Ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome to the Wallbox third quarter business update call. My name is Maxine and I'll be coordinating the call today. I will now hand you to your host, Austin Wood, Director of Corporate Development, to begin. Austin, please go ahead when you are ready.
Thank you, operator. Good morning and good afternoon to all that are listening in. Thank you for joining Wallbox's third quarter business update call. Earlier today, we filed with the SEC and posted to our website at investors.wallbox.com a letter to shareholders. On this call, we will discuss some of the key points in that document. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that certain matters discussed in today's conference call are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to future events and/or the future financial performance of the company. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements.
The risk factors that may affect results are detailed in the company's most recent public filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including its registration statement on Form F-1, filed with the SEC on November 1ST, 2021, which can be found on our website at investors.wallbox.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Speaking today will be Enric Asunción, Co-Founder and CEO of Wallbox, and Jordi Lainz, CFO of Wallbox. We will not be hosting a live questions and answers session today, but if you have any questions throughout the course of this call or following, you can address them to investors@wallbox.com. Enric, I now turn the call over to you.
Thank you, Austin, and hello everyone. We encourage you to review the letter to shareholders filed with the SEC and post on our investor relations site for more detail. I want to start by summarizing our business and reiterating what makes Wallbox differentiated. This is our first public call since completing our business combination with Kensington Capital Acquisition Corp. II, and listing on the New York Stock Exchange in October. At Wallbox, our mission is to create smart charging and energy management solutions to advance electric vehicle adoption and sustainable energy use, with a focus on home charging solutions in particular. We are a global company and operate a vertically integrated business model, designing, engineering and manufacturing our suite of products in-house.
This translates into very fast development cycles, which we believe allow us to stay ahead of the competition and give us more control over our products, especially key during times like these when there are severe global supply chain challenges. It has also translated to peer-leading margins. We see our success today as resulting from our focus on a design-centric, user-friendly hardware and software products that can help save our customers time and money and foster accelerated adoption of sustainable energy sources. Key to our value proposition and truly unique to Wallbox, we believe, is our focus on energy management systems technology. About 80% of Wallbox chargers sold are currently utilizing energy management functionalities through myWallbox, our proprietary software, given the significant benefit that they can bring to our customers.
For example, by constantly measuring home energy consumption, our products adapt the charging power on a real-time basis, ensuring that our users are always charging their cars at max power without having to worry about tripping a fuse. By detecting when homes with solar panels generate excess renewable energy, our products revert that energy that will otherwise go unused to charge our customer cars, enabling them to charge their electric vehicle in a highly cost-effective and sustainable way, while also accelerating the consumption of renewable energy sources. We have taken this smart technology one step further with Quasar, our compact, affordable, and easy to use bidirectional charger. Quasar allows customers to charge their car and discharge their car energy to power their home or sell the energy back to the grid where regulations permit. These products have allowed Wallbox to capitalize on extremely strong historical market tailwinds.
Looking forward, we believe that the market dynamics for electric vehicles and charging remain very bright. In Q3, Bloomberg New Energy Finance raised the forecast of EV sales to $5.6 million in 2021, up from a previous estimate of $4.7 million in Q2. EV sales in Europe and the U.S. increased 234% and 208% in Q2 2021 respectively. Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecast that we will see another record-breaking year due to the regulatory tailwinds and unprecedented demand. We believe that our performance so far in 2021 demonstrates the strength of the market and the value proposition we have believed in from the day we founded the company six years ago.
Let me now briefly touch on some operational, financial and commercial highlights through the third quarter before turning it over to our CFO, Jordi Lainz, who will provide additional figures. We generated $55 million in revenue in 2021 for the nine months ended September 30, and we believe we remain on track to achieve our expected 2021 revenues of $79 million. Our revenues are in fact 16% ahead of our budgeted expectations. From January 1 through September 30 of this year, we sold 66,000 chargers in over 80 countries around the world. Some notable markets that are driving our growth include Germany, the U.K. and France. Strength in this market can be attributed to our incremental efforts around local certifications and marketing. We see a key advantage for Wallbox is that we are a global company with local expertise.
Ensuring that our products meet the evolving government-issued regulations has allowed us to capitalize on various green incentives, not only in these three markets, but also in other countries around the world. Additionally, we have been making a concerted effort to expand our footprint and grow market share through our marketing efforts in these countries. In the U.S., a market we only entered in February of this year, we continue to gain momentum. We made great strides during the third quarter that we think position us well for strong growth, including the introduction of our 48-amp Pulsar Plus and the announcement of our partnership with SunPower. The SunPower relationship is a strategic alliance whereby the new customers can opt to install a Wallbox home EV charger at the same time as their solar and/or storage system installation.
SunPower, meanwhile, has agreed to act as a preferred solar and storage provider and EV charger installation provider for Wallbox customers. SunPower has already placed its first orders, and we believe this partnership will allow us to continue making charging at home easier and less expensive, which has always been core to Wallbox vision. Turning to a brief manufacturing update. In early September, we announced the site selection of our first U.S. EV charging system manufacturing facility in Arlington, Texas. Given the demand from the U.S. market, we knew that in order to have an influential commercial presence in the country, we also needed to have an operational presence. This 103,000 sq ft factory will be instrumental in accelerating the launch of new products to the market.
In addition to producing the current version of Pulsar Plus, which is already available for the North American market, the facilities will have lines for a North American version of Quasar and Supernova. Production is expected to start in the second half of 2022, and is expected to have more than 500,000 units of capacity by 2030. We're excited to report that we are making quick progress on the new Barcelona manufacturing facility in Zona Franca that we announced earlier this year. As a reminder, this is a 120,000 sq ft facility that is being built using state-of-the-art Industry 4.0 technologies and cradle-to-cradle certifications. The first assembly lines have already been installed, and we are on track to begin production in this facility before the end of this year. As we look ahead, we see several notable bright spots.
While Wallbox offers a robust product portfolio today, in the coming months, we will be introducing important new products to the market, which we believe will further diversify our product sets. We believe that the potential with our bidirectional DC chargers is tremendous and barely reflected in our results to date. Historically, we have rolled out this product through strategic partnerships with innovative energy companies and OEMs such as Octopus Energy, Mitsubishi, and JET Charge. By early next year, we expect Quasar to be offered commercially so that anyone in Europe with a bidirectional enabled car can begin vehicle-to-home or vehicle-to-grid charging using our software or through our partnerships. Continuing on the topic of our DC power electronics, we are happy to announce that we remain on track to begin the first shipments of our Supernova DC public fast chargers by the end of this year.
We are thrilled that Iberdrola will be purchasing the first 1,000 units, and that we can support them in their efforts to install over 150,000 charging stations throughout Spain in the next five years. Further, we continue to explore partnership announcements to enhance our brand recognition and expand our reach. Last week, we announced a Bay Area pilot program with Uber, whereby Wallbox will offer rideshare drivers a discounted package for a Wallbox charger, seamless installation, and the option to finance the package all directly available through the Uber app. We also formed a partnership with vehicle-to-grid software company Nuvve. Leveraging their vehicle-to-grid software, we can enable vehicle-to-grid charging compatibility through their GIVe platform. We foresee partnerships such as this as bringing tremendous growth potential as users come to appreciate the value proposition of our products.
We look forward to entering into additional partnership arrangements across a variety of partner types as we continue to grow our company. I will now turn it over to Jordi, who will provide some additional information around financials.
Thank you, Enric. As a newly public company, we have provided abbreviated financial information this quarter. Going forward, we plan to report quarterly results and provide business updates, and we'll issue an annual report with fully audited financials. With that said, let me recap select financial and operational highlights and provide period comparisons where applicable. We reported revenue of $22 million in the third quarter, up nearly 250% year-over-year. As noted earlier, 2021 revenue through the third quarter was $55 million, up more than 280% versus the prior year period. Our revenues are underpinned by charger sales of 26,000 units in the third quarter, and 66,000 charger sales in the nine months ended September 30, which Enric also alluded to. Our gross margin for the nine months ended September 30, 2021 was 39%.
While we faced challenges from the global supply chain shortage in the third quarter, our in-house engineering, manufacturing, and validation allowed us to continue producing without interruptions while maintaining an industry-leading gross margin. We continue to face logistical adversity involving supply chain issues, but our vertically integrated operations give us much more supply chain optionality than some of our competitors. Now to talk about our recent transaction. We generated gross proceeds from the merger of $252 million. This is exclusive of bill fees of $40 million. The merger closed on October 1z, after the end of the third quarter. On a pro forma basis, as if the merger had closed on September 30, our cash balance would have been $231 million.
We believe that our existing cash resources will be sufficient to meet our capital requirements and fund our operations through 2024 and 2025, when we are expecting to turn EBITDA and cash flow positive respectively. Finally, our total shares issued and outstanding at the time of merger close was approximately 161 million. This excludes our warrants and the impact of any stock options or employee stock purchase program. Thank you for your time. I will now turn back to Enric to conclude the call.
Thank you, Jordi. Automotive electrification is at an inflection point today, and charging is essential to EV adoption. With the proceeds from this business combination, we are confident that we can capitalize on this mega trend and stay ahead of the competition as technology and customer demands evolve. We thank you for joining us today and look forward to speaking again with you after we report our first full-year earnings results as a public company in early 2022. Have a good day.