hVIVO plc (HVO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

The Vox Markets Podcast with Justin Waite. Nothing in this podcast is intended as investment advice, and the people in this podcast may hold positions in the stocks they talk about. Do not buy anything based solely on a tip or recommendation. Please do your own research.

And joining me on the podcast right now is Stephen Pinkerton, Chief Financial Officer of Open Orphan, ORPH, its ticker. Stephen, thanks for joining me.

Thank you for the introduction. Much appreciate it, Justin.

Yes. Well, listen, today, you've been announced, you are the Chief Financial Officer and Executive Director effective immediately. And so first of all, obviously, we've not chatted with you before. We've had Mo and Cathal. They're not [indiscernible] Open Orphan. But tell us a bit about yourself, a bit about your background, if you would, Stephen.

Okay. Well, I'm very pleased to step into the new role, and I'm very much looking forward to working with Mo and Cathal, driving this business forward. A bit about me. I'm a chartered accountant. I trained with Deloitte. Just before joining hVIVO, I worked for Thomson Reuters for 11 years. I was in a number of sort of progressive roles. The last role for Thomson Reuters was an FD for a suite of regulatory products responsible for the sales growth, product development and even an acquisition. In 2016, I joined hVIVO, so I've been with this group for 6 years, just over 6 years. And initially, I was a consultant and then became sort of Finance Director for the business. My responsibilities are really the FP&A activities as well as the sort of financial -- commercial finance activities. And by this, I mean, pricing of the studies and also agreeing with financial terms and negotiating our contracts with our clients. This has given me a very good understanding of the business. And consequently, I've also built -- I've been with the business for 6 years. I've had -- I've got some good, strong business relationships, both internally and with some of our clients.

Yes. Yes. Well, tell us over those 6 years, how can you say, beyond the scenes there, we want to know about how have you impacted the business since you joined hVIVO then?

The company has changed enormously. I mean at the very beginning, we were a sort of an R&D loss-making business. And then we have got acquired by Open Orphan. And we've been transformed. We've divested all our R&D assets, and we've transformed ourselves into a sort of more profitable, sustainable business, focusing on the sero side of the world. And to do this, we've built financial metrics and KPIs to really to track our performance and to maximize our growth and profitability. We review these every single month and reflect on -- and they do reflect a positive trend. And I think that can be seen in our results to date and also in our market guidance. One last thing, I'm also responsible for the commercial finance aspects. So I think you will notice that our order book has grown from GBP 25 million to GBP 70 million at the end of June. And obviously -- I'm obviously instrumental in working with the business team to negotiate that all through with our clients. So it's -- a lot have been -- there's been a lot going on.

Yes, certainly. And then you said, the order book has grown, so it looks good for the future. What can people expect in the next 12 months from the business?

I think coming up shortly is a name change. We're changing our name from Open Orphan plc to hVIVO plc. And this is just to align with how our clients recognize us. And certainly, from a financial point of view, one less brand to look after. I think we are expecting our revenues and our profit margins to continue growing. And there's still a lot of growth opportunities in this business. And for example, facilities we've invested, made some minor investments in our facilities. But this has allowed us to broaden our volunteer reach so we can fulfill our studies more easily, and also this will support a field study program. The -- we've also acquired accreditation on our laboratory, and this hopefully will support increasing our laboratory sales. We invested a little bit in our BD resources this year. And hopefully, that will broaden our client base. So I get some Asia clients on board, that'd be good to see. We have a wide portfolio of challenged models, but we have a couple of challenged models that we really like to grow in the forthcoming years, the asthma and the malaria models. The malaria model was developed at the beginning of the year, and we would like to try and get some clients into that. And we are in discussions on that. The other big change in our business has been set a couple of these end-to-end contracts where we manufacture the challenged agent and then we use that to do a challenge study. And we've had a couple of those contracts in play, and we look to increase that next year. And that would really drive significant growth in this business. So in the next 12 months, in summary, I think I would expect more growth, both revenue and profits and a sort of a more sustainable position of this business.

Yes. Yes. Well, Steve, it's good to chat to you and say, the first of many to come, hopefully. And look forward to catching up in the not-too-distant future. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Justin.

The Vox Markets Podcast with Justin Waite. Nothing in this podcast is intended as investment advice, and the people in this podcast may hold positions in the stocks they talk about. Do not buy anything based solely on a tip or recommendation. Please do your own research.