Hey, good morning, everybody, and a very warm welcome to this webinar on IP Group's results for 2020. With me today, I've got Greg Smith, who is our Chief Financial Officer. This is, I think, the second set of results now we've presented in lockdown land, and so hopefully we're all getting used to the format. Greg and I have even managed to coordinate shirts and backgrounds this morning to show our professionalism in lockdown land. Let me tell you the format. What we're going to do is, we're going to go straight into a pre-recorded video, which will last for 20 minutes, which is by me, and that gives you an overview of the results. The session is timed for an hour in total, so we've got quite a long time for Q&A. We completely understand if people want to drop off after the video, but we're available for the hour to answer any kind of questions that you might have. If you would like to ask a question, if you could use the Q&A function or the chat function, we'll collate questions together, and we'll sort of share them out between Greg and myself live after the presentation. Without further ado, if I could ask Adam to play the video. Thank you. Hello. IP Group celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2020. For 20 years, on behalf of our shareholders, we have been backing radical innovators in science and technology, impact investing, long before it became a popular term. This requires patience, resilience, and a long-term perspective. I'm delighted to have this opportunity today to provide an update both on the impact and the financial returns that have resulted from this approach. In this presentation, I will give an overview, a brief recap on our purpose, vision, and strategy, highlight the key aspects of the results and the portfolio performance, then finish with a summary of the key points. Starting with an overview. We have had a very successful 2020. We achieved record financials, a record return on hard net assets of GBP 190 million, record realizations of GBP 191 million. Because of this success, we have declared a maiden dividend of GBP 0.01 per share. I will talk more about capital allocations later in the presentation. Our portfolio companies raised over GBP 1.1 billion in the period, over 2x that raised in 2019. This success reflects the alignment of our portfolio to structural growth themes, the transition to net zero, digitization, and new human health, for example. Looking forward, this alignment built over the last 20-year period means that we are well-positioned to benefit as these themes gain momentum. We've continued to see strong activity into the portfolio coming into 2021. Let me recap on our purpose, vision, and strategy. Our purpose is to evolve innovation in science and technology into world-changing businesses. Businesses that make a positive impact on the environment and society alongside an attractive financial return. We do this by providing the access to the capital and support that scientific innovators and entrepreneurs need to navigate the tricky journey from innovation to scale-up and impact. The problem we address is the difficulty that these businesses experience in accessing the capital they need to make this journey. Although the rewards can be substantial, the risks are huge, and the timeline is often long, and these factors combined make it difficult for many investors. For example, funds that have a fixed life, such as a 10-year venture fund, or investors unable to follow their money, such as early-stage funds or angel investors, to back these ideas. We believe that by funding these opportunities through an evergreen structure, such as a PLC balance sheet, a vehicle that can follow its money through to scale-up, we can mitigate these risks and help create impactful companies. Companies that over the medium to long-term can also generate attractive financial returns. Our vision is an ever-growing alumni of self-sustaining, successful impact companies that IP Group helped create and sustain, companies who themselves are achieving positive and measurable impacts on society and the environment alongside an attractive financial return. Our strategy is to seek an attractive balance between diversification and focus. We do this by operating separate business units or funds that focus on a key sector or key geography or key funding stage in the journey, such as EIS funds. Our key sectors Life Sciences, Deep Technology, and Clean Technology. Our key geographies are the U.K., the U.S., and Australia. This diversifies the geopolitical risk that would arise from focusing on one country. It also aligns the portfolio against several structural growth sectors without an overreliance on any one theme where momentum might suddenly reverse. The objective of our country-facing business units is to create and support university spin-out companies in their respective countries. The objective of our sector-focused business units is to leverage their sector expertise to source, invest, and support a focused portfolio of startup companies that address critical challenges in their sectors. In addition to our sector and country-focused business units, we operate a Global Strategic Opportunities Fund, which is held on balance sheet. This has the flexibility to invest across the portfolio where we consider it advantageous to our shareholders to do so. Because of its size and significance to the group, we also hold our stake in Oxford Nanopore through the Strategic Opportunities Fund. This slide illustrates the relative significance of these business units. GBP 1 billion or 90% of our portfolio is held within the Strategic Opportunities Fund and Life Sciences and Deep Technology business units. The remaining 10% is held within the two country-focused funds in the U.S. and Australia. Aside from investing balance sheet capital, our business units have the flexibility to manage third-party capital, and/or bring in third-party investors alongside our balance sheet capital, again, where we consider it advantageous to our stakeholders to do so. For example, at 31st December 2020, third-party investors held approximately 18% of IP Group Inc, our U.S. business, with IP Group owning the balance. In 2021, our U.S. business raised further capital, now we own approximately 60% of that platform. This strategy has allowed IP Group Inc to build critical mass in the U.S. without the need for our shareholders to provide all of the capital. In the U.K., our university spinout-focused business, Parkwalk, manages EIS funds, including funds dedicated to the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, and Bristol, respectively. Management of these funds generates fee income to the group whilst providing capital to a greater number of startups than would be fundable just from our balance sheet. Going forward, Parkwalk intends to launch a scale-up fund to provide further capital to those companies that show the most potential in these EIS funds. We will be a cornerstone investor in this scale-up fund by investing from our balance sheet capital. I'd like to say a few words now about impact investing. 2020 saw record capital inflows into ESG funds, and this trend will only keep growing, because the next few decades will see the largest generational wealth transfer in history, an estimated and quite staggering $30 trillion from baby boomers to millennials. This will turbo boost an existing trend towards ESG investing. Given the increased interest from investors in this area, we expect to see further development of ESG/sustainable or impact labels as a mechanism to channel investments into assets with higher ESG content or value. A fundamental driver of scientific research is impact, so our portfolio is well-aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and so is naturally very high in ESG value or content. During the year, we’ve also pushed forward in terms of our own governance. For example, we carried out a materiality assessment to determine the most relevant non-financial key performance indicators to report against. We also established an ethics committee chaired by Professor Gordon Clark of the University of Oxford. As I said at the beginning, this business is about patience and long-term investing, and so I’d like to spend a few minutes highlighting a couple of long-term trends which are important. The first is the long-term trend of hard net assets per share compared to our share price. The orange line shows our share price since the company came to market, and the blue line shows growth in net asset value per share. Net asset value per share has grown by nearly six times or over 11% cumulative since IPO. It dipped between 2017 and 2019, which largely reflects the dilutive impact of the Touchstone acquisition, but is now returning to its trend line. The second trend to highlight is the long-term trend in cash into the portfolio and cash out of the portfolio. Here, the orange line shows investment in the portfolio, and the blue line shows realizations, and the bars show the net movements. You can see how investment increased as the portfolio matured, but how this has now reversed in the last year or two. In any short-term period, these trends will continue to show some volatility, over any medium-term period, we would expect the net asset value per share will continue to increase at 10%+ per annum, the realizations will continue to exceed investment. Turning now to the results, the increase in hard net asset value per share. This slide shows the bridge from the opening hard net assets per share, to the closing hard net assets per share. The increase reflects strong performance in three of our business units, in particular, the Strategic Opportunities Fund, Life Sciences and Clean Technology business units. Turning to our cost base, this slide gives an analysis of our net overheads compared to net assets. Overall, overheads have come down in both absolute terms as a percentage of net assets between 2019 and 2020. This reflects the completion in 2019 of the rationalization of the cost base that took place following the Touchstone acquisition in late 2017. As a percentage of net assets, the overhead base in the U.S. and Australia continues to look high, but that reflects the relatively younger profile of their portfolios. In 2020, in aggregate, net overheads across the group were 1.6% of hard net asset value, and we would expect this to continue to fall over the coming years. Moving on to our net assets. The left hand of this slide shows net assets at December 2019 compared to net assets at December 2020. As in previous periods, it's a very simple balance sheet with the three main components, being portfolio cash and then long-term loans. At December 2020, the hard net asset value was GBP 1.3 billion or GBP 1.25 per share. The right-hand donut shows how that GBP 1.25 is made up. The top six add up to GBP 0.53 per share. The top 20 add up to GBP 0.76 per share, and the top 20 plus cash to GBP 0.92 per share. I will pick up the GBP 1.16 billion portfolio later in the Portfolio section. Turning to cash flows, this slide reconciles the opening and closing cash. As you can see, the big movements are on the right-hand side of this slide, realizations of GBP 191 million and investment in the portfolio of GBP 72 million. We've continued to reduce our term loans in accordance with plan. You can see in the table that net cash has increased by over 81% in the year. I would now like to comment on our capital allocation framework. Recent realizations have left us in a strong position, and understandably, we've had quite a few questions about our intended use of capital. We will deploy capital according to this framework, which has three key objectives. Firstly, to support organic growth across our seven business units, three countries, three key sectors and strategic opportunities. Here we are seeking to achieve long-term impact alongside attractive financial returns with appropriate diversification across structural growth themes within our sectors and also geographies. We anticipate most of our existing capital will be used for this purpose. Secondly, to manage our gearing to ensure that our servicing requirements are always met. This is currently a commitment of less than GBP 20 million per annum. Finally, to return any excess capital to shareholders. In the last two years, the group has made significant steps towards cash flow sustainability. We have introduced a progressive, dividend policy this year. We will consider the return of any additional excess capital that we generate going forward as part of this framework. As a growth company, our shareholders expect us to invest in exciting growth opportunities. Where there is excess capital, for example, if there is a large realization which cannot be reinvested in a reasonable timeframe, we will look to return this to shareholders as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Turning now to the portfolio, which you may remember from the net asset slide is GBP 1.1 billion. As I explained earlier, this is managed principally in six separate funds or business units. The three sector focused business Life Sciences, Deep Technology and Clean Technology, a group like Strategic Opportunities Fund, which mainly comprises our holding in Oxford Nanopore and then Australia and the U.S. Turning to the donuts on the right, as usual, the portfolio is quite concentrated with the top 20 companies representing 74% of the value in the portfolio. In terms of contribution of the different funds and business units, the bars on the bottom show the relative contribution Life Sciences, Clean Tech, and Strategic Ops all having performed strongly in the period. Turning now to our top 20 assets. This chart shows the value of our holding at December 2020, together with the fair value movement in the year. The positive movements are shown by the dark- green bars. You can see there are three positive movements of particular significance in the period from this chart. Firstly, Oxford Nanopore, where we increased the value of our holding from GBP 54.25 a share in 2019 to GBP 70 a share at December 2020, and that led to a fair value adjustment of approximately GBP 77 million. This reflects the very significant commercial progress made by that company during the year. I'll talk a little bit more about Nanopore on the next slide. Secondly, Ceres Power, which you can see in the table at the top right of this slide, has dropped out of the top 20 because we sold our holding in the year. This sale generated GBP 120 million of proceeds and a GBP 53 million uplift. Thirdly, Hinge Health. This is a spin out of the University of Oxford that we first backed in 2012. In total, we've invested less than GBP 1 million in this and own just over 2%. After a few pivots, Hinge Health evolved into a digital health platform focused on musculoskeletal pain, and it's now based in the U.S. It is growing very fast and is generating revenues in the low hundreds of millions. On the 7th of January 2021, the company completed a $300 million Series D round at a valuation of $3 billion, and that gave rise to our fair value uplift of about GBP 39 million. Investors included Tiger Global, Bessemer Ventures, Atomico, and Insight Partners. On one hand, this was a lucky break for us because we haven't been actively involved in the company for many years. On the other, the company would not have existed without us, and this illustrates the optionality in our portfolio. I'd now like to talk about Oxford Nanopore. Oxford Nanopore has had a very strong year. The 2019 financial statements are on record at Companies House, these show a 60% increase in revenues from 2018 to 2019. The company experienced strong growth again in 2020, it's worth noting the comment in those financial statements which were filed on 9th of October 2020, which stated that revenues at that point were in line with expectations. Revenues have grown strongly in the core business, the Life Science research tools market, which is thriving. The company has also benefited from a first out in diagnostics with LamPORE, a COVID diagnostic, developed in 2020. COVID testing was really a way of moving the company's infrastructure forward. LamPORE was a great test case showing that they can build a real on-market diagnostic, there are now many opportunities in the future pipeline. For example, diagnostics in infectious disease or cancer or immunology. For example, HLA tissue typing for transplants or in food and environmental testing. The company is now very well positioned to grow gradually or in a measured way into these new applied markets, such as clinical diagnostics. Recently there's been terrific improvement in the performance of the core technology, and this has led to increased interest across the scientific research community. For example, a new sequencing kit featuring a modified enzyme, tweaked run conditions, and a further improved base calling model have produced raw single molecule, single pass sequencing reads above a modal 99% accuracy or Q20+. This is classic disruption. New properties, for example, portability, real-time ability to sequence long DNA fragments already established in the market. Recent technology developments are starting to push performance and reshaping the market to have new expectations. It's worth noting that PromethION, the high throughput device, can potentially sequence as many as 150 human genomes on a desktop device. Of course, COVID surveillance by sequencing SARS-CoV-2 has been a particularly high-profile use case this year, particularly around variant analysis. Nanopore sequencing has been used in 77 countries and to sequence more than 130,000 genomes. This just underlines the broader potential for the analysis of pathogens. I would now like to summarize. In 2020, we achieved record financials in terms of returns on hard net assets per share, and in terms of realizations. We ended the year in a strong cash position, and this has enabled us to recommend a maiden dividend of GBP 0.01 per share. IP Group celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2020. For 20 years, on behalf of our shareholders, we have been backing radical innovators in science and technology, impact investing, long before it became a popular term. Because of this approach, our portfolio is highly aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We are rich in ESG content. As the portfolio matures, we see increasing evidence of its impact. During the year, over GBP 1.1 billion was invested in our portfolio, over 2x that invested in 2019. Our portfolios continue to make good progress into 2021. It remains very well positioned to benefit from structural growth themes such as the path to net zero, increase in digitization and human health. In the years ahead, we look forward to the further impact this portfolio can have. I will now leave you with our usual caveat, which can also be found on our website. Thank you. Okay. We've had a couple of questions on the Q&A. We'll go to those questions and then maybe more will come in as we run through the first two questions. The first question we've had is, what is your view on Ceres Power Holdings' rise in share price since selling a significant proportion of your stake in the company? What influenced your decision to sell at that point in time? Yeah, first of all, absolutely delighted for the guys at Ceres that their share prices continue to rise. Fantastic team, fantastic company, and we're very proud of everything they've achieved. I think every company would want to sell out, so we would hope the share price will continue to rise. That's my point, that we want to leave a grand legacy alumni of companies that are going on to achieve great things. In terms of the timing, first of all, that is the model. We do start up to scale up, and so our job is to sort of traverse that journey, which other investors find it difficult to traverse. It's obviously quite difficult to get the timing exactly right when you sell out. In the case of Ceres, there were two or three kind of factors that were also kind of important. The first is we played a very strategic role in bringing Bosch onto the register of Ceres, and you could certainly argue that that turbo boosted the price, and had we not sold, Bosch wouldn't be there because there wasn't the equity for them to take the stake, and we helped facilitate that direction of travel for the company. As a result of that, the company needed to migrate its board to a fully independent board. I was chair, Rob Trezona, our Head of Clean Tech, played a pivotal role in the company, was on the board, and we both stood down from the board. That meant we weren't actively managing the share. We were no different to any other fund manager at that point in time. A combination of those reasons, plus the fact we made a fantastic return on our investment, led us to the conclusion that we wish them the very best in the future. We're very confident in their future. It was an appropriate time for us to take our money off the table, demonstrate that we can go from start-up through to realization, and then recirculate that cash into the rest of our portfolio. That's that question. The next question is IP/Imperial, which I think means Imperial Innovations, which became Touchstone, have raised a lot of equity over the years from a small band of institutions who have largely exited the share register. Do you think you'll be constrained by this as your model has historically over-relied on raising equity? Well, I would say, if you go back to that slide I showed on the trend on cash flows, you will see that there were really kind of three eras. There were the first 10, 12 years of IP Group, where very small amounts of money were going into our portfolio. Then there was an expansion in quite significant investment from 2011 to 2017, 2018, and I think that's the period which this question relates to. Then you also saw in recent years, the realizations of exceeded investments. We certainly have no existing plans to raise further money from the market. We're well-funded. We don't think that that is a constraint on us for the foreseeable future. Greg, is there anything you want to add on that as our Finance Director? No, I think you covered it well in the presentation. I guess the long-term trend is over the last 20 years, we've been investing in these portfolio companies to bring them to fruition. It's a really exciting moment for the company to have evolved to a position where we're talking about optionality for how we can create value for shareholders, rather than that question around do we need to raise further capital from the markets. I think we are faced with a number of really exciting opportunities in the portfolio. We continue to balance the diversification and the focus. I hope that the capital allocation policy that we have set out will give shareholders greater clarity on how we look to prioritize our capital allocation and give returns to shareholders as things come through to fruition. Okay. Greg, if I answer the next question from Charles, and if you answer the question. Yeah, perfect. The next question is, could you please comment on your relationship with OSI, particularly in relation to your realization? For those on the call who aren't familiar with that nomenclature, OSI is Oxford Sciences Innovation Plc. Oxford Sciences Innovation Plc is a company we were a founder shareholder in about five or six years ago, and it has a formal relationship. It is the preferred commercialization partner of the University of Oxford. It's a single university special purpose vehicle that has raised a lot of money but can only invest in Oxford spin-outs. We have a small shareholding there now, 2% or 3%. I still sit on the board of OSI. The question relates to the fact we sold some of our shares last year. The reason why we did that was because we concluded that the company was now pretty mature. We were less than 10%. It had raised a lot of money from big global investors. It's going great guns, and now we want to move the relationship on to where we are a natural co-investor. We don't need a big shareholding to be a co-investor in Oxford spin-outs that OSI generates. We have a lot of co-investments with them, both through our balance sheet fund and also through Parkwalk. Worth pointing out that Parkwalk manage the EIS-funded Oxford. They have quite a lot of co-investments. Often they're the first investor alongside OSI. That's the reason why we did that. We can achieve all our strategic objectives without having such a large holding. The next question, which I'm going to hand over to Greg is, could you provide an update on Istesso's progress in 2020 and the next catalysts? Yeah, definitely. Good question. You'll see there was about five, six words in the results release on Istesso. The short answer is that they continue to progress towards starting a phase II-B trial this year, which is consistent with what we said at the half year and at last year's results. Charles asked the question, who's one of our healthcare analysts, knows that there's a lot of work that goes into preparing for those trials. Obviously the team has been getting on with audit, quality, manufacturing, tox, et cetera. That continues, and we continue to anticipate the next milestone for that business will be the commencement of the phase II-B trial. In terms of financing, you'd also note that IP Group, alongside the Future Fund, put a small amount of further capital into the business, GBP 6 million, during the year last year. That's given them a bit of flexibility around the start of that phase II-B. We'd anticipate the business raising a further modest amount of capital in order to take them safely through that phase II-B. Progress there continues. I suppose it's also worth saying we've had a reasonable amount of interaction with [audio distortion] underlying our existing view that through a phase II-B, this would be potential. Hopefully that's a helpful update. Could you provide more color on Nanopore's new sequencing kits? Would you have an expectation where consensus accuracy will be, and what markets would you say this opens up for Nanopore that were previously not addressable with below Q20 raw read accuracy? Well, again, for those who aren't familiar with this, there's a sort of difference between what they call raw read or single molecule and consensus accuracy. I referred to raw read accuracy today. Consensus accuracy was already kind of pretty high, so this will only kind of improve that. The markets, they will open up, it will increasingly open up markets in things like metagenomics, whole human genome sequencing, and also people with complex sort of projects. It sort of driving the general kind of interest across the Life Science tools research community in this sort of technology. It will be applicable to many aspects of those core markets. Next question is, "Can you comment on the PacBio share price rise and cash raise? Does it influence Oxford Nanopore's thinking re an IPO?" Well, the first thing that I'd say, if we held the webinar yesterday, you might have been asking me to comment on PacBio's share price decline. Clearly it has been quite a volatile stock. The Life Science tools sector generally had a very strong back end to 2020, continued into 2021, and have sort of come off a bit in the last sort of two or three weeks. There are maybe about eight to 10 companies in that sector that are doing very well, all reflecting the fact that that Life Science tools research market is quite buoyant at the moment. That obviously has benefited Nanopore as well, who had a very strong 2020. The cash raise the questioner refers to, I'm guessing, is the fact that SoftBank recently invested $950 million into PacBio. Does that influence Oxford Nanopore's thinking re an IPO? Not dramatically. Nanopore have a very strong value proposition, irrespective of what PacBio do. It's interesting sort of noise, and has definitely generated interest in Nanopore from investors around the world. It doesn't directly influence the plans of the Nanopore board, I would say. Next question. "Could you be a bit more specific on the plans with regards to Oxford Nanopore? Where and when can we expect an IPO, and what will you do with the proceeds?" Well, the simple answer to that is we can't be more specific, no. We've obviously read the speculation, as I'm sure everybody on the call has read the speculation about a Nanopore IPO. The timing of any Nanopore IPO is a matter for the board of Oxford Nanopore. We are obviously a shareholder, a significant shareholder, there are many other shareholders in Oxford Nanopore. That is definitely a matter for Oxford Nanopore, and we wouldn't comment on the deliberations of a board of an individual portfolio company for understandable reasons. I would say that the most important point is the company is going great guns. They're a great U.K. success story. They are very well-positioned to be a dominant player in a very big growth industry, and we're very proud of them. We want to do everything we can to support the management team and the board achieve its objectives. The final part of the question, what will you do with the proceeds? Well, that's obviously a kind of hypothetical question that we're not in a position to answer right now. Were there to be an IPO, then we have committed previously, and we will fulfill this commitment to discuss with our shareholders at that point in time so that people are aware of what our intentions may or may not be with respect to Oxford Nanopore. Greg, is there anything you want to add on that? Again, that was something that we hoped we would clarify by setting out our views on both capital allocation and dividend policy. As with any material one-off event in the portfolio that is liquidity in nature, then we would evaluate our options for deploying the capital. Also any excess we would return to shareholders as soon as possible in as efficient a way as possible. We talked about, in our release, considering things like share buyback, special dividends, all of those options remain open to us. We felt it was important, given the maturity of the business to date, to include a small element of TSR in the form of a dividend, and we've included a scrip alternative for those investors who would prefer that the capital remains in IP Group and hold this for capital appreciation. That hopefully is a sort of a clear direction of travel on how we think about sharing our returns with our shareholders. Good. Okay, if I take the next question on competitive pressures and pricing dynamics, Greg, and then you take the question on shareholders. Yep. The next question is, "Can you please comment about competitive pressures and pricing dynamics in the various markets you are operating in? Does this explain your relatively high cash balance?" Well, again, that's a two-part question. The first I am interpreting to mean, do you have to pay more for the equity in the spin-out companies that you back? I would say that we don't. Our strategy on the whole is to back what we start. We tend to be the first investor in a company, and then we tend to hold our corner or invest through subsequent rounds through to scale-up. As a general rule of thumb, we don't play in a kind of general market for technology opportunities. We play in the market for our own companies that we have helped sort of create. Does this explain your relatively high cash balances? Well, the cash balances, as we explained on the capital allocation, are held to satisfy three objectives. First of all, to allocate capital over our different business units to ensure organic growth. We certainly have a kind of plan where we can project forward at least sort of two years and anticipate the likely capital requirements of every single company in the portfolio. That's obviously our main sort of priority. The second priority is to ensure that we can meet our term loan commitments at all times. To the extent there is excess capital, then the priority is to sort of return that to shareholders in the most efficient way. Greg, do you want to answer the question about shareholders? Yeah, good question. I think in a way, partly linked to the earlier one we had around, you had a reasonably concentrated register who were helpful in you raising capital during that phase of your growth. I would say the last 12, 18 months have been characterized by a broadening and possibly maturing of our shareholder register. To answer the question directly, our main shareholder now at 15% is Railpen, who we're delighted to have on the register. Long-term capital pension fund seems highly appropriate for the nature of returns in this business. Then the next five, all at between sort of 4% and 5%, are Baillie Gifford, again, a very long-term supportive shareholder. Lansdowne Partners, same story. Liontrust, who are on the sustainability side, which is one of the trends that Alan mentioned. They've been on our register for many years as well and have recently sort of increased their position a bit, BlackRock primarily through the index side rather than the active side, and then Imperial College who are at 4%. They're the main holders. There was a question in the chat, which I'll just quickly cover off now, which is around will we make the presentation available? Yes, we will. We'll put that up on the website after the conclusion of this call and in the appendices, I'm afraid there are quite a few appendices for people to read at their leisure. In appendix three, we have all of our shareholders who are above 2%, and we're just looking at whether or not we can, I guess, sort of buck the trend of a main market company and include regular updates on our top shareholders on our website, which is something that AIM companies do, but main market companies tend not to. We get quite a few questions, particularly from the retail holders. In the spirit of high levels of transparency, we're looking at putting those on the website. Hopefully that answers the question on shareholders. Okay. I'll take the next question, Greg, and then if I could pass over to you Stefan's questions, because they're mainly around kind of cash and quite complex stuff- Quite long. Yeah. Thanks, Stefan. Panelists, so that's kind of a little bit of a hospital pass for Greg. Thanks. The next question then is, in the presentation you mentioned a planned fund in Parkwalk to finance the commercialization of developing Parkwalk investments. Please could you expand on the timing and plans for this fund? Yes. Parkwalk is planning to launch what they're calling a scale-up fund. Today, Parkwalk manages EIS funds, Enterprise Investment Scheme funds, typically raised from alumni in university-specific funds. They've been running funds for several years now at Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial. Well, Oxford, Cambridge, and Bristol, and then more recently, Imperial. They are planning to launch a scale-up fund, which could then be a natural kind of follow-on fund for companies that have had EIS money. If you think about it, Parkwalk have been doing this for a number of years. That portfolio is heavily concentrated in three of the best top 10 universities in the world, and the scale-up fund will invest in the kind of the most promising companies coming through those various seed EIS funds. That seems very compelling idea, and it seems entirely appropriate for IP Group shareholders to be a cornerstone investor in that fund, alongside other third-party investors. We would expect that fund to launch this year. Can we give any further guidance on timing on that, Greg? No. I'd be confident to be this year. Probably not much more than that. I hope we can update you at the next set of results. Yeah. Maybe when we do the half year results, we can ask the Parkwalk guys to come along and give an update and presentation on that business generally. Yeah. Parkwalk, it's worth saying, for those of you that don't know the Parkwalk business, given the nature of their investors are generally individuals in the U.K., they have a very active communications team and blog. You can see quite a lot of information on the portfolio companies on their website. It's worth saying we don't include the lot of it on the IP Group website, mainly because at the moment, we don't have balance sheet exposure to those EIS funds. As we become a cornerstone, we will obviously update shareholders on the major components in that scale-up fund. Right. Do you want to take the next two questions because they're both kind of cash finance taken, and I'll pick up on the Touchstone one, Greg? Yeah. I will read them quickly. They are all around strategy on realizations, deployment, and potential returns. Is the balance sheet now at the right size? Is the fundamental question. The specific questions are, portfolio's maturing and growing, how do you see rate of deployment changing in 2021 or growing in 2021? Will you follow your money more this year? I would point everybody to the longer term trends slide in investment and divestment. Over the course of the last five, six years, we have typically been investing between GBP 60 million, GBP 65 million at the bottom end and up to about GBP 115 million at the top end. That depends to a degree on the major transactions, in any given year at the top end of the portfolio. The GBP 67 million we invested this year, I would expect that we would invest more in 2021 than 2020, just on balance of the transactions. In terms of following our money more this year, you might remember from the first summary slide, there were two very big transactions in terms of the overall monies raised into the portfolio this year, and $392 million of which was into Hinge Health. Alan explained the background to that company, but we didn't participate in the Series C or the Series D in that round. The question around following our money, typically, we have been able to back and support all of our focus companies with the capital that we want to deploy. We haven't been constrained, but the simple answer is, I would expect to see it go up in 2021, but within that range over the last five years. Second component of the question was, will the need for cash realizations be more passive and opportunistic rather than necessary from here? On every portfolio company, we are taking the sort of decision that Alan articulated on Ceres. There is a plan for the company to develop commercially. In the early phases, that requires net funding into the business, of which we are typically the first investor, then a large component as a part of a syndicate. At points in time, it becomes appropriate for us to recycle capital and start the process again with the next batch of maturing companies. I'm sure given the capital markets at the moment, there will be plenty of inbound opportunity, and there are also planned commercial and technical points that will give us opportunity to realize. Finally, would you see cash from here as excess? What's the right size of balance sheet given there are now a steady flow of realizations? Well, Alan sort of answered this one already. We allocate our capital on a two, three-year out basis, given the nature of the portfolio. All of that capital on balance sheet is earmarked for primarily the maturing companies in our U.K. portfolio on Life Sciences and the Tech side, where we see the greatest opportunity for shareholder value creation and realization over the next two to three years. We continue to assess that, and if we have more realizations in excess of the plan that we've built, then as I said before, we will look at the most speedy and efficient way to return any excess to shareholders. We're at a really exciting point. We have got lots and lots of opportunity in the portfolio to create value, and so we will balance that to the best of our ability for shareholders. Okay. Do you want to take the next one, Greg? Yeah. The next one, what are your performance targets, i.e., IRR, time period, money multiple, cash generation per annum? As I would expect any professional VC outfit to state. I think it's definitely an interesting one, this. We obviously have a collection of business units, and we believe the way to generate outperformance is to have the specialist sector and specialist geography business units that Alan described earlier in the results presentation. The long-term trend of our return on capital, and as you saw right at the start of the presentation, was about 11% per annum. That puts us in really good company, and we're in the lucky position this year where we can talk about 17% returns and confidence for the portfolio for the coming year. In order to achieve that at an individual company level, we're clearly targeting much, much higher than that. The typical pre-money for one of our first rounds of investment in a brand-new company can be anything from GBP 500,000 to GBP 1 million. We're clearly looking for that to grow in excess of 50x to 100x, if not 1,000x. The growth in the IRR targets do definitely change by stage. Our view is, we're in a really exciting position, and if we can achieve at least that 10% regularly, particularly in the next growth world and at scale, then we will be competitive with all the major asset classes. Okay. The next question is one relating to Touchstone, which I think most people on the call will know was an acquisition we made back in 2017. The question is, this was an acquisition that wasn't taken very well following several write-downs early on, but more recently, we have seen quite a few of its holdings notably contributing to returns and some of the synergies being realized. Could you take us through your side of the journey from the acquisition to the write-downs, the recent contribution, and your expectation of how its portfolio will perform going forward? Yeah, that will probably take another day to take through that whole journey, but I do my best to do it in two or three minutes. If we start with the logic. The logic at the time was that both Touchstone and IP Group had two constraints. One was a lack of critical mass or size to appeal to global investors, two was an over-reliance on, as one of the previous questions referred to, a small number of investors in the U.K. who were prepared to back innovation over the medium- to long- term. The logic of bringing both companies together was to create greater scale, more efficient cost base, and a vehicle that would appeal more to a greater number of investors on a global basis. That was the logic. Obviously, it was contested, it was primarily contested because we didn't pay a premium. We bought the business at net asset value. The reason why we didn't want to pay a premium is because we thought their portfolio was a tad overvalued, looking at it from the outside, even though we thought the logic for all the shareholders on both sides made absolute sense. Their board contested it because they wanted to get a premium, which we weren't prepared to pay. The write-offs that came were higher than we had anticipated. If you look at their bid defense, they wrote up their assets quite significantly immediately prior to acquisition. A lot of those then reversed out. There was also then a natural period of rationalization or consolidation. We gave explicit instructions to our sector teams to focus on the assets in the combined portfolio that could have the most impact. Obviously, there's an old saying in venture that the lemons ripen before the plums, and there was an element of that. There was an obvious degree of rationalization, that's why the write-offs came first. The question is absolutely right. More recently, there's been some strong performance in some of those companies that we acquired. Companies like Featurespace, WaveOptics, Enterprise Therapeutics. There's quite a few companies who've had strong performance. Going forward, we have quite a high level of confidence in the refocus of the portfolio. Hopefully that answers that question. Moving on, what's your medium-term plan with respect to Oxford Nanopore? i.e., should ONT IPO at some point? Would that impact your desire to continue to hold onto this investment in similar size? Well, I referred to my earlier answer. I can't speculate on an ONT IPO as to some time and also likelihood. We've always said to our shareholders that were that event to occur, we will make our intentions clear, and we're only too into a consultation with them, and we will keep to that commitment. Next question. Following the sales over the last 18 months by Invesco and Lansdowne, nearly 50% of the company has transferred ownership. Only around 15% has been RNS and accounted for by new holders, leaving approximately 30%. It is hard to believe that all of this volume has ended up in the hands of those with holdings below the 3.3% reporting threshold. I think it is in the interest of other shareholders that you attempt to find out if somebody is stake-building and persuade them to reveal their position. I would be interested in your comments. We are certainly not aware of anyone stake-building, and we certainly have released all the TR-1s as soon as we have received them. There were several existing holders who did top up their holding as a result of that Invesco sale. There were quite a wide spread of buyers, and there were certainly new institutions who came on the register below that 3% threshold. As Greg said earlier, there is an analysis of shareholders to the best of our knowledge and belief in the presentation, which will go up on the website later in one of the appendices. I can't remember which appendix it is. Greg, does that show over 2%, does it? Yeah. Yeah. In appendix three on the presentation on the website, we will disclose every shareholder of 2% as far as we have been notified. Next question. During a period of VC boom in the States, why are we only able to raise such a small amount of money and from so few institutions to the U.S. fund? The answer to that is, that was all we were seeking to raise. Obviously, we don't want to raise significant amounts of money and dilute down PLC shareholders at a relatively young age in the age of the U.S. portfolio. If you think back to that slide I showed on the trend on investments and divestments in the portfolio, you will have noted in the first eight years in IP Group's history, probably 10 years actually, including five to seven years of Nanopore, the amounts of money invested in the portfolio were very, very small. The nature of this game is you do want to invest small amounts of money in the early years and allow a Darwinian principle to play out, then put more significant capital behind your winners as they become obvious. The U.S. portfolio is looking really very promising, I think, at the moment. You can see the bigger amounts of money will go in probably in a 2022, 2023 time period rather than in 2021. The answer is, we raised all the money and a bit more than we were seeking to raise. Right. I think we're down to our last question now. There's a couple we had on email, Alan, that I'll cover those as well. Do you want to do the Istesso? The next one's Istesso, and great, do you want to pick that one up? Conscious that there's been no change in attributed value to this holding for some time, is it still realistic? Will phase II-B trial be the only trigger? Is it still realistic? You'll see in the results release that this is one which is not valued on our last funding round. The GBP 6 million that we put into the company was convertible debt. Obviously given the size of it, we have taken a third-party valuation report into account. We've worked with Deloitte on that one and have done for the last couple of years. As part of the work that we've done in looking at the commercial side of the business over the last year, we've ensured that that model is accurate. Clearly it gives you a wide range of outcomes depending on the size of the market for RA and other anti-inflammatory indications. It's clearly one of the subjective valuations, but we're comfortable with it, and it's supported and agreed, and I'm pretty sure KPMG, when they reviewed it, rated it as sort of a medium balanced valuation. Yes, we are, and we do still believe that's realistic. Will phase II-B trial be the only trigger? It's clearly the main one. There might be some other bits of news around other indications, proof of concept, et cetera. The phase II-B is the one that we're pointing at as the main trigger. The next question was, U.S.A., will shareholding in Inc fall further in 2021? Well, as at December 2020, as Alan said, we own about 80% of the business. The funding, which will see the business for about two years in the U.S., will see us at about the 60% level for that period. Clearly we will look at that as one of our major places that we can allocate capital, at the point in time that the business next needs to raise funds. Any general feedback on large shareholder conversations last year regarding possible share buyback. All of that wealth of shareholder conversation feedback that we had since the half-year results last year has gone into shaping our capital allocation framework that we have articulated in this set of results under the joys of the expanded Section 172 world, where we talk about all of the various consultations we have with our important stakeholders, and we do cover that a little bit, and that'll be in the full annual report and accounts. I would say on the whole, major shareholders were supportive of a share buyback below NAV for excess capital over and above that which we can deploy to successfully deliver organic growth as per the first leg of the capital allocation policy. Great. Okay. We're at 11. We've got one final question, which is from our great friend Kerry at Numis. I'm going to answer that one, even if we go one or two minutes over, we'd be rude not to. The question is, can you comment on the recently announced proposals for a revised national security review on investments in the U.K., leading to possible global investor constraints? Sounds counterintuitive for Life Science and Tech sectors and your efforts to globalize U.K. asset platform. This is a trend we're seeing across the world where almost like as a result of recent geopolitical events, countries are becoming more xenophobic and passing legislation to prevent access to intellectual property from outside influences, is probably the diplomatic way to put it. The good news is that everyone's waking up to the value of hard science and intellectual property. Clearly it is a risk in the U.K., and we're actively involved in that sort of debate. We probably have more experience than the vast majority of people because we've seen similar legislation in the U.S. and in Australia. We're starting to see the emergence of a pattern. There's a lot of tub thumping in political statements, and then when you get into the detail, you're able to negotiate pragmatic ways around things so that you can continue to engage in investment activity. I think that's because the overall purpose of this legislation is probably not to stop legitimate investors buying minority interests in particular kind of companies. It is definitely kind of a risk, I agree with Kerry. It's a risk to the U.K., so it does need to be properly addressed. Okay, with that, we're one minute past 11. Is there any concluding remarks you'd like to make, Greg, or are we okay? I was just thinking we have had three or four questions in on email. I'm conscious that it's 11 o'clock. Many of the themes have been covered. If I just do one or two minutes, if people want to leave, then no problem. In the sort of spirit of completeness, I think it's just fair to cover those off. One was on Nanopore valuation. I hope the presentation and the comments that Alan made around the progress made commercially, particularly since Q3 last year drove our view on the Nanopore valuation. A second one was on does the board have a view on how much cash the group needs? Again, I hope that I've covered that one in terms of capital allocation. And then there were two more specifics. One was might Hinge Health be close to a sale or an IPO? There are a number of press reports in the U.S. quoting Dan Perez, who is the CEO there, that they're targeting an IPO in 2022 off the back of doubling their revenues to $200 million this year. There definitely is some public intention on that front. There was a more general question, are there any foreseeable milestones in 2021 and 2022 outside Life Sciences and strategic portfolios? I would answer that one to say yes. Probably two themes to look out for. In tech, there are a growing number of our businesses whose value will be driven by revenue growth. That includes Featurespace, which is one of our top five assets, which is AI for combating cyber fraud, and Garrison, which is a cyber defense business, and Azuri, which is in our clean tech portfolio. They do off-grid solar energy systems. It's also worth saying that a number of the analyst reports have picked up on the positive progress at WaveOptics, who we note count eight of the top 10 tech and social media companies, or the biggest top 10 in the world, as customers. They flagged in their 2019 results that they were planning a funding round. That's on the Tech side. Life Sciences, I guess aligned with that question around the portfolio coming good, the team has worked really hard to shape that portfolio into a handful of focus assets that we have great conviction on. There are about 15 significant clinical, technical or commercial milestones in the next two to three years. The first of which is the EMA or MHRA decision for Chronocort in Europe for Diurnal. You might have seen recently, if you follow that company, that the FDA recently confirmed the relatively easier 505(b) regulatory pathway for their big testosterone product, DITEST, and that has a really attractive market of GBP 5 billion a year. Clearly that's very interesting. Then finally, I'd say, we've been talking about maturing businesses and realizations. You'll come to see a number of the earlier lesser-known businesses over the next two to three years coming to the fore, and there's plenty more in the tail for investors to make great returns on. I think hopefully that answers all the questions that we have had. Great. Okay. Well, with that then, we will wish you all a very good day. Thank you very much for your attendance. If you have any follow-up questions then, by all means, just email Greg or I or Liz in our IR team, and we'll do our best to answer them. Thank you all very much. Thanks, everyone.