Venture Life Group (LSE:VLG) — 2025/2026 Full Year Results

0:00 Good morning. Welcome to the vent... Venture Life Group PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions and inquiries can be submitted at any time via the q and a tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd to hand you over to Jay Randall, CEO. Good morning, sir. Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our results presentation. This is for the seventeen months period, two thirty first of May twenty twenty six. Just to highlight to you, obviously, go to this and you see numbers, remember, it's a seventeen months period. With that, he's going through some of the numbers. He'll sort of outline comparatives and growth rates on a twelve month, twelve month basis, but just be aware of that.

0:45 This morning, I'm joined, well, for those who don't meet, Jerry Randall, CEO, Founder of VENTURE LIFE GROUP. I'm joined by Danny Wells on the right here, who's our CFO. And who you would have seen in the announcement will be taking over as CEO from me at the end of the year. So exciting time for Danny, exciting time for me and the business. And also by Kate Bash, who sat just behind me here. Kate's in charge of marketing innovation. And she'll be taking me through the products, the growth, the innovation we've got coming forward. So as always, there's an opportunity to submit questions and we'll do our best to answer those as we go through. So looking at VENTURE LIFE, we've gone through a very transformational period in the seventeen months to May 26. We've divested of our CDMO operations.

1:31 We've realized a significant amount of cash into the business. And we've divested of smaller and noncore assets, products that are no longer in business. And as we sit today, this is the picture of the group. So we are on four key categories, as we say there at the page, eight brands. We have some what we call power brands in there, which are brands we believe the best growth opportunities are going forward. We've got an innovation engine. We've built a really good pipeline of new products that Kate will share with you later in the presentation. And innovation is key to how we drive the business forward, and particularly consumer healthcare. And in this recent period, about 8% of our revenues are coming from recently launched products. So you can see that's having a meaningful effect on the revenue growth of the business.

2:20 We still employ the omnichannel model and we do so going forward. And that means we're selling in the four key channels where our consumers and customers will buy products, and that is health and beauty, grocery, pharmacy and online. And at the moment or certainly in the period we just reported, those revenues are roughly within our group split roughly equally 25% or so in each of those four channels. And we sit now with sort of just over 60 employees from the group as we stand. So what's really gone in this last period? So in terms of financial and operating highlights, 70% revenue growth from our Power Brands, 16% overall, 19% EBITDA growth on the last twelve month basis.

3:06 Profit before tax, 3,400,000. We've returned money to shareholders through a share buyback. And that continued also after the period end as well. Significant growth in distribution across The UK and US through our acquisition and implementation of our Microsoft Dynamics system. We'll go into more detail on those things as we go through. But what we've done is we've successfully pivoted into a pure play consumer brands business. So we've divested of our development and manufacturing operations in Italy, Sweden. We divested of those to an Italian group that's now a significant supplier for us, but also working with us on development of new products and innovation. So those relationships and those skill sets that we had in the group before still service our group, but as part of a larger group plus wider capabilities that that group has.

3:58 So we simplified the business. We're now focused on brand led consumer healthcare business. We're focused on our brands, we're increasing the investment into our brands and that's delivering great organic growth for the business, which we'll talk about as we go through. We've entered higher growth categories through acquisitions. We've now entered The US obviously and scaled our business. And we now have a platform in The US, not only a revenue earning and profitable platform in The US with a great sales and marketing team that joined us through the acquisition. But that's now a launch pad for our other brands and products going into The U. S. In the coming years. So simplify the business, pure play consumer healthcare. And what do we see as our growth drivers going forward? Well, innovation, I mentioned that already. Fundamentally, we've got some great innovation, some great breakthrough innovation coming through. It's fundamental to growth. That scale in The US, USA is important to us. USA consumer healthcare market is about four times the size of The UK market. And we're very successful in The UK market and we see The US as being a substantial part of our growth story going forward. As I say, we've got a nice profitable, already growing operation out there with a great team on the ground with great relationships with the retailers.

5:10 And we're going to exploit and leverage those that team and those relationships to grow in The US with our existing UK brands. We've got distribution across all the channels, that's growing, great growth across all of them. And fundamentally, we've got a strong balance sheet. So when we raise the capital from the divestments, we paid off our RCF facility. So we're now in net cash. We had just under $12,000,000 net cash in the end of the important period. We still retain that RCF. We've got a $30,000,000 committed facility plus a $20,000,000 accordion if we need it. And we will still consider using that for future M and A. So with that strong balance sheet, we can invest behind the brands and look at some nice selective accretive M and A. I'll now pass over to Danny. He's going give you a bit more detail on the financial performance of the group.

6:01 Good morning, everyone. So as you'll have seen, we did £50,000,000 of revenue across the seventeen month period that represented that 16% like for like growth against the previous seventeen months on the overall top line, although that's 17% growth on our power brands. But if we break that down into the last twelve months to May 2026, which is most helpful, we delivered GBP 39,000,000 of revenue in the twelve months to May 2026. That translates to 20% growth level on the business. And as you'll as we'll come on to the next slide, there's a growing momentum coming across our Power Brands, which I'll talk into. Gross profit for the period was GBP 22,300,000 for the seventeen months against GBP 12,200,000 in the twelve months to end of 'twenty four. The gross margins are stable across the group, and we'll talk through the shape and the evolution of the gross margin later on in this deck.

6:52 EBITDA for the seventeen months was GBP 7,900,000. That includes a almost the last twelve months to May 26, that represented GBP 7,100,000 of that EBITDA. So the underlying growth on EBITDA was 19% across the twelve months May 26, proving out that momentum we're seeing on the top line as well. Adjusted diluted EPS was up to 5.8p against 3.1 in the previous reporting period. And free cash flow was GBP 3,500,000. But as you will have seen in the notes, there were significant exceptional cash costs during the seventeen month period to deliver that transformation. We invested in a completely new ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics three sixty five, moving away from having seven separate ERP systems in the business to one state of the art system that could help us deliver our scalable M and A playbook. So that was around GBP 3,000,000 of cash cost that went out of business to deliver that, and that went live at the end of twenty twenty five. We also incurred all of the costs related to our acquisition that happened post period end. So we completed the acquisition of the FermiClear and Cloroxyn brands on the June 2, but the costs in relation to delivering that acquisition, fell into the period to May 31. And finally, as part of restructuring the business and simplifying it to deliver the new business model, we have some restructuring costs over seventeen months. So point of all of that was that there was a significant amount of, cash that left the business for exceptionals that has suppressed the free cash flow figure

8:22 on the screen. So adding around GBP 4,500,000 back to that in cash cost terms would have increased that free cash flow significantly. And you'll see that for the next twelve months to May 2027, we expect to generate around GBP 7,500,000 to 8,000,000 of free cash flow on the business. So we ended the period at GBP 11,500,000 of cash against GBP 19,000,000 or just shy of 19,000,000 of net debt at the end of twenty twenty four. Just coming back to that US acquisition point, it completed on the June 2, but we actually sent the cash to execute that, transaction on the May 31 due to expanding over a weekend and the deal needing to complete on the June 2. So there's a cash timing on M and A and adding back that GBP 17,000,000 of cash to the number at the end of the period would have meant we ended the period at GBP 29,000,000,000 of cash.

9:17 Kate will talk through the detail of what's driving the brands later on in this next slide. I won't go into detail here, but I'll start at the bottom right hand of this slide. And what we're seeing is a growing momentum coming through the business, with our power brands. That momentum is being delivered by our investment in A and P and marketing spend to drive awareness, to drive new engagements, to try new things in digital marketing that we've not tried before. And in the first half of twenty twenty five, we delivered 11.5% growth on the Power Brands, and you can see that stepped up in the second half of twenty twenty five to just shy of 18%. And then in the latest five months to May 2026, that growth has continued, and it's all nearly 21% growth in the five months of May. So growing momentum coming through the business and giving us confidence that our increase in marketing spend and A and P is giving good effectiveness for the brands. In the middle pillar, as just a graphic here showing the key therapy areas of our portfolio and on a twelve month rolling basis. So from bottom to top, you can see that each of those therapy areas is growing really nicely and consistently over the last three twelve month cycles.

10:25 The bit in dark blue at the right hand side, that's our non core business, the oncology support, which is stable revenues, stable margins, long standing customers, but not the part of the business that we invest marketing and promotional costs behind. We thought it'd be useful to give a bit of an overview of the gross margin, how it's transformed over the predivestment period and then seeing what the future holds for us with the acquisitions we've just made. So at the left hand side of this chart is the in the first two columns, is our gross margins before we divested the manufacturing business, before we divested our low margin oral care brands. You can see the business was operating at around 40% gross margin. Then moving in towards 2024, we completed the acquisition of the Health and Her business.

11:11 That was a significantly accretive product mix for the VENTURE LIFE GROUP, which took us a step up in our gross margins to around 45%. And over the last few reporting cycles, we've been able to maintain and stabilize those gross margins around that level despite strong inflationary pressures and headwinds coming from us from the Middle East crisis in particular over recent months. And particularly, that's been affecting us across packaging components and aluminium, which in fact, some of the cost of goods in some of our our products, and also on, transport and logistics costs. So at the period end, just gone, we had to incur extra costs to ensure delivery of customer orders and all of the delivery dates we had committed to them when we accepted those orders. So the important thing is that we are passing these price increases on to our customers. So Gervais in our commercial team has been spearheading and leading the team to get into an excellent rhythm and routine around passing these price increases on to our retailers in The UK each year at the beginning of the calendar year. And Sarah Arthur, in our international team working with the guys, has been very successful in passing on single digit high price increases to our international strategic partners to make sure that these COGS impacts we're seeing are being passed on quickly, although there is a lag effect on the international orders, as mentioned at the end of this current forcing period.

12:32 Coming into the right hand side of the chart, the twenty six, twenty seven column reflects our guidance for the next twelve months. Of course, having just acquired the FermiTier and GROUP PLC brands on the June 2, We're going to get a full year impact into this calendar year, this financial year, into the from the gross margin accretion from those products coming in as well. Again, similar to the health and health business acquired in 2024, these brands coming into the portfolio are significantly accretive to the legacy VENTURE LIFE products, although the margin underlying on those legacy products is also coming through nicely now as well, typically led by innovation. Innovation is the other key lever of gross margin improvement going into the current period that we're in now. We've got a very strong and robust stage gate process in the group and financial guidelines and metrics and parameters to sign off for new product launches and make sure there are acceptable margins for the group and at minimum revenue delivery for the first twelve months and thirty six months. So these disciplines being installed within our business are in protecting the gross margin delivery and ensuring that step up into the future periods.

13:39 On EBITDA, I won't go into as much detail, but I'll just talk to the right hand side of the charts. So as mentioned up top, the underlying EBITDA growth in the twelve months to May was 19% EBITDA growth, which did a GBP 7,100,000, up to GBP 7,900,000 within that twelve months to May. As we move into the right hand chart, we'll talk to the impact of VENTURE LIFE and GROUP PLC acquisition in a moment. But let's focus back on the current reporting period. So during that period, we divested half of our business. We divested our manufacturing revenues, our Oral Care brands. And instead of rationalizing our overheads to, accommodate that lower revenue base, we actually held our nerve in the organization and have invested further in strengthening our capability to deliver our our strategy and our growth plans. In particular, we strengthen the areas of digital, marketing, commercial, technology, and we also supported the infrastructure by investing in key roles across procurement and HR and finance, as example, to ensure that we can move into new markets of acquisitions and stabilize and support the business and support the commercial delivery of those operations effectively and quickly. So there's a lost leverage over the overheads in the operating cost space during this reporting period, reflecting the fact that the acquisition of Thermacell has happened post period end. The cost and the investment to build the team and invest in our capabilities happened during the reporting period. And also, we've got the fact that we've been increasing our A and P spend. So we've been increasing our A and

15:09 P from around 6.5% of revenue in the prior reporting period, so around 9.5 of our revenue in this current reporting period. And as you can see, it is driving the top line. It's driving strong growth, but there is still lag lag effects within that because science and spend that you incur in that reporting period is in relation to activities and delivery that will continue to run post period and continue to drive the growth of brands that we're seeing. So always a bit of a lag on those investments. So that investment will come back. The resets of the margin will come back to our target levels of 23 over the next couple of years. That starts with the acquisition of Femiclair. That's just happened on the June 2. That acquisition will add around $14,000,000 of revenue, around 11,500,000 $12,000,000 sorry, dollars, about 11,000,000 sterling revenues over the twelve months to May 2027. That's what's built into our numbers. And at higher gross margins and as we've said already, I think, Jeremy might have said up top, we took on a small team as part of that acquisition. So that cost is built into our guidance for the twelve months to May. But that team will also work on cross selling our other brands into The U. S. Market through this existing relationship, which I'm sure Kate will talk to later on.

16:25 The last point to say on this slide, just to give us a contextualization, so I feel I've talked about the gross margin, I've talked about the EBITDA. I think it's important to talk about the revenue build into the twelve months to May 27. So we're guiding at GBP 55,000,000 of revenue. And to break that down, GBP 39,000,000 came from our core business over the twelve months to May 2026. The acquisition of ThermaClare adds around 11 to 12 of that built into our numbers of sort of 51. And we've got an organic growth rate of, building at 4,000,000 of revenues into the underlying for the twelve months to May 27. So that works out just shy of 10% growth on the underlying. And if you look back at our last three reporting periods, our Power Brands is delivering 20% growth, quite consistently now. So we feel confident in our ability to deliver these sorts of growth rates.

17:15 Last slide, cash. I won't go through every bridge. We received a lot of cash in the year. We received GBP 56,000,000 from the divestments through the manufacturing and the oral care. So what did we do with that cash? Well, the first thing we did was pay down all the debts on our RCF facility. So we paid off 22,000,000 of drawn debt. We have no drawn debt on that facility today. And we also incurred significant exceptional cash costs, as I've already talked about upfront in this presentation. And we've also funded the share buyback program. So we invested or returned rather nearly GBP 5,000,000 of funds to shareholders during the reporting period, and we've continued to do another GBP 2,500,000 return to shareholders since the end of the reporting period, although that program has now expired as of September 29.

18:04 The last point on this slide to highlight is the outflow of the cash timing on M and A, as already talked about. So that's the GBP 17,000,000 leaving the business, although the acquisition completed on the June 2. I should have I skipped over working capital there. There was an adverse working capital flux of GBP 2,000,000 in the period. That reflects our May billing. We had the strongest month of billing in VENTURE LIFE's history, around GBP 5,000,000 against an average of around GBP 3,000,000 in the previous sixteen months. And that May period really reflects both strong international orders coming through in the May delivery, but also really strong sell in to our pharmacy channel. The pharmacy channel has been an area of great success over the last twelve, seventeen months through investing in field sales reps, attending more exhibitions and conferences within UK and Ireland. And it's an area that we'll be investing in more going forward, and Kate's going to touch on that later on today as well.

19:00 Great. Thanks, Danny. Hi, everyone. So I'm going to talk through, how the brands and the various therapeutic areas are progressing, starting with hormonal health, which is the Health and Her and Health and Him brands. So it's a really fantastic growth, in the period, 28% growth. And, some of that's come from distribution, but also it's fast price increases, new innovation. We we launched 12 products during the period and, some really strong marketing campaigns behind the brands. Just as a reminder, that these two brands have significant long term growth opportunities. We've actually learned during the period that we are now the number one menopause brand in The UK based on sales value. We're uniquely positioned as a hormonal health specialist to, support men and women throughout the hormonal journey, and you can see that now in our our portfolio.

19:53 We're also having some fantastic success internationally, especially in The US, and we see that that will only continue with the acquisition of the FemiClear brands, but also a fantastic team out there that give us the the launch pads to really grow those relationships with new retailers. And also a strong innovation pipeline, which we have a history of of great innovation on the two brands, thanks to some very deep and meaningful insights that we we take from our proprietary data from from the app, but also some fantastic university partnerships with Cardiff and Swansea University. So our near term growth drivers, as I mentioned, is a... Is an increased focus on use... US retail.

20:39 The Femaclear brand in The US, the buyers that buy buy that particular brands are are the same buyers that also buy this category. So the relationships that we already own now through that acquisition are gonna be very fruitful for us in the coming months. We have a new range of longevity supplements that we're launching in collaboration with Holland and Barrett. And we're also looking to innovate in key risk areas that are associated with hormonal health, in the next, six to eight months. We're also focusing... A common theme with these two brands is that those educational moments, so those those key inflection points when things change hormonally for men and women. And, those key moments, like, menopause documentaries or podcasts and so on, TikTok as well also coming into that, so critical for the brand. So, again, very strong focus in those areas for for both Health Health and Him.

21:35 Moving on to women's health then, so specifically the Balance Active brand. Again, some fantastic growth here, and some strong distribution growth as well. Just as a reminder, the the brand has a particular strength in bacterial vaginosis, which continues to be the biggest opportunity within within intimate and vaginal health, certainly in The UK, but also more broadly globally. And we have a number one position in this particular area, and we see that this is a strong area of growth for us. The deep insights again that we've been able to bring from the Health and Her app, but also some of those university partnerships, so it's really starting to deliver some fantastic insights and also corresponding innovation. And we're also uniquely positioned to really own quite quite interesting part of the category, which is this major trend in using more natural health products.

22:29 And we're compared to our competitors quite in a quite unique position to really strengthen those those credentials and those claims. So as I said, the proven momentum that we've had, so 15% growth has come from some distribution increases, particularly in the high street chains. And we've had our first ever TV campaign, again, really focusing in on educating women about bacterial vaginosis where we were advertising next to Love Island. We've also been executing some cost price increases, as Danny mentioned earlier. And we've launched two really interesting innovations into the category. So a dual action bacterial vaginosis and thrush product. So this is a two in one product, and this is really tapping into the insight that women often don't know what they're experiencing. They don't know if there's a lot of symptom crossover. So this has been a really successful launch for us so far, and we're excited to see how how this product will perform in the coming year.

23:26 We also launched a test kit as well, also playing into that insight to support women in identifying what they are experiencing. And we've also had some fantastic international partner, range extensions and and country extensions as well, which has added to the growth. In the near term, we are, agreeing two new retailers in the next few months. We have the innovation expansion and distribution expansion of those two innovations I mentioned, dual action test kits. And we're also launching a new medical device into intimate odour, which is an opportunity for us to, again, target that miseducation amongst women about what they're experiencing with a product that's much more accessible, slightly less medical in its nature. So this this product especially has scored extremely well in research.

24:16 We're also expanding the brand into balance active for men, which is a huge white space opportunity in The UK. We have seen several other markets do extremely well in The US, Japan, and Germany. This category has really matured and developed over the last decade or so. So really excited to see how we can bring the brand into a new space, with our retailers. And finally, we're really focusing on health care professional education. We have a fantastic opportunity on this brand to provide GPs with another tool to support women with especially recurring recurring BV. And so we're educating them on the benefits of using lactic acid alongside antibiotics. On to energy management, which is one of the most exciting areas for us at the moment. And just as a reminder, this... Both LIFE and Glucogel are really strongly positioned with the NHS being NICE recommended and also first line treatment for type one diabetics.

25:16 This naturally evolves into a really strong sales momentum from from this recommendation. So with more than 70% of sales coming from either a health care professional recommendation or a prescription. There is still, however, a significant opportunity for penetration gains. We believe we own around twenty percent of the hypo occasions for type one diabetics in The UK. And a vast majority of the rest of those hypo occasions are coming from dietary sugar. So things like orange juice and jelly babies. But the body generally prefers glucose as a fat... The fastest acting sugar to be absorbed by the body in, obviously, what can be a very serious situation. So we're continuing to educate health care professionals and consumers about using a pure glucose product in these situations, and we have a number of strategies underway to really go after that penetration opportunity.

26:11 We also have really strong potential for geographic expansion, particularly in The US, which I'll come on to in a minute, but also broader than that. And we've had a lot of interest from other markets for in this in the LIFE brand in particular. The proven momentum here is, obviously, 16% growth within the last seventeen months, which is, again, a really strong performance from this brand. This has mainly been driven through online, so Amazon and web, but also in the pharmacy channel where we have, as Danny mentioned, a really strong field force team, and we're looking to expand that, as we move forward in the in the coming months. We've also launched a new format under this brand, which is the LIFE Gels. And again, the performance of these products already, are exceeding our expectations, a very convenient format, that's portable for our type one diabetics and other users as well.

27:01 Also been driving very heavily and focusing heavily on this health care professional opportunity. As I said, such a critical part of the patient journey is understanding what what options are available to type one diabetics in that hyper management, which is obviously very difficult to manage. And we're also leveraging our new in house digital team, which is now from the health and care side working across the whole organization, which is building some fantastic growth and momentum on on on online. So looking forward in the next twelve months or so in the next period, we have a really exciting opportunity to launch this brand into bricks and mortar into The US. The the products are already available on Amazon or some of the ranges, But we've had some extensive research for... So extensive interest rather from many of our strong relationships with retailers that we have through the FemiClear team.

27:56 We're also accelerating our UK pharmacy growth nationally, so taking our field force, which currently only operates in London and growing that nationally across The UK. And we're continuing to roll out the gel innovation with lots of distribution and interest from our UK retailers. We're also looking to launch some paper roll chews in the coming months and a break... Nighttime in... Innovation. And this is tapping into a fantastic insight that we've gathered around nighttime hypos. And they are... They represent a large proportion of the hype... Hypo occasions for the type one diabetics. And it's a really difficult hypo occasion to manage for those patients. So an area we're very keen to support consumers on on this.

28:43 And finally, we're really doubling down on our health care professional engagements and and really educating our our consumers and our health care professionals about this improvement of benefits of glucose versus dietary sugars. On to ear care then, again, some really strong growth from this brand as well and some good distribution growth, which came quite late on in the in the in the period. Just as a reminder, this is the number one brand recommended by audiologists and specifically helps the whole family from baby right through to the elderly with earwax problems. And also, have the swim product, which is a very unique proposition in in our portfolio. And we're and that brand sorry, that product in particular has been growing fantastically well.

29:32 We have a significant opportunity for a geographical expansion and some really strong relationships over the long term that we that we are continuing to work on to to see long term growth for those partners. And the distribution increases alongside a fantastic radio campaign have driven some really strong growth in the last few months. We're looking to we've also just launched the swim product, which has been relaunched that product to extend it into shower and bath, allows which us to really increase the usage occasions for that product and make it slightly less seasonal. And we're looking to... Sorry. We have done a fantastic job in improving the relationships of our international partners, really sharing best practice, which is, we're starting to see the fruits of that as as that part of the business grows.

30:20 The interim then, we're doing some repackaging and redesigning of the packaging to improve the stand out at shelf of the product, and also really doubling down on the in store activities that we know are are really driving that return on investment. We're also increasing the engagement of pharmacists and audiologists and going after new international expansion opportunities, which should really grow the brand in the short term. Finally, I'd like to cover the Femaclear brand, which I know will be new to some of you as our latest acquisition. Some really fantastic momentum behind this brand with plus 30% during this period, again, with some excellent distribution gains. Just as a reminder, so the product range is based on a proprietary patented formulation, which is which is an oxygenated olive oil. And this this particular formulation has four patent global patents, which also have a lot of time left on them throughout around fifteen years.

31:22 They... They've really done a fantastic job, the Femaclear team, in in establishing this brand as a leading bacterial vaginosis and and yeast product. And as exceptional momentum and growth in this brand that we can see continuing over the coming months. It also has in a similar way to Balance Active, some of those fantastic natural credentials playing into that trend around natural. And also, we're excited to see how we can leverage in the long term some of the VLG insights that we're able to get from, our symptom tools, the app and the Health of Hurt app, with a vaginal tracker and also university partnerships to really drive momentum on this brand as well as Balance Active. So as I said, the distribution increases have been really, really impressive on the brand in the in the last few months, and we're really starting to see even more gains over the coming months as well with some regional opportunities coming coming to fruition.

32:21 Digital marketing excellence is also something we're very excited about within the organization. There's been huge gains for the Femaclear brand, and they're bringing a fresh thinking to the rest of the portfolio. Promotional effectiveness and new innovation, again, have driven some really strong bricks and mortar performance. Looking forward then, there continues to be further distribution gains and opportunities within our current large national and regional retailers. And in addition to this, an opportunity to expand the brand into new retail as well already some strong discussions going on for this particular opportunity. We're also applying our stage gate process and innovation ideas over to the Femaclear brand, and we've got one particular new exciting area with a new infection area that we're looking at, which will be a first globally and a very exciting opportunity in The US in 2027.

33:24 We're also looking at evolving the brands into menopause as well as part of that innovation strategy. And finally, another area of opportunity that we're looking at is really improving the visibility of the brand with health care professionals. At the moment, there is a there is a significant use of boric acid amongst health health care professionals in The US. And there is... But there is an... Unfortunately, the boric acid does have some issues around reprotoxicity. And we believe that the oxygenated oil oil formulation is a fantastic substitute for for that product. So working with the team to develop the strategy around health care professional advertising. Missed innovation.

34:13 Yeah. We... Yeah. It on that. That's right. $2.02 cents. Yeah. Good. No problem. Great. Thanks, Kate. Thanks, Vallis. So if we look back over this seventy months period, let's see where we come from and where we are now. So we were a vertically integrated business. We had a manufacturing footprint. We did CDMO operations and a broader portfolio with some smaller, less interesting categories for us. So over this period, we've divested of the CDM operations. We think that's the right thing for us to do to focus on growth and development of our brands. And we've disposed of our CDM operations to a much bigger and progressive industrial group based in Italy who are growing those businesses. But also within that, they offer us a wider relationship with lots more capabilities outside of those CDMO capabilities that we passed on to them, which we're now beginning to benefit from and building a very sort of strong and sort of mutually beneficial relationship with that group.

35:14 Supposedly, care assets, they were very early into business, and they've now gone to a good angle. We've now also acquired the interesting FermiClear band, which does three things for us. So it's given us a very interesting patented technology, great brand number two in the femco market in The US, lots of products in that portfolio at very early stage in the growth cycle. That group of products and brands came to us already with a lot of inherent growth in it through distribution gains already in place that will be having full year impact in 2026 and 2027. And so now we're a focused asset light ready to execute business. In addition with those three things, it's The US acquisition of the brand. We also had a great sales and marketing team that's now joined us from that business.

36:03 And that team is going to be the launchpad for us into The US for lots of our other current brands. So giving us a real sort of boost into the market, which is four times the size of The UK consumer healthcare market. Now all through this, we've stuck to our strategic pillars that we developed at the start of 2025, and they're listed at the bottom here. So acquiring and transforming interesting brands with good growth to profit. Having a number one brand mindset, our brands are either number one or number two in the category. Omnichannel approach fundamental. What we see in The US is a similar structure in the market to The UK. So you have a smaller number of very large distribution partners with large distribution partners. They require marketing support into those distribution points as we do in The UK. So it's a market we understand, but we've also got a great team that's joined us from The US to help us do that in The US too.

37:00 Integrated digital capabilities, you see the new ERP, we're now starting to use a lot more AI and robust data, sometimes we grow. But ultimately, just retaining our core entrepreneurial ways of working, which are fundamental between agile, fast moving. So just looking at the market we're in, there are quite a lot of significant sort of structural tailwinds that sit in our business. Of course, you'd all be aware of a lot of the global economic trends at the moment, disruptions that there are. But as Danny showed, these are gross margin progression. We're managing those issues around cost of goods and supply chain. We're working with our manufacturing partners to do that. But we have a lot of good positive tailwinds, aging demographics.

37:46 I have heard a report recently in The UK that by the end the century, the number of 65 sort of gone up by 50%, the number of over 80s would have more than doubled. So people are looking to live a longer healthier life. That's what health span is. It's not just about your lifespan, it's how long do you live that healthy life. So there's a lot of demand for that performance driven wellness. People want to be proactive about looking after their long term health and a more holistic approach. And the use particularly of gut health and microbiome. And all of those are pushing into our portfolio and we're starting to make sure we make use of those. So we're also unlocking new markets through a considered M and A strategy. So this acquisition in The U. S, as I said, given us three fantastic benefits there, the products, the team and the access to The U. S. Market.

38:34 And so we now have access to The U. S. Retail fem care market. So GBP 500,000,000 market. It gives us an opportunity also with cross pollination of those products coming back into The UK under our balanced active brand to expand in The UK women's health, health and health category. And we think there's an up to 200,000,000 opportunity for us in The US of taking up brands that we sell in UK and Europe, our products into The US market. So fantastic growth opportunities there with an experienced team, great knowledge about that in talking to South Market in one of the strongest consumer health care markets in the world. So let's look at our evolution and our growth ambition. So looking at the left hand column here, this is the numbers we just reported. Remind you that's a seventeen month period.

39:23 So if you look on a like for like for sort of our last twelve months, so the twelve months to May 25 compared to the twelve months to May 26, And we were we delivered about $39,000,000 of revenue per annum period to May 26. And our guidance is to deliver nearly $55,000,000 of revenue to May 2027. So you can see there's great growth in there. Some of that's the acquisition, obviously, Fenbler and that comes into our profit loss account period to May 2027. But also there's good 10% organic growth built into the forecast and guidance we have in the market. And as Danny mentioned earlier, our track record of growth is much higher than that. So during the period, integrated the healthcare business, which was Kate was one of the founders of. We've got great verticals in the team. We simplified the business. We've invested in our capability not only in increasing the support behind our products, but also in bringing in additional highly skilled people into the business.

40:25 And we've got strong brand momentum as we go into this year. We've a strong balance sheet. And that acquisition of FabiClear is going to give us substantial upside as we go forward. I think that U. S. Market is one of our biggest near term growth opportunities. And as I think Chris already mentioned, good traction from retailers in The U. S. That's taking some of our existing power trends. And so what's our ambition? Well, our ambition is to significantly grow the business and become an important, meaningful platform in our space. And we've got an ambition that in the 2030s to reach up to $300,000,000 revenue running at 25% EBITDA margin. How will we do that? Well, we're going to bring organic growth through the business, continue to drive it, say compound annual growth rate over the last ten years, over 20%.

41:13 We're going to focus on The U. Expansion. And we're also going to look to do additional accretive M and A. We do have a debt facility that actually has a ceiling, which goes up to two and a half times our trading EBITDA plus whatever we buy, EBITDA. But we're not going to go that high. We'd look to go to one to one and a half times that that EBITDA margin at most. We sit on nearly 12,000,000 of cash at the end of this financial period. By the end of this calendar year, that will bring. So we've got good cash generation. And we're going to deploy that in growing the business, growing the organic growth of the products and selective M and A. So really to sort of browse up here, just wanted to pick up the overall look at the business. Here we've got, we're in great markets, we're in markets that are resilient in consumer healthcare, we've got price protection in our products. You've seen that through the margin accretion that we've got. We've got great headroom in our total addressable markets in the areas that we're particularly women's health and men's health. We've just opened up one of the biggest consumer healthcare markets in the world with a great team on the ground with great products, with great relationships into retailers.

42:23 And we'll look to work that further forward. And so having simplified the business, that's where our focus now goes. We've got a great team in place. We've got a great senior leadership team. We've got great expansion opportunities. We've got momentum in the business. We've got some great brands, brands that hold number one or number two space. We're in strongest territories. We have some great partners outside of UK and US. So we partnered with Bayer and Cooper across Europe, as well as a number of other partners like Pharmasia, Vortica. So we've got access to all of those markets, and we see great opportunities for us. I'm really delighted that Danny is going be taking over as CEO. I've been on this journey for sixteen years, and the team has been spectacular and they continue to be spectacular. We've got a great energized team here. I'm not disappearing. I'm to be...

43:13 I remain on the board for a while and remain helping the company's ground develop, but it's going to be under Danny's leadership from the January 1 with the support of Kate, who's based in Sarah, and the other management team that we have. So very excited about the future. And I think I'll start as we segue into Q and A, I'll start with one comment, which I know the anonymous junkies on the bulletin boards have all been saying, Jerry's going dump his stock. I can assure you that's not the case. The stock is substantially undervalued. Got a long way to go. So just to put all your minds at rest, that's not going to be the case. And I'm still going to be involved in the business for a good amount of time. So yeah, great period. Great. A lot small growth to come. We have got some pre submitted questions. So I'm very happy to run through those and we'll each deal with them. So as you go around, I'll read that question and then we'll answer those as we we see fit. So the first question we have, which is a pre submitted question, which said, could you please talk to the decline in health and health the five months ending May 31, which I presume would be 2026?

44:20 So, Daniel, I'll pass that to you. Yeah, Nifam. So as we've highlighted in the June trading update, the comparative periods in May 2025 had the initial sell in to CVS Pharmacy for the health and into the 5,000 stores. So it's around 800,000 tons of revenue in May 2025. So stripping that back, the underlying growth of the health and her business in the five months to 2026 was still 20% to 21%. So continuing backing up that strong momentum growth story that we are talking about from earlier today. Thanks, Danny. And the second question, which I think we've gone some way to answer, but I'm happy to give a bit more color, was what do you believe the roadmap to getting to 300,000,000 sales to look like? And, Daniel, I'll ask you if you just talk through that. No problem. I'll just cover it very high level.

45:10 As we, again, we've talking about today, we've been growing our brands, our power brands at 20% top line quite consistently now for a few reporting periods. So continuing to grow those brands at that sort of level takes our underlying business from 50,000,000 to £125,000,000 over the next five years, just as a baseline. And then we'd be looking and using the debt facilities that Gerry has already talked about and our ability to draw up to 2.5x the trailing EBITDA, including whatever we acquire, we've got a lot of financial firepower there to go after acquisitions. And we would plan to add around GBP 100,000,000 of revenue over the next five years through acquisitions and grow those at 20% as well. That's your GBP 300,000,000 at top line. And Gerry has already talked about the market opportunities and the categories where we're actively looking at those, whether it's asset deals in The U. S, it's bolt ons, the infrastructure we've just created, but also opportunities within The UK providing that the acquisition multiples are in line with our historic target range of seven to eight times EBITDA.

46:09 Great. Thanks, Danny. I'll just add a couple of things on to that. The first thing is, that ambition does not require an equity raise in capital markets. That's an ambition, excluding that. And I think also sort of clear to say that we generate a lot of cash out of this business. Danny has already demonstrated that. And in the current financial period we're in, based on our guidance, the market would expect to generate $8,000,000 of further cash within that period. So very cash generative, and that cash will go into the rest of the business. The next pre submitted question was sales are spread across a large amount of countries. Do you see any large opportunities in any of these? Or are The USA and UK your main priorities? I'll take that question. Yes, The USA and UK are our main priorities at the moment. They are the markets where we have the key retail relationships where we deal directly with the retailers.

46:57 We have joint business plans. We work at strategic level with category leads in all those big retailers. So you're talking about the likes of Fruits, on a Superdrug, or the Barrett in The UK, Tesco's, as the Morrison's, etcetera. And in The US with those big retailers that we're already involved with through our existing business and the acquisition, it's Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, Target and many others. So those are our two key markets. If you add those two markets together, substantial part of the consumer healthcare market. But we do access the European market through our key partners Bayer, Kublin and Vaxil. And though in those markets, those partners are responsible for marketing support and distribution. So that allows us to access that wider European market, but on a less resource intense basis from us.

47:45 The next question, which is pretty submitted is, so are you still seeing growth in Health and Herd coming through in The USA? And what other current product do you see having the largest opportunity? So the answer to that question is yes. We are still seeing some growth both both on bricks and mortar and in The US... Sorry, in... On Amazon as well. The two... There's two products that really stand out, so perimenopause and the weight management product. And we're seeing that that, as I said in in... Earlier on in the presentation, there's some significant opportunities driven by the relationships that the Femitair team have. And the same buyer covers both supplements for menopause and women's health as as they do for intimate and vaginal health. So we see... We're hoping that that momentum will continue and hopefully step change quite significantly if we can land some new retailers and really expand the distribution significantly.

48:43 Great. Thanks, Nick. Next question, which is from Richard F. He says, where can you see online revenue getting to as a percentage of the group? And what is product pipeline looking like? I'll ask Danny to cover the sense of the group. Just to say, we've alluded to some of our new product pipeline in the presentation, but frankly speaking, for commercial sensitivity reasons, we're not displaying that pipeline here because we've got some really good breakthrough innovation, and we don't want to give the competition a heads up too soon. Danny, would you like to cover the online piece? Yeah. Sure. So in the period just gone, 26% of our revenues came from online to contact swaps in that. That includes Amazon, direct to consumer selling across The UK and The US, but also our own ecommerce platform.

49:32 So our LIFE to ecommerce website, our Balance App to ecommerce website, our health and health ecom websites. But going forward, yes, we do plan to grow these areas, and they're an area of key focus. I've purposely excluded at this stage, the retailer.com revenues. What do I mean by that? That is when we look at, for example, Holland and Barrett or Boots in The UK, they have their own online websites, as you all know. And we can see how much of our product is being sold through those websites versus in store. So if that were within the KPI of 26% I just gave, you'd add another 5% to that for the reporting period just gone. And as we're looking forward in our business, we're working really hard right now on understanding the dynamic between online and bricks and mortar within those key retailers in both UK and US, and identifying opportunities to drive that retailer.com opportunity.

50:26 We've made a number of changes in our team in The UK and US to ensure that we allow more focus and dedication to exploring those opportunities meaningfully over the current period. So, you know, longer term, to answer the question, we expect that around one third of our business will come from online, whether it's Amazon, our own ecommerce websites or, retailer.com piece, which is not currently built into the KPI. But we... It's important that we don't overload that channel so we keep our balanced omnichannel approach that we talked about on top. Got it. Okay. The next question comes from Peter W. He says, what impacts could there be from The UK budget? Well, I think if any of us had a crystal ball, we might have any idea of what sort of income budget. I think my personal view is we're gonna generally all be worse off after this budget than we are now. And that's probably going to prevail into the next year as well. So there's no question that they'll going to see interest rate rises. We're to see pressure on the consumers bound.

51:30 And we have to be cognizant of that. Obviously, healthcare is slightly defensive multiple times. But I think what's important, and you'll have seen that already through our gross margin protection that we've done over the last four or five years, Our products do have pricing power. We are growing the business. We do have the opportunity with our suppliers, our CDMO partners to have value engineering initiatives to help to maintain our margin and keep that going so we can still deliver the products at the right price into the market. And a lot of our products are need state products, and it's important, and we have very loyal customers. So I think the simple answer is I think the budget will take a bit more money out of our pocket. The competition will be tighter for those pounds, but with our relationships with retailers at a high category level and the innovation we're bringing through, we expect to maintain our momentum as a business going forward.

52:22 Next question, which I'm looking at the top of the readout, it's from Jeff Jay. He says, the stock looks like good value against FY '27 forecasts. However, in recent years, some forecasts have been missed. Is there any reason why investors should believe this time is different? Well, I'll take a bit of issue of what Jeff's saying here because we had a profit warnings 2021 into 2022 because of the rapid increase in the supply chain costs. You'll remember it came out of back of COVID, prices went through the roof, couldn't get products, short throughout P and L very quickly. We couldn't be out quick enough to protect our gross margin and we had profit warnings. Since then, I've said the last four years, we've found our numbers every time. We've been on our forecast, sometimes above our forecast in difficult conditions, And we've grown the business to where it is now. So from my perspective, you should have, you know, complete confidence in our forecast.

53:15 It's stated in our RNS. We're in this business. I'm a big shareholder in this business, not so many shares. So I say I take issue with that statement, but I'm happy to address it as I have. Next question is from Peter W. He says, are there KPIs in place to ensure marketing spend is effective? Can I get that one? Yeah. Yes. Okay. The answer is absolutely yes. A 100%. So we have the, obviously, main KPIs that we look at are financial return on investments. And we do also look at some softer metrics around brand awareness, creative cadence, and so on, which we know feed into success in terms of the how. Obviously, it's a lot easier when you're doing digital marketing. The ability to measure campaigns is is is is, yeah, very detailed, and you can measure measure them from one day to the next. So the amount of data that we have. For the slightly more kind of linear or offline campaigns, we actually have now a process to to test new new leavers, and we have been doing that. And one of the ways that we make sure that we can test in a in a very robust and accurate way is doing regional tests first, so that we have a strong baseline to, look at the uplifts and then the return on investments calculations thereafter.

54:34 So, yeah, I I believe we have a very robust measurements, in all of the marketing that we do, and we're also very strongly supported by, finance, in that as well. Great. Thanks, Kate. Next question is from Raj Aart, which is, what are your revenue and profitability expectations for VEMIFLAIR and Cluroxime over the next three years? And when should shareholders expect these acquisitions to become meaningfully accretive to earnings and cash flow? And I'll ask Danny to answer that question. So I think I've given a bit of a sentiment already in the deck around the current year and the growth level we expect to achieve in this twelve months. So the business, as shown on Kate's slide already, has been growing 30% on a like for like basis over the last twelve months, Thermiclira brand. It's been growing really strongly.

55:22 And, we've got protections and earn out measures in place for the calendar year as part of the deal structure that are based on those sort of targets being delivered. But as we look forward, we're modeling and expecting to deliver a similar growth rate to what we'll do on the rest of our power brands at around 20% growth top line over the next three years. That'll take revenues from about £11,500,000 over the current twelve month period. That's where we're expecting to run £17,000,000 by 2029. And as we mentioned earlier, the products are generating strong gross margins in excess of 60%. There's a higher element of A and P that goes into that market. The US naturally has a higher price point, higher gross margin. We have to invest a bit more behind the brands to ensure that growth is being delivered. And then there's some G and A where we took on a small team of people, as mentioned, as part of the deal.

56:11 We are investing... Going to be investing more in roles in The US, particularly to drive commercial activities, commercial operations. So around 1,000,000 of overhead was taken on as part of the acquisition. We'll expect to grow that overhead by 20% over the next three years and 20% year on year. So by 2029, pounds 17,000,000 of top line revenue, we'd be expecting to do somewhere between high 3,000,000 to £4,000,000 of EBITDA coming off that business at 90% plus cash flow conversion. So a very attractive acquisition for us in The U. S. Thanks, Danny. Got a whole lot of questions from Ratchy. Okay. So the next question for Ratchy is, you've demonstrated strong growth, but what do you believe is a realistic sustainable organic growth rate for VLG in the medium term excluding acquisitions? I think Danny has probably answered this already, but I'll land to just summarize.

57:04 Okay. Yeah. No problem. I think as we've said in our statements, we see extraordinary growth opportunity in our business, especially having established The US platform and being able to cross pollinate our brands into those existing retail relationships. None of that is built into our numbers. It's all opportunities, upsides for us, and we're working hard to deliver those. So, you know, the the opportunity is massive for us, but our sustainable growth rate that we would model cautiously would be around 15% go forward, having delivered a consistent 20% growth level over the last three reporting cycles. That's where we would say we feel very comfortable, but we've got a long list of opportunities that we're working really hard on to beat that.

57:50 Great. Thanks, Danny. Another question for Raj. As the business becomes a pure play consumer healthcare co, where do you see adjusted EBITDA margins setting over the medium term? On this slide we've got on the screen, we've indicated that 25%. So we see over the short term and it's in the guidance we put out that the EBITDA margins move into the low 20s relatively soon. We see that 25% is a good sort of target for us to get to and we feel comfortable about that while spending or getting the right marginality at the gross level and spending the right amount of support behind our products, which we'll continue to increase. One last question from floor, from Raj, which says, what will the incoming CEO do differently from the current strategy and what changes should we expect? Daniel's side. Yeah. Sure. So first thing to say is I've got the luxury position of coming into this at a point when the organization has been simplified, when it's got one ERP system in place and established US platform, simplified business model, pure play consumer health business.

58:55 Jerry's led us to this point and... But he's worked in this business while it's been a vertically integrated business with manufacturing and that's brought more complexity, more ERP systems in the group. And so I'm in that nice position of being able to come in at a point with a strengthened team around us and a fantastic board, fantastic people in the organization having invested in that capability. So it's not changing anything that Gerry has already laid out on the screen, but what it is, it's going to focus on later life on executing the opportunities that we have been talking about, building out on the pharmacy channel in The UK and US and global pharmacy through the strengthening of our team there, building out on the opportunities on marketplace.com and retailer.com, where we've set ourselves up and restructured our business to be able to lead with that.

59:41 And we've also been able to, of course, cross pollinate, as I mentioned earlier, our brands into that US market already. We're being able to get in front of those retail relationships, existing relationships with, our team that we've invested in. So you shouldn't expect to see any changes from what Gerry's laid out here and and the strategy that we've set out. It's execution of that strategy with a fantastic team around us, ample cash resources, significant debt facilities available to us to use if we get the right acquisition multiples and work within the leverage levels that we're comfortable with. Great. Thanks, Danny. So that is the end of our questions. But I just want to sort of sign off really, and I'll hand back to the moderator for a minute. But just to say, you know, thank you to everybody in the team, VENTURE LIFE.

1:00:32 It's a fantastic team. It's just every day working hard insight, innovation, agility, find a way entrepreneurial spirit. So brilliant. All the team now, the team all the way through VENTURE LIFE history. You know, thank you to everybody who's been in that and will be in the future. And the board as well. You know, thanks to the board. We couldn't have done any of this without the really supportive Board, wise counsel, always having the right words at the right time, good constructive challenge. And then outside the business, our customers, our suppliers, all our partners and our shareholders, thank you to everybody in this journey. Know, it's been a fantastic journey. The business is gonna be in amazing hands with Danny and the team. And thank you for your time and your support.

1:01:18 Thank you to the team for updating investors today. Please ask investors not to close this session. It should now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of VENTURE LIFE GROUP PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation.