Biosyent Inc

XTSX:RX

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q2

[René Goehrum, executive]

Hello, and welcome to the BioSyent Inc. Q2 and First Half 2024 Results Presentation. My name is René Goehrum, and I'm the President and CEO of the company.

I want to bring your attention to our forward-looking statements disclaimer, and I'll dive into the presentation by taking a look at our revenues on a by brand and by unit basis.

So you can see overall that our Canadian pharmaceutical business was up 11% in the quarter to the year ago, up 14% through 6 months. And essentially, the brands highlighted here, FeraMAX, RepaGyn, Tibella, Combogesic, all performing well, both on the quarter and on a 6-month basis. Of course, we don't have data to compare for Inofolic and Gelclair, as those 2 products were launched in the second half of last year. So Inofolic, we started shipping in August and Gelclair in November. So there won't be any comps for those until Q3 and Q4 presentations.

In the quarter, we shipped to international customers. That is for international pharma, and our legacy business was ahead of a year ago in the quarter, but significantly more so on a 6-month basis.

So overall, revenues were just under $9 million for the quarter, up 12% to the year ago -- up 15% to the year ago. I'd like to add that this represented a record quarter in revenue, both measured on a Canadian pharma basis and on an overall basis. So up 12% overall in the quarter. And you can see our EBITDA was in excess of $2 million for the quarter and net income after tax just under $1.6 million. We are investing in growth. We have been talking about that now for quite some time, not quarters, it's been years. And later in the presentation, I've got something to remind us of the activity that we've been undertaking over the last 4 years, in fact.

On a 6-month basis, you see that our sales were up 15%. Our EBITDA up 26%. Our net income after tax, up 26%. And I'd just like to point out that our EBITDA and NIAT margins both moving up from the year ago on a 6-month basis. So an EBITDA margin of 25% and a NIAT margin of 20%. So this in the face of significant investment in growth.

So the second quarter represented our 56th consecutive profitable quarter. We're quite proud of this. We have been investing in innovation, bringing new products to market. And along with that effort and investment, we have consistently demonstrated our ability to drive a profitable business. On a trailing 12-month basis, we earned $0.60 per share fully diluted, that was $0.13 in Q2 and that compares favorably to $0.43 on a trailing 12-month basis and $0.12 in the year-ago quarter.

So I'd like to walk you through a couple of highlights for the first 6 months of the year. So YTD 2024, in March and June, we paid quarterly dividends of $0.045. This was a 12.5% increase from the year ago dividends in Q1 and Q2. Earlier in the year, in February, BioSyent was named to the TSX Venture 50 top-performing companies, in our case, in the life science category. For the ninth consecutive year, FeraMAX was named the #1 recommended oral iron supplement amongst pharmacists and physicians. I've got a little bit more on that later on in the presentation.

We extended our license and supply agreement on RepaGyn and Proktis-M. Those have been now extended to 2032. So our partner, clearly pleased with what we've done in building that business and looking forward to further growth as we move into the future.

We announced in June that we had in-licensed the new endocrinology product for Canada. This we've highlighted as being significantly higher revenue opportunity for BioSyent at peak penetration sales, and we're working now on getting that product approved by Health Canada. So we're preparing the dossier to submit that, and we expect to be launching that product in 2026.

Today, we announced a Q3 dividend of $0.045 that will be paid on September 15. And in the January to June period this year, we repurchased 162,300 shares under our NCIB and canceled those shares. So that was a further roughly 1.5% reduction of our fully diluted shares outstanding.

As far as I mentioned, FeraMAX continues to perform well both in revenue and growth, but also in terms of trust put into the brand by physicians and pharmacists. We're leveraging that trust and building on that trust and taking it next steps in terms of product innovation. If you've been an investor or shareholder for some period of time, you'll know that we have undertaken a number of life cycle strategy steps to move that business along, and we are working on developing an additional FeraMAX product, which will see market at some point in time in the future, not this year -- clearly not this year and not in the first half of next year, but beyond that point in time. We're going to give enough oxygen for our newest product, FeraMAX 45 to continue to evolve and find its position in the market before we bring any further innovation into the category.

So what do we see as our growth drivers moving forward, and I'm not speaking of just the next quarter or quarters, but that period of time and into many years. We're excited by the new endocrinology asset for a '26 launch. So I've just finished walking you through intended further innovation in FeraMAX and growth in FeraMAX.

You could see by the revenue performance of Tibella. We still see growth in that and obviously in Inofolic and Gelclair, our newest additions to the portfolio. And our process for identifying and negotiating in-licensing and acquisitions continues. We've been active on both of those fronts. There's nothing yet to share with you, but we expect to be in a position to talk more about that in the coming quarters.

So our cash position nudged down from the June 30 of the last couple of years, the '22 and '23 number, kind of fairly stable at about $28 million. On June 30, we had just under $26 million in cash. And I'd like to just point out that was partly impacted by some working capital adjustments. For example, in the month of July, so after this period that we're reporting, we had cash from operations generation of $2.2 million just in that month alone, simply collecting receivables from the month of June that came in pushed into July.

So our last 12 months cash from operations of $2.5 million. We've been investing in buying back shares. So in that 12-month period of time, we bought back 335,000 shares, deployed $2.8 million into our NCIB. We paid $2 million of dividends and accumulation of the activity in driving revenue growth and managing cash and returning cash to shareholders has resulted in a return on equity of 21%. So that bounces back to where we were a couple of years ago.

So I mentioned earlier about highlighting some of the things we've been doing in terms of new product and innovation in the company. This summarizes for you in the period, essentially a 3.5-year period starting in July of 2020 when we introduced Tibella to market. And then it follows all the way through to the launch of Gelclair last November. So we've had a number of new products and innovations introduced to the market. That's a fairly significant flow for a modest-sized company. So we've had all hands on deck while we've been doing that. We've been building our commercial infrastructure to lean into revenue growth, and that's been an important part of our story and not just growth, but also diversification of our revenues. So it's core to our strategy. We've been talking about this for some period of time. So that was 8 new product launches or product innovations in a 3.5-year period. So now we're kind of 4 years out from starting with that on Tibella. So the first dollar of cash that we have on the balance sheet is earmarked, not just the first dollar, but that's the top priority, it's earmarked for revenue growth and portfolio diversification, and we continue to execute against that. We expect to see revenue growth going forward in the business and profit growth will be an important feature of our strategy as well.

Yes, we clearly had capital that was in excess of what we require to both grow and diversify and we have started returning capital to shareholders. So that started in the form of an NCIB, buying back shares in the fourth quarter of 2018, and in the form of paying a quarterly dividend in the fourth quarter of 2022. So we're now well into the program for both of those dividends and NCIB and have returned just short of $23 million of capital to our shareholders.

I land on this page just to point out that we have not been issuing share options as a form of equity or incentive compensation. Rather we have pivoted to using RSUs. We've done this for some period of time. So if you are new to the story, we have not issued options in years. And we now issue RSU grants, and we're in the open market, buying shares and holding them in trust so that we can meet our obligations under RSU. So it's a nondilutive approach to how we manage our cap table. And you can see that our fully diluted common shares now is under $12 million and continues to move downward.

I'd like to leave you with that. We look forward to reporting both on growth of the business, continuing to drive a profitable company, and further initiatives in licensing and potentially acquisition as well going forward into the future. Thank you.