Zealand Pharma A/S (ZEAL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

On behalf of the Board of Directors and Executive Management, I'm really pleased to welcome you to the Annual General Meeting 2020 of Zealand Pharma A/S. Today, the Board of Directors is represented by myself as the Chairman, and the Executive Management is represented by Chief Executive Officer, Emmanuel Dulac; and Chief Financial Officer, Matthew Dallas, who, like myself, participate remotely either by phone or video. I would first like to thank our shareholders for your attendance and your continued support of this brilliant company. In 2019, we had a very eventful year, and from a business perspective, a highly successful year. However, as we ended 2019 and moved into the first half of 2020, no one could imagine or foresee the huge global corona crisis we are now in the middle of, impacting both public health and world economy. Zealand has taken firm steps and measures to manage its business at this turbulent time, and management is keeping the Board updated on a regular basis how the business is progressing. You will soon hear more about this and more importantly as well a more comprehensive review of Zealand's business achievements in 2019 by our CEO, Emmanuel Dulac, but allow me just to give a few highlights. We saw many key employees leaving the company last year, for instance, the Chief Executive Officer, the Chief Financial Officer and the Chief Scientific Officer. This created some external anxiety and worries. However, the Board was set to act immediately, and I was very pleased to be able to announce Emmanuel Dulac as the new Chief Executive Officer right after the 2019 AGM. Emmanuel have then delivered a stellar job as the Chief Executive Officer and in finding highly capable persons in Matt Dallas as the new Chief Financial Officer, and Rie Schultz Hansen as the new VP, Discovery and Innovation. At the 2019 AGM, 2 nonexecutive directors stepped down and we elected 3 new ones. I can inform you that the change has been smooth and successful. This is also manifested in an independent Board evaluation conducted by PwC showing high ratings across all areas, which clearly indicates that we have a well-functioning Board. The evaluation results have been discussed in the Board and certain actions and initiatives have been identified to be further addressed and discussed in the future. In 2019, Emmanuel and his team presented and communicated a new focused road map for the business, which brought a much-needed strategic clarity. This was well received by the financial market, and we have since then seen a strong share price development over the past 12 months. The development pipeline also made good progress, which you will hear more about in a minute, and we closed some successful deals. And finally, Zealand also successfully raised new significant capital. So all in all, a successful year. Now over to the more formal part of the meeting. The Attorney-at-Law, Thomas Holst Laursen, has been appointed Chairman of this general meeting by the Board of Directors, in accordance with Section 9.14 of the company's Articles of Association. I will now with pleasure pass the word to Thomas, who will, as usual, ensure that all applicable rules and regulations are complied with in connection with this meeting. Over to you, Thomas.

Thank you very much, and thank you very much for the appointment. This is indeed an extraordinary general meeting. My role is, as always, to secure that things are properly convened, so the general meeting that matters are properly dealt with under the applicable rules and that there is the opportunity for shareholders to have a good general meeting and interact with the management of the company. This company, as many this year, has found itself in the very odd situation that they have had to request shareholders not to attend in person due to the corona crisis. And I think, on behalf of the company, I have been asked to say thank you for this to shareholders. We hope you're attending by the link which has been provided to you. But there are no shareholders physically present, so we are very few people here in the room. And this means that the company is in a position where, importantly, they are able to transact, meaning that the general meeting is able to go ahead and importantly, resolve on the matters that has been proposed. The meeting has been legally convened. There is approximately 42% shareholders represented. And also here, on behalf of the company, I know that there is a thank you extended to shareholders for making sure that they voted in advance of the meeting, so that the company is in a position where things can be transacted, which is important going forward. In other words, we are legally convened. It's an unusual situation, so bear with us if, for some reason, we need to take a moment to properly address the comment or a question. Otherwise, we will go through it and maybe you will see a bit more of the Chairman, me, for just reading out loud messages on behalf of management today, but that is only because we want to make it as smooth as possible. With that, we keep it informal as much as we can. And what we usually do is in this company, we act -- we transact the agenda. So if we take the agenda and just have a look at that on the screen there now, we have 12 items for -- we have to deal with and any other business in the customary item 13. And what we will do is we will deal with items 1 to 3 together. There is an opportunity for you, although, and we will read it out loud, so that it will actually happen here in the room where the general meeting occurs. But if you wish to answer or ask a question, there is a box in the live stream, which should be at the bottom of the live stream page that you are viewing. And you are welcome to use that and give -- and ask questions. We have also received some comments in advance, which will be read out loud here in the room. With that, Emmanuel Dulac, for the proper thing, i.e., what is the company all about and what has occurred, item number 1 to 3. Emmanuel?

Thank you, Thomas. Before I start, I want to remind everyone that the following presentations may contain forward-looking statements. That these forward-looking statements only represent our views and that actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. I would like, first, to introduce the rest of the leadership team, which has changed quite a lot since last year. Second from the left is our CFO, Matt Dallas. He's joining the meeting today from his base in Boston, Massachusetts, and will present financial highlights in a moment. Then we have Ivan Møller, just below, who leads Technical Operations and Manufacturing and is interim responsible for Human Resource, also based in Denmark. Next, below, is Adam Steensberg, Chief Medical Officer, who is based in Denmark and leads Research and Development. On the far right, we have Marino Garcia, who is in charge of our Corporate Development and the rest of the world, International Commercial. He's based in New York. Our Head of Discovery and Innovation, Rie Hansen, who leads our team, is based here in Denmark. And finally, you see a placeholder for the Senior Vice President of our U.S. Commercial Operations. This position is being recruited with the team reporting to me in the interim. 2019 was a transformative year for Zealand Pharma. You will see the many milestones that made 2019 such an exceptional year. These achievements are part of the exciting journey that Zealand is taking. With a clear strategy and successful execution of our strategy, we are poised to deliver on our commitment to improving patients' lives by providing leading peptide therapeutics. Let's take a more detailed view of some of the key achievements. We began a partnership with Alexion Pharmaceuticals 1 year ago. We are thrilled to partner with Alexion, who has been the global leader in complement biology for 20 years. We believe this collaboration will enable our peptide therapeutics to reach more patients in more indications across more geographies that we might have accomplished ourselves on our own. The agreement is also financially lucrative for Zealand. Total upfront and milestone for all 4 programs could reach up to just over $2 billion, plus royalties. Driven by an ambition to transform management of type 1 diabetes and reduce the burden of living with the serious condition, we are working with Beta Bionics to develop dasiglucagon for use in the iLet bihormonal bionic pancreas. We believe that the results from this Phase II study announced last year demonstrated unprecedented glycemic control by the bihormonal iLet compared to an insulin-only setting. We continue to make good progress with the FDA interactions and look forward to the pivotal Phase III trial that is expected to be initiated late this year. Zealand submitted the company's first NDA, New Drug Applications, to the U.S. FDA for the dasiglucagon HypoPal rescue pen to treat severe hypoglycemia. This was a major milestone in Zealand's effort to bring life-changing therapies to people with diabetes. Our ready-to-use dasiglucagon HypoPal rescue pen is designed to offer diabetes patients fast and effective treatment for severe hypoglycemia. In 3 Phase III trials in adults and pediatrics, results demonstrated a median time to blood glucose recovery of only 10 minutes following injections of dasiglucagon. I am particularly proud that the team was able to deliver on our commitment to filing the new drug application for dasiglucagon on schedule, despite having to work remotely and under the difficult conditions caused by the coronavirus crisis. We are pursuing several treatment modalities with dasiglucagon. There are 2 programs in addition to those just presented, for severe hypoglycemia rescue and automated diabetes management. Our third dasiglucagon program aims to change the lives of children and families living with congenital hyperinsulinism. Patient's enrollment continues in both of the ongoing Phase III studies, and we hope to conclude both studies this year. Finally, we are evaluating the potential of mini dose of dasiglucagon as a novel treatment for patients with post-bariatric surgery hypoglycemia. We just announced results from a Phase II study, which demonstrate that dasiglucagon significantly reduced meal-induced hypoglycemia compared to placebo in individuals who have undergone gastric bypass bariatric surgery. We are encouraged by these results and look forward to further investigating dasiglucagon as a potential treatment for individual living with this challenging condition. In addition to our metabolic franchise, we have several programs developing potential treatments for gastrointestinal disease. We also have significant development efforts within the gastrointestinal disease area and leading those efforts is glepaglutide, a long-acting GLP-2 analog that we are developing for patients with short bowel syndrome. These patients suffer from an inability to absorb sufficient nutrients in water and the GLP-2 analog can help them overcome these issues. We are in Phase III, and if everything goes well, we aim to launch this product in 2023. Earlier in the pipeline, we have another highly promising candidate, ZP7570, a unique dual-acting GLP-1-GLP-2 analog, which -- agonist, which we believe represents the next innovation in the treatment of short bowel syndrome. Pre-clinical programs are not shown here, but we also have opportunities within the space of inflammatory bowel disease and other inflammatory disease. Acquiring Encycle was the first time in our company history that we have invested in external innovation to strategically expand our pipeline. The acquired alpha-4-beta-7 integrin inhibitor adds exciting new opportunities for our research and development teams to work in additional gastrointestinal disease as well as possibly helping us develop peptide therapeutics taken orally. Boehringer Ingelheim and Zealand have a long standing partnership, bringing together Zealand's expertise in the discovery of innovative peptide-based medicine with Boehringer Ingelheim's expertise in the research and development of novel medicine for cardiovascular metabolic disease. Boehringer Ingelheim announced in 2019 their plans to initiate Phase II development of the GLP-1 glucagon dual agonist, which was in-licensed from Zealand. This month, we regained the worldwide rights to the amylin analog program, which was licensed to Boehringer Ingelheim in 2014. We respect Boehringer Ingelheim's decision to focus development on the GLP-1 glucagon asset, and we are evaluating the development path for amylin within our pipeline. Finally, Zealand share performance. The price of Zealand shares increased by 186% during the year, which was above all relevant index, such as the OMX Copenhagen Mid Cap Index and the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index. The share price at year-end 2019 was DKK 235 compared to DKK 82 at year-end 2018. Now let's look forward to 2020. There are 4 strategic areas to our company goals for 2020. We will continue to build Zealand Pharma U.S. and prepare for our first product launch anticipated in 2021. We will execute on the clinical pipeline, while also advancing the early pipeline and strategic alliances. Finally, we will maintain a strong financial and organizational position. Our clear focus on peptide drug discovery and development has created this very robust pipeline that you can see on this slide with 4 potential launches in the next 4 years. Beyond the late-stage pipeline, we also have a robust early-stage pipeline with a lot of new ideas coming in from our research colleagues and securing future value growth of the company. By the end of this year, Zealand's transformation into a fully-integrated biotech company will be complete. We will be capable of taking our own products from discovery to development and through registration and commercialization. We will be prepared to execute 4 exciting launches planned over 4 years, beginning with the first anticipated launch in 2021. The pending acquisition of Valeritas is a unique and compelling opportunity for Zealand to accelerate its effort to become a commercial stage company in the U.S. diabetes market and do so with a revenue-generating experienced infrastructure at a very attractive price. The business sells an insulin delivery device called V-Go for people with diabetes. We believe there is a strong alignment between the team's experience and customer focus in the U.S. diabetes market, and our anticipated needs for our own launch of the rescue pen in 2021 as well as the other potential dasiglucagon launches to follow. We are enthusiastic and hopeful about this opportunity and look forward to sharing more about this very soon. With the acquisition, Zealand will add a fourth location to our global footprint, which will be a manufacturing hub in Marlborough, Massachusetts. This will join the original site in Copenhagen, focused on research and development, our New York City location, where our business development is based, and our recently added commercial base in Boston, Massachusetts. Also, I need to touch on the response to CoV virus. Zealand Pharma is taking precaution to keep our employees, patients and business and clinical partners safe amid the CoV virus pandemic. We also remain focused on maintaining our business activities to bring life-changing peptide therapeutics to people living with unmet medical need. And so far, we remain on track with our priority initiatives. We made strong progress across R&D programs. We filed our NDA for dasiglucagon HypoPal rescue pen. The commercial expansion is on track, including acquisition of Valeritas. And our financial position has strengthened with DKK 137 million, around $20 million. We are building the future at Zealand Pharma to change the lives of patients. We are expanding with experience and relationships in the U.S. diabetes market to complement Zealand's 20-plus years of strength in research and development. The resulting company will be bigger and stronger, comprising R&D, manufacturing, operations and commercial and medical affairs. Our company will be capable of making an even greater impact in the lives of patients living with gastrointestinal and metabolic disease by delivering a diverse portfolio of treatment solutions. By becoming a fully-integrated biotech within U.S. commercial presence, we aim to have 5 commercialized products by 2025. I would like now to introduce Matt Dallas, our CFO, to present our financials.

Thank you, Emmanuel. The next slide shows Zealand's income statement for fiscal 2019 and how it compares with 2018. The net result for fiscal year 2019 was a loss of DKK 571.5 million. Further development of the late-stage clinical programs and expansion of the early pipeline combined with pre-commercialization efforts for the dasiglucagon HypoPal rescue pen are driving the cost base for Zealand. These factors have resulted in an increase in R&D expense of DKK 123.2 million and an increase in G&A expense of DKK 24.3 million compared to 2018. The 2018 operating result was mainly due to an increase in other operating income as a result of the sale of future milestones and royalties related to the Sanofi licensing agreement having a net gain of DKK 1.1 billion in the period. On the next slide, this slide illustrates our financial position and our ability to support our clinical programs. Net operating expenses, shown on the left, were DKK 628.9 million for the year. Estimated guidance for 2019 was exceeded due to the increased levels of support needed in internal staffing as well as from professional advisers and external service providers as the company prepares for product launch and subsequent commercialization. On the right side, you can see that our cash position as of December 21, cash, cash equivalents and securities amounted to DKK 1.38 billion or approximately USD 207 million. The increased cash and cash equivalents is mainly due to net proceeds from the issue of shares in the year of DKK 683 million and the upfront cash and equity investment the company received of USD 40 million from the initiation of the partnership program with Alexion Pharmaceuticals. On the next slide, you'll see our financial guidance for 2020. Net operating expenses in 2020 are expected to be within the range of DKK 790 million to DKK 810 million. This is an increase to 2019 and is due to the rise in administrative expenses as we prepare for the product launch and commercialization of the dasiglucagon HypoPal rescue pen. It is further due to the clinical development costs associated with the Phase III programs we have for glepaglutide and dasiglucagon for CHI and the dual-hormone artificial pancreas. Zealand does not provide guidance on revenue from current or potential partnership agreements due to the uncertainty in terms of amounts and timing. Zealand will update the financial guidance with the announcement of the Q1 results planned on May 14 this year. That guidance will reflect the impact of the Valeritas acquisition as well as any non-financial impact from the COVID-19 pandemic. And with that, I will turn the presentation back over to Thomas for any questions.

Thank you so much. I'll flick the slide here, so that if you have, out there, comments and questions. And this is in respect, of course, of items 1, management report, approval of the audited annual report, and then a resolution to cover of loss where the proposal is that the annual result of a loss of DKK 571,541,143 million is carried forward to the following year. So these are the proposals, but we would now welcome questions and comments.

And we will start off with me reading out loud. We have received from the Danish Shareholders Association, represented in this instance by Niels Mengel, has been kind enough to provide us with his comments and questions. And due to the character of the meeting, we would love to welcome here Niels on the stage, but I will be his voice and reading it out loud. So on behalf Niels Mengel from the Danish Shareholders Association. First of all, I would like to thank you for an informative and well-balanced annual report. It has been a pleasure to read both in relation to the messages given as to the way these quite complex pharma structures are presented to the shareholders. This is especially important for the private investors. And last, but not least, the attractive share performance since we met last year of close to 200%, much better than many comparable indices. So thank you for an exciting year, where Zealand Pharma have achieved several important goals, like substantial capital increase, partnering agreements, sale of assets and successful development in the clinical trials to mention a few. Last Friday, you even announced another successful capital increase of DKK 137 million by U.S. investors and at a discount of 5% to present share price at discount level the current shareholders appreciates. That said, improvements in the reporting are possible. To the Danish Shareholder Association, remuneration and transparency are essential issues. In total, inclusive notes and the remuneration report on the website, you do cover what we are looking for, more or less, but the section in the annual report covering management team could be improved content wise, and by adding a simple illustrations on individual level of the salary package, including severance obtainable maximum, et cetera. The important thing in the near future is the successful launch of the fully-owned asset dasiglucagon HypoPal rescue pen scheduled for H1 next year. The preparations have been extensive, and the new CEO with a strong commercial background is in place. Extra financing has been achieved and an acquisition of a U.S. sales organization from Valeritas closed today, serving the same buyers that Zealand is targeting is now a reality. To require -- to acquire a sales organization is a quick way to address the market and will hopefully increase the likelihood of market acceptance and sales performance in the first critical periods. We all know that acquisitions can be difficult and goals might be hard to achieve, especially in the short run. And now we also have the COVID situation, an extra risk carrier. So my questions are: could you please elaborate on the activities you have done and will do to integrate the new organization of 75 sales representatives in Zealand Pharma from Valeritas? How to do that successfully, and on time? And what do you do to retain the new employees in the organization? Question one. Question number two, you mentioned that COVID might influence the clinical trials. Hospitals may prioritize differently now. Could you elaborate on the possibilities of opening up new sites or increase existing to compensate? And this is possibly to do with the present time frame, for instance, glepaglutide. Those were the 2 questions. The comment ends. We have, therefore -- we have, when standing at this podium, touched the issue of the Board of Members shareholdings. In 2018, the holdings increased compared to the year before, but now it takes the wrong direction from our point of view. Out of 9 Board members, 4 does not show a very convincing holding and was -- does not hold any shares. It is remarkable that the largest shareholder is one of the employee-elected Board members. This is, of course, a very isolated -- this is, of course, very good in an isolated way and underlines trust in the company. We would like other Board members to show the same kind of trust, especially now when Zealand Pharma has just accelerated a prosperous journey. This would be another strong hint of trust. I know Boards are restricted in trading, but now that the window is open, the ones who recently joined have no excuse. This was a comment. So there are 2 questions, and I believe that Emmanuel Dulac will address the 2 questions raised.

Yes. Okay. So thank you, Niels, for forwarding these questions to us. So on your first one, which was basically integration activities related to the Valeritas acquisition. We have, of course, developed a very detailed onboarding plan for the first 100 days. This was actually regardless of the CoV virus crisis. We had this plan ready. Of course, since the coronavirus crisis took place and travel ban, so we had to modify some of these. But a lot of them were still valid. For example, we've put in place town halls. We put in place push e-mails, communications, trainings. The one caveat to that is that we had to wait for the company to be, I would say, one, to be able to engage because it's 2 different companies. But our ability to communicate to the employees was basically unleashed as soon as our bid was accepted. So on March 23, we hosted a town hall in which we presented the Zealand Pharma culture, values, our vision, our mission, our pipeline to these Valeritas employees that we are basically retaining and onboarding. It was very well received, and it was followed by a very detailed stream of communications that came out from our teams. Now the team, the 75 -- specific to 75 reps that you discussed are -- they are actually home. They are banned from visiting doctors' office, like everywhere in the world. So we are using this time to actually train them. So they are taking online training right now. We are doing competency development with them. And at the same time, they are actually still in contact with our key accounts. And they are maintaining the activity as much as possible through video conference and phones. There is actually a very detailed communication plan that flows from, I would say, the closing of this deal, which is supposed to be April 2, today, to the following weeks. So we will actually communicate more openly from this time on to the rest of the employees. On your second question regarding the impact of the CoV virus on clinical operations. You had a very specific approach about should we open new sites or just find other ways to increase. So I just want to clarify that right now, we have actually run a very deep assessment of the operations -- the clinical operations. We have seen a minimal -- very minimal impact on the operations, in terms of patients in the studies, for example, we just made sure that they had enough drug supply and that they were able to communicate regularly with their sites of reference. We have been very, very fortunate, because the clinical team had put in place very innovative tools to manage our clinical studies through eDiary management, capture of data. And so we've been able to basically seamlessly use the eDiary in the communication, so that every day, we see the activities of these patients. If it had been for the old, I would say, style of management of studies, which is basically a paper journal capture, then we would not be in the same situation. But that was a very fortunate situation. And again, it shows that being innovative and risk adverse sometimes pays off. The other thing is on the new patient inclusion. So we are seeing a slowdown in new patient inclusion because these patients are refrained from actually being -- showing up to the hospital. On this one, we actually are estimating that short bowel syndrome studies will actually see, actually, less inclusion of new patients. On the CHI indication, we don't see -- we have 2 studies running. We don't see an impact there. And again, we have -- we are very advanced in one of the 2 studies, and we still expect and we still guide on the closing of this study by Q3 this year. That's it for the 2 questions. There was one question on the Board ownership or not. It was just a comment.

A comment, really.

Just a comment, okay.

On behalf of the Chairman, thank you for the comment. And for now, there has been no further questions submitted by shareholders. But -- so we have emptied out the comments and questions with thank you, and we will proceed to the resolution of items 1, 2 and 3 of the agenda, which is that the report of the company's activities are acknowledged by the general meeting, the audited annual report is approved and the carryforward of the previous year's loss of the approximate DKK 571,500,000 loss has been approved. And what you will recognize as customary is that we ask if there are any comments or wishes to vote. But in this instance, there are no shareholders here, but we have a lot of votes in favor. So thank you for that, and the proposals are resolved. From here on, in the general meeting, we will do it slightly differently than normal. We would normally have, of course, the Chairman and the CEO at least presenting more than me, but we have agreed that I will read out loud. And then Emmanuel and Martin from remotely will be available for question and comments. So bear with me, and we will go through. Item 4 on the agenda. This is the election of members to the Board of Directors, and the proposal is that all of the following members are reelected: Martin Nicklasson, Kirsten Drejer, Alain Munoz, Jeffrey Berkowitz; and on this following page, Michael Owen, Leonard Kruimer and Bernadette Connaughton. So all of these are proposed and up for reelection. The Chairman in his initial address has already commented on the -- both of the evaluation that has been done and the description of the qualifications of the nominated candidates was included in the convening of the general meeting. And I have had no questions submitted to us, neither here in the room nor electronically. So with that, I propose to advance and approve that all of the directors are reelected, and I will congratulate all of the Board with the appointments and proceed to Item 5 of the agenda. The Board has gone through a process and is proposing the auditor going forward to be Ernst & Young Godkendt Revisionspartnerselskab, and they will replace the current auditor, Deloitte Statsautoriseret Revisionspartnerselskab as the auditor. Deloitte, who has assisted the company with preparing and delivering the 2000 and auditing the 2019 annual accounts. They are here in the room. And the Board and the Management has asked me to express a deep thank you to Deloitte for the cooperation. And with that, the proposal is that Ernst & Young are elected with no questions. We have established that Ernst & Young is elected as the company's auditor by the general meeting going forward. We have our customary item on the agenda following from the company's article. This is the authorization for the company to acquire treasury shares directly and/or to acquire American depositary shares. I will not read out loud the authorization of the 10%, but I'll leave it there for a second. Confirming that there were no questions or comments, it is established, and there has been votes in favor of the grant of authorization for the company to acquire treasury shares and American depositary votes. With that, we move on to agenda Item #7. And here, also, together with the notice and new remuneration policy has been provided to shareholders. And there is a proposal from the Board of Directors to approve the company's remuneration policies as presented in a connection with the notice convening the Annual General Meeting. The proposal has been subject to the regulation from the implementation of the Shareholders' Rights Directive in the Danish Companies Act. It has, of course, been prepared in accordance with the requirements of the Danish Companies Act and combines and continues the main terms of the company's existing remuneration policy and overall guidelines for incentive pay to the Board of Directors and Executive Management. The overall guidelines for incentive pay to the Board and the Executive Management will, as a consequence of the new regulation, automatically lapse upon approval of the new remuneration policy that shareholders have received. Compared to the existing remuneration policy, the Board of Directors has proposed a few amendments in the new policy, including, new items in regard to vesting and exercise periods of share rights and/or warrants to members of the Executive Management, and lapse of an old PSU plan and introduction of a new RSU plan for members of the Executive Management ensuring contribution to and alignment with the long-term interest of the company by linking the value of the RSUs to the development in share price. There are additional descriptions, as you have all received, together with the notice, and I will not go through any of these more sort of descriptive changes, but leave it with there overall. If there are no questions and comments and shareholders have had -- having had access to the full remuneration policy, together with the notice, it is established that the company's new remuneration policy is approved by the general meeting. And with that, we will proceed into Item #8. As you will have seen from the screen in the presentation, the proposal by the Board of Director to approve the fees for the Board of Directors for the financial year of 2020. Without going into detail of each metric, the fees for the Board of Directors for the financial year 2020 are unchanged compared to 2019. The Board is, of course, pleased to take any comments or questions. And there are none, in which case, the proposal under Item 8 is approved, and the fees to the Board of Directors, as outlined in the notice, has been approved for 2020. The company has 4 proposals, items 9 to 12 on the agenda, which we will present in the aggregate, so that it allows shareholders to comment or ask questions individually or aggregately afterwards. So first of all, there is an Item 9, a proposal from the Board of Directors to approve a new authorization to increase share capital of the company by way of cash contribution without preemption rights for company's existing shareholders. And that essentially equals by issuance of new shares to up -- by up to nominally DKK 9,013,665 shares, corresponding to 25% of the issued capital of the company at the time of the notice. The second proposal in Item 10 on the agenda is a proposal from the Board to approve a new authorization to increase share capital by way of contribution in kind, and again, without preemption rights for the company of up to nominally DKK 3,605,466 shares, which will correspond to 10% of the issued share capital at the notice time. Thirdly, there is a proposed proposal to approve a new authorization again to the Board, this time with preemption rights for the company's existing shareholders of up to DKK 18,027,330 shares, which will correspond to 50% of the issued share capital at the time of the notice. And lastly, distinguishing itself from the authorizations, another authorization, but this time for the issuing of warrants, with up to DKK 821,544 shares in the company, corresponding to 2.3% of issued share capital at the notice time. We elected to go through these 4 proposals together, allowing shareholders to ask any question they want to each of the items. And of course, the detailed and the extensive proposal or the complete proposals were included in the notice convening the Annual General Meeting. There are no questions that has arrived here. So with that, we will proceed, and we will resolve on each of items 9, 10, 11 and 12, where shareholders have, by their proxy votes, approved all 4 proposals before. With that, we have the customary item, any other business this year, that will be not very relevant. There are no one here we can give the word to. And with that, I leave back the word for Martin to round off the meeting.

Thank you, indeed, Thomas, and thanks for an impeccable chairmanship of the general meeting, much appreciated. Further important advancements, as you all know, have been done already with our business during the first months of 2020, despite the significant worldwide crisis we experienced. I am hopeful that Zealand will continue to make good progress despite very turbulent times. I want to thank Emmanuel and the entire Zealand organization for a great achievement. I want to give my appreciation to my Board colleagues for valuable contributions, engagement and support. Three new employee-elected members will, for your information, join the Board this year. They will be presented on Zealand's homepage. Hanne Heidenheim Bak will step down as an employee-elected Board member as she also is retiring from Zealand. And I want, on behalf of the entire Board, to thank Hanne for many years of service, both as a Board member and as a valuable employee and wish her the very best in the future. Finally, I want to thank our shareholders for your valuable trust and support and for showing your interest in today's general meeting. I wish you all and your families to stay safe and healthy in these days. And I hereby close the meeting. Thank you very much.