Vulcan Two Group (LSE:VUL) — Introduction To The Company

0:00 Good afternoon, or welcome to the VULCON II Group PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and could be submitted at any time by the q and a tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to the management team. Michael, good afternoon, Good afternoon, Lily. Thanks so much for the

0:32 introduction. So welcome everybody to our first public investor presentation. So we'd like to give you a quick overview of the team and then into our business and our business model and what we've been doing since we've raised our funds. So so I'm Michael. I'm I'm chief executive. My last business was Vision Direct. It it I started that business when I acquired Brendan's business called GetLenses in in 2009, we developed that through a combination of very strong organic growth plus nine further acquisitions to grow the business. We sold it to in 2016, continued to develop it. And when I left in 2021, it was over 100,000,000 of sales.

1:23 When I bought Brendan's business, I signed him up on a six month, three day a week consultancy contract, and somehow he's he's still here. He's my right hand man and and COO. So, Brendan, please introduce yourself. Hi. Hi, everybody. I I'm Brendan. I originally trained as an optometrist. As Michael mentioned, I set up GetLens in 2000 and sold it to Michael in 2009. I look after everything

1:50 to do with customer retention. So basically, customer service, supply chain, order fulfillment. Our job is to create such a fabulous service that we retain our our customers and patients very extensively. And Keith joined the team relatively recently. Keith is a is a seasoned AIM CFO. Keith? Yes. Hi, everybody. Yes. My background is I've been a CFO on AIM since 2002 with a a number of, quite, high growth companies over the years. A company may have heard of a company called PaySafe, which we took, to being the largest company on AIM before I went on to the main market and perhaps most recently with a company called Boku, which is a payments company, which we IPO ed in 2017, and it's now worth about a billion dollars.

2:42 So, yeah, I joined at the beginning of January, and we've been through this sort of fundraise roadshow, together as a team.

2:49 So as that quote at the bottom states, our strategy is very clear. It's to lead the consolidation of the private prescription sector of the pharmacy market, the prescription side of the pharmacy market, and essentially to execute the very same playbook that we executed so successfully at Vision Direct, which is this combination of strong organic growth and acquisitive growth.

3:18 So we're focusing on the private sector of the market, not the NHS sector of the market. The NHS was the first to go digital, but is a very low margin area that we're keeping clear of. The private market is growing very strongly, and the margins are much, much healthier. We've completed three foundational acquisitions in March, Cloud Rx, Hyperdrug, and WebMed, and have now got a diversified and profitable platform. We cover both b to b, receiving prescriptions from a a a large number, over a thousand prescribing partners, and our own b to c direct to consumer businesses. And the business is underpinned by having quite considerable amount of proprietary API technology, which underpins the b to b business and also is used in b to c.

4:13 We've got a profitable business from day one, growing strongly organically, in the businesses that we acquired, generating cash, and very importantly, recurring revenues. So we are fulfilling essentially repeat prescriptions, and people take drugs, every month. And we're positioned, as the lead consolidator in this fragmented market. We'll come on to it a bit more lit bit later, but we're in a market where there are literally dozens and dozens of players, and the whole sector is ripe for further consolidation.

4:57 So a little bit more detail about Vision Direct. So Vision Direct became the largest seller of contact lenses online in Europe. And as I mentioned, we got it to over 100,000,000 of sales by the time that we left. But the key features of that market are that we were selling products that people had been prescribed. So there wasn't a product selection aspect to the business. People were looking to to fulfill their prescription for contact lenses for products that they'd already been specified. The same occurs with prescription medication as does recurring need. Contact lenses are largely disposable products now, and more than half of them are daily lenses.

5:45 So people literally needed a set a new pair of contact lenses every day, and that's exactly the same with prescription drugs. So people take these medications at least once a day on a very, very regular basis, and that recurrence of use translates into recurrence of revenue. It's not really a price competitive market, contact lenses, and it really focused on giving excellent service. If people were were reliant on us to get their next best box of contact lenses on time, they would come back and place their order again the following month. And at the time, the contact lens market was very fragmented. There were literally, again, dozens and dozens of small subscale websites selling contact lenses online, and we were able to consolidate that market.

6:34 Very importantly, when I bought Brendan's business in 2009, only 6% of contact lenses were bought online. By the time I left the business, a third of contact lenses in The UK were bought online, a massive shift that Vision Direct was essentially responsible for to a large degree and had about a third of that online market, which translated into 10% of the entire contact lens market in The UK. And as I said, we're really looking to execute that playbook in the pharmacy space, a space which is somewhat, like, 20 times bigger than the contentless market was in two thousand and nine, ten.

7:24 Thanks, Michael. So guys, I want to tell you a little bit about the private e pharmacy market because as Michael said earlier on, we are in the private e pharmacy market, not NHS or anything else. But the the this private market has really developed and exclusively grown and diversified over the last number of years. So I can give you a little bit of history of where it came from. Originally, pharmacy really operated in what we would call discrete pharmacy. So it's things like erectile dysfunction, hair loss, things like that. So it was very much a minority sport. But how it really developed and opened up was there were a number of medications which were either not available on the NHS or not readily available on the NHS. The two largest drivers were, firstly, HRT.

8:14 Now HRT is available on the NHS, but it's in a sort of a a restricted manner. So estrogen, progesterone available, testosterone not readily available, and it particularly depends on which area health board that you you happen to live in. So out of that has grown a significant number of sort of a little bit by the the Vina McCall effect, but a significant drive in terms of a sort of knowledge and understanding of HRT, knowledge and understanding of the extra medications, and as well as that private provision because things weren't available on the NHS. The second other medication was ADHD. So as it stands at the moment, a hundred and thirty thousand plus people are waiting on ADHD assessments on the NHS.

9:05 So what has happened in that case, you're looking at eighteen to twenty four months waiting time. So people choose to go privately, and there are a number of private providers. And the other thing that has happened is people take advantage of what's known as the right to choose mechanism, whereby if you're not able to get it on the NHS, you can have it provided your assessment provided by a private supplier, and it's billed back to the NHS. So, basically, what you have is a situation where people are going to private solutions for excuse me. Going for private solutions for these products. Then the other one that everybody knows about is weight loss, which is has seen explosive growth over the last number of years.

9:54 But moving on to the next slide is what we believe are really very interesting long term tailwind, which is the NHS to private migration. And what we're thinking about here is around a GP provision. So nearly everybody will have a story of phoning up at 8AM precisely on the dot to get a a GP appointment. If you miss it by a minute, you lose your appointment. So with the result, thirteen percent of all GP appointments in 2024 were supplied privately. We don't have the numbers for 2025, but we're pretty sure that the numbers have increased quite dramatically. Reason why that has been driven so largely is because private health insurers, VUPA and AXA PPP, are now providing as part of your premium that you can have GP appointments provided privately.

10:49 So this can be video consultations or more recently, actually, face to face consultations. So what's happened is large numbers of people are now going for private GP appointments. Key point is private GP appointments means

11:04 private prescriptions. So we're in a world really where where we're seeing a massive expansion of sort of original sort of lifestyle medications, poorly provided NHS medications, then specifically around that general medication being supplied by a private provision. And then for this one, we call I call this our our size of the price. So what we've done is we've sort of divided up The UK pharmacy market into sort of online, offline, or physical and digital, and then private and NHS. So there actually are no physical private prescription pharmacies because all NHS physical pharmacies can supply private pharmacies.

11:53 So bottom left, you've got your Boots, your Rolands, your Dale Lewis as well, etcetera, etcetera. So they are your your high street and community pharmacies. To the right, you've got the larger online NHS pharmacies. So pharmacy to you and chemist for you and pill time will be probably the better known ones. So we looked at this space, as Michael said. The real challenge is the unit economics are incredibly difficult because, your prices are governed by the NHS drug tariff. The margins are incredibly low, but more importantly, it's illegal to charge for delivery. So if you've got a an average order value in the £20 or £25, 20% margin, and you're trying to deliver which cost 3 or £4, you actually can't make money. You actually need somebody beyond four or five items before you start to make money.

12:46 So where we're very interested in is the top right. So I guess it's kinda the profitable part of the pharmacy market and it's the private and in a lot of cases digital. What's interesting about this and sort of the similarities with the contact lens market where I came from is huge numbers of these private pharmacies are owned, managed by pharmacists. So it's really fragmented. So it's a huge opportunity in the same way that Michael come in to the contact lens market and acquired businesses which were owned and managed by opticians. We're doing the same within the pharmacy market, and we see a huge opportunity. And I'll hand you back to Michael. So a little bit more detail on the businesses we've acquired.

13:35 CloudRx, is a business to business, platform. So, basically, it receives prescriptions from 12 to 1,300 prescribing partners that are integrated through its proprietary API. So it receives prescriptions electronically. And for the majority of cases, it is, operating a patient pay model where upon receipt of the prescription, it immediately sends a payment link to the patient by email, and text message. The payment, is then made by the patient and ClouderaX then processes that as an order. And that can all happen within a matter of an hour or so after, the patient has seen the doctor. The doctor will send the prescription electronically just by pressing a button in their practice management system. It comes into our systems. The payment link is sent straight away. And if the customer reacts to that quickly, it'll all happen the same day, and they'll get the drugs the next day.

14:37 Very, very strong business, very strong recurrent revenues. These prescriptions are coming in, in the hundreds every day from these 1,200 and so, partner prescribers. And the APA technology is proprietary. So there are one or two competitors in The UK. None of them have the same reach as CloudRx in terms of integration with practice management systems and also some custom integrations with larger clinical groups. And it has a very strong recurrent revenue base. And since we bought the business, we have recognized the potential to growing this very, very more rapidly. There's there's really only scratched the surface of the number of private prescribers that are actually using the platform, many of which are actually already integrated through the practice management systems they use. So a huge potential to grow this business organically very strongly.

15:34 WebMed is our, participation in the direct to consumer business. So that is a prescriber as well as a, fulfiller of prescriptions. It has a CQC registration. It does a significant number of weight loss prescriptions, but in addition, it does, men's health, erectile dysfunction, STIs, and and so on. It it specializes in discretion, has a very, very high standard of clinical governance. It includes video consultations. It does for any patient wishing a weight a weight loss medication, which is really at the very, very top end of of regulatory compliance, And it's very, very profitable and even more so because it's it's dispensing operation is soon to be integrated into CloudRx. It will effectively become a prescribing partner of CloudRx, and we will no longer have to have a separate dispensing function within MedMed. So profitable and gonna become even more so. And then hyperdrug is our entry into the Vetmeds market. Very attractive market, exclusively private. There's no equivalent of the NHS in vets.

16:52 The CMA reported last year on an investigation into the the vet market in The UK and ruled that they're going to halt the consolidation of vets into large vet groups, principally by private equity. But there's also a quoted business, CVS, that has done a a vet roll up. And there's two very important aspects to that investigation which benefit Hyperdrug. First is that they're gonna limit the consolidation to 60% and not allow further consolidation. So the 40% of independent vets that are the principal source of prescriptions, the hyper drug, will remain at that level. And secondly, they're gonna mandate that all of the large vet chains that have in house, vet pharmacies are gonna be obliged to let their pet owners know that the prescription can be taken elsewhere and to places like Hyperdrug.

18:00 The real big business development opportunity we see in this business is taking the b to b API technology that we have with with CloudRx and integrating that into the vet management systems that these independent vets use. So we'll be able to offer an exact mirror service to vets, independent vets, that they can then send prescriptions and a lot electronically to Hyperdrug and get a commercial benefit from doing it because CloudRx's business model is giving prescribers a commercial benefit in the prescriptions that otherwise, if they just handed a piece of paper to the patient, they wouldn't get. Same thing reply to vets, And we think that's a compelling sales opportunity and a real opportunity to scale the hyper drug business using that b to b model.

18:51 So all three businesses have been acquired. We've already started doing some of the integrations, rationalizations. You can see here, we've now got the new logos that all that are all common. We have got a a plan to develop a unified brand name for the group, which will be announced later on in the year, and to integrate these onto a single front end web platform and, in addition, a common ERP and fulfillment at the back end.

19:22 So there's lots and lots of opportunities to grow these businesses stronger. So the CloudRx, very successful b to b business, growing organically very strongly, but without actually any, activity. The the the previous owner of that business, Daniel Lee, doing some of the business development himself on a very ad hoc basis, but it had grown completely organically with no proactivity at all. We've now hired a sales team of four people, and they are gonna be focusing very much on increasing the usage of prescribers of the plat of the platforms that we're already integrated to, as well as increasing the number of platforms with which we're integrated. And we've got very, very high hopes that the sales team could scale our business to business business very dramatically over the coming years.

20:18 We're gonna improve and professionalize the the way that we analyze the business, our stock, and our revenue. We at Vision Direct, we're able to forecast, our business, with extreme accuracy because the current revenue, a repeat purchase is the driver of the profitable growth, but it's actually also extremely predictable. We're able to predict our revenue streams with extreme levels of accuracy through just statistical analysis. And we have just embarked on the same project for for this business, these businesses that will allow us to predict how we grow the business, which segments of customers are growing and repeating better, and focus on areas where we identify churn and and be able to address those.

21:11 Digital marketing is a very important aspect of our b to b businesses. We've already started to professionalize this and bring, their marketing campaigns up to a much higher, more professional level. Cross sell is is a very, very exciting opportunity. So we've got b to c and we've got b to b businesses, but over time, we see those business models merging. So CloudRX, as I mentioned, sends, patients a payment link, in order to pay for the the medicine they've just been prescribed. But it's very just a bland credit card form. No real branding. No attempt to sell the products other products, complementary products to that

21:54 prescription. Yet the the model of a traditional high street pharmacies, particularly the successful chains, has always been to sell customers different products. So the the prescription, the pharmacy part of a boot store is always towards the back of the store, encouraging you to walk through the whole store and see a plethora of other products available to purchase. And we're gonna move towards that model for our b to b business, encouraging, people to buy other products alongside the prescription medication that they're paying for at the time. We've already discussed this with some of our key prescribing partners. We're very keen, and we're gonna be offering them a commercial interest in doing this so they will get an added benefit from allowing us to do it. And the model is effectively that we will become a a traditional high street pharmacy chain, if you like, online.

22:51 So that same model of receiving prescriptions from other parties, efficiently delivering those, but in addition, encouraging patients to buy other products at the same time and establishing a relationship with them so they then come to us in a brand that they are aware of and the great service they've received and coming to us independently to buy other products as well. And that takes me on to the the fifth point, developing a b two c brands. We have a project, underway with a world class leading, branding agency to develop a single brand that will be used across the group. So customers aware that when they pay for a medication that's been prescribed to them and has been sent to us, they're aware of a brand that they then can buy things at the same time from, but also come back to and buy things independently.

23:41 So that's a project that's underway. We hope to announce that brand in in eight to twelve weeks time. Quite an exciting point, for us. And then finally, best in class service. The service in the business we've bought, has been good, but can be improved.

23:57 And the the program of, integration, the delivery of a new warehouse, and so on that we're gonna be doing this year will improve the service levels. And we know that that the the better the service we can provide, the stickier our customers will be, and the more likely they are to come come to us and buy those other products that I was referring to.

24:24 So this is the growth strategy in a single slide. Integrating the acquisitions into a single entity, managing the integration, having a single front end web platform. We've signed the lease on a new distribution center in Leeds, which is only just ten minutes away from CloudRx's existing facility. We'll be reducing warehousing warehousing and logistics cost,

24:52 be buying as a single entity, improving our stock levels to reduce any potential for stock outs, improving terms with carriers that we only collect from a single center. We're also doing the back end tech stack, a unified ERP system, which will effectively drive that warehouse and integrating the processes, into a single coherent platform. And as I mentioned, developing a unified web platform and a brand to go with it to creating that consumer awareness and single, single platform and and awareness in the customer's mind. So the key thing is that this platform will deliver higher organic growth, higher margin, and create the infrastructure that we can then do additional acquisitions on.

25:44 Once we've built this platform, we we believe that the this platform with the new warehouse will have capability to expand fivefold from our current turnover before we need to open a second warehouse. So real scope for combining both organic and inorganic growth into the platform that we're building now.

26:09 Keith? Yeah. Sure. So so what does the business that we've now got look like overall in terms of size and distribution shape of customers. 2025 revenues were just under 36,000,000. That was anything from about 15 to 20% up year over year, so it was natural growth in the business. And it's a highly recurring, nature of the revenues, 75% roughly of the of the revenues that we saw last year recur from existing customers. So this is a nicely growing business. On the right hand side, you'll see that, from a product perspective, we're quite well spread, weight loss being the largest sector.

26:56 If any of you seen the Canaccord note, we've we've taken veterinary as as another sector, which is quite large. And the other sectors, we've combined into a general health care section of the business, and you can see we're quite well spread generally. Were you to look at this on a a gross margin basis, and we don't have a a graph to show that, but you'd find that weight loss is actually one of the lower margin parts of the business, and so is is around about 25% of our gross margin. So, and indeed, the, general health care space is is actually the highest margin part of the business. And so from a gross margin perspective, we're we're well diversified as well. So business is in good shape, before we've really layered on top the initiatives that Michael just talked about.

27:45 So just to recap on, the reporting period that that these results we've announced today are relate to. Obviously, it's the, period from the 08/06/2025 when the company was incorporated through to the end of twenty twenty five is what's being reported on. Clearly, we didn't we hadn't acquired the businesses then, so, we had no revenues. But in that period, for those of you who aren't aware, the company IPO ed in September, the beginning of September, raising £12,000,000 on the basis, really, the story, without any formal, plans, financial plans, as a cash shell, but with the objective of buying or acquiring a number of businesses in the e pharmacy space.

28:30 In that period to in that five month period to the end of December, obviously, the business, made a loss because it only had costs relating primarily to the establishment of the business and the raising of the funds, but ended the year with cash of, just over £9,500,000. Clearly, the key part of the actual story is that in March, as as Michael said at the beginning of this, presentation, we we raised a further £40,000,000 from, multiple major UK institutional investors. We're very happy with the institutional base we've got. Some of the largest, UK fund managers are invested in the business. We use that 40,000,000 plus what we'd raised originally to acquire the three businesses that Michael just talked you through for a maximum consideration of just under £42,000,000.

29:20 There's a small amount of deferred consideration to earn out in those numbers. But broadly, if they if they go to plan, that's what we will have paid. And those businesses and the fundraise completed on the March 19. So we will be reporting

29:37 revenues from the 03/19/2026 going forward. You can see, obviously, the business over there, those two periods went from Michael and Brendan through to adding a board. We have a chair to nonexecutive directors, so we strengthen that. And broadly, having bought these three businesses, we've just run through the three things that we talked about before. That's what the funding's for, primarily, having bought the businesses, setting up the distribution center, implementing an ERP system to run the businesses efficiently, and then creating a unified brand and website are the key things that we've been working on, and, we'll start to see the the results of those, investments, later in the year. Back to you, Michael.

30:23 Thank you. So in summary, we've acquired three high quality businesses, attractive valuations, and we've created a diversified and operationally cash generative group. We're in a high growth market with very strong sustainable tailwinds both towards privatization and digitization.

30:45 Very, very important dual drivers for this business. We've got a clear road map of revenue opportunities and infrastructure development, which means that these businesses will be grown very strongly organically before we even look at further inorganic expansion. We've got a very experienced ambitious management team to drive the professionalism across the group, and we are very excited in implementing this. We've already got cracking, in the two months, since we bought these businesses. We've got a huge amount to do this year to get this platform that we've described in place. But we've taken the first step in creating the dominant brand, for private digital pharmacy in The UK, and we're very, very excited about this.

31:39 Okay. So over to questions, Lily. That's great. Thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the q and a tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Guys, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And if I may just start off with the first question here, which reads as follows. How are the sales of the three acquired companies performing? Also, how is the integration plan going?

32:16 Right. Okay. So I'll do the first part. Yes. And, Brendan, you should do the second part. Yes. So the sales are going very well. We've done a lot of professionalization. We've done some weeding out. So we're making sure that the marketing of the two b to c businesses is efficient and have rationalized the marketing into a single digital agency, and that's having already some good effects, on the the top line of those two businesses. And then on the b to b business, CloudRX, again, we've done a little bit of weeding out in terms of some unprofitable accounts, but the the core business that we, are focusing on, the patient pay model where we send these payment links, has been growing very nicely. So significant growth year on year in that segment of the business, which is very attractive.

33:07 And as I said, we've got a head down working through the integration plan. And, Brendan, you wanna describe that in a bit more detail? Yeah. So where we are right now is that we've got three businesses, three distribution centers, three teams, three of everything. We are hard integrators. Our plan is to move into a centralized center. And I think there's another question in terms of distribution center. So we we signed on that in March. The new designs have just been completed. So as well as the 22,000 square foot warehouse, we're actually adding a mezzanine to include offices for finance, for clinical, for marketing, and and supply chain, all those other good parts. So that is go in in in place.

33:56 Design's complete, gone out to tender, hopefully, signed up a contract in the next three to four weeks. It's about a twelve week project. So we're aiming to be fully integrated and have our distribution center ready to go sort of later on this year. The piece that we have to do is we have to also integrate with the new ERP system. So what we probably do is do a little bit of dual running towards the end of the year. But before the end of the year, we'll be fully integrated in the new warehouse with the ERP and have centralized everything. That's great. Thank you. Just turning to the next question. What synergies have you already slash do you expect to unlock from the three acquisitions you've made so far? That really covers a very, very wide spectrum.

34:42 So, we've got this project to come up with a unified brand. The business model is to create, a unified b to b and b to c brand, which might sound a little bit, ambitious, but it's actually just reflective of what a typical successful high street pharmacy chain looks like. So think of Boots. Boots receives nearly all its prescriptions from third party doctors, yet it has a very strong relationship with its customers that bring in those prescriptions. I'm encouraged to walk all the way through a plethora of products that encourages customers to buy to get to the pharmacy counter, typically, at the back of the store. And that's exactly what we want to develop is to develop, a very, very strong b to b business where the majority of prescriptions that we fulfill are coming from third party relationships with prescribers, but that we are increasingly selling those patients other products.

35:48 I mean, that's a really, really important. So integrating the b to b and the b to c concept in a unified whole that consumers completely understand, making it analogous to a a typical pharmacy. And the the online market up to now, quite a lot of it has been direct prescribing, very much like the webbed business that we bought. And although we will have a clinic business that does that, the majority, just like Boots, will be this hybrid relationship where prescriptions come from elsewhere, but we're selling other products. We're already working on this cross sell opportunity that I mentioned earlier, and the number one synergy is between these two models so that we effectively have a customer acquisition program, which doesn't have a marketing cost attached to it. That's a huge one.

36:38 In addition to that, there are quite a lot of operational synergies that that Brendan can talk about. Yeah. So, I mean, reads, even we're starting to see some synergies as as we sort of get our head on the bonnet of of each of these business in terms of supply chain. So, ultimately, we're going to combine. So you've got larger volumes, and there's some commonality in terms of products. Interestingly, even between veterinary and human, there's some commonality of products, but we're we're seeing that. In terms of other suppliers, for instance, we've discovered that Hyperdrug, despite being a smaller business, has actually got better pricing with one of the major carriers, and it's because they just do larger volumes of smaller orders. But we're going to wrap that across. And one of our major suppliers of one of the best selling products has also combined the two businesses together to give us some some pricing improvements on that. And it it's just about, you know, even in terms of customer service, you build out a larger customer service team and they operate operate across the different brands.

37:41 There's just significant operational leverage within that. Thank you. How do you plan to fund the next acquisition? Debt or equity? If it's equity equity, what is the plan to minimize dilution for shareholders as this is a large part of the upside and the investment case? Keith, do wanna take that? Can I take that? Yeah. Look. Clearly, we have we had £9,500,000. Have about 8,000,000 8,500,000 of cash in the bank at the moment. That that is possible. We could do a small acquisition like med WebMed was out of that those existing cash balances, but much more likely we would need to to raise some money to fund it. I think it clearly debt is part of that story. If we have a profitable cash generative business going forward, equity is also likely to be a a part of that depending on the mix.

38:34 But I think it it obviously depends on the size of the acquisition relative to to our market cap and our our cash flows, how we do that. But I think there's clearly, when we went round and raised the money from, from the institutions that have supported us, there was an understanding that we were that we we weren't gonna stop at three acquisitions and that that would inevitably mean some likelihood of coming back for additional funding. And they are prepared for that and, in fact, expecting it indeed sort of ready to to fund the next round as when we're we're ready to to do that. And and I think that timing is probably other than perhaps one target which we might move quickly on. More likely is we're gonna wait and embed the businesses we've got put in place, the systems and process we've talked about before we would do some things that perhaps more likely to be beginning of next year.

39:24 That's great. Thank you. Can we expect to convey a belt of acquisitions? Yes and no. I mean, I think we we we don't want to just do deals for the sake of it. And where we talked about the potential of hoovering up lots of small businesses, I I'm not sure that we're gonna follow that model. There are there are certain strategic ones that we'll be keen to do, probably large scale ones. So I think conveyor belt is probably not quite the right term. A regular flow of acquisitions, yes. Don't think we're gonna be doing dozens a year. I think we're gonna be doing, a few key acquisitions. Because if we've got a good growth organic growth engine, those acquisitions will can be strategic in terms of widening the product range or the product scope, and also deepening in terms of if there are key competitors of ours. For example, Cloud Rx has a couple of clear competitors because it's none of that of competitive space, this b to b API.

40:33 There's a couple that exist. And if one or more of those become available, we would probably want to do those. So I think we're gonna take a strategic view to acquisitions and not be like a a literally literally hoover up. It'll be more of a considered view. Are we using it to deepen our our position, for example, on the API integrations or strategically widening the product set that we're offering? Perfect. Thank you. Just moving on to the next question. What would a successful 2026 look like beyond the rebranding? Well Let go of Brenda this. Operation operationally, basically, I want to wake up at the end of twenty twenty six with a a fully integrated operation, a fully integrated ERP whereby we are really well placed. Think Michael mentioned it earlier, we're going to be able to do five x out of the out of our new warehouse. So at that stage then, you can really support that sort of explosive organic growth, and you can take on acquisitions that that just help us. The the from a supply chain point of view, we want to deepen our stock.

41:44 We want to widen our stock. We want to make more things available. As we move further into the general medication, the number of SKUs that we're going to hold in stock will start to increase. Going back to our history in Vision Direct, we held 70,000 SKUs in stock and a 196% automatic fill from stock rate. And we want to have the same within within VULCON two, and we will have that because the number of SKUs are less. But at the same time, we also want to deepen. So that'll improve in terms of pricing, but more importantly, around that service levels in terms of having auto availability. Because as of I think we said before, ecommerce health care, it's a trust based emotional product. You want to be sure that the people that are looking after the health of your body and your medication know what they're doing, have the products, and have them in stock and get them delivered.

42:37 I I think what I'd like to add just in terms of the kind of the front end of the business is to get this beyond the brand. The question said accept the brand other than the brand, but what that brand gives us. So getting the web platform in place unified, so we've got this this cross sell capability absolutely executed and working. So that's using that common brand to to execute the strategy, I think, is key. If we get that in place, and we're starting to offer complimentary products to to the patients that are coming bringing their prescriptions to us, that are having their prescriptions sent to us, I think we'll be really on the way. So having that that initial, cross sell opportunity actually live in the market, which utilizes the the the infrastructure we're building, but also utilizes that single brand, that'll be a really key achievement and a platform for developing this further.

43:29 That's great. Thank you for answering all those questions you can from investors. And, of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which you know is particularly important to yourself and the company, Michael, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments? Okay. So I think this is a really huge opportunity. When when Brendan and I left Vision Direct, we really wanted to do something else again, and digital pharmacy just came out as the the just the number one, almost the only sector that it made sense for us to enter. It has all the same characteristics. The products are really amenable for digital fulfillment, recurrent need, recurrent revenue, and underpenetrated. So when as I said, contact lenses, 5% penetration when we got into it. Now a third, prescription medication. Again, low single digit penetration in terms of digital fulfillment.

44:24 The difference is that this market is massively bigger. I mentioned 20 times larger than content lenses was when we got into it. If we achieve the 10% penetration that Vision Direct now has in the entire contact lens market in The UK, we'll be building a billion pound to £2,000,000,000 revenue business at teens EBITDA, a super attractive, growing, profitable business that is really valuable to investors. I think that's our clear objective. I think we can achieve that in in relatively short order, actually. And and we're just really excited to get on with it and do it. So I hope that, everybody watching today, gets that opportunity, understands the opportunity, and wants to join the journey with us.

45:17 That's great. Thank you all for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations? This may take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.