Itaconix plc (ITX.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Itaconix plc investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. [Operator Instructions]. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to John Shaw, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

Good afternoon. We're excited to be here. I'm joined by our Chair, Dr. Peter Nieuwenhuizen. We have Laura Denner, we are coming back from London here. Laura Denner is actually back in our offices in New Hampshire. So she won't be live on this one, but is present on it. We're here today to talk about some exciting developments that we've had both in our commercial progress last year. And then in the last couple of weeks in terms of our capital structure and building for the future. We have a standard disclaimer regarding anything we present today. And again, it will be myself, CEO; and then Peter Nieuwenhuizen, who's our Chair. Most important one to talk about today is that we did have our general meeting today. We did complete approval for all the shares that we need to complete the $10.5 million (sic) [ GBP 10.5 million ] in gross proceeds fund raise. That was announced about 1.5 hours ago, the results of -- positive results from it. What we had out of it was 2 parts. One was an oversubscribed placing for about $10.3 million I believe -- GBP 10.3 million for both new and existing institutional holders, and we did complete an open offer to make sure that all of our existing shareholders have an opportunity to participate. What it's done for us is really putting us in a tremendous position to grow for our next chapter of growth. when we talk about kind of completing Itaconix 2.0, when we took our technology, 1.0 was to take our technology and make it its ingredients. We picked up 3 areas in cleaning, beauty and hygiene to get to a stable level and growing level of our base revenues of it, which we've achieved. And now we have the funding to be able to move off into even more exciting times and future growth with what we've completed today. Along the way, we've also been able to rebuild our shareholder base. We've now well -- at the end of this, we'll have a -- it's a significantly larger institutional shareholder base. I think over 40%, maybe about 50% at the end of this will be both new and existing institutions that we've been able to rebuild, which is a key objective for us. So it's a very exciting time for the company to complete this fund raise and position us for future growth. The use of proceeds on it in terms of that's a significant amount of money relative to what we've had in the past, it was important for us to do as we -- our revenues got higher and what our capital needs would be in terms of, most importantly, just working capital. Some of it is just for another short period of operating losses for a relatively short period. But even more important, we have the working capital to restructure how we manage our inventories and our payables and our receivables. One is most -- very important for us is that in the past, we've looked in terms of both our customers and our -- and our vendors in terms of buying around terms, not necessarily always getting the best price, but in terms of what payable days, receivable days we would have, and we can change that now, and we think that will help our gross profit margins moving forward. Second of all, we've -- similar to what we talked about last April when we did a relatively small fundraise with IP Group, myself and Laura Denner. Europe is growing significantly for us, and we are going to be repositioning finished goods inventory into Europe so that we can maintain the service levels to our current and future EU customers to maintain shorter delivery times, higher reliability when we get products into as they start relying on our ingredients more and more for their products. So first and most important was the increased capital. Second of all, area is that we can increase our customer support for our current ingredients. When we approach a customer, there's often a lot of testing that we need to show that we'd like to show as customers consider our ingredients versus some other alternative ingredients and the more testing that we can have, the more verified testing in terms of how our how -- to show why our ingredients work better in their products, the better we can do that we're going to be able to have a little bit more money to be able to do that. We'll also be able to accelerate some of our revenue development of looking at new applications for our existing ingredients and more important, to be able to advance further products out of our technology platform into new ingredients and bringing products forward. And that we don't -- will not have any limits there. The limits we've had in the past in terms of how many products we can bring forward. And last, we'll do some slight increase in terms of our capital spending to support our revenue growth. Some improvements, continuous improvements to our current production capacity. We are not planning to do any -- add any production capacity outside of our plant in North America. But within that plant, as we add more products and expand the number of products that we make with our existing production capacity, there are continuous improvements and modifications that we can make to our existing production line to improve the efficiency and improve the capacity of what we have. And then last is that every time we bring a new product forward, whether it be the new products, some of the new products we're bringing forward in hair care or other areas, usually every new chemistry has some new process -- chemical process that we need to do to modify the chemistry beyond just our base production capacity. And this will allow this -- we will be allowed to bring -- be more aggressive in developing processes for optimizing and controlling more of the production of new products as we go forward, which has been a key constraint for us of bringing new products forward. So all of these are really game-changing for us in terms of how we can operate our business with a stronger balance sheet in place from now and well into the future. When we think about the development of the company, we -- our roots start around bring polymers from Itaconix assets of the market. The routes members start back 60 years ago when Pfizer and then maybe 30 years ago -- 35 years ago, when Rohm & Haas tried to bring polymers of itaconic acid forward. And we had a breakthrough about 10 -- about 14 years ago when we founded Itaconix Corporation then we actually had the economic breakthrough to do it. When I talk about Itaconix 1.0 is kind of from when we were founded until 2014 was really finding exactly where the chemistry applies to certain types of ingredients of whether where we could bring performance, safety, cost advantages and sustainability to certain market segments. And by 2018, we picked out the areas that are key areas to focus on and rebuild the company from 2018 forward around cleaning, beauty and hygiene. And what we've done now is really -- with the revenues that we've achieved, now really kind of exiting that phase where we've now established a very strong base of revenues around those core areas that we focused on over the last 4 years, and we're now in a position to expand out into the much broader areas that we can do with our chemistry other. One of the great exciting parts as we enter what I could call Itaconix 3.0 was having Dr. Peter Nieuwenhuizen join our Board. He's one of -- has known us for many years. He's been one of the most -- has an excellent technical mind as former CTO, AkzoNobel Specialty Chemicals and understands our chemistries and shares our excitement around our chemistries, so that have Peter on board starting last summer has been a very important part of how we enter our next stage of growth.

Thank you, John. And I'd just like to tell everybody how excited I am to be here today with you as we are closing such an important achievement for the company. And once again, my appreciation to you personally, John but also to the entire Itaconix team that we got here as well as to everybody around us here in London that has helped make this come together. So it's really a special day for all of us, Itaconix's investors like yourself and myself to be here. And I'd like to just make, with my chemistry background and having worked in AkzoNobel for quite a number of years, maybe make 2 important points. And you probably know it, but it's good to emphasize. So first of all, at Itaconix and itaconic acid is a platform. It's a platform molecule. It has been identified already quite a number of years ago as one of those 20-ish molecules that could really become a mainstay of a future bio base for circular chemical industry. And in that, Itaconix has really shown that we have made those steps. It has developed 3 important technologies already. But if you look at how the chemical industry is constructed and you then look at the addressable market, which we estimate right now at about $20 million (sic) [ $20 billion ] predominantly made up of acrylic acid and styrene. You can also see this is a massive market. As I said, $20 billion for sure that we identified. And if you look at the history of those markets, they started like itoconic acid, like Itaconix is right now doing. You develop a molecule, you develop a polymer. And then you see, hey, can I use it in this application, in that application. Once you start to show that you can use it in 3 applications, you know you can roll this out into the very many applications that you see here on the screen in food and agriculture, in paints and coatings, and there are literally hundreds of different applications. And that is the story of itaconic acid going forward. That is the story of Itaconix going forward. We have proven this technology in 3 applications. And going forward, we will roll out quite a number more in this very large market.

Yes. It's important when we think about the monomers although we talk about it being plant feed but itaconic acid is produced as a natural metabolite. Actually, all of our bodies have itaconic acid, and we produce it also of it, but it's also the commercial production is by fermentation, that it's well established fermentation in it. So that's good. But when you think about the importance going forward, what I think about, and I think -- we think about it's just the safety aspect of it. So when you start looking at a acrylic acid application, styrene applications and maybe you could describe those pictograms we have up there about the GHS health and safety pictograms. Those are really important, when you think, not just about the sustainability, but even more important is the safety that we can bring to the world.

Absolutely. The reality is styrene and acrylic acid, truly fossil ingredients derived from oil and gas and then they decide it. There are people in manufacturing plants all around the world that are now imminently not directly exposed to these ingredients, to these raw materials. But there are always emissions, and there is always -- and the danger of an accident and a leak happening at which point you are exposing humans as well as the planet to these hazardous chemicals and itaconic acid is an enormous step forward.

So if you think about it, if we had itaconic acid or polyitaconic acid, no issue. We can sit here, you can eat it, nothing from it. If you have a bottle of acrylic acid, you can be run -- you'd be heading for the door because of bad -- bad odor type. And if it was styrene, we'd be running for the door. That's just the nature of the safety of the underlying problem. Now again, we're making polymers out of it and certainly polymers of acrylic acid, once it's polymerized, the safety aspect, once a styrene is polymerized into a product, it's different. But underlying it, the fundamental safety that we have to build off of -- I think it's a huge advantage and will be taken account for it. So it is around the performance that we can have relative to acrylic and styrene. It's the safety that we can have relative to them and is the sustainability of it. So again, what we are doing, and this is one of the most core parts is we just have a wonderful technology platform. I think we have 15 different patent portfolio families of patents around protecting it. That's what we own as a company. And as we go forward, we've already pulled 3 areas out of it. And as we go forward, and particularly with the kind of funding that we have, our ability to continue to pull products out. We have 10 or 20 years' worth of work to continue pulling new opportunities out of this area.

And just like the acrylic acid industry, we took 25 years to reach the size that it has today. That's also the past that I see ahead of us for Itaconix.

So it's a pretty exciting part. I think there's something with the success that we've had in commercializing, we're able to bring to show new shareholders coming in of what the potential could be in there. In terms of -- so we have this great technology platform with hundreds of opportunities about it. The way we go about creating a new ingredient, I think is -- I've done it for many years in many different industries. But the way that [indiscernible] and I and particularly Laura Denner over the 2 years of figuring out how do we bring them forward, how we make sure that we get really good ingredients that come forward and they're going to bring you performance, safety, cost improvement and sustainability is a process that we're roughly -- who we're going to be getting so we have got recognition from in terms of kind of a unique way we go about it, there is a special sauce around how we go about doing it. What we start with is an unmet need. We identify an unmet need, for example, in detergents, there was non-phosphate detergents. We look at what our -- whether or not itaconic acid or polymers we can make from it, have some unique capability to address it. We go out and we find and we go into the ignition stage to find, get the first 3 or 4 customers. We think that if we put this ingredient and we can go get a consumer product that has these claims that are going to be customer-facing claims, that are going to make a difference for how successful that product is going to be on the shelf, and we want to go prove to make sure that, that's true. Once we prove that, that's true, we then can expand and get more brands using it who want those claims on their product. And then when we get through the traction side of it, now it becomes almost competitive pressure that if you aren't using our ingredient, you're at risk of the consumer -- the downstream consumer product is at risk of losing market share. And if you think about where we are right now and the results that we have for our revenues, what you're seeing is that our automatic dish detergent in certain regions or certain segments of the market, we're entering takeoff stage there after many years of working our way through the ignition and traction area. You won't see on the revenue side of it, but in the beauty and in the hygiene area, we are working our way through the ignition and traction area. We are getting formulations going through. We are seeing getting claims on end market products that are making a difference that are tied to our ingredients. So this is to be a continuous process for many years as we continue to look at our technology platform, what we can do, make sure we identify a very important market before connect the 2 and roll it out into it. And what you're seeing today in terms of our revenue results is that we finally have a have our lead ingredient, our Itaconix TSI 322 entering the take-off stage. I think we've talked a lot about the advantages we bring. But just to be clear about what we can do, the functionality that our polymer brings in automatic dish is that when you take out the phosphates, there's a lot of extra materials that were put in to replace the functionality of managing water hardness, so you don't have any spots or films on the glass and what we're able to do is take those formula and reformulate to take a substantial amount of volume out of those products. So we were replacing maybe 2, 3, 4 grams of material with 1.5 -- maybe 1.5 grams of our material so that we get the dosage to have excellent performance down. Along the way we're increasing the percentage of plant-based ingredients along the way. But what we really did is we got the dosage down. That dosage translates into a lower cost per dose of the ingredient cost. So when you're buying a product maybe for $0.20 or $0.30 on the shelf, remember, the underlying ingredients really only costs $0.03 or $0.04, $0.05. So what we've done is we've been able to bring that portion of what we do in the formula, bring that cost down, and that gives the cost advantages. So when -- in North America right now, if you're a consumer, you go to the retail shelf, you think, Oh, I'm going -- I want to buy a sustainable product. I'm going to buy a Palmolive or I want to buy a really high-performing product I'm going to buy Clorox or I want to save 30% to 40%. I'm going to buy the private label brand. We're in all 3 of them. So regardless of what choice the consumer thinks they're making around sustainability, we're bringing sustainability to all 3 categories because of the performance and cost that we bring to it. And I think that's one of the most powerful parts in terms of truly bringing sustainability into the world and advancing the world to the low-carbon economy is to be able to do it with performance and cost.

John, if I may add there. So this goes back to your -- the way that Itaconix develops products you identify that unmet need and then actually the secret is when you identify where can itaconic acid, where can our technology make a difference? And that's when you progress into the next stage. And the beauty of itaconic acid is, of course, that you have various ways to then tune that chemistry to reach that performance improvement to reach that cost improvement what will be inherently built in sustainability.

Exactly. Another area in beauty is the ability to have a hair fixative to have -- fixed that hair into a curl, for curl and hair styling. We actually hold the hair to the kind of internal structure of the here due to the chemistry that we have. So you do not -- you're not creating the traditional film on the outside of the hair that makes the curl kind of crusty. So what you get is, obviously, excellent curl retention competitive to any of the other technologies out there, but you get the soft feel called weightless hair styling or nude hair styling and on top of it is 100% plant-based. So if you want that soft natural feeling curl with excellent performance, you need to be using our ingredient in it. We've had a little bit of a delay here. The COVID caused a little bit of a delay in terms of how the hair market progress. We expect that to be coming back on it. But again, if you want that effect, if the brand wants that affect, that claim, they need to be using our ingredient. And lastly, the odor control area, again, what we're doing is zinc has been used as a -- for odor neutralization for many years. It's been well established. There's a product called there called Zinc ricinoleate which is very effective in neutralizing odors, but it's fairly hard to formulate with. Each pH range as you go from a product that might have a pH of 4 to 5 to 6 to 7 to 8 to 9, you have to work it very hard to go into formulation. And it also will leave a residue on any substrate on a fabric, more on a carpet or somewhere. So what we do is it's a very good delivery system for zinc odor neutralization. It's fast acting, it's comparable formats to the zinc ricinoleate, but it has the advantages of no residue and extremely easy to formulate into. And on top of it, it's plant-based. So again, there's other attributes to it. We supplied, Croda has been out there in the home care area doing very well with ZINADOR. We also market ourselves directly under our VELAFRESH product line. You'll find it in carpet cleaning products, air freshening products. We have it in aluminum-free underarm deodorants, pet care products, tremendous advantages that we have that we think will grow forward. But -- so 3 examples of how we did see a market opportunity tied it to our unique chemistry to bring products forward with the claims on a consumer product brand that other ingredients can't bring. Well, we've had what's great in terms of building a great specialty chemical companies, you keep building up, you get formulated in, you just keep on building up more and more brands that are using it. And we have advanced -- we're in a broad range of automatic dish brands, both branded and private label ones, we're in air fresheners, carpet cleaners, hair sprays, dog sprays, all sorts of one. But now the total -- we believe we're over 100 -- we do identify 145. I think that we're in, we're probably in a few more than that. It gets a little hard to keep track of all of it. But most important to creating a successful company is have a diversified base of formulations where you're used in it, and you're a critical ingredient to the success of that brand. And that's what we've done here. Those brands, once you get into it, when you really get the revenue growth is when those brands progress out into the marketplace to get more market share. And where you really see it is that they get more and more listings at more and more retailers. So now in North America, when you go -- pretty much every major retailer, you were going to find multiple products that have our ingredients sitting on the retail shelf. And we use North America as a leading indicator for us, not because we're -- our operations there. It's just the structure of the formulation market that they use third-party formulators a little bit more. So it's a little bit easier for access so we can establish success in North America and then transfer that into other regions of the world. So we look at North America as a leading indicator for growth. So over the last -- we look at kind of what's the revenue per 1,000 homes and make sure we're penetrating the household in terms of usage. We've been growing almost 70% compound growth in North America, and that's translating to about 60% compound growth across Europe and North America and in major brands -- major retailers throughout, you'll see that we're getting into more and more EU-based retailers, Carrefour, Tesco, Rosmann. And then as you get into North America, pretty much every major retailer, we have some presence there. So that's really the secondary growth as you get into the formula of a product and then that product continues to grow by getting into more and more products. The combined effect of that is the tremendous growth that we've seen. You can see on a half-to-half basis is a little bit of a -- we had a little bit of a bump in the second half of 2022. But remember, underlying, that was an inventory adjustment, but underlying growth, 63% compound annual growth over the last 4 years, really a breakthrough years in terms of overall revenues for us, mainly in Cleaning, as I said before, and that this is a very high-quality base of revenues of recurring revenues, and we're going to continue to build on into the future of it. So as buried a little bit in the fundraising side is just how well 2022 went for us in terms of commercial progress of it. In terms of what happened in the second half, we had continued reorder volumes. We were able to get some recovery in our gross profit margins, not all the way that we'd like to, but we have a significant recovery in it. We put some price increases through. We put in another price increase to fairly recently, so to make sure that we are getting towards our target gross profit margin. Vastly different world in terms of the stability of material of our raw material costs, they've stabilized significantly in the supply chain, the shipping times and the shipping costs for both incoming and outgoing materials has substantially improved. So we're facing a much more stable world in terms of our supply chain incoming and outgoing. The next major area for growth for us is in Europe. We have new cleaning customers that did advance to launches and are now into recurring orders, and we have some initial traction on some major new projects in Europe that will be coming through the first half of this year. Also, last year, we renewed some important agreements that we had with both Croda and Nouryon, -- and we added Brenta in North America. So we are continuing to increase our market reach into both cleaning, beauty and hygiene. Now that you know you have this positive effect. Now you go out and you have that confidence just to go out into more and more channels to be able to grab more revenues out of it. Well, we look for in 2023, we're going to continue to gain market share in dishwashing detergents. We'll have more North American volumes, more traction in Europe, and we're already working on the next generation even in the early generation of North American automatic dish formulations that we hope to roll out in 2024 with some new customers. We are bringing new hygiene products and beauty products to the market. We have a -- in the next few months, we'll be launching VELASOFT BR-300, which is a new polymer for us that is used for preventing and repairing hair damage. We actually are able to go in and restore the bonds, of the protein bonds in the hair to get much healthier, softer hair. That will be coming out. It's beginning of some new technologies we're going to bring into hair care. We have some new beauty products in the odor control, some new forms that we're going to come to the market with and to go out into new marketing channels for it. One area that is continues to progress, not quite as fast as I would like, but I think the fundraise will help us is that we need a little bit more equipment to get our super absorbent to make some additional modifications to our super absorbent to get to the performance -- competitive performance level that we're looking for. So we will be using some of our fund raise ingredients and some equipment for that, and we think that will allow us to make commercial progress in 2024. And then also in our composites, the patent that we have in the composites area we expect to be -- we are seeking partners there and hope to make some progress there. So another good year in terms of commercial progress coming up ahead. When we think about how our revenues develop, the most important area of growth that we have this year will be our existing customers. Any -- particularly our biggest growth is just from the products that are out there just being more successful out in the marketplace. The second area of growth is the new accounts that we brought on in 2022. We'll actually get a full year's revenue out of them, and that will give us kind of locked in growth. And the last hit is our $30 million customer project pipeline of getting some wins there. And we have some very nice wins potentials there, some new North American detergent accounts that we could be quite large, some new European detergent accounts. And then we have a number of smaller ones, both in the detergent areas, in new odor control ones that are sizable ones. So we expect to get continued success in our custom product pipeline. But in terms of relying on those to hit our 2023 numbers, most of it is already baked in to our existing customer structure. So we arrived at just a very exciting stage of development for the company with revenue growth -- with the kind of revenue growth we have relative to our cost -- our operating cost base is where you can see the path that we have towards profitability. We continue to bring our -- we don't lose a lot of money in the first place. We continue to bring those down and those lines will cross. And it's all around that bring the performance cost and sustainability to it, developing that large customer base of recurring high-quality revenues, having a large proprietary technology base to continue to -- over the next 10 to 20 years, we're going to continue to go back and use that our new product development process to bring new highly valuable ingredients forward. And we're doing that with no very -- almost no direct competition of anybody making our exact polymers in it. In each formulation area, you're competing against another -- a particular other technology in it. But in terms of someone actually making our polymers, we're not aware of that nor we get ever seen in the marketplace. We do doing low capital intensity with our existing plant. We have, as I stated many times, ability to go to $15 million, $20 million, over $20 million in revenues just with the plant that we have. We're going to continue to build off of that and improve our ability to run that plant. So low capital needs going forward of it. And again, just this wonderful base of recurring revenues to build off of. So it's an exciting time for existing shareholders that have us in such a strong place with a strong balance sheet. It's exciting time for our new shareholders who've come on board, very exciting to have them on board to rebuild our institutional shareholder base and just to be able to have the resources that we need for many years going forward to continue to build out a large, highly profitable specialty ingredients company.

If I may add there, John is to share what has driven my enthusiasm amongst others about this technology is 2 things on this chart. So first of all, first one is the low capital intensity. And I've seen very many scale-ups -- start-ups in the industry, almost inevitably you need a lot of money to build a commercial facility. It is absolutely unique and to see what you and what [indiscernible] the team have pulled off in this sense. And this should be a unique strength going forward. The other one, which is actually related to the inherent quality of that technology, which was developed, of course, by [ Golderant -- Dr. Golderant ] is the low level of direct competition. I think I know of no plant-based ingredient company that is actually alone in bringing this technology to market. So these are 2 really big strengths. And on top of that, there is a large market that you can grow into. There is indeed the stickiness of sales once you have achieved sales in the chemical industry, they are very sticky. But these 2 things from a very early day really caught my eye, and I believe that will be pillars for future growth.

Excellent. So we will want to make sure we get to everybody's questions and be able to address everyone's questions, I think we can move to the Q&A. I believe.

John, Peter, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon. [Operator Instructions]. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed by our investor dashboard. John, Peter, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation, and thank you to all investors for submitting their questions. Could I please ask you to read out the questions and give responses where it's appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Great. We'll start at the top. In the past, John has talked about one day having a bio-refinery. Are there now plans to take this forward or alternatively, are there any plans to invest in a new production facility in Europe? I have said that my vision as many years out is that we will have a fully integrated plant of an itaconic acid plant, probably that we partner with, that we own, and we will have our facility tied to that, producing a broad range of high value-added ingredients. My hope and dream is that they'll eventually be one in North America and one in Europe. That's a very long time horizon. That is not within any of our immediate plans right now nor does it fall into any of the money that we've raised today. In terms of a new production facility in Europe, we have -- we're still operating at 20% of capacity in our North American plant. One of our biggest opportunities to increase our profit margins is to run that plant at a higher utilization rate. So we are not planning any new production facility in Europe at this time. What we are looking at is ways to continue to improve the hourly throughput rate and uptime of our existing plant and using some capital to do that, and we can expand the capacity there for a relatively small amount. Second question is with the recent appointment of Paul Leblanc, will there be a direct or indirect working relationship with Bemis. Paul Leblanc is the CFO of Bemis. Wonderful experience there. He took it from a relatively small company to a very major player, and he is on our Board and specifically head of our audit community because of his experience as an operating CFO of the phases, the challenges that a company goes as they go from 5 to 10 to 20 to 50. This is -- growth growth can be very challenging in terms of the systems you have in place. Paul is an excellent operating CFO with that kind of experience of it, and that's why he's on our board. Bemis, the company he works for is an excellent company, their applications and our technology do not have any direct apparent ties, but excellent companies will always be on t the look out for opportunities, but there's nothing related to his appointment in terms of any relationship between the company other than Paul was by far the best candidate for what our needs are going forward. Next, would you describe your private label versus branded mix where your products are being used as ingredients. Please data for different product lines. Within -- I can really only speak to in our cleaning area. Remember, a lot of the brands that happen that Nouryon gets at hair styling and the Croda gets at home care, we don't have direct access to that. And even some of -- we work through some distribution, we don't see direct access to it. What I can speak to is in the automatic dish detergent area, we are bringing low-cost, high-performing sustainable ingredients in that area, and it works for both branded and for private label. The specific counsel a lot of these products get produced at the 1 or 2 facilities. Usually, they use -- all of these brands use third-party contract manufacturers. So exactly it end -- how the volumes that we end up go up into different areas. But in terms of the efficacy that we have and the competitive advantage that we give, it works equally in private label and in branded areas of it. And I think the example I gave earlier of a consumer sitting in front of the retail shelf and the types of choices they think they're making, we're in all 3 of them. So it doesn't make almost -- we want to be in every category that the customer makes because of the capabilities that our chemistry has. Next question, could you give some sense of the number of brands that are currently evaluating your products to use as their ingredients? Our customer pipeline is about $30 million. It might even be a little bit higher now. We've had some very good progress. I think going out in some of the efforts that we did in the last 6 months to expand our channels is bringing us some very good opportunities. In terms of the actual number of products, I don't know. I'm a numbers guy, so I think about revenues more than when I think about products. So it's $30 million plus in terms of attendance, in terms of active projects that we have. Next, are you prioritizing breakeven or faster growth? It is -- there's always a balance between it. I think that I don't like -- I would like to be profitable of it. I think we have the revenue growth that we have should get us to profitability, and we should get there as soon as we can without cutting off our faster growth. What we are right now is our existing business in the cleaning, beauty and hygiene, we're going to be a very profitable some sized company. I don't know if it's $20 million or $25 million or $30 million. I can't tell you but it's going to be -- It's a highly profitable business that we've already built and are operating. What the next one to do is our next goal is to be a $100 million company, and that's what we're going to be looking at in our project pipeline, new products to bring forward is, now we need some bigger swings out there. I think we can do -- we're going to do that within the context of what are available of our operating structure that we have now. And I don't -- I really do not want to be deferring off breakeven that much in terms of that. We'll be hovering right around there in the next couple of years on it. And -- but the underlying ambition is to make sure that we're a $100 million company and that we do bring product opportunities forward to do that. Dave, you said last year that a quote on Nasdaq or other U.S. market was scheduled you were talking of a shareholder consolidation to facilitate this, where are we with this? I -- we talked about a share consolidation for the purpose that our existing -- we still have a significant base of shares hold in the U.S., myself included. And one of the issues we have with our share price right now is that our U.S. shareholders cannot hold their shares -- the brokerage firms will not hold our shares in a brokerage account. And that's a major issue for us. So we are looking to share consolidation. We did a -- we made some assumptions about kind of where -- what price we needed to get to in dollar terms and where our share price should be in terms of what we had approved last year. Now that we're through the fund raise, we'll go have a chance to go back and revisit that. I don't think I said anything about -- I don't think I've ever said anything about quoting on Nasdaq. We already are in the OTC market, so we are quoted on the OTC market as it stands. I don't recall saying anything about Nasdaq on that one. But we have talked about -- so the share consolidation, we still expect it to happen. I think it will be a discussion that we take under consideration over the next few months. Next question is, which is the most popular alternative for Itaconix ingredients being used in your customer markets? Good question. It varies dramatically from every product area, it varies. In automatic dish detergents, it tends to -- the formulations we're competing against is there tends to be a small molecule chelate and an acrylate polymer that are used, and we're taking up both of those and replacing it with just our polymer. In hairstyling, we're replacing film former -- traditional film formers, which are -- tend to be fossil-based products, traditional film former ones, and we're substituted with a product that has a different functionality to hold the hair. So the -- and then in odor control, and this also -- probably the biggest thing we do in odor control is people are using fragrances to mask odors as opposed to actually neutralizing them because I actually think the zinc ricinoleate market has been growing, we're growing in it. So I think that probably the biggest competitor in that is people trying to produce the amount of fragrance they're using to mask odors and actually neutralizing them. So again, this -- every segment that we go into there's a slightly -- we're up against a competing formula with some competing ingredients used to it. There's no one there's not one alternative that goes across all of our pipelines.

And to add to that. So this is actually a feature of the ingredients industry, lots of them chemical companies, very many different applications. You go into one application. You'll find 4 competitors. You go in another application, you'll find 3 different competitors. Sometimes there are overlaps, sometimes there are not. So you have to take it application by application.

That's great. Can you please talk about your competitors on their strengths and effects on your business? I would say the biggest -- when you get up into the largest brand, there's 2 segments of the kind of ingredient brand market. There's the smaller brands where ingredients come out, formularies trial sorts of different ingredients and they -- just how well it performs at some of the highest levels when you get up into some of the global brands, they tend to have a 5-year development project with one of the majors with one of the really large global chemical companies, and they will actually develop a new chemistry with the brand. And as part of that, when the chemistry company actually goes and builds the plant, they'll get a long-term contract. So when you look at our product list, you can see our brands, our ability to break into the very high -- the very largest global brands could be quite challenging in terms of the relationships and how those relationships work and the amount of resources that you have to do it and the contractual obligations that they have that go over many years. So I would say that's the biggest one in terms of our ability to break into that next tier is that you really -- you have to be in business for quite a number of years for them to come to put you into that category.

Just a job to also in light of time. So there's quite a few questions that David insider and we cannot see if there are others that have a question that we would like to pick first. And I think this set to offset the hour. Is it not -- we have 10 minutes -- less than 10 minutes.

What are your core patents expiring? We have product -- we have 15 categories. They're -- we still have a life on all of them. It's a very broad range of product families of it. It's hard to say. And each one of them are stacking on top of each other. So we think we have patent protection for many, many years to come. Do you see the plant-based competitor on the horizon? Again, it kind of goes back to -- there is no one competitor. Every product category has a different step of competitors in it. So it's hard to make a blanket statement on that one.

And just to emphasize there, in itaconic acids, there is no competitor at this level of development.

Yes. John, this technology here is great, but should this not be advertised more widely for exposure? Again, we -- our best advertisement is the success of the brands that we get into. Formulators keep a very close track of other formulations. We can do more. We'll have the resource to do a little bit more. But in general, we're pretty well known within a class of formulators for a certain type of product, we're usually pretty well known. I wouldn't say lack of awareness is a problem that we have on it. When are we going to see Itaconix on the list of ingredients on the products I buy? They are listed on it. I mean, there are -- people keep track of it. We have inky names. So when you see sodium polyitaconate, itaconate sulfonated copolymer, we are -- every customer has to list us, our ingredient on their ingredient list. What percentage of your products are -- what percentage of your product base has reached the takeoff phase and what percentage are almost there? We are -- in North America -- in the North American automatic dish detergent market we're in take off stage. We're still in the traction stage in Europe for that. And then in the other 2 are in the traction ignition area on that. Next is what sales revenues and time scales do you envision to be net profitable? And secondly, what is your gross profit percent targets? Our goal is to be well -- is to be above 35% gross profit margin overall. Our revenues are growing. You can see when the revenues and our cost base -- revenues are growing faster than our cost base. So you can expect to see that in the coming years. It's not going to be indefinite. I think we already talked about the competitors strength and effects on the business. Can you ensure supply chain stability through the global diversity, given the changing geopolitical ones? The only source of itaconic acid right now is out of China. I think there are people looking at it. And we'll see -- we keep very close tabs and everybody wants to talk to me about -- talk to us about it. You say there's currently a low level of turn. Do you anticipate this situation to be in 5 years' time? We don't see anybody in terms of someone making itaconates like we make, we don't expect that in the next 5 years. In superabsorbents, how big is the revenue opportunity for Itaconix, which end products drive it? We're in the early stages of that superabsorbents a huge market. And so that's a very -- that's a -- there's lots of opportunity in there. When will you hit $20 million revenues? That's sometime in the future, we're growing fast. Does something like the mass recall of fabuloso cleaner impact? No, it does not. I don't -- not [indiscernible] with that one. We are not in fabuloso. So we do not have any product recalls I know that affect us. Can you confirm that all excess applications from existing qualifying shareholders have been accepted. I believe so yes. And thank you for answering my questions.

Thank you...

We've got all the questions. All right. That's -- those are great questions. So thank you, guys.

John, Peter, thank you. And I think you've addressed all those questions you got from investors. And of course, the company will review all questions submitted today, and we will publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which are now is particularly important to the company. John can I please just ask you for a few closing comments.

It's just the -- so the excitement that we have of entering a new phase of growth with a strong balance sheet, with the commercial success that we have with the commercial pipeline that we -- customer pipeline we have in front of us, I've always been enthusiastic about it. I've known this was coming, but to be able to show the outside world exactly what we are doing with this kind of success and show the outside world than to get investor new institutions coming in to invest behind it. It's just both a validation of what we've done and a very good indication of what we're going to do in the future. It's been a very exciting couple of months for us, and we look forward to continuing to show the steady progress that we've had.

John, Peter, thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure we'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Itaconix plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. Good afternoon to you all.