of that, I really feel like we have a winning model.
The next question is for John. John, Proto Labs gross margins have been decreasing over time. How much does that have to do with pricing pressure from increased competition?
As it relates to pricing, we look at, the market based pricing and compare that to our pricing algorithms. As we evaluate that, sometimes we move pricing up or down in order to make sure that we're market competitive with our pricing. As it relates to gross margin, it really hasn't had that significant of an impact to the gross margin percentages. As we've discussed before, the mix of the business, as we've added on new services, those new services have come at lower gross margins than our legacy CNC and injection molding business. And as we look forward, the addition of hubs will continue to, add to that mix and impact those overall gross margins.
So we expect to continue to see pressure on the gross margin percentages, but we'll be looking to drive gross margin dollars and drive the growth related to that business.
You, John. A follow on from Brian Drab from William Blair. Are you seeing pricing pressure in the CNC market?
I think with the CNC market, it's a very dynamic market, and we're coming off of a pandemic. The pandemic created a lot of capacity the market. And with that, the local machine shops, and there are thousands of them in the world, really have adjusted their pricing to capture any volume that they can to cover their fixed costs. As we see the market pick back up, we think that the pricing will normalize.
Next question is for Rob. Rob, as it relates to hubs, how do you alleviate potential concerns among your manufacturing partners that you won't cherry pick the most attractive orders for yourself?
And so I would remind you of the slide that we showed in the presentation where we had the capabilities and lead times that kind of encompassed the TAM. And ProLabs has a place in that, and Hubs Network has a place in that. And recognize that they don't overlap. And so today, there's virtually no overlap between these opportunities. The hub's network of manufacturing partners brings all kinds of capabilities outside of Proto Labs' in house capabilities.
And that's really core to the whole strategy, is that they're highly complementary. And so the way we'll assure that is we will route based on the needs of the customer. And when those needs of the customer are outside of Proto Labs' envelope, they will be serviced by our manufacturing partners. So I think they're very complementary, and that should really not be an issue.
I'll have a follow-up question. How do you compete with companies like Xometry to attract and retain the best performers?
Yes. So we want to create really strong partnerships with our manufacturing partners. And that's really what was attractive to us with Hubs, was that they've used a very select, curated group of premium manufacturing partners. And so we want to be a great partner to each one of them and drive a significant amount of revenue to each of them. And we do that by having deep understanding of their capabilities.
Hubs goes through a in person audit with every manufacturing partner to really understand their capabilities, encodes that information into their online platform. That drives the routing. There's machine learning that is used to evaluate each opportunity and make sure that it's routed to the best manufacturing partner. And then there's a learning loop around that as well, so that if there was a mismatch, we'd learn from that and refine. So we're really tailoring the business that we're sending to each partner to optimize for the type of business they need.
And because we have a more selective group, we can drive more average revenue to each partner.
Next question is for John. John, the long term plan seems to stress profitability in the out periods. What is the expectation for margin in the next couple of years? I should say that question is from Brian Drab of William Blair.
Thanks for the question, Brian. So as we look at it, we're focused on serving our customers and driving long term growth. As we mentioned in our presentation, we're looking at three phases. The first is to build the platform. We've got a backlog of project R and D projects to help expand our capabilities to serve those customers as well as the integration of hubs that we'll be focused on during that time frame.
The second phase will be to drive growth. And in driving growth, that will provide scale. The scale will allow us to leverage our cost structure and ultimately drive earnings dollars. And I think that's probably a big component here as we look at it. I think focusing on the earnings dollars as opposed to the percentages is where we will be looking as a team.
The next question is again from Brian Drab from William Blair. It's for Rob. Rob, how did you calculate the $100,000,000,000 TAM?
Oh, sure. So as we described in the presentation, we started with the 2,000,000,000,000 contract manufacturing marketplace. And then we selected down for the four service offerings that we take to market: injection molding, CNC machining, sheet metal fabrication and three d printing. And within those, we removed the highly commoditized, long run, you know, reliable kind of demand portion of the market. And that left us with the $100,000,000,000 size of the TAM.
That was how we did that calculation.
Thanks, Rob.
The next
question is for Rich. Has Portal Labs experienced any challenges thus far as the new ecom platform has been implemented?
So let me start by broadening this a little bit from the ecom platform to all of Proto Labs two point zero and give a little context on that. So what we have done is we went live over a weekend in October in Europe and over a weekend in January in Americas with a system that I laid out in the video that is very comprehensive. It redid most of our backbone of everything we run the company off of. So far, that's executed about 60,000 orders. So with that context, the fact that we've been online every day and in business, I think we've had challenges in e commerce.
We've had some other challenges with thousands of people learning new ways to work. But we have overcome those. We've risen to that challenge. And, it's really no small feat to take a system like this live, in such a short period of time.
Rich, as a follow on question, has Proto Labs two point zero impacted the ability to digitally manufacture and quote more parts?
There are a number of places where we've, added capabilities, particularly around quality and production. And so we showed some of those also in the video. Those were things that were, I would say, off platform. They were not fully automated previously. So there were offerings that we had.
We just were dealing with them more manually. So there are a number of things like that and a few materials and other things that are now selectable online. But remember, the key for ProLabs two point zero in that investment was the ability to add more things quickly. So it wasn't just the first launch and that's it. It's to be able to add in all of these other things, including the integration of hubs.
Next question is for Rob. Rob, what percentage of parts or quotes can be digitally manufactured and quoted without human interaction?
So all of our quoting has automation at some level. The services where we offer 100% fully automated quotes are in three d printing, in our legacy business and in hubs, three d printing and CNC. But all of our quotes are automated at some level.
Next question is for Brian. Brian, how do you plan to capitalize on market expansion opportunities and attract new customers?
Yes. Well, we can't wait to bring new offers to market. We do that a couple of different ways. One, we built and created a proprietary database of over 1,000,000 contacts over the last twenty years, some customers and potential people we communicate with on a regular basis. We use that immediately to kind of push any new offerings out, make sure the customer understands what it is, the values and benefits it may bring them.
We then engage our sales force and customer facing teams to then follow-up with more content information and, frankly, conversations about what that is and what that means to those customers. From a new customer standpoint, as an e commerce company, we primarily go to market digitally. So whether that's, paid search on the new offering that we may be promoting or a webinar we may host about what this is for a set of customers or, frankly, the YouTube integration you saw earlier, in the presentation today, Those are the two primary ways we create awareness about any new offerings we're bringing to market.
The next question is from Brian Drab from William Blair. It's for John. Doubling in five years implies fifteen percent annual growth. Your expectation for 15% organic growth each year? If not, when will that be?
Yes. So as we presented, we're in the three phases, right? The first is to build the platform, then we're looking to accelerate growth. And we also are recognizing, especially coming off of 2020, that, the economy plays a part in our growth rates. But as we're looking out and looking to double the business, that includes both the legacy Proto Labs and hubs.
And we feel that all of that is organic growth, and does not include M and A activity.
Thanks, John. The next question is for Renee. Renee, how is Proto Labs increasing its focus on ESG initiatives? Please give some examples.
Sure. I'm happy to provide more detailed information about our ESG initiatives. And admittedly, we're kind of in the early stages of formation of our ESG programs. But we have a lot to be proud of. I think I'll start by talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion at Proto Labs.
It's always been a priority for us, diversity. Our leadership team really believes that having a diverse workforce inspires innovation and is critical to creating the learning environment that we know we need to be successful. Our focus, like many companies over the past twelve months, has been really on inclusion. The tragedies that occurred recently with the George Floyd situation, and more recently with Daunte Wright situation really caused us to be reflective about and look inward and ask ourselves questions about our culture. The leadership team held listening sessions at each one of the facilities within The Americas.
And we asked our employees what can we do differently or do better to have an inclusive work environment. They gave us some great feedback. And one of the outcomes of those meetings was that we formed a diversity, equity, and inclusion leadership team that offers both frequent feedback to the leadership team as well as guidance on what we can do differently or better within our organization. So I'm really excited about that work that we can do together. Another program, I talked a little bit about this in the video, but the Prothe Labs Foundation, which was established about eight years ago by Larry Lucas, who is our founder.
That program provides funding, financial support for STEM education for schools in low income areas of our community. And it's important to us as an executive team to provide that financial background. And more recently, we shifted those dollars to provide computers and technology for these students to be able to learn distance learning while in the pandemic. So I'm really proud of the work that the foundation does. We also do a dollar for dollar matching of our employees' charitable giving, which is and I'm incredibly always proud of what our employees give on an annual basis.
I think the final thing that I'd point out is the work that we're doing to reduce our carbon footprint. As a digital manufacturing company, it's important not only to us, but to the environment to reduce our power utilization. And so we implemented the solar panels in Plymouth, which was really important. We also have green teams within each one of our global facilities that really guide the work that we do in terms of recycling and waste. And these teams are also very active in the community and helping drive projects as it relates to cleanup and environmental impacts.
So really proud of the work that our employees do. But is there anything else you
would add to that, Rob?
Yes. Thank you, Renee. You know, I would add that ESG is definitely a very important priority, as you described, for our leadership team. It is also a key priority for our Board of Directors. And maybe the two things that I'm you know, I'm most proud of as I reflect on it are how we've been able to engage the employees in employee led initiatives like the DEI Leadership Council.
And then also on the sustainability front, I just want to share the good news that, you know, we've won that award from the National Association of Manufacturers for our sustainability efforts. So I think we're early in our journey, as you said, but we have a lot to be proud of, and we're excited about taking this forward into the future.
Next question is for Rob. Rob, how does your digital manufacturing and quoting engine compare to other digital competitors?
Yes, sure. Thank you for the question. So as I discussed earlier, we have a digital thread for our legacy businesses that runs end to end through our entire business, from quoting to DFM through the manufacturing process. And we've done that not only for, you know, the more modern technologies like three d printing, but we've done that for all the legacy and traditional manufacturing processes as well. And that provides significant differentiation in a number of ways.
First, we actually compute a digital twin of the finished part as part of the quoting process. So we use parallel computing algorithms and three-dimensional geometry based analysis to actually precompute every step of the manufacturing process. So when we make a mold, we precompute all the sides of the mold and all these details. That creates a digital twin of the full end to end process, which means we know our time to manufacture, we know our costs, And when we give a quote, we can be sure that that is a firm quote and that it's priced correctly, and we know how long it will take to manufacture that part in manufacturing process. Furthermore, that digital twin, which is the DFM, the Design for Manufacturability feedback that we provide customers, that is precise because it, again, is informed by all the details of the manufacturing steps, the tools, the type of mill we'll use, and all these details.
And so that quote that we give them is precise, and they know from that quote exactly what they will get when they receive their finished parts. Other digital platforms that don't have that close connection to their manufacturing process are providing an estimate, using best practices. But that connection between what the customer will actually receive in hand and what's shown to them can't possibly be as tight. The other benefits to this process, which I mentioned before, are that it allows us to be the fastest in the business because we've taken a tremendous amount of waste out of that system through our automation. And it provides for high reliability because we've also taken a tremendous amount of variation out of the system.
And then lastly, it provides for a very profitable model.
Next question is from Brian Drab from William Blair. It's for John. Don, what will Hub's gross margins look like in 2021 and 2022? Sure.
Thanks, Brian. As we've laid out in the presentation, our target margins for that business are 20% to 25%, and we're looking to drive to those margin percentages and are doing that currently.
The next question is for Rob. Rob, can you expand on the vetting and quality control process for Hub's partners?
Sure. So as I mentioned earlier, it's very important for us to make sure that we have strong partnership with our manufacturing partners, and, we go through a careful vetting process with them. That includes an in person audit that's one to two days, detailed, assessment of their capabilities and cataloging of those capabilities to be put into our system so we can make sure that we're routing parts appropriately to them. We also ask every partner to sign a code of conduct. And we recertify them through an audit every two years.
In addition, on an ongoing basis, we're monitoring partner performance, our own performance in terms of types of parts that we're sending them to make sure that we're sending them the right kinds of parts, their satisfaction is high as well as the end customer satisfaction is high. So it's a continuous cycle, and that's how we do the vetting.
Thanks, Rob. The next question is for Rich. Rich, how do your inspection capabilities stack up against production manufacturing tolerances?
It's a very timely question. We have put significant effort into digitizing quality the same way we have the nonrecurring engineering that's needed to manufacture parts. And starting next week, as a matter of fact, we're going live with something that we call critical quality inspections. But it's part of a suite of things that will make us more attractive as a production supplier for injection molding, particularly at first, but we expect to extend that. It combines the process design for experiments or process development, process capability, as well as the inspection that's fully capable of delivering the dimensional tolerances that customers expect so we can make sure that our process is consistent from run to run, lot to lot in injection molding.
Thanks, Rich. The next question is for Rob, and it comes from Ben Rose from Battle Road Research. Rob, has hubs ever removed a supplier from the network?
Yes. From time to time, they have removed a supplier based on performance and based on fit.
Again, another question for Rob from Ben Rose from Battle Road Research. What are the prospects for a return to growth in CNC?
So we expect improvement in our CNC business and growth in CNC. Again, as we integrate with hubs, the set of capabilities that we can offer are significantly expanded, which allow us to serve customers in a broader set of geometries and a broader set of use cases as well as longer lead times. Also, our legacy CNC business is probably the one that is most closely coupled to the overall macro economy. And with the improvements in the macro economy as we come out of COVID, we are we expect to see good growth as a result. John, anything you'd add to that?
No, I think you covered it pretty well. I don't have anything to add.
Another question from Ben Rose from Battle Road Research for Rob. Is there a limit to the number of hub suppliers that can be properly qualified from the network?
No. There's certainly no limit. Though, as I explained earlier, we have a vetting process. It's a scalable process. It does involve human auditors.
And recall, though, that our strategy there is not to have the most vast network, but to have a curated network of selected and valued partners who operate in a premium set of capabilities that are complementary to Proto Labs and very much along the line of the strategy that Hubs has been following.
Not to sound like a broken record, but another question for Rob from Ben Rose. Does Hubs have any exclusive relationships with suppliers?
So the model is not to have, like, contractual exclusivity with suppliers, but, rather to be close business partners with those suppliers such that they want to work with us preferentially. And that's what we've seen with hubs and with their network of suppliers to date. Some of the things that hubs does to ensure that is both try to drive tailored business to each manufacturing partner and maximize the revenue that we can drive to each partner, but also, through that curation process understand the capabilities of the partner. The other thing that we really liked about the Hubs platform that fits within this is they were very thoughtful about the partner as a customer just as they were with the end customer as a customer. And as a result, thought through the workflows that the manufacturing partners need to have in interacting with hubs in the network, and worked really hard to automate and digitize those workflows and processes to really minimize the work cost and overhead associated with working with a network like hubs.
And we think that that's a real big differential and distinctive advantage for hubs that makes hubs a premier and sought after network to be part of.
The next question for Rob is, to what extent is metal printing being used for part production? Is metal printing still used primarily for prototypes?
Yes. So we're seeing metal printing growing in our business. And the industries that use it more predominantly are aerospace and medical device. And a large percentage of those are in end use parts of various kinds. That said, we are still doing, of course, prototyping in metal.
And the prototyping that happens in metal is somewhat can sometimes be a little bit different in terms of its characterization, because often the customer is as much trying to validate the part design as they are trying to validate the entire end to end process of manufacturing that part, so that they can be assured of the qualities of that part in production as they get to higher volumes. And so we partner with them both on helping with the design of the part, and so it's kind of the traditional prototyping, as well as characterizing that process and helping them test variations in process so that they can be sure that they get the reliability that they need when they go into production.
Thanks, Rob. Another question for you. You are providing some instant quotes in hubs. But across the entire businesses, what services can you instant quote today?
Yes. Good question. So the way to think about instant quotes is actually similar to the question I answered before about what about automation and quoting. So in hubs, all the quotes that they provide, with the exception of, I believe, injection molding, are instant. In our legacy business, we have instant quoting in our 3DP business.
And so that by which I mean that you upload the part and you get a quote back immediately. Now, in our other services, our more traditional manufacturing services, we do have to precompute and create that digital thread that I described. Once that's done and the quote is sent to the customer, which usually takes a couple hours, then all subsequent quoting that they do is instant. They can vary the parameters and the quantities and so forth, and they get instant pricing at that point.
Thanks, Rob. We have a few financial questions now for John coming from Greg Palm from Craig Hallum. John, a few clarifications. Was the revenue doubling using 2020 or 2021 as a baseline?
Yes. We're using 2020 as a baseline in those projections.
And the gross margin commentary of 50% for the legacy business and 20% to 25% for three d hubs, Was that a 2026 target, implying gross margins will be sub-fifty percent until that time?
No, that wasn't the implication. I think what we're trying to do is just highlight the different margin profiles of the businesses. And as we grow and mix changes, that's going to impact the overall gross margins. As we look at the legacy gross margins, there are opportunities that we're looking at to expand. In our previous calls, we've talked about sheet metal.
We've talked about three d printing in Europe, and we think there's opportunities to expand the gross margins in those services. We also believe we'll have some headwinds as we look at it with longer lead times in certain services, that will provide some headwinds. But as we look at it overall, I think it's more just to highlight there is a different mix. And as growth comes through the different services, that will impact the overall gross margin.
Another financial question for John. Is R and D guided to 8% until 2026 or just the next couple of years?
I think right now, we're focused on the backlog and the integration and investing in the R and D to capture that. As we grow and look at things into the future, I think we'll look at the backlog of projects and the things that we're working on as well as where we are from a revenue perspective. So I think more to come on that. There's the potential to leverage that spend a little bit, but there's also the potential that we'll continue to invest as we see opportunities.
The next question is for Rob. Rob, can you elaborate on what service expansion is made available by two point zero, new service lines, or catering to more use cases with two point zero?
Yes, sure. So remember, the purpose of two point zero was to create a platform that allowed us to serve more use cases for our customers as well as an architecture that will set us up to scale our business as we go forward into the future. And we believe that we've done that both those things with the two point zero launch. In terms of immediate capabilities that we've unlocked for our customers with two point zero, there are a number. One is secondary ops are more available now as a result of that.
We've changed the interface for ordering so that customers can order from different services all in one joint project, so that they can manage their projects in a uniform way versus having to think about parts per service. We've made production pricing more transparent and given them more tools for determining how to when to go with a prototype versus a production offering, particularly injection molding. And we've made the ease of ordering, significantly better. So those are just a few of the things that we've launched, immediately with the launch of two point zero. And, we see that as a platform that, because of its modular nature, its modern architecture and its simplicity, we'll be able to add more and more capabilities in a more streamlined way as we continue on in the future.
The next questions are for John from Craig Hallum. Should we expect operating leverage in 2022? Or does the leverage really come in the out years of the model?
Yes. I think as we're looking at it, we're focused on delivering the platform over the next couple of years. Again, the R and D backlog and driving that growth, through the integration of hubs and capturing that. So I think the leverage is really going to be focused on coming more in the out years rather than the current time frame.
Again, the question next question is for John from Greg Palm from Craig Hallum. We've been told that revenue and volume is the biggest driver of gross margin. Has that changed if you only assume 50% gross margin in 2026 in the core business, which doesn't imply much upside from the rate realized in Q1 of 'twenty one.
Yes. I think there's a lot to unpack when you're looking at our gross margin and especially as we look at things going forward and how the business evolves. Ultimately, we're focused on serving our customers and providing the breadth of services and the broadest range of services to meet their needs. And as we've discussed in the presentation, some of that is sometimes they need parts really quickly, and we're the only provider that can do that for them. Other times, they need longer lead times and are looking for more pricing options.
I do believe that volume is a significant component and helps us drive our gross margin profile. But again, this is where I think as you look at our business, looking at the dollars we're producing as opposed to the percentages, mix is going to have a bigger impact. But as we drive the growth through our customers, we'll realize more gross margin dollars as well as operating income dollars.
Thanks, John. The next question is for Rob. Rob, there are a number of platform manufacturers like hubs. What would you say is the competitive advantage of hubs? Why did you choose to acquire them versus maybe others out there?
Yes. So you know, we looked across the space, and we really gelled with hubs for a number of reasons. First, as I discussed before, we felt they had the best in class platform in terms of technologies, in terms of how they think about serving the manufacturing partners as well as serving the end use customers. We also felt a very strong cultural fit with Hubs. And you know, in our experience, the success of an acquisition depends a lot on the cultural fit.
And we found them to be, you know, very innovative and great problem solvers and just fit well with the way they think about the business fits very well with the way we thought about the business. In addition, their approach, their strategy to be strong partners with the manufacturing partners and use a vetted, curated network made a lot of sense to us. And then lastly, their network was already highly complementary to our internal capabilities, and so we didn't see risk of overlap. And for all those reasons, we just thought it was the best partnership, and we've been really happy with how it's gone so far.
I'll just sign between Rob and Brian, maybe decide which of you want to answer this question. How do you manage the possibility of current customers who may not be as lead time sensitive from trading down to hubs, which is lower price and a much lower contribution margin?
I can start with that, and then Brian, maybe you can add in. So again, think about that picture of the use cases that we offered and how that's spread across a range of lead times and capabilities. So in our legacy business, we designed our business with this end to end automation that I described earlier. And that's really, really well suited for the very fast lead times and high reliability. And the investments that we made behind that are all tied to it.
So in the past, when customers have wanted longer lead times from us, and we've had customers who've said, Look, we're really happy with your services. We always use you when we need parts in let's take in the CNC example. In three days or less, you're the only company we go with, and our satisfaction is very high. But there are times when we want parts in ten days. We can be more planful.
And we didn't offer them an option there. And now with hubs, we have that capability. And the manufacturers who have made the right investments to do that in high reliability and with great quality, they can serve that need. And together, we can be a one stop shop for our customer needs in those use cases. Brian, what would you add?
Yes. No, I think you covered it well there, Rob. I think at the end, this is about serving our customer holistically. And we recognize we need that offering, whether it's one day on up to twelve, fourteen, fifteen days as we sort of build it out, is important. That's what our customers look for.
And if we're going to be that one stop shop with this large customer base, we need to have that offering. And of course, there's a different value prop. Of course, the pricing will change. But ultimately, we feel like that's serving our customers in the way they want to be served.
We're going to answer one last question. If we didn't get to your question, we will get back to you after this event. The last question is for John. Given the track record of decreasing gross margin and the need to add lower gross margin products in order to grow, what changes in 2025, 2026 time range that will enable scale to finally provide margin benefit?
Yes. I think you've almost answered it in the question a little bit. I think, as we're looking at it, it's all about serving customers, that will deliver the revenue growth. As we do that, that will increase share of wallet with customers, and we've got a sales and marketing team that are around that, that will be able to serve that customer very efficiently as we grow. But the long term financial model, as we look at it, is, capture the growth.
That growth will provide scale. And as we have scale, we'll be able to leverage some of our fixed costs in the business.
Thank you, John. I'll now turn it over to Rob for some closing comments.
Well, thank you all. Thank you so much for your time today. We were really glad to be able to host you. Appreciate all your questions and the opportunity to have this dialogue with you about Proto Labs, our business, and our strategy. In the coming months, I hope to have the opportunity to meet with many of you in person once, you know, the pandemic eases.
So thank you again very much for your time. All the best.