BioSyent Inc. (RX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the BioSyent Inc. Q1 2026 Results Presentation. My name is Rene Goehrum, and I'm the President and CEO of the company. I want to draw your attention to our forward-looking statements disclaimer as I'm sure there will be some in today's presentation. The last several months have been quite an exciting time at BioSyent. Within a span of less than three months, we announced a significant acquisition, we closed it. We started operating the new business and are now reporting our Q1 results, including 1 month of revenue and profit from that acquisition. On March 1 of this year, we acquired Oral Science and its wholly owned subsidiary, Oral Science International. I'll take a few moments to refresh you on the business and some of the details around it. Oral Science is a Canadian distributor of specialized health care products for dental hygiene and oral health. We purchased the business for $25.5 million. That price included $6.3 million of working capital. At close, there were $2 million of excess working capital in the business, and we paid for that per the agreement that we had with the selling shareholders. In addition to the purchase price, -- there is a performance earn-out, which you will see we are providing for paying an amount in the future. That payment will be made in 2027 based on the performance of the business, which based on the formula that we created on acquisition, we have every expectation that there will be some further payment made on the performance element, which we are delighted based on the performance of the business. And then there's a royalty on the future sales of one additional product that's included that becomes an ongoing expense in the future against the cost of goods. So the purchase price and the fiscal 2025 financial results of Oral Science, which have now been audited and completed, implies a purchase price of less than 6x EBITDA. The founders and the key management of Oral Science are continuing with BioSyent in operating the business. And in fact, as part of the purchase price consideration, received 234,000 shares. So they own about 2% of the BioSyent issued and outstanding. Oral Science continues to operate as a stand-alone business unit of BioSyent. Oral Science is located in Brossard, Quebec on the South Shore of Montreal and the leadership of Oral Science continues in a leadership role for oral Science itself and obviously contributing to the overall leadership of BioSyent. Our brand wall now looks like this. This would be the brands that you're familiar with us talking about on the pharmaceutical side of our business and now adds a number of oral health products to our portfolio. A couple of more words about Oral Science. This is a growing revenue stage business. It had a track record prior to acquisition, a 15% compound annual growth rate using 2018 as a base year. The business is well established. It was founded in 2003, and it owns a number of products as well as in-licenses additional number of products. So similar to the BioSyent pharmaceutical model, where we own some of the products outright in our portfolio and in-license others. At Oral Science, roughly 1/3 of revenue comes from proprietary products and technologies and about 2/3 from in-licensed. In 2025, revenues for Oral Science were just over $31 million, and it was about $4.4 million of EBITDA. We're showing you NIBT on this slide, but about $4.4 million of EBITDA. In the month of March, which is the first month that we are reporting Oral Science as part of our consolidated revenues and profitability, the Oral Science business generated about $3 million in sales, which was a record month for the business and about $0.5 million of EBITDA. So if we look back to the 12 months ending December 2025 and on a ProForma basis had been operating Oral science together with the BioSyent Pharma business, our revenue would have been in excess of $70 million and our EBITDA would have been $16.5 million. So you see on the bottom of the slide, we've reported already our 2025 EBITDA of $12.1 million. Oral Science came in using ASPE accounting rules, so for private enterprise at $4.4 million, sum those two numbers at $16.5 million. So think of that as a kind of a base run rate for our business. One of the steps that we need to follow is where to put the -- or how to allocate the purchase price onto our balance sheet. And I won't spend a lot of time on this slide. The thing that I want to point out and draw your attention to is for a company prior to the acquisition of Oral Science, where we had a fairly limited amount of intangible asset on the balance sheet, you'll notice when you dive into our financial statements and the additional detail in our MD&A that you'll see that there's been a significant increase in intangible assets. And in fact, it's $17.4 million of the purchase price that has been allocated to intangible assets. This has been reviewed by an external party, external accounting firm. So this is not just management's estimates, but actually has been validated by a third-party firm that reviewed this and worked on the purchase price allocation. So it may be subject to change as the year unfolds. I think per IFRS, we are bound to finalize and go firm using end of year 2025 results. So I think we have until Q1 reporting of '27, reporting of the '26 business. So those intangible assets then will be amortized and will show up on our income statement as an amortization. So roughly $250,000 a month will show up as amortization. So that -- let's round that to $3 million a year. And of course, that $250,000 works out to about $750,000 a quarter. In this case, with these financials that we're reporting to you today, we own the business for 1 month. So there's a $250,000 amortization included into our calculation of net income. We also had $273,000 of onetime transaction expenses related to the acquisition of Oral Science. We did incur transaction expenses in Q4 of 2025. Of course, those have already been reported. And if you're interested to know more about that, you can go back and refer to our already reported Q4 and full year 2025 financial statements. So having set the groundwork here with some information on the acquisition and what we paid and the business, what it does, let's talk a little bit then on what our results look like when combining three months of Specialty Pharma in Canada and internationally together with the Oral Health business. So on this slide, you see Q1 2026 compared to Q1 2025. Of course, there is no comparable for the Oral Health business. Oral Health represented one month of sales, whereas the balance of what you see on this slide represents three months or a full quarter. So revenue in Q1 company-wide consolidated reached $13.9 million. I would say it goes without saying that, that established a new revenue record for the company, compares favorably to just under $11 million in the year ago. A couple of things to unpack here beyond the addition of the Oral Health business. Canadian Pharma sales were up 9% to the year ago. International down 44% to the year ago. So I want to take you back to September of 2024. We made an acquisition of the Tibelia International business. That acquisition closed in September of '24, and we started working immediately with customers. This product is distributed around the world. We've got a number of markets where we're active. We had a number of customers that were backlogged in terms of orders that had not been supplied by the previous owner. And so Q1 of 2025 ended up being a significantly disproportionate amount of revenue for Tibelia compared to kind of what the normalized run rate should be. So in Q1 of 2026, we see the impact of that when you compare to a year ago. And I would say, overall, starting in Q2 of this year, that business operates at kind of a more normalized run rate of the business. The other thing, although it's a very small piece of the business, our insecticide or legacy business had an exceptional year in 2025 overall. So it was an outstanding year. It started strong in Q1. And so you see the comparable to the year ago is down significantly. But overall, sales were up 27% to the year ago. And one other thing I'd like to point out on this slide here is this represents the new way that we're going to be doing segment reporting, and you'll see more detail on that in our MD&A and how it's laid out and explained. But we'll be talking about our Pharmaceutical business, both Canada internationally rolled together into one, and we'll be talking about our Oral Health business. both Canada and international rolled into one. So I should add that at this stage, our Oral Health business has no sales yet outside of Canada, although that is one of our initiatives is to acquire distribution for certain of our assets outside of Canada, those assets that we own outright. And then we report our insecticides business that has sales both in Canada and outside. A more conventional look then in terms of our sales, EBITDA and net income after tax. This slide shows you business performance over the last three years, Q1, so ending March 31. As I've already suggested, we had $3 million of additional sales coming from our new Oral Health segment. Our EBITDA was just over $3.6 million. So that's a 14% increase versus the year ago and included $0.5 million from the Oral Health segment. And our net income after tax, our NIAT was $2.345 million, up 1% to the year ago. A couple of things that I'd like to bring to your attention there is that the Oral Health business contributed to net income after tax. So when we announced the acquisition of Oral Science back at the beginning of February, we said that the business would be accretive. And maybe some of you thought I was talking about accretive during the course of 2026, which, of course, is a true statement and a correct assumption. But in fact, this acquisition was accretive in the first month that it was operated by BioSyent. So there have been some deductions off of our net income after tax. And on a tax-adjusted basis, $200,000 of transaction expenses. Those expenses were actually $270,000, but that $200,000 is tax adjusted. And then, of course, I've already spoken about the amortization of intangibles of $250,000. So because we only owned the oral Science business for one of the three months in the quarter. So those would need then to be adjusted when you compare how we're performing versus a year ago or how the business is progressing. So just to show you what those adjustments would then look like, the 14% growth on EBITDA would actually be 22% growth of EBITDA adjusting for those onetime transaction costs and our 1% growth in net income after tax would actually be 20% growth when you adjust for onetime transaction costs and the intangibles amortization. So business performing well, and we've only got one month of Oral Science included in our results. So how does this then translate into our earnings per share? So you see here, the green line in this chart represents the quarterly movements in our EPS. You see that our EPS in Q1 was $0.20, and our trailing 12 months EPS was $0.78. The first quarter of 2026 represented our 63rd consecutive profitable quarter. We came profitable back in Q3 of 2010. That's the first time that we earned a profit as a company. And since then, we have been profitable every quarter. Now a similar adjustment can be talked about to kind of make sure that our results in the way that we normally have presented them don't mislead you or anybody that's kind of looking at our business to get a sense of the trajectory that we're on. So the adjustments that I suggested a couple of slides ago about onetime transaction costs and also the amortization would have resulted in EPS of $0.24 versus the $0.20 that we reported and the $0.20 that we reported a year ago. One thing to keep in mind here is that we also issued over 234,000 shares to the shareholders, the selling shareholders of Oral Science. And that, of course, is calculated in the EPS formula. The other adjustment on a TTM basis would be that the $0.78 would have been $0.82 on an adjusted basis. We'll make sure that you're aware of that. We'll still be reporting. You'll see our kind of bare bones, $0.78 TTM and $0.20 for the quarter. But I think that additional perspective is useful as you evaluate how we're doing on the business. And of course, all of that detail is well presented in our financial statements and in our MD&A. So other than the Oral Science acquisition, we, of course, had some other highlights that I want to touch on. For the 11th consecutive year, the FeraMAX brand was named the #1 recommended oral iron supplement in Canada. This is amongst health care professionals, doctors and pharmacists across Canada. We're very proud of the trust that those customers and decision-makers and influencers have put in the FeraMAX brand. Also in the quarter, we repurchased 100,000 shares under our NCIB. I know that I've been fielding questions through much of 2025 and the beginning of 2026 about whether we intended to continue to be active with our NCIB, keeping some powder dry because we knew we were working on the Oral Science transaction, and we just wanted to keep powder dry to manage our balance sheet properly and responsibly. We have known some things that were not known. And so we went into the market and repurchased 100,000 shares in March after we closed on the Oral Science transaction. As you know, we're also a dividend payer. We paid a dividend on March 13. That dividend was $0.055, representing a 10% increase versus the prior dividend payment. We're now calculated at a rate of $0.22 a share on an annualized basis. And we've also just announced or declared a quarterly dividend for Q2, which will be paid on June 15. Just a couple of more words on FeraMAX. We have three products available in the Canadian market under FeraMAX. The brand is performing well. It is a competitive landscape. We continue to lean into that business. We have a significant sales team that are talking literally to thousands of doctors and thousands of pharmacists on a going basis with literally hundreds of interactions every day of the business week. So we intend to bring an additional asset for a new use case to market. I've spoken about this in the past, and we expect that to be a 2028 introduction. So I couldn't be talking to you about Q1 2026 without acknowledging that geopolitical and trade and economy landscape is, I'll say, quite interesting, fairly uncertain in business environment. This is not unique to BioSyent ,but there are certain elements of it that touches our business, perhaps more than it would touch other businesses. Obviously, there's uncertainty around what is going to happen with respect to tariffs and counter tariffs in Canada with respect to the United States. At the current state, it's pretty stabilized and normal, and I've reported on that in the past. but there is to be some further discussion between our respective governments taking place later on this year. We feel that at this stage, for certainly for a balance of '26, our business and our costs are in a good place. And so we don't feel that there is an issue specifically that's kind of pending on the time horizon that we're talking about for this year, and we'll see what discussions transpire as the year evolves. The armed conflict in the Middle East has got a more direct impact on us. We sell FeraMAX products in the Middle East. And so though we have shipped and the results that we're reporting to you today include multiple shipments to the Middle East in the first quarter that the conflict itself, the fact that it is apparently not a short-term situation and that it is lingering is bound to have impacts on our business. Just trade, supply chain and demand in market because there has been a shift of people in certain markets and as a result, people populations shifting. For example, in the UAE, there's been an outflow of population of people seeking safer environments pending the resolution of the armed conflict. The other thing that's happened that is once again not unique to BioSyent is that energy prices, specifically oil and gas, have had significant impacts on transportation and supply chain. It will also filter through into cost of goods. A number of our products are sold in kind of pill and capsule form and plastic bottles and the outlook for replenishment of those items is at a higher price than we were paying before the Armed conflict broke out. So -- our inventory position, once again, strong. I don't see an issue in 2026. But all of those things put together can have an impact on consumer behavior, and we're keeping our eye on that. At this stage, we're seeing sustained and continued unit volumes for our products and our pricing is in good shape, but it's a challenging environment that we're keeping a close look at. For a number of years, we've been talking about the cash balance on our balance sheet. If we took this chart, which shows you our cash on March 31, it goes back to 2024. If we took that back a couple of years, you would see that we kind of had a cash position in the business kind of in the $26 million to $30 million range for several years. And in fact, we started buying back shares in 2018 -- we started paying a dividend in Q4 of 2022. So we've been managing our cash position and looking for the right opportunity to deploy capital. So I started today's presentation with some comments around our deployment of capital. So you can see our cash position moved down actually two consecutive years. The 2025 number impacted by our deployment of capital into the Tibelia acquisition in Q4 of '24. And then, of course, our deployment of capital into the acquisition of World Science in Q1 of 2026. I would say this that our cash generation in the business now has us expecting that our cash position will be back to where it was, call it, the day before we closed on the Oral Science transaction. We should be back there by the end of next year. So call it, in 1.5 years or so, we're back in that position. On the right-hand side of your screen, you see various deployments of cash. Our cash from operations of $2.7 million. Of course, we bought back shares I've talked about. We're a dividend payer. We took on a modest amount of debt as part of the Oral Science purchase transaction. But through all of this, we've maintained strong return on equity performance, and we keep our eye on that because we are focused on quality and making sure that we're making good prudent investments of our capital as we grow and compound our business. So this is a quick look at the balance sheet. In essence, you can see the movements in cash and GICs when you start at December 31, '25, so year ending last fiscal, just a shade under $32 million. On the day that we closed the Oral Science transaction, that was down to $17.2 million. And then we had debt on closing of $8 million. You see now if you fast forward to the end of March, which is the end of the quarter we're reporting, that cash and GIC is down by $3 million, but we have paid back $4 million of debt. So our debt now is $4 million, and we expect that debt to be fully paid off by the end of September of this year. So likely $2 million at the end of June and another $2 million at the end of September, and then we'll be back to no leverage on the balance sheet. Our business is generating cash. We are looking to deploy capital into new opportunities, both in-licensing and acquisition and both in the Pharmaceutical business, and into the Oral Health business. The Oral Science acquisition isn't the end of the story. It's really the start of a new story into giving us access to new customers, channels of distribution and a new growth platform. So we've been talking about how our capital allocation links to our strategy. We're about growing revenue and profitability, so compounding our business, reinvesting in the business to diversify our revenue streams. We've launched seven new products since midyear of 2020. We've deployed capital into two acquisitions now. And through that period of time, we have paid to shareholders $7.5 million of dividends. That includes the coming dividend that will be paid in June, and we've bought back $24 million of shares. So we've returned almost $32 million of capital to shareholders while significantly growing our business and our cash generation capability of the business. So I'm going to land on this slide. There's a traditional reason why I'd like to finish on this one. And just to remind you that we have not issued a share purchase option since March 2019. We pivoted to using restricted share units, RSUs, as a form of incentive compensation for management and directors in the business. And rather than issuing those from treasury, what we do is we go into the open market, use our strong balance sheet and cash position. We buy shares in the market and hold them in trust. to fulfill our obligations under our issued RSUs. So it's a very non-dilutive approach to incentive compensation and equity compensation, something that is, I believe, fairly unusual in a company our size. So not only are we not diluting through share options or issuing RSUs from treasury, as I've mentioned, we've been aggressively buying back shares through that whole period of time. I'd like to finish the bottom of the slide. If you calculate our enterprise value to EBITDA ratio, you see using trailing 12 months of EBITDA, you see a multiple of 12.88. It is, however, misleading. And so I just -- below that, we've shown you what our enterprise value EBITDA ratio is. If you take that ProForma that I showed you on Slide 6, that shows the combination of the Bioscience Pharma business with the Oral science business, you see that actually it's more realistic to look at that multiple of enterprise value to EBITDA being below 10. So this calculates at 9.8x. So apologies for a little bit of a longer presentation than normal, but I thought that there was a little bit of detail there that would help you better understand what's happening with our business. We're quite excited about the growth prospects overall, obviously, in our Pharmaceutical business and in our Oral Health business, and we look forward to reporting continued progress on the business as the year rolls out. Thank you.