Biosyent Inc

XTSX:RX

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q2

[René C. Goehrum, Chairman, CEO & President]

Hello, and welcome to the BioSyent Q2 and First Half 2021 Results Presentation. My name is René Goehrum, and I'm the President and CEO of the company. I want to start today's presentation with a look at our sales, EBITDA and net income after tax for the quarter ended June 30, 2021.So the quarter represented our 44th consecutive profitable quarter, dating back all the way to Q2 of 2010 when the company turned profitable. Sales were just under $7.3 million, up 53% versus a year ago, and a couple of things I would like to bring to your attention. In the year ago second quarter, we had some softness, and I would take you back to Wave 1 of COVID. In March of 2020, we had a surge in sales, both for wholesale distribution of pharmacies and the hospitals doing some stockpiling. So what we found there was exceptionally high sales in March of 2020 and then a sharp dropoff in April of 2020 and then a building back in May. And June last year is kind of business normalized, and then we proceeded to grow the business over that period of time.So this year, we're working against a slightly depressed comp. But just to be clear, that plus 53% versus a year ago isn't just a kind of sales normalizing to the year ago, this is a strong performance in our Canadian Pharmaceutical business, our International Pharma business and a bounce-back by our Legacy Business as well.Tibella and Combogesic both contributed to the sales growth, and the breakdown was 51% up on Pharma, Canadian Pharma; 75%, our International Pharma; and 74%, our Legacy Business. Now we've been investing in launching both Tibella and Combogesic, and that will be a theme going forward into the balance of the year and into next year. But our -- overall, our business performance and profitability has counterbalanced the investments that we've been making to launch those 2 products. So you can see, in the quarter, our net profit margin, in at 14% of sales versus 15% in the year ago.Taken on a 6-month basis, sales were up 36%, made up of 24% growth in the Canadian Pharma. So you can see more of a normalization as opposed to just a shorter burst over a quarter's comparison. International Pharma business up dramatically, and that is due to a large shipment to our largest market in the first quarter of this year. And then you can see the Legacy Business performing well over 6 months.And what we've witnessed is a resilience of our established brands, so the Canadian Pharmaceutical products during COVID, where much of Canada has been locked down kind of in and out, and I would have to take you back to -- this is a June 30 end, and in many parts of Canada, Ontario and Quebec, for example, a big chunk of the first 6 months of the year, we were in lockdowns, other than essential services. So in that environment, what we've seen is as much as health care is essential, access to health care professionals, patient traffic in the doctor's office is down. So to see our Canadian Pharmaceutical business perform like this is encouraging for all, to have a plus 36% top line at $14.7 million, EBITDA of just under $3.9 million and net income after tax of just under $2.7 million, is encouraging for us.You can see here, taken over a 6-month period of time, the net impact of promotion expenses, offset by increased profitability on other brands and other businesses, working out to 18% NIAT margin this year versus 20% in the year ago.So if we drill down a little further on units, you see here that the Canadian Pharmaceutical performance is, in the quarter, FeraMAX was up 45%, 18% taken over 6 months. So that was some of the impact that I mentioned from COVID Wave 1, March of '20 versus April. However, we've had a very strong quarter with FeraMAX and good demand and not a lot of the sales that you see here kind of sitting in wholesale inventory. So that has moved through well, 18% for the full year, the performance on an established business. And we think there's more growth in this business, and I will be speaking in a couple of slides about some further steps we're taking on our FeraMAX life cycle strategy.You can see here that RepaGyn and Cathejell also benefited from a comparison to the year ago period, though taken over 6 months, where you've got a normalization of the COVID effect in the first half of last year -- or I should say, the second quarter of last year. You see strong performance over 6 months, plus 15% on RepaGyn, plus 29% on Cathejell.The Aguettant business is somewhat different. You can see clearly that it's the only red number on the page. So Aguettant System down 11%. We did see a surge in Q1 at the outset of COVID last year. And so we're working against a fairly high comp. That business has normalized in the quarter. This year, we've done well at plus 13% on Aguettant System. But you can see on 6-month comp, we are down 11%.Don't be fooled by the Cysview units here. That business probably has been the most affected by COVID, just in terms of procedures in the hospital in 2020, Wave 1. And so any business we do this year just looks good in comparison. The business is still performing well below expectation, and I've got some more comments on that in a couple of slides.And here, you see the International Pharma business with a modest contribution for the quarter of $165,000, but importantly, up versus the year ago quarter. And then on a full year basis, we have the impact of that large order to one market that went out in January this year, so overall, the business performing well over a 6-month period and really is an indication that the last year's performance for our international FeraMAX sales was somewhat of an aberration and we're working hard to both diversify markets and diversify products in those markets.And here, you can see our Legacy Business fairly comparable in terms of indexing versus a year ago, both for the quarter and for the half. We had a soft year last year on the Legacy Business, and it has bounced back somewhat this year as well.So I've mentioned a couple of times, COVID impacts. I'm not going to kind of go through a long and winding road discussion on this topic. I think folks are fairly familiar with those businesses and companies that have been dramatically impacted, those somewhat less so. What we have found is our established brands have performed well. As I mentioned, this has been led by FeraMAX. We're seeing continued access restrictions in the hospital, in the community physicians office and specialist offices generally. And this has really impacted the launch trajectory for Tibella and Combogesic.They are different products in different therapeutic areas, one for women's health, one in pain. And COVID has affected them differently, but the traffic that we're seeing in the doctor's office is still down. In fact, we see and have got many of our normal kind of call cycle, where the doctors just aren't seeing patients at all. They are seeing them through remote means through telehealth or Teams, video or just telephone, and that impacts Tibella. At least half the physicians that we've surveyed want to do an in-person assessment of women that are postmenopausal before initiating a hormone replacement therapy. So that's had an impact on the Tibella business.Combogesic, our strategy is to work with health care professionals in introducing the product. So it has not benefited from patient traffic in the doctor's office.I think I've already spoken to the impacts on FeraMAX. I think our distribution partners have been able to push through some of the barriers that were presented by COVID and some other things that are more of a geopolitical nature that came up last year and conspired to really suppress that business. And it is clearly performing better this year and not necessarily just pushing through COVID challenges.We've spoken in the past about some things that we've done with the FeraMAX brand. It's obviously important to the success of our company. And we're leaning into the business. We think it's a great opportunity to grow overall the value in our company. We introduced last October the new FeraMAX Pd product innovation, a new patented delivery system, Polydextrose Iron Complex. It replaced in Canada the existing FeraMAX formulation. We launched our first product, on that basis, FeraMAX Therapeutic 150. That product was launched late last year. As you can see from previous slides, that brand is performing well in the Canadian market. And we've -- kind of the life cycle strategy, internally derived for new product offerings to address needs that we do not think are being well served by current product offerings, both competitive and FeraMAX, quite frankly, and we think there's an opportunity to grow market share and in fact, expand the market for iron therapy and the iron health of Canadians.So this year, just a couple of months ago, we had also announced that FeraMAX was named the #1 recommended oral iron supplement for the sixth consecutive year by both pharmacists and doctors in Canada. So we're encouraged by the strong support of the health care community, by patients, and we're excited about some innovations that we've got coming to market.I'm not going to be talking in detail about those. I'll just say that FeraMAX continues to position itself and our portfolio is a key driver of growth into the future, both top line and profitability. We have got some additional launch activity on top of the FeraMAX Pd Therapeutic 150, the first product. We've got some further activity planned for later this year, in the second half of '22 and in fiscal and calendar 2023. There are some other things that are also on the drawing board that could come into market within the time ranges that I've indicated here, probably '23, and if not, may get pushed out a little bit further also, once again, to address some additional unmet needs in the market.Late in July last year, we launched Tibella hormone replacement agent for menopause therapy. And what we're seeing now after being in the market and promoting for about a year is that some key thought leaders across Canada are now accepting Tibella as first-line therapy, and we're very encouraged by that. This is a typical kind of compounding prescription-type product, I mean, compounding as a business, effective; it is compounding that women take this product for varying durations, up to 5 years post-menopause.And then finally, also a key growth driver as we see kind of our business evolving over the next year or 2, 3, 4 years is Combogesic. We announced that product in the market at the end of last year, and we started promoting it in the first quarter of this year. And it is now available in about 4,000 pharmacies across Canada.So in our first portfolio reshaping, since we embarked on our pharmaceutical strategy for our company, is something I would like to just take a couple of minutes to talk about. So we are going to be returning the licensed rights, and we're going to discontinue the sale of the Aguettant System prefilled syringes and Cysview. So they will no longer be part of our portfolio as of the end of this year. And that really will allow us to focus on assets in our portfolio that can more significantly contribute to revenue and profit growth and provide us a better return on investment.I don't have too much to say on the change other than these steps are planned and coordinated with our partners and that we just want to focus our time and our attention and our capital on growth, real growth drivers in our business. So it's a significant move, as I say, that -- our first reshaping of the portfolio and just redirecting our attention to what we think are growth assets. So the aforementioned FeraMAX products, both existing and part of our life cycle strategy, Combogesic and Tibella.In addition, for FeraMAX, we announced an in-licensing of a unique technology application that will assist us in driving market share for FeraMAX through awareness, compliance and treatment success. That was announced in -- in-licensed and announced in July. And the team is working hard right now to get that technology into the market by the end of this year.I want to turn our attention now to our cash position and return on equity. On June 30, we had just under $25 million in cash on the balance sheet, cash and near cash. If you're a long-time follower, or a short-time follower of the company for that matter, you know that we have 0 debt, 0 long-term debt. We've built our business basically self-funded through cash generated over those 44 consecutive profitable quarters. Over the last 12 months, ending June 30, we generated cash from operations of $4.3 million. And our cash position has grown since a year ago, $21.5 million, despite further investments in NCIB, though they go back some time. There's been nothing in this most recent quarter. But in the first quarter, I believe we were active under our NCIB.That cash position is strong. We're looking for opportunities to invest that capital productively to earn returns on investment to which we've -- we expect. And you know that we are investing in Tibella and Combogesic. We think that's a really good use of our cash position. In a couple of slides, I can show you what the net effect of that has been on our earnings per share.I mentioned NCIB. As you know, that we've got -- now we're into our third NCIB. We started the program with the first NCIB back in December of 2018. Over that period of time to August 20, we bought back about 1.67 million shares, representing a reduction of about 11% of our fully diluted, at an average cost of $6.06. We continue to monitor the market and to look for opportunities to buy back shares. So that's still an active part of our strategy. And just, there has not been any -- there have not been any purchases, I believe, since the end of the first quarter of this year.I made mention of the impact of Tibella and Combogesic launch, investing on our earnings per share. So I'm going to pull that together for you here. In the quarter, second quarter, we had net income just over $1 million, $1,018,000, which represented $0.08 a share, fully diluted. So you can see that, that was up from the year ago at $0.06 in the second quarter, but in this case, down somewhat from the first quarter this year. So you see really 2 things at work. Although the top line was marginally lower in the second quarter versus the first, that represented a shift or a change in the mix of our revenue. So that first quarter top line included $1.1 million in international FeraMAX sales. It's a high-margin business for us and is taxed differently than the Canadian Pharmaceutical operations. So that's just one thing to point out on the difference between $0.08 and $0.13.But in the quarter, we invested the equivalent of $0.06 a share, fully diluted, in true net-new spend on Tibella and Combogesic. So you can see that we're investing, we're using our capital to grow assets to launch and grow assets that are going to contribute to the long-term success of the company.Just a quick snapshot here. I've touched on this piece a few times. One thing I would like to point out here is we've got about 173,000 share options outstanding. We've not issued any share options since at the beginning of the first quarter of 2019. So it's been over 2 years since we've issued any share options. We've pivoted to using restricted share units for a longer-term equity compensation in the company. And what we're doing is buying in the open market to make sure that, that plan is funded and to the extent that we can manage, practically will not be dilutive.On a fully diluted basis, we're just over 13 million shares outstanding. And just to draw your attention to the math on the cash on the balance sheet, we're just -- we're approaching $2 in cash on the balance sheet. And we're well aware of that calculation. I know that some of you will be making that calculation, so just to say, if you're pulling up the calculator. And we're working hard to invest the capital, and if we can invest that capital to earn those same rates of return, then the discussion of returning capital to shareholders is always on the table.I wanted to thank you for your continued interest and support. And we look forward to reporting how we're progressing with the business, and this continues to be a very challenging, challenging year. Thank you.