Biosyent Inc

XTSX:RX

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[René Goehrum, executive]

Hello, and welcome to the BioSyent Inc. Q2 and First Half 2022 Results Presentation. My name is René Goehrum, and I'm the President and CEO of the company. I want to draw your attention to our disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements.

So let's start the presentation with a look at our sales, EBITDA and net income after tax for the quarter ended June 30. So we've done something here for your comparison. We've taken a look at the business with and without our continuing Canadian pharma brands. We discontinued 2 products -- 3 products, 2 brands at the beginning of this year. When we compare the Canadian pharma business to continuing brands, we're up marginally at plus 1%. If we compare it with including discontinued operations, we're down 6% on the Canadian pharma business. The international pharma business down 100%. So we had no shipments to customers outside of Canada. And our legacy business, in the quarter was down 20%, but you'll see up over a 6-month period in a slide when I show you that data. So top line, just over $6.6 million, down 9%, profitability up, EBITDA up 13%, net income after tax up 20%. This represented our [ 48th ] consecutive profitable quarter in the business. So that's now 12 years of profitability in the tank. One of the driving factors in rationalizing our portfolio and discontinuing a couple of brands, one was our outlook for return on investment and where we should spend our effort to grow our business, our effort and our capital, the other is in profit margin. So gross margin on our continuing products portfolio is superior to that of our portfolio with the discontinued products. So that has contributed to profitability.

The one thing that we did observe in the quarter is that we've had improved access to health care professionals, doctors, clinics. Pharmacies, we've had reasonable access over time, but I would also say that, that has been better. I think one of the phenomenons there is that as patients are getting in to see their doctor more face-to-face. So we're getting reports of the pendulum shifting back towards more face-to-face consults. Pharmacists are being used less as the primary health care adviser. This has been good for our business. It's been good in that we are launching products, and we have got a history of being effective when we can detail health care professionals on products and make them aware of the product and explain to them the benefits that they would get to introducing those products to their patients.

So taking a look at the 6-month performance for the period ending June 30. Once again, comparing Canadian pharma brands, excluding discontinued, the business was up 4%. if you take a look at it with discontinued products included, were down slightly at 2%. So we haven't quite made up for the absence of the discontinued products. We expect to be doing so over time, and the decision to discontinue will certainly prove itself to be the right one. And we've got some short-term impacts on top line performance. For the 6 months, $13.7 million and some continued challenges with our international pharma business. In the year ago period, we had very large [ work ] in the first quarter. So that's our comp there. We will take the incremental revenue and profit that's generated from that business and live with the lumpiness and volatility of sales in that business unit. So how did this quarterly performance translate to earnings per share? So the net income after tax of just over $1.2 million represent $0.10 per share on a diluted EPS. That compares quite favorably to $0.08 in the year ago Q2 2021. In aggregate, those last 4 quarters, so trailing 12 months worked out to $0.50 a share, and that's quite favorable to the $0.33 in the TTM ending June 30, 2021.

So through a slightly deeper dive in the brand performance and the business unit performance. So you can see, as I've pointed out that our Canadian pharma business down slightly as we have yet to replace the discontinued revenue represented by the discontinued products. We also saw some rebalancing of inventory with our wholesale customers. And that translated to a decline for FeraMAX measured in units, both for the quarter and for the half. There's nothing for us that's alarming about that. We have seen shipments by our wholesale customers to retail. We also have access to that data, and that shows the FeraMAX units growing in the quarter. So slightly different. Of course, we report sales to our wholesale customers. That's our dollar of revenue generation, but we've seen no real change in the demand in the marketplace. RepaGyn showing strong double digit, both for the quarter and for the half. Cathejell has continued to grow modestly. And then our growth brands, Tibella and Combogesic have performed well in the quarter. Tibella 52% and in the quarter; Combogesic, up 45%. So both of these products were launched during COVID-19. As I mentioned before, they are benefiting now from better access to the health care professional than we've had since COVID began. I've got a few comments on our sales force in a couple of slides. But that bodes well that we get some momentum behind Tibella and Combogesic, and we certainly are looking to those 2 products to contribute to growth as we go forward. And there -- here, you can see kind of the sum and the impacts of the international sales in our legacy business being up 3% for the 6-month period. So that -- that business also is not a [ steady eddy ] business like we find our pharmaceutical business is a little bit more predictable, and it's not uncommon to have a large order in 1 month or another skew our performance. But overall, that business is performing would have expected.

So we mentioned a couple of months ago that FeraMAX had been named the most recommended iron supplement in Canada by both pharmacists and physicians now for 7 consecutive years. And we see this strong brand is a great place to be innovating from. We have made some changes to our formulation, which I will comment on. And so the strong brand performance, we think, bodes well for us to innovate and capture more share of market. And in fact, we believe we have an opportunity to grow the market as well to the benefit of FeraMAX. So we continue to invest in this brand in promoting it to both pharmacy and to health care professionals for them to recommend it to patients in the management and maintenance of good iron health.

So I mentioned our innovation for FeraMAX. We announced the new FeraMAX Pd platform in October of 2020. It's a new patented delivery system called Polydextrose Iron Complex. We very shortly thereafter restaged both our FeraMAX 150 and our FeraMAX Powder 15, about a year apart, but we moved quickly to do that. FeraMAX 150 Therapeutic is now in market has been since November of 2020, Powder 15 since October of '21, and we saw good growth in both of those products last year as a result of that. And based on performance on a YTD basis in 2022, we've consolidated those gains and are working on further growing that brand. So this new formulation provides a great platform for innovation, and we are preparing new product launches. For FeraMAX, we have a product that has been approved by Health Canada. We've been working hard to get that in market. We thought we could get it in before the end of this year. It looks like it's going to leak over into next year, but we see it in market in the earlier part of the year, certainly. And we think there's an opportunity, as I mentioned, to use this innovation to grow our share, and that's why we're in investing in this brand.

So what else are we investing in? And what do we hope to get out of it. So we're investing in the promotion of FeraMAX. We're investing in product development in FeraMAX. There is in addition to the product that is approved and that we'll see market early next year. We are working on development of yet another product under the FeraMAX brand. And as I said, we think that we can position those products to attract new consumption of oral iron in the Canadian market and then take that innovation to customers outside of Canada as well. The process is going somewhat slower than we had hoped for, but it is moving nevertheless, and we expect to reap the benefits of this activity for years to come. So we're building our sales force. I've mentioned better access to health care professionals. We are calling on more doctors now. We are calling on more pharmacists and more pharmacies. So we've built our sales force across the country, increased our headcount and we are investing in additional marketing resources and deployment against Tibella and Combogesic. You can see that if you look back at our -- although not extreme in the first 6 months of this year, but you can see over the last several years that we've increased our OpEx, our spend on selling and marketing. And if you go back to '18, '19 as base year, and you should expect to see further growth in investing in that area. We're bringing innovation and new products to the market. We need to build awareness. We need to give doctors and pharmacists all the reasons why they should be recommending these to their patients or prescribing these products. We've got to drive trial and overtime consumption. And so all of this takes a concerted effort, and we're making that effort, we're making those investments. We do have, in addition to the new FeraMAX product coming to market, we have a women's health product approved by Health Canada. We're preparing that product for launch and it should see market early next year as well. So clearly, we see these brands as growth drivers. We see substantial growth in our top line coming from all of these brands and all of these initiatives. And our priority is revenue growth in the business.

So how did the quarterly performance then translate into cash and cash flow? On a trailing 12-month basis, June 30, we generated $6.1 million of cash. During that period of time, we invested $2.5 million in buying back shares. And our cash position, net result of those 2 now sits at just under $28 million. You can see the positive uptrend going back to 2020. And on a trailing 12 months basis, you can see very strong performance on return on equity, and that is certainly a measure that we've got internally, one of our key performance indicators is our return on equity. In addition to the cash that you see here, cash position as of June 30, we've invested over the last years over $13 million in buying back shares. Our balance sheet continues to strengthen, and we feel that we're well positioned for long-term growth in the business. And of course, we carry no debt at this time.

So this is a good way to segue into our capital allocation and what our intentions are with the capital that we have on the balance sheet. As I've been mentioning, our first use of capital is to generate revenue growth and diversification. For our strategy, those are our first uses of capital in the business, and we have been investing in growth, and we will continue to invest in growth. And I think you may see the proportion of spend on selling and marketing expense to revenue perhaps accelerate through the balance of the year as we have more opportunities presented to us to promote our products. Despite the investment in growth and in licensing and launching the new product activity, we have been growing our cash position, and we've always held as an option to return excess capital that we do not require an execution of our strategy to be returned to shareholders. As I mentioned, we've now had 12 consecutive years of profitability under our belt. So we've been buying back shares, but on the table as another tool in the toolkit could be dividends over time.

So let's do a slightly deeper dive then on what we've invested in NCIB, so buying back shares. We have deployed $13.5 million since we commenced in December of '18. So in about 3.5 years, and we've deployed $13.5 million. That's to the date of recording this presentation. So I'm a couple of days earlier than normal, recording this presentation on the 19th. But we've been in the market subsequent to quarter-end and have purchased, I think, over 100,000 shares since the quarter ended that I'm reporting to you on. So that's included in this data. We've reduced our shares fully diluted by 14%. That $13.5 million has worked out to $6.42 a share spent per share, buying them back. One of the ways to look at the value that we're creating for remaining shareholders is to look at the proportional share of profit. That's attributor to each of those shares. So we can see that we earned on a trailing 12-month basis $0.50, that would have been $0.43 if we had not been buying back shares. So we think that's a good proposition for our shareholders. We have not been issuing any stock options. So we haven't been diluting at this stage, it's been over 3 years since we issued any new stock options and we've replaced -- I guess we've paused options as a tool, and we have replaced it with RSUs. And we are buying shares in the open market, [ pulling ] them in trust. So our RSUs that are outstanding as a form of equity compensation are fully funded on our balance sheet. We think we've got a very shareholder-friendly capital structure, and we're focused on growing ownership and value for our shareholders rather than diluting it. In fact, we haven't raised any equity in the market since 2002.

So I don't have to tell you that the markets -- capital markets have been extremely volatile. There's a lot of turmoil. We obviously don't know what it's going to look like going forward. But what I can report to you [ is proportional ] share of a business that has a strong balance sheet and is growing -- is going up through our activity of buying back shares. And I would say that in the environment that we're in, capital markets and turmoil and volatility interest rates on our sharp upward turn supply chains, albeit recovering, but not recovered and high inflation. We're obviously not immune to any of those, but we have a strong balance sheet. We have a strong cash-generating business. We have growth assets in the market. We have growth assets coming to market, and we feel that we're well positioned for the future.

I wanted to thank you for your interest in the company and your support, and I look forward to reporting our progress when I next speak to you on a quarterly report in November. Thank you.