Afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for coming. I'm Paul McGreevy. I've met some of you, but not all of you. I'm the Chair of Venture Life Group. I've been working with the team for the last 18 months. In terms of my background, despite my very youthful looks, I'm 35 years in retail and FMCG. I was L'Oréal, Boots, The Body Shop, private equity, manufacturing. I've been the brand director, the R&D director, the operations director. A jack of all trades and master of absolutely none. Fortunately, we have quality in the room that you're gonna meet today in all these functions. Today, you're gonna hear from Jerry Randall, the CEO. If you don't know Jerry, yeah. You're gonna hear from the broader team as well. I'm just introducing the board for now. We've got Danny up there, the CFO, which I'm sure you've all met. We have Gianluca, who heads up our operations, yeah. That's the board. I won't do the broader team 'cause Jerry's gonna do that as he goes through it. In the 18 months I've been with the team and having worked with lots of big corporates, lots of small businesses, I was a few years with private equity as well, we've got a lot to share and a lot to be very proud of. The numbers are very good. The brands are excellent. The manufacturing's best in class. The R&D is exceptional. We have all of the foundation for an incredible business, and the numbers are starting to come through to reflect that. Hopefully today, with the broader team, we can build that confidence with you guys as well. At that point, I shall hand over to Jerry. Great. Thanks, Paul. Thanks everybody for coming. A few familiar faces, a few not so familiar faces. Really pleased today to introduce the wider Venture Life team for you. We've got some of our colleagues from Italy, some from the U.K. office, who are gonna talk to you about the brands. We're gonna talk to you about our development and manufacturing operations, about the opportunities ahead of us. I'm sure you'll all have lots of questions, but if I could ask if you save those till the end, so that we keep the flow going. We'll have plenty of time at the end, both within this forum, but also one-to-one outside with a coffee if you wanna chat with any of the folks here. We've got an agenda today. We're really pleased to have three wonderful key opinion leaders with us today. Dr. Shazia, Vanessa and Hilary, they're gonna be talking to you about three of our key brands and how they use them, the space that those brands operate in, and why they think they're good brands for us. Hopefully that'll be a useful introduction for you. After that we'll have a quick break, and then we're gonna get into distribution. How do we sell the products that we've got? The channels that we sell them in, how we sell them, how we target them, and that'll be from Lorenzo. Lorenzo's here. He's our head of U.K. European. From Natalia, who's here today, who looks after the international business for the brands. And then Jos, who looks after our Amazon and online. Later on, you're gonna hear from Marco, who's here today, and Marco looks after the customer brands in Italy. Gianluca's gonna talk to you about the history of Biokosmes. We're really delighted, this year's the 40th anniversary of Biokosmes, since Gianluca founded it, which is a fantastic achievement, and he's gonna talk about what we do there, how we support the brands that we make. How we support our customers in the customer brands part of the business, how that development and manufacturing's integral to our business and the way we operate and the efficiencies that we can bring. I'm really pleased to have Domenico with us here today. Domenico manages supply chain for us in Italy. He looked about 10 years younger two years ago before COVID and everything hit. Domenico's gonna tell you how we coped with the supply chain, how we managed that, and how we continue to manage it, 'cause it's not over yet, unfortunately. We've got Steffi here as well. Steffi runs our development in Italy. She looks after developing the new products and how we bring those through. We've got a number of other members of the team here today. We've got our three brand managers here, Naree, think's up here, Rebecca, Cherry, actually four brand managers, excuse me, and Charlie. These ladies look after the brands on the brand management side. Again, afterwards, please have a chat with them if you've got any questions around the brands. Wanna say thank you to Fran down here in the middle. Fran's done all the logistics today. Fantastic job. I think I've got everybody in there, so let's move on. I'm gonna give a quick overview of the business. Some of you heard this from me before, but as I say, the objective of today is to really get into depth and a bit more detail. We're a vertically integrated consumer healthcare business, and that means that we go right from the idea through innovation, through development, scale up, manufacturing, and distribution of the products. We sell into over 90 markets around the world. It can be a customer who has one product into many markets or many products into one market. Overall, we've got 200 partners around the world, and we'll talk more about those as we go through. Four locations. In Italy, our development and manufacturing is based. That's where most of our people are based. We also have a manufacturing site in Sweden, near Stockholm. We have commercial brands and head office here in the U.K. and a small operation in the Netherlands. We sell our products in the U.K. direct to retailers, so the people you see here, Boots, Lloyds, Superdrug on the pharmacy side, but also into the grocery multiples. Also in the Netherlands, De Kruidvat, Trekpleister. Outside of that, they're sold through partners around the world. We don't have any obligations for marketing or distribution costs in those settings, whereas we do support marketing in the U.K. The revenue that we have in the business is split between two sets of products, the Venture Life brands, and we'll be talking about three of our key brands today, and you've got some of those in the bags in front of you. They're generally higher gross margin. We own the products in entirety, the trademark, the brands, the patents, formulations, et cetera. Then we have our customer brands business, and that's the business that was the original business model of Gianluca when he founded Biokosmes, which is to develop and then manufacture products for companies. We offer both those services. You see at the moment, about 60% of our revenues are from the brands and 40% are from the customer brands. In the bottom left of the screen, you'll see The percentage of Venture Life brands has increased over recent years, but importantly, that doesn't mean the customer brands have gone down. The right-hand graph here shows you the growth in just the customer brands business, which has grown threefold since we joined with it in 2014. A very strong business and a strong business offering. These are the Venture Life brands and therapy areas. We're gonna be focusing on three today. We want to focus on the women's health area, particularly the Balance Activ brand that we had and we acquired from BBI. The energy management space, where we have a number of products there, and also the ear, nose, and throat, focusing on the recent acquisition of Earol, which I'm sure you're aware. We have these other areas, we're not gonna spend time on those today. Again, afterwards or if you've got questions about the other areas of the business, happy to cover those. Manufacturing's at the heart of what we do. When I founded Venture Life back in 2010, and based on my experience in Sinclair Pharma before when I worked with Gianluca, back in the noughties, having control of development manufacture is fundamental to client service. If you go and ask any of the customers, particularly on the customer brand side, what's the most important thing that we bring, it's service, and it's the fact that we deliver on time and in full to quality, and that's really, really valuable. When you have that in your own brands as well, it means you can sleep at night, it means you know product will be delivered, you can develop, you can broaden the brands, you can adjust formulations. Even recently in the last few years with the supply chain issues, we've had to adjust and modify formulations because of supply issues. That's really valuable and really important, and that's an integral part of what we do. We've got significant capacity in our manufacturing facilities. Gianluca's going to talk to this slide a bit later, give a bit more detail. It's really important as we grow that we have the capacity to produce more, and we have that in abundance. Finally, before I hand over to Danny, sustainability is a really important part of what we do. We have been doing it for a long time. In 2022 we launched an initiative called Sustainable Life. The idea behind that was to be more vocal and more planned and more deliberate about our sustainability. We identified our six priority sustainable development goals, which are here on the page. We identified a dedicated team, they're based in Italy. They run that part of the business for us. You'll be seeing more and more about the sustainability of the business as it goes forward. Some great goals achieved last year, in particular, significant reduction in carbon used in transportation by using train transportation, reduction in heating bills. In 2023 some of the activities we're going to apply for B Corp in the main Italian part of our business and then roll that out wider. Carbon footprint analysis, life cycle analysis, all ongoing. Big activity for us going forward, and that's really important for us as a business. I'm now gonna hand over to Danny. Danny's gonna talk about financials. I think just before I step away from the stand, you know, in terms of the Sustainable Life project, I think it's really important to us that the culture of the business develops. We spent a lot of time working on the culture of the business and how we work together and how we grow and develop, and that's forms a big part of our look at sustainability. Danny, over to you. Good afternoon, everyone. What I'll spend the time today doing is giving a bit of a financial overview of the business. We'll look at 2018 to 2022 to focus on that, but we'll also put that in context of 2023 market consensus, so the guidance that we've already issued publicly. We won't go into too much detail due to time, but we'll touch base on composition of the revenue, going a bit further into the VLG brands versus the customer brands. Light touch on cash, leverage and balance sheet, including working capital, and finally a bit of a financial roadmap to show where we've come from, where we are today, and where we would like to get to in the next few years. We'll kick off with an overview of the financial performance here. I know, we've seen a lot of familiar faces here, and we'll have been through these numbers before just to say that we've taken this forward to include the market consensus for 2023. The right-hand side pillar of each of these charts reflects the guidance that Singers and Sencos have out there at the moment. First thing to say is revenue, top left-hand side. You can see that revenue's grown from GBP 19 million in 2018 through to GBP 44 million at the end of last year. That's a revenue CAGR of 24% over that period. In line with the 2014 to 2018 as well, you'll see as we go forward in a few slides' time reflective of what we expect to deliver going forward as well. guidance out there for this year, 2023 market consensus, to deliver a 15% growth to get us to in region of GBP 51 million business. Just to say that, the growth to date has been achieved broadly half from organic growth and half from growth through acquisitions. We've acquired brands, we've then grown those brands organically. Typically in the first year of an acquisition, after an acquisition we account that as acquired growth. Just moving on to 2023. The key message is really to say, I'm sure a lot of you are aware, we bought another business at the end of 2022, HL Healthcare Limited, and that's the Earol brand. We'll get the full year impact of that going into 2023. We actually come out of 2022 at a run rate revenue of around GBP 49 million, but we'll see higher growth come this year from the VLG brands part of the business. The customer brands business had an exceptionally strong business last year, and we won't see that same level of growth next year. We'll talk more about that as we go on. Gross profits. I think you can see from the line on the slide, top middle, that, you know, that small dip in the 2021, 2022, beginning of 2022, that's very reflective of the supply chain environment. It's been a turbulent environment over the last few years and hence why Domenico's aged so much. you know, over that period, we've incurred around 2.5%-3% of pressures on our gross margin from input cost increases, energy cost increases. We've managed to pass around 1.7%-2% of that back to our customers through customer price increases, so there is a net negative impact there. Through the acquisitions we've been making, and we've done four acquisitions between 2018 to 2022. Those are margin-accretive brands that we acquire. Although our core business has had pressures from the supply chain environment, we've passed some of that on through price increases. We have been able to get a net margin improvement overall, through the accretive M&A and higher margin brands that we've been acquiring. Coming out of 2022, we are at a gross margin of just over 40%, but we expect that to step up by around 2.5 percentage points this year through higher growth of the higher margin VLG brands. On to adjusted EBITDA top right-hand side. A big increase in EBITDA last year in 2022 from GBP 6.6 million to GBP 9 million during the year. We did actually invest quite a lot in our infrastructure during 2022, bolstering our commercial teams, finance teams, and supply chain to prepare the business to manage the much bigger business we are today and ensure that we've got the right operations in place to deliver the growth that's ahead of us in our plans. With that, EBITDA margin has been increasing through the GM percentage margin improvement. We've had overhead investment. GM and EBITDA margins are now above 20.5% coming out of last year. We expect that again to go creep up to around 23% in the year ahead as per the consensus that's out there. Cash generation, really important one for us, so bottom right-hand side. Over the last couple of years it's been a real focus on cash generation, improving our cash conversion, so that's our EBITDA that turns into actual net cash generated, but also driving forward tighter working capital improvements as well, which I'll come onto. You can see here that cash generation was GBP 6.1 million in 2022, a big increase over the last few years. We see that increasing further with improved cash conversion to around 90% in 2023. Again, we'll talk to the reasons behind that as we go. A lot of you will have seen this slide before. It's just the revenue evolution of the business, as I like to call it, since we went on an IPO back in 2014. You can see that we've done 25% CAGR over that eight-year period. In the last five years, I talked on the last slide that there was a similar level of CAGR, again, half of that from organic growth and half from acquisitions. We acquired HLH at the end of 2022. That's on the 1st of December. Our 2022 revenues of GBP 44 million only include a very small impact from that acquisition. We've also shown the exit run rate coming out of the year. If you include that business, that's around a GBP 5 million revenue business. You can see we exited the year at second to right pillar, GBP 49 million of revenue. Just looking into 2023, I'm sure a few of you are thinking only GBP 1.6 million growth from 2022 exit run rate to 2023. It's important to iterate the exceptional performance of the customer brands business last year. That business delivered 41% growth from partnerships of key partners, and we don't expect that same level of performance to be achieved in 2023. There'll be a small retraction of the customer brands business. Overall, that business still delivering 15% CAGR over the last two years in line with its historic performance. That's not to be sniffed at despite the small retraction there. Therefore, to the point is that the turquoise bars at the bottom of this chart, these are the VLG brands, and these are the ones that we see growing significantly over this year. That's on the back of the acquisitions we've made, again, with filling out the distribution opportunities in U.K. and internationalizing the brands, which Lorenzo and Natalia will talk to shortly. It's really important to us that we continue to grow that part of the business because, as Jerry said earlier, those are the higher margin brands. Typically, we make around 46% on a blended basis from our VLG brands where compared to around 30% on our customer brands business. Our customer brands business creates operational leverage that helps the margin improvement on our VLG brands as well. I'm just gonna give a snapshot of what that VLG brands business looks like for a second. That's the higher margin part of our portfolio. Just in terms of geography, therapy area and by brand here, you can see that VLG brands were around GBP 28 million exit run rate revenue at the end of last year, including the new acquisition. Just over half of those revenues come in the U.K. through retail and pharmacy channels. These are typically recurring revenues, very long-standing customers, all the key retailers. There are still opportunity gaps in those retailers, which Lorenzo will talk to shortly. In terms of therapy area, the key three therapy areas we're going to talk today and hear from the guys around are energy management, women's health, and ear, nose, and throat. Those account for around 60% of the VLG brands portfolio today. All of those are highly margin accretive to some of the older brands in our portfolio. Within those three therapy areas, the key brands we'll be talking about are Balance Activ, Lift, and Earol. We touched briefly on cash on the first slide. We've had a significant improvement in cash generation from operations, as I explained, that's been driven by improvements in tighter working capital management, but also we've been making highly accretive cash conversion acquisitions. BBI was a 90% cash conversion acquisition. HLH is a 100% cash conversion acquisition. We'll see the benefit of some of that coming through in 2023 again. What I really want to talk to here is that, you know, in 2022, we actually had, although operating cash conversion was 69%, we built our inventory during 2022 by about GBP two and a half million. That had an adverse working capital flux in the business on a temporary basis to help us manage the supply chain situation. If it not, if not for that, we would have seen greater cash conversion than shown here. Going into 2023 with a normalization of those inventory levels, we won't see that same adverse flux and we'll have the benefit of the highly cash generative HLH acquisition. We should see cash conversion push upwards of 90%. If I just draw your eyes to the bottom table here, we wanted to touch base on free cash flow briefly to show how that bridges from net cash generated from operations down to free cash flow itself. Typically, we have around GBP one and a half million of CapEx spend in the business each year. Around half of that is on maintenance CapEx, keeping the facilities up and running and fit for purpose, and half of it's on growth CapEx, investing in innovation, automation, and also developing new products through R&D as well. We do have some one-off investment for MDR over the next couple of years, that's related to upgrading from MDD to MDR. This is a significant investment, but that will taper away after 2024. Free cash flow for 2023 consensus is in the region of GBP 7.6 million. That gives an FCF yield of around 16%. I think that's attractive and worth calling out. Leverage. Over the last couple of years, to those of you who know our business well, we did a, an equity raise back in December 2020, which largely funded the acquisition of BBI Healthcare in June 2021. The acquisition we made in end of last year, was funded mainly at the upfront consideration, was funded from our RCF, our revolving credit facility. That pushed up our net debt at the end of 2022. We had a spike in net debts due to the timing of that acquisition. Our, our leverage therefore, if you draw to the middle column of this table, is around 1.65 x on a net leverage basis at the end of last year. That's against SFA-defined EBITDA, just to be clear. SFA-defined EBITDA adjusts for lease payments, treats them as a cash cost, as an expense in the P&L. Otherwise, our adjusted EBITDA is around GBP 1 million higher, it would result in a slightly lower leverage ratio. Apologies for the detail there. What I wanted to point out was that as we move forward, we're going to be able to rapidly reduce our net leverage because of the high cash generation I've been talking about. Actually, since the end of last year, you'll have seen in one of our recent statements we've issued, leverage has come down to around 1.35x, 1.4 x. That's a big improvement since the end of last year and as we planned it. We expect leverage by the end of this year to come down well below 1.0 x. Last thing I'll say on this slide is that there was deferred consideration for the acquisition of HLH, and that was based on them hitting certain targets, which I'm glad to say they achieved, so they got their payment. It also means the business is performing as we expected it. That consideration's all been paid since the end of last year and was funded through cash as opposed to needing the RCF facility, which is a sign of the cash generation continuing to come through. Balance sheets. Just briefly, more focused on working capital here. A strong balance sheet, largely comprising intangibles acquired through acquisitions over the years. Net working capital as a percentage of revenue, if I just draw your eyes to the bottom table here, peaked at around 38% of revenue at the end of December 2022. That was driven up by build of our inventory, but also phasing of our revenues in our business. Our debtor book, it's peaked at an exceptional high point at the end of last year. We've had that cash collection come through at the beginning of 2023. We can already see that our net working capital as a percentage of revenue has dropped by about 5% since the end of the year. Typically during the year, it's closer to 27.5%-30%. On a more normal basis, it peaks at the end of the year due to the phasing point on revenue. As a business, we see our opportunity to drive down this further. You know, the consensus again out there has got us getting to 30% as a percentage of revenue this year. That's gonna reflect normalizing the inventory level. Holding them at, in line on a pound note basis, but as a proportion of our revenues, a much leaner operation because we've been able to be more flexed in the supply chain, which is helping, but also tighter debtor management and also with a bigger portfolio of products and customers, we're able to smooth out our revenue profile during the year, which helps with our phasing and working capital position at the end. Last slide from me is a financial roadmap which we felt would be useful to show. What we've got here is 2018 left-hand side. This is where we were. We were a GBP 19 million business doing EBITDA margins of 14.5%. At that time, the VLG brand's revenues accounted for 35% of the business. Move forward to 2022 where we are today. We're a GBP 44 million business making 20.5% EBITDA. The VLG brand's revenues now account for 53% of the business. We've grown at between 24%-25% over both the last five years and the five years before that. The guidance out there for the next two years, needless to say, is cautious guidance. I think learnings from some of the past as well there, we're pleased we've been delivering on the numbers over the last two issuances. What we've got here is a cautious guidance taking us to GBP 55 million by end of 2024. You'll see that in the Singers and Sencos notes, increasing gross margin again up to 43%, EBITDA margins tracking towards 24%. You'll have seen our AGM statement recently, back in May, we're tracking to these numbers. This is a cautious outlook. There's no M&A in here. To be clear, these are organic growth. The VLG brand's revenues will continue to increase upwards from 53% to, as we are today, to around 63% in two years' time. What I wanted to point out more usefully, I feel, is where can we be in a few years' time? What's our financial ambition? We say that in the next five years, by 2027, we could easily be a 100 million pound business. That, you know, a GBP 100 million business by that point, pushing 50% gross margin, pushing EBITDA margins of around 30% and bringing the VLG brand's revenue, part of the portfolio, up to around 75%. We don't want to take it to 100% because our customer brand's business is very important to us and gives us great operational leverage to improve the margin on those VLG brands. Through the combination of those two, the higher margin VLG brands, plus the increased operational leverage from our customer brand's business, that will help us deliver those margin improvements, which I think are modest. Delivering that with a revenue CAGR, just to put that back in context again, I keep talking about 25% over the last five years, 26% over the five years previous to that. Delivering that in 2027 is doing 22% CAGR. There's nothing out of the norm here. This is how we run the business, how we plan to run the business, half from organic, half from acquisitions, and we think this is very deliverable. One of the key things that I wanted to get across today is that through the growth of EBITDA in the business, we've got ability to manage our net leverage at a much better and tolerable level to us. We can manage net leverage well below 1.0 x in getting to these sorts of numbers. There will be more M&A that we plan to do. We can't define what exactly that looks like right now, but more bolt-on M&A which will help us accelerate getting to 2027 type of position. With that, I'll pause. Thank you. Thanks, Danny. Hopefully that's been a useful run through for you. We're now going to move a bit more into the brands that we have in the business. These are the three key focus brands. We acquired Balance Activ and Lift in 2021 as part of the BBI acquisition, roughly in the middle of the year. Earol, we acquired in 2022. I think as we said already, as Danny's made clear, our numbers going forward, particularly this year, we're not intending to do any M&A this year. We've bought some great brands. We've invested in our business and our factory and our development. We're going to focus on that and the organic growth of the business this year, then look to the future where we consider more M&A. I'm going to start with Balance Activ. This is a brand in the area of women's intimate health. We acquired this from BBI. It came primarily with a product for bacterial vaginosis, this is a pH imbalance in the vagina. It's often misdiagnosed as thrush, but it's treated differently. Initially, we had three products when we acquired the business, which was the bacterial vaginosis, the menopause moisture, and the soothing cream. We've been working to develop more products in this area, so we've developed a product for thrush, which isn't a drug, it's a medical device, and also, an intimate wash. We currently only have a 3% market share of the women's intimate health in the U.K, and our target is to improve that market share. Currently, we only have 10.% brand awareness on the brand. That's from recent research we've undertaken and again, our target is to improve that. What we're looking to do at the moment is evolution of the brand. Improve some of the messaging around it, look and feel, mission and values, website update. We did a recent study on 5,000 women, which we're analyzing now. Improve the reach, how many people see our product, where they can buy it, and how they hear about it, new product development expansion, which is really important for us to broaden the range. There are eight categories in women's intimate health. We're currently in five, we're targeting seven, 2024 we'll see some more development in this area. If I look at the revenues of this business, overall GBP 5.5 million of revenue in 2022, that was split evenly between international and U.K.. We are the number one bacterial vaginosis brand in the U.K. by volume, so 50% market share. Internationally, a lot of those sales come through Bayer, which is one of the major partners we have in the business. We do have some other partners, I'll share those on the next slide. You'll see reasonably steady growth over the last few years. In particular, in 2020, there were a lot of international launches, so you can see a pickup in revenues there as there was a little bit of a stocking effect. We're delivering reasonable growth off this portfolio going forward. Internationally, as I said, Bayer is a big partner of ours. We have a semi-exclusive relationship with Bayer. They have rights in 54 countries, for the brand, and they sell the brand under the CanesBalance brand, which is part of the Canesten range, which I'm sure some of you will recognize. It's a very similar product to ours, treats bacterial vaginosis, it's made in the same factory. As a premium brand, they sell that at a much higher price point than ours. We have other partners, so Viatris, as you see there, Grünenthal, Brora, some of the others. We're also, with Natalia and her team, looking to expand the Balance Activ product internationally. Under the semi-exclusive arrangement with Bayer, we're entitled to enter countries that they are already in with the CanesBalance product, and therefore benefit from their entry into those markets, as you've seen recently with the launch in Brazil. In the U.K. market, just over GBP 2 million of revenues, as I said, we're the number one brand for bacterial vaginosis in the U.K., growing at just under 8%. It's presented in two forms. There's a gel in the long neck tube you can see there on the left, and also a pessary format. The gel is by far the biggest seller. That's seven tubes in a box. We recently launched a value pack in the U.K., 14 tubes in the box, and that's done very well, particularly in this environment of high cost of living pressures, where people are looking for value when they're shopping, not only going to discounters, but also, looking for value in the pricing. It's a growing brand. If we look at the year to date, Balance Activ is the only bacterial vaginosis brand in growth, in the U.K. market. Market's back slightly 2% over the year. CanesBalance is priced much higher than Balance Activ, and we think they've seen pressure from people shopping for value. We've benefited from that with the growth in our brand. The Femfresh brand, which is relatively new, also after launch, has not proceeded very well. It's a trusted brand by millions of women. It's sold on Amazon. It's sold in all the major retailers. We have a symptom checker online, and we've had 850,000 ladies have gone through that to check their symptoms, whether it's to see if it's bacterial vaginosis or thrush or something else. Obviously, if it's bacterial vaginosis, they can click through and buy our product. One of the reasons for developing a thrush product is because quite a lot of those ladies will actually have thrush, and we want them to be able to click through and buy a thrush product, which we can provide. As I said, they're also aided and trusted by really credible voices here in the U.K., and we've got Dr. Shazi here to tell you more about that. The range. We've got three products there, as you can see, for bacterial vaginosis. The value pack is the yellow branded inner corner pack there. The thrush cream, which is just going through launch. The moisture gel, the intimate soothing cream, and we launched the intimate daily foam wash this year. What's important is that we continue to meet consumer demands going forward, and consumer demands are always changing, whether it's healthcare, whether it's any area of consumer markets, they want progression, they want new products, they want development. For us, there's three areas where we're going to be working here. Remote working is getting less and less. I'm sure it will continue for a long time, but on-the-go products are becoming more relevant. Something you can have in your handbag, in your jacket, whatever, at work. We're working on a number of those products going forward. Wellbeing is really important and preventative. What's really important about our product, Balance Activ, is it's completely natural. It's recommended for people because of its natural base. But for wellbeing and prevention also, we're looking at probiotics and food supplements, which are becoming more common. Finally, the aging population, more in the area of menopause and incontinence. Those areas of development for us for future products. For us, Balance Activ is about a different approach to women's health, empowering women in the area of intimate health with expert advice, natural solutions, and dealing with every stage of their life. As Charlie put together for us, enlighten, encourage, and empower. With that, I'd like to welcome Dr. Shazia Malik, up to the lectern. Dr. Malik's a consultant obstetrician gynecologist. We're very lucky to have Shazia with us here today because she's been delivering babies into the world for the last 24 hours, so thank you so much. Last 72 hours. Last 72 hours. Excuse me. Thank you, Shazia, and. Thank you. I'll hand over to you. Hello, good afternoon. Thank you for the introduction. Why am I here? Well, there are two reasons. One, I believe in the brand, and secondly, because I've been a gynecologist now for 30 years, so I feel I'm at a point now where I can, you know, with confidence talk about women's intimate health in a way that they feel comfortable with. I have two teenage daughters and it's important, I think, with the young generation now to be, A, be able to talk about it, B, to educate them, and C, to find products such as Balance Activ, which aren't necessarily medicated. That's what I like about the brand actually. If I look at my youngsters and the women that I see in my clinics, I get lots of mothers bringing their teenage daughters to see me now and lots of women who come with discharge who are worried, who don't know what's going on. The key change in women's intimate health over the last few years is that women want to find natural solutions. They don't want to be given drugs for everything. They are actually increasingly resistant to using hormones or drugs for anything, never mind their intimate health. This is where I think the brand is going to grow and why it fits into the current climate. Why bacterial vaginosis? There's a lot of men in the audience. I don't know how much you know about bacterial vaginosis. Let me tell you. You probably have heard about thrush or Canesten, haven't you? Because they've really pushed that product, and so vaginal discharge, which lots of women don't know is normal, has become synonymous with a yeast infection or thrush. But actually, BV is twice as common as thrush in women, so it's often not diagnosed or misdiagnosed, and that's why this discussion is important. Discharge doesn't equal Canesten and it doesn't equal thrush. Most of the time it may, or certainly two-thirds of the time, it may be BV. BV is an infection, so it's caused by an imbalance in the acid pH of the vagina, but it's actually an overgrowth of unhealthy or abnormal bacteria, and so that's why women get the symptoms. They need to be able to diagnose it in order to treat it properly, so I see lots of women who come, "I've got this discharge. I've been using Canesten," or, "I've been using a particular wash, and it hasn't gone." It hasn't gone because you were treating something you actually don't have. Sometimes you may be treating something as an abnormality when it's normal for you. That's why BV is important. It's important because mostly it occurs in women in their reproductive years, so women who are sexually active. It's also actually quite common in women who are past the menopause. Just this morning, in between my deliveries, I was typing a quick thing for The Times talking about menopause and HRT and what women... You know, should we give it to everybody? What we should do for all women, who are 50% of the population, is empower them to think about and talk about their women's health. The menopause, actually BV incidence has a spike after the menopause as well. That, again, is because your vaginal mucosa changes, therefore you're more prone to get an overgrowth in abnormal bacteria, and therefore you need a product that is gonna help your vaginal environment to become healthier and maintain normal healthy bacteria. Why did the brand approach me? I've done lots of articles on vaginal health over the last few years, the vaginal microbiome is one of my areas of interest. Why is the vaginal pH and environment important? The vagina naturally has millions of bacteria, billions of bacteria. When we talk about bacteria, we automatically assume that it's something dirty or it's something abnormal. Part of my mission is educating women that your vagina, A, is a self-cleaning organ, so you don't need to wash it, and B, it's full of millions of bacteria which keep it healthy. There are certain things that happen to women which can alter the pH and therefore the bacterial balance, and that's where BV is more likely to occur. What are the key things that happen to women that can affect the pH, that can affect the bacteria? Pre-pubertal girls don't get BV. It becomes a problem once you start your periods and then can continue after the menopause. What happens when you go through what we call the menarche or puberty? Your periods start. The reason you have periods is that your hormones are changing. As your ovaries start to become active and you go through puberty, your hormones through your menstrual cycle change and hormones also affect your bacteria in your vagina, they affect your acid pH. It's extraordinarily common to see women who say that I'm getting a discharge or a smell just before my period or just after your period. What actually a lot of girls are not taught at school is that your vaginal discharge changes throughout your menstrual cycle. As your estrogen levels rise in the first half of your cycle, your discharge then becomes clear and more watery as you're about to ovulate to facilitate passage of sperm. As your estrogen drops, but your progesterone levels change, the mucus can become thicker, and then as the pH changes that's where bacteria can overgrow and you can get a smell or a abnormal discharge just before you start your period. We don't know why some women are more prone to get BV around menstruation than others. It could be that their vaginal microbiome isn't as healthy and as balanced as it should be, which is why we discuss it. It could be that some women, for example, are just immunocompromised compared to others, or they're stressed. All sorts of things can feed into that. BV and menstruation is a key area that can be a problem and that needs to be addressed. As I said to you before, it's more common in women who are in their reproductive years. Why is that? It's because they're sexually active. If you're sexually active and you're exposed to semen and lots of women still don't have the message that they should actually use condoms to protect them from STIs, and they seem very keen to get off hormones or have a coil and not use anything artificial in their body. The pH of semen is different to the pH of your vagina. When you have sex without a condom and you're exposed to semen, that changes the pH. It doesn't mean you shouldn't have sex, of course, but it can mean that in some women, that balance shifts and they're more likely to get BV. Interestingly, women in same-sex relationships, if they share sex toys, they can pass BV on to each other. That's a conversation I have. You don't pass BV on to your male partners, and your male partner isn't giving you BV. Certainly being sexually active and being exposed to semen can increase your incidence of getting it. Why is that important if you're sexually active? If you get BV that is untreated or you have recurrent BV, you are more likely to get sexually transmitted infections. Women with untreated BV. Why is BV a problem? It's a problem because it changes the bacterial balance of your vagina. It changes your mucosal immunity and protection. Therefore, that's probably why you're more likely to get STIs when you're exposed to them. You're less protected if you have untreated BV or recurrent BV, and that's why another reason it's important to treat it in sexually active women. There's another group of women that I've been seeing over the last two, three years. I've been seeing more of them. They have a hormone coil or any coil, and for some reason they present with BV that doesn't seem to be able to go away despite antibiotics or Balance Activ sometimes. I'm trying to shift them on to Balance Activ because what we don't want to do is repeated courses of antibiotics. If a coil is the preferred method of contraception or the only one she can use, we need to find a solution. That's another group of women that we see. Excessive sweat. Now, why is that important? Well, since lockdown, everybody has been either in the gym, cycling in Regent's Park, I can't get through in the mornings, yeah? That's women as well. Or they have been running. The number of women who I see now who are addicted to running or the gym has massively increased since lockdown. What happens is that they're wearing the latest trendy gear, they're going to the gym before work, they're rushing off to work, and then they're probably going to the gym after work as well. They may or may not have time for a shower, but if they do, they've not understood that your intimate health is affected by heat and sweat. There's a group of fitness-addicted women that I see with persistent or troublesome vaginal discharge, which may or may not be thrush or BV. These are triggers for BV that we talk about with the women. What are the-- I don't know if you all want to know the symptoms of BV. You probably don't, so I'm gonna skip over it. Most of you are male, so you won't be, you know, you're not going to suffer this problem, but your partners need to know. I would urge you to direct them to our website. It's been a great pleasure working with Charlie, who has overhauled it. Why have we overhauled the website? Because it's frightening at the lack of knowledge. In fact, we had a webinar a couple of weeks ago where we were talking with different experts in female health, sexual health or whatever, and it was a pleasure to take part of that, and that was on the back of this survey that Venture Life have just done with 5,000 women. A key problem in women's health care is the lack of knowledge. Whose fault is that? Well, it's our fault probably as doctors. It's our fault in schools. You know, as mothers, we're now opening up these conversations. It needs to start young. If you don't know your anatomy, if you don't know that vaginal discharge is normal and what is normal discharge, you're certainly not going to be able to diagnose what is abnormal and whether it's thrush or BV. BV, for example, doesn't cause itching, is an important thing. It does in a small group of women, but it presents normally with an abnormal discharge that has a fishy odor. There's a group of women that don't know they have BV, so we diagnose it in our clinics, and then we have to treat it. What we don't want is repeated courses of antibiotics. Why is that? They then also kill the healthy bacteria, and you create a vicious circle. You have As I said, the youngsters don't want to take medication. I've talked a little bit about why I recommend Balance Activ. The key thing is that it stops me having to give repeated courses of antibiotics. It's user-friendly. You can have it in your cupboard and use it repeatedly. If you're getting the symptoms, you can go to the website, have a look. If you think you've got BV, you can use it. If you've used it and you don't have BV, you are not going to harm yourself. That's a really important part of any treatment, is that you are not harming. It's not just treating, it's not to cause harm. Balance Activ, how does it work? Well, it works in two ways. The first is to change the pH of the vagina, so to get it back up to the more level that it should be, which helps prevent the overgrowth of the abnormal bacteria. The vagina is, it's a mucosal surface. If you think of other mucosal surfaces that you know is, for example, inside your mouth. If you want to keep your mouth healthy or any mucosal surface, you need to have a barrier that then protects that surface. It protects it from friction, it protects it from infection, and from pH changes. The vagina mucosa requires glycogen in the cells to keep them plump, to keep the vagina moisturized, and to keep it in a balanced state. Balance Activ works in both those ways. It's not just the pH, it's to help with the glycogen. That's why it can also help post-menopausal women, because as their estrogen levels drop, their vaginal mucosa becomes thinner. A lot of the symptoms that women get, not just with BV, but with soreness or dryness or itching after the menopause, is the changes in the vaginal mucosa. That's where Balance Activ can help. Because it's got two formulations, it's more user-friendly. Some women will prefer to put a capsule, other women will prefer to put a tube. It allows them to choose what works for them. That's why I think it's a good brand to work with. I've worn their colors today as well. I like the fact that it's green. I think that's good. In the sort of current climate, something green is good. It feels more user-friendly. It feels safer. The website is now starting to reflect it as well. Let's talk about women's health and where Balance Activ can go. What am I seeing in my practice? As you all know, the NHS is on its knees for all sorts of different reasons. What that means for patients is that they can't get appointments. They can't get appointments with their GP, and if they manage to get an appointment with their GP, they're then going to wait six months to see me in the NHS. That doesn't help you if you've got a nasty discharge, if it's got a smell, you're afraid to go to school, you're afraid to go to work, you can't have sexual relationships because you're embarrassed about it. It doesn't help you if you have to wait six months to get help. What are you going to do? You're gonna turn to social media and the internet. That's why social media is so important, and that's why I think the campaign and the direction you're taking, Charlie, is extremely important. I see it with my two teenage daughters, the rubbish that they buy off TikTok, and I'm forever saying, "It is not true. Do you realize you've been scammed?" You know, "Don't worry, Mommy. My friends, blah, blah." Women, teenagers, even older women, working women, if you're a working woman in the city, if you can afford it, you're gonna come and see me. Yeah? I will help you. If you can't afford it or if you're working with four or five children and you don't have time for yourself, you're going to have a look online, or you're going to go into Boots or go to Amazon and buy something that looks like it might help you. What Balance Activ needs to do is be the prime product for BV, so that when you want to access treatment, you're looking at this product. To do that, you need to be able to go to their website and diagnose what you have. I think that's a real area for growth for this product. As I said at the beginning of my talk, the increasing reluctance to either trust some health professionals or to use hormones or to use medicated products in millennials is a key factor in how they approach health and how they mismanage their own health, actually. I think that's a real growth area simply because women are getting frustrated, and they will want help. The cost of living crisis is important because, as I said, women may not be able to access private healthcare. They need to get on with their lives, and so therefore, they're looking for products not only that will help them, but that they can afford. The price of everything is going up now, and so Balance Activ needs to remain competitive in that market. Proactive self-care. Well-being, health, being your own best advocate, brands need to provide the right information with the right authority that people believe and then actually the feedback is, "You helped me. I made the diagnosis, I treated it, and it's a brand that I trust." Yeah. In terms of where I see this going and where I see my own practice going is getting an increased share in social media. That is the future. The reason it's important is that is the future of all healthcare and in particular women's and intimate healthcare. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Shazia. Thank you so much. That was great. Really enlightening for us, thank you. I'm gonna talk about Lift now, which is our next focus brand. We've got Vanessa, who's gonna come and talk to us as our key opinion leader later. Lift is a glucose supplement. This is a product we acquired from BBI Healthcare back in 2021. It's delivered by liquid shots or chewables, chewable tablets you take in your mouth, I'll show you those in a moment. Our aim is to be the number one energy management brand for everyday sports energy, whilst remaining a source of glucose brand of choice for the diabetic community. At the moment, principally it'd be diabetics who take this product recommended by pharmacists. If they're having a hypoglycemic episode, they'll take it. What's really good about the Lift product, it's a metered dose of glucose, so you know exactly how much you're taking when you use it. That's really important for the diabetics. What we want to do with this brand is own the space more than we do now, fill out with new product development so we grow the brand and grow the business, and work with KOLs like Vanessa to influence and drive people to the use of the product. As I said, it comes in chewable tablets on the left here, so we do 10s and we do 50s, different flavors, and also in glucose shots. The brand itself over the last three years has grown very well, so you see over 30% compound annual growth rate. At the moment, we've got a 27% share of the U.K. market for these glucose supplements. Dextro is the biggest competitor in this space. Dextro is not so easy to take for the user, particularly for the diabetic. With Lift, you get that metered, measured dose, so that's really valuable. As you can see there, the Lift brand has been growing. It's getting stronger in terms of market presence, and Dextro has been moving backwards. The majority of the sales at the moment from this brand are in the U.K.. One of our targets is to internationalize this product more as we go forward, also along with the new product development that we're working on. It's the fastest-growing glucose supplement, so it is ahead of the category growth by nearly 9%. It's the number one glucose shot in the vitamin mineral supplement section. It's widely available in Amazon. It's well-distributed in the U.K.. Top 10 ranking in Amazon, and a 47% awareness within the consumer group, which is a very strong awareness for the brand. What makes Lift different? Well, it's got no artificial stimulants. There's no caffeine, no taurine, free from gluten, sodium, and all those other aspects, which is very important, particularly for the diabetic user. It's fast-acting. That's very important as well. If you're having a hypoglycemic episode, you need it to work quickly, and it's vegetarian and vegan friendly. It's measured dose, and it's low calorie. Again, that's important for the diabetic user, and also it's portable. What's really important is the packaging. You can take it around and carry it in your, in your bag, your handbag, your case, whatever. Really useful product and suitable for many there. We like to say that it's for when your body needs the glucose most, and that could be in sports performance, it could be for long days, late nights, and as it's being used at the moment, blood glucose management. Looking forward, what we're doing with this brand in particular is to move it into that, those areas of sport, sports performance, long days. We're not talking about the aggressive gym user. We're talking about everyday use for energy, on the go, say in the car at work or when you travel. That's the brand, and I'm delighted to introduce Vanessa, who's gonna talk to us now. Vanessa, also known as the diabetic health coach, qualified trainer. Vanessa's been a Type 1 diabetic since the age of three, so she knows the condition really well, and I'm looking forward to what she's got to share with us. Thank you very much for the introduction. Yes, as you mentioned, I have Type 1 diabetes. I've had Type 1 diabetes since the age of three years old, and it's played a huge part in my life, just as Lift has. I'm gonna go through obviously how the product has made such a huge difference to my life living with Type 1 diabetes. When it comes to Type 1 diabetes, it's all about managing glucose levels, and what's really important is to treat low blood sugars when they arise, and that's exactly what Lift helps me to do. As I say, I'm a qualified personal trainer. I'm an online health coach, and my niche audience are people who also live with diabetes, both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. And yeah, as I say, I'm also a board-certified behavioral analyst as well, so helping people to change their healthy habits and healthy behaviors for the better. Just a little bit of an overview about diabetes. 4.7 million people in the U.K. have diabetes. There's so many different types of diabetes. The main two that a lot of people talk about, Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Around five million people in the U.K. living with diabetes, and also 1.9 million missed routine checks between 2021 to 2022. In terms of the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, this is kind of, this is what gets mixed up a lot with people ’cause we tend to just say diabetes. If people say to me, you know, "What, what condition do you have?" I just say diabetes. When it comes to the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition. I was diagnosed when I was three years old, and basically what it means is that the immune system destroys the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. I now have to do the job of my pancreas. I have to administer insulin. I have insulin injections. Some people also have insulin pumps as well. It's all about just basically doing the job of an organ, managing glucose levels the best I can. It's not easy. It is a full-time job. Luckily there's so much technology these days that's making it a lot easier. As I mentioned, only treatment is to inject or infuse insulin via pump therapy. When it comes to Type 2 diabetes, this is the most common form of diabetes. 90% of people who have diabetes have Type 2 diabetes. Usually affects the over 40s, but it is becoming a lot more common in younger people. A lot of the time it is linked in with lifestyle, this is basically where the body becomes resistant to the insulin that pancreas is producing. A lot of the time it is managed by, you know, healthier lifestyle, diet, and exercise, and also medication in some circumstances. What is a hypo? This is a term that I tend to use quite a lot, especially, you know, day to day, because as I mentioned, when it comes to Type 1 diabetes, it is having to manage glucose levels and basically stop them from dropping, stop them from going too high. There's two terms. There's hypoglycemia, which is low blood sugar, there's also hyperglycemia, which is high blood sugar. For myself, I'd say I've got quite good control of my diabetes. I mean, I've had it for such a long time. I wouldn't say I was very well controlled as a teenager. Being a teenager growing up with Type 1 diabetes is quite difficult, as I've got a lot older, I have come to be able to manage it a lot better. Again, using products such as Lift has really helped with that. In terms of what a hypo is, it happens when the blood glucose level drops too low, and basically it is dangerous. I mean, if I was to give you my experience of what a hypo feels like, it could be dizziness, it could be feeling a little bit shaky, you know, sweating, confusion, again, it depends on how low my glucose levels have gone as well. There have been instances where my glucose level has dropped very low, like years, not anytime recently, but years ago. I was actually in a swimming pool when I was 15 years old, and I ended up having a really severe hypoglycemia episode, and I woke up on the side of the swimming pool. Anyway, I was okay. Yeah, that's the thing, when it comes to hypoglycemia, it can be very dangerous and that's why it is really, really important to have something that is going to help to get our glucose levels up very quickly. In terms of glucose tablets or shots are usually recommended, as they do enter the bloodstream quickly. In terms of my own experience with Lift, it has played a really huge role. I've actually used Lift for years now, and what I love about it is just how easy it is to take. I mean, I've got my shot here and, you know, if my glucose levels were to drop slightly before I was due to come up and talk, they're fine, by the way, I could just easily take a quick shot and then my glucose levels will come up straight away. As we've mentioned as well, the fact that it's controlled in terms of the grams of glucose and also the calories as well, it makes it very easy, so you know, what I'm taking and to track what I'm taking as well. One thing that's very difficult when it comes to type one diabetes, and a lot of my clients tell me this as well, and we can all relate, when glucose levels are low, sometimes we get quite hungry. That's another sign of hypoglycemia, it's very, very easy to overconsume. Overconsume, you know, sweets or whatever it is that we've got access to at the time, it's kind of knowing how much we need to take to get the glucose levels back up. This is where Lift comes in because again, it's all controlled in terms of how much we need to help to get the glucose levels back up to an adequate level. It makes a huge, huge, huge difference. What I also love as well is the packaging. When it comes to other, you know, other products, you know, other glucose tablets, they would, you know, be in paper packaging if you were to accidentally get that wet, for example, you could no longer use those glucose tablets. Lift, again, the packaging really sturdy packaging that I can just shove in my bag and if my drink leaks in my bag, it's all good. Yeah, it has made a huge difference and especially as well with, you know, I like to travel, I like to, you know, go on holiday. It makes it so much easier when traveling just to be able to quickly treat my hypos using Lift products. The science behind the brand. Glucose, as I mentioned, quickest form of energy to our bodies, especially when it comes to treating hypoglycemia. It contains glucose in a ready-to-use form, meaning that it doesn't need to be digested before it gets to work. One thing that my diabetes consultant used to say to me is, "Make sure that you don't treat your hypos with chocolate." Even though I really wanted to, because when you've got Type 1 diabetes, you kind of, you've gotta limit the, let's say, the sugary foods that you can have. When your glucose levels drop, it's an opportunity to have something with a lot more sugar in. I was told not to have chocolate, that's because again, it doesn't work as quickly to get the glucose levels back up as Lift does. Glucose absorbed easily in the body by the blood, raising the blood sugar levels quickly, providing the user with a surge of energy and blood sugar levels. That's really important because as I say, when my glucose levels drop, and I mean the symptoms, you can't really explain them. You just feel a little bit confused. There's been times where I've not been able to get my words out, due to the lack of glucose in my system and by using Lift, it just helps me to just get back to normal so much more quickly. Which is, again, absolutely fantastic. Once glucose has been transported to the cells, a process called cellular respiration releases the stored energy and converts it to energy that cells can then use. Yeah, a really, really, really important thing when it comes to treating low blood sugars in Type 1 diabetes, and could also be the case in people with Type 2 diabetes as well if they're medicated. again, I'm not a doctor, but I know that speaking with people who have Type 2 diabetes who use insulin, for example, they may need to use products as well to bring the glucose levels up. What about wider population who don't have diabetes? as I mentioned, I'm also a personal trainer, so I do also have clients who don't have diabetes, one-to-one clients. when it comes to training, obviously glucose levels do tend to drop during sessions, so it's really, really useful when it comes to medium to high intensity exercise that requires sustained levels of activity. I actually say to my clients who don't have diabetes that, you know, "Just try one of these. This will give you a little bit more energy." Yeah, I do get a lot of positive feedback. Lift can be used during exercise to quickly restore glucose levels and to help maintain sports performance. Independent research carried out by Lift reveals that 87% of consumers have dual motivations for using glucose products across both sports energy and lifestyle energy, and products that are applicable across both usage motivations have the greatest potential again, which offers an opportunity for Lift. I mean, if I didn't have diabetes, I would 100% still be using Lift for sports performance. Yeah. Been an absolute life changer. You know, it does, it saves my life, which is crazy, but it really does. Again, as I mentioned, this presents an opportunity for Lift to leverage its expertise and heritage in glucose energy management, and to create clearly defined consumer spaces within the sports and lifestyle energy. Yeah, as I mentioned, I highly recommend it to all of my clients with diabetes, but also all my clients without diabetes as well. That's me. Thank you. [audio distortion] [audio distortion] [audio distortion] Thanks very much, Vanessa. We're gonna have one last set of slides on the Earol product. Earol was a product that we acquired at the end of 2020. As Danny referred to in his presentation, we acquired a business called HL Healthcare. Earol is a metered-dose olive oil spray. It's clinically proven. It soften and remove the earwax. People of all ages can suffer from this, particularly children, obviously people with hearing aids, but also a lot of people through all of their life. It prevents and soothes itching as well. It's got a patented actuator and liquid formulation. The great thing about the actuator is when it goes into the ear and it sprays, it covers the whole of the ear canal. It's not like dripping olive oil in that then can leak out. You get good coverage and not leakage. It uses a pharmaceutical-grade olive oil, so very high percentage of olive oil here. This is a product that had been developed by a chap who we bought the company from. He'd run it for 15, 20 years. Done a lot of work with audiologists and key opinion leaders. Hilary is here to speak to us today. He's done a lot of work with the product over the years. We saw this as a really interesting opportunity to expand and grow this product internationally, into distribution to develop new products, We'll talk through what we're going to do there. As a market size in the U.K., the earwax treatment market is just under GBP 17 million. Earol is the number two product in the market, with about a 12% market share. CB12 is the dominant player. It's a bigger brand, bigger range. There is one recent entrant, Cl-ear, which is about 8% market share. In developing this brand, we're looking to launch new products in the autumn. We're working on a baby product that will go into stores. It'll give us the opportunity for multi-siting. At the moment, this product in the U.K. is predominantly sold through Boots, just in the single ENT siting. With the baby Earol, that'll allow us to get into the baby area, into the children's section in retailers. A lot of the retailers it's not currently sold in, Lorenzo will be talking about that later and where we're gonna sell it in further retailers. We put it on Amazon. We're gonna accelerate the marketing and the activities there, expand distribution. There's a really high level of recommendation endorsement, and you'll hear when Hillary speaks about the work that she's done with the product and how valuable it is in its, in its space. A quick highlight of the revenues here. It's grown very nicely over the last three years, about GBP 5 million in revenue now. Half of that's in the U.K., half of that's internationally. Internationally, it's mainly in Scandinavia. There's a lot of international markets still available for us that we're gonna be targeting. In the U.K., as I said, good opportunities to increase distribution. A lot to go for with this product. What we're focused on here with the product is growth, so refresh and grow the brand. That'll be pack refresh. You'll see that coming through later this year. Distribution expansion, as I've mentioned. Develop and distribute NPD to fill the gaps. It's a really good product, but using NPD, we can get into other areas. Further professional recommendations and endorsements that we can have with the brand. Now, we wanna be a leading brand in the earwax market. Obviously, CB12 is a bigger brand than us at the moment, but it's a fantastic product, and we think there's a lot that can be done with it. It facilitates both industry and customer needs, and there's five components here that are quite important. It is a natural product. 15% of audiologists actively discourage the use of hydrogen peroxide drops, and 85% recommend Earol. Really good professional endorsement. There's no waste, it's a metered dose, goes into the ear, coats the ear and doesn't drip out. Easy to use, as I said, no drops. A lot of the competitive products have drops or even people just use olive oil, can be quite messy. It's trusted. Ear Wax was recommended by 93% of ear care specialists. Just to be clear on this data, on the left-hand box, that's audiologists, but the right-hand box of 93% is ear care specialists in the round. It's easy to find. As I said, it's the fastest way to solve the issue. You can find it in th e pharmacies. Finally on here before I introduce Hilary, we've got another product in this range. It's a much smaller product, EarolSwim. This is really helpful for if you're traveling abroad, it's convenient if you're going particularly to places where swimming pools are not as chlorinated, risk of bacterial infection. Again, you spray this in the ear, it puts a coating inside. Really useful product. My children suffer a lot from this, and they've used this product. Works really well. That's only sold in the U.K. at the moment. That'll be going through a medical device process going forward, we'll expect to expand that further. Really interesting product, but I'd really like to hear from Hilary now 'cause she knows a lot more about it than I do. Hilary, if I can introduce you. Thank you so much for joining us. Hilary's known the product for a long time, been involved in a lot of the early clinical studies as well. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much. I do love the opportunity to talk about wax. As I run through the slides, I'm gonna begin with that. Wax is a natural secretion in the body. We know that 20% of people suffer with a problem related to wax, but you also have to understand why we produce wax, and it is there to protect us from bacterial and fungal infections. We know that we will produce wax because it's gonna help to lubricate our ear canal as well as to protect us from the ear infections. The ear canal is the only skin line cul-de-sac in the body, and we know the nature of skin is to shed dead skin cells, rejuvenate and get a new lining. Ear canal in an adult is about 24 millimeters long. As the skin sheds, it will move out towards the entrance of the ear canal, where it then mixes with the glands which are producing the wax and sebum. The hope is the hairs will then waft the wax out to the entrance of the ear canal where it can be wiped. If we look at the reasons why people seem to suffer with the problem related to wax, it is related to people's diet. We know people with a high fat content diet are more likely to produce soft, squidgy wax. We know the nature of wet wax, soft, squidgy wax, is also liked by bacteria, so it's also associated with a greater risk of ear infections. That's actually the group of people that I would tend to use the Swim- Ear on. Because even though we talk about people using it to reduce the amount of water that gets in the ear, I find actually using the natural bactericidal activity of the tea tree spray hugely reduces the number of ear infections that we will see in both adults and children. There is a link that we see with regards to people who are sweating a lot. It's also like Dr. Malik said, it's also people who are sweating a lot who are also often have issues with the pH within the ear canal as well. That's why there is an advantage in using the natural products. The link with regards to breast cancer is there's a number of research studies looking at the link between the similarity of the apocrine glands in the breast and the similarity of the apocrine glands in the ear canal. They were wondering is that link purely because when people have breast cancer, the apocrine glands are known to oversecrete, and hence they're also oversecreting in the ear canal. There's actually much more studies looking at the link between anxiety and stress and an overproduction of wax. Could we not argue that the reason why people with breast cancer are suffering an overproduction of wax is down to the anxiety and stress related to the disease more than the similarity of the apocrine glands? We know that we have more people who are anxious and stressed in the world, and hence we're seeing more problems with regards to wax. We know as you get older, your metabolism slows down, so the movement of the wax, the debris out of the ear canal takes much longer. The longer it takes, the more likely it is to build up. The longer it's in the ear canal, you tend to find the heavier it will be, the hardier it will be. Again, the more difficulty it has in coming out of the ear canal. As you get older, your hairs get coarser, so the hairs at the entrance of the ear canal tend to trap the wax rather than to wafting it to where it can be wiped. If you look at the Guinness Book of Records, they've got a photograph of the man with the longest ear hair, and he's pulling it out 10 inches on either side. You can imagine a small narrow ear canal with hair wrapped around it is going to trap any wax, any debris within the ear canal. We know that there is a higher proportion of problems with wax with people who have a learning disability. It's very difficult to get ethical approval to do a study on people with a learning disability, but I would certainly see a higher rate of patients with a problem with wax who have a learning disability. We know people with trisomy 21 have narrower ear canals, but actually it will be people who are on the autistic spectrum and across the ranges of the learning disability who'll have a problem related to wax. I am gonna talk a little bit more on the slides, but the wonderful thing that I find about the Earol spray is because it's a spray. We know the ceruminous glands, the wax producing glands, are fully covering the entrance of the ear canal. Drops are known to just pool down the bottom of the ear canal. They've stuck iodine into ear drops, and they've taken photographs of the distribution in the ear canal, and it just pools down the bottom of the ear canal. The advantage of the spray is it will fully cover the ear canal. If you've got a child with a learning disability who often suffers with itchy ears, it's very difficult to persuade them to lie still so you can insert the olive oil drops in order to control the itchy ear or also to soften the wax. What I find the ease of using the Earol spray and slotting into the entrance of the ear canal, one squirt will fully cover the wax, and that will hopefully be enough to then soften it till we're able to remove it. Itching, we know that people who fiddle with their ears will produce more wax. You're milking the glands and encouraging them to secrete. We've done research, and we know about 32% of people will use a cotton bud or clean their ears and fiddle with their ears. If I say to somebody who's been using a cotton bud for donkey's years, "Don't stick anything in your ear that's smaller than your elbow," the odds are they will not follow my advice. What I do is say to them, "Listen, when do you use your cotton bud? After your shower, after your bath, when you have an itchy ear. If you use one spray of the Earol instead, I promise you the itching will get less, so the dreaming of the cotton bud will get less. You will find the use of the Earol spray will settle that itching and those symptoms that you get within the ear. The advantage of that for me is I will see you with less problems with regards to your wax. The symptoms of wax buildup, I wouldn't be here, and I wouldn't have a passion about wax if it just gave you a blocked ear and actually even if it reduced your hearing. I'm here because we know wax buildup can cause vertigo, so problems with regards to your balance. We know it can cause tinnitus, any ringing sensation that you have that's not from an external environment. It can cause conductive hearing loss, and we know it's the commonest cause of reversible hearing loss in older adults. We also know it makes people more prone to external ear infections, otitis externa. If you've got a lump of wax stuck at the entrance of your ear canal and you go swimming, showering, bathing, you will have entry of water into the ear canal, and we know there's often bacteria in that water. Part of that water is gonna be blocked from coming out by the nature of the wax at the entrance of the ear canal. You've then got a moist, warm, dark environment. That's what bacteria loves, and that's what will trigger the ear infection. We now know that there is no financial incentive for GPs to remove wax. There's no remuneration for the service, and as a result, there's no NHS funding for adults to have wax removed. You're finding on every high street all the hearing aid providers are now running wax removal services. It's about GBP 80 to have an audiologist or an ear care specialist nurse to remove wax from people's ears privately. It's obviously cheaper than going to see your ENT surgeon who's gonna charge you for the consultation as well as charge you having the procedure to be done as well as the diagnosis of wax, and that can amount to about GBP 500. It is cheaper, but if you've got somebody who suffers with a problem related to wax, especially when people have got a hearing aid, they could be attending this person every four months. Suddenly that GBP 80 for every visit amounts to a lot of money that people are expected to find. We know since COVID-19 that people have more time to fiddle with their ears. We know people are more anxious and stressed, and as a result, we are seeing more problems with regards to wax. The best thing we can do for people, and certainly to make my life much easier, is to educate people about how to look after their ears. That's the main reason why I use and recommend Earol, and I've been using it since the beginning. More than anything, it's really user-friendly. We know that drops pool down at the entrance of the ear canal. We also know they don't go further down into the ear canal, which is about 24 millimeters long and into an adult. We know that the full coverage of the Earol spray within the ear canal does reduce itching in people's ears. I also find if I just say to people, "Just use it for three consecutive nights before the appointment, and if you forgot, don't worry. On your way into the hospital, there's a pharmacy on the ground floor. If you buy it, just use it when you're sitting out in the waiting room." You will find me removing the wax is gonna be much quicker, so it's gonna be better for you, and it actually means that it's going to be less uncomfortable because the wax is gonna be better lubricated, and it's also gonna be more likely to be able to removed. I found that Earol has honestly revolutionized my working life. It has made a huge difference in the amount of time I spend with people and actually the patient's perception of the appointment. There's no doubt we have done research. We do know that the Earol olive oil spray does help to remove ear wax. Why would I use Earol rather than the other brands in the market? I think Otex is purely because it's a historical brand. People have heard it before. We know that if you use sodium bicarbonate drops, first of all, research has told us any liquid in the ear will soften wax. The problem is wax is naturally slightly acidic, which is what protects it from infection. If I stick sodium bicarbonate or hydrogen peroxide into the ear canal, it might soften the wax, but once the wax is removed, it has altered the pH environment of my ear canal. That then leaves me more prone to infection. There's a research study that came out from New Zealand that said if we recommend people use the sodium bicarbonate drops before wax removal, we can then recommend that they use, say, the tea tree spray afterwards or an acetic acid spray afterwards. That makes every episode of wax removal very expensive, and you will find people will not continue to use it. I would use sodium bicarbonate to descale my kettle. Why would I use it in the only skin line cul-de-sac in my body, which is my ear canal? As a result, I would not use sodium bicarbonate, I would not use hydrogen peroxide, and I wouldn't use ear drops in the ear canal because they're not the benefit of a spray, and as a result, I use Earol spray. With regards to further growth for the Earol brand, I find I see a lot of people with dry skin conditions, dermatology-related conditions, and it would be really nice to see a moisturizer in an easy way to apply to the ear canal, and that would be just literally having that liquid within the spray actuator, I think would make a vast difference for the patients that I see. We know actually it's 20% of children that will have a problem with regards to wax. What you often find is we're now seeing a lot of babies, and I often think that when babies are being, you know, bottle-fed or breastfed, you will find the position that the baby's in having the bottle, people are looking in their baby's ears and they're thinking, "Oh look, my baby's got dirty ears," and then they start fiddling with the ears. We know fiddling with the ears is more likely to give you a problem related to wax. When they're sitting there, it's actually really handy for them to be able to use in just one spray of the Earol to help that to settle. More than anything, I would like to see the availability of promoting ear health for people. More than anything it is the rule of thumb, do not stick anything in your ear that's smaller than your elbow. If your ear feels itchy or you want to use that cotton bud, or you wanna make sure with your daily ablutions your ears are clean, the best way to use that is one spray of the Earol spray. I've found patient feedback using the Earol spray is fantastic. Anybody who's ever used drops before, they're very fiddly to use. It's quite difficult to lie down, especially expect an older person to lie down and self-administer ear drops. Using the Earol spray, can be sitting down watching TV. I've got an itchy ear, in goes the spray, and it's one squirt. It is much simpler to use than having to use drops, doesn't overfill my ear. People can put their hearing aid in straight afterwards. One spray will not overfill the ear to block the hearing aid and doesn't cause any damage to the hearing aid. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Lorenzo, and I'm the commercial director for the U.K. team. Today I would like to talk to you about the U.K. distribution of our products, but as well as the main pillars for growth of Venture Life. Before I do that, I would like to introduce the team that we have here at Venture Life Marketing and Commercial. I think from the beginning of this year, we at Venture Life have acquired some really great talent in the team. Great talent actually, from a diverse background, great expertise across different industries and different companies. Obviously, you met already some of the guys here, the brand team. The great thing about this is that the reason why I'm mentioning it is because you need to understand that we have actually great resources behind the brand to support it, to nurture it, as our retail partner actually value this type of this type of element. At the same time, in the middle of this section of this chart, you will be able to see the commercial team. There is myself, I'm supported by the Senior National Account Manager, Azeem. Unfortunately, he's not here today. Also, by the Head of E-commerce, that was already mentioned before, Jos, Jocelyn Kirby. That actually tells you that we have a very great team to engage with all of our retail partners, which is really important. As you know, the Venture Life Group actually plays in four different areas. We play in oral care, we play in women's intimate health, energy management, and ear care or ENT. Today, however, we are focusing on these three categories that you see here, which are the crown jewels for the company, so Balance Activ, Lift, and Earol. Balance Activ is an amazing brand as you've been hearing up until now. It has been growing 20% year-on-year, year-to-date. It is the number one brand in BV treatment with more than 50% of market share. The reason for it is really simple. We have a very, very clear U.S.P, and we also have very great formats. In the U.S.P, it's a product that naturally works with a woman's body to preserve and restore the natural pH of a woman's vagina. At the same time, we also know that it is supported by great KOLs. Lift as well, it's another great brand that we have in our portfolio. Lift is growing at 9% year on year, and it is the number one glucose shot there is in the market. This again is supported by a great U.S.P in the market. It is a product that actually appeals to diabetics as well as for lifestylers, we call them. For people that want a bit of a shot, you know, for their, for their day, and for people who do sport as well. At the same time, the format is really important as well because it is great to have shots that are growing the brand heavily in the market with a great flavor profile. Number three is Earol. Earol has been discussed at length already, but Earol is a brand that has been growing organically, and it shows at the moment a growth of 10% as the second brand, as the number two brand in ear care with a 12% of market share. Just wanted to point out in here that Earol has been growing just organically with zero marketing investment so far, meaning that you can just imagine how much we can do as a team if we're putting investment as we are this year behind the brand. The success that we had so far on these three brands actually is underpinned by the main pillars of growth of Venture Life. What are we focusing on? Innovation. We are focusing on U.K. distribution expansion and three is marketing expertise. I'm going to talk you through these elements one by one right now. Number one is 2022 innovation. 2022 has been a great and successful year for Venture Life, which has been denoted by two factors, market expansion, so basically Earol, and at the same time, portfolio expansion. If we're talking about portfolio expansion, we're talking about the products that are sitting on the left-hand side. If we're talking about the thrush cream that's been discussed before, thrush cream is a product in a new segment where we didn't play before, but we already knew some key stats in there. The thrush is a segment where many women are actually looking for a natural solution, and it's played also by many brands that are medicated. You can imagine that the power of our innovation work when it came to market, as it's providing a natural solution for women, as many people are looking for that. On top of it, we have actually introduced Balance Activ, so Balance Activ 14-pack. It's basically a bigger version of the 7-pack gel that we have, but this is literally addressing the cost of living crisis that many people are living through, we all are living through. By providing a product that has a cheaper price per dose compared to competition, is 52% cheaper compared to competition. The third product is Earol. Obviously, we introduced as addressing a key need in the category, and this specific product is recommended by audiologists as our KOL I just mentioned before. I also wanted to point out that this brand again grew 40% in the last two years ahead of the category with our investment. Again, reiterating the point that as we are planning more investment, as we are planning to expand the product to more retailers, we will grow even further. Second pillar of growth is U.K. distribution expansion. As you can see in the charting here, pretty much all of our brands are distributed across all of our retail partners. However, there is three main areas that I'd say we should focus on, and there is opportunity on. The first area is mainly to fill the distribution gaps, despite the fact that we have 80%-85% weighted distribution, we can actually be present in more and more stores. Number two, mentioned Earol at the moment, we have presence within Boots, Superdrug, and pharmacy. There is an opportunity to expand the brand even further to grow it more. Number three is own label development in U.K. and E.U. At the moment, we are working with Boots. We are working with Superdrug across foot care and skincare. There is another opportunity for us to work with other partners as well as with these guys in here to continue expanding their portfolio and addressing the needs of the shoppers, of their shoppers. Third pillar is marketing expertise. I just wanted to give you here an example on Earol specifically. On marketing expertise, what does it mean? It means that when you launch a brand, we would expect it to support it, to nurture it, to make sure that actually it grows in market. This is the same expectations that our retail partners have, like, with us. In this example for in here, you've got Earol, and we have a very, like, full 360 activation campaign. We have KOL onboarding, so key opinion leaders to endorse our brands, to co-recommend our brands. We have social media and Google to continue driving awareness for the brand. We are introducing NPDs, so obviously, we wanna stay on trend and continue driving innovation to retailers, and at the same time, drive purchase intent at retailers, as it's important to do so. We are covering all stages of the funnel, from awareness to consideration, conversion, and then finally purchase. We are not just resting on our laurels, we wanna continue to expand in there, that's why we are focusing more and more on NPD development in the following years. Starting from, for example, Balance Activ, and this is just an example, we know that 59% of the U.K. adult population take food supplement. However, women's intimate health is underrepresented. We are talking about probiotics, so we wanna be present in a segment where nobody plays in at the moment. On the second, in the middle, you see that many people already are using products, our products for energy boost. There is an opportunity for us actually to provide a differentiation for people who are suffering from diabetes, and they want a shot of glucose, but at the same time, for people that are looking more for a solution to their lifestyle that fits their lifestyle, and they're a bit more sporty. Number three, we are focusing also, we're developing also something in the area of baby, as Jerry mentioned just now, because there is a need in the market, and we know that nobody plays in there at the moment. It's something that we can explore, and we can be the market leader within that segment. Last but not least, I just wanted you to take away three points in here. We have a dedicated team, as mentioned before, just to make sure that we have the right marketing activation and marketing elements to support our brands. Number two, we are focusing on three pillars of growth. There is innovation, U.K. expansion, very important, and marketing expertise. Number three, NPD development, as we wanna continue to drive that for our consumers, for our retail partners. That's it for me. I'm gonna hand over to Natalia to talk about international. Good afternoon. My name is Natalia Ocio. I'm the director of the International Brand Business at Venture Life. I will be briefly present to you the team and the activity that we carry out in this department. The international brand business team is a fairly small one, despite of its recent expansion. We are five people in total, with one senior business development manager focused on new opportunities, two international alliance managers, in charge of existing partnerships, and an export manager supporting with order processing and deliveries. It is an international team, with four nationalities and working from two different locations, the U.K. head office and remotely from Spain. The team delivers the business by collaborating with 103 partners. These partners are split in four different categories: the legacy business, women's healthcare, oncology support, and Earol. 26 partners bring 80% of the total revenues, but we consider eight of them to be strategic. These kind of partners, these organizations, are of different size and different geographical reach. Two of these strategic partners belong to the women's healthcare category, and they market the product in 27 countries. The oncology support category provides four of the strategic partners located in Baltics, Brazil, and the U.K.. The last two key partners belong to Earol, and they distribute our product in 18 countries. The legacy business compile a number of products like UltraDEX, Dentyl, or Procto-eze. Despite the fact that this category does not provide any strategic partners, it's worth mentioning that four of them brought EUR 1 million in 2022. 13 brands constitute the portfolio. Four of these represent 70% of the revenues. These four are considered therefore key brands and include Balance Activ within the women's healthcare category as the main contributor, Earol contributing 20% on a pro forma basis last year. The last two brands, Gelclair and Pomi-T, belong to the oncology support category. You don't see Lift here as one of the key brands for international due to the limited international expansion through partners. We will consider this moving forward after we have leveraged these other four brands. Geographically, the business concentrates in Europe. To do this split, we consider the main location of our partners. For example, all the sales to Bayer, they fall under this territory. However, Bayer might be selling or distributing in non-European countries. Our presence in Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru makes of the Americas the second most important continent for the international brands. We will be focusing in those two territories, and they will be at the center of attention of our efforts to expand internationally. Some of the reasons for this is, they are varied. It comes from detected growth, but also market knowledge, easy access, or even to have existing partner base. In the case of Europe, we do have registration ready, which shortens the time to reach partners and to reach the market. Cross-sales to existing and reliable partners, as well as consideration of our internal strengths and capabilities and product fit will support this geographical expansion. The business model that we have is straightforward. We partner with organizations that will take our product to market. For this, we sign distribution agreements during long periods of time, and those will be under exclusive or semi-exclusive basis. These agreements will include some other commercial terms, such as minimum purchase obligations or fixed prices versus minimum order quantities. The agreement will also include support and responsibilities for both parties. From our side, we will provide documentation for registration, as well as product training. This will be provided by the international alliance management team. The distributor is responsible to gain registration, market access, and to market and promote the product in the territory. The expenses out of these activities, promotion or marketing, will be taken care of by our partners, as Venture Life does not participate of this expenditure. However, we will provide best practices that we gather from the home market or international. The business starts at launch, and until then, we have quite a lengthy process. Everything starts with the lead source, and at this point, we will be reaching out to existing partners or country in-industry contacts, and we will be making use of licensing events and associations to as lead sources. At this point, we will be targeting sizable companies with the adequate fit for the product, the market, and also our business model. This step is easy and straightforward. However, the lead qualification step is uncertain in time and success rate. After the lead has been qualified, meaning there is an initial interest, we find different time frames subject to the geographical area. Here you can see the different steps until a delivery. If we look at the non-European deals, we find quite a lengthy process until agreement signature. After this, we have registration which can take up to one year. The next step will be the production and delivery of goods. When looking at Europe, the biggest difference is the registration step, which has been already pre-empt by internal capabilities. Before I conclude my presentation, I would like to share some of the focus for this and next year. At this point, the brands are clear, and the global geographical focus will be subject to market availability, opportunity size, and a short and long-term strategic approach. In the case of Balance Activ, we have 54 market sign, but the agreement allow us to look into global expansion. In this case, our business development efforts will be focused on Latin America and specific countries in Europe with an in-market growth trend. The distributors of Gelclair market the product in 38 countries on their exclusive basis. This narrows our opportunities worldwide. In this case, we will be looking at available countries in Latin America, Europe and the U.S. Pomi-T, Pomi-T's international cover is narrow, and our partners market the product in nine countries, which allows us to look at a broader opportunity worldwide. We will be focusing in the Americas and the specific countries in Europe. Lastly, Earol, our latest acquisition, as you have seen. This offers a new customer base and that we will be exploiting. These partners market the product in 18 countries, and we will be looking into focusing in specific countries in Latin America and available countries in the south of Europe because our partners are mainly located in the north and the eastern side of Europe. Thank you very much. Hello. I'm Jocelyn Kirby, Head of E-commerce at Venture Life. For the next 10 minutes or so, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about our current e-commerce plans, what we've been doing up until now, and what we're planning to do going forwards. In terms of our e-commerce currently, it's represented entirely by Amazon. We work with Amazon in two different ways. The first way is on a first party basis, which you may have heard referred to as Vendor Central. That's for our oral care brands. For the first party relationship that we have, we work with Amazon on a wholesale basis, so a little bit like Boots or Tesco or any of our other major wholesale customers. It has some advantages. We can ship in bulk to them. We don't have to do things like take the shipping fees out to the customer, but it gives us less control over what we can do. Moving on to the other way in which we work with Amazon, we work with Amazon on a third party basis for Balance Activ, Lift and also soon to be Earol. That's sometimes referred to as Seller Central, and that's where we use the Amazon platform to facilitate us to sell our products directly to the customer ourselves. The advantages of that are that we can have more control over things like pricing, how we represent the products, and when we do sales. What we then have to do is invest in things like the cost of shipping to the customer. Both have advantages and disadvantages. My preference is for third party, where it's commercially viable to do so. In terms of our international reach, with Amazon, you can see here the locations in which we currently retail our products. Within the U.S., we've got Balance Activ and Lift. Within the U.K., we have a full range. Within Europe, in Italy, we have Dentyl. In Germany, we have Balance Activ. We are just launching Balance Activ into France, Italy and Spain. A little bit of a closer look at that both now, but also looking ahead to where we're planning to launch. If we start with Balance Activ, we're currently full range in the U.K., as I mentioned. We have the BV range only in the U.S. and Germany. For 2024, we're gonna launch the full Balance Activ range into the U.S. and Germany. Italy, France, and Spain are gonna be getting the BV range this month. Looking into 2024, they will also be getting the full range at the same time as Germany. Moving on to Lift, we have the full range in the U.S. and in the U.K., and we have just launched Shots in the U.S., so it's a very newly full range in the U.S. For Germany to Italy, France, and Spain, I need to get those out in the right order, we'll be launching Lift in 2024. Moving on to Earol, so as you've heard, the newest addition to the Venture Life family, we are just live on Amazon, I think as of this morning. There were products available previously, through third party sellers, but we're now choosing to sell directly so that we can pull the full retail margin as opposed to the wholesale margin from those sales. For 2024, we're looking at the EU 4, for 2025, moving into the U.S.. Looking at the oral care brands, Dentyl, we have full range in the U.K., and we have in Italy also, UltraDEX currently just in the U.K.. Moving on, in 2022, we have three key focus areas, one important thing to note here is that e-commerce represented 13% of the Venture Life brand revenues. It's a significant part of our brand revenues, and it's growing. We took three key focus areas as a kind of our growth pillars. Efficiency first of all. We invest quite heavily in advertising on Amazon, and you have to do that in order to make sure that your products appear at the top of search. As we focus in on the performance of that advertising, we measure something really closely called total ACoS, which you may or may not have come across, and it means total advertising cost of sale. It's a really important metric to focus on. As an example, in 2022, we grew our ad spend by 5%, but we grew our Amazon sales by 13%, so predominantly that growth is driven by increasing the efficiency of our ad spend. The second key focus for efficiency for us was on the terms with which we work with Amazon on our first party basis. We have decreased our the total cost of our terms by 17%, that's freed up budget to allow us to focus on more revenue driving activities. What it's also done is given us some internal cost savings, both in operational efficiency, also in how we ship our products. As an example, we've moved to pallet ordering for our really high volume lines, that means for 1 order we might be shipping one pallet to one location, whereas previously we might have been shipping 10 part pallets or 10 sets of cases to 10 different locations, that's delivered operational efficiencies for us across the business. Moving on to the second kind of key focus for us in 2022, we looked at range expansion. One of the key things we did and kind of taking into consideration why customers shop on Amazon, they want value for money. They want convenience. We've introduced multi-pack variations, so whilst our single packs are competitively priced on Amazon our multi-packs offer value for money for the consumer, but they also allow us to increase our profitability. We have a lower percentage of our, of our overall cost of sale is spent on shipping that product to the customer. We also increase brand loyalty, so rather than buying one pack, they're buying three packs, so they're using us for three times longer. We focus that predominantly on Balance Activ, Dentyl and UltraDEX brands. Lift already is in multi-pack variations, but we've seen an increase in the average selling price across all three brands thanks to bringing in the multi-pack, so we can see it's having a positive influence on both kind of the sales mix for that range, but also on how long the customers are using our products for. The second element of range expansion was around NPD. The focus for us with Amazon is to always get the product up and live to market as soon as that product's available to us. We're first to market with our thrush cream and our intimate foam wash. I'm really happy to say both are tracking to the projected sales that we had for those from launch on Amazon. The third key focus area for us for 2022 was in market expansion, so we launched the Balance Activ BV gel into Germany. We took quite an aggressive approach to the launch. We invested heavily in advertising at the outset, that is one of the kind of the key things you need to focus on Amazon is getting sales velocity early on in the launch process. We did that. We achieved profitability in less than 12 months, we are now currently at around 20% of the market leader. There was one really strong market leader in Germany, so about 20% of their sales volume. We're now currently ranked as the number two BV treatment on Amazon in Germany. Pretty good achievement for just over 12 months of trading. What I'm sure you're probably more interested in are our growth plans going forwards. For my final slide, it's got three key focus areas. One thing I think is really important to note before I go into these three areas is around what's our approach to e-commerce and how we're thinking about e-commerce. It's really important to follow the consumer, each of you here will shop in your preferred retailers. You know, Lorenzo might like Amazon, Charlie may prefer to go and shop in Boots, and Jerry might like to just pick up what he needs in his local supermarket store. We all shop around in our own way, for me around e-commerce, it's important that we follow the consumer, and we let them find our products in the place that's most convenient for them. We ensure our product's available wherever it is they choose to shop. The second thing I think is really important is that we own a direct relationship with our customers, not only through social media but through a direct transactional relationship. The first point on here is around D2C. For Q4 2023, we're gonna launch a Lift D2C e-commerce platform. In 2024, we're gonna follow with Earol and Balance Activ, in 2025 we're going to launch UltraDEX e-commerce platform. I think it's important to note here we're not gonna be spending hundreds of thousands of GBP on an all-singing, all-dancing e-commerce platform that we don't need. We're gonna be looking at, yes, an investment on the outset to get an e-commerce platform up and running, but it's gonna be agile, we're gonna be focusing on what we really need to be able to sell to the customer. We're gonna ensure that we test and learn and we learn fast so that we can stay agile and we can keep developing along with e-commerce trends and along with what we learn from the data that we get back from our e-commerce platforms. Whilst there will be the initial investment to get the platform up and running, we're gonna operate that profitably from day one. Moving on to other key focus areas for 2023 and ahead, range and expansion and market expansion still present a great opportunity for us. Earol, I've mentioned we have literally just gone live. Previously, there's been no marketing done on Earol on Amazon, so not only do we have the opportunity to gain the full retail margin by selling directly, we also have the opportunity to gain market share by just starting to do some marketing on Amazon. It's a relatively slow-paced category to be in, so I think there's loads of opportunity if we go after it in a really best practice way that we can gain some real market share. Moving on to online exclusives. We have some online exclusives currently, but we're looking to develop some more, starting with some new flavors of Lift shots, and they are currently our biggest selling line on Amazon. I think it's a really exciting development to add to the mix. Finally, from an NPD perspective, I've mentioned it before, but it's worth mentioning again, always first to market, always making sure we're showcasing our full range. Customers do discover products on Amazon, and we not only invest in direct sales driving activities, but some of those look at brand awareness. We can get loads of eyes on our brands and loads of eyes on our new products from the day one of launch. Finally, I've mentioned it on the EU slide, but market expansion, we're gonna be going for the full Balance Activ range across the EU. Within the U.S., I think it's a really exciting market. We haven't talked in great detail about it today, but we're gonna be having the full Balance Activ range and building on the Lift range in the U.S.. I think, you know, the U.S. presents a huge opportunity, both in terms of similar trends to the U.K. on a menopause perspective, and on the women's intimate health range, but also just simply on the size of the market that's available to us out there. Quick recap. Success so far has come from focusing on efficiency and really making sure our ad spend is spent well. Market and range expansion going forward is going to be building on what we've already done, keeping focus on ad performance, but looking at D2C and continuing the range and market expansion. I'm delighted to hand you over to Gianluca. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Gianluca, responsible for manufacturing and operation for the group. Looks incredible, 40 years ago, I was like that, a young boy with a lot of hairs. Now slightly different, my story started there when I was still a student and start my working in the University of Milan in the R&D section. My job was trying to find cosmetic application for raw material that were used in different field. An example, the silicone. At that time, only the dimethicone was used in cosmetic. A huge multinational company come to the university and to me indirectly and asked to develop and to evaluate their portfolio of silicone products that they were using in industrial field. First thought was strange for me, I realized that if I would say impossible, my job was finished. What I learned. This is important because it's still a mindset of the company, of the manufacturing, that we never say no. I know that it's not perfect in English, but the concept is that we have to work to find solution for our customer. This is the point. It's still exactly like that 40 years later. After couple of years, my dad saw my passion and decide to invest 100 million lira, that is roughly GBP 40,000 today. The manufacturing started. In 1999, we start developing and manufacturing the first medical device for Sinclair Pharma, U.K. company. Is where I met Jerry, that used to be the CFO of the company, of Sinclair at that time. Our cooperation start in that period. In 2002, the product was sold to a U.S. company, and so the manufacturing plan has been inspected by FDA, so the first inspection for me is over 20 years ago. After that, in 2014, Jerry came to me and asked me if why we didn't merge our knowledge and competence. We decide to, technically, we, through the IPO, we start working together, and I came into the Venture Life Group and family, bringing my expertise in manufacturing, in development, and that has been added to the international sales and marketing view of the Venture Life company. Which are our strength in the manufacturing? First of all, 20% of our employee are in the technical area. When I say technical, means R&D, and you will listen Stefania presentation later, but also regulatory, quality assurance. All this, the combination of all this knowledge make a big strength for the company that has been very supportive also for the supply chain that, represented by Domenico, that will speak after Stefania, for solving a lot of trouble in 2021, where everything was impossible to find. A very deep collaboration between the R&D and the supply chain give us the opportunity to never stop the line, to always find a solution, to always find the raw material as an alternative of something that was not available in the market. Another great strength, I think, is our partnership strategy. Again, Marco will speak at the end of the Italian session about the commercial strategy in partnership that we have, in partnership with our customers. The customer are working close to us for growing together. This is what we consider partnership. Accreditation, another great strength. We have been always working and investing in being in quality, having the approval, not only from the FDA, not only from the Canada or the Latin America area, but also from the Far East. We are approved for China, we are approved from the Korean FDA, and from Saudi Arabia. Where is the strength? The strength is when a customer come to us, find any possible territories covered by our accreditation. This is very important because when you start a relationship with a new customer, the most important thing is not to lose it and continue working with him, growing together. We are not... I don't consider our manufacturing plant a simple manufacturer, but a service company, a full service company, because we have around us all the competence that give us the opportunity to bring the idea of the customer in a finished product. Stefania will explain the magic of the R&D, and I think it's something really very valuable. Not only that, because again, regulatory quality, packaging knowledge, industrialization of the idea, checking the stability of the product. You have to combine all the competence around you to be able to give a finished product, a quality, reliable, stable, finished product to your customer. In these years, we have been developing a lot of products. We have at least a portfolio of ready-to-go formulation over 1,500, but it's a number. We have been developing thousands of formulation in these 40 years, and most of them are ready to go for our customer. The time to market is very important, so when we receive a new brief from our customer, it's relatively easy for us to adapt an existing formulation to a finished product. The clear example was hand sanitizer gel that everybody remember the first wave in Italy was really disaster, March 2020. In less than three weeks, and thanks to the strength of the company, the supply chain, the R&D, everybody was working together, we were able to have a product for supporting also the authority, the hospital. In three weeks, we were in the market with a new product, starting and fishing from our library. This library is available for our customer, but also for our brand. This is another very important strength that we have, that we offer. We have been hearing from our colleagues, the brand strategy, the NPD strategy can be, we can be supportive to this strategy for a faster growth. Another very interesting point for you that Danny was mentioning is the combined profit. Danny was using a better word in English. We had our manufacturing profit at the commercial profit, so we increased the profitability of the group. We made an important acquisition, two years ago. Now we have two manufacturing plant, one in Italy and one in Sweden. The Swedish one is characterized by very high automation. We have a dedicated filling machine for filling monodose. All the woman health products that we are manufacturing are done in Sweden with very little amount of working people and very high level of production, 270 tubes per minute is the high speed of the machine, so a lot of tubes. From the other side, in Italy, we work based on the flexibility. We have a lot of different, you see in the slide, manufacturing machine. This is another important point because we start from the 25 kg, so very little batch, up to 9 tons. Again, when you start with a new customer, you can follow the growth of the customer. You can offer as a service to our customer, little production, medium production, big production. We have a lot of filling lines for filling jar, tubes, bottle, pump. Everything is necessary for a possible cosmetic product. Again, the variety of the equipment keep the customer close to us. Some consideration about our manufacturing capacity and investment. We have been growing quite a lot in this last year. When we joined together, I remember in 2014, Biokosmes as a single manufacturing plant company was making roughly EUR 10 million revenue. Last year, we closed at EUR 30 million revenue, organic growth, very important. A key factor of this growth has been agreed with Jerry and the board that we always keep 40% of free capacity. Why? If you have free capacity, you can give a good service to your customer. If you have equipment available for new order, for increased order, for bigger order, your lead time is shorter than if your equipment are saturated by 80% or 90%. In all these years, we have been having always a yearly CapEx plan and maintenance plan for our equipment, and for a manufacturing company, this is very, very, very important, because also the existing equipment are always well-maintained, well, perfect in term of performance. We add new capacity, so we are, even if we grow, we are always updated with our manufacturing capacity. For future growth, it's just matter of money, but no problem for increasing our manufacturing capacity. Last year, we made 30 million pieces, but the capacity, we have one shift free still. We don't see a big limitation up to the number written in the slide. Of course, we are not. This is what we consider our trend of growth that is in line with any plan. What's for the future? The future is continuous growing, thanks to a more international strategy. Marco will talk about that. Our main area now are Italy and U.K., but the idea is to bring more effort for developing the international business. Thanks to a great team of people is the most important resources that we have in the company, and also thanks to a intangible asset that is a positive culture that we still have in the company that is solving the problem, find a way, find a solution, work for the customer. We are a service company. To support the growth, we have also decide to improve the structure of our organization. Fabio Perego is here with us, and he is entitled as General Manager of Biokosmes, supporting the growth, and also Operation Manager of the group, Director of the group, because we think that together with the growth of the numbers of the operation, we should also grow the people. Last asset that we are managing, thanks to the technical background that we have, is represented by the technical file that we are bringing from the MDD to the MDR. Is a technicality, the law is changing. There are a lot of things to do, some investment to be done, but we have all the competence, and fortunately, the cash to afford this passage from 27 technical file, that's quite a lot, that will generate a lot of new revenue, new opportunity for the future, because the value of this product will be significantly higher than now in the market tomorrow. We are just optimistic and encourage everybody to follow us. I leave to Stefania to continue the magic of the R&D. Good afternoon. My name is Stefania, and I'm the R&D Coordinator of Biokosmes Venture Life Group. Today, I have the pleasure and the opportunity to introduce you a little bit how is the technical area is composed and how we can follow the development of a new project. The technical area in Biokosmes is composed by 20 people, all with a scientific background, so we are chemist, pharmaceutics, or biology, biotechnology. Our area is divided in four different segments: the quality assurance, the regulatory department, the quality control department, together with the microbiological lab, and the R&D department. We have internally all the skills and all the capabilities to follow the project from the idea till the exit of the product in the market. The R&D department is followed directly by me with the supervisor of Gianluca, that is our technical director, and is composed by different formulators with different skills and different footprints. You have to consider the formulator as a fashion stylist, so with a personal way to formulate. We work together from more than 10 years, so a very long time, and we have the experience to support the development of new medical devices based on substances or cosmetic products. We can cover each kind of galenic formulation that you can find in the market, starting from emulsion to the production of gels or a product for toiletry and so on. If we take a look to the last year, 2022, it's very important to underline that R&D has been involved in the transition period from MDD till MDR for the medical devices that we have in our portfolio. It's a very challenging situation where we have to think about the device in a different way, so we have to consider it, thinking about the design also in a retrospective way. There is a second point that is the clinical evaluation that we are following for the devices together with a group of medicinal doctors with experience in clinical, and we are working together to submit the products. We hope till 2024. Actually, we have 13 technical file under registration, just submitted eight and five to be submitted till the first quarter of 2024. Here you can see a slide showing the formulation developed and produced in the last 10 year by our company that are around 700 and more, and you can consider a range of formulation around 50-80 per year. From my personal side, it is not so important the number, but it's important to say that the formulation are ready to be submitted to the customer. As Gianluca said before, they are safe, they are tested, so we can send them to the customer in a very short way, saving time, saving cost, and personalize it in a very, very easy way. Which is the secret behind the development of a new product? How we approach a new development? As I said, it's a magic bridge between science and creativity and art, and I like to define the formulator as a chef with a lot of many different ingredients available to develop a fantastic dishes. Actually, we have more than 20,000 of raw materials present in the market to develop new products, so we have to think about it with foresight. We have to be careful about the stability, about the quality, about the texture that must be excellent for the final customer. A lot of many different things to be take in consideration to support the development of a new product. When we receive an idea from a customer, we have to identify in a very well way which is the customer needs. This is very important, and our sensitivity, the formulator sensitivity is very, very important, as you have to identify correctly which is the customer needs, and you have to integrate this with your personal vision. The first thing is to identify the raw materials to be used that are the bricks of the formulation, and you have to think about then that as they can work together in a synergy, but sometimes not in a good synergy. It's very important to take in consideration as far as possible any possible risk. When you have identified this first part, you can start with the laboratory trials that are quite complex, and they works together with the selection of the packaging, with the selection of the with the identification of the regulatory aspects that are very, very important. Finally, you can obtain your frozen prototype, but your job is not finished, because now you have to test the stability of the product. It means that you have to grant that the product must maintain its own characteristics during its shelf life in the market. Now you have to consider the stability of the product. It means that we have to check the quality of the product, so the chemical, physical characteristics, the microbiological characteristics and the efficacy too during its shelf life, putting the products in different climatic chambers and tested the different climatic condition that you can find around the world. Actually, in 2022, we have concluded 75 stability studies started from 2018 because for medical devices, the stability are very long, more than three years, sometimes also four years and five years, it depends. At the moment, we have 175 stability test ongoing, so it's a very big quantity of product under evaluation. As Gianluca said, in the last years, we have received an important issues from our purchasing department. Domenico will show you better than me. It was a very important and challenging situation. We have identified a strategy to substitute a lot of raw materials that in that moment were not available in the market due to the war in Ukraine, to the pandemic era, so a lot of different problems received from the market daily. We have identified a strategy to work in advance and to anticipate any risk of delay of production. In 2022, we have substitute 50 raw materials, and in 2025, around 80. A very big number of raw materials tested with scientific reports, and the scientific reports have been submitted to the customers and approved with a change control. It was a very challenging situation, very complex, but well managed. Thanks for your attention today. Many thanks. I leave the... Good afternoon to everyone. Quick explanation about the supply chain environment. My colleagues already anticipated you what we lived last years, that has been very, very challenging. Probably one of the most used word in that period was resilience, but in reality, I prefer to define what we lived and how we work as the ability to absorb. It was something like boxing again Muhammad Ali. The only thing that you have to keep in mind is stay alive, let's try to arrive till tomorrow, breathe if you can, and let's see when the next problem will arrive. Just to give you a ball number, before 2020 we were managing some issue and force majeure once a year, once a semester. In 2020 we had, at least one a day or more than one a day. The idea was let's try to see what we can do our, in our best. The teamwork that we implemented, that we have, the knowledge, the expertise, the chance of having colleagues in several, in several fields that can make the, let's say the production plant still being open was a key. Government was changing rules every day, every evening. Supplier were closing. Ships were disappearing. Train were not working. Every single day there was a single problem. It has been really a one year of managing issues. 2020 has completely changed the way of managing supply chain. From 2021 and also 2022, the world started to change, it was more the ability to manage. I would define as, waves were still very high, in reality on high waves you can surf. In some way you can try to have fun over the situation if you are able to surf. You saw in last presentation from Stefania that we changed a lot of raw material. It is a very long process because you have to find, there must be availability, there must be sample, there must be documentation. It is a long process that we did in a very fast way. We implement a nice way to stay on the market and to every day have the plant open. I would sum up 2021 and 2022 with three different ability. For sure one is always to look behind. This is only an example for sure, but mentioning again Silicol in October 2020, we bought maybe a quantity that seems very strange in the moment, three months after the biggest company, U.S. company, declared a first measure for one year saying, "I will never deliver also the confirmed order, and we have on stock everything." Obviously this is something that has been managed with commercial because our number one customer was aware of what we were doing, and so we had some commercial agreement. Obviously was financial because also with Danny and with Jerry managing the warehouse value and the warehouse space. When the war world was saying, "You, you cannot produce anymore, we have on stock everything for more than one year," the world was changing very fast, so we have to be fast moving. That picture is coming directly from our warehouse, our plant. It was March 2020. Probably, I don't know if you remember what was happening in Italy in 2020. We had big issue, something like, I'm not sure if I can come back home, and I can come back to work the day after. Indeed, we were using a full truck of alcohol in three days, so signing contract in two days, ready formulation, ready machinery, just finding customers, selling a lot. The idea of be fast moving in that world in that moment was really key. As I was saying, this was adding a huge additional complexity because what we learned in the past that was something like managing just in time and whatever was not working. The rule was, if I find anything that is useful, let's buy. Finance was not happy in the moment for sure, but that was the way of managing this, that moment. In this way, we fulfilled 100% of order we received. Not 90%, not 95%, but 100%. The rule, the mindset of never say no was applying. Just bring customer, just bring orders, and we fulfill the order. Considering what was the world in 2020, from 2020 to 2022, saying 100% is a big achievement. The sense of belonging of the company, the teamwork, the expertise, the knowledge of people has allowed us to reach this great result. Time are now changing. This is, was the past. Happy to say that we reached a great result, now the time are changing. One important lesson that we learned is that the world is not that small. Nice to say globalization, nice to say that you can reach every part of the world in a while, the Far East, for example, is far. The reshoring idea is now on site. We have to grant business continuity, but business continuity doesn't only mean multi-sourcing, so having more than one supplier or one CMO or one-Approved source for everything, but also where it is located is very important because if I have 10 supplier, but I have all 10 in Far East, ships are going one way, train are going one way. The idea is that having at least one source in Europe or close to Europe is now paramount. What we are doing right now is granting business continuity with the right risk management perspective. Reshoring is very, very important. Again, multi-sourcing because probably no one was really aware about what could have happened in Ukraine before it started. Even if Europe was considered a... Still considered maybe a safe place to stay, multi-sourcing is needed because we have, for example, one very key raw material that was produced in Ukraine. The day after, the idea was, "Is the plant still there?" Multi-sourcing is really important. Reshoring and multi-sourcing will grant us a better time to market because it's still very, very important to be fast responding because it is always needed by our customers. We cannot say we are not delivering on time because it's important to deliver on time, in short time is very, very important. What I will define that now it is luckily after three years, a better moment to be purchasing department, because I mean, we're not boxing with Muhammad Ali anymore, it is possible to do price negotiation. Not everything is going down. Inflation is there. Some prices are still increasing. The average for 2023 is that we can manage without price increase. The outlook for 2024 is positive. The aim is to bring again back more margin to the group, to the productions because the outlook's really makes sense that we can deal about prices while in the past, the negotiation was, "Do you have the raw material? Please send to me," without speaking about price. It is nice and, with all those factors, the outlook is, for the supply chain now is very positive. Let's say that we don't have the crystal ball yet, but in some way we can try to forecast and to predict what is happening. In, in the short future for sure, the next important topic for the supply chain, to be ready on what the market is already asking is, the ESG aspect. Jerry was highlighting before, our key point that we decided to exploit in the first moment as ESG. It's nice to see that, we are exploiting recycled packaging for, customer brands and for Group product. We are already ready to have all the certified paper, so with every single certification that may be needed. We are already exploiting some sustainable raw material because, sorry to say this, Gianluca, but after 40 years, maybe silicones are not the key raw material anymore, so we can start using green silicone, or we can have same perform raw material, but that are produced with a colder process and not the yacht one. I guess that anyone knows how the energy was a problem in the past last months. Having raw material that are using less energy as a price trend and obviously a green aspect. There are also other very important points that we are exploring together with Stefania. We are already putting on place what we think we are sure in some way the market will need in a few years from now. We are already doing everything to be ready on what we have to produce in next years. Also in terms of social, all suppliers of Biokosmes are going to sign, this is not ended yet, a code of conduct. Also this social aspect is compulsory for us, and we are going to finish this by, let's say, few months from now. Happy to say that also for the future, we are implementing a nice way to manage also every single supplier. Fine from me, and Marco, it's up to you. As anticipated by my colleague, I guess you have several evidences that Biokosmes could be considered as a valuable contract development and manufacturing organization. My aim today is just to share with you how we get a simple commodity in something special. First of all, the team. Actually, the contract development business organization has been built on three different group. The first one is focused on the business development activities, looking for new opportunities in the business arena. The second one is the industrialization team that we're also the head of the project management. The third one is the customer service team that work closely with our partner and manage the routinely business day by day. The key mindset that we have at the basis of our daily activities is not only to gather orders or gather opportunities, but our real mindset is to solve the potential problem of our clients. That means to offer new formulation, to offer new product, to offer an implementation of any kind of artwork and so on. We are absolutely sure that if we were able to solve the problem of our clients, orders will come, and orders come. How do we do that? We could summarize and simplify our process in three different phases. The first one is the picking and selecting the opportunities on the business arena. This is an activity that our BD carried out day by day, interacting with the potential client outside the organization. They collect several briefs that they are processing internally by a weekly meeting in Biokosmes. We selected the project based on a sort of stage-gate approach, based on financial, feasibility, regulatory, and so on. At the end of this phase, we were able to find out a potential product or project lead that start the second phase of the evaluation. That means the project implementation. This is the phase where the technician from one side and the business development from the other side discuss together to find out the best solution for our partners. The concrete deliverable is the cost structure to be offered to our commercial colleagues to be negotiated with the partners and to close the offer. When the offer will be signed, obviously, we bring the project in the routinely manufacturing from one side and through our customer service from the other side. This is a simple method that bring to maximize all the opportunities because both the BD and the customer service work closely with our partner, and we are able to pick opportunities day by day based on the needs of our clients. Second, this is an agile process because we had already test that we are quick in the efficacy to quote our project starting from the first contact to the client, the manufacturing. The third one, the probably the most important, this process bring us to be close, more and more close to our partner. This, at the end, bring to have a stronger network on our partner in the routinely business. The results of our efforts could be summarized in this slide, where you can realize the contribution of the customer brands in the last years. In particularly, we had a significant increase from the 2021 and 2022, not only in terms of% of increase, but also in the number of clients. Just last year, we gained seven new customers, giving us the chance to reach 56 active partners in our portfolio right now. In terms of numbers, their core business is more focused on cosmetics for the 69% and the 28% in the pharma business. There's a little 3% related more on the food supplement. This is just the core business of our clients. In terms of turnover, our product mix has been addressed for the 56% in the medical devices and in 44% in cosmetics. It's important to underline that the 86% of our total turnover has been concentrated in top 10 pharma customers right now. In terms of geographical distribution, our the headquarter of our partners has been located in U.K. for the 51% and the 34% in Italy, and a limited, let me say, limited percentage, outside Italy and U.K.. This is one of the issue at the basis of the next strategy we want to pursue for the next future with the plus in terms of skills and capabilities, and especially among the other, the quality certification we have in our site. This lead us to set up the real aim for the next future, so to increase our presence in the international arena. We had already set several reorganization internally in Biokosmes to be more and more focused on screen and scouting any potential partner to be served and to be reached. Second, we also decide to increase our presence in the social network. LinkedIn is just LinkedIn, the reported one, but we are studying several other strategies to get our name in several platform. The third is reach and serve far markets by our proactive presence. For example, in U.S., we had already decided to participate two main exhibition, the CPHI, for example, and the DCAT in New York. Another strategy we recently put in place is the creation of a capability broker networks worldwide. Again, this is a project that we had started recently. We had already one technology broker active in South America, and this is a sort of pilot, let me say, experiment to fine-tune the strategy and to fine-tune these activities in far markets. The idea is to cover some clusters circled in red, for example, by operative broker in that area. The broker is just the person that work in those geographical cluster serving already any pharmaceutical or cosmetics company. His role, their role is to just promote the name of Biokosmes, to bring the skills and capabilities of Biokosmes, and then create the hook with our organization. The negotiation will be in charge of our colleague in Biokosmes, and the technology broker will be paid a success fee. Again, as our mindset is to increase our presence outside Italy, inside U.K., so please, we are open to partnerships, so feel free to contact us. Jerry, I leave you to close with the question and answers. Thanks, Marco. Great. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, so much for our speakers. Thanks for doing a fantastic job. Just to wrap up really, I mean, hope that's been an opportunity for all of you to see a bit more about the depth of our business, particularly to meet key members of our team. These are the guys who are doing the day-to-day business, running the operations, driving the growth, and pushing us forward. I think you've seen with what Danny's presented, the growth of the business historically, what we've got in front of us, the opportunities, the growth drivers we've got in our products, in our channels, and in our new product development. The cash generation, profit profile that we've got, and we've got an exciting future ahead this year, even without any anticipated M&A. Obviously, M&A will become part of our business, later as we go forward, but this year it's about focusing on those organic growth brands, on those channels, on the opportunities in front of us. We're doing more investment in automation. Labor costs are rising, so in the factory there's a lot of work going on there, to automate there, and there's a lot of work going into sustainability and the culture development of our business. Really, as I say, focus for 23, organic growth, margin improvement. That's through revenue growth, through automation, through getting more efficiencies out of our business, developing the brands, international penetration, NPD, improving that free cash flow, reducing on that leverage, and focusing on sustainability and culture. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for all the pre-presenters, all the work going in there. We've got some time to do, Q&A, so if anyone wants to ask any burning questions, please fire away. Hi, Jerry. Just a quick question about foreign exchange. Over the next few years, I think GBP is gonna get stronger against other currencies. What's gonna be the impact on your business, top line, bottom line, of GBP getting stronger and interest rates staying high? Yeah. One of our key challenges at the moment is that most of our production is done in Europe, so Sweden and Italy. We're selling products into the U.K. market. We've got a margin adverse impact because of that at the moment, the way FX rates are. We are working to help mitigate those impacts through two or three key elements. One is we have a lot of natural hedging in our business by the fact we do have a high base of euros, but a high base of sterling as well. We've got around, in the U.K., a shortfall of around EUR 3 million on an annual basis, which isn't a huge amount, but it gives us a very identifiable amount that we can professionally manage through hedging mechanisms, and that's something we started looking at very recently with a number of brokers. That will help us just smooth out the volatility on our P&L. As we move forward, though, we'd see more opportunity to increase our natural hedging through our internationalization of the brands, as we've been talking about today. Increasing our presence in the U.S. and South America particularly, and that will help us just diversify our currency base and where we're incurring revenues and costs. We're attacking at it from several different angles at the moment. With that, also professionalizing the way we manage FX in the business. You talked about sort of 175 active products or that you're working on formulations. You've said you've got 75 that have just become complete, active or what-whatever that might mean. How does that translate into revenue product, you know, growth for the business going forward? Sure. There's three aspects to that in terms of the product. Firstly, we've got improvements of formulations. We might be improving a formulation for a customer, which could be, you know, raw material that we can't get anymore or an improvement in the raw material, something that gets us more stable. They're not really generating new revenues. That's continuing revenues. We've got active development of new products within our NPD, which you've seen up here. When we're developing NPD, we might be coming out with one product, but we'll be looking at two or three different formulations. We've got the development of customer brand products. You'll know we've got significant customer Alliance Pharma. You know, we'll be working with them on NPD. That will precipitate revenue growth going forward. It's each of those three things we're working on. The NPD you've seen here, customer brands growth coming from... We've seen over, what, eight years, three-fold increase in the revenues in the customer brand business. That's where some of that formulation development's gone, and then the refreshing, which would improve revenue. I mean, you've been working on it for five. The 75% has taken five years of production to get to this point. How much of that, I guess, is customer led for the manufacturing side of things versus just replacement of existing? The majority of that 75%, for example, will be on the customer brand side because obviously on the NPD side, we've got a number of activities. We'll be probably talking 10 or 15 products within that portfolio. I could just add a little bit to that, Jerry. Sure. Please. Please. Just to answer the question further, Steven. You'll have seen typically we spend about GBP half a million a year on R&D doing new formulations, creating new products for our customers. We're extending the range. This year, just to give you an example of what that GBP half a million does for us, we've done around GBP 1.5 million of revenue from completely new products this year, so revenues that were not there last year. As Jerry said, most of that is customer brands revenue, so customer driven. With the acquisitions we've been making recently, we're clearly extending our portfolios. As you've seen today, Balance Activ and Lift come through as well, and Earol as well, the baby Earol. Those are good examples of how we plan to build out. mainly it's customer brands led at the moment because of the way our business has evolved. Jeremy, where do you see of total sales in three years' time, what percentage of that will be made up by e-commerce, do you think? Tricky question. I could ask Jos to answer that. That would be fair. I mean, we see that becoming an increasing part of our revenue. It's grown quite steeply over four years from 4% - 6% - 9% - 13%. I'd expect we'll be getting up to sort of 20-25% overall over that period. It, it needs to start to be that sort of number. That's the e-commerce we have visibility of through Amazon. For example, if our products are sold through a Boots platform, we're not necessarily reporting in that number. It's probably already understated in terms of the level of e-commerce penetration we have. Boots won't split up their data for us in terms of how much they sell, bricks and mortar and how much they sell digital. That's not included in our 13%. That's just our direct. Thank you. David. I must thank you for bringing all the Italian team here. Yeah. It's been excellent to hear firsthand, how they operate. No. I just wondered if you'd like to add a few words about your Swedish facility and how that fits in. Yeah, sure. Sure. Please. The Swedish facility came in as part of the BBI acquisition. We have 15 people there. It's near Stockholm. It manufactures the Balance Activ gel, that's the bacterial vaginosis gel and the moisture gel. It runs, as Gianluca said, 270 tubes a minute, seven of those tubes go in a box. Typically the lines at Biokosmes will run 50 to 100 items a minute. It's a much quicker facility, but it's only utilized 20% at the moment. The original owner, which was Exponent Private Equity, when they signed the deal with Bayer, which was before we had acquired the business, Bayer gave very significant forecasts about the future growth of that product for them. They invested nearly EUR 4 million in installing that equipment to meet that. Bayer have been slower in delivering that. That's why there sits a lot of capacity there. Last year, excuse me, Bayer grew 36% in their business with us, and they're already launching in more territories and growing out quite fast. We're trying to obviously put more volume into that facility through that product. Also, Marco and his team are talking to other customers to try and get more product into that plant. They make the long neck tubes, which you saw with the Balance Activ product, the little stubby tube with the long neck. Products typically that go, it's proctology, vaginal products, oral care products, looking at other manufacturers or distributors of those products and seeing if we can bring more manufacturing into the Gnesta plant to fill out that capacity. It's already profitable in its own right in terms of the transfer price, so additional revenue going in there is pure, almost pure gross margin profitability. I mean, it's clear that you had a very successful period through COVID in terms of your customer service delivery, on the, on the customer brand side. From some of the recent materials, you've talked a lot about the pipeline of leads that that has led to. In the meantime, your dependency concentration has actually increased significantly. Now, that's a good thing. That's a success story. I'm wondering if you could talk more about those leads that have come into the business over the last 12 months, 18 months as a result of your strong reputation of delivery through COVID, and how long it might take for those to manifest themselves in terms of broadening out the, if you like, the dependency, your customer dependency. Sure. I'll help Gianluca out there 'cause he's got a Scotsman talking to an Italian. I think what you're asking, Matthew, is, obviously the reputation of Biokosmes has been very good in attracting new customers. How long does it take to convert those customers into revenue when they come in for a new product development? I think that partially already happened because the growth that we have in these last two, three years is partially the result and a consequence of our re-resiliency. If you have a look at the graph that Marco was showing, our growth from 2019 to now, I don't have the number in my brain, but is really significant. Part of that is already happening. Our reputation to be a reliable company, stay open also during the COVID-19 period, having the feedback. You see from 2020 compared to the previous year, how significant is the growth? So much higher. I think that part of that, we are already getting the benefit of that in terms of reputation, name in the market, especially, I would say in Italy and U.K., there are the two major market where we are well-known. The real job now, as Marco was explaining, is to expand this good reputation in the other territory of the world. U.S. could be one of those. Also for the European company that want to export in United States, and thanks to the FDA accreditation, this could be a tools for growth. The point is there. To expand this capability in the other territories. I think this is the point because in Italy and U.K. it's already a fact. Great. Thanks very much. Then there was another question just in relation to the in-housing of your manufacturing. I mean, some of your acquisitions, the thesis has been led by the opportunity to in-house. Could you just elaborate a little bit on how much in-housing you've done so far of those recent acquisitions, and if there's still more to go for? Sure. The most recent one, Earol, that's was all made under contract to the business in Lancaster, called FMP. If you remember, the Earol business was approximately 50% in the U.K. and 50% international. What we've now agreed with the manufacturers, we're gonna move the international production to Biokosmes from January next year. We're already in that process. Makes sense for two reasons. Obviously, we then be invoicing in euros to euro customers, so we remove that exchange risk. Also, you've got the physical transportation, a little bit closer. We're gonna continue initially to manufacture the U.K. product in the U.K. because we're not shipping it over from Italy. We're not having that exchange risk and all the shipment. We'll review that over the next couple of years, and ultimately will be made at Biokosmes. At the moment, that's the split we're doing there. Obviously Balance Activ was already made within the Gnesta plant when we acquired it. We're doing a feasibility at the moment to look at bringing in-house the juice shots on Lift. Because it's a liquid, we can make that. We do have a very competitive price from our CMOs on both of the Lift products, on the chewables and on the juice shots. We're looking at whether internalizing can improve that profitability and obviously reduce that working capital. Also, we have to look at capacity in our CMO. You know, as Lift continues to grow quite strongly, we have to look at, you know, if that CMO is gonna have capacity issues as well. We balance that risk. Gelclair from the acquisition in 2021 we already made. It's on rid as well. We wouldn't bring Pomi-T in-house. We don't do food supplement capsules. On our recent acquisitions, all of the Pharma Source products we acquired in 2020, all the liquids are in-house already. Typically, it's a 12 to 18 month process from when we start looking at it to bring that product in-house to get the margin improvement and the working capital reduction. Great. Well, look, thanks everybody for coming. I hope you enjoyed the presentations. Thanks to all the presenters. Fantastic job. Really brilliant. Thanks very much for your interest today in attending.