Covalon Technologies Ltd. (COV) Q1 FY2026 Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Covalon's Q1 Fiscal 2026 Conference Call and Webcast. My name is Dani, and I will be your conference operator today. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Brent Ashton, Chief Executive Officer.

Hi. Thanks, Dani, and good morning to all of you on the call today. We really appreciate you connecting in. Katie Martinovich, our Chief Financial Officer, has joined me on the call here; and Saleha Assadzada from Covalon is helping to coordinate the conference call and the webcast today. Our Chief Operating Officer, Kim Crooks, is out of the country and not able to join today, but does send her best. Saleha will now provide us with some instructions.

Thank you, Brent. Good morning, everyone. My name is Saleha Assadzada, and I am the Executive Assistant to Covalon's Chief Executive Officer. I'd like to thank everyone for taking the time this morning to attend our conference call. Before we begin the discussion, I would like to remind participants that this call and webcast are covered by Covalon's safe harbor statement. Please read the safe harbor statement on this slide. This is also available on our website. I will now turn the call back over to Brent Ashton, Covalon's Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks so much, Saleha. Glad to be able to be with all of you today. During our time together this morning, my goals are to first share our Q1 results and then tell you how we're doing in Q2, which we're already halfway through as well as expectations for fiscal year '26 and beyond. Second, talk to you a little bit about the incredible strides that we're making and the amazing value that we're creating for Covalon in the area of IV line infection prevention. Third, share some important operational achievements that are also creating significant shareholder value. And then I'd like to close by sharing a view that draws upon my past where I was running large, multibillion-dollar, global businesses for 2 of the largest companies in med tech and in those roles, evaluating companies for partnership or potential acquisition. I'll share my perspective on how valuable Covalon really is, which is not at all being reflected in the current stock price of our company. While our Q1 revenue was down from a year ago, this is in no way indicative of the progress we're making on the ground. We're already halfway through the second quarter, and we've already booked sales as well as firm orders to ship this quarter that exceed our Q1 results, halfway through the quarter. So we're very confident in having very strong Q2 results. And then looking at our forecast for the rest of the year, we also see this strength extending for what will be a great 2026 fiscal year as well. Our gross margins in Q1 came in at just over 58%, down a few points from Q1 a year ago, but well above our 2025 fiscal year in total. If you look at the gross margins, though, for other publicly traded companies that have a high med tech consumable business, similar to ours, Becton Dickinson, their 2025 fiscal year gross margins of just over 45%. Baxter, another big company in this space historically has been in the 35% to 40% range. ICU Medical just provided their guidance for FY '26 and included gross margins of 41%. At Covalon, we manufacture and sell consumables to the tune of several million units each per year. These other companies, they're making and selling billions of units per year. They have the benefit of massive amounts of scale running factories all over the world, 24/7, incredible sourcing efficiencies with their volume. And Covalon, our small med tech company in Ontario without the massive resources of these larger companies, well, we can deliver margins 500 or 1,000 or more basis points higher. I think that's really incredible. And of course, I'm biased, but we hear this from other companies. "Hey, Covalon, given your size and your business models, the progress you're making and these gross margins, well, they're really outstanding." And then moving -- operating expenses were generally in line with a year ago and the last few quarters and down more than 15% from where they were at just a few years ago, even as we've doubled our annual revenues in our focused areas of our U.S. product business. And with the decline in year-on-year revenue, that dropped down to the lower adjusted EBITDA and EPS, which as we accelerate in revenue, will come up as well. And so just to summarize, Q1 is an exception, not a trend. We have clear line of sight to a really strong Q2, a really strong fiscal year '26 and beyond. And I think the next few minutes will give you some encouraging insights. Covalon has some really unique products that help with one of the cornerstones of health care, the use of IV lines. Something like 90% of all patients admitted to a hospital end up with an IV. And chances are most of the people on this call, maybe all of the people on this call have had one at some point in your life. There are many different kinds, and some patients actually end up with 2 or more of these. Every day, millions of IVs, millions of IVs are inserted into patients, and this adds up to more than $1 billion per year. And they are literal lifelines for patients, infusing critical medications and nutrition as well as being used for drawing blood for diagnostic testing. And therein lies the challenge. These IVs are absolutely necessary. Health care would shut down tomorrow without them. But any time you poke a hole in a person, you're opening a door to contamination from the outside world for all of the bugs and microbes that exist outside of the patient. Well, now those bugs and microbes have a direct pathway into the patient's bloodstream. And this can lead to an infection. And in many cases, the infection could lead to sepsis, and you don't want to go septic in the hospital because oftentimes, that leads to the death of the patient. Of course, this isn't what any patient is looking for when they enter a hospital or other care setting. But these serious infections, well, they cause obviously great physical trauma to the patient up to and including death, emotional trauma to the patient's family and loved ones. A big deal is the psychological trauma to the nurses and doctors who have to treat the patient. And then there's financial and legal trauma to the hospitals and their funders. But here's what you need to know. With the right products in the hands of a great skilled medical team, these infections and other serious complications, they are largely preventable. And Covalon has products that are outstanding at helping to prevent these horrible life-threatening infections. And it's not just a hospital problem either. Home infusion, dialysis, infusion clinics, they all have similar challenges. So we've got these outstanding products. And one area of focus for us at Covalon is how we can stop the contamination of the IV lines or the dressings and in turn, prevent these really bad infections and other complications from happening. This solution is anchored around our VALGuard and our CovaClear IV products, and things are really starting to take off. In fact, in just the last few months, you can see on this slide some of the customers that we've secured with elements of this contamination prevention solution. We're talking about the Mayo Clinic. We're talking about Memorial Sloan Kettering. Nationwide Children's, Texas Children's and so many other well-known and consistently high-rank hospitals. These new recent wins in the past few months for either VALGuard or CovaClear IV or both are very significant. For some of the biggest med tech companies in the world with resources well beyond what we have, these companies sometimes have trouble landing these world-class, well-regarded hospitals. And we're not slowing down. Our pipeline for the future is running very strong. And while our historical focus in the past was on pediatric hospitals because it's a very focused target market, who wants to see babies suffer, right? Well, as we've been scaling up the business, we've added more focus on the adult side with acute care hospitals, and we're seeing really encouraging results, including closing wins with several of the names you see here. And so to transition a bit, if I asked 1,000 Covalon shareholders who Dr. Nancy Moureau was, I don't think many would know who she is. But if I ask 1,000 IV nurses who she is, I bet there would be very few, if any, who wouldn't know. She's a medical rock star who has great expertise, knowing how to deliver the very best in vascular access care and an excellent educator at sharing wisdom and insight to so many clinicians from all over the world. It would be an understatement to say that thousands of patients likely owe their lives to Dr. Moureau between her work in clinical practice and then the education of so many nurses and other clinicians over the years. When she talks, people listen. And she has partnered with Covalon to help educate clinicians about these contamination challenges about infections and the solutions. Yesterday afternoon, Dr. Moureau presented in a webinar that focused on this contamination challenge hosted by the Association for Vascular Access, and they had over 900 people registered to attend. It's a huge number for a webinar like this. And I think it speaks to the large size of the problem, the absolute urgent need for a solution and a very high credibility of the speaker, Dr. Moureau. And beyond the webinar, we're very excited that this topic will be the subject of very important podium presentations by Dr. Moureau at 2 upcoming prestigious scientific meetings in the next few months. These podium presentations will see thousands of nurses and other clinicians learning more about this important topic and the solutions that can greatly improve patient care. The momentum is clearly building here. And of course, these activities are aided by the recent clinical evidence study demonstrating a significant reduction in bloodstream infection rates at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore, thanks to the use of Covalon's VALGuard. And to bubble this up, this is not a small little problem either, right? You heard me earlier, 1 billion IV lines every year. So when we look at the size of the market we can address here, this is a $1 billion-plus total addressable market. And for sure, we're in the early stages of capturing it, but it points to significant upside potential for Covalon. And a validation point here, hot off the press to speak, so to speak, during the webinar yesterday, at the end of the session, Dr. Moureau asked the hundreds of attendees to answer an online poll question of after today's discussion, how likely are you to reassess how contamination risk is managed in your practice? And the results were 80% very likely and another 14% somewhat likely. I've done a lot of surveys and webinar questions over my years in med tech. And let me tell you, those numbers are outstanding and speak to the urgency of solving for the challenges here. And one last point before I move on. Last year, we made some changes with our commercial team, and we were very deliberate in looking for a sales leader who had experience at large and small med tech companies, someone who had proven capability in taking small med tech company products and scaling them to 5x, 10x or more of the revenue. We were very fortunate to bring Tricia Dittlau on board to Covalon. She had the experience and proven success that we were looking for and has come in and is working hard with our great sales team and customers as our sales leader for the U.S. and Canada vascular access and surgical consumables sales channel. And we've definitely seen a jump in outcomes since our arrival. You can see some of the early results here on this page. So I hope that, that gives good visibility to what we know is a large gold mine that exists. It's one that we're working hard to extract as quickly as possible to help our customers greatly improve their clinical outcomes and to greatly increase the value of Covalon for our shareholders. This really is like a snowball starting out rolling down a very tall mountain. It's definitely a catalyst for expanded growth that the financial markets don't recognize yet, but the medical industry does. And then zooming out a bit to the broader Covalon viewpoint, a few recent highlights and achievements that point towards other areas that will no doubt drive future growth and profitability here at Covalon. Starting off on the advanced wound care side, some really exciting news to report. Our collagen dressing is half of a great pairing that one of our U.S. strategic partners, HARTMANN USA, sells. And this -- our dressing as part of a broader solution was recently awarded a new innovative technology contract award from Vizient. Vizient is the largest group purchasing organization in the U.S. This contract puts the combined Covalon and HARTMANN solution at the forefront of the conversation with many providers across the country, and we see this as a solid future revenue accelerator. I'm also happy to report that a poster by noted wound care expert, Dr. Traci Kimball, has been selected for presentation at the Symposium on Advanced Wound Care later this spring. The poster highlights the strong success that Covalon's collagen dressings had in helping to heal extremely challenging wounds. And then rounding out the advanced wound care section, Covalon has taken delivery of some new equipment that will help to automate a couple of different steps in our manufacturing process. This investment in automation will drive expanded capacity and greater efficiencies in manufacturing once they go online. And then shifting gears to our vascular access and surgical consumables business. We spoke earlier today about the great partnership with Dr. Moureau and the recent and future really significant events. We also discussed the name brand customers we're gaining on our contamination prevention solution with VALGuard and CovaClear IV, but it goes even beyond that to the rest of our vascular access and surgical consumables portfolio in the U.S., in Canada and around the world via our international distributors. We've closed on dozens of new accounts who are highly impressed by our differentiated technologies and the role they play in improving patient outcomes and avoiding really tragic consequences of infections and other largely preventable complications. And as we continue to elevate our U.S. commercial efforts and move from selling hospital by hospital to also selling the value of our technology at the integrated delivery network, or IDN, level of things, I'm pleased to share that we've secured system-wide approval and recommendation for use at another large IDN. This one is located in the Southeastern U.S. and has more than 300 sites of care, including more than 15 hospitals. So we're working hard to convert this coveted endorsement into wins at each of the IDNs individual facilities. So lots of progress in different areas here across both of our businesses, many others that I could have touched on. And just before I wrap up, I thought it would be useful to draw upon my experience from my time leading large multibillion-dollar businesses at 2 of the largest global players in the health care spaces that Covalon plays in, 3M Healthcare since spun off from 3M and known as Solventum and Becton Dickinson. A big part of my job in those roles was to look at different health care companies for potential partnerships or mergers or acquisitions. And I can tell you with 100% certainty, both based on my past experiences and based on the unaided reach out that we're getting from companies who are seeing what we're doing in the market. They're hearing the impact that we're making with some name brand top of the-top mutual customers. They're noting the podium activity building up and everything else. I can tell you that what we're achieving at Covalon in the vascular access and surgical side and in the advanced wound care side, it matters. It matters a lot, and it's getting quite a lot more attention externally than it used to. Companies and firms are looking to understand how this small company from Ontario, Canada is doing it and if we have an interest in partnering or looking at mergers and acquisitions type activity. Bottom line, Covalon is sitting on a gold mine. Our stock does not reflect this. And in reality, our average shareholder isn't in the thick of health care, but the value is definitely seen by others. It's seen by nurses and doctors. It's seen by med tech companies and private equity firms and others that might very well be how the ultimate value of Covalon is determined. For some specific context here, I really see a ton of parallels between Covalon and a company that I got to know very well back about a dozen years ago, a vascular access consumables company, strong play in infection prevention, solid growth. Starting to pick up a lot of name brand, top of the top hospital accounts, clinical evidence starting to be generated, that type of thing. Nurses love the product because it made their jobs easier. You see the parallels to Covalon here, right? So that company sold eventually at a revenue multiple of more than 5x its trailing 12 months revenue, which is pretty typical for a growth company in the med tech consumables space. For ease of illustration, if you applied a 5x revenue multiple to our vascular access and surgical consumables business, it would put the value of just that business greater than the current enterprise value of the whole of Covalon. That doesn't even factor in our advanced wound care business, which by any rational argument is worth way more than the vascular access and surgical business. So the value is there, and it's only continuing to grow as we advance our company and do all of the things that we know drive expanded value to our customers, for our company and for our shareholders. So to wrap up today, we discussed our Q1 performance and the fact that, yes, revenue was down versus a year ago, but complete line of sight to a strong revenue acceleration in Q2, the rest of 2026 and beyond. We covered the remarkable progress that we're making with our vascular access contamination prevention solutions that are anchored by VALGuard and CovaClear IV and what a difference they're making. And the strong recent success we've had in just the past few months securing some really top of the top name brand customers in both children's and acute care hospitals. We spoke to some of the other recent achievements and successes that are continuing to advance Covalon as a company. And then we wrapped up by sharing a bit of a different viewpoint on the value of Covalon and why the health care industry is far ahead of the market in terms of Covalon's value. And with that, we'll transition to Q&A.

For our questions, we'll start with questions that are typed into the Q&A feature here online. We'll take a 30-second pause to get things in order and then answer your questions. Okay. Our first question comes from Arnold Shell, and that is around the U.S. tariff strategy. And so Arnold, thanks for the question. And that's one that it's come up a few times in the past. And great news for Covalon, right? Super unpredictable. I can only go off what we know of today. And that is there was the recent announcement from President Trump of the 10% tariff. That doesn't apply to goods that are covered under what in the U.S. is called the USMCA and Canada is the CUSMA. And so we have documentation from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol that states clearly that our collagen products that are manufactured in Canada and imported into the U.S. are covered under that agreement, and so they come in tariff-free. While other large companies have had hundreds of millions of dollars of exposure. And as we look at our competition in the collagen side, at least, manufacturing in China and Europe and under various tariffs, we really continue to view that as a competitive advantage, and we see that in conversations with other companies. So we're feeling very good about the current tariff situation. And like every issue, we continue to monitor and have plans if things change, but feeling very good about things. The second question comes from JD and it ask, were there any insider purchases in the open market the last 2 years? Yes, we're very fortunate. We've got very strong insider participation from our Board of Directors. Around 50% of our shares are held by our Board, which gives us a lot of strength there. And in fact, in -- this was maybe about a year -- a little over a year ago, some of our Board members exercised warrants with the stock. And so we're very grateful to have that strong insider participation. We have another question from Mathieu Martin. It's great to hear that your Q2 and the rest of the year are shaping up to be strong. Can you expand a little bit what you mean by strong relative to most recent quarter compared to prior year? Yes, it's really both. Obviously, Q1 was soft on revenue. And as I indicated, we're seeing a huge bounce back in Q2 already secured between sales and orders well beyond the Q1 mark. But also as we look at year-on-year growth, we see a lot of things coming together to drive that strong year-on-year growth as well. I gave you some insights into a little deeper dive into one of the areas. And across the board, we see all of our sales channels with strong opportunities this year. Mathieu has another question around CapEx. So some color on CapEx this quarter. What are you investing in? And what kind of spending should we expect for the full year? Yes. So I highlighted some of the CapEx that is going towards automation equipment. And we see that as a really big step forward in our manufacturing. It will help improve our capacity as well as our capacity as well as our driving efficiencies and lowering our costs. And so that's a big chunk of the CapEx. We also made some investments -- CapEx investments on the IT side to strengthen our systems. This has been a big area of focus the last couple of years as we continue to strengthen the company and our ERP back-end system. And then a smaller amount on some lab and quality supplies there. So I hope that helps, Mathieu. A follow-up question from Arnold on the U.S. tariff. Question was aimed at the future when the current -- so this was around the tariffs. It was more around a future statement. And yes, so we -- as a company, we've looked at a wide range of scenarios that could evolve, and we like having good optionality. We see the tariff world is certainly uncertain. We think that especially in med tech products, it's not really in the U.S.'s best interest to add tariffs onto those types of products since they're the single largest payer in that category. But we've definitely got optionality. We've manufactured our product in the U.S. before and have different options going forward if the need arises. And then another question from Arnold around kind of the future outlook and why despite a softer quarter this quarter, why will things be great? And a question about, hey, if this is true, why doesn't the market recognize it? And I think, Arnold, that's a key point. The market does not recognize what's going on. And that's because the market is largely Canadian shareholders. We trade on the TSXV. And it's not really a hot bed of med tech. As I indicated, the med tech industry, the health care industry, they definitely see the value we're driving. They see the progress we're making. They're seeing it on the street with mutual customers. And in the conversations we're having, it's very clear that they recognize it. And we believe one way or the other, the financial markets will catch up. Lots of different ways of understanding value. And we're making solid progress and very energized for the future. Okay. I think just let me refresh my screen so that I can see if there's any more questions. We've got -- sorry, we've got a few more that have come in. [ John Tucumbs ] has asked, can you let me know if there's interest from the executive team to purchase shares in the open market? Yes, it's a fair question, and I get -- obviously, shareholders would like to see it. The answer here, of course, is I'd love to, but as CEO, I'm constantly in possession of material nonpublic information. And so that means we're often in blackout periods where we're legally restricted from trading under different securities regulations. I can say this, my interest and our executive team interest fully aligned with our shareholders. We are committed to building long-term value at Covalon, and I'm very encouraged by the progress we're making. And so when permitted to buy, we'll do so. And in the meantime, my focus and our focus remains on executing our strategy. Mathieu has another question. It says, you seem highly convinced there's unrecognized value in Covalon's stock price, and so do I. Why doesn't the company take advantage of this disconnect by aggressively buying stock back? And that's always under consideration. Obviously, a few months ago, we returned over $4 million of value back to our shareholders. Happy to report even despite that $4 million, we closed the quarter with cash in the bank, $0.5 million greater than we started. And so we're in a very fortunate position where we've got a lot of options on the table, including share buybacks, another dividend, M&A. We've talked a little bit about the CapEx side. And so I guess my -- my belief is we're just so fortunate to have those options. And as a Board, we're always discussing what makes the most sense for today and the future. And I see [ Paolo Adana ] asked a similar question. So I think we've covered that topic off. [ Julian Hoffman ] asked a question around the undervaluation and helping investors see that, providing more KPIs for investors to see the growth progress on a consistent basis. And so yes, we're always looking at what different information and key performance indicators we can share that would give good insight. And in future meetings, we'll, for sure, think about what the best way to do that is. We are seeing -- as I showed, some of the name brand customers, like those are not easy accounts to land. There's a lot of rigor that goes behind it. And when different accounts look at buying your product, other name brand accounts look at what's Mayo Clinic doing, what's Memorial Sloan Kettering doing. And so those successes breed further success down the road. Let me refresh here just to see if there's any other questions that have come in. Jason has a question around working capital around accounts receivable and inventory declining quarter-on-quarter. Yes. I mean this was a good part of the cash position. And so when we -- we definitely made improvements around how we manage our receivables and our inventories. On the inventory side, right, strong inventory management. We've really worked hard on our forecasting and our demand planning while also ensuring we've got enough raw materials and supplies for production. And then on the AR side, a pretty big decrease in the quarter, reflected both some strategic decisions to improve our receivables timing as well as strong collection in the quarter. Certainly, there's some quarter-to-quarter bounciness. But I do think we've made significant progress in this area, and it's a huge part of our success on the cash side. As a company, we're managing our cash very well. So thanks, Jason. And then last question I show is from [ Paul Adana ]. And it's -- the question is, is the strategic review over? And the answer I would say is that's the type of thing that's an always-on type exercise. And as I kind of alluded to in my comments, we're in constant conversations with various companies that are fascinated by the progress we've made and looking to understand how we did it and the significant opportunity going forward. Obviously, I can't talk about specifics when we have something to announce, we will. But I would say spending a good bit of time in these external conversations, and it's really encouraging to see their view of the value of Covalon and where we're making a ton of progress. A last question came in here from [ Mohamed ], and it was around the 99% customer retention rate. And yes, we're trying to focus on what's the key information we can share with our shareholders to help them better understand the company. This quarter, we went deeper in this rapid expansion we're seeing on the contamination prevention and the infection prevention side as well as the external piece. But yes, we continue to do very well. Of our top 50 customers from a year ago, we've retained all of them. This is -- it's -- I describe medical consumables as being like an annuity business. It grow retain your base value and even grows and compounds over time as new products get introduced and the existing products get used more and more. And then solid growth within those top 50 customers. And as you saw, added dozens and dozens of new customers. You saw some of the name brands. Some of those customers were ones we had before, but we added this new part of the solution to. Some were brand-new customers and just really an exciting progress being made on that front. So that -- it looks like that wraps up the Q&A period. At this point, I guess we'll turn it back to the operator for any verbal questions.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Brent. Thank you.

Well, listen, thanks again to everyone for joining us on the call today. As you can tell, I'm a massive believer in Covalon. When I chose to depart large corporate MedTech America, a big, big reason was because of Covalon itself. I really saw a unique opportunity to take a diamond in the rough and turn things around, apply some solid learnings from a career in some of the biggest players in wound care and vascular access and infection prevention, work with our amazing team and drive a much greater impact with our awesome customers, add a bunch of new ones, make a huge difference with patients and ultimately create significant value for Covalon and for our shareholders. We've made a ton of progress, but we aren't resting on our laurels. Still lots to do to continue to advance. And with each passing week and greater engagement externally with our customers, with key opinion leaders and with other companies in the spaces we play in, it's very clear to me that Covalon is truly on the cusp of something absolutely amazing here. Thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Have a great day.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.