Good morning, everyone. We're going to get started with our next presentation. I'd like to introduce Ehud Ben-Yair, CFO of TAT Technologies. Good morning.
Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining me. My name is Ehud. I am TAT Technologies' CFO. I'm going to present to you in short the TAT story. We are actually very under the radar company, and I think this is the first time that we are attending this conference, so excited to be here, and I'm sure that you are going to be excited hearing the story of TAT, so I start with the result, and I'll go through presenting the company, but we're very proud of what's happening in the last 24 months. We are a company in the aviation industry, mainly commercial. We came out of COVID back then in mid-2021 when the sky opened and the whole aviation industry started ramping up again, and you see the result. We're a growing company. Revenues are doubling. Profitability is doubling.
I'll get to the details in the next couple of slides of how did we do it and why the company is a very different company right now, and also about the future of the company. So what are we doing, actually? What's our unique proposition? So first of all, this is a company that has been there for the last 70 years, working again on the aviation industry, defense, and commercial, but mainly commercial. We have decades of excellence working with the first tier of the aviation industry. So all of the aircraft manufacturers are our customers: Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, Textron, you name it. Again, both on the commercial and defense industry. Going to the second tier, working with the system integrators that support the aviation industry. Names like Honeywell, Collins, Pratt & Whitney, RTX, Safran, Liebherr.
And then going to the third tier of actually all of the air carriers, companies like American Airlines, Delta, United, UPS, FedEx, from Europe, Lufthansa, and others. These are all our customers. So a very small company working for many, many years with all the big names of the industry, shaping up a very good partnership for a very long time. We have over 300 customers, over $400 million of backlog, and we're working on three operational sites, two of them in the U.S., one in Israel, and our headquarters is in Charlotte, North Carolina. What exactly are we doing or what is our key strategic product segments? So the first one on the left side, this one, these are heat exchangers.
These are thermal solutions that we are developing, manufacturing, and selling, both as an OEM to the aircraft manufacturers and also as an MRO provider, as a service provider, obviously repairing our own heat exchanger systems, but also having the capability to serve additional, give or take, 200 different systems as well. The second one, and I would say the most important one to understand the growth of the company is we call it APU. APU is an auxiliary power unit. It's a kind of a backup engine that sits at the end of each aircraft and provides energy to the aircraft when it is on the ground. And also in some kind of emergency cases, they operate the aircraft with the APU. We are a repair station. We're certified by Honeywell.
Honeywell is the OEM, and we got a license to serve under Honeywell as an authorized MRO station. I will elaborate it in a few slides. The last one is landing gears. Again, we are not the OEM. We are certified as a repair station by the OEM. We're serving several types of landing gear. We have a very unique partnership with Gulfstream. We're providing them services for the G4 and G5. We have another license from Safran for the repair of the landing gear that sits on ATR platforms and also from Liebherr to repair all the landing gear that sits on the Embraer E175, E195. Basically three different types of segments. In terms of business breakdown, we're mainly an MRO company. We're mainly doing services.
68% of our revenue, or 66% of our revenue, is coming from MRO, and 34% are coming from OEM. That's a breakdown for Q2 for the last quarter. In terms of commercial defense, so we are an 80% commercial company and 20% defense or military company. And the business is growing on the commercial. So if you look at the company a year from now or two years from now, you see a higher percentage on commercial and a lower percentage on military. And in terms of the geographical breakdown, 75% of our revenue is coming from the U.S. So we are really focusing on the U.S. Most of our customers are U.S.-based. About seven% is coming from Europe, and the rest is the rest of the world.
In terms of the management of the company, and this is very important, although we are a small company that is growing very, very fast, we have a very stable management team. Starting with the Chairman of the Board, Mr. Amos Malka, he's a retired general from the Israeli defense. He used to be the head of intelligence, kind of a three-star general if I'm comparing it to the U.S. Army, and in the last 15 years, a very successful businessman; he's Chairman of the Board. Mr. Igal Zamir is the President and CEO since 2016 as well, just like Mr. Malka. Again, a very experienced CEO, having almost 30 years' experience internal and out companies and building very strong and growing organizations, and since 2016, he's with TAT.
And I'm here from 2018, again, more than six years, with a lot of experience from publicly traded companies, global companies with operations all around the world. So the main message here is that that's a unique situation that you see in a growing company. A management team that works together for at least the last six years, or Amos and Igal working together for the last eight years. And we're here to stay. We're not founders. We're just working in the company. We believe in the company. We believe in the future, and we're here to stay. The company is dual listed both on NASDAQ and Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, and our main shareholder is a private equity firm called FIMI, which is a unique private equity because most of the holding is in publicly traded companies, unlike many other private equity firms.
As I said at the beginning of the presentation, we are riding the wave. It's a very strong positive wave of the commercial aviation industry. So you can see here on the graph, this is the time where the skies opened in the summer of 2021. We passed out of the pandemic. Everybody started flying again. And you can see the number of daily average passengers in the U.S. immediately climbing up to $2 million a day. And the trend continues. So we are right now very close to $2.7 million. It's a 40% increase. And again, this is driving the whole industry. The whole industry is growing. The whole industry is increasing revenues, improving profitability, but we're doing better.
You can see here the dark blue represents our growth year over year, and the light blue represents actually peer companies that are very similar to us in terms of the combination of doing OEM and MRO activity. We're growing very fast, and we're growing even faster than the whole industry and even faster than companies that are bigger than us or more established than us. Just going quickly on the result that we published about two months ago, Q2 result was excellent, continued the trend. The main issue that I want to highlight here is that we're not only growing the revenue line. So obviously, we're very proud of the fact that revenue went up by 36% year over year, but we're also very proud that all the profitability parameters are improving. So you can see here that the gross margin went up by 47%.
We already crossed the almost 22% margin. EBITDA went up by 69%, net profit by 77%. So again, we're not only growing, but we're growing in a very healthy way. We're improving our efficiencies, and we're showing better and better profitability parameters. The same trend is for the first six months of the year. I will not go to the details of the number, and the trend continues. We are going to publish our result in three weeks, our Q3 results in three weeks from now. As I said, the trend continues. What is actually driving the growth and what is really happening to our company, why we are growing much faster than the other companies in our industry? Just like any other companies in our industry, we suffered from the COVID, from the pandemic. Revenue went down. We had to cut employees.
We did everything that is needed in order to survive the period. But unlike many other companies in our industry, we decided that we are using the COVID time as an opportunity rather than a challenge. And we decided that we are shaping the company in a different way so that when the pandemic will pass, we'll go out as a totally different company. We changed the way that we operate the company. We merged two facilities into one. We saved a lot of money by this, but the main issue is that we signed several strategic deals with Honeywell. Honeywell, by the way, is the number one OEM for APUs in the market. They're actually selling all of Boeing's APU and 80% of Airbus APUs.
During COVID, we signed four major agreements with Honeywell that actually gave us license to service their APUs as a kind of subcontractor of Honeywell, but not necessarily, but we got certification from Honeywell in order to serve those APUs. The upper two are actually contracts that already started generating revenues since their inception, so this one was a kind of a contract that Honeywell sold us all of their activity for the repairs of the APUs that sit on Boeing 757, Boeing 767, and C-17, which is the major aircraft of the U.S. Air Force. There are 1,500 aircraft in the world, and it's a market which the size of it is about $85 million a year. We are dominating this market. The revenue started climbing since we started this contract. We already have more than $100 million worth of LTAs coming from this engine alone.
We signed another unique contract with Honeywell for kind of a buy and lease back of APUs. It's generating only $4.5 million, but it's very important to understand the company. The profitability there is very, very high. And it's a major contributor to the EBITDA line that you see quarter after quarter. The next two ones, which are highlighted, these are actually the Holy Grail. These are the engines that will grow the company, or these are the growth engines of the company for the coming years. The first one is, again, a license to repair the APUs that sits on, sorry, on Boeing 777. That's a market of about $300 million a year, and there are only three players in this market. One of them is us.
The second one, which is the largest one by far, is, again, we acquired a license to repair all the APUs that sit on Boeing 737, all platform of Boeing 737, and Airbus 319, 320, and 321. There are about 22,000 aircraft flying in the world using this APU, and the annual estimated market is about $2.2 billion a year. Again, in this market, there are only three players, one of us. In this market, there are only six players, and we are one of them. The company I'm highlighting again, and I'm emphasizing it during my meetings and presentations, these two engines are still not generating any revenue to TAT. It's very important to understand. If you look at the company's past and you want to evaluate the future, you need to understand the market potential from these two engines.
They are still not affecting any results that you saw in the last quarter, so the major issue that, or the major change now from signing those contracts is that if in the past TAT kind of exposed to a market in the size of about $380 million a year, and we tried to grab some kind of a market share, right now we're exposed to a $2.5 billion market share, and again, just grabbing pieces of this market share can double and triple the company in the next couple of years. Just to give you some, again, these are not guidance, but this is actually our working plan for the next two years. From this engine, we already have 29%, and we expect to grow to 53% next year by just winning another contract that is supposed to go out at the beginning of 2025.
These two engines, which I highlighted before, currently we're doing nothing, and we expect to get about 10% of this market share in the next two years and 5% of this market in the next two years. Do the calculation, you can understand what's the potential for the coming year for the company. So again, just summarizing the last several slides, what are the growth engines of the companies? So the first one, again, strong demand for product and services of the whole industry coming out of COVID. The second one, as I said, APU 331- 200, which we already have LTAs worth more than $100 million. It's already generating money. We're going to grab more market share in the future. It supports the growth.
The third one, which is very important, as I said, that next two engines, the new engines that we are currently not showing any revenue, this will be the main driver for the coming years. And the last one, I didn't spend time on it, but we also have two very important strategic deals for landing gears. One of them with the major airlines in the US and the second one with Gulfstream, as I said before. Both of them are going to start generating revenue on the Q1 of 2025 and will be another contributor for the growth of the company in the future. In terms of the result or the growth of the major three product lines, so from the left side, you see the heat exchangers. Last quarter, we ran on a $15.8 million revenue a quarter, representing a 54% increase year over year in revenues.
Second one is APU, 48% increase year over year, running right now on a pace of $10.7 million in the last quarter. The last one, very small right now, average of $2 million a quarter. Also a nice growth of 15%, but we're showing it because, again, as I said before, there's going to be a major jump in landing gear activity in 2025. In terms of the backlog, the backlog actually tells the story of TAT. If before COVID, the company was running at about anywhere between $170 million-$200 million backlog, after COVID, after signing the contracts with Honeywell and starting winning some new contracts from new products and new services, the backlog jumped to the area of $400 million plus.
Currently, it's very stable in the last three years, and we're expecting another jump in the backlog starting from 2025 when we'll start being very active in acquiring contracts of the new APUs, as I mentioned before. In terms of the financial, I already highlighted the revenue growth, but you can see the trend in the next couple of slides. This is the gross profit, again, growing up 42%. We're currently on 21.1% gross profit. We aim for a higher gross profit. Our plan for next year is to be at about 25% gross profit at the end of 2025. So again, I'm emphasizing that the company is not only growing its revenue, but we are doing everything in order to grow healthy and improve the profitability. You see the result. Operating profit, again, the same story, going up 79% year over year.
You can see the trend and net income as well. Going out from COVID, where the company lost every quarter, and again, you see the major jump in the profitability. Right now, it's $2.6 million a quarter, and again, I'm emphasizing the trend continues. So the company is going to show a growth. We're going to show improving the profitability. And I think the last one, just to be a little bit a selling person, if you see the share price of the company, again, the share price is reacting to the result. Share price went up dramatically in the last 12, 15 months, but in our view, the share is still undervalued. And I think it's mainly because most of the community are not aware of the TAT story, and this is why we are here. So questions, we have five minutes.
Yeah.
What else are you doing to, I guess, just what you said, to attract more attention? You're doing like 50,000 shares a day, which obviously makes people more interested in that.
Yeah. So one of the things that is very important to understand, we were really not exposed to the US market until a year ago. Last year, actually, both Eran Yunger that is sitting here is our IR director and myself. We moved to North Carolina, and we started a huge plan in order to expose the company to the capital market. We hired an IR firm. We started participating in conferences like this. We're doing more and more one-on-one calls and private calls in order to tell the story. Shareholders' result seminar kind of after each quarter. We already had one last quarter. We're going to have another one. Give us your name. We'll invite you.
So we're doing everything that is needed in order to expose the story of the company and the company itself to the community. We only started. And I think, by the way, this is the opportunity. This is a very early stage discussion. Yes.
Can you say, give us some sense of why in these new markets with these great contracts? You're a small company, maybe relatively to some of your competitors. Why do you take a lot of share with your strategic advantage?
So I think at the end of the day, the philosophy behind the company, and again, being a very small company, also compared to our peers, but also compared to our customers, is partnership. We're really trying to form a partnership relationship with our customer, not necessarily a customer-supplier relationship. It works.
We're creating a very good relationship on a personal level with the decision-makers, with the people that work with us on a day-by-day basis. And this is why the customer stays with us. I can give some very good examples like FedEx. FedEx is working with us on an exclusive contract for the last nine years. UPS, the same, in the last five years. Boeing is working with us for more than 30 years. It's partnership. It's the technology. It's the capability to provide your services or your product on time in a very high quality and management that is not changing every day. A very stable management team that can create a very good and long-term relationship with the customers. Yes.
You have shown that you have those two large contracts that you're expecting to drive growth in the future, but you signed them in 2020 and 2021.
But you're saying they're doing nothing. Why is there a lag? Why is that happening? Yes. There is about two and a half years that you need to prepare yourself. So we just signed the contract, and then you need to buy all the equipment and all the tools. You need to hire the employees. You need to pass all the certification process in order to be there. It's a long time, unfortunately. If you see also the financials of the company, you see that this is a time of high investments. You need to invest. You don't just sign the contract and then immediately go to the market. You need to do all the preparation and the certification in order to be ready. We were ready about two quarters ago.
We started acquiring customers not on an LTA basis, but an engine here, an engine there, nothing more than that, just to start touching the market. And the real strategic idea is to really go strong next year and start winning contracts. So there is a lag of time in order for you to be prepared from signing the contract until you can go to the market. That's the short version of the answer. Yes.
So I heard North Carolina. I assume that's where the manufacturing is occurring. Where are the independent manufacturers right now?
Tulsa, Oklahoma, Greensboro, North Carolina, and another facility in Israel. That's where the manufacturing headquarters is in Charlotte. Yes.
What needs to happen for the revenue to start ramping in, especially in the year? What needs to happen for the revenue to start ramping, especially in a big opportunity like you're talking about?
In 2025, our plan is to start competing on large RFPs of the two new engines that I mentioned. When we will start winning those contracts, you will see an immediate jump in the revenue line, also on the backlog, but immediately on the revenue line. So revenue will increase in a very higher pace than it's already high, I would say. For an industrial company to grow by 35% quarter after quarter, it's very high. But it will be higher once we will start winning a contract. I think I'm out of time.