Of Aptera Motors. Next, we'll hear from CEO of Zeo Energy, Tim Bridgewater, along with their CFO, Cannon Holbrook. Then we'll hear from CFO at XCharge, Joel Gallo, alongside COO, Aatish Patel. Lastly, from Head of Investor Relations at VinFast, Amanda Bai. Each company will present for approximately 15 minutes, followed by a brief Q&A. Please submit your questions at any time through the Q&A portal located at the bottom of your screen.
Before we begin, please note that Webull was not involved in the preparation of any materials, and this is not a research recommendation, solicitation, or endorsement of any kind. No investors should rely solely on the information provided in making a decision to invest. On to the presentation. To start, we'll hear from Aptera Motors, ticker SEV, a solar mobility company driven by a mission to advance the future of efficient transportation.
Its flagship vehicle is conceived to be a paradigm-shifting solar electric vehicle that leverages breakthroughs in aerodynamics, material science, and solar technology to pursue new levels of efficiency. Now I will turn it over to Chris Anthony, Co-founder and Co-CEO. You can share your screen now.
Thank you. Happy to kick this off, and welcome to everybody who's trying to learn a little bit more about our mission towards solar mobility. Hopefully, through me sharing some information about us, it will inspire you to add SEV to your watchlist today. Is my presentation showing okay?
Yes.
A little disclaimer, more disclaimers, and our mission. Aptera is driven to build a future where every journey is powered by the sun. We do that in a lot of ways, but to reflect a bit, modern transportation is really driven by pollution. Burning fossil fuels, only getting 25%-27% of the energy out of the gasoline you burn, feels to us like an engineering failure. We have the technology to do better, and Aptera is applying that technology today to the transportation landscape.
We believe we have the solution. In a vehicle that's made for efficiency through the power of aerodynamics, light-weighting, and a super-efficient powertrain, we're able to do some pretty amazing things. First, it really enables range through efficiency. We see over the EV landscape today that range is one of the biggest motivators for people to adopt electric vehicle technology.
The more range you have, the more people are compelled to look at your offering. Our longest range edition of the Aptera is projected to be over 1,000 miles. Our standard range is 400 miles, and it's really enabled by solar. It untethers you from the grid, and we really see it as freedom to be able to have your car charge anywhere where photons are hitting the ground.
This is the first of our presentation.
Super aerodynamic and lightweight, which means every photon that hits the roof and that's turned into an electron can power your vehicle to its destination. Nice camping scene here. It's very cool to think of the Aptera being able to drive 200 miles to your favorite camping spot. You could camp for a week and actually come home with more power in your Aptera than you left with.
It really is a whole new vehicle segment. When you buy an Aptera, you're not just buying the vehicle, you're buying a lifetime's worth of fuel with the vehicle. Whenever it's outside and it's charging in the sun, you can get up to 40 miles a day of free range just from leaving it outside. That means you don't have to stop at the gas pump. You don't have to plug the vehicle in.
For most drivers, you just leave it outside and let solar do its thing. It really is the first vehicle that creates its own fuel, and there's nothing else like it in the world. We really see this as freedom. Freedom and mobility. Freedom and energy. The world's impact from this technology can be pretty extreme.
Billions of free miles driven, if we can ship 1 million Aptera over the next 10 years. Billions of pounds of less CO2 in the air, and a lot less oil being used and refined into gasoline and other products. In a world where energy anxiety is a real thing, solutions like Aptera can make a real difference. We're not beholden to oil. We're not beholden to the gas pump. We're not even beholden to tying to the grid for your daily transportation needs.
It really makes the world a better place in a lot of ways. We've got a great team assembled to execute on our goals. Steve is my co-founder. He's a pilot and electrical engineer. He really had the first vision for what efficient transportation could look like. I was lucky enough to meet him when he was with a company called Illumina, putting all the DNA synthesis players out of business with their amazing robots that synthesized DNA.
Now they're obviously a huge company. I was off with a boat company, Epic Boats. Since, I've had a lithium battery company, and some other amazing opportunities before we kicked off Aptera. We've got a great CFO who's prepared us to be a public company, which we went through our direct listing last October. Tim and Leon leading our engineers.
Leon just came to us from NIO, helped scale them from nothing to several thousand engineers, and now they're a major player in the EV space. Blake helps keep us compliant and prepared us to be a public company. Chris McCammon's leading our marketing team. We recently added a couple new board members, too, Tony and Todd, both with amazing industry experience.
Tony, particularly, with Volkswagen, Audi, and BMW, and Todd in big manufacturing back east. A little bit about our company. We're really on a mission to deliver solar mobility through the masses and tell our story as effectively as possible. That's really inspired a lot of people to come to support us. We have over 1 million followers on our different social channels. We have the second most popular EV channel on YouTube, behind Tesla.
We have almost 50,000 orders for the vehicles we're building behind me here. We had the most successful crowdfunding of its type in history, with almost 20,000 investors joining us to kickstart the company before we went to a direct listing to Nasdaq. Our manufacturing plan is scalable and capital light. We have our first assembly facility in place behind me.
It's 87,000 sq ft here in Southern California, and we're working with a global supply chain to get the parts here to build these vehicles as we cruise into 2027. We also got a grant from the California Energy Commission. It's part of a $42 million program. We've used a significant portion of that grant, but it's buying great equipment for us, like the robotics to assemble our battery packs, and the manufacturing equipment to build our solar panels for the vehicle.
Commercially, we're building a new vehicle segment that's never existed. A vehicle segment focused on efficiency, and never having to charge a vehicle. A new vehicle segment where vehicles come with all the fuel you'd ever need for them when you buy them. It's really enabled through our super low aerodynamic drag, lightweight construction, and super efficient powertrain.
We feel we have a very validated market, just by virtue of us having almost 50,000 orders for the vehicle. To further prove that, we also opened up the first 2,000 delivery slots to larger investors, and we had some of the earliest spots, one, two , three, four, go for over $1 million. On average, people invested $20,000 a pop to get access to the first 2,000 Aptera deliveries.
We feel very confident the first couple of years' worth of production has a home, and obviously our aspirations are much bigger than 50,000 units a year. We want to scale to around 150,000 units just with the three-wheeler here over the next five or six years. We've got a great global supply chain in Europe, in Asia. Great partners like CSTAMP in Italy, LG Energy in Korea, Yazaki in Japan.
These groups have come together to support our mission to get to production as quickly as possible. Our manufacturing model is capital light. We worked with a great company called Munro & Associates out of Detroit, to make sure we're not just building the most efficient vehicle ever, but also manufacturing it in the most efficient manner possible. We reduced our body structure into only six components, so it's very easy to put together.
Every part of our body structure is human positionable, less than 100 pounds. I actually weigh more than the body structure of the Aptera behind us, even though it's incredibly strong. When we last tested it actually had the highest roof crush strength of any passenger car on the road.
The tooling for this is low CapEx, and the workforce needed to assemble and put these vehicles to market is very low. On our assembly line here, at rate production, there's only about 30 people on the assembly line. At rate, we can build an Aptera about every 12 minutes. Here's a brief tour of our manufacturing line here. We just rolled off some of the first production vehicles here in Southern California, and we're continuing to build off of this line.
What we learned from these first production validation builds is how the process works, how the vehicle comes together, and we're refining every time to make it quicker, to make the parts come out of inventory and hit the line more effectively. There's some, "Hey, this part needs to go in this way instead of we had it turned backwards and it was too hard to get the screws in," and stuff like that.
Lots of learning going on here at Aptera with these validation builds, and all that will educate us for volume production closer to the end of the year. Our first product is designed for efficiency. Super aerodynamic. As you see, the vehicle looks more like a fish than a box.
What's sad about today's transportation is you look out on the freeway at other vehicles, most of those vehicles are burning about 70% of their fuel at highway speeds, just pushing air out of the way. If you can make your vehicle more aerodynamic, you get 70% better fuel economy just right off the bat. If you then make it lightweight and have a super efficient powertrain, this vehicle gets about 350 miles per gallon equivalent.
You talk to your neighbor and they just got a car that gets 35 miles to the gallon. You're like, "Wow, that's an efficient vehicle." We get 10X that efficiency. We use very, very little power per mile, which means we can do some amazing things with quick charging and solar charging. We use about a third of the energy per mile of the average EV.
It's about a 20th of the energy per mile of a combustion vehicle, at about half the weight. It's still really usable. We've got lots of storage in the back. We actually have a camping kit. A tent can go over the back, and you can sleep two people in the back of the Aptera. You can go to Costco, you can load it up. You can take all your construction equipment to your site.
If you're in a band, this vehicle's perfect for you. We've also got a pet kit. It's got a little net that goes between the drivers, and the rear so you can have your dog in the back. If you push the seats forward, you have about seven feet from the back of the seats to the tail.
A lot of usable space back there for surfboards, for camping, for all kinds of stuff. For safety, some of the biggest attributes are we have a low center of gravity, so the stability's great. We've got a superior composite construction, as I said, super high roof crush strength, side impact beams, frontal crumple zones, all the things you'd find in kind of modern automotive, but built in a package for efficiency. Solar power really is the star of the show.
Integrated solar that gets you over 10,000 miles a year of free driving. That's over 1,000 miles of charging in the summer months. This is something that's freedom from the grid, it's freedom from energy anxiety. It's so many things because of the solar package. We think that's why we have most of our fans because, hey, solar power transportation, this is amazing.
How do I jump on board? Our future is further developing our solar technologies. We've got other markets we're jumping into, ground support equipment at airports, other EV manufacturers. We really think that the revenue streams just from our solar technologies could be pretty enormous. We've got other designs for a three-wheeler, more commercial vehicles.
Fleet vehicles are super concerned about total cost of ownership and cost per mile. Our total cost of ownership is like a third of a Toyota Camry, and cost per mile is like a fifth of a Toyota Camry. When it's so low cost to operate, we really think the fleet vehicles in the future could be a compelling market for us, and we may sell more commercial vehicles than consumer vehicles. Which brings us to our plan, to production and beyond.
We're raising another $45 million now to get into production, end of 2026, 2027. We've got a $75 million equity line of credit right now that we've been utilizing. I think we've only taken around $5 million off of that equity line of credit so far. We're continuing to raise money in the markets now that we're a public company.
Once we're solidly in production, then we want to scale quickly, open up new plants, not only across the U.S., but also internationally. We're looking for another $160 million after that, and then to grow from profits, after that. That's all I got for you, but I hope you have some great questions, and I hope you'll add SEV to your watchlist so you see what we do in the future and hopefully participate in bringing solar mobility to the masses.
Thank you, Chris. Definitely exciting times for the company. I see that you received a few questions during the presentation that you could answer located at the bottom of your screen. Please read the question aloud before answering.
Hold on. Let me stop sharing here so I can get back to my screen. Questions. Q&A. Curious how you think about consumer adoption risks and engineering advantage, especially given its unconventional look. I know the ultra-efficient design is a core differentiator. We didn't do market studies or minimum viable product analysis when we designed Aptera.
Steve and I set out to design the most efficient transportation, and we hoped that the world would want it. Within the first couple of weeks of showing the world, we had 4,000 or 5,000 orders. Now we have almost 50,000 orders. We think the world is hungry for compelling technology that makes the world a better place, and we think our product fits that to a T.
Our mission is to continue to evolve our products to be more and more efficient and meet more and more people's needs so we can have more transportation powered by the sun over time. We think there's clearly a market segment for that because lots of people have raised their hand and put money down to invest in us as a company, our mission, and obviously to get the product once we start producing it.
I hope that answers your question. Anonymous asks, "Are you looking into experimental batteries, especially ones made of exotic materials?" We're at a point now where we're planning for higher volume production, so we're not really looking at unique battery technologies unless we are sure that they could produce them in volume. For a vehicle like this, we're talking millions of cells within the next 18-24 months.
We need something that's in production, that's commoditized, that meets our cost targets, but also can last 10-20 years in service life. We don't really want to dabble in a lot of the esoteric technologies, though a lot of it's really cool. I've got a great history in batteries, in developing unique battery chemistries. We're sticking with high nickel content NMC batteries for initial production.
Who knows what'll happen in 2027, 2028? Maybe some cool things come out and we can explore those. Third question, "What does your go-to-market strategy look like? Direct to consumer only, or are there partnerships we're exploring?" We're exploring partnerships on the service side, and possibly the distribution side, actual customer deliveries outside of high population density areas. Direct to consumer is how we'll start. As I said, we almost have 50,000 orders.
Really, we just need a great customer delivery experience now and then service after the fact, should the vehicles need it. We're also a right to repair company, so we'll give you information on how to fix your vehicle. We're motivated to keep Aptera vehicles on the road and functioning as long as possible.
If something breaks on your vehicle, we'll tell you what it is, how it works, why it broke. We'll ship you a part within 24 hours if you need. We think this open mentality to service will help us with some strategic partners. That's the name of the game, direct to consumer and find some partners for nationwide service if we need it.
Fourth question, "What are the biggest execution risks over the next 12-24 months that investors should be focused on?" It's really completing our funding plan, so we can get through these validation vehicles and start to pay for the high volume tooling we need. We need the die-cast metal parts on the suspension, injection molded interior parts that you see behind me. Those all cost some pretty big dollars.
Some ED&T to finish up some of the larger systems, anti-lock braking systems and airbags being some of the biggest ones. Those are the biggest things we have to conquer. Our funding plan's been going great this year. We hope that will continue, and we can accomplish all of our goals into 2027. Probably time for one more question. "Aptera's website reports that climate control is designed into the cabin between 60-90 degrees.
Do you have any idea if the climate control will be possible to accommodate cabin control? I'm thinking about customers that live in New England and outside of those ranges. Any idea? I'm not sure what your question means, but we will have a typical climate control. You'll also be able to control it from the app. The great thing about having solar power in the vehicle is you should never have to get into a hot Aptera.
Can always keep the vehicle at 75-80 degrees, because you're always taking power from the sun, and that power can augment your climate control, so you can set it to get into a very comfortable vehicle. But I appreciate all the questions. I appreciate you having a look at Aptera, and I hope you'll add SEV to your watchlist today and keep track of us as we grow. Thanks.
Great. Thanks. That's all the time we have for questions. Chris, thank you for your time and presentation today.
Thanks, everybody.
For more information on Aptera Motors, please visit their Corporate Connects page on the app. Next, we'll hear from both the CEO and CFO of Zeo Energy, ticker ZEO, a diversified clean energy company providing residential, commercial, industrial, and utility scale solutions that cut costs and carbon emissions. With its vertically integrated approach, Zeo Energy helps customers with a cost-effective transition to 24/7 clean energy. Now I'd like to introduce CEO Tim Bridgewater and CFO Cannon Holbrook.
Thank you very much. Just confirming you can see my screen.
Yes.
We've been in business since 2019. We are not a sexy business as Chris just presented with his next generation vehicle, but we sell solar systems on primarily residences and then in some cases, commercial structures. Basically, safe harbor statement for our presentation is here just to talk about forward-looking statements. You're welcome to download our investor deck from our website, and have that available to you. To give you a little background, our business has basically two focuses and components.
Our core business is our residential solar business. We're in 10 states licensed where we have installed in the past and/or acquired companies with installations. Most of our core focus now is in the Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Illinois markets, with most of our sales representatives there selling. The second part of our business is long-duration energy storage.
We acquired a company last year called Heliogen, and have been working in the commercial space with large scale commercial battery technologies, and I'll get more into that a little bit later. The residential solar business continues to be benefited by increasing electricity prices. Utilities continue to raise prices. We sell customer savings, so that they can lower their cost of power versus their utility bill.
Challenges in our industry are higher interest rates, continued changes at the federal policy level, with the Big, Beautiful Bill that shifted our industry's focus for the next few years. Funding for the customers based on interest rates and reliable sources of tax equity investors. Supply, historically, most of the supply has come from overseas. But now, with the tax incentives, more domestic content is being produced by modular factories in the U.S. and inverter factories based in the U.S.
We see the prospects recovering after two years of downturn and negative growth because of the high interest rates and the slowing solar industry. We see that returning this year to positive growth. Right now, we're projecting at least 20% year-over-year growth for 2026. The penetration in residential solar is interesting in the United States. We're basically behind most of the rest of the world, who are in 15%-20% penetration of residential homes that have solar on the rooftops. We have about 100 million homes in the U.S., about 8 million of those are powered by solar during the day and part of their power demands at night. So we see a lot of potential and tailwinds accelerating growth. In 2021, 2022, the industry had 15% year-over-year growth rates.
That slowed because of interest rates, and there's been a lot of shakeouts in the industry, some bankruptcies that have slowed the growth as well. We look to return to high growth this year and in the coming several years. Germany, 15% penetration. Hawaii has about 40% penetration rooftop solar. We think the rest of the U.S. is poised for a lot of growth.
Our business uniquely is driven by our sales engine. We have a summer sales model where we'll send teams out into different locations, and they'll sell intensely over the summer by knocking on doors and giving presentations. There are a lot of industries, like Vivint Smart Home, insulation, and others that have been driven off this summer sales model, and we have a great core team of sales reps that are in the field. Our company's been historically profitable.
We haven't had to use debt to fund growth. We took the company public in March of 2024 and have been ahead of the average industry performers. We're careful not to expand too much. We showed 10 states, but really focused on five states, with our core installation teams. Because we haven't had to take on a lot of debt, the business has been self-generating from a cash flow perspective.
Our sales approach works as follows. We have a manager out in the field. He oversees closers and setters. The setters go out and knock doors, 50-100 doors a day usually. Of the presentations that they're able to set up, our closers and our managers will typically close one out of two of those presentations. Customers have to have an interest in solar.
Our sales reps close, they bring the financing to the table as well to give options for the customers to either pay for the systems or finance. The changes in policy have pushed everybody to the leasing model now in order to continue to receive the Investment Tax Credit benefits of that system. We use our own developed CRM that's incorporating AI more and more to help enhance our efficiencies. That goes from the door knockers all the way to delivering the systems, operating to the customers, and tying into the utility. We're seamless in that regard. The customer proposition for the value is that we provide lower costs of power than they're paying to the utility.
We see that utility pricing continuing to go up because of the AI data center demand, and the grid is just not able to keep up with the demand for power in the U.S. Those prices continue to go up, and we save customers money. They lock in 25 years of payments for their energy, so it's knowable, and their savings is clear. We also provide the customer with the comfort that they have a system that if there's problems with the grid or blackouts or utility disruptions, they will continue to have power. If they have a battery installed as well, then they can continue to have that power during the nighttime hours, and it's always up and running. Customers are also able to monetize excess power generation of their system by putting that power back onto the grids in states that have good net metering policies.
They can then get credits for that power and then utilize that power when the sun goes down. We offer a seamless, vertically integrated offering to the customers where we sell, we install, we maintain. We also provide them opportunities for financing with our finance partners so that they can just rely on us as a one-stop shop. Our commercial division, Heliogen, we acquired in August of 2025.
This group is now focused on attacking the AI data center sector. Data centers are driving up power, they're expanding rapidly. $1 trillion will be spent in the U.S. on data centers this year. A lot of the hyperscalers are just trying to find where they can get power to fuel the data center demand for ChatGPT, Claude, all the other AI demands that are hitting the marketplace right now.
The Department of Energy has said you have to bring your own power instead of relying on the grid to power these data centers, or else you're not going to get an operating data center. What we provide is the storage of energy, so you can take wind and solar and store that and have base load power.
We're focused on long-duration energy storage systems, meaning over 10 hours. We've announced our first project recently, and we're working on several others. Basically we are a partner to the data center developers, where they can have reliable, dispatchable power 24/7 through these long-duration energy storage systems. You can see the exploding data center business is driving a lot of economics right now.
I just heard my favorite shoe company, Allbirds, has pivoted out of the shoe business and into compute and AI data center development, and their stock exploded recently. That might be a good one to watch. We want to sell picks and shovels to the data center industry, by providing power and energy systems, and power systems that they can use to fuel those centers and the continuing growth.
Our engineering team are experts at designing and building feasibility studies and putting together the unique long-duration storage technologies. We've looked at compressed CO2, molten salt, as well as other BESS, lithium and non-lithium BESS systems to provide the best solution for our customers to store the energy on-site close to the user.
We do that in the residential business, where you basically have solar power generated on the home, a battery to store the power and power the needs of the system. Data center demand, I won't go too far into this, but I think everybody can read and see what's going on in that. Just multi-gigawatts coming on in a fashion that we didn't anticipate a few years ago. We're trying to capture a small portion of that business by providing long-duration energy storage systems.
We announced our first project, an MOU with Creekstone Energy, which is a project located in central Utah. That project is moving forward very quickly. In November 25th, they announced the Series B funding round to fuel that site. In February of this year, we announced an MOU with Creekstone to develop effectively 280 MW of base load power.
They have since signed a 13,000-acre lease with the state of Utah to build solar plus energy storage for that site. Their first gigawatt of power is being marketed now. We feel like this is a great project. It's similar to some of the large projects in Texas and Virginia and other places. This is our first foray into the long-duration energy storage business.
Basically, we provide the vehicle for energy to make its way from either photovoltaic fields, off-peak grid power, concentrated solar, put it into a system to spin the turbines, create and generate electricity to run the data center or put back onto the grid, creating dispatchable power. Market trends for our company that we see in the future.
Just to summarize, the continued load growth demand in the country with just the general economic growth as well as AI data center growth continues to increase prices. We think that creates a great opportunity in the residential space for customers to continue to put solar on their house. The long-term economics favor PV, even if the ITCs, the investment tax credits go away.
It's a lower cost of power than many other alternatives, and you're seeing solar, both on the utility scale, commercial scale, and residential, take up more and more of the production of energy in our country. Utility price inflation is a material tailwind. We see residents adopting more power, getting VPP, meaning virtual power projects, by putting batteries in their homes and being able to sell that capacity to the utility, who will pay a monthly fee for that. That's a continued tailwind as well.
More and more financing partners are doing prepaid leases, and providing lease financing because of the changes in the Big Beautiful Bill, which have pushed consumers to use leases as opposed to buying the systems themselves. Energy storage continues to grow. We see increasing attachment rates of our batteries, and we think that there's been a lot of shakeup bankruptcies in the industry.
There's been dislocation, and we are an acquirer of opportunities. We've made two acquisitions since going public, and we continue to look at opportunities in our space and in complementary areas, to grow our business. We see the areas for growth as being organic, internal expansion of our business, adding other complementary services such as roofing, possibly HVAC and other adders that our sales reps can sell while they're in the home.
Looking at strategic bolt-on acquisitions to grow our business over the coming years. I'll turn the time over now to Cannon Holbrook, who is our CFO. Cannon comes from a summer sales industry in pest control and has worked in similar industries over the years, and he's been great at helping us become a public company and make sure we're on track to continue to grow our business. Cannon, do you want to take the next section here?
Thank you. Tim. Just to, as noted, refer to our 10-K that was filed on March 31st, if you have any detailed questions associated with some of the information on this slide. I think what's important to notice is that we, in 2022 and 2023, as you can see, historically, we generated positive income and adjusted EBITDA. As the business pulled back in 2024 and 2025, that has been negative income and negative adjusted EBITDA.
One of the things to notice in 2025, just at the high level here, is that the adjusted EBITDA number of $3.3 million loss does not take into account an adjustment for $3.2 million of bad debt due to primarily the bankruptcy of Sunnova that we had in our accounts receivable. We would've been roughly break even in 2025, not including that event.
I think that what we're looking for and seeing in the business is that it's positive. We are seeing positive outcome for this next year in terms of our ability to sell and having salespeople available to sell for us. If you're new to looking at Zeo, one of the things that you'll want to pay attention to as you look at us quarter to quarter is as a summer sales business and in the way the solar business, when people start to look for solar, is in the summertime.
We have the majority of our revenues and sales happen in Q2 and Q3, and then we have a slower period during Q4 and this Q1 that just ended. If you look at our financials, you'll see that as you get to know us.
A couple of things also to note with the 2025 year, when you look at that loss, is that there was, associated with the acquisition that we made at the end of 2024, there was $7.6 million of amortization with that acquisition, which drives a lot of that loss and a lot of the amortization expense that you see in our financial statements. I think that kind of gives you a high level of what we're looking for going forward this year, as well as some of the things to pay attention to in our financial statements.
Okay. Let's move to question and answer then. We can take these on.
Great. Thanks, Tim and Kennon. Very exciting updates. I do see that you received a few questions that you can find at the bottom of your screen. Please read aloud the question before answering.
Okay. The first question is, how do you differentiate Zeo in an increasingly crowded residential solar market? I would say the opposite is true. There have been a lot of players that have gone away or gone bankrupt. Freedom Forever, which was one of the largest players, just announced bankruptcy recently. We're seeing a shift. Companies that are managing their cash flow and doing well are continuing to grow, and there's been a shrinking of competition across different states.
I think California is still quite competitive, Illinois quite competitive, but we don't see as much competition as we did in 2022, 2023 when the market was booming for residential solar. We are one of the few companies that are public. We're transparent. We can work with the public markets, raise capital. I think we have a better offering. We're not in too many states.
A lot of national companies have overextended themselves to try and operate a business in so many states, so many people. I think we're core, we're conservative, and I think we have weathered a difficult two years in the industry and now I think we're poised for growth in the coming years. Second question from anonymous attendee is, what are your margin profiles across geographies. Where are you seeing the strongest returns? Kennon, do you want to take that one?
Sure. I think that, in our situation, the majority of our expenses are going to be labor and then the cost of the materials going on the roof. From a cost perspective, we don't see a lot of difference region to region in terms of what the cost is. The question becomes, where can we get better revenues, right? In terms of where there's more room for pricing when you sell the system. For us, what we've seen is we've saw very good revenue and margin, relatively speaking, to other areas in Virginia last year. We moved into Virginia, and that was a very strong market for us, and we'll continue to move there strongly this year.
Yeah, I would say wherever power prices are highest, you get the better margins, but that's where the competition also goes to. I think we're careful in selecting states where there's good economics, but also not direct competition with some of the larger players like Sunrun and others. Next question is, how quickly can Zeo Energy's long-duration storage solution with compressed CO2 and molten salt and other technologies be deployed?
A re other companies using those technologies? Great question. The long-duration energy storage field is relatively new here in the U.S. There are lots of deployments of these technologies in Europe and Asia. Molten salt and CO2 systems go from 10 MW to 100-MW systems. There are 300-MW molten salt storage systems in Spain and Dubai and other places.
The U.S. is coming on to adopt these as the demand increases and the need for really solid commercial, low operations, and maintenance types of technologies come into play. Lithium has a limited lifespan, and it degrades pretty rapidly. These technologies stay at the nameplate capacity for 30 years and really are differentiators. We're carving out a niche in that long-duration energy space, and we think that it's going to be attractive to the market. So far so good.
We're in early innings, and it takes generally 12-24 months from start construction to deliver the storage system. They're longer lead items. Supply chain issues are obviously going to control some of that, which have been complicated recently by tariffs and other government policies. Overall, the timeline is in line with what the data centers and the hyperscalers are looking for.
All right, great. That wraps up our Q&A. Tim and Cannon, thank you again for your time and presentation.
All right. Thank you.
Next, we will hear from XCharge, ticker XCH. XCharge, founded in 2015, is an integrated EV charging and energy solutions company. Committed to providing innovative and efficient EV charging solutions, XCharge is actively working towards establishing a global green future that is critical to long-term growth and development. Now I'd like to introduce CFO Joel Gallo and COO Aatish Patel.
Thank you, guys. Bear with me one moment. Just trying to get this presentation to load. All right. Are we able to see the presentation on the screen?
Not yet.
How about now? No?
No, I'm not seeing it.
One sec.
There we go.
Perfect. All righty. I'll get started. Hello, all. I'm Aatish Patel, COO of XCharge Group and President of North America. On the line with me, I have my colleague, Joel Gallo, our CFO, as well. Safe harbor and disclaimer statement is standard. Getting into it, we're XCharge. We're an OEM in the EV charging and energy storage space. That's been in the game for about 10 years now. 180+ employees worldwide.
We offer both DCFC and ESS products in our portfolio. Our key thing is DC fast only, vertical integration in the terms of not only producing the hardware, but also some of the core components as well as the software and stuff needed to make the solutions work well for where they're needed. Our inception was in around 2015, 2016 timeframe, originally in Asia.
Got our teeth cut there in the space and went through that market cycle, really built a foundational business in Europe, which I'll get to in a second, in 2018 and through 2022. Entered in the North American space at around 2021 and have been growing there ever since. 10 years in the game. We have a presence worldwide in various geographies, and we're continuing to grow as we're about to explain.
Globally, our global HQ and test center is in Hamburg, Germany, with an additional test center in Madrid as well. We have 40+ full-time staff across sales, after sales, and G&A in this market. We do full R&D and integration testing for our software and our hardware products there, as well as coordination of aftersales and whatnot through these two facilities, as well as some satellites that we have.
Just some photos of some of the partnerships and deployments we have there. A lot of our work in Europe is with utilities. EnBW, Vattenfall, Total, et cetera, are some of our core partners there from the utility side. Additionally, we do work with operators, like Electra and Enel, actually, in terms of being their hardware provider, specifically on the DCFC side of things.
On the North American side, formally established in 2022, based out of Austin, Texas. Again, vertical integration, hardware, software, as well as development and the support side of things are all in-house here. We have active clients in all spaces, commercial fleets, public operators, developers, CPOs, and distributors. Couple of just names and logos of people we work with, but very broad in terms of how we operate.
The key thing here is we provide DCFC equipment, and as well as battery energy storage systems, to these operators to basically allow their businesses to fulfill. Some active and notable partnerships to just be aware of. EVPassport, we're an exclusive hardware provider for them for their charging as a service product on their DCFC side. Orlando Utilities Commission, again, continuing with our utility involvement in Europe.
We've continued that here in the U.S. with partnerships with OUC that allow us to develop and mold our solutions to work more strategically with their grid operations. As well as a lot of partnerships with QSR, like Roady's Truck Stops. Working with them, their franchisees and their development teams to supply, develop a DCFC infrastructure strategy on a nationwide level with their locations as they gear up for the next stage of urban transport and whatnot.
Gateway Fleets, they're an exclusive supplier or partner of ours that works with us to develop charging stations for some of their clients, like FedEx and other companies in the LTL space. As far as how we go about it from a strategic standpoint, we're really focused in on the constrained grid market.
Where we have seen and developed an attention to is using our experience in the past market cycles to develop an understanding of how things are going to go in, I guess, the forthcoming market cycles. In Asia and APAC, or in Asia and Europe, we have seen development continue to mature. Right now, as we're starting to see adoption rise and the need for infrastructure increase, that's where we're starting to see constrained grid market conditions come in the way of further development.
With that foresight, we've developed and shaped our strategy to be ahead of the curve in a sense, in the sense that our solutions are really geared towards accommodating that constrained grid market. Focusing on zero incremental grid constraints, or grid upgrades, and really trying to make solutions that can be deployed quickly and efficiently, and to allow utilization to ultimately solve the problems they're intended to solve. The way we do that is basically by reducing complexity, but while still delivering a capability that's useful.
Products like our GridLink, which incorporate a variable voltage input of 208 or 480, as well as energy storage system, allow us to take a typical charging site, as you would see on the right-hand side, with a bunch of infrastructure that's needed, a bunch of equipment, and a bunch of permitting and installation, that honestly will cost money and take a lot of time to get fully realized.
We're able to basically bypass a lot of that work and integrate it into a nice, compact solution that can be installed in weeks, not months or years, depending on where you're installing it. That's mainly due to the fact that we have a lot of ability to avoid needing power upgrades, and other stuff associated with DC fast infrastructure deployment.
Additionally, this allows people to, and operators to charge, and optimize their solutions and their businesses a bit more on the energy side of things, by allowing more choosy and more strategic supply of energy at costs that may be better and allow them to have better margins, more ROI, and ultimately, much more healthy operations from a power delivery standpoint to their customers.
The solutions we have, like the GridLink, but also the C6 and the C7 allow us to keep the cycle moving, not only with CPOs, but also the grids, the utilities, the OEMs, as well as the EV drivers as a whole, and really allow people to get charging and moving forward in a way. Our growth strategies and where we're focused in moving forward is really on infrastructure as a service.
Allowing our customers and our partners to trust us to be their infrastructure support provider. Not only provide the hardware, but also the solutions and the strategic support needed to make sure that this stuff works and produces the ROI needed to continue to grow other fleets. We're continuing to focus more and more on energy storage, specifically with hardware and software solutions that allow us to further optimize and leverage the ESS aspects of our products, in ways to help improve ROI, and just general usefulness.
Additionally, operational expansion, as we continue to grow not only in Europe but also in North America. With new business pools, business partners, support, et cetera, as we're continuing to see growth increase as adoption in the EV and energy space as a whole continues to grow. With that, I'll turn it over to Joel, to go over financials. Take it away, Joel.
Great. Thank you very much, Atish. I really appreciate it. Hello, everyone. My name is Joel Gallo, and it's my pleasure to be here today. I'm the CFO of XCharge. Continuing the conversation that Atish started, let's just discuss some of our financial highlights. We'll start off with some of the top-line revenue numbers.
These are our audited numbers from 2022, 2023, and 2024. You can see the revenue grew from about $29 million in 2022 to $38.5 million a year later to a little bit over $42 million in 2024. Most of that revenue comes from our products. Our different chargers that we sell, as Atish mentioned, we have C6, C7, NZS, and GridLink.
Also a small but growing component of service revenue, just a lot of after-sale software upgrades and some of the hardware maintenance that comes along with some of the chargers that we've already deployed. In terms of revenue by region, a lot of the sales are coming in really from Europe and North America. Actually, as time goes on, increasingly will continue to come from regions such as Europe and North America.
There's also some revenue there from China as well. When I say North America, not necessarily just the United States, but also Canada, Mexico, and included in there, which is part of the others bracket, will include sales in Latin America as well, places like Brazil, Peru, and so we're actively expanding into a lot of other different markets. Aatish, if you could actually go on to the next slide.
There we go. Are you able to see?
Let me see. I think it was there and then. Okay, there we go. It was there one second. All right. It just came back. Great. Thanks. Looking at some of the expense side, let's talk a little bit about some of the cost of goods sold. You can see the cost of goods sold for 2022, 2023, and 2024. You have a lot of the, as an electric vehicle company, we rely on a lot of manufactured parts, power modules, battery cells, all kinds of sensors, cables, and everything that goes into the production of the electric vehicle chargers. Certainly, shipping costs are part of that component. We have to ship our chargers all over the world.
We sell our chargers in dozens of countries. I mentioned many in North America and also in Europe, and so we have to get our chargers overseas and some additional COGS as well. The gross profit actually has been going up from 2022 - 2023 and 2024. You could see the actual numbers there, the gross profit growing increasingly and also the gross profit margin, which are the percentages at the top of each of the bars from 36.4% - 45% to about 50.3% in 2024. I will say that 2024 is the last year that we have our audited financials ready for.
Our 2025 year audited financials are actually undergoing the audit right now. We'll be publishing those by the end of this month. In about another week or two, we'll be releasing our full fiscal year 2025 numbers for that as well. Tish, if you can go on to the next slide, please.
Yep. Should be showing. Joel, can you see it or no?
Yep. I got it right there. Great, thanks. Some of the operating leverage numbers, the operating expense breakdowns. Typically, you would see a lot of selling and marketing. We're very active in promoting our products out there. We have a very big business development and sales force as well in North America and Europe.
There's a lot of that selling and marketing expenses there. You can see the growth there from 2022, 2023 to 2024. Research and development, of course, we're a high-tech manufacturer, and so we are going to make investments in making sure that we're developing new products and ensuring that our products are working properly. Then typical G&A expenses as well, which is typical for a firm like us. The operating income and loss.
We had a slight operating income in 2022, and that actually turned into a loss in 2023 and 2024. Part of the reason, and really the main reason for that, is that we're actually making heavy investments into the company. We have to procure a lot of supplies from our different supply chain vendors and also make sure that we're able to reserve some manufacturing capacity from some of our manufacturers as well.
There's prepayments that need to go out there. Net income and loss, you can see the numbers there as well. Adjusted net income and loss, you'll be able to see the 2025 numbers come out, like I said, in about another week or two. I think we go on to one last slide.
Yep.
Great. Got it. I see it right there. Capital expenditure, I mentioned that we're making a lot of investments into CapEx. You can see that increasing in 2023 and 2024, and that will continue to increase into 2025 as well. The cash and equivalents. We did our IPO in September 2024, and so we were able to raise some money via our IPO in Nasdaq. I think that is it. That is the last slide.
Thank you, Joel and Tish. Definitely exciting times for the company. I see that you received some questions at the bottom of your screen during the presentation that maybe you could answer. Please read aloud the question before answering.
Yep. Let's see, Fred Crawford. As EV charging space has become highly competitive, where does XCharge fit into the value chain, hardware versus software versus network? Great question. I mean, for us, it's really a solution fit. We're one of the few companies that are able to actually do all three things associated with hosting an EV charging station. Not only provide the hardware, but also the software, as well as now also the turnkey development side of things.
For people that are trying to get into this space, whether it be new operators, independents, or even existing operators, we're able to provide a lot more of a strategic mindset and I guess value prop when it comes to providing a solution compared to some of our peers, which has allowed us to differentiate ourselves in that aspect as well as with the energy storage integration that we're doing well as well with our products.
I guess, another question there. I guess from the demand side, are you seeing commercial fleets, municipalities, or retail locations? How does this mix impact margin? Margins honestly stay the same more or less. We are a premium product. We don't necessarily discount as much, and by that, you can see it in our gross margin. We're able to maintain growth there.
We're seeing demand equal amongst all three of those that you listed, I think, just given the current market dynamics and the adoption that you're seeing in North America as well as in Europe. Across the board, any place where charging is needed is generally seen as a good demand center these days. Bottlenecks. What are your biggest bottlenecks to scaling? Grid constraints preventing your capability.
I think, at this moment, it's mostly been associated with grid constraints and/or capital availability for our partners. The market has definitely opened up a bit in terms of the financing of this equipment and this asset class, and we're starting to see things kind of thaw out. But those are probably the two main things that have been the constraint or the bottleneck for deployment at scale. How do government incentives factor into your pipeline, and what happens if subsidies decline?
For North America, we have not been focusing on subsidy-backed business. Pretty much all the business we've built over the past five years with North America has been done without any subsidy considerations. That's allowed us to avoid a lot of the noise and turbulence that you've seen over the years, with NEVI and such programs coming and going.
From our side, has allowed us to be a bit more resilient to the headwinds that we're seeing, and honestly, the facts and the pudding with how we're continuing to scale. Yeah. I guess how will the rise of AI data centers contribute to your profit margins, not just revenue? Data centers are kind of a weird fit for us. For us on the ESS side, it's a potential market in that sense.
However, we're still starting to see a lot of the noise in that market kind of stabilize. It is an opportunity. It is something that we're looking into, especially with their ESS side of the business. However, for us, a lot of the forecasting we're doing and a lot of the focus we have is strictly oriented towards charging, just given where we're seeing the demand centers be tending to. I think that's it.
Great. Yeah. Joel and Atish, thank you again for your time and presentation.
Thank you.
Lastly, we'll hear from VinFast, ticker VFS. VinFast is a global electric vehicle company from Vietnam focused on making EVs more accessible through smart design, competitive total cost of ownership, and a vertically integrated manufacturing model. Today, VinFast is more than just a traditional OEM. It is a vertically integrated, software-defined EV platform that combines EVs, software, and green mobility ecosystem services to scale EV adoption worldwide. Now I'd like to introduce the Head of Investor Relations, Amandae Baey. Please go ahead and share your screen.
Thank you, Kevin, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for staying on till the very end to hear a bit more about who VinFast is. Today, I'll be walking you through not just who we are, but our journey so far, how we have scaled, and also how to think about our growth trajectory going forward. At a high level, as Kevin has mentioned, we are a global EV manufacturer. We're very much focused on technology.
From day one, we've been operating a vertically integrated, software-defined EV platform. Everything that we have done has been anchored around one idea, and that is to make electric mobility more accessible at scale. You can think of VinFast as essentially offering exposure to countries with the highest EV growth potential, excluding China and excluding U.S. Now, before I go deeper into the VinFast journey-
Amandae.
Yes.
Your screen isn't sharing.
Oh. Let's try this again. Can you see my screen now?
No. There we go.
Okay. Yes. All right. I failed to hit the share button at the bottom. My apologies. Before I go deeper into the presentation, let me begin by just giving you a bit more background about who our parent company, Vingroup, is. Because our parent company, Vingroup, remains to date our largest shareholder. Now, Vingroup, I think the audience here might not be familiar with who they are.
They are the largest privately owned conglomerate in Vietnam, with around a $50 billion market cap as of mid-April, representing roughly about 15% of the Vietnam index. Vingroup has a track record of building and scaling businesses across various industries, from real estate to hospitality, healthcare, and education. VinFast is part of the industrials and technology pillar, where electric mobility is the core focus.
When investors ask why VinFast, the answer is always we have been backed by leaders that have demonstrated they can execute growth plans at scale and repeat that across verticals, and they're doing the same with VinFast today. Now, VinFast started back in 2017 as Vietnam's, and Southeast Asia's, first vertically integrated OEM. It was founded by our CEO, Mr. Pham, who's also the founder of Vingroup. What's remarkable about this journey is that VinFast had to do everything from scratch.
Prior to the company's existence, Vietnam as a country did not have any auto manufacturing capabilities. Management actually went west to learn from established legacy OEMs, some names that you might be familiar with, like BMW and General Motors in the early days, on how to set up an automotive manufacturing operation. By 2022, VinFast was fully committed to being an all-electric mobility company.
Today, we're only producing EVs, electric two-wheelers, and electric buses. We started deliveries in 2022, and a year after that began our international expansion in the U.S. and Europe with the focus of planting the flag and getting the NCAP ratings initially. Today, VinFast has one of the broadest electric mobility offerings amongst the newer OEM brands. We have 15 electric car models, a dozen electric two-wheeler models, and four e-bus models.
Cumulatively, we have sold over 400,000 cars since we began deliveries in 2022. We sell in over 10 countries. We have over 400 showrooms, and we have four factories globally. To give you a sense of our growth trajectory, we did close to 200,000 cars in 2025, and this was more than double what we did in 2024, which was around 97,000 EVs.
For 2026, our target is to do at least 300,000 EVs and to grow our two-wheeler volumes by at least 2.5 times what we did in 2025, which was 400,000. Now, I'm going to take a moment to explain how we think about our go-to-market strategy and what really anchors us when we move into each new market, because it's one thing to be selling cars in just one market, that is your home market. It's another thing to scale and to do it quickly when you move into international markets.
Everything that we do comes back to three core pillars, manufacturing, products, and markets. Globally, we have 600,000 EV capacity, and we operate highly vertically integrated facilities across Vietnam, India, and Indonesia. In Haiphong , which is in north Vietnam, this is our flagship facility. We have 300,000 capacity.
We have many key suppliers located on-site, which allows us to get more than 70% of local content for certain models. In central Vietnam, Ha Tinh , we have another 200,000 EV capacity factory. Now in central Vietnam, this facility also has battery pack assembly lines, so we are able to assemble a certain percentage of our battery needs in-house. Right next to this facility, we have a separate joint venture battery cell facility with one of our key battery suppliers.
In India and Indonesia, we have a 50,000 CKD facility, which is in phase one. The intention is to eventually scale these factories in India and Indonesia to position them as future export hubs. For now, the 50,000 capacity in those two markets are intended for just domestic demand. On the product front, our strategy is very simple.
We have a very wide offering covering the full range from entry-level mini SUVs to premium SUVs. This gives us the flexibility and optionality to enter new markets and new segments quickly. For 2026, our key focus is on selling the mid-size cars, which is mainly the VF 6 and VF 7, and also the seven-seater MPV called the Limo Green.
What's important to understand about our product strategy is we have consciously decided to create three distinct brands to distinguish what we sell to the end consumer, what we call B2C, and then to corporate fleets or third-party fleet operators, which we call the B2B sales channel. As of today, VinFast essentially has three brands. The VinFast brand that you might already know of, that sells to end users, the Green brand, which sells commercial cars to fleet operators.
The last brand is an ultra-luxury, low-volume, high-spec brand called Lạc Hồng that is meant for government fleets. Now, finally on markets, where we are today. Beyond our home market, Vietnam, where we have the number one market share, our focus right now is prioritizing expansion in our core Asian markets, and that is Indonesia, Philippines, and India. For this year, specifically, we are aiming to double our dealer footprint in India. Last year, we had 35 showrooms.
We want to double that this year. In Indonesia and Philippines, we are focused on partnering with other fellow conglomerates, larger dealer groups in the country to quickly accelerate our penetration in those markets. In the U.S., which was the first market that we started expansion in, we continue to pursue a measured dealer expansion strategy while assessing the right time to bring new products to the U.S. market.
Now, this page here gives you the sense of the breadth of our product portfolio that I mentioned earlier. I want to take a moment here to just point out, it might be very obvious to you, but while we might be a newer company, having been only around for less than a decade, the breadth of our portfolio shows that we have the similar amount of offerings to that of a more established OEM.
This is a very deliberate decision that management took from day one to bring to market as quickly as possible different models to address different use cases and different segments. As I mentioned earlier, the VinFast brand is focused on personal vehicles. As you can see, the VF 3 and VF 5, which are the smallest cars, those have been our top sellers in our home market for the last few years.
The VF 3 and VF 5 accounted for 50% of our total deliveries in 2025. Increasingly, we are seeing more contribution from the mid-size cars, specifically the VF 6 and VF 7. These two models are our flagship cars in India. We launched sales for India in August of last year, so only started selling in August. By December of 2025, we finished as a top five battery EV brand in India.
This actually gave us the confidence to take a 10% price increase in the India market at the start of this year. We have continued to maintain our top five battery EV brand position in India to date, despite taking that price increase. On the Green side, this is our commercial vehicle lineup. What I'd like to point out is these are actually modifications of the existing personal vehicles.
We've taken out a lot of the bells and whistles and certain infotainment aspects that are not needed for taxi drivers or fleet operators. We've lowered the BOM cost, and we're able to sell more of these cars through what we call the B2B sales channels. Finally, Lạc Hồng, as I mentioned, the ultra-luxury vehicle lineup. Now where we are today in terms of our markets, I've mentioned earlier, we sell in about 10 countries and have over 400 showrooms. Our sales model is simple.
We are a full dealership model. We started as a direct-to-consumer approach, and at the end of 2023, we announced that we were going to transfer and move these showrooms to third-party dealerships. We started that transfer in Vietnam, and last year we did that transfer, shutting down our own showrooms in the U.S. and Canada and replacing them with third-party dealership showrooms.
Now, this shift to a third-party dealership model has seen our SG&A costs come down dramatically. Back in 2024, SG&A as a percentage of revenue was over 40%. Today, SG&A as a percentage of revenue is less than 20%. A lot of this cost savings has come simply from the fact that we have shifted to a third-party dealership model.
Now, I won't spend too much time on the manufacturing side of things, except to just call out what I mentioned previously, that we have four facilities globally. Very important to note, we have very high vertical integration, especially in our flagship factory. In Hải Phòng and in Thai Nguyen , we have over 90% automation in key areas like the paint and press shop.
We have very high localization at Hai Phong because we have a lot of key suppliers like Lear, Faurecia, and Antolin, located directly next to our factory. This really reduces logistics costs for us also. Finally, in closing, I would just like to take a step back and highlight a few things that you may want to take away from this webinar. The first thing is VinFast is a company that's already at scale.
We've already proven that we have scale, and we are still growing that. We did nearly 200,000 cars in 2025, with $3.6 billion in full-year revenue last year. We have a clear path to get to at least 300,000 cars in 2026. Second, our model is structurally improving. This year, we are focused on rolling out a new vehicle platform and a simpler electrical-electronic architecture. We call it domain zonal architecture.
This new platform and new EE architecture will help us lower BOM cost materially by up to 40%. This will allow us to enjoy structurally better costs going forward. Third, as I mentioned at the start of my presentation, VinFast is building more than just EVs. We are really integrated into a broader mobility and technology ecosystem.
Beyond just building EVs, e-scooters, and e-buses, we also have a roadmap towards level four autonomy, and we talked about this on our most recent earnings call, where we announced that we have partnerships with the likes of Autobrains. We are doing a robot car taxi trial in Hanoi right now using Autobrains' camera-only approach to autonomy.
We've also announced that we will be the manufacturing partner for Tensor Auto, which is a personal autonomy car that is going to be launched later this year, and they are based in California. The last point I leave with you today to take away is, as part of a much larger conglomerate, VinFast enjoys synergies across the Vingroup ecosystem, including various private companies like VinRobotics and VinAI.
We also have very close partnerships with sister companies that are part of the green mobility ecosystem umbrella. Ultimately, our story here today is we're not just focused on volume growth, we are also scaling to drive better unit economics over the medium term, and this will ultimately lead to our path to profitability. With that, I will pause here and open up for questions.
Great. Thanks, Amanda. Very exciting updates from VinFast. I do see a few questions came in during the presentation that you could answer, located at the bottom of your screen. Please read them aloud before answering.
Okay, great. I'll start with the first one. "As VinFast has expanded aggressively into global markets, how are you thinking about balancing growth versus capital discipline?" That's a great question. We've been very conscious about balancing this, and I want to take you back a few years where in April 2024, the company announced that it was going to put on pause the North Carolina facility in the U.S. and rechannel those CapEx to India and Indonesia.
That was a very strategic decision at that time for a few reasons. One, management at that time believed that the nearer-term opportunity to drive EV adoption was more tangible in emerging Asia rather than the U.S. This, in hindsight, had a lot of foresight because this was before the end of the EV tax credits in the U.S., before the announcement of auto tariffs, right? The decision was very simple.
In emerging Asia, you have a lot more regulatory tailwinds that will accelerate EV adoption faster. CapEx needs in those markets are also significantly lower than the U.S. Prioritizing entering markets closer to home just demonstrated a lot more capital discipline, and that's where we've decided to focus most of our spend in order to get the scale that we need. The next question is about what are the biggest challenges in building brand trust in markets like the U.S. and Europe?
The biggest challenge is definitely, I think consumers being further away from Asia have a lack of understanding about the Vingroup heritage, the quality, and the track record of the management team. As a new brand in the U.S. and Europe, and you don't have an existing manufacturing plant, there are definitely more challenges, and it's going to take time to address them.
I think that it's no secret we had negative headlines from the very earliest time of our entry into the U.S. Our cars have changed dramatically from the first shipments that came here in 2023, but it will take time to rebuild that trust and confidence. That's why we're taking a very measured approach to assessing the right time to bring new models to markets like the U.S. and Europe.
How do your vehicle economics compare to established EV players? Where do you have an edge? For us, our manufacturing edge really lies in the fact that we are much closer to the established Asia supply chain. I think if you're just thinking strictly between established U.S. players versus VinFast, we have very high level of vertical integration. We do a lot of key components in-house.
Most of the electronics, the plastic fittings, the e-motors, we assemble that in-house in our flagship facility. Vietnam's proximity to countries like China and Korea, being much closer to a large Asian supply chain, also allows us to enjoy some cost advantages there. The next question, what are the most important KPIs investors should track over the next year? For 2026, there are a few things you should be paying attention to.
One would be our quarterly global deliveries. We announce it every quarter. Q1 will be coming out probably later this month. Quarterly global delivery numbers for EVs, also for e-scooters. 2026 is the first time we have announced a two-wheeler guidance because of the significant growth we expect in this segment. We are also bringing e-scooters to international markets for the first time this year.
There are policy tailwinds in Vietnam specifically that are pushing consumers to switch to electric two-wheelers. Definitely monitor our delivery momentum. Also monitor the updates that we put out regarding our showroom expansion in our three core markets, and also any B2B partnerships that we announce that will ensure that we'll be driving more volume in the future. The last question I see is, looking longer term, what does success look like?
Are you aiming to be a global mass market EV player or more niche premium? I think the answer is pretty straightforward. We are aiming to be a global mass market EV player, but specifically in the nearer term, which I define as the next three-five years, global for VinFast means being more of an Asian regional player.
We believe that in order to be profitable for the long run, you need to be profitable first in your home market and in the markets closer to home, where you have more control over cost, brand awareness, ecosystem rollout, and so on. Our focus is really to be a regional Asian mass market EV player for the next three-five years while keeping an eye out for opportunities to reestablish the brand in markets like the U.S. and Europe. That's it from me. I think that's all the questions that I see.
All right. Great. That wraps up our Q&A. Amanda, thank you again for your time and presentation.
Thank you.
For more information on VinFast, please visit their Corporate Connect page on the app. That concludes the Clean Energy webinar. Please stay tuned for more upcoming Corporate Connect Service investment webinars featuring a variety of sectors at www.webull.com/webinar or in the Learn section of the Webull app. Thank you for joining us, and have a great rest of your day.