Kromek Group plc (4KM.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi. I am Arnab Basu, CEO of Kromek.

And I'm Claire Burgess, CFO of Kromek.

For the fiscal 2026, we are very pleased to report the results, which are in line with market expectation. We said what we are going to do 18 months back, and we did that. Revenues of GBP 27.1 million, and that revenue is driven by growth in both sides of the business, the Advanced Imaging and also on the CBRN detection side. Both businesses saw strong underlying growth coming through. And as we entered this year, fiscal 2027, we remain very confident of delivering results in line with, again, what we said to the market, in line with expectation. I'll hand you over to Claire now, who is going to take us through the financials, and I'm going to come back and talk about the individual business segment performance and what the opportunities lies ahead.

Thanks, Arnab. As Arnab highlighted, our results for the year at GBP 27.1 million revenue were in line with market expectations. But more importantly, the growth in the underlying business of 36% underpins business for continued growth as we move forward into our financial year 2027. As you know, the reduction in the gross margin is expected, and it's just a reflection of the change in product mix as the high-margin enablement contract revenue contributed GBP 16.5 million in 2025 compared to the GBP 10 million in 2026. It's important to note that the underlying margins were maintained on both sides of the business, and we expect margins to return to the mid-50s, excluding the enablement revenue. Administration and distribution costs resulted in a reduction in the year due to one-off costs in 2025. And there was a small underlying below inflation increase as we continue to target appropriate reductions in overhead to support the growing business. All of this resulted in a profit before tax of GBP 2.5 million ahead of market expectations. The tax charge you can see here predominantly relates to a GBP 1.7 million noncash deferred tax charge. When we look at the real tax in terms of cash tax, corporation tax was GBP 137,000, and this will be offset by the nearly GBP 800,000 R&D tax credit that we achieved in the year. The cash receipt, the net cash receipt is just over GBP 600,000 will be received in half 2 2027. The adjusted earnings per share takes out the noncash deferred tax movement of 0.4p compared to 0.5p last year. And that, again, is a reflection of the reduction in the enablement revenue. Moving on to the next slide. I really think it's helpful to illustrate the revenue mix pictorially with the green bar pulling out the licensing and nonrecurring revenue. You can see the growth in the underlying operating segments with Advanced Imaging achieving a 76% and CBRN achieving a 17% growth year-on-year. This will increase as we move into FY 2027 as the licensing revenue recognition from the enablement deal drops to around GBP 1 million. Moving on to cash. I think it's really important to recognize that pre-enablement deal, the question from the market focused on whether we were coming back to the market to raise funds. Thankfully, today, we're managing to focus on working capital of the business to support the underlying growth that we're achieving. In order to do that, I've secured a working capital facility from HSBC. Net debt at the year-end was GBP 1.5 million, with a further GBP 1 million of cash received shortly after the year-end. In addition, we have additional working capital with Advanced Imaging inventory to support growth and mitigate any supply chain issues and potential disruptions. And we also have the year-end cash impact with higher debt position, which is wholly related to timing differences between sales and receipt. And as always, this will unwind in the 2027 financial year. Again, turning to a visual in terms of cash representation, we can see that the cash generated from the business of over GBP 3 million in the year. Net cash from financing of GBP 4.5 million to support working capital, as I previously highlighted, and investment in the D part of R&D as we continue to innovate and design products for the future. I think with the continued growth of the business, the banking facilities we've achieved, we're well placed for the year to come. I'll now hand back over to Arnab, who will take you through our operational review.

Thank you very much, Claire. I'll now talk through the business segments and what we did and what the opportunities lies ahead. Just to take a step back, at Kromek, we are a global detection company and what we provide are best-in-class radiation detectors and biological detection systems in key global markets, which are growing. The key of Kromek, which has really driven Kromek where we are today is an innovation engine, which has generated the IP that supports the technology and the product base we have, created the product range, which has really enabled us to develop the relationship with key customer bases, whether it's the DoD in the U.S. or it's large medical OEM, Tier 1 medical OEMs or any other customer around the world that we have today. And that has been delivered by a team which has been stable and rock solid over a long period of time in Kromek. So working within a very agile environment and responding to customer needs very, very fast. So -- and that -- those are all critical elements how we win business within our customer base. Now our products and our business does not sort of exist in a vacuum. We exist in a global market space. And the growth drivers are very important to ensure that we can maintain a sustained growth going forward. If you look at the megatrends or the growth drivers within the 2 business segments we have, in Advanced Imaging, it's relatively easy to understand. The Western population is getting older, and the prevalence of disease is getting higher like cancers and dementia, age-related diseases. And as a result, our overall cost of care is increasing, whether it's privately funded like the American model or whether it's publicly funded like the NHS model here we have in the U.K., the cost is escalating, the total cost of health care is escalating. And one of the ways, not the only way, but one of the ways to mitigate that ever-escalating cost of health care is really for early detection, more reliable detection. Just if you can catch cancer in Stage 1 versus Stage 3, the patient outcome is better. But more importantly, and also really important from a financial perspective, the overall cost of care is lower. And that's exactly what CZT does. CZT enables better diagnostics, early diagnostics and more reliable diagnostics of diseases early on in the cycle. So we are very well aligned. Our technology is well aligned with those big growth drivers that exist in the market. The other side of the business, CBRN detection, this -- the growth driver is completely different. This -- the growth driver in this market is the key thing is increased defense spending, increased emphasis on security and internal security of countries, nations, cities and so on. And those happens when there is increased geopolitical conflicts driven by wars or tension between nations. And we do have some of those around us in pretty much every part of the world. And that is what is driving spend in defense markets. That is what is driving spend in security markets for internal and border security. And that's where we will benefit from that increased spend through providing the best-in-class radiation detectors and biological detectors to our war fighters, to our sort of border security personnel. So both the growth drivers in the 2 key markets we operate are very well aligned to what our business does. If you look at the evolution of the CZT within the global markets, there were 5 companies which started the commercialization journey in CZT between mid-'90s to 2003, 2003 being us. From that period to now, there has been 4 key acquisitions. In 2008, GE acquired Orbotech in Israel. Siemens in 2010 acquired a company in -- the company in Japan, the Acrorad. Kromek, we acquired eV Products, which was the original company which started in America and then Canon ultimately acquired Redlen in 2023. That left us the combined Kromek eV, which is Kromek today as the only independent player within that market. And as you can see, post acquisition, a number of products has been introduced in the market, whether in SPECT, by GE, by -- of course, Spectrum Dynamics, one of our customers. And -- but now with the enablement deal, we expect Siemens to take the same route ultimately. So the SPECT market, which is the 90% of the market share held between GE and Siemens, are now firmly rooted to go towards that CZT detector sort of choice. Within the CT, we have seen a number of new product launches that has happened only in the last 3, 4 years. Siemens post their acquisition of Acrorad, launched their NAEOTOM Alpha range and then NAEOTOM range, which has now a number of derivatives in the market. And we have seen some early product launches from Canon and other companies over the last year or so. So again, this market is transitioning and that transition will going to continue over the next 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 years before it starts to get into a steady state. And that's where our opportunity is for a significant growth over that period of -- period from here on. If I look back on the last year, of course, Siemens enablement played a critical role and a big role within our activities, particularly our financial performance. If you look back to 2025 fiscal year, it was a big part of that. It was reduced last year, but that still played an important part. That is -- that enablement contract and that enablement program is going really well. So we are working very closely with our customers. We are on plan as we demonstrated post year-end, we announced completion of a milestone and the receipt of the sort of payment as part of that milestone delivery. So that relationship is going stable. And as we have talked with the market before and articulated, there is also the supply agreement that exists with Siemens, which will start to generate revenue from -- we expect from this fiscal year. We are serving our other customers, Spectrum Dynamics, which has been a customer since 2019. We are continuing to send products and that business is growing, and we will see a growth from last year to this year. And we also have a range of other customers within the gamma probe and bone mineral densitometry and so on. The big thing that is happening and which will be a key growth driver going forward is that transition from -- of the market from conventional CT to photon counting CT. And we are really excited about what the future holds near term, midterm and long term for Kromek. And that journey really has started, and we are working very closely with our customers within that photon counting CT market. And we hope that over the coming years, we are going to start to see the results that will come out as this transition and our supply starts to make commercial -- sort of starts the commercial journey in that. So to summarize in Advanced Imaging, we had a good year of growth. We're going to have another year of continued growth, and we are looking forward to that conversion into photon counting CT, which is going to be a key growth driver going forward on a sustainable basis. Coming to CBRN detection. Firstly, let's talk about radiation. Here, we sell a range of handheld radiation detectors to a range of customers around the globe. In fact, our products are available in over 60 countries. We have got customers in over 60 countries. We're really proud of that. And with very high-value customers in our home markets in the U.K. and the U.S. with our Ministry of Defense, our armed forces using our products, and we demonstrated that with order wins in the last year and -- together with home office orders as well. So where we have been traditionally that our order -- our contracts were concentrated in our home markets, U.K. and the U.S. And that was a good thing. We validated our product. We got real credence and validation. Over the last 18 months or so, as I had articulated in the previous sort of interaction with you, that we have been investing in growing our channels, in maturing our sales and marketing team, growth of our commercial team under Michael Stephenson, who joined us from Johnson & Johnson in May last year. And that is starting to have a positive effect because we are seeing the near-term pipeline is really distributed over many geographic areas other than just U.K. and the U.S. So we have now got very good near-term pipeline in Europe, in the NATO countries, in some parts of Asia, particularly in Southeast Asia and pockets of Middle East as well. So in the near term, we feel very good how our pipeline has developed and how distributed they are, so slightly derisked they are in addition to our existing contracts and framework contracts in the U.K. and the U.S. So we have had pleasing developments and progress in this market over the last 12 to 18 months. Our big pipeline still remains in the U.S. with the U.S. government procurement plans that are in place where we have unique technological positions and products that we can bring to the market. And that pipeline is that GBP 300 million pipeline, which is over to mature over the next 4 years or so. We are not able to give you an exact timeline when each of those procurement programs comes on board, but those offers us a significant growth opportunity in addition to this organic growth that we are seeing through this distributor network increase and so on. So we remain very positive and very confident of delivering growth again this year in this segment, and we are expecting strong adoption of our products, which are very well differentiated in terms of weight, in terms of size, in terms of usability, functionality and performance validated by key users in U.K. and the U.S. governments. Talking about the biosecurity. This has been, as you know, since 2019, we started off a program post our very successful delivery under the SIGMA program of 10,000 detectors to New York City, radiation detectors. We entered into a program where we were asked to develop an agnostic pathogen detection system to plug into the network, which could be used as an early warning alarm system against bioterrorism or, of course, post-COVID, now we are much more aware of emerging pandemics and so on. So that DARPA program ultimately evolved into a program with Department of Homeland Security in the U.S., which is running today, which is -- current program is $6 million. We are halfway through that. That is really developing a system which would be continuously on analyzing air, looking for pathogens, which could provide -- which could pose a threat to citizens in urban areas. The second program we are working on is the U.K. government program, which is developing a much more smaller portable system to be used in field where today, the capability is you have to collect a sample and come back unless your multiplexing PCR system has a hit for the 3 or 4 PCR tests that you can carry with you. And that poses a real logistics problem because you are having to collect a sample without knowing what -- if you encounter a sample, you're having to collect, bring it back to base. And then in the base, there is a big laboratory setup, field laboratory setup, which has got lots of people, lots of equipment. And then you ultimately get a result with a massive time lag between collection and result. What we have developed under this program is a portable system where you can insert a sample and get a result in a very quick manner within an hour, 1.5 hours. And that is a game-changing capability in terms of point of use of DNA and RNA sequencing-based agnostic detection capability of pathogens. So this has been -- pre-commercial revenue, although we have attracted roughly over $20 million into this segment and have developed these unique IP capability and product platforms. This is expected to go into commercial use from this year, this fiscal year. And we are really excited about some of the prospects we are seeing in front of us. We are going to be able to articulate a much better business plan over the next 6 to 9 months of the growth in this sector, but we remain, again, very confident of the capability that we have developed is going into commercial use and the revenue it will generate. One difference between this particular product platform and a remainder of our business in AI or in radiation is this is a consumable-driven revenue model. So that small little box that you're seeing, which is replacing a field lab, is a capital sale, that black piece. But every time you do a test in this portable system, that orange piece is really a consumable. So every time you do a test, it's a paper test. So it's a very attractive business model, and we expect to come back with much more details in terms of our growth plans over the next periods. So just to summarize, this has been a year where we did what we say we are going to do. With the Siemens enablement contract over the last 2 years, we have, of course, demonstrated that the business, the balance sheet and everything restructured, we are in a strong position. But it's now about growth. And we have demonstrated the underlying growth of the business, and we are very confident of continuing on that growth journey and again, delivering what we have told the market we are going to deliver in terms of revenue, profitability in this current year. And that growth is going to be generated by both sides of the business, both Advanced Imaging and CBRN Detection. And that growth is underpinned by the fundamental growth drivers that exist in our end markets. Whether it's reduction of health care cost by early detection and more reliable detection using CZT detectors in CT and SPECT, or whether it's keeping our citizens' infrastructure or key assets safe against nuclear terrorism, nuclear accidents or nuclear incidents through provision of the best-in-class radiation detectors. We are confident of the future that lies ahead of us, and we are thankful for your support. Thank you.