Venture Life Group plc (VLG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Venture Life plc investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to hand over to Jerry Randall, CEO; and Daniel Wells, CFO. Good morning to you both.

Good morning, everybody. I'm Jerry Randall, Founder and CEO of Venture Life Group, and I'm joined by my Chief Financial Officer, Danny Wells, to share with you today. So today, we announced the significant acceleration of the simplification of Venture Life Group to drive future profitable growth. We divested of the CDMO operation to the group in Italy and Sweden and some peripheral brands at the same time. This significantly simplifies our structure, along with other activities that we're doing and makes us lean for growth, takes away the capital-intensive nature of the CDMO. We've become a pure-play branded consumer health care platform. And we're recycling that cash from the sale of this lower-margin, mature, lower growth product business into a higher-margin, high-growth products. That's the ones you've got at the moment. We'll invest in and also ones we'll acquire. And these products have pricing power, enabled to grow our existing core brands. We're becoming horizontally integrated with a focus on strategic customer relationships and a strategic vision to be the partner of choice for what we phrase as proactive, healthy longevity or health span. So to achieve this simplified, less capital-intensive business approach, we've divested the CDMO. We've -- that's the Biokosmes business and the Gnesta business in Sweden with some small peripheral brands. And we've received a payment of EUR 62 million for that disposal. When I say received, we're exchanging contracts today and then we'll complete in a few months' time subject to some regulatory filings. The purchaser is a company called BioDue, private equity-backed Italian manufacturing business. And that group will become our biggest supplier. We will enter into a long-term manufacturing agreement, which will maintain surety of supply and pricing and then include a strategic partnership with this group for better ways of working to unlock additional mutual value in the future through NPD in our chosen proactive healthy longevity categories. And we're also going to have a short term, what's called a transitional service agreement from completion over a number of months while various contracts are handed over and that transition takes place. So moving on to the next slide. These are the power brands that will remain within the Venture Life Group. so which we have done product portfolio expansion, distribution expansion, new product development. And collectively, these brands delivered about GBP 45 million of revenues or will deliver about GBP 45 million of revenues this year. What's really important as well in retaining these brands is we retain our key strategic customer relationships in these brands, for example, with Bayer Consumer Healthcare. And just to emphasize here, these are the brands, smaller peripheral brands that we're disposing of. So these are smaller brands, which are -- only generate a small amount of revenue. 2024, they contributed about GBP 800,000 of revenue, about 1.5% of our overall turnover. They're lower EBITDA contribution because they're smaller brands, smaller products, and it's less efficient to manage the partners for us in customers of this size. So we've disposed of those to the same purchaser.

So as Jerry just explained, our objective has been to simplify and optimize the business this so that we can enable more focus on the growth of our own brands, our VLG brands. The divestment has provided an opportunity to significantly accelerate that plan. We were already working on a business optimization plan, as we've talked about over the last 18 months, and that's progressing well. So this has accelerated that plan significantly and enabled us to realize an attractive valuation for the CDMO operation and peripheral brands. The EUR 62 million proceeds is the equivalent of around 11x the reported EBITDA from the target entities for 2024. So these proceeds, they will be recycled into our more profitable VLG brands. These are the brands that were higher margin. They have greater pricing power. They are market leaders in their space, and they provide for greater innovation opportunity. So we want to grow these brands out faster with more focus. This will be done as a combination of more marketing support behind the brands, plus utilizing significant available funds for future M&A, so using the proceeds we've generated today. We will look to use those proceeds in M&A at multiples in our trend range of 5 to 7x EBITDA. That's the multiple under VLG's stewardship post synergies. So realizing cash proceeds at upwards of 10, 11x EBITDA and redeploying into assets with greater opportunity, greater growth potential, greater margins at lower multiples, as I say. The other advantages of this divestment and key reasons behind it is it will lighten the capital-intensive structure of the business going forward, specifically no machinery to maintain, less property to keep, lower spend investing and maintaining the technical files behind our medical devices as all of those costs will transfer over to the buyer. This means that our future investment can be focused on our VLG brands. And that entails not only the marketing support I talked about a moment ago and the M&A opportunity, but also investing in the systems that we have in our business and our digital capability. These are key things that we need to become leaders in the space so that we can almost invest ahead of our time, ensuring that we have a scalable M&A playbook for our plans in future. When we do acquisitions, we can slot them into our existing operations and our systems quickly and easily. Additionally, this divestment provides for some great benefits to our cash flow conversion. On the back of lower capital-intensive nature of the business, we'll also remove some significant warehousing costs from the business, specifically the leases that we have in Italy with Biokosmes and ultimately dropping GBP 2 million of finance costs off the P&L. So we're drawn at around just over GBP 20 million on our RCF prior to paying down that drawing in full as part of the completion fund. So significant costs that we have been incurring over the last couple of years through our M&A strategy that will be coming off the P&L. So there will be a greater conversion of the EBITDA to free cash flow as a result of these factors. So this simplified portfolio is allowing us to focus on our power brands, do faster execution of the product innovation behind those brands. Our target, as you can see on the screen, is to generate up to 20% of revenues from new product development over the coming years. We'll measure that through clear measures such as the Vitality Index. We operate at around 7% to 8% of group revenues come from new products today. So that's a significant increase in that contribution from innovation. And ultimately, all of these factors will allow us to become a pure-play consumer health care platform, which should attract higher valuations for the business and interest in the business going forward, which is important for our shareholders. So to be clear, we will use the cash to pay down our existing RCF in full. As I say, that's just over GBP 20 million today. But we will keep the RCF, the revolving credit facility in place to the group that gives us an ability to draw up to GBP 50 million of cash. So we'll have around GBP 40 million of cash in our bank plus GBP 50 million available to us through the RCF, giving us significant firepower for that M&A. And that facility also allows us to borrow up to 2.5x our last 12-month EBITDA, including the full year impact of any assets we acquire. So to summarize, the divestment gives us significant cash resources to invest in the development and growth of the branded group, our VLG brands. That's to be achieved through investment in our A&P, data insight, innovation to drive NPD to grow ahead of our peers. We want to build a pure-play platform attracting higher multiples for VLG. As I said, this will improve the quality of our earnings and that drop-through of EBITDA to cash flow -- free cash flow conversion. And you can see there that we've got listed some key markets on the screen. We already have a huge amount of opportunity in the U.K. for our existing brands. We've got distribution gaps still. We've got increased brand awareness opportunity. We're increasing our value proposition to our shoppers. The Health & Her acquisition at the end of last year is a great example on the distribution gaps point. We've acquired a business which has a foothold in some key retailers, but we've got an existing relationship in other retailers, and we're continuing to fill out those gaps so that we can provide full self-care product opportunity to those customers. In the U.S., we have a platform on the back of that acquisition as well, on the back of the Health & Her acquisition to accelerate our expansion plans in that market. We already have now distribution in over 6,000 stores in the U.S. And this is giving us that platform, as I say, to go and put in our other core existing brands into that market where we only have a small presence today on some of the existing brands as an online presence. So it's giving us opportunity to now get a brick-and-mortar presence in the U.S. as well in addition to the existing presence that our recently acquired Health & Her products have. A note on that with regards to tariffs is that we are able to manage the U.S. tariff impact as part of that plan because as we are entering this market now in a big way, we're able to factor that into our pricing. We're not locked into pre-existing tariff change prices. So that's within our control to manage and ensure that our margins don't deteriorate as a result of Donald Trump's announcements. And I think worth mentioning as well is that we've recently begun setting up an infrastructure in the U.S. So we have -- in preparation for this, we have warehousing already there. We've got agencies and advisers on the ground. And more recently, we've also registered a legal entity in the U.S. to facilitate trading in this market. So we've got an opportunity now with all the platform and infrastructure in place to now go and invest in that market, continue to build out that infrastructure, and we've got significant ample funds to be able to do that.

So our vision is built on insight -- data-driven insights fundamental to product development, product selection and commercialization. And there's a real significant prevention and treatment opportunity going forward as people look to have this longer, healthier life to increase their health span. There are 8 risks and behaviors that drive the 15 chronic conditions accounting for over 80% of chronic illness globally in heart disease, stroke and cost in the U.S. health care systems is over $250 billion a year, $160 billion lost productivity. So a healthier world requires increasing attention and investment in health and proactive prevention as we go forward. So preventative bias in treatment is fundamental to achieving this, and that's where we see our business growing and developing, and it's fundamental to individuals who want to proactively achieve a greater health span. In fact, interestingly, recently, the World Health Organization commented that at least 20% to 30% of health care budgets should be invested in prevention. And that's crucial to reducing the long-term costs of chronic treatment and improving overall public health. So this is the space we sit in, and this is where we see the continued and expanding opportunity for us. If you look at the global wellness economy, it's a huge market, and we already operate in some of those areas, but the opportunity will be to continue to grow as the population aspire to healthier outcomes and longer health spans. We're ideally placed in women's health and men's health, as you can see from a number of the products I've got here already. So we're ideally placed there to grow significantly these sectors and categories today and tomorrow. And now we have an agile light structure and the funds to support our insights to grow these and realize this ambition.

So elaborating further on the strategic rationale of this divestment. We've got a growing trend in the preventative self-care space through empowering and enabling. We see that data-driven insight is going to be fundamental to this strategy, and we're already making significant investments in our ability to gather data and use it quickly. Our insights will ultimately drive our M&A and innovation decisions, which will become of an increased focus. We're already doing that, but this will now allow us to do it in a more focused and rapid way to execute on those decisions quickly. And we'll find the right niche opportunities within women's and men's health, and it's important to highlight the word niche there where we think we can provide effective products to meet their needs as we have been doing with the VLG brands for many years, but building out and expanding on that much further. This process is already underway, as I touched upon there, with a number of existing and exciting M&A opportunities in the space and a pipeline of NPD opportunities in front of us, which we are working towards at the moment to build out on that plan. On the next few slides, we're going to talk through our strategy in a bit more detail. To give an overview of this to begin with, we've come up with 5 strategic pillars in Venture Life, which will become focus to everything we do and the VLG team do on a day-to-day going forward. You can see here that, first of all, acquiring and transforming our core brands, making sure that they have a clear runway for profitable growth, having the #1 brand mindset when we are thinking about our brands and what we want to do with them, making sure we have an omnichannel go-to-market strategy tailored to where the shoppers shop and how they buy. Touching on the data point, ensuring we have great integrated digital capability, giving us an opportunity to have advanced AI and robust data to drive the insights, both for M&A and our new product development. And underpinning all of that is making sure that we've got a team who have a mentality of winning ways of working, core entrepreneurial competencies within the team and breeding that culture through everything that we do.

Driving down a little bit further into each of those strategic pillars, we can just see how we've already been doing this within our business. As you see here, acquiring and transferring brands into a #1 space for profitable growth. So Earol, recent acquisition, Balance Activ, Health &Her/Him, and Lift, all brands we've recently acquired and that are growing very well within our portfolio. And we see our knowledge and expertise in achieving this continuing to support us as we go forward in acquiring and developing more brands as well as continuing to develop the ones we have, growing revenues and growing profits. So we've got a good track record of acquiring and transforming brands, and we're going to continue to do this as part of our growth strategy. If we move on to the #1 brand mindset. So a number of our brands are already in #1 positions in their market space. Health & Her is the leading menopause brand in the U.K. Balance Activ is the #1 bacterial vaginosis brand in the U.K. Earol, the #1 olive oil wax spray in the U.K. and Lift is the #1 glucose supplement in the U.K. for type 1 diabetics. So we're used to bring in our niche effective products into #1 spaces, and that will again be a focus of how we grow our business going forward. Moving on, looking at the omnichannel approach. Omnichannel is really important because ultimately, we need to be where the shopper shops. It's not about so much the consumer these days. It's where is the shopper because we're a B2B business. So we need to make sure our products are where the shopper shops and having a go-to-market strategy that's tailored to that and how people buy. So as you can see here, these are all retailers that we are in and that we use and channels that we use today, and we'll continue to exploit those and push those forward. We're pushing out, obviously, in the U.K. and we have a great position already, but we're starting to launch in the U.S., and we're focusing much more on the EU as well across all of those 4 channels. So that is health and beauty, grocery, pharmacy and online. And we're in all of those channels already, and we'll continue to supply into all those channels to make sure we are always where the shopper shops.

Diving into a bit more detail on the integrated digital capability, AI and data piece. We have a first-class app that's available in our business today coming over from the recently acquired Health & Her business. We have an app that is giving real patient benefits and monitoring trends and daily habits in our consumers' lives. This technology is first-in-class, and it is a platform for what we would like to do across all of our other brands. So having this technology on the left-hand side of the screen, you can see there to track, learn and build upon -- build positive habits, personalize your goals. We want to be able to have this technology available to all of our core brands to hit all of our target consumers so that they can -- we can replicate and lift and shift this capability that we've recently acquired in Venture Life across our other key category areas in which our core brands play. Further to that, we are also, as touched upon over the last 12 months or so, investing and implementing a new ERP system at Venture Life, that is the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP. Within that, we are -- have been investing in key modules to manage our finance and supply chain operations and ensure that all of our systems are using a common ERP that can talk to each other quickly and that we can gather data and insights from cross-functional operations within those systems. So to give you an example of that, we've got a core finance and supply chain model. But with the investment proceeds we're getting on this divestment, we're also to roll this out across all of our CRM space, marketing modules, HR. These things are allowing us to have one ERP where all the different operational functions and data from those parts of the business can talk to one another and allow us to get information quicker, make decisions faster and have insights that we may not already realize are in the data at the moment. So these are investments that are already underway and capabilities that we already have in the business, i.e., the app I'm talking about there. And we've got an opportunity here to now roll these out more widely across VLG and across all of our brands. And this is really important to being able to have that fundamental data in place, which has got the data integrity so that we can introduce AI into this to help us gain those insights quickly and accurately to make rapid decisions. And finally...

I'm sorry, Danny, go ahead.

And finally, in regards to the fifth pillar there about underpinning all of this, as I said at the start, it's having that winning way of workings and core entrepreneurial competencies within the team. Agility is key to this to ensure that we can make fast impactful decision-making. It's what some of the big players lack. This is giving us an opportunity to have speed to market. And we've got an energized and aligned team with delegated authority to do their job and ultimately retaining that core entrepreneurial spirit is vital to all of this and ensuring that we have got people in the team who are going to drive this forward. And we've got that. We're very lucky with the people we have at Venture Life and their engagement in this. We've been working on this since the beginning of 2025. So we're able to hit the ground running with this announcement today with renewed focus and clarity.

And underpinning all of this is driving our core focus activities. So coming from this strategy where we've got the team involved and aligned. It's addressing large and attractive preventative needs. Obviously, women's and men's health is a place where we are. There's premium pricing opportunities in that space, obsessing over consumers and shoppers. So where they constantly need to be delivering to the needs and insight, looking at data-driven insight to deliver opportunity, to deliver new products and deliver channel expansion and be where our shoppers shop and partner with strategic customers, like we mentioned already, Bayer are a big part of ours, but other larger partners in that space will continue to form strategic alliances with to grow our product offering and our portfolio.

And important to that, again, is having that bold entrepreneurial mindset, driving us -- helping us to drive agility rather, innovation, inclusive leadership to empower our team, make sure we can communicate openly on issues, opportunities, challenges, overcome those together, make sure that we seize the opportunities, execute those with speed and creativity so that we can stay ahead of the competition. And aiding all of that is making sure that we've got that faster insight-led decisions across our business, having strong governance around our data where those decisions are being made on, continuous investment in our people and our technology to give us a greater ROI with clear measures to form those decisions on what is acceptable to us and where we want to focus our resources and ultimately ensure sustainable, profitable growth in an accelerated way.

So really, the message of today is we've simplified the Venture Life Group for growth. Divesting of the CDMO activities and smaller brands has given us a lighter capital structure. We'll maintain a long-term manufacturing arrangement with those same facilities. They'll be our biggest supplier. The relationships that we've worked on for many years will continue in place and continue to help us grow and develop our brands and our products. We'll have a brand focus, high margins, #1 mindset. Data-driven insight is fundamental. We've got a significant amount of data in the women's health space, and we'll be using that to generate new product development insight and growth of our businesses -- of our products, excuse me. Omnichannel approach, as I said before, we got to be where the shoppers shop digitally integrated. That's not just in how we operate, but also how we interact with our customers and our suppliers and how we look at the market and achieve growth greater than our peers in the marketplace. A pure-play consumer health care platform, that's really important, particularly for our shareholders that attracts much higher valuations and ultimately, long-term benefit for shareholders. We remain -- retain, excuse me, that entrepreneurial spirit that's driven us to this place. Since we started the business, that's what's got us to grow, be agile, nimble and move quickly, and we're retaining that with the way we're growing the business and have a core geographic market focus, particularly around, as you said, U.K., mainly EU markets and into the U.S. So I just wanted to thank you for your attention today. We're very excited about this opportunity. We've had a great and long relationship with Biokosmes and the Gnesta sites, and that relationship will continue. We're still working with those and with all the people we've worked with for a long time, but working as a third-party supplier rather than part of our group. We see this as a fantastic opportunity for acceleration of our business and simplifying the business in the way we have allows us to move more quickly, more nimbly and allow us to generate greater returns going forward. So thank you for your time. We're not taking live questions today, but any questions you submit into the platform, we will reply in writing. So thank you for your time today.

Jerry, Daniel, thank you very much indeed for updating investors this morning. If I could please ask investors not to close this session as we'll now automatically redirect you for the opportunity for you to provide your feedback in order that the company can better understand your views and expectations. This may take a few moments to complete, I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Venture Life plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.