Arcticzymes Technologies ASA

OSE:AZT

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q1

[Michael Akoh, executive]

It's a rather early start for me. So I apologize if I sound a bit more tired and look a bit more tired than usual. But I'm sure we're going to get through this presentation in good style. I'm in the U.S. because I'm attending a very important congress. I'm here together with our commercial team.

It's the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy that is going to kick off today. Yesterday was the opening reception. And it's great to see that the industry is still thriving, spend some difficult years, but the first talks I had with partners and clients yesterday showed that there is a cautious optimism in a sector that has been hit rather hard during the last year. We have a presentation for you today and Borge, if I can ask you to switch to the next slide. Thank you. A quick look at the agenda. I'm going to start off by giving you an overview of the company. We have a lot of new people joining us each time we do these presentations. So just a quick run-through of who ArcticZymes is and the journey we are on.

Then I'm going to share the highlights of the quarter. And then I'm also going to focus on our strategic priorities, both for the short term as well as for the long term. Then we're going to look into a sales update for the quarter. And after that, I'm going to give you an update on both the biomanufacturing segment, the launch of our SAN HQ GMP product as well as a customer case from the Molecular Tools space.

Then Borge is going to take over, and he's going to run us through the financials on a more detailed level. And as usual, we're going to end up by having a questions and answers session. Next slide, please. A quick overview of ArcticZymes, who we are. We are a company that have world-class products. We have been able to provide novel enzymes for both advanced therapies, biomanufacturing as well as molecular diagnostics. And we have a strong reputation within the 2 segments. And that is also something that we have validated recently through a so-called Net Promoter Score, where we have surveyed our customers and asked them about ArcticZymes and asked them one simple question, are you going to recommend ArcticZymes to a colleague? And here, we get a very good score of 84 on a scale that's up to 100. We are targeting high-growth segments, segments with high growth potential. And we have a company that has a good culture. We have a world-class R&D team and we have the ability to turn our innovation into excellent products that can be commercialized through strong manufacturing capabilities, and we are able to live up to tight regulatory regulations, which is essential within this space.

53 employees currently and in regards to the financials, high margins, recurring revenue streams, is accessible, sticky business. Once we're earning on a process or a product, then revenue is very often recurring. We have sales of NOK 119 million last year. No debt, and we have a rather large cash reserve of NOK 240 million. So a very, very good starting point, a very good starting point for the growth journey that we are going to embark on now. Next slide, Borge. Highlights for Q1 2024. Of course, the big highlight, the big milestone that we hit was the launch of San HQ GMP. I'm going to get back to more about how that launch has been received, market reactions and so on. I was also really, really pleased to see a publication from researchers at the University of Tübingen in Germany, where they validated our M SAN HQ, benchmarked it against competitive products. And I'm also just going to get back to the highlights of that publication, but a great publication to see out there.

During the quarter, we also initiated a research partnership with an Austrian biotech company called acib, and they're going to provide us with real life or benchmarking data of our SAN portfolio. And this project is supported by another organization in Austria, another organization called COMET, more about that later as well.

In regards to our financials, then we achieved sales of NOK 30 million, and our EBITDA performance was NOK 2.3 million for the quarter. Next slide, Borge. I think it's important that you all understand the main strategic priorities that we have as a company. It is all about building a platform for long-term growth and the journey has already started. If we look at the short-term priorities, then it's very much about strengthening our market position. It's about focusing on the current portfolio. It's about what -- it's about selling what's available today.

That's what I'm working on currently with the commercial team. We are within the SAN space, the SAN segment, as earlier communicated, going to be launching new GMP variants of existing products. Molecular tools, it's been part of our history. It's also going to be a very important part of our future.

I know we have talked a lot about SAN in the past presentations but molecular tools is here to stay, and we also see significant growth opportunities within this space. I have a customer case that I'm going to get back to later in the presentation. But right now, we are working on developing more application data and repositioning some of our core enzymes within the space. There's much more potential with our current portfolio.

And as I started off by saying it's really about strengthening our ability to commercialize our products. It's about our sales presence, where are we present and what channels do we sell through. And then it's also very much about scientific marketing. That's a key element. It's about selling to scientists in this space. In order to sell to scientists, you need to have the correct and credible scientific data.

We want to be doing more talks. At this conference in Baltimore, we have one of our talented scientists over here, and she's going to do a presentation today at 3:00 p.m. local time on our SAN portfolio. So very much looking forward for that, looking forward to see the reaction to that talk. If we look more long term, then it is about penetrating the advanced therapies biomanufacturing space. Today, we have SAN. We're going to continue to work with new GMP variance short term. But long term, we have already started the journey.

As I talked about in the last quarterly presentation, we initiated a collaboration with an AI enzyme engineering company called Biomatter. And currently, that project is progressing nicely. So they're working tightly in conjunction with our internal R&D team to develop the next generation of SAN products utilizing AI. Molecular tools. Here, we are also working with new projects in the pipeline. Long term, it's going to be within these 3 categories which might not mean a lot to you, but it's within the sample prep area, the amplification area and synthetic biology that we are focusing.

On the M&A front, M&A has been a talk for a long time. It is in the horizon. We are open to opportunities that, of course, come forward. And longer term, we are going to be more actively engaging in this. And what we are looking for is really to find a match where we can further strengthen, develop, complement our current product portfolio.

We are also looking towards opportunities to how we can strengthen our GMP manufacturing capabilities for the future. And finally, we are, of course, also looking on the commercial side, what makes sense in regards to enhance our commercial reach, strengthen our commercial channels.

So that was a quick recap of what we are currently doing. And as mentioned, the journey has started, we're executing on all of these initiatives as we speak.

Now on to sales update. First, for the Molecular Tools area. And here, during Q1, we saw quarterly sales of NOK 18.3 million. That accounted for approximately 60% of Q1 sales. And it's actually the best quarter we've had since Q1 2022. That was facilitated by a larger order that came in Q1 instead of Q2. But overall, I am satisfied with the development in the Molecular Tools space. Next slide, Borge.

Looking at Biomanufacturing. There, we had sales of just under NOK 12 million, accounted for approximately 40% of total Q1 sales. And sales is clearly impacted in this segment of especially the current market situation in the U.S. biotech sector.

But as I also said during my Q1 presentation, we expected things to be tough in Q1. That has turned out to be true for the Biomanufacturing segment. And we still expect that Q2 is also going to be a rough riding. And thereafter, we currently see that there's room for, as I mentioned earlier, some cautious optimism towards the latter part of the year.

We are currently in discussion with several accounts in regards to our SAN portfolio. But what we can also see is that these discussions, currently in the current market environment, take longer time than they did previously. And projects in this space are really being evaluated very carefully and you're selecting the very best projects and putting your funding into those projects.

We have also seen that in Q1 in the U.S. biotech market that funding is better than we have seen for a long time. So that's also something that points towards that we have some reason to be cautiously optimistic for the latter part of the year. There is going to be a lag from companies get funding till we actually do a sale.

SAN HQ GMP, of course, provides a very important opportunity for us to get back to several accounts and knock on the door again as we now have ticked the box of regulatory compliance in form of a GMP variant. Next slide, Borge.

So looking at combined sales, the trend continues to be flattish. We had sales of NOK 30 million for the quarter. As mentioned, slight increase from Q4 last year. What we saw was the split was different. 2/3 of our sales came from the EMEA region, mainly Europe, whereas the U.S. accounted for 1/3 of the sales. And as you probably recall, our split is normally 50/50. In terms of new customers, we saw 25 new customers placing orders with us, and that's split with 13 within Molecular Tools and 12 within Biomanufacturing. Next slide, Borge.

Then I'd like to give an update on our Biomanufacturing segment in terms of SAN HQ GMP. We received the first orders for the products and what we are experiencing as well is that customers are increasingly requesting our quality and regulatory information, which is being sent out to biotechs and to CDMOs. And we're also, of course, doing supply quotes.

In terms of sales activities that we have initiated, I want to focus just on one thing, and that's really what we did last week. We had a webinar. We had approximately 110 potential customers as well as customers signing up for the webinar. And those customers, out of those customers, potential customers, approximately 45 of them joined the live webinar that we had and what we're seeing now is that we have sent out an on-demand version that the rest of that group is slowly but surely clicking in and watching the on-demand webinars. So we are going to do a lot more in the future in terms of webinar. It's a very good way of us to extending our reach, reaching more customers in a cost-effective way that cannot just be done by the BDs. This was a first for us, more or less, and we're going to continue to improve the format as we go through the year.

Then another very important thing I want to state as well is that although we are seeing that the market conditions are tough in the U.S., we are still going to invest in strengthening the sales team. We've already executed on that. We have hired a very seasoned business development. Yes, he started April, so it is really also a testament of our belief in the U.S. market that this is going to come back. And when it comes back, we need to be ready. There has also been a lot of talk in regards to New Salt enzymes from rivals. And I want to say 2 things about this. First of all, this is a very, very important endorsement of ArcticZymes Salt Active Enzymes. It's very, very good to see that it's not just us that sees that there is a big potential, there is a market need within this high salt viral vector production.

Secondly, I want to say that this is really something that is also going to help us build market awareness on the usage of Salt Active Nucleases. So far, we have been more or less the only company that have marketed -- been out there promoting Salt Active Nucleases, that use their benefits. Now we have more ammunition that is being used within this space.

So although we have tried to market our products in very clever, good ways, then having more people tell the same story is also going to help us out. It's going to start the conversation on a different level than we have been able to do previously.

And of course, we are also looking into benchmarking data of our SAN portfolio versus the rivals, and that's work being performed as we speak. But I'm very confident that we still have a very competitive offering with our SAN portfolio.

Quickly, just running through what we're doing and executing on in regards to penetrate the advanced biomanufacturing space with SAN, we are basically doing a lot of different things, having a lot of different initiatives in order to penetrate this market further.

On the left-hand side, it's all about having a relevant product that solves a concrete customer pain product. We verified that with our SAN portfolio, ticked that box. And in the future, we're going to add more to the portfolio of relevant products. And we're going to expand also, so we don't just have SAN enzymes in the back.

When we go out and meet these biomanufacturing customers, we are also going to have RNA enzymes and that project for developing that pipeline is already kicked off to what I mentioned at the last presentation, the Norwegian research grant that we received. So work that is being currently executed on for the future. Regulatory compliance is, of course, also, as we've talked a lot about, extremely important to succeed within the space. We have our first GMP grade enzyme out there, tick that one. Future, as mentioned, going to add more GMP variants and launch them, going to most likely also have more DMFs in the future. And currently, we are also preparing for more customer audits in Tromsø. Application data, rival data, is also essential. Publications, I'm going to talk about one of those that came out recently, but we need to have much more, generate much more data on a continuous basis and that's why we entered into the research collaboration with acib, the Austrian biotech company.

All of these things, they're going to form a value proposition that very clearly states what tangible benefits there is with switching to SAN. We're going to work and are currently working on enhancing that value proposition with concrete benchmarking data in terms of yields that you get with our product versus the competition, and also, of course, what does that mean in terms of the cost picture.

Go-to-market is very important as well. We have decided to add an additional BD resource in the U.S. But we're also evaluating other channels as we speak and also evaluating potential distribution partnerships in order to penetrate and grow this market further. Next slide. A quick word about the research project with acib and what the goal of this project is. acib is a very renowned research center in Austria and they complement our internal capabilities really well because they can, in a real life production setting, use our enzymes and generate important data for us.

So this collaboration is going to form the basis for both the benchmarking data, and acib is also going to work on creating content that we can use both for posters and talks at future conferences. And also, they're going to be working also on hopefully also getting some peer-reviewed publications out. I'm also pleased to see that we actually got external funding for this project by an Austrian organization called COMET. They normally only support Austrian initiatives, but they decided to support this projects with EUR 100,000. So we are very thankful and pleased about this support. The time frame for this project is approximately a year.

Next slide, Borge. I'm sure that some of you have seen this publication that came out some weeks ago. And just to highlight the important aspects of this publication is that it supports M-SAN and it supports M-SAN in regards to production at large scale and so-called suspension cells, which is important. And the conclusions when M-SAN HQ was benchmarked against a key rival, Denarase, was performance is superior in terms of removing DNA, better purity. It's also faster and incubation speed is better, incubation time is shorter. And then last but not least, the cost picture is also better as the amount of nuclease that you need to clear DNA is less. So very pleased to see this publication out there. And of course, we are working actively with distributing this in all the channels possible. Next slide, Borge.

An update on Molecular Tools. As I said before, we've talked a lot about SAN, and that's because SAN, of course, short term, is a very important, strategic initiative for us, but Molecular Tools is equally as important. And what I've done today is I've taken a customer case with me. We started a collaboration with a diagnostic company and that diagnostic company, they focus on bringing low-cost cancer screening to the market and they're utilizing our proteinase.

It's a well-funded company with a history of moving fast in order to pursue this purpose that they have to prevent and cure one of the deadliest types of cancer out there. The history of the collaboration was that they started off testing our proteinase already back in 2020 for incorporation in their cancer diagnostic platform. They have now validated the enzyme. This was the only enzyme in the market that worked well in their assay and this was mainly due to the ease of how the enzyme can be heat-inactivated. So they did a detailed comparison with a lot of other products in the market and ours came out top for their application.

So the next step is that clinical trials are currently ongoing. And earlier this year, they published what I view as being extremely promising data. So very excited to see this. And the next step is also that they're going to come to Tromsø to do an audit that is currently scheduled for August 2024. So this tells you a lot about the potential for our Molecular Tools enzymes. It tells you also a lot about the quality of our enzymes. Even though that all our enzymes are not launched recently, they are still extremely competitive in the right setting.

And next slide shows you the revenue potential that is in this project. This is, of course, a big disclaimer. This is pending successful future clinical trials as well as launch. But they have submitted a forecast to us. That allows us to do this graph showcasing that in 2030, it's a NOK 19 million annual revenue potential.

So this is just one case, but I think it's important that we also talk about Molecular Tools because we have great enzymes in there. We have been able to, in the past, develop some great enzymes that are in our portfolio. We have to continue to work with them alongside with also, of course, still working with our SAN portfolio. And we are also going to, as I talked about earlier, continue to develop new products for our pipeline within this space.

Next slide, Borge. And that's it for me, for now. Now I'm going to hand over to you, Borge, to go a bit more into details with expenses and the profit side of the quarter.

[Børge Sørvoll, executive]

Thank you, Michael, and thanks for that, for the introduction now. And now we're going to move a little bit more into the expense side and the profitability side of the business. And I think focus in the first quarter this year has been kind of to ease up on the total and reduce the spend moving forward now. That's been our main goal, especially on the expense side.

And this is kind of leading us into the personnel side of the business now. And as you might be aware of, and as we have talked about in previous presentations, personnel is a significant cost driver in the organization, and it accounts for almost 75% of our operating expenses here. And in the first quarter this year, we have decided to reduce our burn rate, and we also decided to close down the Oslo office. We have reduced the head count in the organization through natural leaves and some downsizing, as I said, about the Oslo office here. And most of the changes we've done were carried out now in the first quarter, and we have reduced the number of employees from 65 people at the end of 2023 to 53 people now at the end of the first quarter.

And the majority of changes has impacted the R&D part of the organization where we kind of have reduced their percentage of the organization. In the past, in the previous -- or at the end of last year, it accounted for almost 40% of the total number of employees in the organization, whereas now it's just a little bit more than 30%. We have also done some restructuring in some of the departments where we have moved some people around and this is also due to regulatory and some functional demands. It's also important to highlight that we do not have any further plans to reduce the number of employees we have in the organization. And also, as Michael stated earlier, we have also increased the commercial side of the business with one person in the U.S. now in the second quarter. Moving on, looking at the bottom line, and it is a kind of as we've seen in previous quarters, we continue to deliver positive contributions here and our first quarter EBITDA ended up on NOK 2.3 million compared to NOK 6.2 million in the same period last year. But there are, however, some extraordinary items in both first quarter this year and first quarter last year that has impacted the underlying results that I will also return to in the next slide where I can show you a little bit more detail about these items here.

Our operating expenses for the first quarter are slightly higher this quarter compared to the same quarter last year, and it's up by NOK 2.6 million from NOK 25.1 million to NOK 27.7 million. And this is also similar to what we saw in the fourth quarter of last year.

And you might also see on the tables on the right-hand side that there is a major difference in the cost of materials and the inventory between the 2 years. And the reason for this is that it is related to accounting and how we book our expenses, especially related to external production that we do for -- at the CMOs. For first quarter this year, there were basically no external productions impacting the cost of materials and change in inventory. Hence, the numbers in the first quarter in 2024 are more similar to what you have seen in the past. As I said, personnel increased by almost NOK 2.5 million comparing the quarters to each other. But as I stated in the beginning, there are some extraordinary items first quarter last year that had a positive effect and there are some extraordinary items in first quarter this year that had a negative effect that I will also return to.

Capitalization of projects and personnel is something that we've experienced to a larger degree over the last few years. And this first quarter -- and in the first quarter this year, NOK 4 million were capitalized, whereas NOK 1.7 million of this is related to personnel expenses. Other OpEx is slightly higher this quarter as well, but this is also impacted by extraordinary items. But in general, it is important to say that we have really tight and good cost control in the organization.

Looking at the graph on the left-hand side, you can also see that our EBITDA margin is just slightly higher than we had in the previous quarter, with 8% now in this quarter compared to 7% in the previous quarter, but it is, of course, lower than the 20% we had in the first quarter last year.

And as I said now in the previous slide, there are some extraordinary items that have impacted Q1 this year and last year. In the first quarter last year, we reversed NOK 1.8 million in relation to option expense for the previous year and we also accrued NOK 0.4 million in national insurance related to options as well. And this resulted in a NOK 1.4 million positive effect for the quarter or a NOK 1.4 million reduction in personnel expenses for the first quarter. And also in the first quarter this year, we had to accrue NOK 0.8 million related to severance payments for closing down the Oslo office. And in addition, we had expensed NOK 1.5 million on ERP implementation. And this project, that's been expected to be finalized towards the second half of the year, and we are in the midst of the implementation right now.

And when we are eliminating these extraordinary items both last year and this year, you can see that the adjusted EBITDA for last year would have been NOK 4.7 million instead of NOK 6.2 million and it would have been NOK 4.6 million this year compared to NOK 2.3 million this quarter, which is more or less the same figures.

What is important to highlight moving forward now is that all expenses related to the Oslo office are -- have been taken out now. So there will not be any further expenses on this side of the business moving forward. And for the first quarter, the Oslo office, including personnel and everything, had a total cost of NOK 2.3 million.

Moving into the cash balance and the changes in cash. And of course, this is a consequence of our profits and our sales and the investments that we are carrying out. And changes in cash and cash equivalents were negative with NOK 6.9 million, and this is primarily influenced by changes in accounts receivable, where receivables have gone up by close to NOK 10 million in the quarter compared to fourth quarter last year. And this is also due to, you can see unsettled sales towards the latter part of the first quarter. For end of the quarter, our cash position was in excess of NOK 170 million. And also, as I mentioned in the fourth quarter presentation, due to technical reasons, we have had reclassified investments in low-risk interest rate funds to other assets now and instead of having them as cash equivalents now.

And of course, this impacted our cash position by an estimated NOK 70 million. But it is -- but it does not have any impact on our available liquid funds in case there should be a need for cash. And with cash and the short-term investments position of NOK 240 million for end of the quarter here, I will hand it over to Michael again, who will round off this presentation and open up for Q&A.

[Michael Akoh, executive]

Yes. Thank you, Borge. And I'm going to end up with an outlook. As we stated also during our Q1 presentation -- our Q4 presentation earlier this year, we saw that or expected the first 2 quarters of the year were going to be rough sailing so to speak. And that's also what we have seen. And we also expect that it is going to be rough sailing during Q2.

And then, as mentioned early on, the key thing to watch is really the U.S. biotech marketing within cell and gene therapy. When does the positive development here also start to have a positive spend on our business? We are, however, going to continue to work extremely hard to develop our portfolio. I mentioned some of the projects that we're currently running. And we are, which is a key focus of mine ever since I came to the company, that is to strengthen our commercial engine. And is it also to balance our value chain, so to speak, in terms of the resources we have deployed in each part of the value chain. So you see that we have reduced our FTEs on the R&D side. And we are now, whenever it's feasible, looking for possibilities to strengthen the commercial part of the organization. We took the first step. It might be a small step, but it's a significant increase in our U.S. presence in regards to hiring a new BD on the West Coast. So that is my final remarks. We had a quarter where we had to fight for each sale, and we expect that Q2 is going to be similar. But there is some cautious optimism towards the latter part of the year. And that's what I'm also hearing from a lot of other companies within the space that, yes, it is challenging currently, but we are not expecting things to get worse. We are expecting things to gradually improve towards the end of the year in terms of the general market conditions that we operate within.

So that was my last comment before we move into the questions-and-answers session. And I want to thank every one of you for dialing in this morning and spending some of your valuable time together with us. So thanks a lot for doing that and for supporting ArcticZymes.

Now on to the Q&A session, Borge.

[Børge Sørvoll, executive]

All right. We have received a few questions online, and I will try and go through the ones we have received here. I will start with one here.

We expected increased sales -- expected increased sales of SAN HQ appear to take longer than previously expected. And now 2 competing products are on their way to the market. Is there room for 3 Salt Active Nucleases on the market? And does the limited sale of SAN HQ mean that it is difficult to gain entry into an established market with large players?

[Michael Akoh, executive]

As I mentioned before, I think that there are 2 important points in regards to the rivals that have entered with salt enzymes, whatever they might be and whatever characteristics they might have. It is a validation that there is a market, first of all, which is very important.

And secondly, we are a smaller company. We have limited commercial muscles in regards to changing the general perception of how you process viral vectors. So having larger companies go out there and also talk about salt and the benefits of using Salt Active Nucleases or high salt nucleases or whatever they might call them, that is going to be helpful for us. We are no longer the only company pushing that message.

In terms of the other question, if I remember correctly, if it's challenging to get into this space, the sales numbers clearly show that it's not a walk in the park. So there's no denying that. But the past also shows that it is possible. What we have to be very aware of, that is our target groups and we, of course, also have to be very aware of the fact that once that process is firmly established, then of course, it is more difficult to breakthrough.

You have to have really strong and compelling arguments and that's why we're working a lot with our value proposition, which is amongst others, composed of all the application data that we are currently developing and also -- and that's done both internally but also, of course, externally as we have to develop that benchmarking data in a real-life setting, so to speak. And I think also there was a question that I can also follow up now in regards to when can we expect to see benchmarking data. We have the competitive salt enzymes in our lab in Tromsø currently, but we got them a couple of weeks ago. So it's rather recent. But I've already got a glimpse on the first initial, very, very initial unvalidated data.

So I'm not going to share that data today because we need to do much more work on it. We need to do more runs, experiments and so on before we can actually share that data with the world. But the timeline currently is that we are going to be able to most likely have some initial data that we can share before the end of Q2.

[Børge Sørvoll, executive]

One more question regarding the SAN. Based on the SAN orders so far in the second quarter, do you expect sequential growth from the first quarter?

[Michael Akoh, executive]

We are going to grow this business, that is, of course, a given, and what is expected rightly so by everyone, including every employee in the company that is working hard on creating growth within this segment. But we did see that it was more rough sailing in the U.S. in particular.

But then again, we have a new tool now that we're going to go out with. That is the SAN HQ GMP, of course. And that is going to help our mission to get back on a growth track in this segment in the not too far distance.

[Børge Sørvoll, executive]

All right. We have some questions regarding the Molecular Tools side of the business here. Can you explain what to expect for the second quarter in this segment? And also given what was the size of the order that was kind of pushed forward to the first quarter this year? And also, what is the main driving applications for enzymes in this segment now that the COVID effects have been -- have waned. Is it PCR sequencing or PCR sequencing...

[Michael Akoh, executive]

In regards to the orders, I'm not going into directly how large the way -- it was actually 2 orders that were pushed forward and both of them were above NOK 1 million, to give you some sense of where we are. So this basically tells me one thing that they ordered this product because they also see a need for having it. So they were not doing us a favor. So that's a positive definitely that I'm pleased to see that this ASAP order was being pushed forward amongst others.

[Børge Sørvoll, executive]

Right. Is there any specific guidance on roughly which quarter the first RNA prototype might be launched? Any innovations that must be launched this quarter and throughout the rest of the year?

[Michael Akoh, executive]

Sure. That's a good question. I think what you're going to see going forward is that, we are, of course, going to be launching new products for the pipeline. But what is also going to be of significant importance, that was the SWAT that I talked about earlier on, that is sell what's available today, ensure that we penetrate the market with the great products that we currently have.

So that is a specific focus and we are not only focused that growth should come from improving our product portfolio because today, we have potential, as I also showcased in the presentation, with the enzymes that we currently have available. So we have to become more focused on the SWAT, selling what's available today. And that is a key priority for me. But just another comment. We have launched the T7, which is really our first enzyme within the RNA space. And we have dialogue ongoing with CDMOs in regards to this enzyme, also in regards to how it can be applied. We also have the [indiscernible]. That's a very promising enzyme that's a prototype being work done currently as we speak and that's also out in the hands of a couple of very influential companies in the space.

So we have already come quite far, but we still have further ground to cover and that ground is partly going to be covered through the research project with -- that we're going to -- that's funded by the Norwegian Research Council. So we are moving towards next year before we're going to see actual products being launched within this space.

[Børge Sørvoll, executive]

One more question. Have you raised your prices in '24?

[Michael Akoh, executive]

We have raised our prices in 2024. And if I'm correct, it's a low single digit of around, I believe, it was 3% or so in average.

[Børge Sørvoll, executive]

All right. Let me see here. We have a question about the -- excluding some of the one-offs that we've seen in the first quarter and with the lower FTEs that you have, can we expect OpEx to go down to leverage approximately what we saw in the fourth quarter? Or will it go down even lower?

And maybe I can answer that one, it is also about what can we expect for the personnel expenses moving forward now. And as I stated in this presentation, we had NOK 18 million in first quarter and last year at the same time, we had NOK 15.5 million. And I think moving forward, there will be a combination of somewhere in between those 2 areas here.

It will be lower for sure in the second quarter. But you can see our personnel expenses will also depend on how much we are capitalizing on the projects that we are doing. And as I said, in the first quarter this year, we capitalized NOK 1.7 million of personnel expenses. But also, it will also be a combination of kind of the performance that we are driving on the top -- on the sales level because there are commissions that we are paying out to our BDs as well that will impact it.

And when it comes to other OpEx, I think that where we are now between that NOK 7.5 million, NOK 8.5 million, NOK 8 million is probably where we will be in the coming quarters as well. We have that ERP project that will be going on for at least into the second half of the year. And there are also some increased commercial activities that we are driving in the second half of the year as well. That will also have an impact on our other OpEx for sure. Will ArcticZymes be a growth company, even a company that only wants to join with a small profit or breakeven? If the company still wants to be a growth company, when will the growth come out, come as you see it?

[Michael Akoh, executive]

We have a clear strategy in place, and that strategy is all about growing the company. And we have, as mentioned earlier on or upfront in the presentation, we have a very good foundation. So we are on a journey, and that journey only is going to take us one place, and that's back on a growth path.

Exactly when it's going to happen, as mentioned, there's also a question here in regards to the cautious optimism, when exactly is that going to pan out? I expect that the market conditions, as mentioned, are going to be better during the latter half and if the market conditions are going to be better, then it's our job to capitalize on that as well.

Exactly, is that going to be a Q3 thing, a Q4 thing or whatever, I'm quite cautious in regards to mentioning the exact quarter because based on all the other comments I saw last year, most comments were not right in regards to when things are going to exactly turn around.

But we are seeing that we believe that the bottom has more or less been reached and that the future is going to be, of course, looking brighter. And that's what we're planning for, that's the initiatives that we are working on. We are fully focused on that.

[Børge Sørvoll, executive]

Okay. Two more questions before I think we round off here. In the report, you're right that we expect further organic growth within Molecular Tools. Is that on a year-over-year basis? Or is it as a quarter-over-quarter basis as well?

[Michael Akoh, executive]

I think we have to look at that on a year-on-year basis in terms of Molecular Tools. I also see there's some questions in regards to our collaboration or how we view China at the moment. And of course, we have future hopes for China. But currently, there's not a lot going on in China.

We have a collaboration with Genovis in China that makes a lot of sense to me. But currently, we have not seen the fruits of that collaboration. And then we're, of course, going to have also and in relation of that partnership and what the future brings for that partnership. Right now, our focus is in the U.S., our focus is to get back in the U.S. and get up and running again, as soon as possible. So that's our key market focus at the moment.

[Børge Sørvoll, executive]

All right, Michael, I think we have covered all the questions that we have received online. So I think we will end this first quarter presentation and thank you all for listening and sending in good questions to us, and we wish you all have -- I hope you will have a nice day, and thank you. And goodbye.

[Michael Akoh, executive]

Thank you so much. Goodbye.