Observe Medical ASA (OBSRV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to a company presentation and with a trading update by Observe Medical. My name is Jorgen Mann, and I'm the CEO of the company, and I will take you through the latest update on our journey to make Observe Medical a significant company within the med tech world. There will be an opportunity to ask questions as you can see on the way we have logged in. We will be picking up on those questions at the end of the session, but please send them continuously as there's a little bit of delay. So if we don't get it continuously, we will maybe miss them. So please do that. All right. Let's start. There's a disclaimer here. Nothing new on that one. So please look into that if that's relevant for you. As for our strategic vision, a recap on that. We are a Nordic MedTech platform with a global reach. That's where we are now, and that's our reach and our ambition also going forward and also to expand our footprint there. Our current platform is built on our proprietary products, products in our own brand sold under -- as Observe Medical being the legal manufacturer of these products and with full ownership of the trademarks. We do also have another pillar of our strategy where we want to be working together with the Nordic ecosystem for innovative med tech. There's a lot of things going on. We would like to be involved in more companies that are aiming to bring products to the market. We do believe that what we have achieved in the last years will qualify us to represent them in a number of ways as everything from the commercial approach, but also within regulatory and R&D. This is where we are now. We have a strong portfolio in the market under the UnoMeter trademark. We call it the UnoMeter family, and we have launched a vast variety of products. We have also a very important product in our pipeline that we will dig into a little later. We do have now, as a result of the last year's hard work, a scalable platform. We do have a manufacturing setup with a third party in a very effective setting. And they are fully integrated in our quality system that is a prerequisite to be representing a high-quality product on the global market. We do have our own product development. And as some of you will know, this has led to the launch of a brand-new product, the first new product within our category for the last 20 years, the UnoMeter Safeti Max. We now have distribution and sales within 46 countries by close to 30 distributors. And nonetheless, we have also quality and regulatory under control in the sense that we are having and running our own quality system and our products are legally manufactured by us. This is the journey we've been through from a portfolio perspective. The ambition is clear. We want to be a global leader within this category. We believe that is the way where you want to be if you want to be profitable and you should want to be able to work effectively, you need to be in the top 3. So this is our aim. We have already launched, as you can see on the green marks, a number of products. The first 3 on the left was the one we inherited from Convatec, as some of you will know. They were brought back to the market and launched at the end of 2024 with the last product, Safeti Plus and since now in Q1 this year, we have launched the UnoMeter Safeti Max, which we believe is a product that will redefine this category. It simply delivers on the biggest challenges that exist within this category within the ICU where these products are used. On the right-hand side here, you will see the UnoMeter Safeti Max. In the U.S. design version, this is a product that we are -- we definitely are very much focused on also representing because this one will give us access to certain markets globally where the design of the other products will be less accepted. And therefore, this product is a necessary part of our portfolio. We also do believe that some of the elements from Safeti Max can be added to this product and therefore, give us differentiation into the market. UnoMeter Sippi, I will come back to some more details on that. For us, it is still extremely strategically important that we bring this product to the market. We also see that by doing the other product launches that you see here, we are actually paving the way to launch the Safeti -- sorry, the UnoMeter Sippi. Trading update in terms of numbers, we are a small company. We see fluctuations from week-to-week to month-to-month and quarter-to-quarter. But we are quite happy and proud to be able to present you this progress that you see here. If you compare the first half year of 2026 with the last quarter of '25, you will see a growth of order in the order intake of 73%. This signifies a number of things. First of all, we do have a continued penetration of all the markets where we are present. We also see that our expanding portfolio is starting to give us a more significant footprint there. If you look at the net sales, the invoice sales, we are looking at a growth of 92%. It's almost a doubling from the last half year of last year. We are not a very seasonal dependent company. So we sort of see how are we developing half year by half year. And on that scale, we have almost doubled our net sales from H2 last year to H1 this year. So market penetration is going on. It is picking up in speed and we are actually quite happy about this. This is not taking us all the way to where we want to be, obviously, being a global leader. But for us, we are taking significant step continuously and pretty predictable now where we see growth continuously. Some of the -- one of the markets I would like to bring forward here is India. We have made some announcements earlier on that country. Historically, the UnoMeter products have been strong in that market and has left or created a strong brand position for the UnoMeter brand. And this is what we are exploiting now with our new distributor there. We have now received 3 orders and the UnoMeter Safeti Max is part of that bundle. Very ambitious approach to take this position back being the market leader. And obviously, while India -- why is India then that important? I mean, the size of that market is obviously extremely big already, but this is one of the fastest growing markets we see in the -- on the global scene. So our presence there, we consider that as a cornerstone when we want to build a global leadership position. We do have a lot of expectations for this market to grow further. Even though we are still in the early days, this is -- we have a very, very positive feedback from the market. So happy about that as well. So what are we aiming to do when we deliver our portfolio or develop our portfolio. These -- that you see here, the main challenges that the health care systems, the ICUs that are using our products are facing when they use this particular product. We are talking about a very significant risk of having an infection or if you use a catheter and a urometer. So that part is actually one of the top 3 in hospital-acquired infections areas that the hospital systems experience across the world. If we can solve that, we are definitely where we want to be, and this is exactly what Safeti Max is aiming for. The manual measurement inaccuracy and suboptimal measurement frequency are elements that are the target of our next product, the Sippi product, and I'll show you a little bit later what that actually means. Already now, the UnoMeter or the urometer products are being used in a world where everything is digitized, where everything is optimized to save time and be efficient and have an early warning in terms of patient well-being. So we want to deliver also on the unnecessary staff time expenditure. And already now we deliver UnoMeter Safeti Max on that -- on that part because UnoMeter Safeti Max will significantly reduce the time needed to manage a urine output measurement. So this is the UnoMeter Safeti Max as it is now. We are -- we have been taking orders for the last 1 month, and we are seeing the first deliveries next week to our distributors. This is a clinically proven product and CE certification is all there. Obviously, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to take orders and sell it. But we have also now a trademark that is covering this technology that we are introducing that we call UnoMeter Uno Safe code. And this is already covered by 3 patents. We have 1 additional patent pending. We do believe this is a technology, and we have also now clinical documentation that shows that this is an effective technology. And this is exactly what I was referring to. This is the abstract that has recently been accepted for publication and presentation in October this year. And as none of you may be a very clinical experts, but I think it's relatively easy to get to a point where you can see the clarity of the wording here. UnoMeter Safeti Max provided 100% effective barrier against the swarming mortality of retrograde migration. And that is the foundation of an infection that you have a retrograde migration situation. And what we also are now able to deliver on is a usage time of 14 days which is double the market standard within our -- within this category, also, therefore, within our own products, but mainly also, of course, also our competitors. As you also read, the silicon oil technology represents a significant advancement in closed urinary draining design. That is another dimension. This gives us the foundation to start using this technology in a broader scale. That's what we are looking for going forward. As I already mentioned, well, situation is that we have worked with some health care professionals to Professor Jan van der Linden and Martin Slettengren, they have written an abstract. That is the abstract that I just showed you. This abstract has, as I said, been accepted for publication and presentation. And the reason why that is important is because that means that the data that our study has shown and the conclusions that has been written up that I just show you has been peer reviewed and accepted that these data are solid and valid and also the conclusion has foundation. So that's why the abstract publication is extremely important for us because that gives us the green stamp to use the conclusions also in our marketing journey going forward. There's also an article written, and it's right now being reviewed by the Journal of Hospital infection. Any day now, we expect that to be accepted as well. And therefore, that will also be published in most likely late this year. This is not under our control, but nevertheless, the feedback has been positive so far. Fundamentally, if you have documented and published clinical data, you are in a very good position. That's the position we want to take. If you do not have that, you will be living in a world where you have obviously some claims, some indications of what your product can deliver. But in our case, we wanted and needed a solid documentation accepted and published data. So these are the -- these are the elements that UnoMeter Safeti Max delivers on. Related to the infection control part, as you just wrote, it's red, it's a 100% barrier for retrograde migration. And if you look at that part alone, that means that if you look at a population of 1,000 patients, there is a saving potential for the hospitals where they do not have to manage these patients of EUR 80,000 and/or equivalent to EUR 70 per urometer they buy. So basically, they can buy UnoMeter, EUR 70 more expensive and still not spend any more money. They would, on the other hand, also have a very strong patient outcome overperformance because, of course, if you look at patient outcomes, when you get an infection on an ICU, you are vulnerable and therefore, you actually with a catheter-associated urinary tract infection, there is an increased mortality rate. As we see here, optimized nursing, that's the one we talked about before, you need to have products that are effective, measuring urine output is one of the last manual operations in ICU, and we need to be effective in doing that. And obviously, if you need to change less urometers because you can use them longer, that will have a very impressive effect. Also, our product offers through the design, some effectiveness elements that are also giving a very effective use. So 75 hours a reduction of nursing time per 1,000 patients is a significant reduction. Sustainability, as it's pretty obvious if you can increase the length of usage for the product, you will have less waste. You simply will be in a situation where you will be using 24% less urometers. So that has a solid sustainability impact, but obviously also has a health economic impact in the sense that the customers simply will use 24% reduction in the urometers that they use to treat the same amount of patient if it was a 7-day system. So how far have we come? The abstract was approved, what is it, 3 weeks ago, 2.5 weeks ago and actually now published. We have now received orders from distributors covering 28 countries that have placed orders on the Safeti Max. Actually, we are in next situation now where we will already be in back order. We will solve that as higher volumes are going into the European setting in the later part of August or early September. So next week, we will be delivering the first products. We've taken on certain products by air to Europe because the request has been significant. So that will come out now. And therefore, the journey of communicating, validating -- converting customers into Safeti Max, starting from a practical perspective next week and also with the abstract now published we are in a very, very good position to start that journey. What will be a significant change for us and for our distributors and eventually also for the end users is, of course, that we are asking a premium on the price for Safeti Max, obviously, because it can do more. And it can save life, it can reduce cost, and it can actually also have a significant sustainability effect. But taking this clinical leadership role requires us to also act in a different way. We need to communicate and help our distributors and ourselves, position the Safeti Max as the clinical leading product and that can do significantly more. In order to do that, we have now built and are continuing to build a system or a solution where we will be addressing very targeted end users on a hospital acquired -- sorry, hospital staff level, where we will be communicating directly to them via an AI-based digital engine, where we will be targeting them, as I mentioned, but also we will be communicating with them and taking in the -- these hospital staff people within our frame and we'll also share this with an integrated way with our distributors. So we will communicate digitally and also capture digitally the interest of our products from a clinical leadership role. This is going to be a challenge for us and anyone that wants to take this clinical leadership. But I think we have now built sort of an integrated engine where we will be driving -- and driving demand and we will be picking up those -- that demand and transfer that into actual leads that we can actually take action on together with our distributors. So we look very much forward to also stepping into that world of a intelligent AI-powered engine. So where are we now? This is a picture that some of you may have seen before. We launched UnoMeter 500, some 2 years back and followed by the plus and now the Safeti Max. So we have in the high-end category now, full coverage across all price and quality segments. And we also do have a number of other products that are in the same category and within the same tenders that will not only in itself drive revenue and profit, but also start to form a system sale, basically meaning that we can solve the issue of urine output measurement by having a full portfolio. And these are very significant step we are taking now to expand our portfolio to expand the market and also to make this more attractive for us, but also definitely for our distributors. So we get the necessary sales time across the whole value chain. This is -- we have only started scratching the surface in terms of taking on the market potential here, and we do see that there is a lot of potential going forward, and we already see that as you saw in our order intake and net sales. As I mentioned a little earlier, we have in our portfolio, the Sippi product, UnoMeter Sippi. This is a product that is already regulatory approved. It has been sold some years back. We put it a little bit on the side while we build our market position with the manual urometers that we acquired from Convatec. We are getting to a situation now, as you've seen, where we have not only launched the previous market-leading portfolio, but actually added the UnoMeter Safeti Max to that portfolio to take a further step in taking market leadership position. But we also see that in order to manage all the challenges that is definitely the role of a market leader within the ICU, then we also deliver on certain other things. And what we're saying here is that Safeti Max delivers on 2 of the very important pillars of the challenges in an ICU. In order to completely uncover all the challenges, we will introduce and we'll be focusing on now how to find a solution on how to bring the UnoMeter Sippi product back on the market as soon as possible. Because as you will see here, that delivers on a number of elements that are fundamental and just gives us even more potential and more leadership. This product will be building on already proven safe code technology because actually, that technology comes from the development of the Sippi product. And that's why we already have 3 patent on it. And the clinical leadership capabilities that we are building now. We are building them internally. We are building it together with our distributors and setting up key opinion leaders across the world to -- and we'll -- that platform, that foundation will facilitate also the launch of the UnoMeter. So -- this is -- we are taking already as we see it, big steps in paving the way for taking Sippi into the market. What has happened within the ICU compared to 4 years ago when Sippi was last launched is that while at that point, the ICUs were still in a position where they were working their way through this digitization. They were resistant to some extent to the wireless data transfer and also to the integration of data from a third-party products. Those challenges have been managed in the meantime. Let's put it like that, that many, many other companies with other categories, have launched products where there is a data integration into the ICU world and into the patient data monitoring systems of the hospitals. So the platform also on the digitization of the ICU has moved forward and significantly improved our ability to launch Sippi into those platforms. Little bit about our market sizes that we are reaching out to until we launched the Safeti Max and also the closed system bags and the UnoMeter 400, we were reaching out for a market that we estimated at that time of around NOK 670 million. With the introduction of the closed system bags, the A4 and the A6, we have expanded that to a large extent, but also by starting to deliver on the U.S. design version, we are having access to markets that we did not have access to before with the design and the products that we have at that time. So that will take the market size that we are reaching out to from NOK 672.6 billion, and when you're looking at a full implementation of the UnoMeter Sippi, that market will actually grow to 5 billion, both because of a bigger geographical footprint, but also because this is more attractive from a profit and revenue perspective and simply just adds a higher revenue per patient treatment. So we have now built a portfolio that has market -- strong market potential. And obviously, we want to bring that into the market in an effective way. And we are still, in many ways, a growing scale-up company, but we need definitely to have a bigger operational footprint. So what we have done is found some of the most experienced people in the field of our category. And we have brought in Torben Sandgren and a Danish guy that I worked with also in the past when the Uno Medical days where we work with UnoMeters as well. He's an extremely senior guy working in several CEO roles. He will be doing a business development for us. We have a number of projects ongoing, and we will continuously have ambitions also in the second pillar of our strategy of working with the ecosystems but also within our own portfolio. In order to have a better sales coverage, we have set up a situation now where we have hired Dorthe Jensen as our Sales Director for Europe and South America starting in August and also extremely experienced within the med tech world, and it has also very specific experience within driving clinical sales through distributors. That is our journey. That is what we need to excel at. Arun Kesavan is a new guy on the team. He's our sales director for Middle East and Southeast Asia has been with us for some weeks now and is delivering on, let's say, approaching and penetrating these markets. We do see traction, but we do see opportunities that are not captured. So Arun is based out of UAE. And we sort of took the decision that we wanted local presence. We wanted local culture. We wanted local knowledge to drive that market segment. So this is our expanded team as of August. So in terms of summary, this is where we are now. We are selling in 46 countries through distributors -- sorry, we have 28 distributors that have placed orders for this Safeti Max and more is coming. It's just a matter of how fast we can move basically in the introduction and the presentation and driving this market introduction. We have these 27 distributors covering very big parts. We are talking about maybe 90% of the potential outside of the U.S. that we are now covering. We are very happy with that position. We do need to grow together with our distributors in order to capture the market leadership role and the revenue and the profitability that goes with that. Our portfolio has expanded significantly -- we are now not only having the biggest and strongest portfolio within UnoMeters, but we also now expand into some of the areas that are in the same category, but also doing certain other things and thereby expanding our market portfolio and market potential. We are reaching out for a big market. We are only scratching the surface so far. We are still building a platform both on the product side, on the distributor side and on the internal competence side, as you have seen, but the traction is good. We are happy with it. 73% growth compared to last half year in terms of order intake and 92% growth in net sales growth. We see that as significant further steps towards our ambition -- reaching our emissions. And with that, that was the formal part of the presentation. And I wonder if there's any questions -- there are no questions. So therefore, I would just like to say thank you again for joining this company presentation and trading update. And please look out for our communication on LinkedIn. Going forward, we will be keeping our tradition of having these trading updates continuously, but with certain sequence. What we also will is communicate continuously on our portfolio, on our products and our customers and our progress via our LinkedIn profile, please follow that. That will give you more detailed information on our continuous progress. So thank you again, and thank you for your support, and that's all for today. Thank you.