The feasibility study confirms the high potential of the product and that the company should pursue it. Even considering conservative figures growth of the home automation market and hypothesizing a global market share of less than 1% of accessible market, company revenues and profits will grow dramatically: forecast predicts that after launch, this product only will generate 5 years cumulative EBITDA of 71M (optimistically) or 35M (pessimistically), achieving revenues that will be more than 20 times higher than in 2015. Company will break even in year 2 of commercialisation period and will pay the investment back in year 3 or 4 at latest. The investment needed to reach the commercialisation stage amounts 4,5 millions of €, and the total investment will be 7 million of €. Part of the needed financial resources has been already secured. In order to reach commercialisation, the company will need to employ additional staff, estimated at 9-13 additional technical staff (Researcher, development engineers, software engineers, business development manager, and product manager). Once reached the commercialisation, the company will hire new staff for all of its departments: R&D (10), Sales and marketing (15), Technical support (5), QA and QC (2), Procurement (5), Area managers (5), Manufacturing (10), administrative staff (5) and others. Manufacturing of the new product will take place in Robotina’s facilities in Slovenia, some activities will be outsourced to other EU based companies, therefore the whole production will be EU-based. The product generate profits for companies other than ours: the proposed product allows user and third party programmability functions (similar to smartphones apps), so within the HIQ system customers may purchase functions and applications developed by other companies. EU is hardly following US in means of smart homes and subscription based services. We will substantially contribute to increase importance of Europe in this field, especially in SaaS and smart home. Finally, the newly developed product will substantially contribute to the energy efficiency of smart homes: thanks to our multi-objective optimisation, the prototype can already reach 10% energy savings in a typical home at the same level of comfort for the user, and even 15-20% energy with minimal comfort reduction for the user. Assuming only a 1% acquisition rate in EU, this will result in approximately a reduction of 1,250,000 metric tons of carbon emissions per year.
